Once I was happy

 

Honestly, I am seldom deliriously happy. I am not crazy, but a good chunk of my life, especially the last twenty odd years, I am more than content most of the time. It is why I smile so easily in pictures. One of my Facebook friends, also a relative, once asked me if I was as happy as I look. I am.

But not during quarantine and not during Trump's four years in office. I was so unhappy that I was actually sick. Truly sick and tired. That is not just a phrase. It is an apt description of how you can feel when you are not content with your life. Those months grated on me. Bad news, isolation, covid, family members who were intelligent, but didn't have their heads on straight, it all added up to misery for me.

My bestest friend came up and spent a week with me in an Air B&B after we were both vaccinated and I was so worn out I could barely function, but that was the beginning of my comeback. My achilles heel is actually both my feet and they act up when my life does. But little by little I realize that days are getting brighter. 

Even though it's winter.

I am feeling more like my old self. Hopeful, happy, excited about things. I have more energy. I want to do things. I want to play and paint and build dollhouses. I even want to cook and entertain. 

Once I was happy and then I was forlorn, but now I'm on the road again and smiling like a blooming idiot at the strangest times. Even my dreams are happier. And I am grateful.

Grateful for my life and my friends and the gift of being able to bounce back.

Christmas

 

My daughter is having her first Christmas far away from everything and everyone she is used to. She and her boyfriend moved to Tempe, Arizona for better jobs and it is actually working out for them. They both have good jobs and they have a nice apartment.

What she doesn't have is her youngest daughter hanging around waiting to do everything with her and neither her boyfriend, nor his adult son are too interested in tree decorating or perpetuating the Christmas myth. Not to mention it is too far for her oldest daughter to show up on Christmas day

Myth, you say? Christmas isn't a myth! But the idea of Christmas, that we are fed from infancy on, really is a myth. It is supposed to be one big celebration complete with a sound track of Christmas songs while the family sits around the perfect turkey at a formal table for twenty after exchanging a billion dollars worth of fantastic gifts. The fireplace roars in the background. The tree twinkles. The cookies were decorated by Martha Stewart.

Nobody is sick, or tired, or wanting to leave and go play on the X-box. 

Everybody sits around oozing love and feeling appreciated for who they really are.

Really?

What big family gathering ever really goes that way? It is a ton of work to make Christmas happen and while most people can put up with the celebration, they don't want to do the work. After the kids are older, and before they are adults away from the nest, they aren't too interested in decorating trees, or cookies.

Christmas is a pageant directed by one member of the family, usually mom, who thinks it is so important she is willing to do almost all the work, cheer everyone else on and convince them that this is what is it all about. As long as that one person keeps it up, the ruse is perpetuated.

Once no one is interested in directing this production our dreams of Christmas have to be adjusted. It can still be fantastic. In fact, it could be better, but people have to have realistic expectations. If no one has the energy to cook, you go out, or pot luck it, or have french toast! It isn't about the food, or the tree, or even the presents. 

Christmas is a time to come together and enjoy each other's company in the best way possible, whatever that is for you,  and the more people who believe that, the better it will turn out.

Here and now

 

I grew up wanting to be and marry a man like the men my father worked with. Professors in tweed coats, smoking pipes and discussing art and poetry and great ideas. 

Then came the sixties and I wanted to be a farmer's wife, living off the land, eating food we grew, making my children's clothing, writing poetry and getting back to nature.

In college I met a man I thought was like my father and he had a beautiful name. Times were turbulent and emotions ran rampant. I married him convinced he was the love of my life.

Of course he was in Vietnam most of the time preceding our marriage, but those were the days my friends. I really thought they would never end They did. He was a good provider and for a couple of years he was even a good and faithful husband. 

My father always used to say that Adam and Eve got married. Then they got bored and decided to raise a little Cain. I thought if we only had children our marriage would be better. Nobody worked harder than I did to have children. I had nine miscarriages, was a foster mother and then we adopted two children. Right after that our youngest son was born and I loved those children more than life itself. I thought that was enough. I made their clothes. I made their baby food. I made them the center of my life.

But it was not enough.  I suffered through the lies, the betrayals, the other women and the pain of knowing I was not enough. There are a million ways to hurt your wife and my husband was exquisitely adept at most of them.

Now I am a divorcee of over twenty-two years and while life is not perfect, I have learned it is pretty darn good. The people in my life choose to be here and I want them here. I have had time to learn who I really am, warts and all and I can not only live with myself. I like me! I find it hard to think about, or talk about my good points, but I believe I really do have them.

I do have a professor to talk to, but we don't sit around in tweed jackets smoking pipes. We find it much more satisfying and fun to do a thousand other things. I no longer want to get back to nature, except from the lovely bug free shade of a screened in porch. I can still write poetry, or stories, or just my dreams if I choose. I still love my children more than life itself, but I don't need all the props I thought were necessary to feel fulfilled and happy. 

I am happy being me. Here and now.

Forgiveness

Forgiving is a term I honestly do not understand. I understand the concept, the words, the idea, but not the feeling. And yet I believe I forgive without any of this.

I forgive as a child does. It is part of my makeup. It happens organically because I breathe. 

I cannot seem to choose it. It doesn't work that way for me. To choose it, I would have to have some understanding of how it works.  I don't.

And yet, I have that feeling of peace that floods the light when forgiveness occurs. Sometimes I don't even know it happened except in retrospect.

I am like a child. in so many ways. Once I thought this was not a good thing, but as I grow older I realize it really is.

Normal

I have lived in the town of Normal off and on for the better part of fifty years. A little more on than off even though I don't live there right now.

But I never appreciated normal as much as I do this evening.

I have been incapacitated in one way or another since the year before last. I was sick for a while, then there was the quarantine.  My doctor prescribed a bunch of drugs that nearly did me in. I was so weak I could barely walk upstairs, then I developed gout from the drugs and ended up with my right foot in a soft cast that caused me to injure my left foot!

I was due to stop wearing the boot on that foot last week when I injured some muscles in my back and was in more pain than I can ever remember experiencing in all my life. I spent my 72nd. birthday in agony. 

Now, today, the boot is off, my back is so much better, and I am wearing new shoes with special inserts that feel so good. 

I feel so good!

I feel ten years younger!

I made Christmas cards for my youngest grandchildren, mailed Christmas cards, and started thinking about putting up a tree! I don't think I've felt like this in, well, so long that I don't even remember.

I'm almost afraid to say this, because I don't want to jinx it, but instead of thinking like that, I'm just going to savor it.

That thing

 

The thing about feeling so bad is that when I start to feel better -- it feels so good!

I started feeling bad last spring when a new doctor prescribed a bunch of new drugs. I eliminated them, one at a time, until I was only taking one and thinking I felt okay, mistakenly continued taking that one until it caused my body to develop gout as a by product of dehydration.

The gout was tenacious. It would not go away despite all the prednisolone packs they gave me and I eventually ended up at a podiatric surgeon's office. In desperation, she put a soft cast on my foot and eventually prescribed massive doses of naproxen, which I am not supposed to take for the sake of my kidneys. I took it and the gout gradually disappeared after weeks in the cast, but not before I fractured the bones in my left heel by favoring the sore right foot.

That was nearly seven weeks ago, so I was looking forward to this holiday week (both my birthday and Thanksgiving) as a time when I would be free to sleep without the boot I have been wearing. It would, or will be, the first time I have not had some sort of thing hindering my movement in nearly four months.

Then Tuesday I must have pulled a muscle in my back and for the last three days I have been in almost unbearable pain day and night. Taking naproxen and extra strength Tylenol both at maximum doses I have been at the point where I thought I would rather be dead. Finally last night things improved.

Today I have only taken the Extra strength Tylenol and used the heating pad. I still have to remain in a position that takes all strain off my back, semi-reclining, but it is the difference between night and day. Between unbearable and believing that I am really on the mend.

Just not feeling like nothing works makes me feel so good! Now I think that by Monday, when the doctor office opens, I will be okay and not even need to make an appointment, but I wouldn't have believed that Wednesday night, or all day Thursday.

Retirement

Retirement means no longer going to work everyday and getting paid by someone to do something so you can pay bills. I think it is the money that people mistake as a valid way of feeling valuable. If they were not paid, would they do the same thing with the same vigor?

I've never been able to sustain working at a job where I was miserable, or even unhappy. There is not enough money in the world to make me believe that this is the only option. Teaching preschool, working for a florist, these are simply things I loved doing that paid me money. The few short years I spent in a office couldn't pay me enough to stay, so I didn't. 

Fortunately I was able to retire fairly early in life. Retirement didn't mean much change for me. I've always done the things I loved. I loved taking care of my children, feeding them, teaching them, playing with them, introducing them to the world and hoping I was giving them what they needed to live in it.

I've always loved doing creative things. Sewing clothes for my children and myself, costumes for plays, crafts for gifts, is just one of the loves of my life. I used to love cooking and baking. I still love eating. Under the guise of parenting, I played with blocks, painted, drew pictures, rode bikes, did puzzles.

The pay I received for doing all the things I loved was getting to do it.

Retirement has only meant a little more time to do all those things I love in a way that is less stressful than it was when I had to get up early every day and go somewhere else.  I tell people I'm retired, but really I am just doing many of the same things I've always done.

I used to redecorate and rearrange my house. Now I live in an apartment, so today I spent the entire afternoon building a house with my blocks and then I furnished it and decorated it with exquisite miniatures. That is retirement!

Sensibilities

Everyone has their own set of sensibilities. Whether they are innate, or instilled is an interesting idea for me to contemplate.

I grew up with almost no personal boundaries in a family where the children were treated as simple innocent creatures to be cared for, en masse, with no allowances made for gender until I was almost twelve. I do remember my mother shouting at my father to put some clothes on when he was heading into the bathroom when I was around three, but it was her shouting that made it memorable. I don't even remember seeing at him.

My mother had no inhibitions when it came to her and me. Up until the time she died, I was comfortable anywhere she was and that included in the bathroom bathing or using the toilet. I don't remember any of my other siblings being there, so I don't know what they thought.

I had more privacy as a mother, but it was more because I like alone time and the bathroom was the only opportunity I had for that for ten years. I wasn't overly concerned about the state of being dressed or undressed as long as we didn't have company. Sometimes the bathroom was actually a surreptitious reading room!

I really have no sense of what is truly right or wrong when it comes to personal boundaries between people who are close, so I try to go along with whatever the person I am with feels comfortable with now. 

These are the ties that stretch

 

Loving someone does not necessarily guarantee that love will be returned, or returned in a way you might have chosen. But in the long run, it is the loving, more than being loved, that is so fulfilling.

Thinking of the loved one. Seeing the face of someone dearly loved, even just in pictures, can be a wonderful experience. After all, love means wanting the best for the beloved. Needing to have that love returned is less loving and more selfish. 

After a while, just hearing that a loved one is happy, or thriving makes me feel good. I find myself stretching my needs and imagination to fill in those long thin threads of separation and after much practice, I am good at it.

Long ago people left on boats or covered wagons and never returned home, but those at home never stopped loving them. Today we can fly across the world quickly, but being able to do something and actually doing it can be mitigated by many things. Still, the love, invisible as it may be, travels even more quickly and the heart is full.

Simple joys

Life has been a true trial this year. A bad reaction to a prescription set off a chain reaction that has seen me off one, or both feet since the beginning of August. Now that my daughter has moved to Arizona this has been difficult. I use a service to deliver groceries, but getting to my mailbox requires driving my car down there because I cannot walk down the little hill. Taking out my trash means making it to the parking lot, which is difficult, especially when both feet are bad.

One foot has been wrapped and in a boot since September. The other has me in too much pain to walk some days and okay others. I have a world class walker that is the only thing keeping me from being totally helpless this past Fall.

Other worries mount up. My car battery died. It jumped and started, but the radio needed to be reset. I had the factory code, only it didn't work. Trash piles up between doctor visits, which are the only time I've been able to leave the house. House cleaning is a spotty and iffy process done in bits and pieces depending on my feet, the walker and the job. Even changing the sheets is a major problem and I have had to sleep on top of the blankets because I have been sleeping with the boot on so that I can get up and make it to the bathroom twice a night.

Yesterday my foot doctor decided I still need to wear the boot, but the wrapping can come off. I just need two heavy socks now, which means that showering is now greatly simplified. I was able to drive through the Honda dealership and get my car radio working. I took out my trash, got my mail and even was able to get a flu shot and covid booster. 

I cannot tell you how relieved I feel being able to do these things. Simple things become major life problems when mobility is limited for so long. Cross your fingers that soon even the boot may come off (in the next two to four weeks.) Another upside? One of my twin kindergarten pen pals wrote back!

Lost in time and space

Family meant everything to me when I was growing up. My world was in a constant state of flux. We moved. People came and went. Schools changed, but my family was always there. 

I felt safe when I was with them. There was something solid and coherent in being together in the family car, or on vacation in Minnesota on the lake. Our homes, schools, and friends changed, but our routines were the same. The first twelve years of my life were spent as one fourth of a group called the kids. We bathed together, played together, rode bikes, and sat together at meals or watching television. There was such security in that little group.

My mother was the god-like creature who held us all together. Her strength, love, and fury defined our lives in no uncertain terms. I may have been afraid of her some times, but I always felt safe from everything else in the world when she was near by.

My father WAS god. He knew everything. The state superintendent of public instruction once described my dad as the most intelligent man he had ever met. I believed that. If he said something, I was willing to die before letting anyone else tell me it was wrong.

Moving to my mother's small home town when I was a senior in high school changed the dynamics. Not right away, but in the long run. There is a snobbery in small towns, a kind of backwards clannishness that separated our family. My younger siblings spent more time there than I did and the rift between us has never completely closed. We are no long one thing made up of four parts. We were them, and me, and each thing I did away from them - going to college, moving away, having an extended family of the heart, redefined who we were.

When my mother died we all drifted farther apart. Now my father and one of my brothers have passed on, my sister has migrated into a lifestyle I do not understand and my youngest brother is someone I talk to on the phone a few times a year. It is hard to imagine we were once one tight knit little solar system orbiting around the love and light of two people whose differences made them fit together like custom puzzle pieces.

I have sunshine on cloudy days

It has been a while since my last thot and it isn't because I haven't had thoughts. It is simply because I have had such a profusion of thoughts that I couldn't seem to formulate them into any one coherent Thot.

Heading into my next birthday I am a little bit surprised at how quickly my life has moved along. There are times that seemed, or seem interminable, but in general it has flown by faster than the recap that precedes Netflix series.

I have memories prior to age three that are as clear and vivid as ever. I can honestly say I remember fifty years ago as if it were yesterday. Even sixty years and maybe seventy!

It saddens me when I see someone treated as less than coherent and intelligent just because their skin is old and withered. It infuriates me when people are judged on their physical beauty. As a species many of us are still very very primitive. I sometimes wonder how many eons it will take for us to be truly civilized. 

Running fast to kill dinner might have been important to a caveman, but driving fast has nothing to do with saving ourselves as a species. Unless we figure in those throwbacks who still murder, rape, pillage and destroy.

Many of us haven't figured out that we are one with this planet and when she goes, we go. In fact, we will most likely go way before her, because we are not as resilient as she is. Thinking we have enough money to fling ourselves into outer space where we will survive on another planet is the height of hubris. Chances are if there is life out there and they know about us, they will not encourage our visiting. It would be like inviting un-housebroken wild things to live among them.

Still, on the whole, I am enjoying my life. I am proud of my children who seem to have their feet on the ground and their hearts in the right places. My family and family of the heart truly bring me sunshine on cloudy days. I love Iphones and computers.

And who could ask for much more than that?

Do something you love

 

It isn't just what you say that matters. It is what you do.

If all you do is sit and moan, nothing will change. At least nothing for the better. 

There are people who simply do what is necessary to get by and while we all do that sometimes, if you make a habit of it, you miss a lot.

People need to figure out what makes them happy and do that!

That!

Whatever that is: playing with miniature dollhouses, or trains, playing guitar and singing, painting, crocheting, something that is fun to do even if it serves no other purpose. That is part of living.

There is no awards ceremony, that I am aware of, at the end of a life, that hands out certificates for the most work done. There are no martyr awards unless you are willing to die burning at the stake and settle for a paragraph in some distant history book. 

If we have children, we need to raise them so they understand how to get along in the real world. There is work, play, some meditation and some musing, but all one thing and not the others makes one a very dull, and unhappy, person.

Don't just do something.

Do something you love.

Family

 

I try not to over react when my crazy family does something unusual and by unusual, I mean odd, strange, weird, bizarre. 

Some of them are notable oddballs. They do things that are not only not in their best interests, but actually harmful to themselves. 

However it is not illegal to do a lot of crazy things.

It is also not funny, cute, or laudable in any way.

I have one relative who never answers their phone, responds to a text, or listens when anyone talks to them. I have been known to call them, listen to them talk and have them hang up before I get a chance to say why I called! They are not angry with me, they are just so self focused they don't seem to realize someone might call them for a reason.

Tonight took the cake though! My phone rang and I answered it. I repeatedly said, "Hello," and no one responded. I was almost ready to hang up when this person giggled and said, "I thought I was hallucinating. I forgot I called you then I heard this voice coming from somewhere."

This person has a job working with people and I wonder how that works out? 

Our phone call was a jumble of random stories that had little to do with anything I said, or asked. It made little sense. I felt like I was hearing pre-made responses randomly tossed out over and over.  I asked if they were on any medicine and was given only their normal prescription names. 

Now I have an ache deep in my stomach, a sense of foreboding, and the knowledge that there is nothing I can do about it. Experience has taught me that. Sometimes I wish I could just forget I have these people in my life, but it is not that easy.

Mobility

 

When you have an injury that leaves you unable to get around you are one step from a nursing home. I would rather be dead than go there.

I injured my left foot while the right one was healing and found myself virtually trapped!

My walker was five years old and never a very good one. Using it didn't help much. It left the palms of my hands bruised and every step was still agony. 

Necessity is definitely the mother of invention. I discovered I could scoot around on my desk chair and kitchen bar stool. Neither is made for that and neither worked very well on the carpeting, but they were fine for the kitchen and bathroom.

Thank goodness I had recently snugged up my living space, so most of what I need is not too far away, but there were still problems. I used a cane to reach the switch that turns the fan on and off and made a train when the groceries were delivered outside my front door. 

Using the cane, I hooked the groceries off the front patio, put them on the office chair and, sitting on the kitchen bar stool, pushed the groceries back to the kitchen where I put them away. The first time I did it, my sack fell off the front of the chair, the one with two dozen eggs in it, but not one broke!

Today my new walker came, a week early! It is the difference between night and day. I can get around my apartment. I can carry out my trash and get my mail. I can even get to my car! 

I will live to innovate another day!

How did you know?

 

How did I know?    

I didn't.

Yet I did and I did it just right.

Some people call it luck,

Others coincidence,

A few might say it's magic,

But I think it is just paying attention:

To feelings,

And yearnings,

And love flowing between

Those who care about each other.

Touching

 

I want to reach out

Hug you

Hold you

Make it better

But

Emptiness explodes inside me

Filling me with something 

I cannot touch

Cannot feel

It hurts more than I can explain

This wanting

To heal

Your grief

I feel but cannot touch.

Letting go

I have found myself drawn to her from the very beginning. Seeing her play hide and seek with her boy, watching her tirelessly chasing balls, convinced every yellow tennis ball was made just for her!

She has a great life. I don't think anything has been left out. Her parents let her sleep in their beds. They cook for her, take her on long walks every day, arrange their vacations so she can swim in the water wherever they go. And now they have taken the extra long road around her cancer, making sure the quality of her life is absolutely as good as it can be.

Today she will slide out of her large doggie body and into whatever comes next. She will do it at home, surrounded by love and peace, broken hearts and tears of sadness. She will not suffer. She will never suffer.

It is the final step in loving. It is letting go at the very last moment when that is the kindest most loving thing to do.

Maddie

Vibrant eyes

Smiling mouth

Galloping across the grass in radiant wonder

Her panting a mantra of joy

Her presence a comfort

Love on four legs.

Set free

Amusing Grace

 

People are taught to want the common. 

It is easier for the world if everyone wants superfluous things like geegaws and faddish clothes.

Buying new cars and houses and cruises keeps the fat cats fed and everyone else running on treadmills where they are too busy doing the habitual instead of thinking, or really living.

Joy is defined in columns of dollars and cents, files of positive and negative tests, being different like everyone else.

The ultimate success can be seen as winning a gig on The Voice, a husband on the batchelorette, or a promotion in a tall building.

All things can be won, bought, or collected! The right ones are supposed to make you healthy, wealthy, and wise. But do they?

What if what makes me happy is something else? Finding that something could be the secret to a truly fulfilled life. One where I don't have to be or do what I see on television. 

Striving to be what I am not really only leads to failure. Some people were not cut out to be mothers, or teachers, artists, or race car drivers and all the work in the world will not make them successful at that. Not really. If life makes escaping to work, or sleep, feel good, maybe I am in the wrong place doing the wrong things.

Life shouldn't be years of escapism. Joy comes from immersing myself in what I love. 

Grace is not conforming, or even not conforming. It is finding fulfillment in doing what feels right. Not just looking right.

There are Puritans among us

My journey along the way has been long. As a child I was open and vulnerable. Ready to believe whatever was told me, taking it at face value no matter what, finding security in the grown-ups around me. Exposed to religion in bits and pieces, I put together a strange and sweet story based on love, fear and an agrarian society.

My teen years found me romantically searching for truth among the stories of saints and those extreme religious, like cloistered nuns in hospitals. I wanted ritual and order, safety and absolute security.

After my marriage I was drawn back into the religion of my husband and my father's family. Episcopalians are transitional people. Not quite Catholic and definitely not Baptist. But looking back I think it was mostly belonging. The priest drew us in, gave us places in the church, work to do and he tapped into our neediest desires. That belonging lasted through my child raising years.

And then, just as my boys were starting to question and rebel, the people in our new, tiny, upstart Episcopal church began to bend towards the fanatical. Not the priest, he was and still is a person I love, respect, and admire, but many other upstanding members began to stand above and upon the others. There was a dark, grim, satisfaction in suffering that emanated from them, time honored descendants of a Puritanical society.

I did not belong.

In the end this opened the way for me to explore other religious and spiritual paths and, ultimately, a doctrine of my own based on science and being and meditation. This morning, walking across the acorn strewn grass, stepping over and around huge, long tree roots, feeling the breeze gently blowing through my hair, seeing people in the distance fishing, I felt an overwhelming sense of belonging, of being, of a love that transcends time and space and finds the puritans among us to be mere shadows in the light.

The compression of atoms that define this body in time seems of supreme importance to me, but this is barely a spark in the continuum of time. I am. I was. I will always be.

Whether I am aware, or how I am aware, is irrelevant to 99% of what is, but it is important to me now and I want to make the best of it.

A glance at the past

 

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2008

What Do You See?

I have to ask my sister. "What do you see?"
I need to know.
Not that I doubt my own eyes, my own judgment, but I want to see through her eyes.
I want to feel the image pressed against her retina, smell the odor of it within the confines of her receptors.
I want my hand to reach out and feel what she feels and he feels and they feel and you feel.

Right here, among us, the creator constantly works. Everywhere, mountains of creations, worlds of creations, simple, plain, ornate in a million different ways, surround us. Each one, only the same one, made again and again. The medium never changes. The hands work with the same level of skill and the skill never varies. Not one is any more precious than the other, not one looks different in its creator's eyes, like a cook preparing innumerable meatballs for a great feast they are all the same, only these are Faberge meatballs, their value beyond comprehension.

Each one shaped with love and exquisite care. Each one honed and fired and decorated and then, just before letting it go, a thumb presses slightly into the cradled object. One thumbprint, a small indentation for identification. A shallow shadow of a place left to hold all the differences that can be. Almost invisible, it is the only place visible to many of us and it is a shape shifter, a reflecting pond displaying our own selves, not the one before us.

How odd that we judge ourselves so harshly thinking that it is someone else. How strange the conclusions we draw from such a shallow place. How bizzare the levels of resentments and pain that pile upon us from something so immaterial, so miniscule and fleetingly fragile. How often do we crack the object during our perusal, imagining a tiny little flaw the creator deemed a signature? This ever changing flicker of uniqueness becomes the visage blocking our view and we spend our entire lives seeking what we are.

And so I ask my sister, "What do you see?" Thinking that perhaps I should stir the soup one more time, this time with my eyes closed so that I may immerse myself in us.

Stifled?

Society is built around customs and conventions. We grow up thinking that the things we learn and do are the right way.

Different is always dangerous because the average person is afraid of it. They don't recognize it immediately, nor do they trust it, but change is part of growth and customs are often just arbitrary things that caught on over time.

Holding a fork and knife a certain way changes depending upon where you live, but as long as the nutrients reach your mouth, nature doesn't care. I care, but that is only my preference. The same goes for styles and colors of clothing. Wearing white after Labor Day was once a great faux pas. That doesn't hold true for everyone anymore. Faux pas are like other customs. They change.

Kitchens were once separate houses, or rooms, behind the house because of heat and fire dangers. Then they were separate rooms closed off from the rest of the house so guests would not see the clutter, but now most of us cannot afford hired kitchen help, so kitchens are part of the living room, or great room.

We transitioned from teepees and cabins to houses, to McMansions, and now some people have gone full circle back to tiny houses. Our need to distinguish ourselves by building bigger anthills has diminished somewhat. We are building homes we find comfortable and not necessarily museums.

Although a home is a museum of sorts. It's the place to display our personality. The key word being OUR. Daring to live and decorate and dress ourselves in ways pleasing to us takes courage. Honestly, there really aren't any absolute rules for living besides being safe and healthy. Buying a book written by someone who is supposed to really know the etiquette for all of life mostly benefits the author.

Stifling creativity for the sake of so called etiquette is lazy. 

That being said, I don't want to see the food in your mouth, or be subjected to your noise unless we agree to share it. Those are some of my personality quirks. 

Balance is tricky.

To the moon

 

I  have occasionally thought about the fact that I am separated from one of my children and, as painful as this was for a while, it has become acceptable now. All my life I have had to separate from those I cared about. 

Our family moved frequently while I was between eleven and seventeen and even if it was only across town a few miles, the new school meant never seeing my old friends again. Looking back I don't understand why my mother didn't find ways for me to maintain those relationships, but she did not and it never occurred to me that I could. Today a ten minute drive to a friend's house is nothing. Back then it was like going to the moon.

I am watching Star Trek Voyager and one of the characters becomes the caretakers for some children who eventually must go back to their biological families. Each time this happens my heart sinks and I feel a deep sadness for her. It didn't occur to me right away that I have had similar experiences.

Foster children are not ours to keep. Other children may move on as adults. People divorce, die, move onto new relationships in other states, there are infinite ways to say good-bye.

Learning to adapt was a necessary part of my maturation process. It might be a little easier for me than it is for some people. I am a naturally hopeful person. I tend to discover the best in most situations. I am malleable and resourceful. I can protect myself by expecting the worst, but that never lasts longer than it takes to find some glimmer of a reprieve.

And for that I am truly glad.

Mind does matter

 

I belong to a Facebook group that shows pictures of our town long ago. Sometimes I look at them and feel a sense of longing that seems out of place.

Born just before 1950, my generation was a transitional one. All generations are to some extent, but mine saw horse drawn milk wagons, tiny mom and pop stores, hot summers without air conditioning and our first forays into space.

Houses still had functional porches surrounded by towering trees to keep things cool. They had big windows and lots of doors for light and breezes and access to outside places to work in hot weather. Garages were still huge, leftovers from when they had been barns and many large houses still took up a quarter of a block of land.

Coal furnaces had to be stoked and piles of coal were delivered through chutes into brick basements that often had dirt floors. Electric chandeliers were often converted gas lamps attached to ten foot ceilings and clothes were washed in old wringer washers dragged into the kitchen on wash day. Later they were dried on clothes lines propped up with long wooden poles.

Families had one radio that people gathered round like we do televisions today and one car, so walking was the most common form of transportation. We still got smallpox vaccinations and polio shots came out, but not before many children were living in iron lungs.

I jumped rope, played jacks, roller skated and rode my bicycle to my neighbor's house where we dragged her toy kitchen out onto the front porch to play. Dogs were not penned up, or tied out, so there were packs of them running, even on the school playground. I was afraid of dogs.

But I had a dog! He was a Scottish terrier, Snorkel, that my father brought home. He followed me everywhere until one night some children happened on him eating on a meaty bone and he bit them. I don't know why, but he was put down after that.

It was a time of innocence. We were all bathed together, played together, fed the wild squirrel bread from our hands and polished silver on the picnic table with a bunch of friends. My girl friend and I pierced our hands with a safety pin and become blood sisters. I had a squirrel tail hanging on the handlebars of my bike and a rabbit's foot in my pocket. We were little savages, but so was everyone else.

During the course of my childhood I had pet rabbits, ducks, fish, frogs, a parrot and monkeys. Once we even had a tiny alligator, but my mother returned him to the store because he preferred his meat rotten and saved it in his little pond.

So many of the things we believed, did and hoped for are no longer safe, politically correct, or even imaginable now. Looking back at it I sometimes feel closer to the world of my grandfather than my grandchildren, but that is the way of the world.

Youth is best defined by its ability to change. The wisdom of old age is mitigated by the amount the mind has atrophied.

Memory Album

 

I found a realtor's ad for the house I lived in from kindergarten through eleventh grade, minus two years in the middle. My grandfather bought it and rented it to my parents so I could go to kindergarten when kindergarten was a rather rare commodity in schools at that time. 

Walking through those pictures sparked a lifetime of memories! There was the corner of the yard that used to have bushes with a path through them. I ran through it on the way home from school on days when I had piano lessons and one day I tripped. I fell so hard it knocked the wind out of me. And there was the sidewalk where I would ride my wagon by putting one knee in it and pushing with the other leg to zoom down the side of the house, or ride my bike and see how I low I could go while turning the corner, before I fell one day and took layers off my knee.

Inside was the mail slot into our foyer with the big glass door to keep the chill out of the house. To the left was the living room and I could still see the baby grand piano in the corner that used to hold our giant Christmas tree, wired into the woodwork so four little ones couldn't knock it over. I could see the windows I had peered out of when my mother went out to build a snowman for us since we were too sick to go out ourselves. There was the wall where our aquarium sat, right by the big television set that had converter boxes and rotator boxes on top so we could watch one of three channels.

The sun porch was painted white, but the bookcases were still there from when my father had his office upstairs. The dining room where we ate every dinner and celebrated birthdays and holdidays had different light fixtures, but I could see where the buffet with it's huge mirror had been. My mother hid a brush in one of the drawers so she could do our hair before we left for school.

The kitchen was much different, but there were the windows our neighbor passed in a trouble light through one night when the power was off. I remember sticking my finger in the empty socket as I pulled it in and getting shocked. Under them was the space where our kitchen table sat. We each had our place. My youngest brother sat at the end on a step stool type chair and sometimes the toast would fly out the end of the toaster and slide all the way down to him! I also remembered where the high chair was and the trash can next to it where one of my brothers threw away a match when he got caught playing with fire. My mother was a hero that day, kicking the burning trash can down the steps and out the back door and ripping the curtains off the wall before the firemen came.

The basement still had the room that was once my dad's office when he was a high school teacher grading papers, and the old enamel brick shower we sometimes used in the summer. Even the toilet on its dais was still here, right in the middle of the laundry room!

I could see the second floor bathroom, pretty much the same as it had been, but no longer pink tiled. And I could see into all four upstairs bedrooms, three of which were mine at different times in my life. Each room full of memories from that age when I slept there. The bedspread decorated with dolls from many lands when I was young, the day bed room with the bright green furniture my mother thought a young teen would love, and finally the deep orange painted room of a young girl in high school with her Nasa clock and so many dreams.

I remember sleeping on brush curlers, using Ten O Six on my face, getting ready for dates and standing there looking at myself in my dresser mirror thinking, this is me?

So many memories waiting in those pictures, it felt like a time machine.

Sunshine

After dealing with problems for two days I was very relieved to have things solved, so I decided to paint something.

I've been picturing some kind of ocean with the sun coming up, or setting behind it, but my skill is such that I never really know how my paintings will turn out. I mentally divided my canvas into three sections and began with my favorite color, cerulean blue. Then I used some deep purple, another color I really love and finally, because suns are typically yellow, I used that for the top. By this time I was getting into it and adding some red highlights to the sun seemed like a good idea. 

As usual I found myself drawn into the process and when I looked up it had been almost two hours, which isn't long for a painting. I usually start like this then leave it for a few days while I just kind of stare at it until I am ready to do more. Sometimes I share it with Bestest or my youngest son and sometimes they make a suggestion. This time Bestest really loved it!

He liked it so much he called me to see if I actually painted it and then told me it was beautiful! He's never done that before and it really made me feel good. In fact, it kind of changed everything. 

Now there is a possibility that someone is going to buy this painting! I would gladly just give it to them, but the thought that they want to pay for it astounds me. I like it. I sit and look at it sometimes, but I honestly don't know what is so different about this painting. Still, the whole experience has been joyful and uplifting. It's like the sunshine in that painting spilled over into my life.

Frustration

I am having to rollover a beneficiary 401K to an IRA.  At least I think that is what I am doing! I have an accountant who has taken care of things like this for me since 1998, but State Farm has decided to make things difficult.

Suddenly the paperwork is not enough. They sent me a vague letter saying I needed to call them, but when I did, the woman wasn't really sure why I was calling. Since I didn't know either, it was a problem. I took the letter to my accountant, but State Farm would not allow her to speak on my behalf.

Armed with information she gave me, I called them back.

Now every time I call I have to go through a text message to prove I am who I am because I have never been able to get their pin number to work on my online account. And every time I called today I got a different person who had a different problem with what was going on. I ended up calling back and forth between my accountant and State Farm's benefits people for first one thing and then another. 

I was finally able to give them the name of the process that satisfied them, the account number for the new IRA, the name of the new company and a name to put on the check they insist must be sent straight to me. But . . . the name of the new company was too long! It would not fit on their check! I asked couldn't they just abbreviate the less important words? Couldn't they just use the name of the company, Putman Fiduciary Trust Company? Couldn't they look at the detailed paperwork that company had sent them to facilitate all of this to begin with? Nope! They needed me to call back with a shorter name that would fit on their check!

I called around and had a name for them, but when I called back I had used up my day's worth of allotted texts for my pin number and they could not accept my call! A woman offered to help me update my pin, which I have been unable to make work for years. She said it was simple. Forty minutes later she gave up too and decided she would pass me on to a 401K representative. (I might mention here that during the course of the morning I had been shuffled from one kind of representative to another, each one ostensibly the ONLY one who could help me. In between I was placed on very long holds waiting for my call to be the next one in line.)

All I needed to do was give him the short name they could type on the check they were going to send me, but he can't do that for 24 hours since I used up all the text messages they allowed.

Tomorrow at 12:35 PM I am hoping to call back, get the right representative, and have them type Putman Investments on a check that will be mailed to me. It sounds simple, but I have nearly four hours of phone calls that say it won't be that easy.

Joy

 

What is joy?

I thought that would be the easy part of this, but joy is elusive. It is light and airy, something that lifts me up like a feather on the breeze. And yet its foundations are forged deep within my past. There is something mysterious and magical about joy. Something indiscernible.

But it is visceral, like my favorite colors or flavors, it is a part of me distinguished by something inside of me for something outside of me.

Joy is what connects the two. It is the peaceful feeling of fulfillment unlike any other. It is a deep, abiding satisfaction that emanates from my very core.

I find joy in the things I display in my living room niche. I also find joy in removing all the unnecessary things in my life. For reasons I do not understand, I find joy in the sound of thunderstorms and rain pelting against my windows, joy in order and the security it promotes within me, joy when gazing at water, or the silhouettes of herons flying by. I find joy in the sound of certain people's voices.

I like many things, but most things that give me joy cannot be held in my hand. 

Only in my heart.

Remembering

 

Who do you remember?

Who are the people who made an impression on you?

I doubt many of you think fondly of: Mable, she had a kitchen floor so clean I could eat off of it, but I preferred the table and plates. Or, Maxine who was always working in her basement. For forty years she worked on that basement! Paid a guy fifty bucks to haul it all away in the end. Or Gramma, who worked so hard all day that she slept the rest of her life away.

Most of us remember people who did things with us. People who built sand castles, or tents made out of blankets we crawled in and out of. People who sat down and looked us in the eye, listened to us and offered some kind of feedback to show they really cared and paid attention.

We don't want to be someone's project. We want people who walk beside us, who interact with us in inspiring or joyful ways. People remember smiling faces and thoughtful words.

All the clean houses and all the big jobs, cracked Humpty Dumpty up and that's no yolk! Remember the story of the Dutch woman who was so clean she scrubbed the faces right off her children? She probably believed that was more important than playing with them. Misconceptions can ruin us. Work is what we do to survive. but it is not enough to define a memorable life.

Do what you love.

People will remember your sparkling eyes, your genuine smile, your love of life.