Let’s talk about happiness …
26 Feb 2013 3 Comments
in Daily Prompt, My Thoughts, Photos Tags: About Me, be real, brave, family, happiness, living, love, loving, marriage, relationships
| Daily Prompt |
“And they lived happily ever after.” Think about this line for a few minutes. Are you living happily ever after? If not, what will it take for you to get there?
Am I living happily ever after? The short answer is yes. The long-form answer can be found in my January 30 post entitled “Behind Every Good Woman is a Good Man!” The TMI answer is tucked safely away in my heart.
A happy life seems, in the end, to be part luck, part result of cumulative choices, part magic … and to stem in large measure from a willingness to work hard and to know when you have it good.
Living happily ever after doesn’t necessarily hinge on having a fairytale “other” to share your life with … but in my world it has certainly helped!
A little perspective …
24 Feb 2013 2 Comments
in Graphics that Grab Me, My Thoughts Tags: About Me, be real, brave, family, farming, graphics, inspiration, living, loneliness, loving, marriage, relationships
Daily Prompt: Buffalo Nickel February 24, 2013
Dig through your couch cushions, your purse, or the floor of your car and look at the year printed on the first coin you find. What were you doing that year?
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Since I’ve never been so lucky as to find money in a couch or on the floor of my car, I pulled a penny out of my billfold and checked the date — 1979. Total recall would be handy … but what I know for sure is that my son was nine years old, we were living on our farm, and I was ten years into what was intended to be my first and only marriage.
The farm was miles from any town and there were no neighbors my age, so I remember perpetually wishing for girlfriends to spend time with. I was lonely out there most of the time, but I stayed busy cooking, cleaning, doing laundry … school activities with John … feeding cattle … bottle-feeding baby calves … some part-time employment … and later on, driving tractors and combines. And reading. Always, always reading.
The years that preceded and followed 1979 helped to cement independence, self-sufficiency, patience, and a whole lot of other things into my nature, all of which I was able to tap into when my husband was killed in a harvest accident in 2003. Looking back from that vantage point, 1979 seems like a very simple time with no problems whatsoever. And little true loneliness.
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/daily-prompt-this-year/
What I really want …
24 Feb 2013 14 Comments
… is to write funny. Funny ha-ha, not hieroglyphics. Ever since I was a precocious child entertaining my aunts and uncles with my fancy vocabulary (and how many jaded adults did I completely annoy the bejeebers out of?), I’ve thrived on making people laugh. I apparently told someone that my name was Agnes Opal from Constantinople (never underestimate the power of a mom who reads to you), and it stuck. To at least one uncle I’ll always be Agnes Opal.
That episode is vaguely embarrassing to me now, but the joy of spitting out genuinely funny stuff embedded itself in my psyche early on. I sit here every day and read the giggle and belly-laugh producing stuff my blogger friends post, and wish I’d thought of it. That’s me being honest, folks.
But life is life and truth is truth. And what I’m apparently programmed to write about is memories. I have a lot of them, and I now have the dubious distinction of being the eldest in my immediate family. Both sets of grandparents are gone. My parents are gone. All of my in-laws are gone. My brother is gone, and even though he was the youngest, he had the closest ties to the farm and would probably remember things I never knew. My sisters moved away fairly early on, and are both younger than I, so by default I’ve become The Keeper of the Secrets. For the most part, they’re secrets that need to be told for preservation’s sake … and the mission seems to have fallen to me.
The truth to which we’re all called to be faithful is this …
Tell me a story …
20 Feb 2013 2 Comments
Our big snowstorm seems to have arrived. Sitting here watching it come down, blow around, stick to everything, run down the windows, I’m remembering the huge blizzard we had when I was about ten years old. If I have this right, it snowed for at least three days without let-up and the wind howled the entire time. The power went out, of course, so my dad got kerosene lanterns from my grandparents’ house … I still remember what they smelled like when they were all lit. Living on a farm, we were usually pretty well prepared for whatever might come up, so I’m guessing there was plenty of food in the house. Anyway, I don’t remember going hungry. And we had propane heat, so the house stayed cozy.
I do recall playing lots of board games and card games … and we probably drove our parents crazy … four kids under ten years old cooped up in the house for days and nights on end. When the snow finally stopped and the wind died down, we emerged to find our world transformed … drifts up to twenty feet high with deep valleys between. I have no idea what my dad did about the livestock while the storm was raging, but they must have survived somehow.
It was several days before the county could get through with blades to clear some of the roads, and a few more before we could make it to school. The storm happened in March, so we ended up with a fabulous vacation out of it. We spent our time exploring the new snowscape, in awe over the fact that our neighbors could walk out their upstairs windows onto the drifts. Our grandparents’ orchard was one enormous playground, with drifts up to the tops of the tall cedar trees and plenty of big hills to slide down. Our parents definitely got a break from the craziness … except, of course, for all the snow boots and wet jackets and gloves and mittens and stocking caps and …
Sadly, the heavy snow broke most of the cedars and fruit trees, and the orchard was never the same. As kids, of course, the cost extracted by a storm like that didn’t register with us until much later. We just knew it was the most amazing thing that had ever happened in our lives to that point.
Me with my two younger sisters atop the drifts in the orchard, with cedar tops peeking through. Our little brother was in the house.
The strange world of Facebook …
20 Feb 2013 Leave a comment
in My Original Blog, My Thoughts Tags: be real, Facebook, family, friendship, living, relationships
Facebook is even stranger than real life, which is saying a mouthful. I’ve been rattling around its environs for years now and I think I’ve seen Just.About.Everything. I realize I’m being silly in even claiming such a thing, however, as there’s always something even more mind-blowing around the next corner. People never fail to amaze. Most anyone who spends any appreciable amount of time on social media knows it’s a distillation of daily life in the world … every mindset is represented, every problem magnified, every personality laid painfully bare.
Let’s talk about “friending” … an intriguing concept in every way. It’s hard for me to let people into my life, and yet I’ve met fabulous individuals from around the globe whom I would never have had the opportunity to know otherwise and we carry on funny, fascinating, engaging conversations nearly every day. I also have a raft of family members on my friends list, most of whom rarely talk to me … but I don’t take it personally. We’re family, after all, and one sticks with family … at least in ours. And we share an industrial-strength genetic makeup … we tend to be quiet and introspective until someone hits the right button, and then just try to shut us up. I’ve received a lot of friend requests from people I used to know in a passing sort of way. Sometimes those work out and we strike up a comfortable relationship that’s better than anything we could have claimed in the past. Sometimes I authorize the request and never hear boo — not a hello, a comment in a conversation thread, a simple “like.” In those instances, I usually assume the whole thing was motivated by curiosity (have I gotten fat or fallen on hard times??), give it a few weeks, hit the delete button, and move on.
The first time I was unfriended, it was like a kick to the gut … it happened to be someone I thought was a close friend, someone who’d been by my side during life-altering events. I considered myself safe, accepted … in other words, in my mind it was a true friendship. Not so … my political and spiritual convictions, only mildly hinted at during those innocent early days, rendered me unfit for that particular relationship. Revelation having dawned, I tucked it under my belt and marched on. I’ve since been unfriended by a handful of other people for the views I hold, and the only thing that would make that an untenable situation is if I changed my thinking in order to keep people happy.
Interestingly, Facebook has succeeded in teaching me far more about friendship than I was able to learn in the rest of my life to this point. I’ve met lovely people to whom I feel very bonded … some of the truest friendships I’ve ever known. Thus, in some ways I’ve grown softer toward people … more accepting of personalities and the endlessly varied ways in which they express themselves. Inevitably, however, I’ve developed a thicker crust about some things. I do not tolerate prejudice, particularly the kind based on skin color or a person’s station in life, and I do not willingly subject myself to incivility. I’m all about keeping it real these days. If you pass me in the grocery store without a glimmer of recognition, I have to assume we aren’t actually friends. If you take me to task for the things I believe in and try to shame me into adopting a different mindset, I’m quite sure we aren’t friends, as no quality relationship operates that way. If you requested to join my friends list and we’ve never had a conversation or any sort of interaction, you’re probably not there anymore … or won’t be tomorrow. What’s the point?
Stay tuned … Facebook isn’t finished with me yet, nor I with it.
I love Stephen Wright
18 Feb 2013 Leave a comment
“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.” ~Stephen Wright
Heroes
17 Feb 2013 2 Comments
in My Thoughts, Photos Tags: brave, family, inspiration, living, loving, nursing, relationships
In one of my file cabinets there’s a folder labeled “Role Models” which is filled with clippings, photos, and articles about people who have continued to do physically and mentally challenging things far past an age when most of us tend to be ready for a break. A man who learned to read at age 98. A 73-year-old woman who continues to work as a pilot and flight instructor. A Nashville surgeon who still practices medicine at 80. A beautiful Broadway dancer who’s 78 and looks no older than 48. Bessie Doenges who, in 1995, was still writing and getting published at age 94, and brooking no nonsense, thank you very much. You get the idea. I’m in awe of all these people and so many more … but I don’t necessarily consider them personal heroes.
I have two real heroes in my life — my husband who kept me from dying of grief anorexia and loves me unconditionally … and my son.
John is an only child who ceased being a kid long ago. I knew he was an old soul from the first moment I laid eyes on him and in many ways it seems like he raised himself. He was always quietly settled on who he was, and the opinions of others didn’t cause him to waver much. He’s unfailingly polite, kind, and tactful, and if you need someone to really, really listen to you, he’s your guy. I can’t count the times in conversation when his spot-on discernment has gone through me like a laser.
He paid the price to get a five-year degree in Industrial Design and had a career for about a dozen years in which he was steadily moving up. Then 2003 arrived, bringing crushing loss — his dad and both grandfathers. A year of self-examination followed, and another year spent on college prerequisites for a career change. He then earned his RN degree in a grueling 18-month period instead of the usual three years, and it didn’t kill him … although the possibility existed.
He now works in the Oncology/Renal unit of an Atlanta hospital and was recently made Clinical Coordinator on the night shift. He may do hospice care someday, and if that happens the people he ministers to will have landed in a good place. He is uniquely gifted to help people leave this life with their dignity intact.
John is my flesh and blood and yet I often find myself wondering where he came from. As his mom I feel very humbled by him … proud … grateful. The way he’s lived his life to this point, and especially the way he handles adversity, along with so many other things, makes him my true hero. I could write a book …
Oh, and PS … he has a wicked sarcastic streak that will knock you off your feet.
Join the conversation …