It isn’t the person who doesn’t like me that matters, their voice isn’t what I will listen to. Instead, I hear the whispers of those who love me … “Carry on.”
(from a wonderful shirttail cousin)
18 Apr 2013 Leave a comment
It isn’t the person who doesn’t like me that matters, their voice isn’t what I will listen to. Instead, I hear the whispers of those who love me … “Carry on.”
(from a wonderful shirttail cousin)
17 Apr 2013 Leave a comment
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
~Mary Oliver
11 Apr 2013 Leave a comment
in Daily Prompt, Press This, Re-blogging Tags: family, humor, life, relationships
Fathead Follies rarely disappoints in the humor department. Any parent will relate (and cringe) upon reading this story.
11 Apr 2013 2 Comments
in Daily Prompt, Press This, Re-blogging Tags: be real, blogging, brave, friendship, inspiration, learning, life, living, marriage, relationships
I love Transman and his story … and this one touched my heart in a unique way. It deserves to be Pressed.
10 Apr 2013 6 Comments
in Graphics that Grab Me, My Thoughts Tags: celebrations, family, happiness, happy stuff, life, living, love, loving, marriage, relationships
The following post is in celebration of my time on WordPress — one hundred posts since January, 2013. My husband has retired a bit early, which is another reason for celebration, and he’s regaining his health and color more every day — the best reason for celebrating that I can think of. Here’s to life and health!
Things I love about my life …
10 Apr 2013 2 Comments
in My Thoughts, Wisdom Tags: About Me, be real, brave, Facebook, friendship, learning, life, living, love, loving, relationships
I read an article this morning by Anne Lamott that latched onto my molecules and won’t let go. Anne is one of my most favorite writers anywhere, ever, in all the world, because she’s honest. She’s so honest she makes me flinch sometimes. And I love it. The article is here if you want to read it. http://www.oprah.com/spirit/How-To-Find-Out-Who-You-Really-Are-by-Anne-Lamott . I’m not usually a purveyor of O Magazine, but hey, Facebook.
Which segues directly into what Anne did for me this morning. I’d been thinking for days … weeks, really … about tweaking my friends list to make it a little more honest. Who has 350 actual friends, let alone wildly imaginative totals like 1,600? Or 6,000? I’ve seen those numbers and recognized them for exactly the popularity contest they represent, all the while knowing that there was no good reason for my own list of acquaintances to hold upwards of 400 names — at one time even topping 500. As with everyone on social media, there were at least 400 explanations as to how all those names got there, some of them not valid enough to warrant their staying. Anne’s ruthlessly straightforward article finally gave me the kick in the butt I needed to perform surgery.
Forty-seven excisions later, the list is starting to more closely line up with what my daily/weekly/monthly interactions on Facebook look like. There will be further cuts, but my brain already feels freer, lighter … more honest. It irks me when someone sends me a friend request and then never says hey. There were a lot of those. Of the people left, 58 of them are family. They don’t have to like me, in fact it’s highly probable that some of them have hidden me due to my intermittent political yammering, but it’s unlikely that I’ll be deleting any of them. Family is family. The other 251 consist either of people I’ve shared a relationship with in this life, or beautiful souls I’ve met via Facebook, and it would be impossible to say which group I feel closer to, even though it’s unlikely I’ll ever have a face-to-face meeting with most of those in Group Two. It was revealing to me that when I scrolled through the list to get a count of family members, I had to stop repeatedly and think “Is he/she a cousin? No. Hmm.”
Anne’s beautiful article is entitled “Becoming the Person You Were Meant to Be,” and this quote is so liberating I may print it on a card and put it where my eyes will land on it every day. ” … you are probably going to have to deal with whatever fugitive anger still needs to be examined—it may not look like anger; it may look like compulsive dieting or bingeing or exercising or shopping. But you must find a path and a person to help you deal with that anger. It will not be a Hallmark card. It is not the yellow brick road, with lovely trees on both sides, constant sunshine, birdsong, friends. It is going to be unbelievably hard some days—like the rawness of birth, all that blood and those fluids and shouting horrible terrible things—but then there will be that wonderful child right in the middle. And that wonderful child is you, with your exact mind and butt and thighs and goofy greatness.”
I realized some time ago that it makes me angry when other people tell me who I should be. Spitting cursing angry. So I don’t let people do that to me anymore. By the same token, I found that having people lurking on my Facebook page who never talked to me, never shared anything with me, never gave me anything of themselves to hang onto, get to know, be interested in, made me the same kind of angry. Fair or not, my antenna picked up judgment. And I decided I didn’t need it.
Facebook, as pitiful as it may sound, is a huge part of my social life. And now it feels a whole lot warmer and friendlier than it did when I got up this morning. My page is just that — mine. It’s good to be Queen. Thank you, Anne Lamott for being an honest, vulnerable human being and for gifting me with the wisdom you’ve gained from your joyous take on life.
08 Apr 2013 4 Comments
My husband Kim and I on mandolin and keyboard, recorded in his studio a few years ago. This is an Irish folk tune called “Be Thou My Vision.”
07 Apr 2013 2 Comments
Oh.My.Gosh. My husband spent time this morning building a killer playlist for my iPhone. Tears and chills … I could never get tired of this music. The closing track is the two of us on keyboard and mandolin, recorded several years ago in his studio. I somehow completely forgot we had it. Such an amazing gift. Bonnie Raitt’s “Feels Like Home,” playing now, says it all. Thank you, love … for everything.
05 Apr 2013 12 Comments
in My Thoughts, Poetry Tags: be real, brave, DPchallenge, friendship, learning, life, poetry, relationships, writing
I was never what you wanted me to be ...
your requirements were too cramped, my heart too wide,
and my eyes would not un-see
what you didn't know you'd showed me,
so I sweetly held my tongue and played the game.
I could now explain and justify ... but why?
Degradation is an IOU due no one, self-abasement ...
a crushing mortal sin.
The choices have been made
and life moves on.
There's surely nothing helpful left to say.
I never hated you for what you didn't want to know,
just wished your certainty extended outward.
And yet ... what does it matter in the end ...
for you are only you and I am I,
as regrets and might-have-beens all fade to black.
Judy L. Smith
Copyright April 2013
03 Apr 2013 Leave a comment
01 Apr 2013 2 Comments
in Holidays, My Thoughts, Story Time Tags: be real, celebrations, family, food, happy stuff, life, living, love, loving, memories, Photos, relationships
Yesterday, for the first time in memory, Easter Sunday buried me under a huge pile of nostalgia. You’d think Thanksgiving and Christmas would have considered that their sacred duty, but no, it was innocent pastel little Easter that ended up blindsiding me.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m the eldest sibling in my family. Our brother is gone, our parents, too, all of our grandparents have passed away, a lot of aunts and uncles, a few cousins, and without warning yesterday a tsunami of loneliness sent me rolling end over end. My sisters, although close in spirit, don’t live nearby, my son and Kim’s are long hours away in different directions, so it’s just me and Pa, which is ordinarily more than fine. The Kimn8r himself is now an “orphan by default” — grandparents, parents, step-parents, sister all went off and left him via death. His niece and nephew, cousins and aunties live far away. So. We manage, and we have a very good time at it. Yesterday was just one of those days.
Oh, the growing-up years. Depending upon the whims of the calendar, Easter morning sometimes dawned sunny and mild, but more often cloudy, gray and chilly. Regardless, we four munchkins threw jackets and hats or goofy little headscarves over our jammies and ran across the driveway to our grandparents’ big yard where Grandma was waiting with our Easter baskets. The hedges and trees and other hidey-holes yielded up an abundance of chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, candy eggs and assorted Easter-y gifts until our baskets were overflowing. Then a breakfast of waffles and bacon, followed by a mad scramble to get into our new dresses (made by our mom), white anklets and patent-leather shoes. Our little brother was stuffed under protest into a pair of pants and a jacket, and the tie that always gave him a “church headache.” As for the three of us girls, we could be found complaining bitterly about the way Mother did our hair — it looked “dumb,” too curly, too straight, too not right. Caught up in the joys of motherhood, she continued the grooming ritual on the drive to church, straightening (or smacking) anything within arm’s reach and using Mom Spit to clean the ears of whoever was fortunate enough to grab the middle position, front seat. When she managed to get dressed is a mystery for the ages, but at least our dad knew enough not to sit in the car and honk the horn the way one of our uncles did every Sunday. I have to wonder if he would have lived to see another glorious Easter morn.
Once there, we sat in a row, with Grandma in charge of keeping order through the judicious application of Juicy Fruit gum, pencils and church bulletins. Our parents were in the choir shooting us the stink-eye if we whispered or giggled too much, while we sneakily pinched each other under cover of the pew in front of us. Grandma gave it her best shot, in her Sunday dress and hat and sometimes wearing a pair of earrings lovingly shaped out of flour, salt and water paste and gifted to her that morning. Grandpa went to church with us about once a year, at Christmas time. He always said he wasn’t cut out for church because “When I work, I work hard. When I go to church, I sit. And when I sit, I fall asleep.”
Our parents would leave the choir loft and sit with us for the sermon, during which time Daddy invariably found it imperative to clip his nails. That little task accomplished, his next aim was to free a piece of hard candy from its crackly cellophane wrapper. His painstaking efforts to keep the whole process quiet only resulted in its taking f.o.r.e.v.e.r. … one tiny explosion at a time. If I’d been the pastor I’d have marched down from the pulpit and thumped him on the head, but as a kid I hardly dared even think such thoughts.
Church blessedly over, we all piled back into the station wagon, our brother sighing loudly and claiming a window seat so he could stick his head out and breathe once again. Of course, he always ripped his tie off on the way to the car.
We’d come back home to the aroma of the Sunday dinner Mother had somehow put in the oven that morning — another mystery of time and space — shuck out of our good clothes, and start sorting our Easter basket haul. Little grubbers that we were, I’m sure we managed to stuff a goodly pre-lunch portion of it in our faces before getting caught.
The afternoon usually consisted of endless egg hunts of the boiled and dyed variety, culminating in the cracked and battered dregs getting thrown at whichever sister, brother or cousin veered into our line of sight. It was all fun and games until somebody put an eye out, of course.
I’ve been contemplating what sort of cosmic convergence might have set off yesterday’s blue mood, but nothing momentous stands out. Just a little too much, maybe. A little too much perfect day, a little too much sunshine, too much quiet, too much capacity for remembering, too much of not seeing people I love for too long.
The earth is back on its axis now, though, and life goes on …
17 Mar 2013 2 Comments
The sequel to my Raised in a Barn piece …
My son is an only child, so I asked him once how much he’d minded growing up “in solitary.” He told me he’d liked having his own room and possessions without having to worry about siblings messing everything up, and he enjoyed all the attention and the regular proximity to adults and their world, but his one regret was that he had no one to share his memories. There was no brother or sister involved in the events of his childhood, no one to corroborate or contradict now when the stories start, no contemporary to help keep the memories alive when Mom and Dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles are all gone. And implicit in all of it was the fact that there was no one to share the blame when things went south.
I, on the other hand, am blessed with sisters — two of them. And we had a younger brother whose memory is sweet beyond words. When my sisters and I are together it’s all about the memories. Even when we aren’t actively talking about the past it’s there, part and parcel of who we are.
We had no shortage of memory-making opportunities during our growing-up years. We lived on a farm, across a gravel driveway from our grandparents, so we had plenty of space, including two good-sized houses, for inventing make-believe. We built forts in the barn and tent cities in the house, decorated dollhouses upstairs and down, strung paper dolls, Baby Linda dolls, Barbie dolls and their wardrobes from one end of the house to the other, set up tea parties in Grandma’s garden, made mud pies in front of the playhouse. Whatever fantasy world a child is capable of creating, we most likely did. And possibly the most interesting, compelling, and fabulous fun to be had was playing dress-up in Grandma’s attic.
Getting there was a bit of a trek. The stairway was hidden behind a wall in the kitchen and accessed by a door. Once we stepped up onto the landing, the view was straight up the narrow staircase, with not much hint of what lay beyond. It was always perfectly still up there and the air felt heavy. We could hear wasps buzzing in the windows, but we knew from experience that if we left them alone they could probably be counted on to return the favor. Every once in a while Grandma would go up there with a big pair of scissors and methodically cut off their heads, which we found deliciously cold and efficient on her part. Of course it only added to her cred, and we already tended to obey her faster than we did our mom. This is the same grandma who pinched the heads off the red and black box-elder bugs she found crawling across her floors and feared neither snake nor spider in her garden.
There was a shallow ledge parallel to the stairs which served as storage area for an intriguing assortment of items, both old and newer, but there wasn’t much time to take it all in as we had to concentrate on not tumbling back down to the bottom. At the top was a bookcase holding musty old volumes, including my first acquaintance with Gone With the Wind. It literally fell apart before I got to “Frankly, my dear …”. Also sitting on the shelves were several of our dad’s iron toys from childhood. Those heavy cars and trucks and cleverly-designed coin banks brought a nice sum years later when our parents held their retirement auction.
I don’t recall venturing up that staircase alone until about junior high. It wasn’t so much creepy up there as heavy with history and the weight of lives lived, and it just seemed better experienced in the company of others. Our dad’s model airplanes still hung silently from the ceiling of his former bedroom, and the pictures on the walls beckoned us back to an era we knew very little about. There was an old feather mattress on the bed in the biggest room, and everything had a patina of dust that made it seem as though nothing had been touched since the original occupants, our dad and his brother, went off to take up lives of their own.
The space held enough mystery to provide the perfect setting for make-believe, so it naturally followed that we and our friends would spend hours on lazy summer days assembling just the right outfits and posing for Grandma and her old Brownie box camera. We had a wealth of treasures to choose from, as the bedrooms included slant-ceilinged unfinished closets tucked under the eaves, full of a wondrous array of dresses, hats, gloves, jewelry, shoes, jackets and coats dating from the late 1800s forward. Flowing crepe dresses, hats with veils, long gloves, moth-nibbled fur coats and stoles, all of which we set off with bright red lipstick and old-lady face powder. Our grandparents’ house wasn’t air-conditioned so the upper story was stifling hot in the summer, but we didn’t mind. We were having far too much fun to worry about it.
It’s a simple memory, this one. No big drama happened, no momentous story. Nothing to see here, folks, might as well move along. Just ever-changing groups of young girls trying adulthood on for size.
Speaking of size, it strikes me that our feminine forebears must have been truly petite, delicate women. Incredibly, I see my four-year-old self wearing a dress that looks only slightly too large for me, albeit too long, and other photographs tell the same story.
I can only wonder at the patience it took for our grandparents to listen to us clomping endlessly up and down the stairs, giggling and chattering nonstop. And amazingly, I don’t remember any of us ending up in a heap at the bottom. Or maybe since it didn’t happen to me my brain thinks it didn’t happen at all. One thing we didn’t do at Grandma’s house was argue. At the first sign of trouble all she had to do was remind us quietly, “If you quarrel, you’ll have to go home, remember?” and everything was suddenly copacetic again.
When we finally tired of the game, I’m sure it was left to her to restore order to those magical closets, even though it was part of the deal that we at least try. I do know that we three sisters would give a lot to go back and thank our grandparents for all they contributed to our lives in countless ways. They were a huge part of the rich, full childhood we enjoyed and took for granted, and there’s really no way to overestimate the value of that kind of heritage.
My cousin Katie and I. She was eight or nine and I was four years old.
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