Hello! I have decided to do something different with my blog for a while. I’ve been working on a book I’m hoping to get published in the next year entitled “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. The book is a compilation of real stories about real relationships between mothers and daughters, sisters, sister-in-laws, girlfriends, aunties, and grandmothers. It’s about us girls. Many of the stories are heart warming and many are funny. Some are sad. The underlying theme is that we need each other. We may have wonderful marriages, a great relationship with our children, love the in-laws, etc., yet we are incomplete and empty without other women in our lives. In what ever form they arrive, blood relations or not, we need sisters and sister friends. There is a popular saying that states something about people becoming a part of our lives for a season, for years, or for a life time. Each one is significant and precious regardless of the time spent in the lime light of each others lives. Some fire flies lose their spark quickly and some glow warm in our hearts forever. Yet there is never a time when we don’t need sisters. I will post…
Category: Randomness
A Hallows Tale
Once upon a time a lady named Hazel flew on her broom to my house. I had three little kids at the time and I didn’t want them to be afraid or ask too many questions, so I asked Hazel to leave her broom on the back porch along with the pointy hat she insisted on wearing every day of her life. I had known Hazel since we were ten years old, kicking around in the same neighborhood woods where one day she came upon the broom. I’ll never forget it because it was so high up in this big old maple tree we were climbing and I couldn’t imagine how it could have gotten up there. “It flew, of course,” Hazel declared. Well I snickered to hear her say such a silly thing and wondered out loud where she got that idea. “Hazel, it didn’t fly. Brooms can’t fly.” But she showed me. Hazel grabbed hold of the handle, threw herself off the top of the tree straddling the broom, and held on for dear life. I screamed, sure she was heading for a crash landing on the rocky forest floor. Instead, she took off with a mighty swoop…
Excuse me, but I seem to be missing my eyebrows!
It’s six a.m. and as dark as the time we got caught in an underground tunnel in the middle of the night and suddenly all the lights went out. So dark it makes no difference if the eyes are open or closed, the sense of touch will find the light switch long before sight will. Yet this won’t last forever; just until this coming Sunday when daylight saving ends. It will still be dark at six in the morning, yet not quit as dark. Things change. For example, I used to have a full set of eyebrows. Not anymore. Now I have half-a-brow. They start out just fine but come to an abrupt halt at the half way mark. I’ve no idea where the rogue halves wandered off to, but they are gone. Now I take the eyebrow pencil and pick up where the originals left off and fill in the blanks. It drives me crazy. No one ever prepared me for half-a-brow. But then I never knew I’d be one of those people who are overheated all the time. I’ve spent most of my life freezing to death. But now, I find my coat coming off before making it…
Isolate
With autumn, comes the beginning of exercise classes and reconnecting with the ladies I left behind as summer blew in on an old sailboat. I’m not one to go to the gym or yoga studio when the sun is bright and warm and encouraging me to do my workout outside in the warm fresh air. But this time of year I can hardly get myself out the door under the blanket of gray skies, clouds, and wind, to so much as take the dogs for a walk. So, I’m loving my yoga class. This morning’s class got me thinkin. We were practicing the art of isolating our muscles by doing exercises such as clenching a fist without tightening the shoulder, bicep, or forearm. I found it nearly impossible, yet loved the whole idea. What concentration and self control it encouraged! Have you ever tightened your right glut without having your thigh, knee or calf tighten also? It’s tough but it’s fun to do and it shows us how connected everything in our bodies is. It’s a challenge to isolate one muscle and flex it without several others joining in, yet a great practice. I had a tooth ache once, a…
Battening Down the Hatches
Battening down the hatches describes our activities this time of year, don’t you think? It’s all we seem to be doing these days, in one form or another. The patio furniture has been stored away, even if all that means is stacking it on the side of the house and covering it with a tarp. The barbeque grill is under cover and the Velcro straps are all secured, the flag has been taken down for the season and the boats are out of the water- engines winterized and tarps bungied from one side to the other. And the sailboat? Well, it’s in the marina with the brass padlocks securing the hatch. Let the storms begin! We are ready…or are we? There may be more to battening down the hatches than all that. The word batten means to secure. And what is a hatch? It’s a small connecting door. So, battening down the hatches is the same as saying secure all small connecting doors, regardless of where they connect: to the cabin of a boat, to an attic, through the floor to a crawl space, or maybe, just maybe, something as totally unexpected as to the door to our hearts.…
Getting Back in the Groove!
I’ve missed blogging! Life got in the way BIG time but I’m ready to get going again. Blogging keeps my writing life in order, my goals on target, and my mind sharp. Stepping out of the routine for such an extended period of time has proven to be fatal. Time to regroup and get back to it. I’ve spent the past six months taking care of family and friends and although I feel blessed to have had the chance to be there, it’s good things are settling down now because my keyboard is screaming for use. Words have gotten backed up in my brain and need to be released. They are fluttering around looking for a landing place on a page where a story is forming, questions are being asked, and emotions are shown. Words so full they explode like the sweetness of blackberries in peach cobbler or sparkles in the sky on the Forth of July. So, I’ve settled on a word for the day. Today’s word is inertia. It means the inability or unwillingness to move; to act, kind of like I’ve been for half a year. Well, it’s time to move, time to act, time to…
Surprise! Surprise.
The roller coaster of life continues. Ever notice how the nice, peaceful, contented times last for such a short stretch? Like sometimes as little as an hour or two? And then there will be a time, like a whole two weeks where we get lulled into thinking all the challenges and struggles and negatives are done with. We’ve faced it all and handled it all! We’re done! Not quite. Exhausting isn’t it? I thank God for my sense of humor. Without it, I would be hiding away in some tiny cabin deep in the mountains somewhere, chopping wood and washing my hair in rain water. If I couldn’t laugh at life, there would be no sink or swim; there would only be sink. Humor is magic. It’s s gift that allows us to release tension and stress without having to cry all the time. The motor won’t start, there is no wind for our sails, and we’re stuck out on the water at nightfall. How are we getting home? Humor got us there. We celebrated our thirty eighth anniversary the other day. Without a sense of humor, we would never have made even ten. I look in the mirror –…
Road Trip
A lot of time has passed since I’ve taken a good long road trip, but I have one coming up. The price of filling up the gas tank has taken the fun out of this good old American pastime. We used to do them often, every chance we had. Driving allows travelers to observe the country as it is, not from above the clouds where everything appears to have a sense of order. A road trip is the real thing. Did you know, outside of the Pacific Northwest, lush and green and amazing as it is, the sun is shining? Not only that, but the temperatures resemble the summers of old. Nice and warm in most places, downright hot in others. Looking out the window this morning, I’ve decided to wear sweat pants, a long sleeved t-shirt, and a rain jacket to take my morning walk. I’ll need a hat. It’s raining. If the wind were blowing I’d be wearing a fleece under my rain coat, but thankfully it’s not. The dogs will be soaked to the bone by the time we get back. A little sun would do us good. So a road trip to the sunshiny state…
Eagle Eye
I sat in my neighbors kitchen close to the window where an eagle perched on the lip of a bird bath not ten feet away. The magnificent creature was very aware of our presence, so we spoke quietly and moved slowly not wanting it to leave. A good thirty minutes past, with our camera’s flashing and a crow making a perfect pest of itself by diving at the eagle’s head, cawing continuously. The most extraordinary thing about the bald eagle is it’s vision. They can see forever. I watched the head that can turn nearly 180 degrees and the eyes that scan for miles and wondered how it would be to have such vision. Would we see danger coming long before it arrived? Would we see warnings written on the walls, whereas we miss it all now? Vision is tricky. It’s subject to our open or closed hearts. There are times we see sadness, despair, and rejection, in the eyes of each other, only because our hearts are soft and receiving. The other times are navigated by the coldness of our hard hearts as we refuse to see past the outer layer of those in our midst, past our anger,…
It’s all about the babies…
None of us can forget the emotional rush that transported us from being a mere woman to being a woman who is also a mother. How can it be explained? Nothing has ever felt as spiritually all consuming as the moment I took that precious newborn in my arms, inhaled that intoxicating newborn smell, and felt the heart beat of my child against my chest. It’s overpowering. Unexplainable. Unbelievable. As a mother, we never forget the moment when the world stopped and all of heaven and earth smiled upon it’s newest addition. Pure magic. It’s the reason Mother’s Day is such a big deal. It doesn’t seam to matter what happened after that, the memory on Mother’s Day is the one where we are sitting in the glider holding our newborn and feeling nothing but contetment and love. But then, I’d never been a grandmother. Until now, that is. Oh, my, I love being a mom, but being Grandma is the best! Us Grandma’s are consumed with an intense love of the new grand-baby that courses through our veins like the flood of rushing water spilling over Niagara Falls in the spring. It’s beyond words. We want to breath that…