Having just spent 7 hours in the ER with my father (after a fall, which fortunately did not end up with broken bones or bleeds), I am "worn slap out" as my Granny used to say.
No musings on the ER at the moment, but maybe it will arrive another night.
Now, to bed.
3/23/26
By this time the snow had given up and warming temperatures melted what remained. The teachers followed the university students on an unmarked path back into the woods. They found a clearing and a barbeque by magic, and soon, the students were unpacking their backpacks with the different snacks and food they brought.
Potato salad, bread with dried fish, butter and dill; a dish called Shuba (layered fish, carrot, beet, mayonnaise) and Sala (or pig’s fat) came forward one by one. While the other dishes were cold, they heated the Sala a bit, then passed it around. They told stories of how Stalin, during World War II, starved the people of Ukraine. When they could no longer buy meat, Sala provided calories to keep them alive another day with hopes to see Stalin defeated. They were survivors.
The English speakers sat silent – how does one respond to resilience of this magnitude in the face of vicious hate?
With awe and respect.
The picture was a Writer's Workshop prompt from February of 2023. I gave myself 15 minutes to write on the picture prompt and it took me to my time in Kyiv, Ukraine '98-'99. 3/20/26
Is it food?
Does it feed off another?
May it wait for yet another type of seed
Which by combining
becomes something new.
The hazelnut contains the universe –
The work of millennia formed and
Transformed into this tiny seed.
Give it soil, rain, sunlight –
The nut transforms into something
Quite different – larger, broader
Containing multitudes of itself
For all of time (maybe).
All the tree releases from itself –
Gases to fill the air,
Nitrogen to feed the soil
As it dies it decomposes into hummus and fungi
Decomposes into
Soil and spore and molecule.
The world below and the sky above
Filled again by what had been
One tiny seed, by what had been
Universe.
So what of my short life?
The lesson may be not so much
All my transformation
But mostly I am stardust as much
As I am flesh and
To stardust I will return.
The vanity of life
Its crowning glory:
The whisper of eternity
In each breath,
Each turning of a life.
Writer’s Workshop, 11/16/25
I get it now – wanting the space to be inviting because we want the kids to come back, to enjoy the space, to associate our home with welcome, fun, love. It becomes obvious the kids have many more activities and interests grappling for their time and they do not have to spend any of it with us. Like my friend’s post a few weeks ago declared, once the kids leave at 18, assuming they can and do, our time with them becomes sparse indeed. When they return, our home needs to have something all the other activities don’t, so we specialize in comfort, cleanliness, food, play and (hopefully) a lot of love communicated in a myriad of ways.
The question on the Lent card today is “where do you need healing?”
I know a fair number of grandparents who live close enough to be babysitters, Little League carpoolers, dance rehearsal chauffeurs and on-call overnight hosts. They see their grands regularly and fall into a pattern with them. Inside jokes and knowing glances grace their interactions. A single expression translates a book of dialogue due to years of spending regular time with each other.
J and I do not live close enough to any of our grands for that depth of ease or knowing. I don’t know if it is something which needs healing, but it is a distance which I pray will be closed with each visit, each game played, each meal shared, each book read aloud. And maybe having the bookshelves dusted, the floors vacuumed and the bathrooms clean will help a little, too.
3/18/26
He meant the particular suburb of our habitation – one which grew around the farm land my great grandfather purchased over 100 years ago. While once considered a “dangerous part of town” per an old college minister of mine, the area developed into an affluent section of the larger city. J quipped years ago we would never be allowed to live in this part of town unless we bought newer cars. I don’t know if he ever expected we would live exactly here, in the home of my childhood.
By his question, he’s still figuring it out. Or maybe he simply wants to make sense of the aimlessness of retirement or the boredom of home management – how did HE end up here?
Only he can tell his story, but as I sit in the room we now call the office, I remember it’s many iterations. When my sister moved into this room, we were a package deal. She read to me at night, fixed my hair in the mornings and put up with my kung-fu theatrics overnight. When she hit her teenage years, I moved to the front bedroom and she had this room all to herself. She painted the walls purple with a zig-zagging rainbow right in the middle interrupted by Garfield and his thought bubbles making sarcastic comments. I thought it was the coolest room ever.
She left to go to college and I inherited her space. I can’t remember if I left the bed on the floor or if I placed the bed on the floor. Because I thought my sister cool, and myself not so much, I’m sure I left it on the floor, catty cornered to the middle of the room. The stereo system sat just behind the bed in the corner and it became my crystal ball. If Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” or Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” came on at just the right moment, then my crush had to have noticed me that day/month/year.
The room has been a place of confession, study, creativity; of prayers, tears, heartache. In the five years since our return, it has served as a TV room, an office, a dance studio and a music conservatory. We have all imposed our wills on this space and place, molding it to our needs, wants, desires. We ended up here because we have made it so. Each decision bending us toward a future we only recognize in hindsight.
For me, the decision to leave so many years ago inevitably led me back because I needed distance to discover the edges of myself and now, I need proximity to solidify them. It’s that simple and that complex.
3/17/26
When I awoke this morning, the temperature hovered around 50 degrees, by 11 am snow fell curtain-like covering trees and lawns, by 4 pm the scenery was gaslighting me, telling me the snowfall had all been in my head. The temperature whispered, “It was real.”
I visited my OB/GYN today. When I entered, the waiting room brimmed with expectant parents, moms with just-walking infants exploring this new world and beleaguered parents (“The schools closed early I had to go get all of my children,” explained the woman in the business suit with her four pink-jacketed girls in tow.). Movement and energy buoyed the space and infused it with vitality. By the time I heard my name an hour later, the space was empty save another woman with an appointment after mine with the same physician. We seemed to share the same life-stage: no young children, no possibility of pregnancy, deep appreciation for stillness and silence.
After working out early in the day, I came home, enjoyed drinking chocolate, read a bit about the updated Whole30, then promptly took a nap.
A day full of opposites.
J and I worked downstairs for several hours preparing our basement for the arrival of our daughter and granddaughters on Wednesday. In a flurry of activity, we rearranged furniture, set up a TV, repacked or moved items we had unpacked and left strown across the beds. J cleaned the sheets and remade the beds, vacuumed the floor, dusted; I cleared out cobwebs and provided job oversite.
Then I came upstairs and put away more of my mother’s bells. I could see her in a gift shop, admiring the many souvenirs vying for her money. I imagined her reaching for some lovely, delicate trinket, commenting on how pretty it was, then turning it over to see the price. Her face fell a little, knowing the item too pricey for what money they had and then she turned to the other, mass-produced wares. She scanned them until she saw the graceful lines of porcelain. Picking a bell up, she shook it between her index and thumb and considered its tone as well as its message. “This will do,” she thought, “this will do.”
I’m in the place where the weather changes by the moment – bitter cold and gray to sunny bright and blue (though the temps just don’t feel as warm). It’s not a bad place to be, just a new one: jubilant and curious, aching with the inevitable passing. Another borderland, another edge, another horizon. Time and time again.
3/16/26
A slippery fish
Fighting the pull of current
Yet still pushed along
To some destination yet unseen
The steely-eyed hawk
Soaring on the winds
A dance with changing direction
To keep aloft and flying
A sunflower
Raising its weighty head
Adores the sun and moves
To communicate its praise
And what of me
Fights or soars or adores
Through the flow of my life
Directed by forces unseen?
Tomorrow is mystery
Unfolding in every breath
A past which whispers
“Bidden or unbidden, God is here.”
3/14/26
I ripped plants out of the ground this afternoon after work and before the sun set. I recognized the irony in mourning a tree but mercilessly pulling out dandelions, creeping charley and other nameless blights from the wet earth. If I did nothing, I would have a yard of color – mainly white and yellow - dotting shape-shifting greens with wild violets punctuating the ensemble in deep purple.
My aunt tells a story about my grandmother and flowers. The story goes like this: My aunt and uncle built onto the old farmhouse sometime after they married, eventually moving into the main house while my grandmother occupied the one-bedroom apartment my aunt and uncle initially constructed. My aunt began planting around their shared home, and Granny asked her what she was planting. “Flowers,” she said, to which Granny replied, “What a waste.”
Growing up, much of the back yard supported corn, beans and peas. A side yard had turnip greens, tomatoes and okra. The flowers bloomed on those plants, but the end prize was the fruit or vegetable it produced. I don’t know what she did about all the “weeds (and their flowers)” which have now overtaken the back yard.
As a small child, I loved the wild violets and always hoped they would survive their harvesting (which they did not). I loved dandelion seed heads and finding one which looked perfectly round in order to try and blow off all the seeds with one giant breath (which rarely occurred). I don’t remember the other variety of flowers and plants which I now grab and pull from the earth with abandon.
When I stop to look at the plants, these so-called weeds, awe overtakes me. I can think of at least a dozen different types of leaves, growth patterns, flower designs, heights, root structures, etc., as I consider what I grabbed by fistfuls and yanked from the ground earlier today. Their ability to replicate and proliferate far outweighs mine. Thousands of flowers formed week after week and I trample them to admire scrawny azaleas and thorny rambling roses – both miserly with their blooms, demanding a certain amount of pampering to keep up appearances.
Still I clamor after showy blooms and shocks of color, preferring the hassle of prima donnas to the scruffy take-what-take-can of chickweed, henbit or purple archangel.
My mother, who could kill pretty much any plant in her general vicinity, told a different story about Granny and flowers. In her version, her mother took a hillside and transformed it with gladiolus and a crepe myrtle. According to mom, Granny loved to witness the flowers unfurling each summer and delighted in them. As she aged, she bent more toward roses from what I remember.
On her deathbed, she woke out of whatever stupor held her and spoke of seeing Jesus. “Everywhere he goes is love and peace,” she said. Then, her eyes brightening, she added, “And the fields are filled with yellow and purple roses!” A few moments later, she had passed into the place where roses grew like wildflowers and weeds.
3/13/26
Just underneath my left rib cage I feel a small hole opening, a beak scraping the inside of my stomach as it opens and closes waiting to be filled. Just above the curve of my right hip, a small pinch nags my back until it moves just enough to shush the nag for a moment. My feet cheer the invention of ottomans. My eyes would like a break from the day.
When I perform a body scan, my body talks to me, tells me about where I hold stress, reiterates the need for rest, reminds me all things change, get out of kilter occasionally (or more permanently) and grow older. At the end of the work day, my body tells me, and I mainly feel, tired.
There was a time I would have pathologized my tiredness. Do I not like my work? Am I in the job I’m supposed to be in? Do I need to change professions (again)? A lot of close-ended questions, begging a polarity which serves no one.
Granted, many people discuss the importance of loving one’s job summed up in the “Love what you do. Do what you love” mentality. I loved the idea of this and have wanted work which felt effortless and filled with “flow” or the “energy of love.” Yet I didn’t account for my own personality quirks or even reality.
I believe there are people who “love what they do and do what they love.” They are likely the ones who came up with the phrase. They are likely extraverted sales people who know how to market an idea which can hook people into the dream of what might be. I tend to enjoy living in the “what might be” space because dreams are easy and require no work and little effort. In other words dreams are easy and reality is hard.
Being back in my childhood home, taking the same route into downtown my mother and father took before me and experiencing, again, various degrees of resistance/dislike for my work; I am reminded of my mother’s expressions of frustration around her own job. She got up early and rushed to get out the door to beat traffic downtown. She was responsible, conscientious and trustworthy; but she hated working. When my father retired, she got out 1 year later when she was about 55 years old. She did not want to miss any time with Dad and she resented having to leave him everyday, at home, when they could have been together.
I failed to appreciate this early example of “don’t love what you do but do it to survive,” which I saw in my mom. I do not know how my Dad felt about work. When the work was steady, he steadily worked and came home caked with dirt and simply wanted to sit and relax. He worked extra when he could to cover for the inevitable times he would be laid off.
Somewhere being exposed to all of their attitudes and actions regarding work, I absorbed a “hate work” mentality. Don’t get me wrong, I worked from the time I was 16 years old. But no job ever brought me to the place of feeling “flow.” The psychological weight of work made getting out of bed miserable each morning. I have wondered for years what was “wrong” with me and why I could not find the work I “loved.”
Now I recognize I “stewed” in an atmosphere with a vocal mother who really never wanted to work outside the home but had to work to pay the bills. I saw my Dad physically exhausted from his blue collar job. What felt normal for me was to have resentment about work or to find it fatiguing. I had few examples of people who “loved” work and certainly no examples within my home.
Some of my disdain for work was simply carrying on the family tradition because that is what felt normal for me. In this realization, I felt some release from “weight of work” I carry. It also gave me freedom to live in a third space which isn’t just “love what you do” or “hate what you do,” but allows me to do both and be okay with it. It also helps me allow work to simply be neutral to me – I don’t have to get so emotionally involved – it’s just work!
But I still want to enjoy what I do. And after years of trying out different options, I finally found the work which smacks of vocation and calling even when I am tired at the end of day or occasionally dread the beginning of the work week. I don’t have to love the work all the time, nor do I have to question if my quest for my “life’s work” is in peril because of the occasional dip in enthusiasm or energy. The third option, as usual, gives the most freedom.
For being tired, this post is way too long. Good night and may you always find the third option.
3/12/25
His family hangs
On
Every
Breath
Refraining from taking
Too much in.
Oxygen, Nitrogen
Carbon dioxide
Molecules heavy with meaning;
Molecules worth their weight
In gold.
I hold the weight
In my gut
A never-ending
Sucker punch-
Inhalation halted
The life force
Expelled
Can I not give mine
To him?
Brain burning-
Mechanical breaths
A metronome -
Counting time
He may not have.
8/1/25
Photo credit here. Eastern Angel Blow upon this sea Thick with reeds And re-create Dry land from Water’s depth So all of us Living in capt...
