Dear Readers, Writers, Friends, Family and Artists of All Kinds,
Thank you for being here, and for all the wonder, thought, goodness, and genuine love you bring to the world. Wishing you rest, refreshment, and everything you need, today, and in the new year. You are, to me, all beloved members of the pack.
With Love,
Lori
Filed under Calendars, Gratitude, Publishing, Uncategorized, Winter
“The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.” – Napoleon Hill
Hello, Reader and Writer Friends! I hope this post finds you well and blessed with the energy, time, and resources you need and deserve. I am grateful to you and wish you joy. The past few weeks have brought both expected and unexpected news, tasks, challenges, joys, and sorrows to my little corner of the planet, and I suspect they may have to yours also.
Changes of season, the holidays, national and world events, community and family celebrations, work, play, plans, and the shadow of illness and even death for some have been on the hearts and minds of many.
This week in my little town we’ve lost a young woman to suicide. The tragic and violent event has left many of us in shock, and the pain is palpable. And yet, standing right beside that horror, we also have grace in the shape of a group of dear people who planned and cooked and decorated our community center, and fed everyone in town who wished to come. And we had the Christmas tree lighting in the park, followed by fireworks. And we have a live nativity on Main Street coming in a few days. And I’m going to Disneyland with my grandkids next week. And yet, a friend’s cat died and one of our own adopted cats disappeared (you see how the sadness creeps back in). And yet, I got a surprisingly good medical report from my doctor. And in the netherworld of being a writer, I began another round of manuscript submissions today, sending out queries to six publishers.
The light shifts, the wind blows.
We manage as best we can, remembering that the strongest oak
is the one that stands in the open.
Filed under Christmas, Depression, Gratitude, Health, Holiday, Loss, Nature, Publishing, Relationship, Seasons, Uncategorized, Winter, Writing
Today is the first day of Advent,
the beginning of a new year for my Episcopal and many other Christian churches.
The weeks leading up to Christmas have always been my most anticipated, though I’ve probably never come close to understanding the depth of the reasons my heart finds them so.
In the beginning, it was certainly the way Mom made everything magic for my brother and I, and it was the tree and the lights and the music, Santa and the reindeer—my dad’s sweet smile. As the years went by, I learned more and went through different periods of faithfulness and failure, but I was always striving, trying to understand the magic and make it real.
According to Father Luke Gregory, OFM, “As the world enters the sacred season of Advent, a period of preparation and reflection for many Christians, we find ourselves standing at the intersection of hope and longing. This time invites us to consider not just the anticipation of Christ’s coming but also the deep desire for reconciliation and peace within our fractured world” (www.vaticannews.va).
The intersection of hope and longing—yes!
Wishing all of you, whether you subscribe to the faith of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, or you’re Atheist or Agnostic—wishing you an unlimited experience of hope for a meaningful, hopeful, peaceful future, whatever you call this time of year.
Thank you for being a part of everything. Your presence makes everything bright and beautiful!
Bless You!
Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
―Mary Oliver
Moving a life forward is an investment in dreams, time, learning, relationship building, and so much more. Moving a writing life forward is all of that, and I would add it is also, at its best, a life transformed. As Anne Frank so eloquently put it: “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” Writing did not save Anne Frank’s life, but I believe her writing has saved the lives of countless others.
Writers may feel called to the creative life, but that one precious life often must take a back seat to another, more practical life, one that includes a sensible career (aka something with a steady paycheck), perhaps with snatches of scribbling in between the job, chores, and attending to family or societal needs and expectations. The writing life can be a kind of shadow life. It has been for me. Some writers seldom or never mention their craft while engaged in their more acceptable “real” life.
“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
—James Michener
It’s hard to explain to nonwriters why a few hours or a whole day spent attending a sporting event or a picnic can create in the writer a kind of panic—a feeling that the time needed to be alone, to read and to write, will never be enough, that time is seeping away, draining their spirit. Spending “free time” in non-creative areas can feel terribly wasted to the writer, while to others, the writer’s avoidance of joining in reeks of selfishness, or delusion. Or perhaps it’s just incomprehensible. Why, people wonder, is writing so important to you? There’s no money in it. And if there is, it’s only available to a few spectacularly talented gifted authors. If you had that gift, surely you’d have been published by now.
The writing life can be an ill-defined series of swells of poetic energy or flow, which is heady and soul lifting. There is nothing quite like those times. Catherine Drinker Bowen says, “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.” And I have felt that many times. Writing has healed me.
But those transcendent hours or days are for writers seeking an agent or publisher likely to alternate with rejection after rejection after rejection. Writers do much of their writing alone, but if they seek representation and traditional publishing, they must eventually learn the oft times punishing lessons of business.
Soon I’ll be working with a developmental content editor on my completed World War II historical fiction manuscript. I’m excited to be taking this major step forward. It’s been a long journey, and honestly, I’ve loved the myriad lessons and experiences along the way, even the hard ones.
“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
—William Faulkner
Thank you for visiting! Wishing you a wonderful day, doing exactly what you need and want to do.
With Love Always, Lori
Filed under Authors, Fiction, Gratitude, HIstorical Fiction, Identity, Literary Agents, Publishing, Reading, Research, Uncategorized, Work, World War II, Writing Advice
Just before Christmas, Mr. P and I drove to the Hickison Petroglyph Recreation Area, which is located a short drive from our home over the Austin Summit on Highway 50, “The Loneliest Road in America.” I love nature and history, as well as walking and exploring new (to me) places, and this little day trip exceeded my expectations. As soon as we arrived, I was surprised that I had not heard much about the place in the four-plus years we have lived in Austin. Only one person had ever mentioned the spot to me, and that was a traveler who stopped in to see our historic general-store-turned-library and told me he had camped there the night before. I imagine the locals have all been there, and they have been good at telling us about other wonderful places to explore in the area, so it mystifies me that no one thought to suggest this historically and scenically stunning spot to visit.
Therefore, I will do so. If you travel Highway 50, be sure to make this one of your stops!
Some history:
“The Hickison Petroglyph Recreation Area provides public access to petroglyphs created by prehistoric people living near Hickison Summit at the north end of the Toquima Range and the south end of the Simpson Park Mountains in the U.S. state of Nevada. . . In the general vicinity of Hickison Summit are multiple prehistoric hunting and living sites dating to 10,000 B.C. as well as more recent sites such as mining camps and ranches.
Trails used by mid-19th century explorers John C. Fremont and James H. Simpson pass through the area as do the routes of the Pony Express and the Overland Stages. At the time of the earliest prehistoric sites, the Great Basin contained large lakes, including Lake Toiyabe and Lake Tonopah in the Big Smoky Valley west of the summit. As the climate became drier, the lakes evaporated, and the former lake dependent cultures were replaced by hunter-gatherers. When the first European-Americans arrived in about 1850, Western Shoshone people lived in the region” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickion_Petroglyph_Recereation_Area).
Wow, right? My dear friend, Cheryl, just informed me that when you see faces in things, it’s called pareidolia. I definitely see a face here, and a neck as graceful as Audrey Hepburn’s.
Here is the proposed text for the marker plate, State Historical Marker No. 137, from the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office:
The summit is named after rancher John Hickison because the road to his ranch passed over the summit. About one-mile northwest lies Hickison Summit, a natural pass between two low buttes. Passes and canyons were common Native American hunting locations for funneling and ambushing bighorn sheep and deer herds. Archaeological sites in the region reveal a dominance of bighorn bones and horn, reflecting the bighorn’s importance to Native Americans as food and raw material for tool production. The bighorn lacked resistance to diseases introduced by domestic sheep in the nineteenth century, and this resulted in catastrophic bighorn population declines through the West. Prehistoric native American petroglyphs, images and designs are carved into rock surfaces and are interpreted along a short hiking trail. Archaeologists hypothesize that the meanings for these designs include ceremonial, female puberty markers, ritual hunting magic symbols, and rock art or simply graffiti.
On the day we went, there were no interpretive booklets available, and other than a lone camper, no other people, so we didn’t learn as much as we would have liked. Still, it was stunning, and felt somehow sacred. The park was silent and isolated enough that all the years of this century easily fell away, and then echoes of past centuries offered themselves to our quieted minds. I was saddened, too, as I often am, thinking of how much is lost in the mists of history. What a stunning sight it must have been, all those herds of bighorn sheep and deer, and what a shame that diseases introduced by newcomers decimated the population even unto today.
Standing here, looking across the Great Smoky Valley to the Toiyabe Mountains, blue in the distance, I felt connected to all those who came before me. . . human, bird, mammal. . . all.
Such an amazing planet. Such an amazing gift to live here. Sending love and best wishes for a healthy, joyful, and adventurous 2025. Happy New Year!
Filed under Camping, Gratitude, Nature, New Year's, Relationship, Uncategorized
I have thought a lot lately about the discomfort of being in a perpetual state of waiting for something to happen, of worrying about what the results will be when something finally does happen, and then, wondering if I will navigate any of it well. The word “limbo” is often in my thoughts.
2024 brought new health concerns for my husband, and with that a reconsideration of where we should live, since we are currently in a very remote location, three and a half hours by car from the nearest medical center with cardiac care. We responded decisively by putting our house on the market. That decisiveness did not break us out of Limbo, however, as we do not know when or if our home will sell, and we do not know what it will sell for if it does sell. We cannot make plans on where to move until we sell the house. Still, we’re thinking about returning to the Midwest where real estate prices are more reasonable than here in the West and where we can reasonably expect to afford to live in a town with a hospital. But, until we sell, we are in Limbo.
Also, in 2024, I was thrilled to receive an invitation from my dream literary agent to send her my full manuscript, A Fine Suddenness, a World War II historical fiction novel based in Lake Arrowhead, CA. I’ve no idea if she has read it yet. It has been out of my hands for six months now, this after having worked on it pretty consistently for years. Many years. I miss it terribly (it’s an odd thing, really, the attachment I’ve made), and I have no interest in beginning a new novel yet, though at least I am continuing to write. Even so, journaling or posting online, as important and healthy as they are, do not give me the same sense of mission as novel writing does. I wait to hear from the agent, and I do not move forward on a sequel to the book I sent her, nor on some new unrelated novel, because I desperately want her opinion on A Fine Suddenness first. More Limbo.
And 2024, oh my goodness, has been a year of intense worry and anticipation for our nation and the world. We are no longer in the first stage of that particular limbo state, but we are certainly still in a place of transition and uncertainty. So many possible scenarios there, and so little I have control over. More Limbo.
Earliest historical references to Limbo describe a place in-between—not heaven, not hell—a place for deceased unbaptized humans born before the birth of Christ, or who died as infants before baptism, to reside until the second coming of Christ by the Roman Catholic Church, and these begin in the 14th Century. From there, the word limbo (more and more with a lower case “l”) entered usage in less theological contexts: as a place or state of restraint, confinement, neglect, oblivion, uncertainty, or an intermediate or transitional place or state.
Etymology also traces limbo from the English of Trinidad and Barbados limbo “a dance that involves bending backwards under a pole,” related to Jamaican English limba “to bend,” from English limber “flexible” (merriam-webster.com).
Which leads us to the dance, or funeral game, which dates back to the mid to late 1800s on the island of Tobago. In the beginning, the game started with the bar at the lowest possible height and the bar was gradually raised, signifying an emergence from death into life (Wikipedia.org). It is possible that the roots of this practice come from the slave experience of being transported across the seas in ships, where the slaves were separated and tried to squeeze through narrow spaces in order to see or touch one another. In some African beliefs, the game reflects the whole cycle of life . . . the players move under a pole that is gradually lowered from the chest level and they emerge on the other side as their heads clear the pole as in the triumph of life over death (Stanley-Niaah, Sonjah “Mapping of Black Atlantic Performance Geographies: From Slave Ship to Ghetto.” Quoted on Wikipedia.org).
The secularization of the dance began in the 1940s where “it became a popular entertainment in Trinidad and was adopted as a physical fitness exercise by American troops,” . . . and is now “considered the unofficial national game of Trinidad and Tobago” (Wikipedia.org). It has become a fun and happy pastime.
Historically, Limbo to limbo, has moved on. Broken free, so to speak. I wonder if my own limbo could progress that way, too. As for human history, perhaps also for me? If I am stuck in the place between heaven and hell right now, will it be possible for me to become limber enough to squeeze myself through the narrow places that block me from reaching the open, even joyful places that still may exist beyond my current ability to see them or experience them?
In order to do that, I would need to understand the constructs of the narrow places. What are they exactly? What are they made of? Are they hard and impervious, like granite? Splintered like rough wood? Flexible and sometimes deadly like serpents? Or are they only real because I make them real in my own paralyzed mind? Maybe I could wish them away, disintegrate them, with new knowledge or some kind of personal epiphany.
Perhaps there is a way. Perhaps not. But I must strive, at least, to remember Helen Keller’s words, these taken from her open letter in response to Nazi book burnings in Germany on May 9, 1933: “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. . .You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.”
If Helen Keller believed that ideas and hopes have always “seeped through a million channels,” who am I to deny it? Might not a few of those ideas and hopes, and more likely a multitude, have made their way to us now at the dawning of the year 2025? Might not they sustain us, quicken our minds, and help us find a way out of our narrow places and into the light?
Filed under Advice, Books, Depression, Identity, Lake Arrowhead, Literary Agents, New Year's, Uncategorized, World War II, Writing
Since leaving Lake Arrowhead three years ago I’ve been having trouble hanging on to my voice. And not just my voice really, but also my words. Sentences and paragraphs and pages of text I should be writing but that I push aside for a good novel or a movie or a great new recipe involving bacon, sweet potatoes, rigatoni, mascarpone cheese and fresh sage (this, a recent distraction—the dishes are still soaking in the sink).
I’m sure it’s not only that I am in mourning.
Some of my writing inertia could be due to a mind busy with other things—new things, like teaching college speech and all that entails… learning innovative technologies, tackling a new curriculum, slugging through online faculty required “teaching”courses, trying to lacquer my wild mane into some semblance of what my imagination believes a professor’s hair should look like…oh so many time consuming diversions.
Still, I know I should also be writing creatively.
I’m sure it’s not only that I am in mourning.
When I left Lake Arrowhead, a pain planted itself firmly behind my breast plate and I can’t shake it. I can’t walk it off, though my dear husband and I take many beautiful nature walks every single week. I can’t read it off, though I take time to immerse myself in many an enjoyable book. I can’t yoga it off, or massage it off, or wine it off. It is sewn in, gorilla glued, bolted; it is chained to my heart.
But that cannot be the only reason I do not write.
I did, in fact, write quite a bit a year and more back. (The book is about Lake Arrowhead.)
Lake Arrowhead, CA
But I’m sure it’s not only that I am mourning.
I adore Wisconsin, and the weather here suits us perfectly. The vast greenness of the place in summer, the orange-red-yellow-green autumns, the take your breath away white frozen winters. A lake so big it looks Pacific. Lake Arrowhead, amplified.
Mourning comes to some of us for a visit. For me, without my children and my grandchildren, it stays. It has moved in to the quaint little Cape Cop home on the tree-lined avenue where we now live. It’s here to stay.
There, I’ve said it.
Missing Lake Arrowhead means missing a million moments that can never be regained—with my kids, with my grandchildren, with my friends, with all the people I was so fortunate to know. And as much as I love the cardinals and Canadian geese (and I love them a lot!), there is something sad about knowing that I will never happen upon a bear or be awakened in the night by the ungodly howl of a pack of coyotes closing in on its prey.
So, my voice began to falter a while back and has gone somewhat quiet of late.
My husband began to worry, so I finally forced myself to sit and write tonight, but as little as this accomplishment is, and as much as I love him, I cannot give him much of the credit for bringing me to my chair, for opening the blank page, for placing my fingers on the keys and letting them speak for me, expose me, help me… nor can I take any of the credit myself.
It came not from knowing that I should do it, it came instead as a magical gift from a miraculous profession.
Teaching.
Thinking I needed more family photos on my office walls, I drove over to Walgreens this afternoon to pick up some photographs I had ordered. They are beautiful photos of our newest granddaughter, Adaline Lorene, and her big sister, Jasmine, who visited us here in Wisconsin this past June.
As you can see, they are worth the ache. My girls.
Anyway.
On my way back out to the car I stopped to ask a young man (who was coughing uncontrollably as if he might be choking) if I could help him. Just a simple, “Are you okay? Can I do anything?”
The young woman next to him, obviously his companion, said, “I recognize that voice! Do you remember me?”
The coughing continued, but she ignored it. She walked toward me. “I heard your voice and I said, ‘That’s my speech teacher!””
Of course, I remembered her, a lovely person and a good public speaker, animated and organized. We hugged. Her manfriend, ignored, coughed his way unaided to their car.
“Does he need help?” I asked. “Does he need the Heimlich? Because I’ll do it.”
“He’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s wonderful to see you.”
She recognized my voice. Here, in Kenosha, a town of roughly 100,000 people. She recognized my voice.
It seems silly, perhaps. To place so much value on recognition. But I do. I suddenly felt a little less alone. The sharing of a past. In Lake Arrowhead, a teacher never goes out without encountering a former or present student, which sometimes unnerved me. I never realized how important it was to my self-image, to my belief that I was connected to the community. I knew that I loved my students, but I didn’t perhaps understand how much I needed them.
Today I was given back a small piece of my voice, reflected through a young woman’s memory. I still feel the pain, I still crave the everyday closeness of my grandchildren, and I still miss the bears, but I can write, and that’s a soft and soothing salve for my soul. I’ll take it.
Filed under Depression, Gratitude, Lake Arrowhead, Nature, Reading, Teacher, Voice, Wisconsin, Writing, Writing Advice
Sammy was a truck driver stuck in my husband’s place of work, a truck fixing place—what’s that called anyway—a really big garage I guess. Anyway, it was Christmas Eve and Sammy was supposed to be home with his wife and children in Georgia, but instead he was stranded in Wisconsin in a cold garage. He was leaning against the service counter with his head down when I arrived to pick up my husband from work. I’d brought our two dogs into the shop as a special Christmas treat for everyone. Merry Christmas, Guys! Time to get home and celebrate. Atticus, the schnauzer, promptly lifted his leg on one of Sammy’s tires, unleashing a steamy stream of urine that left an impressive puddle. It was kind of fitting really because Sammy’s truck wasn’t going anywhere for some time. I guess it was super broken. It had let him down, and on the most important night of the year. Atticus must have sensed that.
Atticus likes to hide in bed, too!
I’d been feeling pretty blue, but had been trying to hide it in public for quite a while by then. I found it difficult to get out of bed in the morning and impossible to stay away from that same bed with its heating pad and two willing dog companions as each gray day unfolded. I mean, it was Christmas and I was going to be with none of my kids or grandkids, not for months. Granted, I had just gone to visit them the month before, but I already deeply missed them and I’d never been away from the little ones, who really aren’t that little anymore, on Christmas. And I was living in a state I loved but that was 2,000 miles away from the state where I’d built a life for thirty-eight years.
I was missing all kinds of things and people I had loved and many that I had taken for granted. I still planned on making a big Christmas dinner, but it would only be a dinner for three: my husband, his father, and me. And it had rained for weeks in a state that should have been a winter wonderland by then. My roof leaked. The yard was a mud hole. The holding tank had filled up just that very morning, setting off an alarm almost as offensive as the smell in the mud hole yard, and nobody likes to call Pat’s Crap Pumping Service on Christmas Eve. My solar Christmas lights obviously wouldn’t turn on because there’d been no sun forever. My pink fudge didn’t set. I wasn’t writing. What was there to get up for?
I took this picture at the Kenosha Museum, but it represents my dilemma quite well I think.
And then came Sammy, and Sammy wanted to get home for Christmas. He hadn’t been able to rent a car with his out-of-state driver’s license. My husband suggested the airport. Could he get a flight? We would drive him. Sammy didn’t know if he could get a flight, but it was his best chance. Soon, Sammy, my husband, Atticus, our other dog, Diesel, and myself were all crowded into my little blue Beetle headed for the airport. It was about a half hour drive going in the opposite direction from the mud hole, making the round trip to pick up my husband something like two hours.
I’m a nervous driver when it comes to driving on freeways or anywhere near a city, but I found myself relaxing as Sammy told his story. He had left Africa at twelve-years-old, alone. He was the only member of his family who was able to emigrate. He lived in a small town in Utah and attended high school there. He loves America. He said that “the father Bush was the president when I came, so I liked him. He let me come to America. I couldn’t understand when Clinton suddenly got the job. How can someone replace the president?”
He said the president in his former country had been in power for twenty-five years and there was nothing anyone could do to change it. His family was afraid when Sammy would visit because Sammy had learned about free speech and they thought he’d get killed for speaking out about how bad things were there. He said, too, that Americans are the nicest, most helpful people in the world. He said that in other countries people won’t even give you directions, much less a ride to the airport. I think Sammy is a little partial to America and that there are lots of nice people everywhere, but it was still nice to hear.
I love stamps, and writing, and letters…
He teared up when I asked him if his children believed in Santa. I cried, too. My husband was in the back seat with the two dogs, but the car is so small that his face was only a few inches behind us. I glanced back at him and his eyes were bright blue with tears. Suddenly, it was starting to feel like Christmas.
Sammy got a flight and Mike and I headed home. By this time we too hungry to go home and cook the special dinner we’d planned just for the two of us so we began searching for an open restaurant. We stopped at two places that had their lights on and doors open, but they were having private parties and weren’t serving the public. It was Christmas Eve, sorry. So we did the unthinkable and drove through a MacDonald’s. We got cheeseburgers for the dogs, too.
When we arrived home, we waded through the mud and entered the front door. We both remarked on how cozy the little cottage looked. We each poured a glass of wine, his red and mine white, and Mike checked his phone. There was a message from Sammy.
Merry Christmas and Thank You. I’ll talk to you soon. It was a pretty good Christmas. Wishing all of you a good New Year with lots of random Sammys to bless you.
This may be an old New Year’s hat, but it’s a Goody.
Filed under Christmas, Depression, Gratitude, Humor, New Year's
Last night in bed, I started thinking about my body. About how it aches. About the way it doesn’t move anymore, not in the ways it used to. About the way it gives me very little pleasure anymore. I mean, I still get up every day and put clothes on. I even walk my dogs most days. There’s some pleasure there. My body takes me up and down the street, along the river, and if I so choose, into the woods. The dogs definitely derive pleasure from these walks and I, too, am grateful for them.
I also still very much love hugs. And kisses, especially on the back of my neck.
I love the cool touch of the wind, and the warm caress of the sun.
I love the sound of laughter. And music. And falling water. And birdsong.
I still love the taste of good food and drink, but only late in the day after my tummy settles down from its angry-cramps-in-the-morning routine. Still, I do get to eat and enjoy doing so, which is a big part of the enjoyment of having a body. Oh, and a lovely chilled glass of chardonnay served outside in a garden—that’s pretty blissful.
Field Recordings, Paso Robles, CA
It’s not that I am particularly decrepit for my age. I guess it might just be that I haven’t been this age before, and I am realizing how much I took this amazing body for granted for so long.
My skin, for example. I was never much enamored of my skin—too pink, too blotchy, too many freckles—and those moles. I covered my forearms throughout my entire puberty and adolescence, thinking that if anyone knew I had two moles on my left forearm, well, I’d never be loved. But my skin was amazingly sensitive. It buzzed with life and reacted to everything that touched it. Quite spectacular, thinking back.
My joints were supple. I could wrap my legs around my ears!
I ran. I ran for fun. I ran to cleanse my mind and change my emotions.
I was a sensual being. My body, well. All bodies, really, I hope. Electric.
My womb carried two babies, my breasts fed them, and my arms held them. Those were exhausting times, I remember, but oh so incredible. There was no end to the tasks needing to be done and no end to the hugely blossoming love that encompassed every simple movement. Ah, those nights rocking my baby in the dark, singing an old lullaby, afraid to get up and tuck the baby in the crib, afraid to lose the magic
.My body took me on camping trips, road trips, plane trips, and a few trips of another sort—like when I fell down a flight of stairs. What a crash. And what a healing. My body always healed.
My body brought me to my beloved classroom and allowed me to teach for many years. I remember when I could hop up on the counter while reading the scene from The Call of the Wild where the man in the red sweater breaks Buck out of his crate and all of the men in the yard jump up on the fence to watch. I remember replaying that scene in the classroom for years, and then one year, I just couldn’t make the jump. I landed on one of my eighth-grade students.
My body survived numerous surgeries, cancer, and chemotherapy.
My toes have been numb for several years now. Neuropathy from the chemo. My joints ache, especially those on the left side of my body. My skin is wrinkled. My hair is silver. I wear bifocals. I can’t hear out of my right ear. A one-mile walk leaves me exhausted. I find myself longing to go to bed with my heating pad early in the evening, and I basically never really want to get up.
My body likes to rest, and I like to try to forget about it altogether. Meanwhile, my mind considers other things. Like, maybe this is a normal part of aging. A stage of getting ready to let go of this old body and move on. So I pray, and read, and write, hoping to figure out what it is that is happening, and even if it is in fact, a real experience, or maybe it’s just a new and interesting facet of depression.
I look for articles about anything and everything connected with this sense of disconnectedness, wondering if anyone else feels this way, too. And then, today, my friend Stephanie posted an extraordinary article from The Washington Post about a rare illness that makes people think they’re dead. Timing is everything. I mean, it does seem that you attract what you think. Last night I’m thinking about being dead and today I’m reading this article. You can read it, too. It’s quite fascinating: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/zombie-disease-makes-people-think-they-have-died/2015/10/30/ca8ab52c-532f-11e5-933e-7d06c647a395_story.html. Though it doesn’t describe my experience, in particular, it does contain some familiar aspects of what I’m trying to describe.
I remember, for some reason, right now, something my brother told me after our mom died. He said she came to him and said, “It’s okay, Billy. It’s ok.” That’s all.
I was sort of miffed. Why didn’t she come to me? But I guess she knew Billy would tell me. And maybe that’s all I need to know.
It’s ok.
What do you think?
Filed under Aging, Depression, Writing
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Ensayos y crónicas bilingües sobre fronteras y pertenencia//Bilingual essays and chronicles of borders and belonging
Expressing Thought Through Photography
Poems, prose, and observations
portfolio of memories and musings
Dive into a collection of memories, musings and emotions delicately concocted into stories and introspective articles
It is a secret blog.. Share it only with your best people
All Things New England
Here are my observations as I reach for understanding. {no award nominations, please}
testi e fotografie dell'autore
LakeArrowheadLadyWriter 