The Novel of Life

Eighteen Easters ago my world changed forever. I've always loved Easter. As a little girl it meant an Easter dress, new shoes, white gloves. It meant Easter baskets and solid milk chocolate bunnies to be savored slowly, one little nibble at a time. It meant snow sometimes, but hearty crocus and snow drops peeping up from the faded green grass under the snow. Daffodils bravely waving their beautiful yellow faces at the mild sunlight. It meant church with my family, dinner with my maternal grandparents. As I grew to adulthood it meant family dinners here at my house, out of town family always coming for a feast; me loving to entertain and feed them all, Steve lording over it, enjoying my family as much as I did.

And then it changed. I do not celebrate Easter now. I have not cooked Easter dinner in the same way, and then, only rarely since. I love to paint Easter colors and Easter ceramics, but I don't celebrate it with any of the joy I had for the first 37 years of my life. Eighteen years ago my uncle died just before Easter. My cousin Ann flew down, and she and I drove her parents car back to New York. Aunt Betty and my other aunts and uncles flew. The funeral was sad, yet it was so good to be with the entire family. Steve could not attend; he had a job out of town and he could not take off. I understood. When I came home from New York, the next week was Easter. The aunts and uncles came back because they needed to close up their winter homes, so again, I planned Easter dinner here. Steve was still gone and we had not seen each other since before Uncle Polly's death, but we talked on the phone the Monday before Easter. He asked me to buy a certain printer for the house so he could fax time sheets, etc from home if need be. He was not available when I called after that and it did not raise an alarm in me until Friday, when I realized it had been a few days since we talked. My heart started working overtime; I knew something was wrong. His voice mail was full and would not receive more. A call to his company was fruitless, and even my call to them reminding them that he was in their truck and missing was not doing any good. It was a terrible time, not hearing from him. My father, who it turns out, was fairly certain Steve had cheated on me, drove to their hunting camp to confront the girl Steve had been with in New York - another fact I found out later. My father thought he may have been suicidal and had gone to the camp; he was not there. Chris called her husband; Steve's friend and co-worker, and he evaded her. Easter Sunday I bravely went through the motions of cooking. As my family began arriving, so did Chris. We went to the laundry room and she told me. She had threatened her husband until he told her the truth. She said Kim, he is not coming home. He has left you. He is with another woman out of state, in New Hampshire, meeting her family and celebrating with them.

My world collapsed. I remember falling to the floor. I remember her crouched over me. I don't remember too much else after that. My family left, dinner unfinished, untouched. I am sure someone put it away, but I lost the rest of the day. Chris left at some point and I died inside. I made it through the night and into the next day, and I remember sitting on the couch looking at the fireplace; the oyster bricks that we lovingly picked out together just three years earlier. I looked around me remembering every nail, every board, every brick; every moment of building our home together. I remember giggling was we spent clandestine time in the house as it was being built, making love in each room in the middle of construction. I remembered our plans, our lives, our happiness for all those years and all that we went through to get where we were. I remembered being at his mothers side when she died 10 months earlier. I remember discovering his father in his bed after he died in his sleep. I remembered losing our baby and discovering there would be no more. I remembered the sadness of that. But I remembered our laughter and our joy, so much more than all that sadness. I died a thousand deaths inside. I would not, could not accept that it was over that he had turned into someone who could or would injure someone, anyone, me, that way. Not the smiling, happy faced boy I fell in love with, the man who whistled as he worked in the yard, as he reorganized, as he planned, as we planned our future. It was devastating. He finally called Monday night, late into the night. He was at dinner with his new love, and he had stepped away to make the call to me. I was not allowed, in his eyes, to be angry. I just needed to face the fact that it was over and he was moving on. He never told me why, even all these years later. He never told me exactly why he became such a coward and why he could not tell me face to face that he wanted out. For 18 months he came and went, and I let him because it was so inexplicable, so unforeseen, just so random. He never told me, to this day even, that he was leaving. He just did it. He spent the holiday with his girlfriend; who eventually became his wife, and then his ex-wife. He spent the holiday pretending that he and I had been separated for over 6 months and that I was fragile, and crazy, not wanting a divorce and he was being kind and giving me time. I found all this later, and it still reads to me like something from a novel, not something that actually happened to me.

I have been doing a new writing exercise; 750words.com. I think the process of writing these daily words has been leading up to this. I have always realized, underneath all my pain, all my suffering, all my growing and healing that this is the novel I need to write. I need to write the novel of my life, beginning with that first magical summer of Us and ending where it did, as it did. As I have been writing the last 27 or 28 days, I have wondered where all this has been heading. I will have a record of how I need to write it, why, and it will remind me that life happens. That we learn, we love, we grow - we lose. That is the novel of life.

Dreams

I look around me here in my own personal library and I think of all the words in here. Books written by souls like mine; souls that want to write, to share, to encourage, inspire, create. I was driven to write from a young age. When I graduated high school my goal was to move to Colorado and write poetry. I did not want a job or a career. The only thing I wanted was writing, Colorado and happiness. Needless to say, all these years later, here I am at my computer, typing my thoughts and feelings, trying to come closer to being a paid writer. I don't need to make a living at it, although it would be nice. Just to be paid something might be nice. But I don't write for pay. I write for my heart, for my soul. I write, like last night, for my sanity. There have been long patches in my life where I did not write anything; a journal, poetry. Nothing. The happy years, I guess you could say. But those are the years I would have been able to maybe take the time to produce, to polish, to send off. I spent them being a wife. Being a homemaker, working jobs I had no passion for; just a job to make money. Now I know I have passion for my job and money to pay my own bills, but I am not in my "happy" years. Not to say I am unhappy; I am not. But I am not in the lap of luxury, I am not safe in the knowledge that my heart loves another and that is my be-all-end-all.

I am not living my dream of being a published author. I did not feel the urge to write in those years; I basically put my dreams on hold. First, because my parents said I had to. To them, college was the only option. I have never regretted that, although it ended up taking me a lot longer than I ever dreamed to finally get a Masters Degree. I don't regret the college years, and I am very grateful to them for the life path they sent me on. But, there are lots of side tracks in the road to life. Lots of diversions in those "happy" years. I don't regret much in life, and I don't regret those years. I don't regret putting every bit of me into my marriage, into my life with Steve. I was mostly happy and I think that I could have stayed in that marriage forever, just making it through life entangled lives always together. But it was not to be, and reflecting back I can see that I was not always happy; it was not a blissful time. There was a lot I gave up to be who I was then. My writing dream. A life different than the one I had - that Colorado dream. I can't express the love. We had love. A lot of it. We had respect, and fun, and caring and consideration. Until we didn't. I can look back and see the imperfections in myself. I can see them in Steve and in our life, too, but I can see them in me. I can remember the days I would be cleaning or cooking and working really hard to just exist; and I can remember crying, longing, desiring some other life and just not sure what that looked like. I remember knowing I settled when I settled into life with Steve; that I put my own dreams and heart aside to be joined forever. I can see his flaws, although I am not here to pick them apart; that is not what this is about. It is about how easy it easy to give away your dreams so carelessly.

I still go back to my thoughts about alternative world; parallel universes; how I wonder if they exist, and how comforting it is to believe that they do. That somewhere in time along another plane, the me that I really wanted, the poet with the Rocky Mountain High - I hope she is happy pursuing her dream; that somewhere she is poet laureate to the world; the Robert Frost of her time. I hope that she is living a Bohemian life style, un-tethered to any one soul, answering only to the call of her heart. That she dresses in flowing linen and gauze and she wears beautiful clanking bracelets given to her by a lover madly desiring her. I hope she dances naked in the moonlight under the stars and that she washes her face in mountain streams when the mood strikes. I hope she paints color portraits of her world with her words - and maybe, also in oil paints on canvas too. I hope somewhere sometime she and I can meet, share notes and discover that we wanted what the other has. I hope, that in my parallel universe, somewhere, one of me did achieve the dreams we wanted for ourselves.

The gray house

Driving home today I watched the trees and houses; sometimes springtime here in Florida is so crisp and clear, it just makes the heart soar. There is this one particular house on the edge of the historic district in Plant City. It is gray and kept very well. It has a beautiful paint job, shining many-paned windows. The yard is kept clipped, the white frames of the windows look nice; the trees are trimmed. There is something about that house that makes my heart ache. It has a sweet soul, I can tell. It has been there a long time, and yet it has such a pretty timeless, clean quality to it. I am not sure what it is that makes such a mark on my heart. It's a house I'd like to live in - not the location. I would not want to be in town on such a busy street. I would like the back yard to open up to a beautiful pond or a pasture with a mountain in the distance, maybe. But the house does speak to me.

I think about where I want to live next. Someplace cooler, less humid, less crowded; with less people wanting to move into the state. It is too much for me here - too much traffic, too much noise, too much chaos, too backwards ways of thinking, yet too many people wanting to change things to their own way of thinking. I remember reading something about Italy or France once and how it is important, should you decide to move there, that you definitely learn the language and the customs of the land. That it is expected. And it makes sense - French and Italian cultures have survived much over the long years. The inhabitants go with the flow, but they maintain their own core values. Moving to such a place implies to me that you learn the customs of the land. Why move to a new, wonderful adventure and bring your old ways and expectations with you? What is the point? You might just as well stay put if you want things to always remain the same. People originally moved here to America for a new, better way of life; to escape oppression, tyranny and so on. They brought their customs with them and they discovered that was not enough. It is not a debate about what happened to the natives already here; yes, that was a tragedy, but that is not exactly what I mean. Or, maybe it is. A whole culture, a whole way of life was desecrated. Still, back then, those new not-yet Americans did have to change, to adapt, to learn to live in the new land and to create a new culture, different from what they left. It seems to me that now what happens in today's society is that people move and expect things to be exactly the way they were in their old home. And they push for changes without really thinking them through. Others listen, and soon you have a lack of regard for old ways, old houses, the why's of what make a place special, and it becomes a hodge-podge of chaos and confusion, and it seems that no one is happy.

When I moved here I kept the parts of me that were me - I kept my language and my education, but I understood the language of being here; southern is different than upstate New York, for sure. I learned, grew, changed, and I accepted life as being different from what I knew. I don't always like it, and in fact I look forward to moving, but back then, I accepted that being here was different and some of the old ways had purpose and meaning; especially to those already established here. What happens now is that developers see empty land and they see the need to develop for money; take the money and run. Cities see the developers as a way to generate more revenue in the form of taxes, and to improve their community - interestingly, not always in the best way. It seems to me that it has to stop somewhere before it all goes by the wayside. It is kind of what is going on now - too many personalities from too many places stirring the pot and not liking the stew that is created; that melting pot society. Still. There are places here and there that are still reminiscent of the way things were once - this sweet gray house at the edge of the historic district. Life has built up around it, but somehow it has maintained it's dignity, innocence and heritage. That must be what draws me to it.

750 Words a Day

I started a new quest for writing. It's been my life for so long, being a writer (paid or not I know I am a true writer at heart) but I have found myself at odds the last few years. I've let living life take over my writing. I used to write in the dead of night, when I laughed, when I cried; when I was happy or sad. I would write stories, or starts of them; I would write poetry; pages and pages of it. I have neglected that part of me, though. Too busy - what a terrible word and terrible excuse. I have words to share with the world and they are not getting shared when I am too busy, too tired, just not in the mood. Today I saw this link to a site that intrigued me; 750words.com. It is private, and encourages daily writing, and helps log it, track it with points and badges; you basically compete with yourself. 750 Words came about because the creator read Julia Cameron's The Artist Way. I read that too, and was so intrigued by writing morning pages that I gave that a go for many months. But I have been unable to successfully keep it up. I already get up so early, and although I managed it for awhile, I just tapered off. The idea of morning pages is to purge your thoughts first thing in the morning before you really start your day. With purged thoughts, your creativity can come out easier. It's great and I loved doing it, but I also hated doing it, because it just was not practical for me.

Driving home I am often so inspired by sights, sounds, smells in the air. My mind wanders and I find myself wanting to write it all down. But when I get home a million things wait, and there go my 750 words again. For the last three years I have been on a committee reading and approving kids books fo the state of Florida. After this week my time on the committee is done, and my time will once again be spent doing what I want, reading what I want, and now, hopefully, writing what I want to free my creative soul. I'd get home over the last few months and I would see this huge pile of books waiting to be read and I'd know that I had to do the right thing, writing on my mind or not. So. Here I am signed up for 750words.com and today was my first day. I hope I can continue and finally inspire my own self to make my dreams come true.

Monday March 05, 2018

On the way home tonight I saw two young boys fishing off a bridge. They were pre-teen, scruffy, barefoot, one without a shirt, pants riding low on skinny hips, underwear showing, but not in the hip-hop, gangster style. This was just a casual, don't care about my appearance kind-of clothing. It was around 3 pm; the kids in Plant City today, did not have school, so it was an out-of-school moment for them, I am sure. Next week is spring break; maybe more time for these boys to fish, I hope. The trees are all in bloom - the oaks, grand in their newly budded bright spring cloaks, the air almost shimmering with it. The young boys stirred my heart. I cannot help but consider Steve at that age, probably dressed in a similar fashion. It teases my soul. I don't love Steve with all my heart now, but I did for a long time, and it makes my heart happy to see little boys with their futures stretching out in front of them, as was Steve’s once. They are still too young to see mistakes they might make; still too young to be of much harm to anyone but themselves. Their lives really are shiny and new; regardless of what they might end up as; today, they are young boys fishing off a bridge, enjoying a warm spring afternoon away from school and doing what boys love to do best. They can be a mess, look a mess, get dirty, wet, fishy. It doesn't matter. It's a wonderful way for them to while away the time; innocent, yet grown-up enough to be out of sight of parents. They might have siblings; a lot, just one. They might be from a split home; living with either parent seeing the other on the weekends, or not. Their stories can be played out in any direction, any number of truths possible. For today, they are just two young boys fishing off a bridge on a beautiful, warm, blooming spring afternoon.

Farther down the road I passed a house on the other side of the road. Chipped green paint, wooden frame, azaleas in riotous bloom all around the house in tall bushes. That's the way azalea's should grow and bloom, not trimmed into perfectly round balls, beaten into submission. They are naturally rangy, tall bushes in a variety of colors, although these were a deep fuchsia pink. It was an older house; no telling just how old, but an old frame house, the way houses were when they were built here in Florida until recent years. Now houses in this area tend to be concrete block, fancy stucco, mission style with rounded windows and archways. There is nothing wrong with those type houses; mine is a ranch stucco, but the old houses have such character. Built on concrete blocks, like feet, the air could pass through under the home and keep the house cooler in the summer, although in the winter it does nothing to keep heat in. Most were not insulated, were without central heat and air, and some even without original plumbing. They were fodder for termites, especially with the damp and moist heat we live with so much in Florida. So this house I passed was an old frame house built up on blocks, but also framed in around the bottom with what looked like wooden siding. The window frames were an odd brownish-green color that looked like it wanted to offset the chipping paint, and it really did so successfully. One framed window screen, however was slightly askew. My mind found itself wondering just what set that screen askew. Some teenager sneaking out at night, sliding open the window, lifting the screen, sneaking out into the night, clandestine meetings planned with friends; a boyfriend or girlfriend? Just for the thrill of getting away with it? Entirely possible; the window with the tilted screen faced west; if mom and dad came home from the east each day they would never see it. No yards really need mowing now, so chances are dad won't catch it while mowing. I remember seeing it askew as far back as last week, so who knows the truth of that wonky window?

All we have to do is watch where we travel; when driving, walking, wherever and however we get there. There are stories everywhere. We can imagine each and every detail, we can make them up ourselves; it doesn't matter the truth, really. What does matter is our curiosity, our observations, and the stories our own mind comes up with. I've always known I was a writer because of my inherent curiosity of the world around me. I've always wanted to know the lives lived in tumble-down, abandoned houses, in old barns with their roofs caving in; in the old tractor equipment left to pasture. It peaks my imagination, my curiosity, and it makes my storyteller mind come to life.

Living in Fear

I have never been one to live my life in fear. I have been afraid of things, and not wanted to face things, but I have always forced myself to do the uncomfortable, the scary. As I write that, I wonder if I have always lived like that or if it came to me gradually? I am not certain. I remember quitting color guard in my senior year of high school , but I do not recall that that was from fear; I think that was just teen aged awkwardness, or some other factor. I did not want to go to college, but it was not out of fear; it was just not a path I wanted to take in life. I moved to Florida on my own, fear aside. I have taken so many various directions and paths in my life, and I do not believe, to the best of my knowledge, that fear has ever guided me.

A few years back we went on a trip, my friends and I, along with an assortment of parents and family members. We travelled to Colorado to scatter the ashes of our dear friend/sister/mom/daughter, Wanda. My friend died suddenly at just 37 years old. It was a blood clot from her leg, and it killed her instantly. The loss of her in our lives was huge. She lived a quiet life, devoted to her son and to us, as we were to her. She loved to go to the beach, to sit in the sand and comb through miniscule shells. She loved to travel, she loved our Friday night ceramics nights; she loved food, beer, and sunshine, and she always smiled. She was the quiet one, the sweet one, and the easiest of us to get along with. She really loved life. A year after her death, we scattered her ashes in The Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs where she was born, in a public place we could all access if we chose to go back. We were a bunch of people with a bunch of personalities and we all had different ideas about our trip. We mourned our friend/sister/mom/daughter, but we were all alive and breathing and we were all able bodied. I learned so much of myself on that trip. I learned that I did not want to grow older and be afraid of everything or anything. I climbed Seven Falls Water Falls, crying all the way back down, scooting on my bottom most of the way. I crossed Royal Gorge Bridge on foot, 1053 feet in the air. I was terrified, but I was determined to live my life. I would do it again, with no less fear, but also, no less determination. Since then I have climbed mountain paths all over America. I have stood on mountain tops, ridden with my eyes closed up and down steep winding mountain cliffs. I have not lost my fear, and my knees grow weak, my breathing shallow; my heart beats rapidly. But I am determined to not live afraid, and I am determined to life my life.

Society lives in fear these days. It breaks my heart. Before I leave my house each day I open my blinds and let the sunlight soak my house, inside and out. I believe in living in light, in the open, with fresh air coming in as it may. Today I had to cover the small windows in my library, my workspace; my classroom; where I spend my work life five days a week. Each tiny, small window had to be covered. Because our society lives in such fear. We have to protect the children at all costs, and I do understand, I really do. But I mourn the loss of the slices of sunshine I have had in my life day in and day out. I despise that there are evil and violent people out there who force others to take these precautions. It makes my heart hurt for these generations of children who will know nothing but fear; fear that violence may visit their school in the form of a crazed gunman, or worse. It makes my heart hurt that the generations that followed mine did not have the same range of freedom I grew up with; playing outside all day until the sun went down – playing outside with no fear that someone crazy might snatch them from their yard or sell them into child slavery or worse. That many still look to the sky at a plane seemingly off course; that we have to have armed police at schools, concerts, sporting events; everywhere we gather in masses. What sadness.

I cannot live my life in fear. It is not part of who I am. I will be myself. I will continue to open my blinds at home daily, and allow the sunshine in my heart to fill my library, even if I have to keep the windows covered. I cannot give in to the fear that those who are mentally ill, or societal outcasts seem to thrive on. I cannot and I will not live in fear. That is my choice in life.

Understanding Poverty

So, here's the deal. I am sitting at my desk, and just finished eating a soggy tuna sandwich. I arrived at 6:45 am, as I always do, reset the copier, added paper, changed the lunch menu for the morning show, turned on all 30 computers, ran the morning show, sat through awards ceremony and took photos for the school slideshow, ran to the office to mix a printer snafu, came back to the media center to run my ongoing book fair. In the process I tried making two different cups of coffee (unsuccessfully finishing before both went cold). There has been no time for breakfast or even a water break, so by the time I was able to consume my very soggy sandwich (at 12:45) it didn't matter how it tasted, because I was quite honestly starving! I was able to finally check email during my sandwich time, and thank goodness nothing pressing was missed.

In the middle of my day, in between all else, I soothed ruffled teacher feathers, added water to the coffee maker, took candy from 5th graders (today is the day after Halloween, and despite the mandate there is no candy, there has been candy everywhere.) That is life, in a nutshell, when one works at an elementary school. What is easy about any of that? And seriously, what has any of that to do with my actual Master's Degree in Library and Information Science? My degree and none of my education prepared me for any of these things. Life prepared me; living life, learning to empathize, learning to problem solve, troubleshoot, learning to be a nurturer. But all those things were not taught in higher education. They were learned because of who my parents were, where I grew up, the influences in my life, both good and bad. It takes a village - it took a true village to teach me so much of that.

As a staff we are doing a book study on Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty. I did not understand the gulf before this book. I am not sure I even now understand it. But here is the thing. We are teaching kids from a middle class point-of-view, and they are coming to us from a generationally impoverished environment. We don't always speak the same language, even if we all speak English. So add all of that questioning to my above morning, and it is no wonder our public education system is in the uproar it is. I certainly do not know the answers. But I know this - what we are doing now is not working. When someone like me with an incredible wealth and passion of knowledge and books, with the compassion I have inside of me - with the education I have paid for has a morning like I had today; and nearly every day has a similar path and schedule, with similar results. When that happens, it is time to truly rethink what it is I do, why I do it. And to consider what next I want to do. Because none of those things satisfy that urge inside of me to continue to blindly share what I know without seeing some connected end result. It becomes harder and harder to give of myself, and continually give. That is where educational burn-out occurs. There is something truly wrong with this whole scenario. I wish I knew the answers.

Chewing Thoughts

February 5, 2018

I came home in an odd mood tonight. Pensive, reflective, almost apprehensive; vexed in a certain way There is nothing wrong in my own life to contribute to these feelings, and yet I  tend to absorb the moods of others; their thoughts, fears, sadness’s; their anxieties. It is not a quality I am always glad to have, though. I did the handful of odd jobs I normally do when I get home. Living alone with no husband or children does not mean there are not always odd jobs to do; there are, In fact, there is no one to share normal duties with, and sometimes this can be a cause for its own distress. Today, though, I know where my mood stems from. Still, the knowing does not always stop the mood. Immediate tasks completed, I lay back on my bed, Jimi-Kitty cuddling and purring in my ear. I rubbed his silky head and ears, and his purrs were a soothing balm to me. He curled up around my head, his world complete. My biggest cat jumped up on the bed too – something he seldom does except at night when it is time to sleep. His purrs were louder than Jimi-Kitty, and he took it upon himself to nuzzle my eyelashes. Both my male cats do that when I am stressed or sick, or even just very tired. It snapped me from my revelry, my pensive thoughts, and I mentally shook myself. Nothing is wrong in my own personal life. What I was doing, was projecting from my friends pain and an running wild with an innocuous comment she made about the value of a house for sale close by, and how it was “dated”. I lay there on my bed imagining future days and future actions. I was imagining myself purging my house of belongings in an effort to minimize, and I was imagining what I needed to do around my house and yard to make it more “sellable” and just how dated was my own house? I was adding up in my head the costs, and subtracting it from the mortgage due and the equity earned. Why, I wondered? I don’t have any intention of selling my home in the next few days, or even months, and yet here I am staging the sale. My grandmother used to call that “borrowing trouble”; imagining wrongs where nothing was. Doing tasks that are not even the most remote of possibilities today, and not even physically doing them, but imagining them elaborately inside my own head.

This summer we had to go through Mom-Carole’s things. It is a thankless task sorting, someone else’s belongings. Every little thing, at one time, had a purpose or a meaning. Sometimes personal, sometimes long forgotten reasons why it was kept. But to sort through belongings that were collected by someone near and dear – that is so hard. My friend’s mom is laying in that semi-state of life and death, with death imminent. I’ve been visiting daily’ bringing food, giving hugs; helpless, as every person is in that moment of life. Wanting to help, not being able to; seeing the pain, knowing what all are feeling and experiencing. It is a tough place. Because I have that absorbent personality, I have been taking it all in, carrying it around with me, and keeping it inside my heart. There is a song from Sister Hazel called “Your Winter. One of the lines of lyrics says “Why do you chew your pain?” That is what I do. Chew my pain, and that of others; I absorb moods around me like a sponge. It is almost a physical feeling. Knowledge of it still does not allow me to distance myself. I found myself redirecting my thoughts once I realized what I was doing, and I managed to shake of my reverie and the strangeness I brought home with me. Now the evening is upon me and my day is winding down. I am grateful, once again, for the peace and quiet of my own thoughts and my house and possessions all around me.