ADDRESS UNKNOWN

I’m going to tell you about the dumb thing I did recently. I ordered a gift through Amazon for my sister-in-law and since I was in a rush and on my iPad, I wasn’t paying close attention to where I was shipping the gift. I have a list of addressed in Amazon of family and friends who I may decide needs a coloring book or nectar rings for feeding hummingbirds. I just selected the address for James R. Graham and placed my order. It was only later after I knew it had been delivered and I never heard from Katrina about it that I started to suspect something. James R Graham is my brother’s name. It’s his son’s name and son’s son’s name. I’m pretty sure if that son and his wife decide to have a baby and it’s a boy, that kid will be a James R Graham. James R Graham was also my dad’s name.

I sent Katrina’s gift to my Dad. In Collinsville OK. To a house that we no longer own because my dad is dead.

After some interweb sleuthing, I tracked down the young man who bought the house when Mom sold it and messaged him through Facebook. He was very kind and had been trying to figure out how to contact the family because he recognized the name. I don’t think he opened the package and I’m pretty sure it’s weird to receive a package delivery for a man who has been dead for almost then years. Mail is not so unusual. I still get mail for Chris all the time. But a large box containing a glass hummingbird feeder is an unusual gift for a dead man. I was able to connect him to Katrina and she was able to retrieve her gift.

My dad had an almost zero online presence. He appeared in pictures that we posted, but he didn’t have a Facebook page or Twitter account. He never sent texts and had the most basic cell phone he could possibly have. Dad was not tech savvy, but also did not require a tech savvy person to ‘fix’ something like a printer connection or run a software update. Because of his lack of online activity, it never really dawned on me that there would be internet things of Dad’s that I would need to clear out or download, like what I had to do with Chris. There’s a whole external hard drive in my file cabinet that contains all the content of Numskullery.com, as well as pictures and word documents of started projects. I weeded out so many domains that he had purchased but never used. I still have Dad’s phone number saved in my phone (as well as Chris’s).

Apparently, I still have his address stored in my gift list.

In my explanations to the young man and Katrina about my shipping snafu, I said “I don't know what happened.” I also called myself a ‘dope’, but to be honest, I’ve had Dad lingering around me ever since I started planning our moose hunting trip. His silly jokes just randomly bubble up out of my own mouth. It is not unlike Whoopie Goldburg’s character in Ghost where she plays a medium for spirits to speak to the living. I keep thinking about how his prize for anything was always a fifty cent piece. Always. Inflation had no effect on this. Sort of like the five dollar bill Grandmother put in my birthday card every year until she died when I was in my twenties. I have a small stash of fifty cent pieces, but they were not won by being the first to spot anything. The Tooth Fairy left those and I have saved them all these years.

And I can’t believe I am just now realizing that the Tooth Fairy was my dad.

I haven’t been back to the house where we lived since Mom sold it. I almost asked Katrina how the old house looked, what had been changed, what was the same. I don’t think I want to know. One of the ways I figured out I had tracked down the right person was through his photos. He had a photo that had the old scary shed in the background. That shed was so full of old tools and crap. I don’t think I ever really went in two steps past the entrance. It smelled of dirt and old oil. There were always wasps. But it was something I could still recognize. I don’t know about the rest of the place and I prefer not knowing. I prefer to think that the front brick entry way looks exactly the same as it did when we all as a family would stand there to pose for Easter pictures, Mom’s irises blooming all around us. That place will be forever in a state of Spring in my memories. Maybe summer too when it would be so hot, tar in the road would bubble up. We’d ride over the bubbles with our bicycles and laugh at the popping sounds.

If I delete the address, do I delete the memories?

That address was one of the first things I was forced to memorize and I’ll remember it always, burned into my brain deeper than any password or anniversary date. So, I will be going in and cleaning out the old address list and at the very least remove those who are no longer with us. Oh, and I’ll warn the guy living at the old place to keep an eye out for a second package.

Yeah… I sent two packages there.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

If I go over to the gym at a specific time, I can use the yoga classroom for my own practice because there are no classes going on at the time. If I miss that timing window, I end up rolling out my mat between the windows and the exercise bikes. The exercise bikes are not the most popular and usually no one is on a bike while I’m moving through suryanamaskara. It’s not a big deal to me to have a possible audience because I have my headphones on and the volume up loud enough to drown out other gym noise. I’ve gotten adept at putting a mental bubble around me and my mat, but getting to use the yoga classroom gives me easy access to the yoga enhancers (props) and a bit of privacy.

That being said, I do not treat the space as my own personal space. I leave the doors open or at least partially open and I leave the sign outside turned to ‘open’. I want others to feel free to use the space even though I’m in there doing my own thing. It just feels selfish of me to claim this whole space for just myself. My schedule has been so wackadoodle that I’m struggling to carve out time for my own yoga practice. So when I do get the opportunity I make my practice really challenging. I’ve added hand weights to my suryanamaskara and mix in some dynamic movement, but I also leave time for a good long savasana (final relaxation). The end part of my practice is truly the most important part because I don’t get a savasana when I’m teaching classes. That’s twice a week where I’m doing and teaching without reaping the full benefits of yoga. My classes are not my practice.

This week, I was in that space doing my thing and I had just settled into final relaxation. I heard some other people in the gym, but quickly tuned them out. There was a singing bowl playlist playing through my headphones loud enough to feel the vibrations without damaging my ears. It was a good final relaxation. I wasn’t fidgety or crying (that happens). I sunk right in and landed in the space between awake and asleep. I was there for a good fifteen minutes and when the timer signaled the end, I peeled myself up to a seated position. When I opened my eyes, I noticed that someone had closed both doors to the yoga classroom. They had even turned the sign around to read “in use”.

My job and my service as a yoga teacher is to protect my students during their savasanas. I am the time keeper and on high alert watching over my student to ensure they are comfortable and feel safe. I take this job very seriously because I feel that savasana is (especially in our current lifestyle/environments) the most important thing a person can do for themselves. Not only does it allow the body to recover and adjust to the physical changes that happen during the moving parts of yoga, but it gives a body time and permission to just rest. I have taught at studios where I have had women tell me that they pay me so they can rest. It is their only guilt free moment and they need the permission to ‘indulge’. I think having to pay someone to give you permission to rest says a lot about what is happening in our society.

I did some investigating and it didn’t take much to find out who closed me up in the yoga room this week. I haven’t had the opportunity to thank them in person yet because they’re on vacation, but I want them to know how very grateful I am for their simple little act. By closing the doors and turning the sign around, this person gave me permission to fully relax in the space. Their actions were very much like having someone watch over and protect me during my own savasana, something I rarely get.

And this is a prime example of how small acts of thoughtful kindness has big impacts.

SAY CHEESE

My theme for my weekend at Heather’s was Cheese. We made a ridiculous recreation of the Milk Bar Bakery’s Cheesy Puffs cake. We ate fancy grilled cheese sandwiches at Cheese Bar and then bought cheese at the store that owns the restaurant. Their pimento and cheese is my mother’s and I ate the last of it when I got home in the same way I’d eat it as a kid, sandwiched between two pieces of Wonder Bread. With the first bite, I started singing “Let’s do the time warp again!” After I left Heather’s, she and a friend attended a cheesecake class and were in the middle of baking as I passed a Sargento cheese truck.

I’m planning a cleansing diet for the month of May.

This trip to Des Moines was my second trip to the city and my first trip on solo with Josephine. Here’s what I learned. It takes no time to get from Kansas City to Des Moines. If you’re lucky, along the way you will spot bald eagles. I saw two! There’s an opportunity to see covered bridges and shop at an Amish store filled with homemade canned goods and crafts. You know you are leaving (or entering) the state of Missouri when you see all the giant firework warehouses next to the highway. I-35 is very much like the section of I-35 that runs through Oklahoma, meaning it needs some work. The cheese shop with the most wonderful cheese is right next to a French bakery that sells all the best flakey pastries and baguettes for the cheese you just bought at the fancy cheese shop.

There will be many trips to Heather’s in the future; one of which will be for the State Fair.

This trip was also a test of how well Josephine will do in the car without being able to sit in my lap for most of the ride. I fixed her bed in the front seat with a towel in the floor. There was a little bit of a dance in the beginning, but she very quickly settled into her bed. Then she split her time between the floor and the bed. She was the perfect copilot. She let me listen to whatever I wanted and didn’t talk while This American Life was playing. We made one stop for potty breaks for both of us and she didn’t request anything from inside the gas station. She never acted nervous or anxious. This is all very important because I have some solo camping adventures I want to do and it feels safe to have Josephine with me for those. She’s a little dog, but she’s got a big bark.

There was a particular song that kept popping up on the radio last year, This Year by Emily King. It’s catchy and felt like a good morning theme song. It’s the song that played in my head when I was writing out my plan/flow chart for 2024. It’s not a self absorption or a ‘you’re so vain’ thing. I don’t listen to the song and think ‘yeah, the world needs to revolve around me!’. I hear that song and see it as a reminder to take care of my own happiness. I have also spent too much time making space for someone else both physically and mentally. In my efforts to make room, I have made myself smaller and a little numb. So all the things I’ve put on my chart for the year have been activities I want to do for myself. I’m becoming less numb and less tolerant of being talked at as opposed to being talked to or with. I’m working at being less small. Making space for myself is involving a number of solo trips this year because planned trips force me to carve out the time for me. If I put it on the calendar and book the room, I’m going and that’s that.

I guess the next adventure will be solo camping. I’ve built the kitchen box and organized my camp gear. All that’s left is to throw a dart at the map and go.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Westside Local posted a picture of my art hanging on their walls, which I in turn shared to my social media places. The prints have been up all through March and I have to make plans to remove them at the end of April. Honestly, with all that is going on, I sort of set this showing out of my mind. I had intended to go into Westside Local for lunch with coworkers, but suddenly it’s April 19th and I don’t understand what happened to time.

Where’d it all go?

I realize there is still time to get there for a lunch or something. April is not over, but coordinating my calendar around everyone else’s calendars is like trying to solve a complicated quantum physics problem. Yesterday, I spent a large part of my morning texting back and forth with Jenn about lunch dates. I finally ended up just sharing my calendar with her. We managed to schedule a lunch day and provided proof to each other that it was a real date because we both put it in our calendars. Everyone is busy with life right now because we are all basically hibernating mammals. Sure, we weren’t sleeping during of the winter months but we were only into minimal effort activities. Now that the sun’s out and the birds are chirping, we’re crawling out from under our layers and setting down our bowls of soup. The salad days are upon us! I mean sort of. I have to cover plants tonight because temps are dropping into the low 30s, but it’s a brief two day cold front and then we’re right back into balmy thunderstorm weather.

Any way. Things are happening and we’re all doing the thing.

I’m super grateful to Westside Local for giving me the opportunity to hang my pictures on their walls. This has been the most chill experience. I didn’t feel rushed to get things prepared. There was zero hassles in hanging photos, which I had to do on my own. I didn’t have to endure another artist reception where I uncomfortably had to talk to people about my art. I haven’t sold anything from this showing, but funny enough I sold a print that is not in this showing, a photo from a recent trip. I do not care that I have not sold anything. Money is not my motivation, though it is a validation. It just feels special to have some of my favorite pictures displayed on walls where complete strangers will see them. Really, that’s all I want to say about it because it still feels super awkward to talk about my art.

With that, I’m off to Des Moines with Josephine as my copilot. We’re going to spend the weekend with Heather where there will be shenanigans, bubbly drinks and beagles. If you are in the Kansas City area and find yourself looking for a nice place for a meal, I suggest you give Westside Local a try. The food is delicious, atmosphere is charming, and the art on the wall isn’t bad.

THINGS I DON'T DO ON THE WEEKENDS

I don’t check my email on the weekends. I have two gmail accounts, one is the original that I got locked out of for a few weeks. I created a new account when that happened and now the old account is mostly spam/ads/trash with the occasional reminders for a bill or a receipt from Google Fiber. My work email used to be attached to my phone but I never had that set up when I swapped phones two phones ago. In order to get to work emails from home, I have to pass through the security gauntlet that is not unlike getting through all the booby traps to get to the hidden treasure. So I just don’t bother. The gmail account I created while I was locked out of the old one was meant to be a cleaner account but this one has started to get a little junky with the spams. Every Monday morning I open up the email accounts, select everything unread in the promotions folder and delete without thinking twice.

And it feels really good.

I also do not even look at the news until Sunday mornings when CBS Sunday Morning does their little snippet of news at the beginning of the show.

I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to ignore my email accounts on the weekends. I didn’t flash a meme of sitting on the beach with a cold beer and a notice that reads “slams laptop ‘ill Monday” up anywhere. I just stopped checking my email. During the weeks, I am continuously answering to someone in email and/or Teams (stupid Teams). I much prefer face to face conversation and sometimes will ignore a work email and just go find the person who sent it so we can discuss the issue. This continued answering to people doesn’t just apply to work. There are doctor’s notices, Vet visit reminders, bill notices and the countless daily things that must be taken care of to keep the lights on. When I’m not answering to people, I’m keeping my self accountable by staying informed with worldly news and checking to see how my representatives are representing me with bills they are voting (or not voting) on. In my case, it’s about 50/50 on which rep is doing a decent job for this state. (I did just have to send out an email to our Attorney General, defending Planned Parenthood).

A Chookooloonks newsletter was waiting for me in my inbox this morning and in it Karen Walrond wrote of the importance of self compassion. Treating yourself with compassion should be a daily practice, not something you do when you’ve completely depleted yourself. Karen is not talking about spa days. She writes of small, simple actions like dancing or stopping to take pictures of wildflowers and how these actions help sustain us in our activism, particularly when there is so much that needs doing right now (any one see the recycling segment on CBS Sunday Morning this week?). The state of things is overwhelming and reminding myself that change happens in micrometers starting with my own community is my daily mantra, but I never really stopped and thought about the little actions I take daily that gives me the energy to write the letters and make the phone calls.

I often stop to take photos of flowers and it is not uncommon to look over at my cubicle and see me dancing like banshee. The no emails or news on weekends are just two small things I do as self compassion. I just didn’t realize it until now.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Sunday was for lawn work. I bought some plants for my tiny backyard garden that ends up being a mix of herbs and tomatoes every year. I purchased some decorative plants for the front, including a hosta plant called Queen Josephine (because, of course). As Michael and I roamed through the large plant center, our cart started to fill up and I was juggling cost, durability and beauty while reaching for this or that. I kept asking Michael “Can I get this?” and he would say “yes”, but I don’t think he realized that I was asking because I wanted him to keep me in a budget. At one point I said that he could not just let me buy and buy. Then he said “But it makes you happy.” And that is why we can’t stick to budgets. Sure, buying plants makes me a little bit happy. It also stresses me out because I am neglectful and just not into the continued maintenance of plants. I want easy, tend-for-themselves kind of plants.

Tulips came up in the front area this year, but only one bloomed so I pulled all of them out of the ground. I’ll plant new bulbs in the Fall. I trimmed back the hedge that had slightly gone wild and would try to grab you as you walked up the front path and I pulled out all the weeds. This is when I discovered the perennials I had planted last year and the year before. I was like “Hey you! I remember planting you there!” The hostas I had purchased at a plant sale in OK three years ago were also coming up and they had multiplied. I split them and redistributed them around in hopes that the whole front area will be nothing but hostas. I never would have wanted a hosta in my yard if I still lived in OK. Every time I saw them planted in someone’s landscape, I’d wince. They were sad plants. They were sad plants because they prefer a muggier climate. The hostas I have seen around my neighborhood have been large leafy green things with beautiful blooms. The first time I noticed them, I was stunned. I’m not a gardener and hostas are the easiest plants for me to work with. I told Michael that next year I am not allowed to buy new plants for the front yard, only something nice for the pretty blue pot I keep on the stoop. I can honestly say that as I prepared the front bed for the new plants and discovered the plants I had planted from previous years, I felt some joy.

I wondered for a moment if this is the reason my mother tends to her flower beds.

While I have said that I am not the gardening type, there is something about planting things permanent in the ground. One of my mother’s biggest laments when she sold and moved out of our family house in Collinsville was about all the plants she was leaving behind. She had multiple beds filled with irises and various trees and shrubs, all plants that she had tended to for more than thirty years. The soil and how the sun hits the house she lives in now is totally different then it is at the old house. A smaller yard also meant that she couldn’t just dig up everything and take it with her. She had to leave them behind for the new owner to do whatever with them. I haven’t been by the old house since we helped moved my mother out, so I have no idea if those irises are still blooming or if the magnolia tree we gave mom for mother’s day one year has survived. And while the house Mom is in now is different (her front door faces directly east), she has planted new plants in the ground and spends her time caring for them and fussing over them. Gardening seems like an activity my mom does truly for herself and because she loves it.

There is satisfaction in planting things in the dirt and watching them grow, but the real joy comes from seeing those things come back year after year.

I’m meeting my mom and sister this evening in Manhattan, KS so we can go to the tulip festival happening in Wamego which is close to Manhattan. I’ve not been to any of these places before. Wamego is a tiny town known for an eclectic Wizard of Oz museum and apparently, tulips. I’ve been told that the museum is more like someone’s personal hoarding collection of all things Wizard of Oz. There a little Toto statues all around the town and a Dutch Windmill. I am excited to see the tulips and seeing my mom and sister. The weather is predicted to be sunny and warm. I’m looking forward to spending my day in the sunshine, basking in the bright colors of the tulips, something I am not sure I would have appreciated as much if I hadn’t spent years watching my mother work in her own gardens.

THINGS I DECIDED TO DO

I wrote a short Thankful Friday entry last week about a goose who has laid eggs in a precarious place and the whole nature vs nurture thing. I didn’t post it because I never really finished it. It was sort of done. Then I got busy and Friday rolled in. I technically could have finished it Friday afternoon, but instead I took my new camera lens for a walk to the Kauffman Gardens and then rushed back to help someone and finish up on some work. So, Friday’s gratitude post just didn’t get posted and the thing is, I didn’t feel too bad about it.

Back in October, I rented a camera lens to take with me to Woods Hole. It was one I was considering buying and camera lenses are not cheap. I thought that renting it and spending a week with it would give me some idea about want vs need. Would this be a whole lot of money spent on something I would only use on occasion? Or would this be the lens I would want to use most of the time, setting my zoom lens aside for those times it would be unsafe to get too close? I did not take my zoom lens with me and relied only on the rented lens. On day one, I was already starting a mental list of what I loved about the lens. It’s light weight, making it great for travel. Handles low light situations better than my zoom lens which allowed me to use faster shutter speeds, and all the pictures I took that week have a dreamy look about them. I counted maybe five or six times when I wanted a zoomed image. By the end of the week, I knew that this lens was a need. Okay…a wanty need, but a need none the less.

The rule for big ticket item fun purchases is that one must be paid off before buying the next. So, we paid off the last big “fun” purchase, a TV, and then headed out to buy my lens. Except the place where I was going to buy it, didn’t have it in stock or online. I had to go to the computer store that I hate with my whole heart. They didn’t have it in stock, but I could order it online. This actually turned out to be an easy, smooth purchase and I didn’t leave the place fuming. Side rant: I have not once gone to this particular store and been helped by anyone other than a condescending (male) computer know-it-all. This was the first time I have ever walked into this store and been treated like I actually knew what I was talking about. In fact, I was so surprised by the experience that I even said to the sales clerk “Wow! This was a way easier and a more delightful experience than I expected!” The camera lens arrived on Wednesday of last week, but my schedule didn’t open up until Friday for me to take it out for a spin. Then I started pointing it at things and remembered all the reasons why I fell in love with that lens in the first place.

Using my camera brings me joy and I am investing in my joy, not just with fancy new gear, but by making space in my day for my camera. I had zero plans to photograph the eclipse, but made some last minute adjustments to my camera and schedule. I set myself up at the top of our parking garage and while I don’t think I got anything spectacular (we only got 90% eclipse), I had a great time doing it. I used my phone as a remote device for my camera and laid back and enjoyed the sunshine and the view. As the eclipse reached 90% the parking garage filled up with people. Then I had a number of people chatting with me about what I was doing and how I was doing it. And while I wasn’t wowed by any of the pictures, I was able to compile a short time lapse of the event.

Skipping out on a Thankful Friday entry is by no means a sign that I had nothing to be grateful for last week or that I’ll stop doing gratitude posts. This is a gratitude post. I’m grateful for being able to invest in the things that bring me joy. It also has me thinking about how I can invest in other activities that bring me joy like yoga, bicycle rides for ice cream or plain old snuggling on the couch with Josephine. What does investing in those things look like or even mean? So much of that investment is time and making space for those things. Well…it means really learning the power of the word ‘no’ and really paying attention to how I feel when I say "yes” to something.

I feel pretty good about saying yes to investing in more joy.

THE STUFF WE DID

I’ve been a regular New Orleans visitor since the age of two. In all of those times, I have never participated in a swamp tour. We visited the zoo a number of times and rolled down the tallest hill in New Orleans (which is a man-made hill in the middle of the zoo). I have ridden the streetcar all through the city. I have walked down the most touristy streets, but I have never done a “Cajun Adventure Tour”. Michael wanted to see alligators on this trip, so we booked ourselves on a two hour flat bottom boat ride through the Honey Island Swamp just east of New Orleans. I could not convince Michael to ride an airboat or do a kayak trip through the swamp. Those things didn’t feel safe to him but a large boat carrying twenty people with a captain that often joked about losing tourists in the swamp felt safe.

There have been drives through swampy areas where Michael will ask me about what I might be looking at out the window. I always say that I’m looking for alligators. It is not really true because an alligator is pretty impossible to spot from a speeding vehicle. Alligators spend a lot of time mostly submerged with only the tops of their heads sticking up out of the water. They are the color of the water and look more like floating bits of wood than animal. The things I’m really looking at out the window are birds. White egrets and gray herons mostly dot the swamps along the road side. This trip, I saw two flamingos fly overhead. One our way down through Arkansas, I spotted a bald eagle just sitting in a field. One our drive up through Mississippi, I spotted another bald eagle flying away from some smaller birds he had made unhappy. Bird spotting is easy. Also deer. I see lots of deer on our road trips.

So this cajun goofball version of my dad gave us a tour of the Honey Island Swamp. He pointed out the wildlife which was mostly just alligators and raccoons. He told us about the spiders and snakes in the area. He thumped the boat canopy regularly to scare us into thinking a snake had fallen into the boat. When he wasn’t being silly, he told us about the plants, pointing out wild rice and irises. At one point, we came across a small pink cocoon like structure. This was filled with apple snail eggs, a highly invasive species that will wreck havoc on the ecosystem. I leaned over and told Michael about how we had to get special permits to use these as model organisms in research. We use them in the study of eye regeneration because apple snails can regenerate their eyeballs. This was so fascinating to Michael that he almost shouted out to everyone else on the boat that I am a scientists and I know about these snails.

Thankfully we managed to keep my knowledge just between the two of us.

Along with animal sighting, we collected license tags, forty two of them to be exact. Though four of those tags were Canadian and the Alaska tag was discovered at our very last roadside stop on the way home. Since Michael is a teacher by trade, he likes to give us ‘grades’ on our tag collections. He said we earned a solid B on this trip. Between alligator searches and tag collecting, we had sort of a scavenger hunt to find Banksy art pieces. Michael was unfamiliar with Banksy, an England based street artist, political activist and director. A while back, Melissa and I went to a Banksy Exhibition Show that felt like more of place to be seen, sipping fancy cocktails than a place to see and learn about the art. Frankly it was a little disappointing and now I think the disappointing display of work was by design. The thing you are supposed to take away from that showing is that Banksy’s art must be seen in the wild and part of the art is opening your eyes to the sights around you.

Banksy was in New Orleans in 2008, three years after hurricane Katrina. He left behind around fifteen stencils scattered all over the city. Most of those have been destroyed, painted over or part of buildings that were demolished. The first one we found was a piece called Looters that had been rescued from destruction and put on display inside a hotel lobby. The hotel has a small room off to the side of the art that explains a little bit about the artist and the efforts made to save this piece of art work. It helped that this was the first one we actually saw because this gave Michael a quick and dirty education on Banksy. Banksy’s art, for me, perfectly conveys the impermanence of life. Every thing. EVERY. THING. is temporary. Even that ‘permanent’ tattoo you had placed on your low back in 1997 will be dust someday. The map I was using to hunt Banksy art had not been kept up to date. There was supposed to be one of his stencils just two blocks down from where we were staying. We went looking for it on our first evening and when we got to the building, the stencil had been removed, the wall painted over with pink paint.

Someone must have recognized the importance of Nola Girl with Umbrella because a protective plate of plexiglass had been secured over her. She resides on the side of building that is boarded up and covered with graffiti. It looks like it used to be a walk-in clinic which is funny because right next door is a Voodoo shop. We found ourselves walking with a tall lanky young man who we shared pleasantries with while waiting for the street light to change. He had just found out that he had the day off and the weather was beautiful. He asked if we were looking for “the Banksy” and when we said yes, he guided us there because it was on his way. Michael and I stood there, the only tourists in the area, marveling at how temporary all this art happens to be. Not just the Girl with Umbrella, but all the other brightly colored graffiti art. It reminded me of something I had seen and experienced a long time ago.

There used to be a famous black sand beach on the Big Island of Hawaii. Photographs of the beach were plastered on prints and postcards and used in tourist promotional brochures. I was on that island with my parents in 1990 and there was a major volcanic eruption at the beginning of that week that sent lava flowing towards that beach. We went and stood on that beach and could see the smoke and glow of hot lava in the distance. By the middle of that week, half of the beach had been covered with lava and by the time we left, the entire beach was gone. Poof. Just like that in a week’s time this beautiful beach area was covered with molten lava. Now, years later, the ocean is wearing away some of that now hardened lava and a new black sand beach is forming. Vegetation is starting to grow up between the craggy lava rocks.

This is graffiti in nature.

New Orleans is, in itself, very temporary. It is torn down and flooded out only to be built back up again, very much like that beach in Hawaii. And we spent our time simply wandering around, soaking up the temporary beauty of it all.

THE BIG SAD

There was a small bit of graffiti that Michael and I passed a few times while roaming New Orleans. It simply said “Big Sad” with a sad face drawn under the words. I didn’t take a picture of it, which is weird because I took lots of graffiti pictures, but for some reason never pointed a camera at this one. It sparked a small conversation when we first noticed it. I said to Michael “You know how sometimes things make you a little sad? Like, I’m out of ice cream; this makes me a little sad. Big sad is reserved for things like when your favorite ice cream shop closes.” I told him that I think I’ll use Big Sad more in sentences.

Leaving New Orleans made me big sad.

On our first night in the city, we took a forty five minute walk through the Garden District to get to a dinner reservation at Basin Seafood. I was smarter on this trip and did some research, made reservations so we wouldn’t be floating with indecision on food choices. I found Basin on Eater in their best oysters on the half shell list. It’s a small but elegant restaurant on Magazine Street and the food there did not disappoint. Michael got the short ribs served on cheesy grits, which I tasted. They were the best grits I have had in years and the oysters and lima beans were so good that Michael, who does not really like raw oysters or lime beans, left thinking that maybe he was a raw oyster/lime bean eater.

On our walk to the restaurant, even on the walk back, we took turns pointing out various houses. Every time I saw a ‘For Sale’ sign I’d say “We could buy that one. We could live there.” I believe I even mentioned at one point that I had not seen any yoga studios in that area. “We could buy that one and I could open a yoga studio downstairs while we live in the top half.” Michael nodded and mumbled vague agreements each time I said something like this. While he agrees that we should visit this city often, he is less keen on the idea of living there full time. To be fair, summers would probably kill him. March is a tease in New Orleans. The weather was perfect with bright sunny days and cool breezes. The summer months are steamy and full of hurricanes (not just the fun boozy kind). I don’t know why I didn’t notice this on the last trip, but on our drive into New Orleans, we passed many stilt houses that you could only access by boat. “The only way to get to that house is by boat. What if we lived in house like that?” Those houses sparked more interest because Michael wants a boat. I think I wouldn’t be able to handle that kind of isolation. I need the street sounds and the strolling paths. I require the earth under my feet to be less squishy. Though, I wouldn’t mind kayaking through the swamps on weekends.

You know when your time in a place is time well spent if it breaks your heart a little to leave that place. In my case, I feel like I am always leaving something behind in New Orleans, something of great value so that I must return again soon to retrieve it. Then I leave something else and must return again, repeating this loop until maybe I’ll get that place out of my system. Maybe one day, it just won’t have the same appeal. I did notice a number of houses up for sale as though some of the residents of New Orleans have given up on the city. It didn’t seem as crowded with tourists this time around, but honestly we didn’t venture too deeply into those places. We skirted around them and into those residential areas that are often ignored by our government. That’s where you’ll find the best fried chicken and a Banksy that’s been left untouched by other graffiti artists or painted over by the shop owner.

We stopped in Mississippi on our way back north to meet my cousin for lunch, a cousin I haven’t seen in almost twenty years. I didn’t expect the feelings of joy and delight in seeing her face and hugging her tight. It was almost as if there had been no space or time between us since our last encounter and I confess that tears welled up in my eyes when we said our goodbyes. She had asked if we would be traveling up through Louisville, the town where our parents had grown up, where Pepaw’s house and shop used to be. I told her that I couldn’t stomach to drive through there knowing those places were gone. My cousin said she felt the same even though she lives close, she always makes a point to drive around. It’s too hard to see the empty spots that once held so much. I wiped tears from my cheeks as we drove north through that state, brushing away my complicated feelings. It might sound as if I didn’t have a wonderful vacation. Complicated feelings and tears and melancholy and all. The truth is, the trip was too good. Misti sent me a text asking if I’d had a good adventure and I burst into tears because this adventure had ended. I am still full of oysters and crawfish. Making this week’s menu was a challenge knowing that nothing I make is going to taste as good as the food we ate last week. I don’t cook with bacon fat or ham juice. And I ate plenty of things cooked in meat juice last week, plus a piece of fried chicken.

Recently, I sat down to evaluate the wordy collage I had created for the things I wanted to do this year. I listed all the things that had been completed, made a list for things that have been planned and a list of things that are still a work in progress. I was surprised by the number of things that I have already completed. When we got home, I took New Orleans from the planned list and moved it up to the completed list, but not before noticing that I have several adventures still sitting in the planned section. I’ll be back in New Orleans in a couple of years. I have to retrieve a valuable item and leave an equally valuable item behind. For now, I have hundreds of pictures left to be processed and I will take my time pouring over each photo, savoring the memories.

I’m big sad this adventure has ended but I’m really excited about the next adventures.

NOW WHAT

There’s a part of me, that people pleaser me, that almost feels like I should apologize for the rage that I poured out onto these pages last week. I have to stop and remind myself that I am practicing the allowance of all feelings good and bad. Contrary to what some may think, I don’t walk around breathing fire like a dragon or punching walls all the time. My rage stays contained inside this body until I can furiously type it all out. A friend of mine referred to it as “Beautiful rage” and I love that so much, I’ve been thinking about where to have those words tattooed onto my body. But I don’t want this space to just be a rage against the machine page.

Saturday morning, I sat down in my usual space at Heirloom and opened up my Fortune Cookie Journal (so few pages are left…I don’t know what happens when I fill them all). The music playing that morning were all the 90s bands that made up the soundtrack of the end of my HS years and into my college years. Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Cake. I knew the words to every song that played through those speakers and I was pulled back in time to a place of great happiness and naivety. Those years smelled like burnt coffee, used bookstores, cigarettes and incense mixed together. These were the years of learning the importance of finding meaning in words and oh how we dissected lyrics and movies and scripts. I was a biology major, living alongside english majors absorbing their coolness while memorizing biochemical compound structures. We were carefree even though we had no reason to be so.

I watched Past Lives over the weekend and I have been pondering those moments that feel like past lives for me now, much like the one described above. It took me longer to get around to seeing the film than I had intended. I knew that it would be beautiful in a way that feels prickly and it was. It was full of the what if questions, the kind of game I have often played on my own. There are the choices we make and there are the choices made by others that have a ripple effect on the trajectory of lives and all of these lead to questions of what if I had chosen this way instead of that. If everything in life is a choice, half of those choices are how we have decided to react to the choices made by others.

Perhaps I was a bird and you were the branch I rested on. - Nora, Past Lives

I joke that in a past life I was a devout Catholic, possibly even a nun. Guilt was often my motivator and I would constantly stress over doing the “right” thing. I’ve never really thought much about who (or what) else I might have been in other lives. I’ve never really thought about the what if I’d gone to a different college, accepted that full music scholarship to OU or at the very least sent my MCAT scores in and applied for medical school. I don’t really think about it because I know how unhappy I would have been with those choices. I knew at the time of decision that choosing those paths would not lead me to a life of joy. I never started playing the What If game until after Chris died. Then I questioned all the choices I had made and what life would be like if I had made different ones. Except, I haven’t played this game with myself in quite some time. I didn’t choose those other lives; I chose this one. Has it led me to a life of joy? I heard someone say once that we can’t have all joy all the time. This is true for me, but I do have joy.

This is my life and I am living it with you. -Nora

Next week, I’m dragging Michael back to New Orleans, a place where if past lives are truly a thing, one of mine was lived here. The last time we went was the first time I’d been back since before Hurricane Katrina and I thought that so much had probably changed since then that I wouldn’t feel at home there anymore. What happened during our last trip was I became so overwhelmed by memories of previous trips, that I froze. I didn’t make tentative itineraries or search out restaurants. We just sort wandered aimlessly and hoped to stumble onto good food. The wandering aimlessly was good, the food finds were not. Reservations are needed in this post-Covid landscape. This time around, we’ve made better plans and we’re even doing an activity that I have never done before any all the many times I have been to New Orleans. We’ve booked a swamp tour in hopes of seeing alligators in their natural habit.

We’re not leaving until next week, but I feel like taking a break from this space. Maybe I’ll spend some time updating some photos and thinking about what’s next. I need to spend more time with paper and ink. This is how I conjure up the experiences I want for myself and I’m a planner at heart. Don’t worry though. I’ll be back.

In this life I am still a blogger.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

At the beginning of this week, I posted tales about the state of my body that many found relatable. Women friends have reached out, nodding heads in agreement and sharing their own personal experience. This was exactly my intention behind that entry. I am infuriated by the taboo of conversing above whispers in regards to our female bodies and well over the idea that I should feel shame about the normal things that happen to my female body. And because of the lack of interest from the medical industry, we (women) must come together and share, share, share in hopes of navigating our way through this highly uncertain phenomena of perimenopause/menopause.

Chad sent me a TikTok story about Rosalind Franklin and how Watson and Crick stole her research, which ended up winning them the Nobel Prize in 1962. This story is not new to me. All female scientists know this story. My first education on Watson and Crick though told a different story. They didn’t mention stealing any work or ideas from Franklin, but they made sure to talk about how disagreeable Franklin was to work with and, one would say, a bitch. The reality is that Rosalind Franklin was standing up for her research and herself. Watson and Crick would never have figured out the helical structure of DNA without Rosalind Franklin’s work. So instead of allowing a woman to get the credit for this discovery, they villainized her. They projected their fragile male egos and jealousy into writing a false narrative of a contentious woman.

Psst…this isn’t the first time in history fragile male egos and their jealousy has been projected to vilify a woman.

Some of you are probably wondering what the story of Rosalind Franklin has to do with woes of perimenopause. Trust me. This is all linked together. For far too long women have been pigeon holed into a projection of what men have wanted us to be and in doing so this has lessened us. Our bodies, our thoughts, our appearances are all gender constructed for the man. Deviations in said construct are not to be tolerated and should be ignored, thus putting our basic needs in the backseat and our contributions outside of childbearing, something to be stolen or unnoticed. I did not intend to set off to write yet another rant on the never ending reach of the patriarchy, but I can’t ignore that the lack of research and information around women’s health is directly linked to the patriarchy. Women have been relegated to barely even whispering words such as vagina or bleeding because men find those words unappealing or offensive, while there are whole industries built around glorifying the male ejaculation. A cock and balls is probably the most popular choice for graffiti artists and it is usually placed near the mouth of the model on the poster.

Where is the graffiti artist drawing vulvas in the mouths of poster models?

This is not a sermon for the choir kind of post. I wrote all of this on Wednesday and usually writing down my rage helps to dampen it. Instead, all I managed to do was pour gasoline all over my rage. I spent the day feeling prickly and stabby. But after another fitful night of sleep, I thought about what many of the women in my community had said about what they are going through. The most common phrase written in my comments is “I thought I was going crazy.” Of course we think this; we’re all tired and doctors wont listen to us. The number of comments I read that started with “my doctor didn’t believe me” or “three doctors later..” was ridiculous. Not only are we dealing with changes in our bodies that start with messing up the very foundation needed for basic living (which is sleep. sleep and rest are the most important things for our bodies), we are doing so while still, STILL, fighting to be the women we want to be and not the women men (or society) may want us to be. I want you to know that I am grateful for your voices and your continued hard work in this daily battle. We all deserve naps.

Let’s all go take naps!

DESPERATELY SEEKING

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a lot of different things. Things I want to do. Things I want to write. Things I want to buy. Things I want to change. Things that may be too expensive for me to keep. All of this is surrounded with questions. Should we get another dog? Should we try to rehab the chicken coop? How do I get someone to repave my driveway for a reasonable price? Can I remove the bushes in front of the house and have a porch installed? Am I ever going to do something about my kitchen? Should I enroll in electrician school and learn how to rewire my own house? I think I should teach a yoga workshop about shoulder anatomy and straps?

That last sentence doesn’t really read as a question, but when I say it out loud I tend to illicit a questioning tone.

I am restless. Truly, restless. Even when I am supposed to be sleeping and resting, I am lost somewhere in my own thoughts. Just last week I was so lost in my own thoughts while on my morning building walk, that when I made it back to the first floor I didn’t know what floor I was on and could not remember walking all of the second floor. I am now up to three different wake up times in the night. Sometimes it is because I had that dream where I have to use the bathroom in an unconventional bathroom setting but mostly it is because I heard a noise and then I have to spend the next hour trying to go back to sleep while thinking about the noise. Before I know it, Josephine is tapping me with a paw and it is almost about time for my alarm to go off. Last week, Josephine started tapping me exactly one hour earlier than the alarm in anticipation to the time change. I am sleeping. I am just not sleeping well.

This is probably why I have finally fallen for one of the many hormone treatment ads that I am bombarded with on a daily basis. I poked around on the company website and then I went in search of some non-sponsored reviews. As a result, I discovered a community of women who all had similar stories of restlessness, no sleep, scattered thought and mood swings (I didn’t really mention those but…). This community had some very insightful and helpful reviews in regards to the product I was considering and after reading through many discussions, I was convinced. I filled out the survey, had a very brief chat with an online doctor and am currently waiting the arrival of an estrogen body cream along with a dietary supplement of DHEA. If I see some significant changes, I plan to contact my regular doctor to see about getting this stuff through my insurance.

I’ve been slow to admit to myself that my symptoms were not all in my head, a perfect example of how the medical industry has been gaslighting women since there was a medical industry. It doesn’t help that perimenopause is the great unknown of medicine with confusing symptom descriptions like “frequent or infrequent periods.” Perimenopause and Menopause are the epitome of Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to dole out grant money to research it. No doctor wants specialize in it. No one cares about a woman’s body unless it is still capable of reproduction. Perimenopause is that gray timeline where a woman could still have a baby. While there’s a whole lot reasons why a could is not a should, no one’s going to do anything that would exclude the possibilities. Women in America do not have rights to their own bodies.

I’ve had four periods since the start of the year. Yes, that’s two a month but so far zip all nothing but an occasional right ovary cramp for this month. I don’t think I’m having hot flashes, but experience moments when I feel hot. It’s nothing dramatic. I get hot, take a layer off and five minutes later I’m so cold my teeth start chattering. I have no energy yet I still do all of things. And since I have no idea what forty eight is supposed to feel like, I chalked it all of this up to seasonal depression and inefficient heating and air systems. Honestly, for all I know those things could be the problem. I guess I’ll find out soon enough once my prescription arrives.

I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here looking at puppies.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Long ago, I stepped back from a life where I seemed to always be burning a candle at two ends. Sometimes I think of it as stepping into a life a leisure, which is a bit absurd if you think that a life of leisure is working a nine to five job, keeping up a house, making sure pets are well spoiled, teaching two yoga class a week, and walking ten thousands steps a day. But yes, apparently I consider my current life to be one of leisure. Maybe it has been a little too leisurely for me because I recently seem to be continuously adding stuff to my social calendar. There are two back to back weekends in April where I will be out of town on adventures. My norm is to only have one weekend adventure a month, if that, particularly in the winter months. Now it seems I am making up for all the days I lived the life of a mole.

I took Tuesday off from work so that I could hang photos at Westside Local. I don’t know why I thought this would take me hours, but fortunately I was home when FedEx dumped a large cumbersome box onto my front yard. The box contained a chair I had ordered that was scheduled to arrive on Thursday. Now you can just go ahead and imagine all Lucille Ball moments now because that pretty much sums up how I managed to get the large cumbersome box into the house. The chair is for the living area and it is the chair I wanted for that space to begin with but ended up compromising on a chair I did not love. That chair has served it’s purpose and now others can see why I did not love that chair because their butts have been sitting in it long enough to recognize the flaws of said chair. The new chair is a nice orange, is smaller and less bulky than the old chair. And I love it.

I also thought that by taking Tuesday off, I would have time to rest up before heading out to see Jenny Lewis in concert. This is a concert I have dreamed about for years and even though it was happening on a school night and the show didn’t start until 8 with the opener, I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. The concert was at the Truman which does not have seating unless you purchased the VIP balcony section. I was too cheap to do that when I bought our tickets months ago, thinking the balcony at the Truman would give terrible views. I know different now and was told that “we are grownups and can afford the slightly more expensive seat.” I had terrible views from the floor area, but this did not keep me from nonstop dancing for an hour and half. At one point Michael brought me a cup of water and suggested I drink it all. I thanked him for that when we left the venue and started our walk back to where we parked. He said with a little bit of awe in his voice “You didn’t stop moving the entire time.”

I can’t help it. Music just makes me move my body.

Wednesday evening, I met (Nurse) Jenn for dinner. She told me about her full dance card and the number of times she had been asked by others to reschedule our date. She had held firm, refusing to reschedule our time together. It’s the dumbest thing. I can literally walk to her house, but finding time on our schedules for each others requires the moon and stars to be in a very specific alignment pattern. I had also considered the possibility of rescheduling our date for a couple of reasons, but stayed committed. Jenn told me that even though all of these other things were going on, I am one of the few people in her life who “fills her cup.” And by this point, she really needed a refill. I can say the same is true for her. Jenn is really good at getting me to talk about things that I usually leave floating around inside my head. Our time together is equal parts listening and sharing. She thinks I’m amazing and is very vocal about it. I think she’s the cool girl I have always been trying to impress, but I also think she’s spectacular.

So here we are on Friday and I have to say that I’m exhausted. I’m looking forward to a weekend of more leisure than adventure. Our biggest adventure will be swapping vehicles around oil change appointments while getting the Cabbage to piano lessons. The fox, chicken, bag of feed and one row boat riddle is practice for living life. But while my body is tired, I am entering the weekend with a full heart. I am grateful for full dance cards and most especially grateful for spending time with someone who fills my heart.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Monday and Tuesday this week, I rode Valerie (the scooter) to work. Monday’s ride was spectacular. Tuesday’s ride was…not so great. I left the house under fairly mild conditions. The high for the day was 75 degrees, but I knew a cold front was moving in at some point. I bargained on being home before the front moved in. I was wrong. When I left work at 6:00 PM the temperature was 43 degrees. I had to stop at a local pub for an AIDS Walk Open Volunteer meeting. When I left the bar at 7:00 PM, the temperature was 38 degrees with strong gusts of wind. I was four blocks from the house when it started sleeting. It was not even remotely ideal scooter riding conditions, but I did it and I’m still alive.

I am notoriously territorial about my scooter. I don’t want anyone other than me riding Valerie. The same was true with V. I know Chris rode V once because that’s how he discovered my back tire was bad. He didn’t ask permission; he just did it. So there could have been other times. I don’t know. Once, I let my brother ride V home from work. He and Katrina were finishing up a long motorcycle ride to Canada and had stopped at my house. I went to work on V and let them have my car for the day, but at the end of the day, the city was hit with a downpour. My brother had all the rain repellant gear with him. So they came and got me in the car. I drove my car home and he drove the scooter so I wouldn’t get rained on. I am forever grateful he was there to do that.

Michael jokes about my territorial attitude towards the scooter and needles me about letting him ride my scooter constantly. Look, I am often the passenger when he’s driving a four wheeled vehicle. I am often behind him when we are on scooter rides. I do not approve of his driving techniques and this is why I will not let him drive my scooter. There is also something to be said about having things of your own. I would never ask to ride Michael’s scooter. For one thing, I’m not confident I have the strength to handle it. His scooter is heavier and has a bigger engine. For another thing, I don’t feel the need to share everything.

I struggled with my identity for a long time after Chris died; not that I think my identity is solely tied into a thing. It is a simplification of all the things, thoughts and ideas that are truly my own. I had so thoroughly woven my identity with Chris, that I couldn’t really tell what part of my actions or thoughts were Chris’s actions and thoughts or my own. I never noticed this while we were Chris and Cindy mostly because the two of us were so often on the same page about things both emotionally and intellectually. But when he was gone, I wasn’t sure how to be just Cindy. Eventually I figured out that I’ve always been just Cindy, that my identity wasn’t absorbed or defined by my relationship with Chris, but rather enhanced by it.

Being a little territorial about some things like my scooter or my writing or my ideas is my way of maintaining my own identity. Women, especially, have been trained to feel guilt for wanting/needing something of their very own, that we are being selfish for wanting our own time and space. This is yet another patriarchal lie that I am burning to the ground. Several times this week, I have looked at my reflection in the mirror and been surprised by my own cuteness. I have looked and thought “Hey there, cutie.” I may have even said it out loud and when I have finished taking note of my cuteness, I have whispered “you are deserving.” I am deserving of my own space and time. I deserve to be a little bit selfish.

Hey there, cutie. You also deserve to be a little bit selfish.

MY FLAMING LIPS

Okay, this is not a real entry or worth a whole post but it is a ramble of things I’m a little bit proud of. First of all, most of you know about my peeling lips and how I pick at them. Most of the times my lips are in a state of scabbed, chapped or just a bleeding mess because I lack all restraint and cant’ keep my hands from peeling any bit of a possible flake of skin from my lips. It is a terrible ugly habit, but it is a habit of a lifetime. There have been short snips of time when I have not done this. Once when I was on a gluten free diet and once I don’t know why or remember, but I just didn’t. It has been three months now and so I feel like it is safe for me to disclose that my lips are healed and in the best shape of their lives. How did I do it? One morning I was smearing Aquaphor cream onto my tattoo and rubbed some extra onto my lips. Since then, I’ve been doing that twice a day and even though there have been times I’ve tried to pick at my lips, there’s nothing to pick off.

Pucker up! It’s a gosh dang miracle.

The second thing that I’ve done is print out cute little price tags that include a QR code for my Venmo account that I will place with the prints I’m hanging next month. Is this a big deal? Nope, but it makes me feel real tech savvy and hip like a young person. Some of you are sitting there thinking “But Cindy, you are savvy and hip!” and I’m here to say that I am savvy and hip for my age demographic. My generation invented blogging and online sharing of photos. I can do those things well, but Reels and TikToks and the Snaps? Forget it. I’m not saying I can’t do those things. I’m saying I have yet to create space for learning to do those things and I don’t feel like I’ll be making space for that learning any time soon.

Back at Christmas, when we were at Jenn and Wade’s, we all had to take turns saying something personal about ourselves. One of the questions posed was “what is something you lie about to yourself?” I tell myself that I am unhealthy. Like all the time. I have had people tell me that I am not enough in some way or fashion. Not every day or all the time, but eventually there’s been the review where I’m not doing my job enough or the relationship where I don’t praise enough. Commercials and ads tell me I’m not thin enough, eating healthy enough, young enough, happy enough. I am bombarded with outside ‘not enoughs’ and for a while I had started adopting this language when talking to myself. It’s like spending a week in London and suddenly picking up a British accent. That’s basically how the biggest lie came into being. The biggest lie I tell myself is that I am not enough.

Wait. That is also not true.

The biggest lie I used to tell myself was that I am not enough. I’ve been working on this for a while. That whole unhealthy lie I tell myself slipped by me and I was surprised it even came out of my mouth. Here I was smugly thinking that I had beat the habit of telling myself all the ways I am not enough. Habits are hard to dump. Celebrating small victories has become part of my strategy for dumping that bad habit. Neither of those above things are news worthy items, but both of them are small victories. I am not unhealthy. Look at my lips! They’re so healthy looking! I eat a bag of kale a week. Is that something an unhealthy person would do? Maybe? I don’t know, but you might also notice in that part on my second small victory, I did not allude to being not techy enough. I know enough things and I’d rather spend my time in other ways than spending it learning new tech.

Small victories for today (so far): I added my outside walking loop back in with my inside walking loop. I have taken over 8,000 steps today all before 10:00AM. I figured out a Jupyter notebook coding problem I was having last week. That’s amazing! And the day is young. I think I will celebrate with a dance party at my desk.

You should celebrate your small victories.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

It is currently Wednesday and I’m thinking about Friday’s gratitude posting. When I look out the window from my standing point at my work desk, I have a perfect view of the fountain in the center of the circle drive. More than a dozen robins are taking turns between being at the fountain and the trees that surround the fountain. I have seen people walking outside without coats on and this weekend I’m checking the tires for all two wheeled vehicles. This was never a Fake Spring, but the real deal with an the occasional appearance of Fake Winter. The air feels like Spring and tastes like adventure.

I gave Michael the option of joining me on my Moose Hunt in June and he got pretty excited about hunting mythical creatures. Months ago, I made a plea for a return visit to New Orleans. I know we were just there, but I feel like I didn’t absorb enough aiyee. I didn’t eat enough crawfish or slurp down enough (hardly any) raw oysters. Ever since leaving from New Orleans, I’ve been craving that place more than I would expect. I might love the Pacific Northwest, but I left my soul in New Orleans years and years ago. It has owned a piece of me since I was three. I didn’t have to twist any of Michael’s arms to get him to agree to another visit. That trip is booked and planned and I hadn’t expected to be planning any other trips for the year.

But then the Moose Hunt.

And a weekend tulip festival with my mom and sister.

And some gal camp trips.

And…

And…

I don’t want to spend a lot of money or even travel a great distance, but I want to fill this year up with tiny adventures. I did not know this at first, even though, well before the New Year, I had made some sort of word collage of wants for 2024 and “seeing a moose” and “solo camp trips” made an appearance in this collage. I didn’t really believe that I would get any more proactive than writing those wants down somewhere. I didn’t believe I would ever say the wants out loud. Yet I have said them out loud and in doing so it feels like I have cast spells. This spell casting has me feeling lighter and hopeful. There have been times when the thought of planning and actually going places has felt exhausting. Finding the place to stay. Packing the car. Making the drive to the place. Just the idea of all of it has felt heavy and leaves me in need of a nap. But something is different now.

This feels exciting.

THE WEEKENDER

I met Amy and Deborah in a town that I have visited a thousand times. Honestly, it was not far from where I grew up, but we managed to see things and explore areas that I had never seen before. I actually went inside the Price Tower instead of just seeing it from the road and then we discovered another tower in a park that I had no idea existed. That was called the Play-Tower and it was built in 1963 by Bruce Goff, commissioned by Mrs. Harold C. Price. The spiral staircase takes you up six feet to a steel ball and is rather terrifying, because once at the top, you can feel the tower swaying back and forth. When we made it back down, the three of spent the rest of trip complaining about our old lady knees. As per usual, there was lots and lots talking and lots and lots of laughter and lots and lots of snacks.

My drive to and from our meeting space had me traveling old country highways and somewhere in Kansas, I passed a sign for a Little House on the Prairie homestead, one that I don’t remember every noticing before. Talaura, Michael and I visited the homestead in South Dakota and we dragged the Cabbage to the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home in Mansfield MO, but I didn’t realize there was a place in Kansas so close to the OK border. So on my way home from the weekend, I followed the signs and took a detour. I was the only person in the parking space outside the homestead. It is currently closed for the winter, but you are still free to roam the property. There is a replica of the original log cabin built in 1870 by the Ingalls. The other buildings came later, after the Ingalls had moved back up to Pepin WI.

The Ingalls family moved around a lot and not from town to town. They moved state to state, which is impressive considering they were traveling by wagon.

As I made my way around the property, a very vague and dreamy memory kept nudging the back of my brain. I could have sworn a preschool version of me, along with a group of other preschoolers ran around this place like the feral children we were. I can almost hear the slightly stern voice of a woman trying to wrangle us up. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and juice boxes made up our picnic lunch. If this is a true memory, I can assure you that I was wearing a prairie inspired dress with a matching bonnet. I don’t know what my obsession with all things Little House is all about. I read all the books and watched the TV show and reruns of the TV show, but I don’t remember reading the books over and over the way I did Little Women. Yet there was, is, still something about prairie life that hooked me. I spent hours building an imaginary homestead in our pasture when I was little. I spent hours imagining living life on the prairie while I was actually living life on a prairie.

Building something from nothing.

I think this is what I am drawn too in these stories and the real places that birthed those stories. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family reinvented themselves over and over, move after move. When the first life they tried to build broke, they moved on to build a new life, starting practically from scratch each time. And there were times when it may have felt impossible to rebuild. There were times so awful, that Laura Ingalls Wilder couldn’t or wouldn’t write about them. Yet the family not only survived, but thrived so much so that we know their names and the stories Laura wrote feel like stories about our own grandparents. Life on the prairie forces resilience. I may have been raised in modern times, but I was still raised on prairie land. My high school’s neighbor was a dairy farm and we participated in more tornado drills than fire drills. Though, my HS was evacuated more than once due to wildfires. Bouquets of prairie flowers were clenched in my hands often wilting before I made it home from whatever pasture adventure I had been on. I know the tunes from the area songbirds.

I told Michael my plans for a moose hunt this summer and he is onboard for this adventure. We have started planning and plotting our route, a route that will take us very close to two other Laura Ingalls Wilder homesites. Homes I have yet to visit. I am placing pins in those towns with intentions for stopping on our way back home. I figure this could be my consolation for hunting imaginary creatures and coming up empty handed.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I spent most of Saturday in our basement framing prints that I will hang on the walls at Westside Local in March. When I ran out of frames, I took a break for lunch and discovered that the rest of the frames that I had ordered were sitting on my front porch. So after lunch, I went back down to finish framing. Once that was done, I looked around at the cluttered mess of the basement and set to work breaking down boxes and reorganizing shelves. I filled a box with kitchen items that hasn’t been touched in more than year and filled a bag with garbage. Then I moved over to the camp gear and pulled items from the old camp kitchen that I could use in my car camp kitchen. I organized all of my car camping equipment into one spot so that it’s easy for me to grab and throw into my car.

It was a very productive day and I started to get excited about the possibility of throwing my camp gear into my car and spending a weekend in the woods. Recently I posed a question to a group of friends about how far I might need to drive in order to see a moose. Several agreed that straight north into the Minnesota/Canada border area was probably my best bet. That’s about an eight to ten mile drive. Totally doable. I could easily take a long weekend and go for a moose hunt. I got so excited about the idea that I started looking at maps and moose sighting forums. Moose sighting forums. They exist, probably because there are people like me that do not believe that moose are real. I’ve settled on a visit to a place just north of Duluth, MN. I’d really like to make that happen this summer.

Any way, I fell for the trap that is Fake Spring. I allowed myself to settle into the warmer temps and start to dream of outdoor adventures. Of course, the weather has flipped back to cold. There’s even an 87% for snow today. It’s snowing right now! Which seems just about right since I’m driving to meet up with Amy and Deborah for our annual gals weekend. When I look at the crystal ball that is the weather predictions, I see more flip flopping temps in the following week and it makes everything feel a bit manic. I am practicing patience and preparing for the day Fake Spring becomes Real Spring. And you know what? I feel like I didn’t eat enough soup this winter. So this gives me more soup days to enjoy.

Now to address the elephant in the room that centers around the events of this week.

I started writing this entry on Wednesday, before the Super Bowl Parade and the mass shooting that occurred at the end of the celebration. The Super Bowl Parade has and is a celebration that involves day drinking. The state of Missouri is also a Right To Carry state, with no permit requirements for handguns. It is a miracle we have not had this tragedy happen before. When looking back through archives, the last mass shooting in Kansas City occurred in 1933 during the Kansas City Massacre, which ironically was also at Union Station. Comprehensive gun control is on my list of wants and needs that I vomit out to my senators and representatives every week, which is starting to feel about as productive as a thought and a prayer. And that’s about all I will say here.

I will say that I am grateful for the texts from loved ones checking in to make sure we were and are safe.

I am grateful that my Kansas City friends who went or almost went, are also safe.

I am grateful to be spending the weekend away from the city.

I am grateful to be spending the weekend talking and laughing with Amy and Deborah.

I am thankful for the promise of outdoor adventures.

I am thankful for soup days.

I am thankful for you.

WORDS

I’m not entirely sure where we were, but it was north of the river. North of the river is how the people of Kansas City refer to anything north of the Missouri River. This is an area that has gone largely unexplored during my time here. I know where the roller rink is and maybe a couple of casinos. I can get myself to Michael’s school and the airport, but don’t ask me for restaurant recommendations. Unless you’re into Indian food, then Swagat’s out by the airport is a solid choice. We happened to be in a completely unrecognizable area on this day because Michael was buying a used exercise bike. On our way home, we passed a billboard for a layer that read in large, yellow lettering “Winningest!” and I lost my mind.

At first, I couldn’t stop saying the word out loud over and over. I found the sound of the word to be ridiculously hilarious. It’s not like I haven’t heard someone use the word before, but it is always been used in jest around me. Seeing the word spelled out on the billboard just reiterated how stupid this word is. I was almost over my minor turrets moment when we passed the same advertisement on a different billboard. Then I exploded. This is an advertisement for a law office. Do you really want someone you cannot even use grammatically correct language in their advertisement to defend you in a court of law?!? Yeah, I know that my house is made of glass. My posts are the Swiss cheese of poorly written navel gazings, but I didn’t major in English. This dude is a lawyer; His job revolves around language. Besides, my editor is dead. What’s that lawyer’s excuse?

Lately, well ever since the “winningest” incident, I’ve found myself increasingly ranting about language. I will see a turn of words that makes my brain itch and I will go off in a ten minute rant. Yesterday, Michael had the TV on and it was all day coverage of concussion ball. There was a story about Brock Purdy (I didn’t know who this person was before this story) and the day he was drafted for the 49rs. They were showing footage of the draft and there was a woman standing on stage, holding up a jersey the read “Mr. Irrelevant”. I said “Why are they calling that guy Mr. Irrelevant?” and Michael replied “It’s because he is the last person to be drafted.” Disgust and rage instantly boiled up out of my body. Before they showed that footage, the sportscaster was talking about how Purdy has a “chip on this shoulder.” Of course he has a chip on his shoulder! He was just called ‘irrelevant’! That is just mean and uncalled for. As if I didn’t already think poorly about the capitalism and exploitation of athletes that is the NFL, now I think even less of them because they are bullies. Mean, hazing Frat boy, bullies.

And while everyone was speculating about Kelce proposing to Taylor and/or the Chiefs Super Bowl win being a government rig so that Taylor and Kelce could use that platform to endorse Biden (people are fucking crazy), actual genocide was/is happening in Gaza. I know many of you are sitting there thinking ‘But I can’t do anything about the genocide in Gaza’. Yeah, well, you can’t do anything about the whole Taylor/Kelce relationship either but it doesn’t keep you from chattering on and on about it. And if you can chatter and on and on about that, surely you can do some chattering to your representatives about demanding a cease fire and shifting our funding from weapons to humanitarian efforts.

Maybe now that we don’t have football to scream about, we can be the winningest by raising our voices against genocide.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

In 1996, Chris and I drove to Kansas City, KS to see Sting in concert. It was the Mercury Falling tour and our first concert together. We had no idea who the opener was going to be and when Tracy Chapman stepped out onto the stage, Chris and I turned to each other and practically squealed with glee. Tracy Chapman was the icing on this cake of a concert. The two women sitting in front of us left the concert when Tracy Chapman left the stage. They paid Sting amount of moneys to see her and I don’t blame them. Seeing Tracy Chapman step out onto the stage to sing her song Fast Car with Luke Combs at Sunday’s Grammy’s made every one I know burst into tears for good reasons.

Chris’s birthday was on Tuesday.

Tuesday morning, while getting ready for work, I asked Alexa to play songs by David Bowie. There is not an obvious link between Chris and David Bowie. We loved Bowie’s music and it was often featured in our daily playlists. We never got to see him concert, which is a bummer, but we never really talked about the possibility of going to a Bowie concert (mostly because we figured we could never afford it). My link with Chris and David Bowie is a bit more subtle. Many of you know that David Bowie died of liver cancer in 2016. Some of you may not realize that Bowie died two days after celebrating his 69th birthday. Chris also died of liver cancer within days of his birthday and it’s taken me a long time to say that this is how Chris died. For years, when asked, I’d tell people that Chris died from a large tumor on his liver that was wrapped around his bile duct. It felt (sometimes feels) that “liver cancer” is too simple of a description and the word ‘cancer’ implies that it can be removed and treated. None of these were options for us. There was no excision of a tumor or chemo treatments. We were handed a sheet of paper containing a list of phone numbers for hospice care.

Chris died four days after celebrating his 41st birthday.

Concerts were our church. Movie scripts were his scripture. Girls on Film by Duran Duran started playing in the car on my way home yesterday and I sang along with Chris’s lyrics “Dogs on stilts”. I don’t think I can sing it any other way. Chris lacked the ability to carry a tune, but was more than skilled in linking a tune to a scene. In December of 2011, Chris and I saw our final concert together, Florence and the Machine. He was very sick and in a lot of pain, but we didn’t know then about the tumor or the cancer. He spent most of the concert sitting on the floor and we did not stay for the entire show. The morning Chris died, I drove to work in hopes of getting an hour or two of tasks accomplished. Hospice had settled into our home by then and Chris was comfortable. His mother and brother were there, so I thought this would be a good time to step away for bit. As I made the drive, Dog Days are Over by Florence and Machine came on the radio. I was at my desk for ten minutes before they called me to tell me that Chris had passed.

I wanna hear one song without thinking of you… -Me and My Dog by Boygenius

I have carried a trunk full of guilt and anger over Chris’s last morning for years. I should have been there. He’s such a jerk for choosing the moment I leave the house to draw his last breath. What kind of idiot am I for thinking I could ‘step out for a bit’? If I’d been there would he still be breathing? That is a particularly horrific thought. A day and a half before Chris died, he stopped being the sharp witted person we all knew and loved. He was unconscious and incoherent. The Chris we all knew and loved had already left the building. Chris didn’t choose that moment to leave out of spite or meanness. It was just his time and it was easier for the both of us for me to not be present. My presence made it harder for him leave and he really needed to leave. Knowing this is why I don’t carry that trunk around with me all the time now. I might move it from one place to another from time to time. It is always in the room with me, but I am no longer carrying it every waking moment.

The day the doctor handed us the phone number for hospice care, I was forced to recognize that there was nothing I could do in this situation. Being put into this absolute position broke my brain. It didn’t happen all at once. It took phone calls to various cancer centers and the inability to get Chris’s pain managed for it to sink in. There was nothing I could do to fix this. With time, I’ve started seeing this as less of a failure on my part and more of a surrender. When I tell my students to surrender to their final relaxation it is my cue to them to give in and allow for relaxation. There is a floaty feeling that happens when your body completely sinks into your mat and you have surrendered. It is not dissimilar to the feeling I have when I set down that trunk of guilt and anger.

I am often asked if it ever gets any easier, this whole grief thing, and I still after all this time don’t know how to answer. There is not a day that passes where I don’t think of him or miss him terribly. But I have surrendered myself to the reality that Chris no longer has a physical presence on this planet. That particular reality has become part of that trunk I sometimes move around. The answer to the question of ease has a yes and no answer. That trunk is heavy and takes up space, but it is filled with things I can’t completely dump. On the days I’m carting that around, my answer is no. On the days when I’m not carrying it, but I can see the trunk in the room, my answer is yes.

There is gratitude to be found in the surrender.