A FEW THOUGHTS ON LIFE, ETC.

[I reread the text of this post from a few years ago and realized it was still true! Does that mean my life doesn't change much? No, my life really does change, but some of my musings stay valid beyond the end of the week.]

-----

So, here are a few thoughts on Life, Etc.

Often--say, every other day--I wonder what it would feel like to have complete control of my life and schedule. Mornings I'd write; afternoons I'd sew. I'd hire people to do all the things I don't want to do (cleaning house, especially dusting). I'd be freed from the minutae of my everyday existence and roam freely in my own little creative world: new plots for stories, new quilt designs, new ideas for blogs, new articles. Utopia!

Right? Well, maybe.

For example: What would I do when I got stuck? When a writing idea doesn't pan out? When a quilt that's nearly finished looks just plain awful.

I don't smoke, don't have a secret bottle in my deep desk drawer, wouldn't know where to get my hands on mind-altering substances.

So what's a gal to do?

I clean. Move stuff (though not furniture), find better places for what I already have. Sort. Discard. Re-box for storage stuff that will later get sorted and discarded. I mull over possible gifts for birthday and Christmas giving. Try new recipes. And my latest fave: surfing the Internet. (I call it research. You never know when something might work its way into a story, quilt, letter, blog, conversation. Or into my storage.)

Last week it occurred to me that, if I clean out the drawers in the washstand, I'll have a great place for thread--of which I have a lot. The smaller drawers will work for seldom-used items like quilt templates and tools. And the area with a door just might be big enough for ring binders of patterns and designs (once I find another storage place for the music).

Little by little I get things done. Baby steps--the Montessori method.

Hard for an impatient person to gear down to a lower pace, let the project dictate its own speed. But it's actually less stressful because all the little interruptions and distractions are what Life is—as they say, Life happens. And so we don't get something done this year. A valuable lesson.

A companion lesson--also hard to learn--is this: Don't beat yourself up when you miss a goal or deadline. (You might want to ignore this advice if you have a paying job with deadlines. Just a thought.)

If it's your own project that doesn’t get finished—one that doesn't make ripples in someone else's life--then forgive yourself for missing the goal, extend the deadline (if it needs one), try again.

Life's short enough, without reducing the number of good days by whining, stressing, worrying, and fit-throwing.

However! If a good fit, pitched at the right moment, eases anxiety, then I say, Go for it!

 

Still unfinished, and I still
love it!

MEMORIAL DAY
     May 28, 2018

Remember the fallen, and give thanks for their lives.

       Pray for the missing and wounded, that they may know peace.

              Hug a veteran--because you can.

GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS!

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR

[This came about because I couldn't come up with a great topic to entertain you with. Some weeks are just like that. But people all around me are working in their yards and some are planting things, so, here are some thoughts on gardens that I wrote a couple of years ago.]

What happens when you don’t have any idea what you’re going to write about?

Some folks just start typing and see what develops.

Some ask their friends and family for suggestions for a topic to write about.

Others look up things on the Internet, browse through a book of quotations, look for words of wisdom in quotes by famous people . . . .

Today I’m not very inspired by what I see in my neighborhood, or know is coming up on my calendar. I mean, I’m having green grass, bloomin’ flowers, and singing birds. Lots of folks are having the same. A couple of days ago I had dental work done. Are you interested in hearing about that? No, me neither.

So, let’s think about something current and nice to contemplate—gardens and gardening. Here are some pithy thoughts to stir your brain:

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

[Can’t argue with that one.]

 A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.

Liberty Hyde Bailey

[Hmm, effort. Yes, indeed.]

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

Voltaire

[Yeah, but sometimes I need to rest, a lot. Sorry, Voltaire.]

 I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.

Walt Disney

[Wilderness is fine, but there better not be any snakes and big bears.]

 The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

George Bernard Shaw

[Good one, George.]

 Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

May Sarton

[Maybe I better rethink this gardening thing.]

 Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

May Sarton

[Ah, gardening as metaphor—now I can get into that.]

-----

When I googled “gardening” I discovered mostly info about flower gardens and what I call English gardens—not a kitchen garden that feeds the manor but cultivated and high-maintenance beauties.

Pole beans make hiding places by August.

Then I thought about gardens in my life, and I time-traveled back to childhood—Grandpa Jenkins was the first gardener I remember. When we went to visit him and Grandma at the edge of their little town, there beside the house was a HUGE garden—what I’d call a couple of acres now that I know what that looks like—where Grandpa tilled, planted, cultivated, and harvested every kind of vegetable. I remember especially the tee-pees he made to encourage the beans to vine up. Those made wonderful hiding places in summer if I wanted to get away from my irritating (male) cousins.

We kids often pulled and ate radishes and carrots right out in the garden. Dirt? Well, yeah, there was dirt on them; they grew in the dirt. We wiped it off on our slacks or on the grass, and chomped away.

By August there was always something to can. My mother and her sisters and sisters-in-law came to help Grandma “put up” pints and quarts of beautiful food. Some of the jars went home with the helpers, some stayed at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. My job was washing the jars, because my hands were smaller than those of my mom and aunts. (And also less swollen because I was too young to have arthritis, a family hand-me-down.)

My own adult experiences with gardening have no romance about them, not even in memory—I recall back-breaking work, sweat, mosquitoes (try picking cucumbers at dawn to take to the local pickle factory), more sweat during canning. But for me, it was an eye-opener: my parents and grandparents went to a lot of trouble and toil to provide meals for their tables. Nothing like an aching back and some itchy mosquito bites to drive home a lesson about how food gets to the mouths of our children.

At my time in life, firmly established in retirement, I enjoy the produce grown by others: my daughter and son who are the gardeners in the family; folks who offer their wares at the Farmer’s Market; neighbors and friends with surplus tomatoes/squash/cucumbers on their half-dozen plants that all produced at the same time.

When I miss the camaraderie of the kitchen at harvest time, I go to my daughter’s in Ohio and cut up, slice, or clean whatever’s going; wash dishes, and jars and lids and rings; stir a pot of something that needs to cook a little before being canned (jelly and pasta sauce); rest my weary back and legs for a while and eat a quick lunch; then back to the jar-filling before I head home. Come winter, I’ll spread jam on toast and utter an “ummmm.” And when I can’t think of anything to cook, there’s a jar of pasta sauce on the pantry shelf waiting for my gluten-free pasta to join it for a filling dish. Tomato juice? V-4 juice? Just right for soup. Get out the slow cooker and start putting things in.



Nowadays I’m more of an appreciator than a gardener. But I celebrate and salute all those who really dig gardening. J





LEARNED AT MY MOTHER'S KNEE

What did you learn at your mother's knee?

One thing I learned was how to swear. Fluently.

My mother had four older brothers and three older sisters. No matter how vigilant Grandma and Grandpa were, older siblings will be older siblings. I suspect the boys were the more accomplished swearers, though.

And it didn't take me long to learn where and when swearing was tolerated--not many places and not often.

But the best thing I learned from my mom was how to be a Positive Person.

Not a family pic--but this is how women
looked in the 1940s.

I knew all six of the Jenkins girls: Dessie, Grace, Sarah, Mom (Doris), Dorothy (Mom's twin), Virginia. It was a rare moment when all six happened to be together, so I got to know them in smaller groups when they met at Grandma's house to can green beans or help clean house or just because they wanted to visit and Grandma's house was central for most of them.

Picture this: Grandma sitting at her big round kitchen table, waited on by whichever daughters showed up. A pie is cut and served. The coffee pot is never allowed to go dry. Voices mix and mingle and soar. The decibel level rises to ever greater heights.

What did they talk about? Everything. And I learned a lot from the corner where I sat and listened (they thought I was reading--well, I was, but I was listening, too). What I learned was this: There was nothing too big or too personal or too sad or too upsetting that it couldn't be laid on the table, commented on, hashed out, maybe even solved.

These women faced the problems in their lives.

They acknowledged the problems.

They shared them with each other.

Then they got on with life.

And always, they laughed. By the end of the pie and coffee and the afternoon, someone's burden was lighter.

-----
When I think about my mother and her sisters, I realize they taught me many useful approaches to life. Such as:

-- Stand up to adversity.

-- Share your burden.

-- Laugh if you can.

-- Cry if you can't laugh.

-- Be honest; don't say it's worse than it is; don't lie; give the benefit of the doubt, if you can.

-- Walk away, if you have to (though I don't remember much of that, not permanent leaving).

-- Apologize if necessary.

-- And a very practical lesson: Clean the house--it's great for anger management. (Not to mention you'll have a cleaner house.)

-----
As you can imagine, the above lessons were the ones I caught by example. No one gave me instructions or a list called How to Live as an Adult. I suspect most of us learn by the examples we were given.

Which makes me wonder what my children would write, if they were asked what they learned at their mother's knee. I grow faint just thinking about it.

-----
Whether or not you have children, you were once a child yourself, so you had a mother. If she's still on this planet, wish her a happy day, and thank her, if you can, for what you learned from her example. If she has passed on to another place, salute her for the lessons she gave you.

Mine showed me how to be positive, even when life gives you lemons and you don't have a pitcher or enough sugar to make lemonade. Her smile, even when she was dying of cancer, was genuine; she wasn't trying to deny death. She was still saying "yes!" to life.

CONNECTIONS – Part II

[Sometimes I feel dis-connected from life. This is not a psychotic state, merely a time in which many of my scheduled events have slid off the calendar for one reason or another. People have sudden and unexpected changes in their lives that impact mine as well. So today I wanted to think about connections--and remembered I'd been there/done that a couple of years ago. Part II of this little series speaks to me today. Hope you find it gives you something to ease any dis-connectedness in your life.]

Today I want to consider connections through music, art, literature, and popular culture—ways of connecting ourselves to people long gone from planet Earth, to their creativity, their world view, their time and mores. In a sense, seeing with their eyes.

-----

I used to feel a deep sadness when I thought about Beethoven’s deafness robbing him of his ability to hear the grand and glorious music he composed in later years. One source reported that he was unable to hear either the orchestra playing his Ninth Symphony or the great applause that greeted its premiere.

After reading several articles about Beethoven, I no longer feel sad, because I’ve heard music inside my head, as he must have also heard what he was working on. What he missed was the orchestra’s interpretation of his symphony. What he always possessed was the way it was supposed to sound because he’d heard it first inside himself.

I have no training in art appreciation, so I bring very little knowledge to the viewing of a painting. What I can do, as I gaze upon the work of the Old Masters, is enter into their vision—see with their eyes for a short time. Was that man’s nose really that long? Was the woman’s chin so pointy?

-----

What draws me most, connects me strongly, is the written word. From my earliest reading on my own, I could see inwardly the scene unfolding in the story. Only black marks on white paper, but, oh--! People doing things—racing to catch a crook; dashing about the country roads with the top down on the convertible, dust billowing behind; creeping through the trees at dusk to spy on the inhabitants of the old abandoned mansion . . . . People saying things: dialogue to help the reader follow the sleuth’s thinking, or show character strength, or make the transition from one scene to another; dialogue to stimulate the mind.

Description also sucked me in—but only if it was good description. Long before I attempted to write stories, I “osmosed” the need for all five senses to make a scene “real”—to make a book live in memory.

-----

Early in my life I was allowed to stay up to listen to radio serials. The Lone Ranger was a favorite. Yes, I was one of the kids who lay on my tummy in front of the radio and “saw” the action in the cloth-covered speakers. Several years later, television appeared, but it never won me over the way the radio shows did. The stories about the Wild West appealed to me because my father had lived in Colorado in the 1920s and worked on a ranch as a young man. Whether he experienced any of the wildness of the time, I never knew. But I liked trying to picture him in that setting.

-----

Movies are a category of their own. I wasn’t crazy about historical novels, but movies set in old times, far-off places, could transport me immediately. Again, it was the visual detail that captured me. I was taken to see Gone With the Wind long before I could appreciate it, but later viewings gave me a taste of what it was like to live and struggle in the South during The War Between the States. Though I never knew my Great-grandfather Cather, I knew he fought in that war on the Union side. That knowledge gave me a different sense of what the war meant to people like me.

Historical shows are still popular: Downton Abbey, Foyle’s War, Grantchester, to name a few. They're set in the 1940s and 1950s--historicals? I remember those times! Does that mean I'm old? (Hmm, something to ponder.)

-----

My examples in this post come from times gone by. I've lived through many decades, so I know what the feelings were during those days, how we dressed, what was available in the grocery store. Connecting to someone who lived in my parents' or grandparents' time helps me understand them as young families--what they lived with, and through--and so my own ancestors become more alive to me.

-----

You'll find connections everywhere. You don’t even have to look for them—just recognize them when they occur.

They may be as near as your mailbox, when you get a letter from an old friend. Or as close as the movie theater or video rental store. Libraries offer such a broad range of subject matter, settings, and time periods that you can lose yourself in any era you select. Or, people you meet may open a window onto a time or place or way of life you never experienced.