COMING SOON . . .

Baby peonies...on their way!

One of my favorite emails (there aren’t many, sad to say) is the one whose subject line reads: “Your order has shipped!”

In the days of long ago, an order was made out on the form provided in a catalog, put in an envelope, stamped, addressed, and mailed. No one acknowledged it had been received, but after waiting, sometimes impatiently, for a few weeks, suddenly a package appeared on the front porch, courtesy of the letter carrier. (Those days we called him the mail man.)

I don’t know which is better—a long wait, letting the anticipation of the coming items grow into a Big Thing. Or, with the click of a mouse button, letting the nice folks at L. L. Bean or Amazon or some other big chain know that I want my stuff ASAP. They always acknowledge that I’ve contacted them (“Thank you for your order!”). And they sometimes let me know the order is being processed. Okay. Great. Then comes the magic message, “Your order has shipped!” Sometimes this is only one day after I ordered. That’s service.

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I thought about the ordering process while I was working in the back yard yesterday. After several days of feeling under the weather (allergies, sinus problems—the usual annual annoyances), I discovered the trees had deposited another great load of little sticks, big sticks, long limbs, and a couple of chunks of dead wood (not sure about those) all over the yard. It was time to don mask and gloves, haul out the biggest bin for sticks, and pick up (changed to raking when I saw how many there actually were) as much as possible.

Lily leaves...overachievers perhaps?

Now the clean-up didn’t actually trigger thoughts on the ordering process. But as I finished I went around the yard and looked at various bushes, plants, and other growing things.

Lo and behold! The hostas were coming up, the peonies were 4 inches above ground, and the Resurrection lilies--! They’re way ahead of schedule.

I knew Spring had sprung when the neighbor-across-the-street’s daffodils blinded me one morning with their near-neon yellow mass. They live in a flower bed between the houses—just the right place for the sunlight to fall and get trapped for several hours, making an effective hothouse. Those bulbs bloom first of anything in our whole neighborhood.

So Spring isn’t coming soon . . . She’s already arrived. If you live in middle Indiana or farther south, this is old news. But for us up here in the northeast corner, Spring’s arrival lifted many a flagging spirit. And we didn’t have to search online to order!

Though Spring officially arrived last Sunday, March 20^th, we’d been having warmer days for some time before that. And my highly unofficial records of daylight hours show that the Equinox occurred at approximately midnight on March 16.

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In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours. --Mark Twain

(Mr. Twain is sometimes given to embroidery.)

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Besides beauty and longer hours of daylight, Spring is Renewal.

Renewal of Nature—we see this all around us, smell it when the blossoms open, hear it in the birdsong, feel it with the waft of a warmer breeze, even taste it (have you ever tried dandelion greens, or wild asparagus?).

Now, go deeper—how about Renewal of ourselves?

An overwhelming job, you say? Well, might be. It is for me. But if we break it down into do-able tasks, like anything we tackle, it may become less overwhelming.

So here goes: I’d like to renew myself in thought, word, and deed.

Thoughts can determine our attitudes. Being wound up in a tangle of ideas that never seem to resolve themselves creates in my little self-universe an attitude of “what’s the use?” Why bother? Someone else will clean up the world. Why fret over someone else’s “wrong” way of thinking? I’ll never change them. (See how it works? Not a pretty sight, is it?) If, instead of letting those thoughts veer toward the negative side of life, I keep them firmly in hand and head toward the sunny side, I find my attitudes smooth out. Maybe I can’t clean up the confounded world, but I can work on my own little corner of it. (I know, I’ve said that before. Still true.) And I can pray for the other person--not to change to what I want, but for whatever healing he or she needs.

Renewing myself in word turns out to be easier. That is, so long as I have control of my tongue and my fingers. No matter what technology has done for us, there is no DELETE button on our tongues, no UNDO icon to click just in time. If I’ve said it, then I’ve said it. And if it was hurtful, my best efforts are pretty wimpy—“I’m sorry” helps, but the words said . . . . 

The DELETE button does work when we write letters, emails, or comments on blogs. Always a good idea to reread what we’ve written—did it really come across as I meant it to?

The renewal of deeds—actions—is a whole other ball game. Now we're in the big leagues. What we say, what we think, are important, and can have lasting effects, good or bad. But what we do—that’s what people, complete strangers, see and experience of us. What do my actions tell about me? (This is scary, folks—like looking in a mirror and seeing an image you don’t recognize.)

One of my hardest actions to change is forgiveness. Not that I carry a grudge forever—these are the everyday little annoyances that seem to simmer and stew and affect my attitude (yup, back to that). Can I let go of the irritation I feel when someone cuts me off in traffic? Is there any reason to resent a curt voice on the phone telling me to wait? (This part of renewal is on my permanent Today List.)

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Using Nature as a guide, we can do our personal renewal step by step. Nature doesn’t fling out grass, flowers, fruit tree blossoms, high temps, rain and sun, all at once. There’s a logical progression—warmer days, plants emerging on their inherent timetable, rain; grass in its own time. Birds return in waves, not all at once.

So much is happening every day we tend to think it all came at once. But it didn’t. We, like Nature, need to take time for renewal. A cheerful note, a helping hand, a prayer for someone’s healing—seeking forgiveness from someone we’ve hurt—offering forgiveness to one who has hurt us.

Take it a day at a time, one step at a time. If we fall back, get up and begin again.

As my tortoise friends say: “Forward is forward.”

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In our competitive society we think so much about standards, about keeping up, or passing, other competitors, about reaching a goal, about winning.

With Renewal, there are only winners. We have our favorite flowers, birds, type of weather, but that’s only our own opinions. In self-renewal, there is only success, if you truly want to renew. That success may be incremental, almost non-existent; but consider—a seed looks mighty insignificant when compared to its full-grown plant.

Try a little renewal—you may surprise yourself at how you’ll blossom.

And while you’re at it, Celebrate Spring! Celebrate the season of hope, of new growth, and celebrate another chance at renewal.

 

Wonderful sight to greet the weary winter eye!

CONNECTIONS – Part I

When I got a haircut in February, I scheduled an appointment for March.

“How about the 15^th?” I asked the stylist.

“The Ides of March!” she said.

I came up for air on that one. Someone younger than I am—by over a decade—knows about the Ides of March?

About all I remembered about this date was a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Beware the Ides of March!” And it was good advice, because Caesar was slain by a large number of people on that date. (Maybe that’s where Agatha Christie got her idea for Murder on the Orient Express.)

Back to Ides of March. During the month following that appointment, my mind kept going back to our little conversational exchange about a date I figured almost no one remembered.

Besides Caesar, the other dire event for which March 15 was known to me was the date income taxes were due—this was before my time as a tax-paying citizen; we’ve had April 15^th (or 17^th this year) since, well, maybe forever.

[Now You Know: The first income taxes were due on March 1, 1913; changed to March 15 in 1918; and changed again to April 15 in 1955.]

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I’ve been thinking about my Ides of March conversation lately—to us, the date Julius Caesar was put to death (in 44 BC) is not only ancient history, it doesn’t relate to life today. Or does it?

How about, for example, the way we view history now? I’ll give you some personal examples:

·       I feel no particular reaction to March 15, but around the third week of November I start feeling uneasy—I recall watching our young president get shot in Dallas.

·       School starts in August in my neck of the woods. The second week of September I honor those who died in the attack on the Twin Towers in NYC. I don’t have the same numb “no, no, that’s not really happening” feeling that I had that day in 2001 when I saw the disasters shown again and again and again on Internet news. No gut-wrenching horror. No, now there’s the felt but unvoiced certainty that our country can be invaded, can be attacked, our people (all kinds) can be wiped out as we watch it happening.

·       In many Christian churches, Palm Sunday begins on a triumphal note, but the service ends with the certain knowledge that there’s a bad time to come. Holy Week can be especially emotional for me—when I was an organist I could get through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services by focusing on the music. This year I’m one of the characters in the Passion readings. It will all be happening again, for me.

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History can be interesting. I’ve learned a lot of world history reading novels set in other times, far-off places.

Note, however: Novels may not depict what actually happened, but their stories are built around actual events. We can’t know, ever, the facts about an event—we always know it only by way of the particular lens through which it was viewed: a soldier, a nurse, a young mother, a business executive, a grandmother alone in the world, a school boy, a teenage girl planning her wedding. This is true of "eye-witness" accounts of current events, as well as what people thought and wrote about events in 1865 or 1066--any date you want to pick.

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Equally true for me, history is always a personal thing. It ties me to events far outside my daily round.

For that reason, when my daily round included four children under six years of age, meals-meals-meals, diapers ad infinitum, Sunday School, choir, and occasionally sleeping a whole night through—when I lived that life, very little of the outside world crept in. There was simply no crack it could get through, and no place for it to light if it did.

I wrote letters to family members, eagerly read the ones I received. The kids and I made trips on foot to the branch library for books; I read mine while stirring pudding on the stove, and read theirs to them at bedtime. Letters and books gave me access to the outside world. Limited, true—but it kept me in the loop, so to speak.

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I truly admire women who “do it all.” Even if I could have morphed into Wonder Woman (my childhood dream) I doubt if I’d have been happy. Yes, there was, or seemed to be, no leisure time for just being, just smelling the lilies of the valley that came up in the yard or watching the sun set on a summer day. Evenings, though, I put the kids to bed and sat at the piano to play while they drifted off—folk songs, show tunes, old-time songs (“Ben Bolt,” “Beautiful Dreamer”), hymns remembered from childhood. That was leisure time activity. By 10 PM I was ready for bed—right after I folded laundry, straightened the living room, put away the clean dishes, checked the fridge for milk, juice, fruit for the next day (though why, I won’t ever know; there was nothing I could do about it late at night in the early ‘60s).

But even deeper, I had too much fear, too much uncertainty about life, too much anxiety left over from my early years. These kept me near the edge of emotional collapse. Add four young children to the mix—what if she fell? What if he got a bad disease? Should I let her go to nursery school? Are they warm enough? Do they eat enough?

Relax? I never learned how.

Watching news on TV made it too, too real. In the newspaper events seemed milder, but still--. I began to feel guilty for not “doing something” to make life a better place for my children, for other people. Nowadays, we say we have too much on our plate. Then, we said we had no time.

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I still relate to news of the world—it still makes me uneasy, though perhaps I’m less fearful. My church has an active outreach program where we’re doing something positive about feeding hungry people, and making blankets to keep them warm. We hold fundraisers to collect money to send to aid global needs.

Years later, as maturity catches up with me, I can view world events without feeling I have to do something big and grandiose. Or, maybe I’ve actually learned a couple of important things: (1) there’s always going to be something bad going on in the world; and (2) praying is doing something.

We may not be able to clean up the world and the messes we find there. But we can work on our little corner of it. That’s one way of staying connected.

WHY DO YOU READ?

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“And whether rich or poor, well or ill, happy or sad, books can be a refuge, they do not change with changing circumstance, they are the open highway to yesterday, today and tomorrow wherever you will to travel.” ― Gladys Taber, Stillmeadow Daybook

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Why do you read? Why do I read?

A couple of days ago I went to the library to check out books by Gladys Taber. Mrs. Taber was a short story writer, published often in the women’s magazines; also wrote novels; and later became a popular columnist for Ladies’ Home Journal and Family Circle. From her columns, which were about country life in Connecticut (and later Cape Cod), she branched out into several nonfiction books about the same subjects—life and living in the country and by the ocean.

I read the original columns in Family Circle when I was a teenager. It was like being a part of her family—her children and grandchildren, the family visits, dinners, taking care of cocker spaniels and an Irish setter--. Gladys Taber’s writing filled in some of the empty places in my life, and I couldn’t wait for the next issue of the magazine to come to the A&P Store.

Rereading her books now, I recall how much they meant to me in the late 1950s. I am grateful for people like Gladys Taber who shared their lives so generously.

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After I finally learned to read (in first grade), I couldn’t get enough of books and stories. Along about third or fourth grade I discovered mysteries for kids. The easy ones soon gave way to Nancy Drew and later on to Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, and Agatha Christie.

But my reading habits were eclectic--reading cereal boxes and pulp magazines, serious novels for high school English class . . . you name it, I probably read it.

From such a beginning, it was a natural, even inevitable, parth to a degree in English lit. That broad umbrella included American literature, expository writing (composition), and linguistics. I had a taste of European literature in advanced French classes. (That was an experience I appreciated, but never kept up with.)

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We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed. --Lawrence Clark Powell

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There have been a few times in my life when I couldn’t read.

When I was ten, I had scarlet fever. It was a mild case, but precautions were decreed: no reading; keep the room dark; bed rest. (That’s the only time in my life I can recall being bored. B-O-R-E-D.)

In my 30s and later, I had bad allergies that tended to wipe me out. I knew I was really sick when I didn’t even want to read.

Major surgery, with heavy doses of anesthetic, wiped me out again; while I was recuperating I couldn’t read anything for over three weeks. After that, only short--very short--selections in magazines.

And in my latter years, the time we call maturing, I’ve found some medications have a negative effect on me; my emotions virtually flat-line. Fortunately, I’ve been able to get away from most of those meds.

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You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury

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We read for so many reasons—to gather information for a job; to learn about other cultures; to escape current situations; for pure enjoyment.

I venture to say all these reasons are about connecting with something or someone else. We learn about our jobs by participating in what someone else wrote. We find out about other cultures, and discover how alike people are, everywhere. Even our escape reading, and our reading for the simple joy of reading, connect us to another person’s mind and heart that conceived the story we are living through their eyes.

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For my birthday I received two Amazon gift cards! Talk about rich!! I now have a healthy account balance at Amazon.com and a Wish List that makes me smile every time I look through it.

Buying books (and movies and DVDs of TV shows) will never grow old.

The only problem is where to store everything. Hm, that downsizing gig isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

ACCOUNTABILITY - An Extended Definition

When I taught college freshmen how to write essays, we used a textbook that defined the different types. At the time, I think there were eight, so I spent the first few weeks introducing general concepts about this kind of nonfiction writing. Thus we eased into the types.

I was never happy with the one called Extended Definition.

All my life—well, after I learned to read—I had used a dictionary to help me define words. What else do you do when the only adult in your home refuses to tell you what a word means and you have to find out? You haul out the dictionary and “look it up.” (My children remember this well—I wouldn’t tell them, either.)

Fast forward to this end of my life, and what do I find myself doing? Writing essays about words, my old anathema, The Extended Definition.

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Now that I recognize what it is, the Extended Definition has less gut-wrenching quality about it. After all, an extended definition is merely using my knowledge of life—as I’ve lived it, read about it, heard from others—to make a word come alive.

Today’s Word: Accountability

I know, I know—you don’t really want to hear any more about it. Your choice—find another blog to read this morning.

For those remaining, are we ready?

Accountability is partially defined as responsibility. Okay, I get that.

My walking buddy and I check in with each other in the mornings—do you feel up to walking? Did you rest well? Is the weather too cold/windy/icy for you? If we agree that all systems are go (more or less), we meet at the Y and do our laps on the track. One of us may walk more than the other does; depends on a lot of things.

What we’ve learned about ourselves—we’ve both mentioned it—is that if one of us doesn’t walk that morning, the other one may not either. Having a buddy going through the same early morning process of waking up, dressing for the Y, and driving the mile or two to the site, is a better motivator than just saying, “My schedule says I’m walking at the Y at 6:30.”

But we’ve also learned—no matter how tired, grumpy, unmotivated we feel, if we do go through the getting up stuff and make it to the Y, we’ll feel better afterward. Even if we do only half the number of laps we usually do. The effort is worth it, but usually only recognized after the fact of walking.

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Along with responsibility, there’s an element of trust here. Much like responsibility, trust introduces the sense of relying on someone for support. This is especially true of organizations.

Take Weight Watchers. The organization has been around for decades. It’s now online so you don’t have to leave your hearth and home to weigh in. The website has opportunities for recipes, chats, and articles to boost your morale. The underlying message is that you aren’t alone in your struggle.

Churches have always helped me. When I go there I will be welcomed. The service won’t hold huge surprises, so I can forget about “doing things right” and just do them. I can sing or not, depending on my voice that morning. I can pray with a large group or I can silently add my own petitions. Besides having support in my spiritual life, I am being a support to someone who needs it. (Often I don’t know who that is; doesn’t matter. The important thing is to show up and be there.)

Perhaps the best support group is one’s own family. (This may not work for some people.) My children don’t live geographically close to me. Yet we are a close family—interested in each other’s lives, our growth, our problems. We check in from time to time—some are regular visits, some are occasional. If we have bad days, we trust someone close to us really cares.

Today’s technology practically forces us to keep in touch: email, texting, Skype, Google Hang-Outs. And if you aren’t on Facebook or one of the other social media, you’re really out of it. We dinosaurs still love our snail mail and phone calls.

But the bottom line is this: We trust someone else to be on the other end of our reaching out.

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Accountability has been around forever, probably.

Families expect and encourage us to live up to some set of values. Many people think of that as "guilting” but without it, there might be no values lived up to at all.

School—now, there’s accountability in spades: grades, report cards, parent-teacher conferences. You did your homework for grades. You might get a chance at extra credit. But when it came down to the end, it was all about how well you did in your work. (And sometimes deportment—attitude plays a part.)

Group efforts—sports, music groups, clubs—expected each person to take part; team effort became the watchword.

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I don’t have any great pronouncement to end this writing. I’m not in love with the word accountability, but I understand it and encourage us to embrace what it stands for.

For me it brings a sense of community, even when I’m alone.

YOU KNOW IT’S A GOOD DAY WHEN . . .

·         You go shopping and find your favorite parking spot is ready and waiting.

·         You get inside and your cart is the one without the squeak. (I’ve heard there’s one in every store, but not sure that’s a reliable statement.)

·         The items on your list are all available . . . . in the size you want, the quantity you need, and at the price you expected to pay. Even, sometimes, on sale!

·         You get the cashier you like best—chat while you go through the check-out process, exchange smiles—leave the store with your attitude well preserved.

·         You get home in less time than usual, put away your purchases, and discover you have leisure to drink a cup of coffee before heading out to your next event.

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If you don’t have the above good fortune, don’t immediately conclude that it’s going to be a Bad Day. Unh-unh. Nope. Nada. Even one good thing happening can steer your mood in the bright direction.

Another point to consider—if there’s even one baddie in your day, that doesn’t color the whole 24 hours. Forget the saying about one bad apple spoils the whole barrel—just toss the bad apple and let the others breathe.

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My recent experiences on a Good Day, included the above shopping, knitting with my friend, a trip to the library, and visiting with my daughter on her supper break.

While we knitted, my friend told me about movies she and her family had watched over the weekend. One was Max, about the dog of a Marine who is killed. It sounded like my kind of movie, so when I went to the library, I asked about it. Yes, they have it but it’s checked out; may I put you on the list? Of course you may.

I’d returned two novels to the library, then rummaged through the fiction shelves for two other authors (not read before): William Kent Krueger, who wrote a much-acclaimed coming-of-age novel called Ordinary Grace; and Dennis Lehane, who writes a PI series set in Boston that I haven’t read. Found both, picked out the first of the Lehane series, and went down to the circulation desk. Next thing I knew, there was a third book on my stack—a new arrival that I’d put on hold had come in. Serendipity! I now had three big unread books to tide me over during the snow/cold/wind to come the next few days.

After my supper, I gathered up some magazines for my daughter and her friends at work and drove to Butler, about 12 miles away. We had a good visit. I found out the state of her broken ankle and toe—healing but not quite there yet—and learned she can now be on her feet longer per hour. Before I left to come home, she gave me a little storage box of cream of celery soup she had made. (I ate it yesterday for lunch. Wow! Good stuff!)

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Yes, definitely a Good Day.

Yesterday we got dumped on with a heavy wet snow plus freezing rain, all enhanced by strong winds gusting up to unbelievable miles-per-hour. I poked my head outside twice—to put a birthday card out for a friend of mine and to get the mail after the delivery. I was entertained by library books, a sewing project for another daughter’s birthday, the blog of William Kent Krueger, and writing about Tuesday.

We may not get the Plus days as often as we’d like. We can celebrate like crazy when we do. We may not have rainbows and and butterflies and flowers. But I know for a fact that birds are out singing in the early morning (also an event  on Tuesday). 

(And remember, don’t let the Minus days get the better of you. There’s likely to be a kernel of good in there somewhere. Look for it.)

 Today's more of the snowing, blowing, winter advisory stuff. So? It's winter! Spring is coming, so hold that thought while you hole up in your den with a good book.

HOUSES – Part II

In the first 10 years of my life, I lived in five “houses.” [Details in Thursday’s Child post, February 3.] I use quotation marks around the word houses because one of them wasn’t a house as we usually define it.

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After school was over the year I was in fifth grade, my stepsister went back to California to live with her mother.

The rest of us—my mother, stepfather, and me—packed up and moved to southern Missouri, where we lived on a red-clay hilly farm eleven miles from the Arkansas border. The landscape was lovely, though unsuited for farming as we knew it in Illinois, and our location in the foothills of the Ozarks meant we had hills and hollers, winding roads, and a small mountain (remember, I’m still about 10 years old then) behind our house, just across a creek.

We also had a variety of poisonous snakes: rattlers, water moccasins, and copperheads. I had two experiences with snakes. Once a humongous snake slithered through the yard and went right under our house. (Adult knowledge says it was a harmless black snake, but I was still 10 years old.) I had nightmares for weeks, waiting for that big old snake to come up through the floor into the house. (It didn’t.) Another time, I was sent to the hen house to gather eggs. As I went out the door, Mom reminded me, “Look before you put your hand into the nest, there might be a snake there.” That time I almost didn’t look first, and snatched my hand back just in time to avoid an unfortunate meeting with a you-know-what. I dropped the egg bucket and fled screaming to the house.

I attended another one-room school, eight grades, maybe sixteen students. Being from the north, my accent was “funny” to the other kids. But I had books to read, and a library in a nearby town, only four or five mile as the crow flew, but by road. . . .

After southern Missouri, we moved to Wichita, Kansas—and that was much less stressful. (No snakes.) Even though Wichita was the largest city I’d ever lived in—300,000 in the early 1950s—I knew about streets, traffic lights, and noise. I walked to school, sometimes with my neighbor across the street, sometimes alone. We lived in half of the downstairs of a two-story house—two apartments on the ground floor, sleeping rooms on the second floor, and the landlord’s apartment in the basement. About all I remember of that year is that I liked seventh grade—different rooms and teachers for every subject; I learned to love art—made a marionette for the show we put on and was chosen to be the voice of Beauty in “Beauty and the Beast.”

The only downside of that year in Wichita came in the spring when my mother got sick. She felt bad enough to go to a doctor, unusual in our family. Only later did I learn that her health was part of the reason we left Wichita and moved back east, nearer home.

The next year, our little family split up. For eighth grade, I lived with my dad and stepmother in Charleston. Mom and my stepfather moved to St. Louis where they got jobs in a factory.

Eighth grade was rather fun. I was once again in my hometown, and I recognized kids I’d known in third and fourth grades at Lincoln School. We lived in one of many small ranch-style houses my dad built in Charleston, and I rode a bike all over the south side of town near the college. Dad bought a television set that first summer, and I got my first taste of game shows and soap operas. They were all right, but my real love was listening to Cubs games on the radio.

Then school was out, my mom and stepfather returned to Illinois, and I went to live with them in a small town called Lerna, population about 300, located several miles southwest of Charleston. As soon as school began in the fall, I met a girl a year ahead of me; we rode the school bus together to Charleston High School, and became great friends. I often spent time at her house, partly because she was one of five kids, the only girl, and was needed to help her mom with cooking, laundry, ironing, and cleaning. The other part of spending time with her was so I could experience what it was like to live in a big family, have older brothers who teased, and enjoy the relaxed atmosphere. Her house was old and run-down, but I don’t recall ever thinking that was a bad thing. Just different.

Our two-story house was the former Methodist parsonage which we lived in rent-free in exchange for janitorial duties at the church next door. For the first time I had an upstairs bedroom from which I could look out over the little town and make up stories about the people who lived there.

We lived there all my freshman year in high school and part of my sophomore year, until Mom was diagnosed with cancer and had to have major surgery. In the mid-‘50s, hospital stays could be quite long. She was in Decatur a few weeks, then transferred to Charleston Hospital. By the time she returned to Charleston in October, I was told her illness was fatal and she wouldn’t live very much longer. She died the end of April 1956.

During Mom’s hospitalization and after her death, I lived with my dad and stepmother in various houses. Dad would buy an old house for us to live in, build another next door, move into the new one, tear down the old one. Repeat. I don’t know how many times we went through that cycle, build—sell—build another.

Our last abode was a big trailer, or mobile home, perched on a narrow lot above a deep ravine at the edge of town. I didn’t sleep much while we lived there. Central Illinois is in the heart of Tornado Alley—high winds from the west made the mobile home rock. I became a worrier par excellence during those two years “on the edge.”

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Houses—of whatever type—have always meant a lot to me. I’ve lived in so many that I no longer have an image of the ideal home. But in my heart, I recognize that any house can be a home if the people there love each other, or have love to share. I now live alone, without a dog to talk to (though I often talk to myself, another story there), but I’m not lonely. The love that sustained me through the years of living in many houses is still with me.

Today I celebrate the love that keeps a house from being merely a place to go to when it’s time to eat or sleep. May you have that kind of love in your life.

Ozark Foothills Landscape

HOUSES – Part I

     You have many houses,

       One for every season . . . .

Judy Collins published and sang that song in 1975. She might have been writing it for me.

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My first house was the one in which I was born. My father built it—dug the basement, laid the cement-block foundation, then built a garage that he and my mother lived in it while he completed the rest of the house. When it was finished, they moved in and I joined them.

I recall living in that house—fragments of memory: eating my mother’s potato soup at a small counter built into a recess between kitchen and living room; playing records on the phonograph by myself (I was about three years old then); and my strongest memory, shaking my crib because that other baby was in it (my cousin Mike, who had come to visit with his mom, Aunt Virginia, and who had needed a nap; he was younger than I was, but by gum, he was in my bed).

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Next came a rental house on Third Street in Charleston, two doors down from Uncle Tom and Aunt Flossie. That’s the first place I recall getting into trouble—a group of neighborhood kids was fooling around, finding minnows (this is hard to believe, even now) in the flooded street, and deciding to roast them on a fire. I ran back to the house, hollering that I’d bring the matches—only to meet my mother, stern of face, who said, virtually, “You’ll do no such thing.”

A great memory from that time, though, is going to see Aunt Flossie. She always had jelly beans. I loved jelly beans! And almost better—certainly right up there in my estimation—she sewed! On a sewing machine! I could sit for hours watching her stitch two pieces of fabric together. Sometimes she gave me little pieces that were left over. That’s what I call ecstasy!

But our tenure in that house was short-lived. My dad was building a new type of house, a flat-top—four-square, one story, with a flat roof. Quite modern for 1946. The basement was a walk-out type, also new at the time; I recall playing there—the smooth concrete floor made a wonderful skating rink.

While living in that house, I first went to school—Clearspring School, one room, one teacher, eight grades. Reading, writing, arithmetic, social studies (with the big kids), recess, treasure hunts, Christmas play (I was one of Santa’s helpers—my first stage appearance), end-of-school picnic and school trip to the movies. I think we saw Gone with the Wind, but that’s such a long film that it might have been something else. Memory doesn't always latch onto some details.

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At that point in my life, many things changed. My parents divorced, and I lived with my mother. We left the flat-top house and moved into Charleston, where I’d been born, to live in a converted gas station. Piecing things together in later years, I decided the living quarters went with my mom’s waitressing job at the truck stop next door.

I attended town school, grades 3 and 4; learned to write stories, sing two-part harmony, play with other kids (I was never good at games, not did I ever succeed very much at social interaction), and continued to entertain myself with books (libraries are wonderful treasure troves, in case I’ve not mentioned it recently).

Another life change: My mother remarried. We moved to a town several miles west of Charleston to live for a few weeks with my new step-grandmother, then settled into a rental house just a block away. The town was larger, and a little frightening. City buses became part of the scene. Downtown was a long ways off (to my 10-year-old eyes).

And another unforeseen thing happened—my step-sister Janet came to live with us for the school year. She was three years older, in eighth grade. I was thrilled to have my very own sister! It was for me a storybook come true—I irritated her, she had little time for me because she wanted to be with her older friends. But we shared a room with long windows and high ceilings, and slept in two white-painted wood-framed beds. I couldn't have written a better story.

In that house I had scarlet fever and measles—not at the same time, thank heaven—and learned from my adult cousin Eula how to draw women’s hats. While I recuperated from all my illnesses, I drew hats galore, and then branched out into copying cartoon figures from my comic books. Actually did a pretty good job with Donald Duck and his cronies.

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Those were my first five “houses”—in my first 10 years. Not quite one for every season, but definitely one for each new season of my life.

After my step-sister left to return to her mother, our lives changed again and we left Illinois to live in other states in the Midwest. More seasons of life unfolded.