ATTITUDES & GRATITUDES

When I was young, long before I could drive a car, I rode with my parents. If we wanted to get somewhere quickly, we took what my dad called "hard roads"--meaning, the surface of the road was probably concrete, or maybe asphalt. We called it "the black top" because that's what it looked like.

If it didn't matter how long the trip took, or if the people we were going to visit lived 'way off from civilization (or so it seemed to  my young mind), we drove on gravel roads. These were supposedly maintained by the township where the roads were located. Sometimes they were.

I bring this up because whenever we found ourselves on the lesser improved roads, we often hit a rough place. Literally. The road might be deeply rutted, due to heavy rains followed by vehicles, trucks or wagons, that sank down in the mire. Somehow or other, we always got through.

Right now, I--along with any number of people--am going through a rough place. The way ahead is uncertain, though so far there's been no detour or sliding off the road into a water-filled ditch. Metaphorically speaking, you understand.

I don't recall my parents and I ever had a bad outcome to our jaunts. Somehow or other, we always came through--maybe a little muddy on the outside, or possibly with a flat tire out of the ordeal. Overall, though, not so bad. Maybe that's the genesis of my basically positive attitude--we always came through.

So today, in case you're in, or nearing, a rough place, I'm sharing some thoughts that may make the going a little easier.

First, Attitude:

• You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.( Brian Tracy)

• The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. (Aldous Huxley)

And now, Gratitude:

• Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. (Melody Beattie)
• As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. (John F. Kennedy)

I'll give Winston Churchill the last word:

Until next time,

Blessings

Thursday's Child

 

SPRING TONIC

In my grandmother’s day a good dose of blackstrap molasses and sulphur cleaned out the human system, warded off any lingering malaise from winter’s icy clutches, and tuned up the body for three seasons of hard work on the farm.

In my youth, the Spring Tonic on Grandma’s shelf was replaced by a few cups of Sassafras tea or stewed rhubarb, which pretty much worked the same way as the dreaded tonic. By the time I became a grandmother, a week in Cancun or Barbados or Aruba was the remedy. Or if your pocketbook resembled mine, five days in Kalamazoo.

Some of my friends—whose pocketbooks may be anorectic—swear by a day at the spa.

Say “spa day” and right away you’ll conjure up a jumble of images—pummeling and pomading through ten hours of sauna, massage, styling, tweaking, manicure, pedicure, every-kind-of-cure for the common blahs and disenchantments of the face and figure. Wintertime, springtime, anytime.

View of one of the "Chain"

By happy accident, I discovered another kind of spa day.

We drove from Auburn, my friend Janine and I, in her 4X4, to Chain-O-Lakes State Park about 30 minutes away. Picture a day in late April. Spring sunshine, leaves taking their time unfurling their shades of green. Water standing in fallow fields, running in ditches, swelling creeks, all from late winter snow that had no chance against a young spring breeze and honest-to-goodness sunshine.

In northeastern Indiana we celebrate the first day of spring with the rest of the civilized world—around March 21^st when the spring equinox shows up on the calendar. We know that’s a token celebration—on a par with a green Christmas—because real spring, the one worth celebrating, comes on a day when you least expect it. It’s a mid-week day, when offices and schools and businesses are up and running, expecting their employees and clients and students and customers to show up as well.

But.

On a real spring day, some of us are privileged to get in a 4X4 and cruise the trails and roads of a state park. 10 mph cruising. No hurry. No agenda. Only the journey.

The 4-by heads into the park, makes a loop around one or two of the lakes in the chain, from which the park gets its name, and climbs one of the steep hills into a wooded area. Campground, cabins, fish-cleaning station…. Down another hill into the valley floor. What used to be a racing creek has expanded into a flowing meadow. The water’s nearly level with the bridge over the no-longer-dashing waterway.

We stop and park on the side of the road. Janine takes out one of her cameras, a monster thing with a long lens that allows her to poke her eye into Nature’s intimate business from a safe distance. I watch last autumn’s leaves float down the lazy stream and let the sun fall on my face.

Our only companions are woodsy inhabitants, too shy to come out.

When Janine winds up her photo op, we continue our loop around the park, and end up at one side of the biggest lake where a pier juts out into the main channel. I stand in the sun, my arms propped on the side supports of the pier, while Janine snaps photos of me in various hats and scarves for future use as publicity pics.

We’ve spoken fewer than fifty words since we entered the park. No pummeling, no pomading. No need for the delights of the day spa.

Because here, in this natural setting, we’ve bathed in warm spring air so delicious you can almost taste it, spied out elusive greens that will soon be in full leaf to delight the eye, caught the springtime perfume of sun on old leaves and new growth. Our souls have basked in Nature music: bird song, trickles of water running over stones, dry leaves from a year ago whisked away by a sudden breeze.

We’ve spent no money. Yet we’ve received simple gifts: cures for the common winter blahs, and disenchantments of the spirit. You can’t bottle this tonic and sell it for profit. This cure is free for the taking. If you want it.

Autumn @ Chain-O-Lakes
Another inspiring season

 WORDS FOR SPRINGTIME . . . 

[I'm repeating this post because it fits so perfectly the current time and place. For some people, Spring doesn't last long enough. For others, it's 'way too long (allergies also bloom in the spring, tra la). But I find poetry often helps me go forward when life isn't working out as I intended. Hope this poem from Robert Frost makes your day.]

We are well and truly into Spring. My neighbor has mowed his grass twice since the snow went away. Birds are eating everything we put out. And the wren, who likes my house, has tried again, this year, to build a nest on top of my porch light--we even gave her a new wren house of her very own!

Here's a poetic thought from Robert Frost to honor Spring:

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.


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Spring will be with us for a while yet, then we'll let her go and enter into another season.
We don't own her--she's only loaned to us for a time. Let's enjoy Spring while she's with us.


P.S. I saw my first goldfinch this morning, all decked out in her golden plumage. Now there's something that can stay for three seasons!



Blessings from

    Thursday's Child

 In Just-

spring

[Another re-posting . . . going through a rough patch (it's a spring thing) at present and I'm a little distracted. April is the month my mother died, and to this day, 62 years later, I recall  those last days and weeks. Re-reading this post has helped me--I can now begin to celebrate the opening-up of another spring.]

This is what I call the e e cummings season, "mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful." Today’s forecast calls for light rain, which begins any time now; my guess is that it’s holding off till I go out to run errands and will let go the minute I open my car door. But that’s just a guess.

Just-spring here in Northeast Indiana comes with a full basket of tulips and dandelions, mowed yards, birds courting, bushes in red and green and yellow, trees in pink and white and magenta and yellow-green.

Landscaping is newly mulched. Gardeners grow antsy waiting for the frost-warnings to lift so they can be the first kid on their block with annuals shoving each other aside in hanging baskets and flower boxes and any little patch of soil that doesn’t have anything in it.

-----

Spring returns every year (March 20th or 21^st in the northern hemisphere), with new growth in the earth; with hope for new beginnings (Easter is a spring festival, you know); with beauty so abundant you feel it will run right over you.

It’s overflowing and everywhere. And it’s for everyone.

Spring (with apologies to Janne Robinson for her lovely poem) doesn’t care: whether you’re black, white, Hispanic, or other. If you’re super-sensitive to pollen or criticism or penicillin. If you’re grieving or rejoicing. If you’re too old to, too young to, or don’t give a damn. If your income exceeds your outgo or you have no income worth talking about. Spring breathes on us, whether we like it or not.

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All the therapy in the world won’t take away Spring. All the fervent prayers, tears, threats, tantrums—no effect on Spring.

We’ll have to deal with Spring--endure it, embrace it; enjoy it, avoid it. Spring doesn’t care.

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If you see a white-haired woman in a black sweatshirt and New Balance walking shoes, carrying a box of Kleenex, that’s probably me. I’ll sneeze from car to grocery store and back again.

Spring doesn’t care.

But I do.

Celebrate Spring! And I hope you enjoy what She has to offer.

 MARCH MISCELLANY

Day after tomorrow, it'll be April Fool's Day.

Resurrection Lilies, in progress

The next day will be Palm Sunday.

Another week passes, and it's Easter.

Somehow, March snuck by me and I didn't even notice. But I can't say I'm sorry to see it go--it came in lionish and seems to be going out with the same attitude.

Whatever happened to "In like a lion, out like a lamb"?

I'm not the only person who has picked up on the yo-yo activity of March weather. In fact, the whole winter went bouncing up and down on a string. Maybe this is all localized here in Hoosier land--or maybe, just in my own neighborhood. 

But whatever the causes, I'm trusting the weather to mind its manners after Easter. That was what I learned when I became an adopted Hoosier 60 years ago (makes me faint to write that number). But, yes, that was the prevailing wisdom: Don't expect nice weather until after Easter. 

I'm not so gullible that I believe that 100%. But it does have a nice positive feel to it.

-----

What else is going on in March?

Friends report their kids are entering the last trimester of high school. Baseball teams are being chosen. School golf teams are gearing up for some tournaments. Nursing students are nearing the end of their studies. 

The view outside my windows includes:

• green grass (same color it was all winter when the snow melted)
• green shrubs (never change color)
• green leaves on the Resurrection Lily bed--that's new. Last year's dried tree leaves covered that patch all winter--the lily leaves are not long but they're thick and very green
• dog walkers every morning
• birds que-ing up for seed and suet several times a day
• deciduous trees still shy--no buds, no leaves, no blooms

As I hinted a few paragraphs ago, we need a change in the weather.

-----

All kinds of things happened in March, in days gone by. Fr'instance:

• 1872 - Yellowstone becomes the U.S.'s first national park.
• 1932 - The Hoover Dam is completed. 
• 1958 - U.S. launches Explorer I, its first satellite. 
• 1961 - The U.S. Peace Corps was founded.

If you want to know more, just type in "what happened in March in history?" and your browser will bring up all-sorts. Be prepared--it'll include the good, the bad, and the ugly.

-----

So today we say goodbye to March. Next week we'll be coming to you from a spot in April--a month that always makes me think of sunshine. 

Blessings,

Thursday's Child

coming soon!

 LAUGHTER!

[I'm repeating this post because . . . well, because I think a lot of people need to remember that laughter is important to us human folks. If you're in a low place in your life at the moment, see if there isn't something you can laugh about. If it's a really really low place, try for a smile, however weak, or even a light giggle. I'll join you.]

My laughter tank has been running low lately. When I began looking for quotations to illustrate this post, I discovered what I've always known (how's that for logic?)--laughter and pain are considered by many, many people to be two sides of the same coin.

Okay, I can work with that. I don't laugh when things are going badly. Say, for example, my car doesn't start, or the garage door spring won't lift the door when I push the button, or I slip on the front steps and skin my knee (if I'm lucky and don't go into sprain/broken bone country) . . . none of those qualified for the slightest chuckle. Not even in retrospect.

But I do know that when I'm feeling low, when my emotions have managed to delude me into thinking nothing good will ever happen again (rare, but it has happened), then I'm ready for relief. I've been known to watch a TV series that used to send me into gales of laughter, but if I'm in that low-down place, nothing sounds or looks funny.

I love Erma Bombeck for her home-grown humor. She saved my bacon on more than one occasion when I had a houseful of little kids all needing something different, and I just needed a little peace and quiet. She could laugh at herself and her situation--somewhat like mine--and I was eased.

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This past winter I had a long spell of nothing-funny-about-anything. In those periods I can't read, I don't want to write, knitting/sewing/cooking don't interest or distract me. 

To have some voices in the house, I put on a DVD--TV series, movie, whatever; I don't remember just what it was. And within 20 minutes I had laughed out loud twice. Twice!

Those moments of laughter brought me back into the human race.

(Thank you, Mark Twain--for reminding me that I do have "one really effective weapon" in my personal arsenal.)

-----

Why would we waste any of our days mired in sadness or anger or fear? Well, apparently we can't banish them entirely. Can you imagine day after day after day of laughter? Important to have a balance. Sadness is a natural thing to happen to us--we all lose something or someone. Anger rises when we least expect it. Fear? Oh, yeah, fear is always around waiting to pounce.

So a little laughter each day may save it from being wasted? Hmm. Need to think about that for a while. But I'm 99.44% sure I can live with it.

-----

Do you have someone you can laugh with? My closest friends are people who smile or giggle or chortle or double over with mirth at the same things that hit me that way. Doesn't have to be trading one-liners. Think about it. 

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As time passes, I'm learning to let go of more and more things that used to get under my skin and keep me in a constant state of irritation. More things strike me as funny. Or nutty. Or absurd.

Smiling comes easier. (Remember the old joke? "Smile! People will wonder what you're up to.") I smile a lot. People at the grocery store and Walmart smile back. Maybe they wonder what I'm up to. Or, maybe, they know.

Have a blessed week . . . filled with laughter, and joy.

Thursday's Child

4 MORE DAYS!

Counting today--4 more days till the First Day of Spring!!

 Now the question is: Have you made your Spring Resolutions?

[Please don't frown like that--what if your face froze that way?]

Okay, folks, SPRING RESOLUTIONS!

Perfect time to make resolutions--weather changing, outdoor stuff needs doing, right?

If you haven't spent much time in the yard or walking around the house or poking in the garage, now's the time to do that. You can:

• check the lawn mower
• inspect the outside of the house for winter damage
• look over the plants/seeds/bulbs at the nursery
• shake your piggy bank to be sure you have funds for the bulbs, etc.

No house? No problem.

Wherever you live, you have stuff--and please don't try to tell me you got rid of every bit of extra stuff last year. Stuff accumulates--all on its own--no help from us. (Don't ask me why, I've just observed it happening--to me, my family, my friends, my neighbors.)

So here's what you can do:

• look through closets for clothing to donate
• check those linen closets and storage boxes--blankets to donate?
• take a good gander at the rooms in your living space--anything need painting?
• furniture needing new covers?
• floors can/should be replaced?

That's a start.

Clearly, this is an addictive process. The caveat is this: don't rush out to buy everything at once. The assessment and planning phase will get you through the long rainy days Spring delights in. When it's sunny again--and possibly warmer--a nice long walk to see the neighborhood may perk you up. 

And by the time you get back home, the walls/furniture/flooring look just fine. Your energy can go into something else, like painting a picture, taking photos, writing a poem or a letter or an email, calling a friend for a meet at the local tea shop or cafe.

Nothing was wasted--it all helped you Reset.

And once you've Reset, you may find you can go with the flow better--enjoy a time of less stress--relax and do something you really want to do (read a book? get a dog? see a movie at a local theater? take dance lessons? re-learn how to roller skate?)

Spring is the true beginning of the year--new growth occurs, trees and shrubs and perennials waken and get on with their job of beautifying our lives. Try a Spring Resolution or two.

Blessings,

Thursday's Child