Our house is a very very very nice house..... ~ Crosby, Stills & Nash

Unless I have a personal photo of some sort that I want to use to help illustrate my posts I'm no longer going to put images on my blog.  Hope you all won't miss them much, if at all.  Now that we're all settled in and I'm back to caring for my grandsons full time thru the week I am back to being seriously limited on my computer time.  As I've mentioned before, if I didn't type 70-75 words per minute, this blog probably would've died a slow death a long time ago.  Luckily for me, I do type fast and I can rattle off a blog post pretty quickly.

The reason for my change is, Blogger has twiddled around with the image uploading.  At least I think they have, because I can't seem to get my photos and images to load on here as quickly or as easily as they used to.  Once I do have them on here, I can't seem to get to a point where I can type what I have to say.  It's frustrating me.  A lot.  And coming here at the end of the day is my 'sanctuary' time of relaxing and letting go and sluffing off the daily stresses, not adding more to them.  It will give me more time to write, which is what I love to do and what I come here to do.  When I can, I'll post pictures of the boys or whatever.  I do that already quite a bit on Facebook, which is very image-posting-friendly, and many of you have my Facebook account info as it is so a lot of my pictures are second-time-around for you anyway.


With that said, I'm good to go.  Been on the road since 6 am doing a 400 mile drive-about the state, seeing all kinds of beautiful new landscape.  Got home, went out to dinner, and now it's time to take my new book and go relax on the front porch for a while.

It's good to be home.  And it really does feel like home now when we round the corner and see our house.

Our house...it really is a very fine house.

Don't refuse to go on an occasional wild goose chase - that's what wild geese are for. ~ Author Unknown

Isn't it funny what an influence rhythms have on our lives?  The ebbs and flows of Nature's rhythms in the movements of the moon and the sea.  The changes of the seasons.  The rhythm of our daily routines, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment we shut them for the last time as we drift into sleep at the end of the day.  We find comfort in them.  We gain a sense of security in believing they won't vary much from day to day.  And...usually...they don't. 

How do we react to great change, to a total upheaval in our lives?  From the known to the unknown?  From having a pretty good idea of what faces you as you head out into your day to not knowing how to find your way home?  To having to use a GPS to make it from your house to a grocery store, and from the grocery store to your house?  From having all kinds of familiar landmarks to help you figure out what direction you're headed, to a land devoid of  anything but enormous blue sky overhead? 

I'm not sure.

I'm still in the process.

There are vast differences between Portland, Oregon, and southeast Michigan.  There are different trees, different flowers, different insects.  There are no Cascade Mountains to the east, no Coast Range to the west.  There are gently rolling hills in some spots, but mostly flat land with trees and trees and more trees.  Any sizable 'hill' we've spotted so far has been man made and is usually covering a landfill.  Most of the houses in our area here outside of Detroit are made of brick.  There are fire flies and cicadas.  There are "Michigan 'U'-ies", and you can turn left on red lights as long as they're flashing and there's no danger of a collision.  Young people call you "Ma'm" and treat you with respect.  Clerks in stores greet you with a pleasant "Hello!  How are you?  What can I do for you today?"  They even approach you and ask if they can help you in any way.  You hear a lot of "Please" and "Thank You" and "You're welcome".  Here in Michigan, if people are going to the 'beach' or the 'shore' it's going to be somewhere along one of the Great Lakes.  Do you know...until I moved here I never realized Michigan is surrounded on three sides by water...at least the lower part is.  And that it's shaped like a mitten?  And if Michiganders are trying to tell an out-of-stater where some town is located in the state, they'll hold up their hand and 'show' you where it is.  Because Michigan truly is shaped like a mittened hand.  In Portland we had the east winds that blew with ferocity out of the Columbia River Gorge...frigid in the winter, blistering in the summer.  Here in Michigan we have 'lake effect' winds and thunder storms that blow thru with amazing displays of lightning, sweeping rains, and claps of thunder that seem to go on forever and ever and ever.

And it is also amazing how quickly we go about making our new house a home.  How quickly we feather our nest with familiar objects to take away the strangeness, the newness, the unfamiliarity.  We go about forming new rhythms, new patterns.  We find grocery stores and gas stations, new favorite restaurants.  We begin taking a certain route to and from work and pretty soon it's our regular commute.  We don't think about what exit to take.  We don't stress about driving along unfamiliar freeways.  Because those freeways are ones we drive every day.  They become part of our daily rhythm.

We know no one when we first arrive.  We can leave it that way if we choose to.  Or we can begin to approach our neighbors and introduce ourselves.  We begin to wave and call out hello when we see each other out watering our yards.  We tell store clerks "We don't have this brand out in Portland, Oregon".  We mention moving from Portland, Oregon, a lot to everyone we come across.  And people respond with all kinds of friendly, welcoming words.  They can't believe we left Portland for Michigan.  Just about everyone will say, "But Oregone is so beautiful, isn't it?  And it IS "Oregone" to them.  That sounded so strange at first, as did the midwest accents all around us.  But even those have begun to sound familiar, have become a recognizable rhythm in our days here, too.  As to the beauty of Oregon, it is beautiful.  But Michigan has its beauty, too.  Just in different ways.  The funny thing is, they don't know anything much about Oregon, about as much as I knew about Michigan when I arrived here.

It's all about rhythms.  It's about getting established.  It's about wrapping your head around the reality of moving to a whole different region, a whole different culture.  It's about embracing the changes, about adapting to them and not holding stubbornly to the past.  About not constantly comparing.  It's looking at the new world around you with fresh eyes and an open mind, and being content where you are.

It's about finding that new rhythm, and making it your own.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~ William Wordsworth

I received an email recently from a writing contact I have known for a few years to inform me she'd submitted my name to a professional editor who is looking for bloggers to add to her Baby Boomer women's website.  She told me to expect to hear from this woman soon.  Within a few days, I also received an email from this editor as well.  I was pretty thrilled.  Still am, for that matter.  She told me she would love to have at least a couple of blog entries from me per month.

And yet...

In writing emails back and forth, trying to figure out what she wants, how she wants it written, I am beginning to find out I don't know whether writing at a 'professional' level is for me.  I don't want to chop away at my posts until they're so sanitized I won't recognize my own 'voice' any more.  I honestly don't write for the pleasure of anyone else but me.  To have people enjoy coming here again and again and leaving encouraging comments is an added bonus for me.  But that's not why I've been writing since I was 8 years old.  Almost half a century.

Why do I write?

Now, there's a question.  I don't know if I have the answer, but I'll try.

I write because I need to empty out the words that build up in my head.  I can feel the pressure in my brain, craving that release, the endorphin 'high' I get when I finally hit that "Publish Post" button.  It's an addiction.  Not quite an obsession, nor a compulsion.  It's seeing something, hearing something, experiencing something and wanting to share it with the world.  And then trying my best to make it 'real' for them, too, especially for my grandsons to come and read someday when they've reached adulthood.

I had a conversation with my younger brother several months ago.  Both of our parents are dead now and we find ourselves chewing over our pasts quite often when we get together, trying to come to terms with a lot of different issues and memories.  When our mother died, she died almost friendless.  If it hadn't been for my dad and us children attending her memorial service at our oldest brother's church, there would've been very few in the crowd whose lives had touched hers in any personal way.  Those who were there were friends of my oldest brother.  As my younger brother and I were talking I said to him, "You know, outside of giving birth to the four of us kids, Mom really contributed nothing more to the world, did she?"  She wasn't a bad person, and I think a lot of her insecurities came from lack of confidence and self-doubt, but she never opened up and gave any one much of herself.  Even to us children.  Not emotionally.

I don't want that to be my legacy.  My greatest fear in life is to have someone say, "She was just like her mother."

That is why I share the words in my head.  That is why I've sat down at this keyboard and typed 1,070 blog entries on this blog and several hundred more on my first 'retired' blog.  I'm leaving a huge piece of "me" behind.  For my children, for my grandchildren.  That is why I don't want to chop down, weed out, guess and second-guess what I write.  If an editor's gut instinct tells them they 'love my voice', go with it.  Publish it the way it is.  Let the reading audience decide.  I don't want to lose myself in trying to make my blog into what someone else thinks it should be.  It isn't theirs.  It's mine.  It's me.  And some stranger who comes along and reads this for its editorial merit is going to find a lot wrong with it.  And that's ok.  But if they only had a clue of the blood, sweat, and tears...the great joys and great sorrows...the good times and the bad...that have contributed thru the years to this 'voice'.  

I am who I am.

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future. ~ Paul Boese

I've been married to this man for a long time.  37 years, to be exact.  I met him on a blind date.  When I opened the door to let him and our mutual friends into my parents' house for the first time he almost blew me away.  He had long dark brown hair that cascaded halfway down his back.  He wore a leather jacket, jeans, and boots.  He had the most piercing brown eyes I'd ever gazed into.  I was in speechless awe.  At the end of the evening, after he and our friends had dropped me off at my parents', he told our friends, "Someday I'm going to marry that girl".  They laughed him to scorn.  5 months and 4 days later, he made those words true.

You learn a lot about another person after being with them for close to 4 decades.  I sometimes feel as if I know him better than he does himself.  But that isn't true.  There are parts of each of us that are never revealed to the world around us.  But I do know the important things about him.  I know he's a man of impeccable integrity.  I know he's honest and true.  I know his strengths and his weaknesses.  He has proven to me many times that he's in this for the long run, 'til death do us part.  He has been with me in good times and hard times.  He has stayed by my side when I've been very ill, so devoted that even the nursing staff has commented to me how lucky I am to have someone who loves me so much.  They have seen many women dumped off at the hospital, the husband never to be seen again until he comes to pick them up to take them home.  Dear Hubby has been an awesome father to our two children...and still is.  And I don't think there is a Papa in the world who could be loved by his grandchildren as much as he is by our two grandsons.

For a life change as huge as the one we've undergone these past few months, learning of a possible move to Michigan from Oregon around the first part of November last year and then making it so in March of this year, it's gone remarkably well.  We hit a pretty big bump in the road when we first arrived in Michigan, only to find a mortgage mess of - to us - catastrophic proportions.  We ended up living in a hotel suite for over two weeks while everything got sorted out.  Beyond that, it's been pretty seamless.  We've settled in and already grown to love our new home and surroundings.  But Dear Hubby and I began sniping at each other, a little here, a little there.  We were irritable and short-tempered.  Instead of doing what we've always done in the past by talking such things thru, we let it fester.  With all the adjustments to a new home, a new city, a new state, and a completely new job for him I don't know if we weren't aware of what was happening or if we were too distracted to give it much thought.

It came to a head a week ago.

We sat out on our porch on that Saturday morning.  Grumpy.  Not very talkative.  And then Dear Hubby opened up like a dam and let all his frustrations, his hurts, pour out of him.  I sat and listenend in rather stunned silence, letting him say his piece, mulling over all that he had to say.  And I found myself agreeing with him.  I told him it was too bad he hadn't opened up sooner instead of bottling it all up inside.  But I'd done the same thing.  So after talking these issues thru we decided we'd start from square one, from that point forward, and put all our grievances and gripes behind us and move on.  We also agreed if we saw ourselves falling back into that rut, to point it out to the other one and change it right then.

You see, communication is the secret to a happy marriage. 

We have had many people say to us thru the years, "If you guys could bottle up what you have and sell it you'd be billionaires".

There's no bottling up of any secret formula.  There's no magic elixir.  What there is is the want-to to make this relationship work.  It's mutual respect.  It's realizing that my opinion, my feelings, are only half of a whole.  His are the other half.  It is leaving selfishness behind at the marriage altar.  It is a building process, one day at a time.  It is what you make of it.  It doesn't just happen.

There is no white knight in shining armor, coming to sweep you away.

If you're lucky, as I have been lucky, you find a good man you want to spend the rest of your life with.

If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree. ~ Jim Rohn

  

I have had a lifelong love/hate relationship with friendship.  As a child in the secure comfort of my small hometown, going to school with the same 25 to 30 kids each year until finishing the 6th grade there, I was a very friendly, gregarious little girl.  I didn't realize how many friends I had until I moved away and didn't have them any more.  And then began the nightmare of going to three different middle schools and three different high schools until I graduated.  It felt like I'd just begin to halfway settle into each school, then I'd be uprooted and would have to move on to another one.  From those years I have my beloved best friend Lizzee.  That's it.

Once I graduated from high school and got out into the working world I began to make a lot of friends again.  Mostly other single young women to begin with, then young married wives once Dear Hubby and I got married.  And those fell by the wayside when we became Christians.  My friend Sue is the only one I still have from the 'young marrieds'.  And that's it. 

And then in my early church years I went back into my shell.  I had a couple of good friends.  But I felt like such a freak.  I'd gone from being a crazy, worldly wild woman to this sedate mild-mannered Godly woman.  Instantaneously.  And my worldly friends didn't know what to do with me.  And the younger women in my church didn't know what to do with me, either.  At least, that's the way I felt.  I didn't even know what to do with me, I'd changed so drastically so quickly.  After years immersed in spiritualism and the occult and no religious background, I didn't know what a Christian woman was supposed to be like.  I didn't even know what a Christian was, for the most part.  I knew people went to church and Sunday School but I hadn't ever had any interest in it until I became one.  And then I was like a babe starved for milk...I wanted to know everything.  But friendship?  It freaked me out.  What did Christian women talk about?  What did they do for entertainment?  How did they live?!  I went around for years afraid of my own shadow, afraid of offending someone if I said or did anything 'wrong'.  And so many of the friendships within the church of women my age had been forged from diaperhood onward.  A pretty daunting task, trying to break thru those walls.  I felt I wasn't up to the task.  I felt I wasn't worthy, because of the life I'd come from.  So I found my quiet little corner and stayed there and didn't venture very far from it.  My Comfort Zone.  Tho I didn't like it.  It was a very, very lonely corner.  For years.  And it built up a hurt that festered for years until, in 1999....one of the worst years of my life for spiritual-health-work issues....it became such a huge blister on my soul it finally popped.  And I quit going to church.

I stayed away for close to a year.

It took a lot of soul searching.  It took buckets of tears.  It took so many vials of prayer I'm sure I have my own private stock in Heaven.  It took a serious illness.  It took a lot of courage.  And it took a lot of humility to go back.

But, you see, I'd made the mistake for all of those long years before then, 23 to be exact, of not living for myself.  I had spent those years trying desperately to fit in, to be who I thought others thought I should be.  I lived thru my husband.  I lived thru my children.  I didn't live for myself.  I didn't even know myself.  I had become someone I don't think I would've recognized if I'd seen myself on the street.

I worked at a school in Portland at the time.  I would go to work an hour early where I'd sit in my truck and read my Bible and pray and talk out loud to the Lord.  I would weep.  And weep.  And weep some more.  And it was when I began asking the Lord to be my Guide...to have Him let me know if what I was doing was right or wrong, if how I was dressing was right or wrong, if how I was living was right or wrong, if how I was thinking was right or wrong....that I began to slowly heal.  Way down deep.  Way, way down.

When I made the decision to go back to church, I kept a very low profile.  I loved everyone, tried to be kind and friendly and helpful.  But something had changed within me.  It was like I felt I needed to reach way beyond the walls to open up to people.  To let my light shine there.  I'd led such a cloistered life for so long.  A very insular life.  And I hadn't been comfortable doing that.  Because, deep inside, I was still that friendly and gregarious little girl and I'd been wanting to come out of the shadows and begin living again.  I was tired...exhausted....of not being true to myself.

 I reached out more to my neighbors.  To co-workers.  To people on the street and whoever crossed my path in stores or wherever.  And I became reacquainted with that little girl inside who'd been yearning to come out.  And I have found it to be so true, if you want to have friends you need to show yourself friendly.  Not that we didn't have friends within our Portland church.  We had wonderful friends, many who came to wish us well before we left.  It wasn't them who had the problems, it was me.  I don't know why I couldn't seem to let go and just be myself.  But I couldn't.

And now, here in Michigan, I talk to everyone.  And just about everyone responds in a positive way.  And I've reached out to my neighbors and I'm making friends with them.  And I'm not lonely.  Not lonely at all.  I've been here 3 1/2 months and I feel a true sense of community.  I feel happy here.  Peaceful.  Content.

I am 57 years old but I feel like I began life anew in 1999.  I am thankful in many ways that friendship is something I've struggled with.  Paralyzing shyness as well.  Because somewhere in all this I've come to realize that the majority of people on this earth are just as shy and scared and unsure of themselves as I was.  That to reach out and make the first move is as impossible for them now as it used to be for me.  I've found that if I make the move and reach out, most people will grab on like I've tossed them a lifeline.  

And maybe I have.

It takes hands to build a house, but only hearts can build a home. ~ Author Unknown

 

I will most likely never see this house again in my lifetime.  It is the home of my childhood in a small town in Washington State, not too many miles inland from the Pacific Ocean.  My parents bought this house in 1960.  I believe we moved in to it during the week my mother was in the hospital after giving birth to my baby brother, 6 years my junior.  It wasn't the first house we'd lived in.  The first was in the town of Aberdeen where I was born, up on Thinkame Hill.  The only memory I have of that house is of the big fireplace in the living room that I could stand up in.  We moved to my hometown when I was 3.  This house...this beloved house...was the fourth one we lived in after moving there.  My dad worked for Texaco: "You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.  The big bright Texaco star!"  You have to be of a certain generation to remember that commercial song.  And I am.  One of that generation.  My mother stayed home and raised us kids.

Prior to the time I met my husband, this house held the most precious memories of my life.  It is where my family lived its happiest years.  It was big enough where my three brothers and I each had a bedroom of our own and an extra bedroom we used as a storeroom for toys.  It had French doors leading to what we called our "TV Room".  It had a butler's pantry.  Room in the kitchen for a table big enough for six people to sit at for meals, maybe one or two more, depending on any stray neighborhood kids or friends who happened to be around at dinner time.  It had a back porch where my father would stand and yell for any of us who weren't there when my mom put the food on the table.  If we were anywhere within a quarter-mile radius, we could hear him.  My dad was a wonderful whistler.  You could hear that all over town, too.  He whistled a lot.

As you look at the house, my bedroom was at the back left corner.  When we lived there, the arborvitae to the right of the porch was there.  The only other tree in the yard was a very old and very big cherry tree out in the back.  One of my bedroom windows overlooked it.  In spring time, when the limbs were full of cherry blossoms, my room would glow from the light they cast off.  I spent many hours sprawled across my old cast iron bed reading library books, munching on apples, and gazing out at that tree.  I also got the last spanking of my childhood under it at the age of 12 when my mother caught me eating green cherries.  There's a long story behind those cherries...her telling me never to eat them because they'd make me sick and me never getting sick from eating them.  I think she swatted me out of frustration more than anything.  She was barely 5'3" and at that stage I towered over her at 5'7".  It was humiliating enough that she was spanking me, but made even worse when I spotted a boy I knew from school walking down the hill next to the house witnessing it and laughing himself silly at my expense.

We survived the Columbus Day Storm in that house, in October 1962.  It was the closest thing to a hurricane any of us in the Northwest had ever been thru.  My dad was in the National Guard at the time and I remember my mother fretting and worrying he'd be called out for action.  But he wasn't.  He and my mother nailed heavy Army blankets over the big picture windows in the dining/living room and we camped out on the floor.  We lost our electricity and my dad lit a kerosene lamp in the house.  If the storm didn't kill us, it's a wonder the fumes from the lamp didn't. 

I had the hard measles in that house.  I ran a temperature of 105.  I was sick enough where my dad set up an Army cot in the TV room on Christmas Day so I could be with the family when they opened their gifts.  I was so sick I don't think I had the energy to open mine.  I remember an act of kindness I've never forgotten.  My poor harried mother also did day care thru many of those years and there was precious little time she could spare for tender moments.  She really wasn't a tender-moment mother anyway.  But a friend of hers came to visit, and Betty came into the darkened TV room where I lay, sat on a chair beside the bed with a basin of water and very gently bathed my face and my chest with it.  It felt like heaven! It felt so good it almost made me cry.

Back in the years I lived there, families still had lots of children.  There were my three brothers and myself.  The Wilder family had 10.  The Ritters had 6.  The Nelson family moved in with 7.  And when you added all of our town friends from school coming over to play we never lacked any playmates.  Oh, the games of Hide and Seek we'd play in warm summer twilights!  Oh, how we dreaded to hear our parents come out on the porch as nite would fall and call us home.  How many times I begged for "Just 5 more minutes, mom!"

We moved away in 1966.  And from 1966 until I married my husband in 1974...well, those are years I don't care to remember.  Three different middle schools, three different high schools.  Who and what I had been in my little hometown meant nothing to the kids I came across in the last six years of my schooling. My home life was not easy, either. I lost myself somewhere along the way.

When I lived on the West Coast in Portland I didn't make it up to my hometown very often, even tho it was within a 3 1/2 hour drive.  It hurt too much to go back, to be reminded of the happy years.  It brought back too many ghosts.  But the last time I was there, when I took this picture, was in March of 2006.  A couple of weeks after my first grandson was born.  The reason I was there, with my younger brother and our spouses, was to have a memorial for our dad who'd died 8 days after my grandson Dylan was born.  As my brother and I had talked over what we felt might be appropriate I suggested to him "Why not go up to Lake Sylvia?  That is where some of our happiest childhood memories were.  You could hit a golf ball out into the water!"  Our dad was a lifelong golfer.  My brother thought that was a splendid idea.  So we made plans to meet at the house of our childhood and to go to the lake from there.

So, as I look at this photo, not only do I have reels of my childhood spin thru my head but I also have the sight of my brother taking the golf ball we'd written a memorial message on for our dad, slicing thru the air with an almost-Tiger Wood swing, and launching it way out over the water until it landed and sank below the surface.  For a March day it was a beautiful day...it didn't rain.  I walked over to the dam at the lake with a handful of spring flowers and kissed each one before I sent it downstream....one for each of us children, one for each grandchild, and one for my best friend Lizzee who was loved by and loved my parents almost as much as I did.

What is a house but four walls and a roof overhead?  But the stories that house could tell of the lives we lived within it!  That's what makes it a home.  My very beloved childhood home.

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. ~ Auguste Rodin

40 years ago my parents and younger brother and I vacationed in the little town of Waldport on Alsea Bay in Oregon.  A quiet little burg along Highway 101.  It wasn't one of the more popular tourist towns, tucked back from the Pacific Ocean.  We'd rented a cabin-style unit in an older motel for four days.  It wasn't a vacation I  wanted to go on.  I was 17, my younger brother 11.  My parents were going thru some particularly hard years in their marriage and the air in the cabin was thick with tension and bickering.

My brother and I escaped to the long stretch of beach that skirted the bay.  The tides came and went with a quiet ferocity.  There was no surf...we could spot that off in the distance at the mouth of the bay.  But sea lions bobbed about when the tide was high.  Sea birds skittered and cried overhead.  We skipped rocks out across the smooth surface of the water.  For siblings with 6 years between us, we got along remarkably well.

Towards the late afternoon of the second day there, we befriended two brothers and their sister.  They had shrimp guns and we amused ourselves by screwing them down into the wet sand and extracting small sand shrimp.  Nothing worth eating.  We might've built a sand castle.  But as the sky was streaked with apricot orange and pink sherbet and we were standing together in a circle looking down at the shrimp gun, another pair of bare feet entered into our tight orbit.  My gaze moved upward until I found myself staring into the most incredible pair of golden brown eyes I'd ever seen.  They belonged to one of the most handsome young men I'd ever encountered.  We stood transfixed as that moment in time stopped for the length of a heartbeat.  Sound didn't register.  We created our own vacuum.  And when he said, "Let's go take a walk" we headed off down the shore.  One of the brothers yelled, "Hey, where you going?" but I didn't look back.

I don't know what my father sensed.  He'd been standing there off to the side.  But when my younger brother began to run after us Dad called him back and told him to leave us alone.  And when the two of them headed back to the cabin no one called for me to follow.  I stood in the cool wind as the sun went down and became acquainted with my soul mate.

It wasn't love.  What teenage encounter at that age is real love?  But until the moment he entered into our circle I had still been a tomboy girl.  I'd had no serious crushes.  And this wasn't a crush.  It went deeper than that.  Is there such a thing as chance encounters, or does everything that happens to us in our lifetime happen for a purpose?  Was he there to help me cross the chasm from childhood into the moment when I became fully aware of myself as a young woman?  I don't know.  But I do know it was magical.  We sat up half the nite, hunkered down against the sea wall to block the cold wind blowing in from the sea.  We never kissed.  We never even held hands.  But he told me, "If I were to die right now it would be ok because I'd know you were still here in the world."

As this memory came to my mind tonite I remembered his name.  I did a Google search on him and it surprised me he was even real.  And he is alive and hopefully well somewhere in southern California where he is a high school teacher of Fine Arts.  That seems very fitting for him.  He had the soul of a poet.

And I will leave it there.  I have no desire to contact him.

But he will always remain the apparition who seemed to flow in on the tide.  Who made a young girl feel pretty and worthy of the attention of a handsome young man for the first time in her life.

Oh, the summer night, Has a smile of light, And she sits on a sapphire throne. ~ Barry Cornwall

 A long and busy day.  My daughter-in-law flew out to Portland last nite to spend a week at our church's camp meeting there and to visit with friends.  I think of all of us she's been the most homesick for 'home' so I'm glad she's having this opportunity to reconnect and have fun.  While she's gone I'm having the boys for a couple hours later each day.  With her out of town I have to wait for our son to come by and pick up the boys.  But it's not a hardship.  It's only for a few days and they're so good it makes no difference anyway.  

It was hot outside early on.  Or maybe it's just me and hormonal imbalances of some sort.  I've just been feeling hotter lately, if that makes sense.  Not sweaty-yucky hotter, just...hotter.  Oh well.  My body has been a mystery to me ever since I had my full hysterectomy around the time Cooper was born.  No HRT for me so I just kind of stumble my way along this midlife path one day at a time.  I do take a wonderful natural supplement called Menoquil that helps with soaking nite sweats.  I am not a very nice person to be around if I forget to reorder it and run out of it and slip back into waking up wringing wet two or three nites a week.  Dear Hubby will agree with that!

The grandboys and I spent most of the morning outside until the heat of the sun chased us in around the time the mail arrived.  I gave Coopy a cold bottle of water and had him go give it to the mail lady.    They spent their time running thru the sprinkler and 'painting' our sidewalks and driveway.  They love having buckets filled with water and and taking paint brushes and going to town!  They end up with just as much water on themselves, which I'm sure is part of the appeal.  I love coming up with old-fashioned things for them to do that I enjoyed as a child on a hot summer day.  They don't need remote cars and trucks and endless video games.  Mercy, they don't even need toys.  Cooper likes taking a little yellow bucket and filling it with rocks that he brings to me and presents to me like treasures.  He tells me they're his 'crystals' and I believe him.

We have fire flies here in Michigan.  I find them as magical, if not more so, at the age of 57 than I did when I saw them for the first time in New Hampshire when I was 14.  Maybe because I know I don't have as many fire flies in my future from this point forward.  Getting older changes your perspectives in a lot of ways you'd never even begin to take into consideration when you're 14.  You don't comprehend death in a finite way, especially your own.  At 14 you're going to live forever.  At 57 I'm glad I'm not going to live forever.  All I ask is if I can live to see my grandsons to adulthood.  But every year onward is a gift and every year I'm blessed with I'll be thankful for.

This year has been filled with so many changes.  And much to my surprise I'm finding I'm thriving on them.  Obviously, change doesn't bother me or I'd be writing this at my grandmother's desk in my dining room in Portland, gazing out the window instead of at my new desk here in my living room in Livonia, Michigan.  No window view here, but I have items scattered on the shelves that mean a lot to me and I find myself gazing up at them instead whenever I'm trying to think of a word or get lost in thought.  

I just got off the phone with Dear Hubby.  He's on his way, driving home, stopping in Idaho tonite on his way back to Michigan.  He should arrive here sometime on Saturday.  He told me this morning that even tho he enjoyed his visit out there it really isn't home any more.  He can't wait to get here to see us all again.  He drove by our old house, visited with our neighbors there who came out to greet him when he drove up and they realized who he was.  Many of them we lived next door to for 25 years or more. He said it was nice to see everyone but looking at the house gave him such a strange feeling.  I loved that old house, even tho it felt sometimes like it was falling down around our ears.  Old houses require a lot of TLC but grandchildren require more.  Our plan had been to redo it all once the boys were in school full time and I got back to working a 'real ' job.  A real job...right.  That has to be something a person who's never raised kids would say out of total ignorance.  Shall we say a job out in the working world?  Whatever.  But our plans weren't the Lord's plans.  And our little house sits there, a diamond in the rough for someone else with plans to come along and make it into the home of their dreams.  And what they'll have is a house that is filled with the ghosts of my family and whispers of love and wonderful, wonderful memories.

I am not homesick.  I can not tell you how content I am here.  But my entire life was lived in the Northwest.  My history.  And sometimes I feel a little shell-shocked when I think of how fast we packed up and moved 2400 miles away.  But if someone was to offer me the same opportunity heading back westward, I'd say no.  No thank you.  Not even remotely interested.

And I don't even know why.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. ~ Thomas Edison

I have a day to myself.  My daughter-in-law is flying to Portland for a few days and wanted to spend today with the grandboys before leaving on her flight tonite.  I always look forward to days like today.  And yet I wander around the house like I'm busy looking for something I've lost when the boys aren't around.  It's 10:30 and so far I've read my Bible for half an hour, ridden my exercise bike for an hour, vacuumed the house, done 3 loads of laundry, spot-cleaned the carpet where sticky drips of juice have acted as dirt magnets, filled the bird feeder, watered my flowers.  Rearranged the storage bins in the exercise room.

Next on my to-do list?

Get my daughter's iPod and practice playing Angry Birds for a while.  It's one game I can play with my grandson Dylan who's 5.  And he seriously kills me on every level.

Very humbling.

It's so lonely when you don't even know yourself.

We women have lost something along the way.  A clear perspective of what womanhood is all about.  Have we ever had a clear perspective, really?  From the beginning of time our welfare had been dictated by the men in our lives and social mores from the cradle to the grave.  Until the 1960s unleashed Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer into our realm and we began asking ourselves, "Is that all there is?"  And as it was in the days of Susan B. Anthony and the Suffragettes, banding together into numbers, legions of women standing together, brought about great change.

Was it good change?  Truly?

Equal rights, equal pay.  The ability to buy a house as a single woman.  Being able to adopt a child.  To have a child out of wedlock and not be condemned for it.  Sexual freedom. 

I'm reading a book right now that's making me wonder about all of this.  It's making me wonder about the women in the 1960s who didn't want the changes, who were frightened and threatened by them.  The ones who didn't embrace them.  The ones who were content being traditional wives and mothers in traditional roles.  Who found fulfillment in caring for a home and a family.  The ones who were made to feel less than  a 'real' woman because they weren't wanting to be 'liberated'.  The ones who didn't feel they needed to be let out of the cage. 

My mother was a woman in her later 30s when the Women's Liberation movement peaked.  She never became a bra-burning feminist but I can remember the bitterness and resentment that seemed to sour her soul and made her lash out at my father.  I remember the upheaval and tension it brought to our home.  In all honesty, in things she said to me, I don't know if she ever should have married in the first place.  A lot of what she said to me shouldn't have been shared with me.  A lot of it was too adult for a young adolescent girl to absorb or understand.  How did that affect me?  How did it color my own thoughts and choices as I reached adulthood?  I can not begin to tell you the times I'd say to myself, "If I ever do get married I won't say or do or be like that."  And I haven't been.

The trouble with trying to change long-time societal traditions is we humans have the tendency to go at it in a too-hurried impulsive way.  Without putting a lot of deep thought and meditation into it.  We jump on the band wagon, we get the world in an uproar, and then it's the next generation...and the generation after that...who have to pick up all the pieces and try to put them all together in a cohesive way that makes sense.  And for those who weren't there and didn't witness the way the original changes came about first hand, they don't have a clear picture as to how those puzzle pieces should go.  They have to try each one first one way, then another.  Some don't ever finish the puzzle because they have no clue how to complete it. 

Some of the changes brought about by my mother's generation, the Equal Rights Amendment for one, were good for women.  But it's been the changes within our inner psyche that have faced more challenges than any other time in history, I think.  Because even tho we get the same pay, we have the same rights, as men do we've also lost something along the way.  We've lost our sense of who we really are.  Not as mothers and wives...but of our true inner selves.  I don't think we really know where we stand sexually.  Sexual freedom doesn't bring sexual fulfillment.  Our basic nature isn't to be 'tough' and you have to be tough to survive in a man's world.  I think it has brought a sense of anxious vulnerability to us.  Do we really know what our role in this world of today is?

No matter how each of us chooses to live our lives, I think we women ought to respect each others choices.  We don't need to condemn or judge or ridicule.  If what we do and how we live brings us inner peace and contentment I do believe that's the ultimate goal of each one of us.  Or maybe, as a daughter of the 60s, I'm bringing too much of my own experience into this.  Maybe I'm assuming my daughter's generation just seems a little lost in the mire of what this world is becoming.  Maybe I'm seeing something that isn't really there.

But I don't think so.  I don't see where the 'liberation' their grandmothers dreamed for them has changed their world for the better.