Writing Prompts and Secret Blogs

I had to resort to looking at writing prompts to come up with a topic today. That won’t be true come Saturday, having several fun things on my day planner to report on by then. But today I’m still in a dry spell. So what writing prompt did I pick from the list of 365? I went with the one listed for July 9^th…the day I’m actually writing this post which is: “Keep out! Who is the one person you hope isn’t reading your blog and why?” If you want to challenge the writer within---and I do---you can’t pick and choose the prompts that come easy for you.

I was, however, tempted to pick July 16^th which was: “Dream home. You win a contest to build your dream home. Draft the plans.” I drew my first set of house plans when I was 13 or 14 and I haven’t stopped designing houses in my head and often on paper ever since. Dead center of my first house was a three stories high, round foyer containing a spiral staircase with a glass dome overhead. Two wings went off the foyer---one the formal living room and a library, and the other for the kitchen and dining room. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a massive landing overlooking the foyer. Kids. What do they know about anything? When I ran across those plans as an adult, the house looked like a brick prison with its flat roof and with all the windows at the back. Over the years my house planning aspirations have changed. The last set of plans I drew up since becoming a widow was a one bedroom house the size of a two car garage. But both my first and last imagery houses were built on Lake Michigan.

“Who is the one person you hope isn’t reading your blog and why?” It wasn’t my husband when he was alive and I was blogging on a stroke support site. I was writing about my experiences as his caregiver and I'd often read what I wrote to him as a way of communicating. And I have Oprah’s back-then fad of writing a gratitude journal to thank for finding humor in my upside down world. After Don’s stroke I was under enormous stress. He had lost his ability to walk, the use of his right arm and his speech. It took six months of speech therapy just to learn to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and they weren’t reliable even at that, so having “conversations” literally took hours where I had to debate both sides of what we needed to do to move forward. He thought he was going to get his old life back and I knew that was impossible.

The other person in world who I really want to read my blog is oldest my niece and she often does. It keeps me striving to be fair, honest and without embellishments when I write about my family. I love her like a daughter and wouldn't most people want their daughters to understand where you’ve been and where you’re at in life? (Patience, I am getting to the list of those who I don’t want to read my blog.)

Only a few others have had a personal invitation to read my blog: 1) a friend I've had since I was five; 2) a friend I met through my husband 48 years ago; 3) one of my Red Hat Sisters and 4) one of my Gathering Girls pals. The two old friends are...well, everything you'd want in an old friend (except they both live out of state) and like my niece, the thought that they might see what I've written keeps me striving to be as accurate as possible when I share memories here. The Red Hatter is a writer of immense talent and she understands that you have to dive deep into your head to write memoir and journal-type stuff---spilling the good, bad and the ugly along the way. She's only read my blog a few times out of curiosity. My Gathering Girls friend may be reading more frequently but she’s a genuinely nice person who’d never intentionally hurt anyone by repeating something negative I might have written. Trust. The bottom line is I trust all these ladies not to use what they read here as gossip fodder.

As you can see, I don't make a habit out of inviting people in my offline life to read my blog although I make no secret of it. A link to my blog is even in my bio on Facebook but to the best of my knowledge only one person has actually found it buried in the fine print and have been here to read---Tim, the son-I-wish-I-had. Tim and I are extreme opposites in our politics and Pro-life/Pro-choice support. He’s very religious and I call myself an agnostic but we’ve had many respectful, in-depth conversations so I know he wasn’t and won’t be shocked or offended by anything he reads here. I can’t say that about most of the people I come in contact with in this very conservative county in West Michigan and I have not been willing to take that chance. Until the past few years, I’ve gone above and beyond to hide my opinions on controversial topics and core values. I'm still very careful. Why? Out of fear of being ostracized. If someone in the blog community doesn't like you based on your world views, they'll just move on and you’d never know about it. In person, it's more complicated.... ©

Easier said than done.

Times Change and Husbands Die

 

Yesterday morning I watched my new 15 foot white pine tree get planted back in the area where earlier this summer I had to have three trees removed.  It wasn’t an easy planting because of all the tree roots underground that had to be cut out with an axes and the wooded space the Bob Cat had to work in was like a Chinese puzzle for the driver to solve. My new green friend is beautiful, though. It gives me back my sense of privacy and the tree was well worth the $600 I had to pay.

After the tree crew left I decided I need a new garden sculpture to use in front of a white decorative fence near-by and where some of my husband’s ashes reside. The two metal chickens I’ve been using by the fence are looking tacky so off I went on a mission to check out a country garden center, hoping to find a good sale. No such luck but I did manage to take a wrong turn coming home and ended up on a designated Nature Beauty road that wound around and up and down and finally brought me to a bridge where I could connect with a road I knew would take me home. I’d been lost in that ‘Bermuda Triangle’ before so I wasn’t too worried but it’s at times like that when I start missing my husband all over again. He was my GPS. He grew up in this end of town and knew all its secrets.

If I had a smart phone I could get an app to replace my husband’s knowledge of back roads and highways but sometimes it's a good thing to get lost. Life can get too hum-drum and predictable when we just go through the motions of living. We drift from place to place, from season to season without taking in the scenery that passes by. Then we get lost and we’re forced to take note of things like the ladder-like pattern of shadows on the road ahead cast by WPA trees planted in the 1930s, the sun-dabbled creek off in the distance, the sound of gravel crunching under car tires and an early sign of fall when you see a truck loaded apple crates leaving an orchard. Times change and husbands die and maybe using a GPS would be a constant reminder of those irrefutable facts? Maybe it’s better to get lost once in a while on a beautiful afternoon.

A couple of young guys came this week to clean my carpeting. I’m running behind. This is something I usually have done in the spring but back then I was a tad busy with my flooded basement followed closely on its heels by my broken arm. Life rolling along; there’s always something we can use for excuses for why we don’t do what should be done. The house looks and smells great again and the two cleaning techs had a real appreciation for art so it was fun seeing my house through their eyes. One of them was a college student, an aspiring artist, who stood in front a cowboy print for the longest time as fascinated by its detail as my husband and I were the day we bought the scratchboard.

It must be nice to be a college professor or someone in a career that brings them in contact with young people like these two guys. I fed off their enthusiasm and joy of seeing stuff they’d never seen before and I felt like they enjoyed hearing what I had to say. How cool is that! Old people are okay for me to hang around with---I am one, what else am I going to say? But septuagenarians don’t get excited over much anymore. Times change and husbands die and maybe I do really need to become a cougar after all? That is a JOKE, people. Don’t call the paddy wagon to haul me off to get my values tuned up at the local mental health hospital. What I’m trying to say is it’s been a long time since I’ve been around people who love to learn for learning’s sake. I was like that in my not too distant past and it was one of the things that bonded my husband and me. When kids come along like my carpet cleaners, I see myself and that makes me long to be young again.

On a different note May Sarton wrote something in a book I'm reading that speaks to me: “A life extended in a thousand directions risks dispersion and madness. A kite can fly only when it is held taut by a string in a hand and then catches the wind. Today I am a kite entangled in a tree and there is no one to free me for flight.”

Don held my string.
He helped me fly.
But times change
and husbands die.
I untangle myself
from tree after tree
but whether or not
I find wind again
remains to be seen. ©

* The frog up above is a garden statue I'm lusting after. The only reason I don't get it is because the place I need a statue is a little memorial corner of the yard and my husband wasn't into frogs, yoga or Zen.  Neither am I either but I love the silly expression on that frog's face.

Are You a Thistle or a Rose?

 As I sat here in my frumpily bathrobe trying to decide what to blog about I got to thinking about how much we change through out our lives. My skin, for example, is as leathery and “full of character” as a pair of alligator shoes I bought back in the 1960s. God, those high heels had the power to turn on my sexy side and I felt great when ever I wore them! I don’t even remember the last time I wanted to look sexy and it amuses me that my favorite footwear, now, is a colorful pair of chunky Crocs. Today their little crocodile logo smiling up at me seems to say, Hey, old lady, you’re wearing rubber and that’s about as fashionable as wearing a paper sack. There were a couple of decades in my life when I cared about such things but that gave way to caring more about comfort and I’ve never looked back---and apparently not in a mirror either. I need a make-over.

Outward appearances aside, the internal changes we experience in our lifetime are much harder to critique. Taken as a whole, I am happy with the emotional, intellectual and spiritual grown and progression I’ve experienced from my toddler days to these toddling old-person days. I’ve had many ‘aha moments’---moments of comprehension, inspiration and realization of what life is all about. And as most of us do as we age, I’ve made a mental catalog of all the opportunities I’ve grabbed hold of and those I’ve let slip through my hands. I also know the points in my life when I could have done better, made better choices and I comfort myself by knowing that if I had known better at the time, I would have done better. Wouldn’t we all?

Where is all of this reflection leading to? Damned if I know. I guess I’m trying to decide if I’ve gotten to the point May Sarton was at when she wrote the following in her memoir titled, At Seventy.  “I love being old,” she wrote, “Because I am more myself than I’ve ever been. There is less conflict. I am happier, more balanced and more powerful.” If I take widowhood out of the equation and the temporary (I hope) sadness that comes with it I would agree with what May is saying here and I would chime in, "me too!" Old age comes with a lot of intrinsic advantages if you’re open to embracing them. In the same book she also wrote: “In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing---the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”  I guess I would reshape the idea by saying the more pain and lows we’ve experienced in life the more opportunities we have to evolve into an empathic, thought-provoking and wise person as we age. Of course, it could go the other way, too, and we could let life beat us down and become bitter, resentful and crotchety. Somewhere along the line we all have to make a decision on how we process our pasts and use them to drive the rest of our lives. What’s your choice? Do you want to be a thistle or a rose?  ©

“We have to dare to be ourselves,

however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

May Sarton