look around

When I think back on our childhood home, I think of a large house with front and back porches, a large kitchen, a front room, a living room, a dining room, five bedrooms and a bath, plus a few "wash houses" connected to the kitchen. Sounds big, right?

Oh, so wrong! Upon a visit many, many years later as I stood outside in the back, my mind spun. How had these new owners shrunk the house???? Truly I was speechless! And inside the rooms were tiny - only the kitchen had room to swing a cat! 

I guess as our minds and bodies grow, our environment shrinks! Even now, in our current small kitchen, I realize that we used to store the boys' bikes in the kitchen because we had no garage and they would have been stolen off our stoop. Now we have a lovely little table in front of the window where the bikes leaned and I can't imagine it any other way. And I was an adult both times! Yet it seems like another lifetime/place.

So maybe its just our environmental scans that change! I know that because I am basically not tuned into detail, I adapt very quickly to my surroundings on general feelings, not specifics. I guess that's why when time passes and I return to once well-known places I am nearly always astounded!

I am such a cheap date!

moral compass

Moral compass.

How often we hear that combination of words. But defining that concept is much harder. I wonder if one puts aside all the religious patter of whatever ilk, and narrows it's origin down to a person(s) who was influential to you as a child -be it mother, father, grandparent, neighbor, cleric, teacher - and showed you how to get along in the world. From the earliest lesson of sharing toys to the larger world of social accommodation. Doesn't it all boil down to compassion? What interpersonal relationship whether within your household or between nations wouldn't be bettered with simple attitudes of compassion. That monstrously easy/difficult task of seeing the other person's side.

I will never forget the times around our supper table during childhood and I would be spouting off about some "injustice" that happened to me from the teacher and Mother telling me to think of how difficult her task is to keep all those boys under control as well as teach all those classes, etc., etc. Was I grateful for this sage insight then? - not on your life! But looking back, I see how the molding took place. Bit by bit we try to smooth the pugnacious  edges of our children as they grow.

But that is our privileged background! Suppose you never had that mentor playing devil's advocate and were allowed to pursue your own ego-driven sensibilities?

Is that why these loners - be they in ordinary neighborhoods or the White House - operate in such a vacuum?

the parlor

Grandma's parlor was a place of mystery.

Well, actually, the whole house was somewhat off limits. I remember as children when we went to aunts and uncles houses we would rollick through the house, not wrecking anything, but moving with ease. Grandma, never in the best of health from my earliest recollection, was a woman of principle and woe to him who breached whichever one in question! I didn't exactly fear her, but distance was the prudent thing. So there never was that exploration abandonment within her house anywhere.

But the parlor - the mere word isn't used anymore. let alone the concept - from this perspective 60 + years later remains a dark, dark place, with dark, stiff furniture and a need to pass through quickly or not enter at all! I remember only one time when the adults gathered there with Grandma and we were told tightly that she was having one of her "spells." To this day I don't know if that was heart related or asthma attacks. We were told just to go and play.

And play we did outside in the creeks and meadow, throwing indoor caution to the winds and frolicking to our hearts content.

Yet the parlor still looms.

chemo

chemo

I quite accidentally spilled
a bucket of dirty water
all over the floor.
I hadn't noticed it
sitting behind me
and backed into it.

I will try to 
clean it up.
But you know
its hard to get 
rid of 
every single spot.

Every swipe of my mop
Improves the mess.
But I don't know 
if I got it all.

Hope is,
sunshine
and fresh air
will poke into 
the dark corners
and erase what I
can't reach.

At the Market

I was concentrating on buying apples, tomatoes and humus. Then the lady called to me from another stand at the Farmers Market. Seeing there clearly was no produce, I groaned inwardly thinking politics. But then she said, "I'm from the library."

Magic!!

"So am I, " I said.

The link. We chatted for the next ten minutes. I learned she was new to FCPL as opposed to my recent 35 years, but that she was started at the same library, in the same position as I had all those years ago. And, she was from Reading, PA! What are the chances two ladies from Reading and Lancaster would end up in the same position in Reston VA and meet at a Farmers Market many years later?

 Whatever they are, the chance encounter lit up the gray morning with a lovely light, small-world tap.

At the tone

Frost alert!

What! Wasn't I just wading in the ocean a few weeks ago?!

Yes and yes. Somehow, retirement has added to the speeding up of time, when I anticipated just the opposite. I thought I would sagely ponder the changing seasons, fully extracting the measure of each in a thoughtful manner. Not exactly. Right now I feel as though I'm sliding down into the holidays and my feet are really digging for purchase!

Time now really has few markers. My husband and I constantly muse aloud, "what day is this?" No, we are not addled or dotty, it's just that while working our jobs marshalled the days into place. Your days were carved out by specific tasks or schedules. Now there is this beautiful amorphous blob of time to shape as you will. Heaven, but nothing to do with knowing what day it is!

pick up that broom

Sweeping the front stoop is rather like making one's bed in the morning. Endless. But as some naval commander recently wrote a book about, making one's bed perfectly every morning is a small, but important course correction for the day! It's taking one simple task, performing it well, and off you go - Bob's your uncle!

As your broom sweeps away debris of all kinds from the steps and walk, metaphorically you are sweeping away the night fog from your brain perhaps. Simple movement. Not profound. And yet, when you look at the cleared area, satisfaction smiles within!

I remember my mother sweeping endlessly - that broom cleaned the kitchen, the wash houses, the porches and the walks. And I remember her smiles. Simple task, big dividends. 

Order out of chaos. A walk, a day, a life.