Still learning what it all means

I just turned 56 years old. Where has the time gone? Where have I been all my life? How did I get here?

Just like the song, “7 Years” by Lucas Graham, I turned around and I was 10, chasing after crayfish shells along the creek and reading fairy tales that I believed in. I turned around again and I was 21, and married. Married at 21?! Wow.

I turned around and I was 30, with three little children, 34 and a single parent. Spin ‘round again and crowding 50 and so many questions; and now here I am suddenly closer to 60 and oh my, I’m still feeling as if I haven’t yet begun to know who I truly am.

I was born the day before Halloween and as a kid my birthdays always were full of spooky celebrations with my girlfriends. 

We would sit in the dark and pass around bowls peeled grapes, cold spaghetti, jiggle Jell-O, (eyes, guts, and brains) --pseudo body parts--that my mom had prepared for us giggly goofs to sink our fingers into while we sat in a circle and told ghost stories. It was gross. It was so much fun.

Then, my mom would top it all off with a birthday cake that had a new Barbie doll standing in the middle of an inverted sponge cake that billowed outward and was decorated like Barbie’s party dress. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and best of all; the Barbie was mine when all the cake was gone.

Inside the cake, my mom had hidden ten-cent pieces wrapped in wax paper. Magically we all managed to find a dime in our piece of cake. It was amazing and I, for one, felt rich.

Ten cents would buy a handful of candy at the local store near the school. I think it even bought a chocolate bar.

When I was one year old, I put my face in my birthday cake. Plunk. Just like that. Oh, the undeniable free spirit of the young at heart. I did it again when I turned 18, a calculated move. Plunk. Hilarious.

I still have my Barbie dolls in a box. I still love birthday cake, spooky stories, and chocolate, and fairy tales.

I still wonder where am I going and what this woman who is me is going to learn about herself today. Some of it I will like, and some of it I won’t.

I wonder about the tomorrow river and the circumstances that are sure to come along, as they always do, that I will not understand and if I will remember to do as Pema Chodron wrote: 

“The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart—to the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart. You are given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.”

Here I go.

Hello Me, I'm back

 I’ve been away.

I’d love to say it was because I was in the places of my heart--hiking the Pacific Coast trail or the magnificent mountain territory of Wyoming or long highway under the clear blue skies of Iceland.

Nope. Alas, those destinations remain in my shoebox full of goals called a bucket list.

I’ve been away from the page because I was very unhappy and I don’t write well at all when I am unhappy.

A part of my life had become unmanageable, like really bad hair. I left it uncombed too long, it got matted and mouse-nested and instead of giving it loving care, I just gathered up my unhappiness in a bun and pretended it was okay, and made excuses for why I should live with it. It stole my sense of things and buried it in the manure pile behind the barn.

I kept my mouth shut and my head down and I got sideswiped by a severe case of codependency. I got lost and I didn’t really know how to find my way back to being true to myself.

I would look back at my path over the last few years and think, “Seriously? Haven’t I had enough rough patches? When is my turn for once? Why does life have to be so hard all the time? I must deserve it.”

I fed the bad wolf. I played the victim role to a “T.”  

I wore that long, flowing black cape of unhappiness like a pro. Sometimes it was two city blocks long, double-knotted around my neck. Sometimes my unhappiness cape was there with me in the shower, it covered my pajamas at night, and lay around my feet at the kitchen table in the morning during breakfast.

Even when I was driving in my car my cape followed behind me billowing in the wind and as soon as I slowed down it snapped to a stop and fell in around me.

But let’s be clear on one thing. This was not depression. This was failure to be true to myself and I used all the tricks and excuses and scenarios in the book to convince myself why I could not just stand up and say “No” to this black caped sleuth.

And then something happened. That one needle in the haystack of unhappiness poked me in the toe and woke me up. It was time for change, to follow through on difficult decisions, and be true to me. I got my wings back.

Every story starts with that first word, maybe three.

I’ve been away.

Chocolate is the root of all good things

 I’m sitting here at my writing desk looking for inspiration in the tiny ball chocolates wrapped in tinfoil that were left over from the annual Easter Egg Hunt held here almost a month ago.

Perhaps I should clarify and fess up. The chocolates weren’t exactly “leftovers.” I stashed a few (okay maybe more) handfuls of them in the cupboard just for me—and up high enough that one had to stand on a chair to reach them.

And just the other day I also found a few wayward plastic eggs strewn about the farm yard still with chocolates balls inside. The grandchildren missed these when they were running around that day like the break after the eight-ball, bouncing off bushes and tree stumps in search of sweet treasures.

I ate all the contents of those eggs too—even the contents of the one I found splayed open on the ground. So what if the tinfoil was muddy. The chocolate inside of that was perfectly fine. It wasn’t until I popped it in my mouth and bit into it did I wonder if my resident nemesis squirrel had purposely opened the egg, taken the chocolate ball out, rolled it around in the dirt and put it back—just to spite me—knowing full well and that I would eat it anyway.

Let’s face it. Chocolate fixes everything—always has, always will—and it certainly is making it easier for me to tolerate the dragging carcass of cool weather that I liken to Chinese water torture—slow and relentless.

I keep trying to pack away my wool sweaters but they just won’t let go. I’ve gone so far as to have a “Yosemite Sam” temper tantrum that involved stomping my woolies flat under my feet before I throwing them fitfully down the stairs to the basement—only to look down and see the big sweater dragging itself back up the stairs as I scolded it like a small child for even thinking I would wear it again before next December.

Maybe if I eat more chocolate warm weather will come quicker.

The trouble is, now I have a fiancée who is an equally enamored chocoholic and the proportions of said “fixer of all my problems” isn’t as big as it used to be.

Does this mean I have to share?

Doesn’t he know how much chocolate is required by the “love of his life” in order to keep the peace?

Come to think of it, does he even know how much I like to eat and that I’ve been known to consume (albeit not all at once) a whole pizza by myself, a box of Kraft Dinner, all four servings of chocolate pudding, or vacuum up a large bag of potato chips and a vat of sour cream in between television commercials?

Oh no. Does this mean I have to share the TV remote too? 

This is definitely going to require more chocolate on my half of the coffee table.

Spring hatches memories of yesterday

You never really know how much poop a dog puts out until the snow melts. 

And when it comes time to clean up, nobody – not even my vigorous, dive-into-anything grandchildren want to make that extra five bucks cleaning up dog poop. 

It seems they’d rather have a week’s worth of extra household chores added to their list (without remuneration) or be made to eat a plate of vegetables they detest, than to spend time with a shovel and plastic bag scooping up the wet, soggy, smelly droppings of the canine. Go figure.

The snow is all but gone—at least for today. And despite the jokers posting cartoons on Facebook of “Canadian Spring” that shows a guy in a t-shirt on Monday and encased in a snowsuit by Wednesday, I am clearing my slate for the upcoming weekend, which I predict to be the crack that sends Old Man Winter packing his bag of chills. 

With each successive day where temperatures hover around the melting point, I think about my childhood—like the days of black rubbers with the red stripe, called “pig boots” used in robust playing fields called puddles.  

The waters of Frog Creek would start low in the spring and then rise with May showers. In those days, I wanted to be a hundred things when I grew up, one of which was a biologist. (Come to think of it, I still want to be 100 things.)

I would venture out along the bending and withered creek in search of treasures. I’d plunk along in my pig boots picking up tidbit souvenirs uncovered by spring--bird feathers, clam shells, and amputated crayfish pinchers—leftovers from the seagull’s meal.

The pinchers were beautiful to me, nature’s pencil crayons of deep green or fire red, small and fat, and long and sharp that, to a country kid, were a collector’s item. I stored all these marvels together in an old shoebox under my bed where I’d forget about the collection for a month or two.

Needless to say the fermented stench of rotting crayfish parts, clam shells and the like, left my bedroom smelling pretty bad when I finally lifted the lid.

Thawing gravel roads gave way to delightful eruptions of mud that sucked in the handles of broken hockey sticks we had that made great tools for exploring these mucky holes. We shoved them down as far as they would go—to the other side of the world (or so we believed).

But my favorite memory of spring when I was a child had nothing to do with pig boots, puddles, crayfish, or mud. It came each year in a cardboard crate, for which I waited—with all the patience a kid could muster—for my grandmother to bring home. 

The contents meant business to my grandmother, but she knew how much it meant for the “littles” in her life to raise the lid.

And when we did . . . .  Well, there was nothing that smacked of spring like a sea of warm, yellow, soft-smelling, and noisy baby chicks.

The weather of simply living

I’ve been on a learning curve the last two column weeks, mouth mostly closed, ears open and listening to the stories of others—and through theirs was reminded of my own. I learned about literary boundaries and I continue spinning a web of words in my head that will find its way out the end of my fingers and onto the page.

I don’t have cable or satellite television. I stopped that madness, as it pertained to my life at the time, in the spring of 2012. I don’t miss that kind of television at all—not the news programs, the soap operas, nor the prime time weeknight tv dramas and comedy shows, or drone of incessant commercials about hair shampoos and shiny new cars. 

This is not to say I don’t partake in “TV World” once in a while, as I did in mid-January in my hotel room during a weekend in the big city. I was glued to the blue-light eminence that never really loses its addictive quality no matter how long one boycotts it.

And as I did Sunday night, when I watched in its entirety the “88^th Academy Awards,” ceremony “’LIVE’ from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.”

I was parked in front of a flat screen television on a comfy couch in my comfy clothes, with two of my favorite people, amid homemade appetizers of tasty measure, a glass of red in my right, and my left hand at the ready for proverbial “thumbs up” and pumping arm gestures in support of really great movies, sound mixes, adapted screenplays, and the men and women who played the roles that made their big screen pictures a nomination station.

I listened with much interest that night to the very public black and white controversy of who is and who is not getting the roles they believe they deserve.

And I watched and listened with silent honor and speechless admiration to the powerful message of “Til It Happens to You” performed by “Lady Gaga.” The soul filled song is the “Pied Piper” for the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which continues to face controversy and challenges in its groundbreaking movement to open the doors of awareness.

To paraphrase Mark Nepo, “It is essential to bear witness to our own naked stories.”

Nepo goes on to write about the never ending work of relationships and how “each of us in our own time and way move the stones between us, repositioning the heavy things that get in the way, so the life of feeling can continue. The weather of simply living jams things up, and we, like every generation before us, must roll up our pants and sleeves, step into the river, and unclog the flow.

What are the heavy things that get in the way? They are habits of not: not seeing, not hearing, not feeling, not being present, not risking the truth, not risking the heart’s need to live out in the open.”

Every day this life teaches me more about who I am and what matters most to me—but only if I listen.

The truth can set you free

Many, many years ago—26 of them in fact—I was sucker punched in the side of head by someone I was married to.

I was holding my four-year-old daughter at the moment he punched me, and even though it dropped me to the floor my child never left my arms.

Then he said he was going to get his shotgun and the words drowned my lungs in terror and I could not breathe. At the moment he left the room I leapt from the floor with my child, threw open the doorway to a flight of stairs that led outside, and ran like hell.

I was so terrified, that I left my other child—a one year old—playing on the kitchen floor because I didn’t think I had time to stop and pick her up.

I tore up those stairs like a steaming locomotive and burst into the front yard of the little suburb street of the city I lived in, and ran.

Instantly, he was behind me and I expected to be shot.

There was no one around to help me.

I made it to the neighbor’s front yard across the street before that man grabbed me, and when I turned around to face him he didn’t have a gun after all.

I pushed myself to the ground, determined to cement myself there on the grass, arms wrapped around my daughter, as I listened to that man shout abusive violations as he pulled at my shirt.

Within the hour I was back in the house with him trying silently to figure out what I’d done to deserve that.

I couldn’t walk straight for a week because that punch damaged my equilibrium and when I went to the doctor about it, I lied to him about how I got that way.

The man who punched me never apologized and I never talked to him about what he had done to me. I didn’t want to make him mad. I believed I could fix it by myself with magical thinking, library books on relationships, and by just keeping my mouth shut.

I never told anyone about that time nor any of the other times when he got really mad and said things that leveled my self esteem.

It took me another five years after that punch before I believed in myself enough and found the courage and made the choice to stand up for my children and myself and walk away.

When I finally made the decision to leave him, it got much harder for me than I ever imagined, but I kept my eyes ahead. I asked for help, told my truth, and learned just how amazing that village of support is that awaited me when I made a stand.

I think one of the hardest things in the world is watching another woman walk a really hard road, a situation unique in its own right and yet not so far off a path I once walked.  

I know all about magical thinking, second-guessing yourself, feeling helpless, alone, empty, and overwhelmed.

Change is hard, change is damn scary. “Stepping onto a brand, new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation which is not nurturing to the whole woman.”

I listen. I hear.

Keep going. Reach out. Ask for help.

Eyes ahead.

You are not alone.

And again.

Stand. Stand. Stand.

Do right by yourself

So goes the Universe, ebbing and flowing over our lives, swirling experiences produced of free will mixed with an unfolding set plan we often do not understand.

Or so I believe, anyway.

Many of us remain stuck in old ways that aren’t working for us, and yet we are unwilling to change the one thing that would change everything. We question what our heart tells us and keep doing what we’ve always done because it is grossly familiar and the unknown is a scary place.

Pay attention to your intuition. Follow it. It speaks the truth.

Or so I believe, anyway.

Of particular interest to me, of late, are the wise little children around me who don’t worry what others think. They believe in their voice. They ask for what they want and need and aren’t afraid to put themselves first. 

Some of the women out there could take a lesson or two from the primary school of thought and start acting like the grown ups they think they are. 

We are not born to be quiet, hide our emotions, our wants, and our needs. Somewhere along the line, some of us lost our way—were encouraged and convinced by selfish forces to put those precious gifts of individuality at the back of the line. Some of us forgot that our individual precious inside happiness matters. What a shame.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that children are the greatest teachers. They are more honest with their immediate feelings than most any other living creature on earth. They are not afraid to wear their heart on their sleeve.

You there. Don’t use others as excuses to hide behind. Do not blame the other for what is wrong in your own life. Find better things to do than soak in self-imposed sticky pudding excuses for not standing up, hard as it may be, and owning yourself.

This life is not about what someone else has to fix in his or her own life. This is about what you are willing to live with and what you are not, and what makes you happy and what does not. No one else can do that for you.

Today, begin to believe you are a phenomenally strong woman who knows for sure that choice is possible and that “stepping onto a brand, new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation which is not nurturing to the whole woman.”

If you want positive change, start with you. If you need help, ask for it.

The late Martha Graham, one of the pioneers of modern dance, believed that we learn by practice.

“Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.”

Or so I believe, anyway.

An unforgettable moment on ice

Ice fishing. Ever since I tried it for the first time two years ago, the sport has remained my #1 favourite pastime of the winter season.

I’ve spent countless blocks of time in the fishing tackle aisle at local hardware stores, reading package specs of small bait hooks, trying out ice fishing rod and reel sets that beg to be rescued from the store shelf and put to work on landing the big one.

I’ve watched YouTube videos on how to tie fishing knots and how to spool a spinning reel, and I’ve joined the ranks of ice-fishing websites.  

I love the sport so much I daydream about taking a day off middle of the week and sitting in an ice shack for the whole day, quiet, and focused, and feeling like I’d won the lottery because it wasn’t yet the weekend.

The entire ice fishing experience fills me up with such excitement that my heartbeat races the closer I get to my fishing destination. It’s the truth.

Driving on a frozen lake to get to where the fish are still fills me with wonder at the scientific process of how ice is made, across miles of a liquid sea of fresh water.

I’m 55 years old and I feel like a little kid, eyes big as saucers, when I see an ice auger drill that butter soft hole in the ice until the volcano of winter white shavings change to an icy blue snow cone mixed with the water that signals the break through. Amazing.

And then there’s the refracted sunlight that bounces back through the ice-hole, decorating the auger rings and lighting up the minnow on my hook, on its way down, down, down, glowing until the dark deep waters swallow it up.  

I’ve read the ice fishing advice that suggests that the best thing about ice fishing is that you don’t need a lot of equipment. It’s a simple pleasure.  

And it’s a newborn fantastic experience every time, when I see the bobber dip below the surface and get dragged down with a fish on—and the excitement of pulling up my line with my hands, in what always seems like a forever moment, and spotting the fish I hooked, lit up in the light of the ice hole like a piece of gold as I pull it through.

I used to think that part was the best thing about ice fishing. I was wrong.

The best part, the part I will never forget, happened this past Saturday when I looked out the window of the ice shack at my 10 year old grandson who was my fishing partner, on his inaugural ice fishing adventure.

He’d been out there fishing a hole for quite some time on his own, deep in concentration. As he was reeling in his line, no fish on, just in the moment he was, he turned and looked back at me and smiled. He was hooked.

Now that, folks, was a Kodak moment.

Feline capers good for a laugh

My cats know the exact moment that the dogs leave my house for their trip home. Up the stairs from the basement they barrel like steaming locomotives to form a synchronized three-abreast perch on the porch windowsill. There they watch attentively as their canine nemeses clamor into the cab of my boyfriend’s truck.

After the truck leaves the driveway the cats pile three-high with eyes as big as saucers in front of the kitchen door and clamor to get in before one of the dogs shows up again. It’s hilarious.

Once inside, they scatter like the break shot after the eight ball, and disperse in all directions. 

One heads straight for the dog dish to finish off any remaining morsels of food as if I’ve starved it for a week. Another makes a beeline for the living room where it drops to the floor and writhes there purring and stretching its legs and full of glee at the disappearance of the canine rulers. The third cat, the troublemaker, first checks all the rooms to make sure the coast really is clear and then—like clockwork—pounces on the other two, spurring feline follies that ricochet off walls and furniture and burn pent up energy after two days of skulking in the basement.

As for me, I do a reconnaissance walk through the house to see if the little dog with a big ego had left me a pee present on the floor beside my bed. 

In a moment of gesturing to protect myself as two cats practiced airborne moves from the “Matrix” movie I stepped in something warm and gooey that oozed between my bare toes.

I took up an impressively difficult yoga pose and balanced precariously on my clean foot as three messy possibilities were considered.

Dog poop, dog vomit, or cat throw up.

I hoped for the latter until I remembered that I’d recently fed my cat worm pills and wondered if what I had just stepped in were the un-dead writhing beasts expelled onto the bedroom floor.

I was afraid to move so I just stood there on one foot making improper use of the English language.

“They” say curiosity killed the cat. I was pretty sure that if I looked at the unknown byproduct seeping between my toes, my curiosity would kill the daylong craving I had for a creamy chocolate bar.

I made a plan to glance quickly and then hop to the bathroom and have a shower hot enough to cook a bird and the tapeworms I was convinced were sucking on my big toe.

I looked down to see the ripe and blackened banana squishing up between my toes that I’d peeled two mornings prior while sitting in my reading chair. I’d forgotten it there and the cats had found it, toppling the fermented fruit to the floor beside my bed. 

I was so happy I almost reached down and scooped up some banana goo on my finger to eat.

Thank goodness for second thoughts.

Say, what's that up ahead?

I finished my gift shopping two days before Christmas and on the evening of December 23^rd, I wrapped presents like the dickens. 

At 9 a.m. Christmas Eve morning I started my holiday baking and despite my best efforts, only my world famous butter tarts and homemade chocolate truffles rolled off the assembly line.

I’m a super woman but I just didn’t have my super power battery pack on that day. The “best ever” fudge, coconut macaroons, sugar cookies, rocky road and magic cookie bars did not make it from recipe to table.

I slid into Christmas holding onto the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. I didn’t make it without nicking the skin off the shin of that grandiose timeline that presses against us like concrete—and I suppose I didn’t get my gold stars for pulling off the perfect smoothie of a holiday season.

But who really cared? No one, that’s who. All that really mattered already was perfect—family together in love, with thankful hearts and gratitude.

Oh, the pressures that rain down on us to “get things done” before the holidays hit and oh, how so much of it is fleeting nonsense.

“We could never have guessed, we were already blessed where we are  . . ,” crooned the great James Taylor in the song “Up Er Mei.”

Sing it again, James.

And here I am, standing just inside 2016 with a butter tart and a dozen of my famous truffles left over, and all of it calling my name.

I don’t generally make New Year’s resolutions because I tend not to follow through. I have vowed to lose 30 pounds before the end of July but maybe I’ll move my “start that weight loss” date from today until next week.

I’d like to sail my boat more often to the places on Rainy Lake that eluded me last summer—mostly because I was afraid of the wind. Go figure.

I would like to spend more time with the love in my life, plant more strawberries and a bigger garden, save money, paint the inside of my house, exercise more, pick up my guitar and play it for once in 10 years, read more books, and raise my own puppy and make it my goal in life to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.   

And sometimes I want to be more wild and crazy than I already am, to break out and throw away the list and live out loud because of what I know to be true—that there are no guarantees. Life can change in an instant.

“Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming, “WOO HOO, what a ride!”

Here I go. Say, what’s that up ahead? Looks like a great big adventure to me.

A merry little Christmas story

“What if I choose not to believe?”

It’s a line from one of my favorite movies of the holiday season, “The Santa Claus.”  

I’ve always believed in the power of mystery and magic and the older I get the more I understand that my attitude towards everything really is everything.

I have an old rotary dial telephone in my kitchen—not wired in—but yet a direct line to the North Pole.

No “elf on the shelf in my house.” I’m the elf.

I can call the big guy in the red suit at any given hour on any given day and have a heart to heart.

My grandchildren know about the phone too, and this time of year it’s an especially popular item in my neck of the woods. It’s mystery and magic.

My grandchildren also know that the North Pole never says a word in return. Instead, the other end of the line has the best listening skills of all. The North Pole is a “mouth closed, ears open, presence available,” kind of mystery and magic connection.

You’d be surprised how many times I’ve picked up that phone, too, and made my own wishes known to the mystery and magic. Granted I’ve asked for “grown up” things—patience (because sometimes mine lasts about as long as my pinkie finger in a clothespin,) world peace, a break on my taxes, and a rush job on getting answers for some of my “issues.”

Why, just the other day after fighting my way into the porch with the “real” big Christmas tree I’d purchased and laying waste to the rug with sawdust after a pathetic attempt to saw a slice off the trunk, did I call the North Pole.

I was good and hot under the collar. I told the North Pole all about it and that I was swearing off the one-woman Paul Bunyan exploration for a Christmas tree. Next year I was going to instruct my “honey-do” to  “pick whatever tree you like honey, it’s not my department.”

Don’t get me wrong; home queens like me have got it together. My mind is a multi-tasking bionic unit like nothing man will ever know. I’m one of a kind. And I also know what a good Christmas tree looks like. I just shouldn’t volunteer to put it up.    

After my rant to the North Pole, a calmer me went back to the tree, now cringing in the corner of the porch—and mathematically evaluated whether or not 15 strings of LED lights, 20 years of ornaments and children’s Christmas art work would be enough to cover the monstrosity I had just purchased. 

At closer attention, I realized the woman with the saw had hacked off the trunk just below the two good branches on the bottom, leaving no room for the tree stand. Awesome. The tree would be just the right height for a dog to pee on—but that’s another story.

Merry Christmas everyone. Don’t stop believing in the mystery and the magic.