Act the way you want to feel

Monday, June 25, 2012

I have a photograph of my late grandmother Florence Drennan on the wall facing where I sit and write. The photo was taken in 1929. Grandma is 14 years old and one of eight young girls in wool cloche-style hats trying to be still for the photographer. Some of them are laughing. My Grandmother has an ear-to-ear closed mouth grin and looks ready to bust a gut at something funny that must have been circulating among them that day so long ago.

I found the photograph among my Grandmother’s things after she died at the age of 91 in 2006. It’s my all-time favorite photo.

It resonates a “carpe diem” lesson for me. The fresh young faces whisper to me the message about not wasting time waiting around for the right moment to do something that makes me happy.  I am reminded to live out loud and that I deserve to be happy.

I think we all deserve to be happy.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about happiness, having recently been introduced to someone who among other attributes just finished reading “The Happiness Project.”

On Page 23 there is a Buddhist quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

I’ve had the same book sitting yet unread on my bookshelf since I bought it shortly after it was published in 2009. I started reading it yesterday.

A counselor I saw in late January while I was on the bleeding edge of a personal tragedy told me outright that I deserved to be happy. At that moment when all was dark and cheerless I really didn’t appreciate the happiness warrant for my life but I soon discovered that he was right and that he was talking about the attitude I take to my life table of contents.

“No deposit, no return.”

I believe in and I love myself. I think I’ve done a very good job of coming back to a full albeit new life, while honoring the one I had to leave behind on that brutally cold winter’s day. I’ve worked very, very hard to do that because I believe I deserve to be happy.

Some people have said to me, “That was fast.”  I try not to let the comment hurt my heart because I know the archaic reaction is usually based on the old and rusty rule of socially acceptable time frames born in another century. But it hurts anyway.

None of us really has any business making a comment like that to someone who has been through the grief grinder. This much I know is true.

It’s very easy to sit in yesterday. There’s no challenge in doing that. The tape reel is recorded and burned and doesn’t mind replaying for us as many times as we would like to sit in on it.

And for all my self-care work there are still times when the past would have me sucked into its movie where I am welcome to mope until everyone else thinks it’s time for me to move forward and direct my own play.

Moving forward through the intersections of life is risky. Look both ways and go.

It is my belief that grief, no matter the source, is not meant to be overcome. I don’t think we are supposed to conquer grief, but—to paraphrase the poet Rumi, to treat it honorably because someday somewhere somehow it may be clearing you out for new delight.

The balance is tedious, constant work. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I do appallingly, but I will never stop striving for everyday happiness again.

Life is windy and as my new friend reminded me, “You can’t change the wind, but you can adjust your sails.” Thank you.

I may be a child of the wind to my dying day, but I’ve got a big sailboat and her name is “Bring It On.”

The bond around here sticks like glue

Monday, June 18, 2012

The news has probably been out there for a long time but I just found that our ear lobes never stop growing.

That’s just great—there goes one more part of my body headed south without my consent.

Perhaps I could postpone the imminent downward droop with duct tape. Goodness knows the super adhesive is my back-up plan for putting other things in their place.

I’ve used duct tape to hold my pinky toe against its digit neighbor so it didn’t hurt so bad after I broke the little buddy kicking a big rock that I couldn’t pick up.

I’ve also used it to tape extra car keys to the underside of my car, although know that I’ve made that a public announcement I’ll be forced to find another locations for said keys.

I’ve also used duct tape as a substitute for a hair removal system on my upper lip.  I only did that once.

I seem to recall that my ex-husband, Peter, used duct tape to wrap my Christmas present. After the flat-stare look on my face, he only did that once as well. 

 

As an entertainment technique I’ve used it to cement my five-year old grandson to the kitchen floor. It was his idea, although I’m sure he got the inspiration from his Granny, who is well-known in her neck of the woods for her (albeit empty threat) cautioning thrown to her mischievous little peppers, that ignoring the house rules will result in being duct-taped to the wall.

My grandson had a rip-roaring time in his attempts to extract himself from the vinyl flooring and in the end required the assistance of his “taper” to wiggle free.

Oddly enough the experience did not deter him from challenging the house rules five minutes after he was re-mobilized.

And all I heard after that was “Can we do that again, Granny?”  In my mind’s futuristic eye I pictured my grandson standing at the front of the class during “Show and Tell” at school as the teacher asked him to share what he’d done over the weekend and him blurting out in pinching detail that his grandmother had duct-taped him to the floor. The teacher would make one call and I’d have a child advocate counselor on my doorstep.

And while I did not follow through, I will admit that I desperately fought the compulsion to duct tape my daughter’s 18-month old golden Labrador to the side of the barn after it ran like a wild racehorse through my yard headed for my garden, during a recent dog-sitting weekender.

My own canine capers, which stood motionless on all fours with their jaws dropped open and struck stupid by the visiting terror, I think would have helped me secure their nemesis after she bowled them both over during a flying leap over my picnic table.

Using my Alpha voice I threatened to duct tape the dog if she didn’t settle down, but my Hurricane Tribe must have tipped her off about my meaningless uttering.

However I did put Mya on the end of a leash and tried to walk the excitement out of her. The result was my upper torso thinking it had just been “dragged down the street by two Great Danes.” I came home dragging my knuckles on the gravel road and duct taped my popped-out shoulder joints back into their sockets.

Currently, as I sit here thinking about how to end this column I realize I am pulling on my ear lobe.

What are some of the best duct tape decisions you ever made? Sometimes you know right away when you do that. Sometimes it takes a bit of looking back over your shoulder to see that you did.

In this moment I cannot lay claim to the latter.

I looked back over my shoulder to see if I’d left the roll of adhesive on my dresser and a big wad of my nice long hair got stuck to a wide upended piece of duct tape that was sticking up from where I’d wrapped my shoulder joint.

Help.

Sometimes I do know what I'm talking about

Monday, June 11, 2012

I don’t imagine a lot of 16 year olds read my column. If my own daughters were still in that age group I know for sure this writing space would be the last place they would cast their eyes, because they’d be sure to find their haphazard and often dramatic ways cloaked in feeble anonymity and spread like alphabet butter in a 600-word essay.

Today my young women are spread across the 20-something years and they have learned—since I began writing “The View From Here” in 2004—to tolerate their mother’s often public musings on their messy bedrooms, unwashed dishes, and piles of dirty laundry et al.

Still, they may roll their eyes. I have loved and raised them as best I could. We’ve had many ups and downs. I’m still learning how it all clicks and so are they.

But I was reminded recently just how tenuous the parent/child mosaic remains out there.

 

Even when parents do the very best they can, 16-year-olds can pack up and leave home under the belief that something better exists outside the four strong walls of love and opportunity they’ve grown up in.

Memories of yesterday flooded back to me, poked at old wounds, cast old shadows of soul drought and of desperate times of the heart.

12 years ago one of my own children left home just short of her 16^th birthday and although I tried to move heaven and earth in as many directions as I could to keep her at home, the winds of her change eventually trumped me.

Most of the time I knew where she was, but sometimes I didn’t and the stress of all of it rotted my stomach. Thank Heaven for a rib cage or my heart would have leapt from my chest in those distressing times.

There was a part of my psyche that wanted to hire Special Forces to kidnap my daughter and plunk her premature would-be independence on a remote island made out of duct tape.

I ended up in counseling and I learned a hard, hard lesson in what degrees of control I had.

My daughter didn’t return to live at home after the age of 16. It broke my heart. I missed out, and so did she, on some good “at home” years and she knows it.

 

My daughter took the bumpy road and it was difficult. She wouldn’t dispute that.

She stopped going to school and because of that choice alone, and the fact that she did not hold herself responsible; the education crust in the pie of life was unfinished. 

If you asked my daughter today she would of course agree that her hindsight is 20/20 on many levels during those tender years. 

I have never stopped believing in her despite some “tough love” choices I chose to make and I am infinitely proud of the wiser woman she is today.

That said, I would still go back in time and try to change her mind the day she packed her things, because from a mother’s point of view it wasn’t the right choice.

But as Leslie Poles Hartley penned, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

In spite of what I cannot change, today I am restless to run screaming down the street with a red flag and magic wand.

I wish 16-year-olds who leave good homes would read this and believe me when I say what a grave lapse in judgment it is.

I wish I could change a young mind just like that. If only it were that easy.

Do the hardest, most unthinkable and most mature thing of all and go home with your suitcase and hug your mother and hug your father and spill your heart, tell the truth, face consequence and accept compromise.

Home is where the heart of your young life is. This much I know is true.

June kickstarts with color

Monday, June 4, 2012

I love the month of June. In fact, aside from my birthday month of October I think June takes the cake. 

I say that now, while my lawn is still two days off another cut. Usually by the time I’m done mowing it and because I have a big yard and there’s only one of me, I’m not quite so thrilled on the bursting green rapid growth that happens in month six.

But today I like it.

I am most in awe of the new green needle tips on all the many branches of the massive evergreen trees that line my driveway. I am at a loss for how something so incredibly huge manages to draw in enough energy each year to produce new green at every finger of its limbs.

It is perhaps the most promising sign there is for me, that life is driven to carry on despite the challenges of getting from A to B. 

Another “awe awe” moment was watching a C-130 Hercules with 20,000 pounds of fuel clear the runway in a heartbeat at the Fort Frances Airport on Sunday afternoon at the end of a very successful annual Fly-In event.

I felt like a 10-year old standing there as the reverberation of the four-engine megalith vibrated in my chest when it raced by all of us lifting off in a roar, banking sharply around for a low pass over a crowd of thrilled onlookers.

After its second such roundabout pass I shot a fist into the air like a trooper, turned around with a little jig to see my dad standing there with a grin as big as mine. We looked straight at each other and without words we knew exactly how each other felt in that exhilarating moment.

Hats off to members of the Canadian Air Force Squadron 435 for a job well done.

“June Bugs” are out too—ages one through six—and they love to play with the garden hose that “Yours Truly” rigged up from a pump at the creek for my weary skeleton who didn’t want to haul pails to the repeated watering needed for my herb and flower gardens.

Quite simply, the simplest form of entertainment for children on a hot summer day is a garden hose. Second is a whack of sidewalk chalk to brighten Granny’s patio stones and cement steps to the colors of the rainbow. 

However I forgot to ask my little peppers to remove their shoes before coming inside, and in so not doing had a pink, blue, green, and yellow chalk trail through the porch to the kitchen and into the bathroom, where small feet had trickled as the day wore on.

Most entertaining scene of all was when “Ozzie” the cat, in his usual display of how pleased he is with life, ventured outside and laid down on the patio stones and rolled around in kitty-like fashion.

I’m still kicking myself for not taking a photograph of the cat and his amazing technicolor dream coat derived from all those lovely chalk drawings.

 

Seeing him lit up like that reminded me of my slightly askew high school days and my own version of said coat.

Mine looked like a shag rug made into a vest and indeed was a colorful array of long wool fibers. It was a one of a kind accessory and I’m not even sure where I got it.

All I remember is that it was right up there with plucking my eyebrows too thin. The response from my classmates was not very favorable. 

But Ozzie looked impeccable in his and still believed that he was king of the hill even though he looked like a wad of cotton candy from the Emo Fair.

June also has reintroduced me to Rainy Lake and just how spectacular it is at sunset while floating in a boat in Sand Bay.

Thank You to the two good hearts who scooped me up and delivered me to the moment of power that I’d been talking so much about. Now.

Memories worth their weight in stone

Monday, May 28, 2012



I am experiencing the let down that comes with the end of a really great holiday. I liken my quick descent back to reality to the loud gurgle and sucking swirl of water that I always stare at after finishing a sink load of dirty dishes. 
“Uh huh, there goes my ‘Cloud 9,’ out with the dishwater.” 


All the life tasks I conveniently forgot about while in Wales now loom in the air around me akin to a cat litter box desperate in need of an emptying. 


Thank heaven for my “Sawzall.” 


There’s no better cure for a “down in the dumps” mood than gripping my hands around a reciprocating power tool and finding something to demolish. 
The autonomous act lifts my spirits, propels my confidence to deal with the realities of life and reminds me that I am indeed the “Jackie of All Trades” in my neck of the woods. 


The trouble is that in the throes of all that handheld supremacy I go berserk and can’t stop.


When all is said and done, the poor tree that I was just going to trim back a tad, now looks like my eyebrows did in Grade 8 when I kept plucking one and then the other to equal them out. In the end I was left with pencil thin tufts that got me stares in ways I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. 


I awoke to my writing day Monday morning to the sound of “Millie” the cat sitting outside my open bedroom window and whose 5 a.m. “rooster call” sounded like the life was being drawn out of her through a straw. 


It wasn’t exactly how I want to be yanked out of the dream I was having of being carried off to safety by Idris Elba of “Thor” fame. 
However the caterwaul beat the banshee wail I heard at 3 a.m. in Wales and that I was sure was about to crawl through the second story window of the room I was sleeping in and chew my face off.

I’ve always said I was born in the arms of a great imagination and as it turns out it was a screaming fox and not the infamous banshee. Still, the little hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention when I think about the sound that shattered the Welsh night air. 


That lovely slice of the United Kingdom also sports adder snakes and hairy spiders made legend by the stories of my fine hosts. I was warned a couple of times about the eight-legged creature spotted on the ceiling of a 17-th century pub “loo” but I was in and out so fast that the arachnid never had time to get a spit line out and down to my Canadian carcass. 


When I arrived and was soaked in the world of the Welsh, it was all I could do not to want learn how to speak the language. 
Be still my stupidity. 


With all due respect to the ancient dialect I don’t think I can make my tongue and palate work like that—unless we’re talking food.


One of my favorite experiences in Wales was a day trip to car boot sales where, in parkades and fields, scores of people sold “one man’s junk another man’s treasure” to the masses.


And it was at one particular car boot field where I was introduced to “Effin Effin,” a ruggedly handsome Welsh bloke rightly and famously named in South Wales for his rampant use of the English four-letter social expletive. Jaw-dropping amazing. 


My lovely hosts went over the top with home and food hospitality and if they ever decide to break out into the tourism business I’ll be their booking agent—gladly.

I wanted to try all the ethnic foods I could and although there were a couple of times when I wished I hadn’t said that out loud as I stared at my plate, I learned to work Welsh delicacies into tasty little adventures. 


My very first Welsh meal was faggots and peas and as soon as the meat passed over my lips I knew I probably wasn’t going to ask for the recipe. 


I appreciate that Mr. and Mrs. Hibbard love it. I love a fried egg on peanut buttered toast and they just couldn’t fathom that either.
I tried the gelatinous dark paste “laver bread,” and cockles with bits of bacon and oh, yes! duck eggs. Quacking good. 


My friends kept telling me I would gain two stone before I headed back to Canada. I thought they were talking about all the rocks I would pack in my suitcase from the beaches at Swansea and Rhossili. Nope.


If I gained any weight at all while on holiday it wasn’t from liver and seaweed but from the Welsh cakes, sugar mice, and clotted cream teas I stuffed in my face. I’m a sweetie through and through.


But hey, most of you knew that already.  :)

The Anatomy of My Whole Life

 Monday, May 21, 2012

I wake up at 6 a.m. every morning, pour a cup of coffee, sit in my favorite chair, write in my diary, and read a daily reflection from “The Book of Awakening” by Mark Nepo.

Nepo is a cancer survivor and his book is touted as one “about life, informed by the shadows of death” and full of one-a-day thoughts that are “vitamins for the soul.”

In my view no truer statements could be made.

This is the second year that I’ve re-read it on a daily basis and I’m constantly finding new connections to the wise words and how the book often mirrors my own journey.

Until now I’ve lived a very safe existence—one that’s calculated and organized so that I turn as many of the knobs on the horizontal and vertical as possible.

It’s the control freak in me. I’ve prided myself on being a subtle commander, but in then end a control junkie in my little world all the same.

Thank you for change.

I know how words work. I know how to put them together to get my point across in this space but they fail me now as I scrape my brain dictionary for the right “write” ones that will paint a picture of how my trip to Wales has opened my eyes and planted a seed.

Sure, people travel in big fat planes to far away places every day and I don’t know a thing about what it does to them.

We’re all unique in our life experiences and I try to respect my fellow man and woman in theirs.

However I only own mine.

I will admit that I thought I knew the world by the view out my kitchen window, the one the media paints on television, the Internet, and yes, even the newspaper.

If I had allowed some of those avenues to decide for me I would have never climbed into an aircraft with hundreds of other people and flown. I was an unwitting victim of hype and uncertainty and the unknown.

As I write and read this, perhaps I shouldn’t ditz the view from my kitchen window. It’s pretty darn amazing.

Nonetheless I thought life was just fine and cozy-safe right here at home plunk in the middle of 59 acres of country paradise. No better place in the world did I imagine there to be—until I flew across the ocean purely on faith that it was okay to let go and let live.

Thank you for change.

And too, my friends and family kept telling me that if anyone deserved this trip to Wales it was me—for all I’d been through in the past two years and most specifically the end of my marriage to a man I dearly loved who decided not to come home and then finding love again with a gentleman’s gentleman and abruptly facing the instant end of a lovely future with him when he committed suicide.

I don’t know if there has ever been a time since I first announced the story behind my trip to Wales that I’ve agreed with anyone who replied with, “you deserve this.”

I have had a very difficult time believing that I deserve good things should happen in my life and I think it’s because if I started to believe that then I somehow would diminish the rewards that grow out of me when my soul is wounded.

And yet if I believed that wishing upon a star made wishes come true, then two years ago I would have wished Peter loved me enough to stay married, and I most certainly would have called on all the stars and planets to change Jon’s mind to more promising horizons on that fateful day in January.  And I did do my share of wishing.

But the Universe unfolded anyway.

More important to me than what I “deserve” in life’s peach orchard is that I have faith that I can grow good from the pits.

Mark Nepo writes “Perhaps the secret to growing from our wounds is to live close to the earth, to live without our hearts and minds and bellies always in touch—both inside and out—with that which is larger than we are.

Perhaps, when cut in two, it is a life of humility, of risking to be at one with the soil of our experience, that allows us to heal into something entirely new.”

The morning I left for Wales I wrote in my diary, “I want more than what I can get by wishing. I have so much life to live, so many opportunities ahead of me to experience. I will love again and in the mean time I love my life today just as it is with me in it.”

William Blake was right. “The cut worm forgives the plow.”

I am living proof.

A "Wale" of a story in the making

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

I was born with a great imagination, and as I was flying over the North Atlantic Ocean one week ago on my way to Britain I thought my mind’s eye had a pretty good idea what this trip would be like.

Suffice to say I had no clue. This experience has been more than anything I could have possibly dreamed for myself.

I don’t even know where to begin. My editor would say to start with the most important thing and even that advice is difficult just now because there are so many stories trying to jump through my fingertips to the keyboard.

The eight-hour flight to Europe was long and I didn’t sleep a wink. How could I? I was alight with anticipation not to mention that I could not take my eyes off the near full moon that shone in the night sky and through my airplane window for the entire journey. 

We reached the north coast of Ireland and England just before dawn and at 39,000 ft and clear skies it was a sight to behold as the cities below were lit up in the colour of gold.

When I landed in Amsterdam for a 10-hour layover I felt like I could do anything. The world was my oyster.

But even oysters wind up in nets.

The time and space continuum froze for me when six Dutch security guards gathered to ponder an anomaly in my carry-on luggage as it passed through the x-ray machine at the boarding gate for the flight to Wales.

I felt like a foreigner in a foreign country. Wait a minute—I was.

Another guard appeared and took my passport from my trembling fingers and pulled out his mobile phone. All I heard was my birth name and “Cardiff, Wales” tossed about in another language.

I was convinced I was a goner. My identity would be red-flagged at every airport on every continent. They made movies called “Missing” and “Vanished” about these kinds of things.

 I looked up and there were the wide-eyed faces of all my co-passengers who were sitting pretty and in the clear and staring at my folly.

Security was backed up for 15 minutes as I waited for “special ops” to arrive. I was sweating like Arnold Schwarzenegger when his wife found out about the housekeeper, but I also was as clueless as Alicia Silverstone about what could possibly be in my possession to cause such an international incident.

Eventually a guy who looked like Alan Rickman (the actor who played the bad guy in “Die Hard”) arrived wearing a flack jacket and walked over to me after looking at the x-ray image and promptly said “tell me everything that is in your bag—exactly.”

My mind went blank and all that spilled out of my mouth was “Well, I ate all the chocolate.”

It was hopeless. My nerves shot, I couldn’t remember but four of the some 25 things I had packed in that bag.

“Mr. Flack Jacket,” with a stern, heavy accent and with big blue vein throbbing in his forehead, held up his hand and said, “I will get your bag and we will open it together.”

I had nearly everything pulled out of the bag onto the table, naming off each item as I went as eight security guards stood around the contents. Suddenly one of them pointed to the earplugs for my iPhone and a metal belt clip on the “travel approved” silk zip bag that had contained my passport.

Mr. Flack Jacket nodded and left and I was free to go.

If it weren’t for the streak of white hair that had suddenly appeared on my head, there’d have been no evidence of the incident—unless of course we counted the huddle of passengers who had all moved to the other side of the room when I stepped through security to sit down amongst my fellow flyers.

The rest of the trip was “crackin,” but that’s another story—or two.

Flying high on wings of my own

Monday, May 7, 2012

Let me begin by recanting my sad story about my home septic woes from last week. It wasn’t a miserable Monday after all. It turned out that all I had to do was replace a dirty filter. Thanks to “Good Man Joe” I am free to flush!!

So here am on a merry Monday (May 7th) and on my way to the land of the Welsh. I can hardly believe I am in this story! 

I can’t believe I did it! First of all, I wasn’t even sure I’d get through U.S. Customs at the International Falls border without extra scrutiny, My vogue statement for the debut of “Yours Truly” as a world traveler included having my 21-year old daughter straighten my hair, and hence I looked nothing like my passport photo.

Secondly I also managed to fight my way into the compression pantyhose I needed to wear in order to protect my vascular system from the bane of an eight-hour flight although I pulverized the pair of surgical gloves  that I had to use in order to shovel the pair of high density leggings up my torso.

Heaven help me if I have to pee anywhere between here and my layover in Amsterdam.

I had less than 40 minutes to make my flight connection in Minneapolis and I’d never been in that airport before. I had worried about this for weeks, but everyone was right. It was easy to find my way through the maze—although I didn’t get where I needed to be without walking as fast as my legs could carry me.

The airport’s automatic walkways are awesome, except when you forget to step off properly. Me, my 17lb carry-on bag and my 15lb purse went for a tumble when my feet hit the carpet at 5 mph.

I was okay though. I was embarrassed until I realized no one in the entire airport knew who I was and would never see me again.

One hour and 45 minutes have passed in flight time and oh, no, I have to pee and I’m in a window seat. Nine flight attendants are serving liquids from all directions and as much as I would love a glass of water right now, I’m going to pass on that. Having to ask the guy next to me to move so I can get out is only going to happen once on this flight if I can help it and I’ve still got seven hours before we land.

He isn’t much of conversationalist and I really don’t want to bother him. Besides he is fast asleep and his poor head is flopped forward like a rag doll.

I’m gob smacked that there are some 350 people bound for an overseas destination and all together at the same time in a machine with only two wings—one of which I am seated over. I booked this seat not realizing that I would be looking out my window at the rivets and jet engines. But then again, I’m now some 39,000 feet above the ground and beyond the clouds. The temperature outside is -40C and there’s not much to see anyway. Wait! is that ice on the wing! 

It’s 5 p.m. and I can smell supper. My Grandpa and Grandma Drennan would have been pleased to know they serve the meals around here right on time. Besides I’m starving.

Oh no, I just realized I asked for a vegetarian plate when I booked my ticket. What was I thinking? While everyone else is eating steak and baked potato I’ll be picking through my black bean and apple bake looking for signs of life. Thank heaven I packed that Snickers Bar.

It’s 6:00 p.m. and I must admit supper wasn’t so bad. Turns out making a meal preference reservation didn’t make any difference, as noted by the flight attendant who looked at me and said “Chicken, chicken salad, or pasta?”  I still chose pasta. (I watched “Food Inc.” I’m ruined for two legged beakers that didn’t originate from my local organic farm.) 

It’s 6:30 p.m. and I finally got up the nerve to ask my co-flyer to let me up so I could go pee. It felt so good to stand up that I was going to ask the flight attendants if I could volunteer to serve refreshments for the rest of the flight.

The line-up to the bathroom was long and stirring with conversation. I met someone from every continent standing there. It was an eye- opening experience to the fact that even though the world is small sometimes, it remains a gigantic mosaic of cultures. I need to travel more.

We’re four hours in and the flight tracker on the little TV screen in front of me indicates we are beginning our path over the North Atlantic. How awesome is that?!

And not one “anxiety pill” as passed over my lips. There’s not an ounce of nervousness in me as I fly into the future.

Yet as corny as it might sound, I could just burst into tears in this moment because of how grateful and happy I am.

I used to think life was a beautiful thing as long as I held the strings.

I’m learning more and more every day that life is still a beautiful thing even though I don’t always have control over what happens in mine. But I do control the most important and beautiful thing of all—my attitude.

And folks, I wish you could see what I see right now.

That is one big beautiful ocean out there.

Sailing my ship a life long journey

Monday, April 30, 2012

“Mondays can be miserable.” Uh huh.

There’s nothing like being informed at 9 a.m. on the first day of the workweek that my home septic system needed to be dug up and repaired.

I would be lying if I said this monkey wrench news didn’t cause me to expel words from my mouth that would count as improper use of the English language.

Even the chickadees and robins went scurrying to the treetops when I stormed around like a steaming locomotive this morning. And all I could hear was my lovely late grandmother uttering the words,  “There’s always something.”

As I sit here on this otherwise sunny and promising Monday, now at 10:30 a.m., as Adele’s voice blasts “Set Fire to the Rain” from my speaker system, I’m still trying to find some blue sky in my mind.

I looked up at a quote I have posted on my desk by Louisa May Alcott, “I am not afraid of storms for I am learning to sail my ship.”

I cranked the music up and thought “Really? I’ve had enough storms for a while, thanks. And as far as my ship is concerned, I don’t need another lesson.”

What I do need is a holiday, by cracky.

By the time this rant is hot off the press, I’ll have but five more sleeps until I step out of my comfort zone and into an airplane with 334 other passengers with an overseas destination.

My luggage (one big old blue suitcase from 1970s) has yet to be filled to capacity. Of course if I did that I’d have nothing to wear for the rest of the week! As it is I’m scrapping about 30 lbs of needless attire from my suitcase so that I can haul home my quota of rocks and sand from the south coast of Wales.

I’m a big fan of travel guru Rick Steves and I have his recommended “Packing List for Women” pasted to my bedroom mirror and another copy of it in my luggage in case I forget what I’m supposed to bring home.

Remember, we are dealing with a clueless green thumb world traveler here. If I didn’t read up on this all this stuff I wouldn’t have known that I am not supposed to dress for travel as if I’m on a photo shoot for the cover of “Vogue” magazine. Who knew! Now I’m free to wear my gumboots and a straw hat as I stroll through the airport in Amsterdam during my 10-hour lay over there.

I also wouldn’t have known anything about the Warsaw Convention, which I understand has been around since 1929. I had managed to get by in life knowing nothing about it (probably because I never fly) until I read the fine print with a magnifying glass, listed under “liability for international carriage of persons, luggage or goods“ on my plane ticket.

I would rather not use air travel and liability in the same sentence if you don’t mind.

Point A to Point B to Point A. Thank you. In one piece. With my suitcase on the carousel at both ends. Safely. That is all.

I can see anxiety medicine in my carry on bag being added to the list, Rick.

But truth be told . . . wait a minute, I always tell the truth. Still . . . truth be told I am about to do something I’ve only ever dreamed about. In my mind’s eye, I could not have predicted a trip to anywhere other than Virginia, Minnesota for groceries, let alone an excursion to Wales for nine days in May.

I’m so excited and full of anticipation I’m going to need gravity boots to keep me from floating.

However, don’t for one minute think I’m also not scared out of my wits. I am. After all I’m a control geek and doing this is not remotely within the realm of what I have power over. If it were, I’d be getting there by canoe.

Oh I see. This is a “learning to sail my ship” sort of thing.

As I wrote in my column a few weeks ago, this is the miracle reward I received from the Universe at no cost to me when I was standing in the shower one night last week thinking “maybe I should start traveling and write 'The View From Here' from somewhere else.

I’ll be doing just that for the next two weeks.

Tune in!!

One more hurdle in the bag before take off

Monday, April 23, 2012

Leave it to me to make a mountain out of a molehill. I may be free of guilt trips and voyages to “regret-ville” but I certainly haven’t conquered my anxiety when it comes to stepping outside my comfort zone and away from my neck of the woods.

I had best find a way to rest my apprehension. My trip to Wales is but 14 days away and there’ll be no turning back once I’m in an aircraft 35,000 ft over the North Atlantic Ocean.

But like I said, leave it to me to make a mountain out of a molehill.

All I had to do was get in my car and drive to Thunder Bay this past weekend to visit my sister-in-law. I planned the trip about a month ago and yet, as the days to “take-off” crept closer I could be heard having conversations with myself about all the reasons why I couldn’t possibly go.

And it’s not like I haven’t done a Thunder Bay run and other trips by myself before this, but there have been none since Jon died and yet I didn’t expect the doing would be such a mountain to climb.

If I could compare this hump in my road map to anything I would liken it to being on a boat cruising out to the lake to fish.

I expect to coast along for a while with minimal effort when suddenly the boat motor quits and the trolling motor goes on strike. I coax the motors, talk to them, and reason with them and still I get nowhere. Eventually I have to paddle my big boat if I want to get where I’m going—never mind try to paddle AND fish at the same time.

That’s what my trip to Thunder Bay looked like late last week. My motor quit and my trolling motor folded its arms and gave me the flat stare of a 16-year old teenager who I just asked to take out the garbage.

I hotwired my trolling motor going over the Causeway and yes! got on the road but it kept failing and eventually I had to resort to paddling and paddling down the entire highway.

I hadn’t realized what a comfort zone this little town and my little world had been for the last three months—where everything was predictable and I always was safe at home.

But you know me. I took the wheel and made it from Point “A” to “B” thus deciding that I would use the trip as a trial run for my clueless green thumb world traveler-self who need a fast learning curve on how to pack for nine days in May.

I knew this for sure because I was hauling three-quarters of my clothes closet and 16 pairs of underwear for a day and half trip to the city.

Thankfully there was a hydraulic dolly in the barn that bore the mammoth bag out of the house and into the car’s trunk.

I’ve been reading travel blogs and travel wikis and travel advice columns for all the latest recommendations for what to pack. I challenge myself daily to pack less and less junk (save the giant Toblerone and must-have chocolate bars in case I get stranded on an island with Tom Hanks).

Yet in the trial to pare down the piles of underwear et al, I will not give up my compression stockings. Yes folks, compression stockings.

I may be aging gracefully above my chicken neck, but below the knees not so elegantly.

Thus, seated in an airplane for eight hours while my lower legs dangle helpless and motionless as the blood tries to jump past the faulty valves in my calves, means I have to wear therapeutic high density trouser socks made for travelers with varicose veins. (There I said it).

And if you think that’s a media shocker, you are very lucky you didn’t walk by my car on Saturday in the parking lot of the home health store in Thunder Bay while I was trying to put one of those compression socks on my foot.

Never in my life had I such an experience. I used to think tummy control pantyhose was a hard haul on to my body until I tried to stretch that black sock out far enough so it would fit over my toes.

Anyone who wondered what was happening inside my car that day would have thought I was being devoured against my will by a 12-inch black eel, as I writhed in the front seat.

By the time I got all five toe digits kidnapped in the compression sock and pulled and stretched the rest of it up my leg, a big fat blue bulging vessel had popped out between my eyes.

Please tell me I don’t have to buy something similar to compress my head before I travel.

Getting that evil sock off at night was like firing a boomerang from a slingshot in a small room—but that’s another story.