A Time for All Things Under Heaven...

Fall has always been my favorite time of the year, I have
never thought of it as an ending but rather as a beginning.
When I was a young girl, it was the start of the new school
year; new school uniform, new shoes, new books, new
pencils, and a new 'school bag' to put them in (those of you
under fifty Google the term). I remember the smells, nothing
smells like new leather shoes, new books which have never
been opened by anyone but me, and newly sharpened pencils,
that still smell of the forest from whence they came.  And is
there anything more reminiscent of school than the smell of
library paste.

Fall is the beginning of the holiday season for me, the last
holiday, the Fourth of July, is long past.  Now corn stalks
and pumpkins foretell of Halloween and Thanksgiving.
The earthy smell of mums, mingles with the smell of wet
leaves and wood smoke.  The trees, which were dressed in
a thousand shades of green, now don robes of rust and red
and gold and garnet, muted or magnificent, they put on their
brief show and then fade away.

It is half past the middle of September, and warm still, the
usual chill that portends the first frost, has yet to arrive.
I have chosen today to put my garden patch to bed, the
weatherman says there is rain coming for the next three or
four days and I have only a small window of time available,
as I am going to the Middle-East in two weeks. I had pulled
out the summer squash last week and heaped them in a plie
to be dried and reduced to a more manageable size.

Setting about to pick my meager harvest, I collect the last
of the green peppers and the lonely eggplant clinging to the
bush.  My green beans have suffered the past weeks with bean
mosaic, and there isn't enough to bother with.  There are a
few ripe tomatoes that I place in my basket.  I'll leave two plants
to see if the remaining green tomatoes will ripen before I leave.
The swiss chard has done well away from the heat of summer,
I select only the larger leaves and leave the smaller ones for
the deer and rabbits, as they will be able to reach them when
I remove the fencing that kept them at bay since early spring.

Time to pull up the plants; pepper, eggplant, tomato, and beans
and put them on the pile of squash leaves that have shrunk
to less than half their size.  The pole bean fencing, that made
picking beans so easy all summer, now has become a chore
to clean, as the beans have wound the their way round and round
the 2x4 inch weld-wire openings in the fence.  If I don't remove
them now, while they are still green and pliable, I will have to
do in the spring when they have dried and have a stranglehold
on the wire.  Though not a strenuous job, it is boring and will
consume most of the time I will spend in the garden.  My mind
wanders to a dear friend who used to share this chore with me.
We gardened on this little plot, though it was bigger when we
worked it together, for several years.  She passed away; it will be
three years this November.  I have lost four other friends this
year, it doesn't seem possible.

The fencing, now clean, gets rolled up for storage, along with
the poultry fencing that covered the chard.  The fence posts are
pulled and stacked alongside.  Time to hoe and pull the weeds
that had sprung up amongst the veggies, and all goes on the heap
for composting, there are four wheel barrowsful.  Lastly, I cut
an armful of zinnias, I always plant flowers in my patch, they
are food for the soul, and their beauty sustains my spirit as well
as the vegetables sustain my body.  They are especially radiant
today, it is as if they know their time is short.  I leave the plants
for my fellow gardeners, they will produce blooms until frost,
and who knows, they may still be here when I come home.  I have
cut enough flowers to deck out every room in my house.

I take one last look at the garden, the tomato plants at the far end
and the zinnias at my end, stand like lone sentries guarding an empty
plot.  It was a good garden, they always are, and it will be here again
come spring, whether I am or not.  I always say I don't think
 I can do it for another year, my back is sore, I worked up two
blisters on hands that grew soft over the summer, my nail are ragged
and dirty.  But I know come February, when the seed companies
inundate my mailbox with their colorful catalogues, I will once again
long for the smell and feel of the earth.  Like childbirth, I will forget
the pain and only remember the joy of watching what I sowed grow
to fruition.  I will do it until I can no longer turn a spade or rake a
clod of soil.

As I stow my harvest in the trunk of the car, along with my garden gloves
and shoes, the wind begins to pick up, there are ominous clouds on the
western horizon, and the first drops of rain splatter on my windshield.
I will have the chard and tomatoes for dinner, they will taste especially
good, as good as the first ones of summer.  Next week I will have to
vacuum summer's soil out of the car.

I'm just sayin'.

You Can Call Me Stupid...

Well, everyone is entitle to their mid-life crisis, if
this is mine, I will have to live to one-hundred and
fifty.  I had to put my beloved dog, Sweetie down
three years ago, her heart just couldn't go on, and I
knew it was time to let her go.  I cried for two weeks;
she was the last thing I had left of my husband.  She
was really his dog, and she mourned his passing as
much as I did.  Sweetie merely tolerated me, but she
would give up her life to protect me.

When my husband died, I took a month-long trip to
Poland to connect with relatives, and when I came
home, I put the house up for sale, piled as much as I
could carry in the car, and with Sweetie as my co-pilot,
we headed to Wisconsin.  I didn't know a soul here
but, as fate would have it , I now have a wonderful
group of friends, and a network of activities that
keep me busy six-days a week.

When Sweetie died, I bought a new car, I didn't need
a new car but I bought one anyway.  And not just any
car, I bought a sporty SUV, with a variable-speed tranny,
turbocharged engine, speed shifter, and all-wheel drive-
for the snow don't you know- his name is Spike.  I
always name my cars, and this one is definitely, Spike.
There isn't much room in the backseat for passengers,
but then I didn't buy it for a taxi.  My friends groaned,
and rolled their eyes.

This year for whatever reason, I have decided to take
my life in a new direction.  I have been involved in a
class in reminiscence writing for the past seven years. I
have seven years of memories set down on paper, I have
listened to other people's lives unfold in snippets, weekly
installments of their childhood through adulthood, and I
quit.  I refuse to look back anymore, there is nothing left
there that I wish to recall.

I have taken the same four classes in my Senior Learning
Group for the past seven years.  This year I am taking four
different classes.  I am giving up the comfortable for the
challenge of something new and different.  No more physics
and philosophy, I can't do Kant for another year and no one
can explain quantum mechanics, and they don't care, so why
should I.  I am going back to my first love, poetry, and I am
going to finish that collection of short stories that I started
writing a lifetime ago.  I am going to improve my skill with
a writers workshop.  And I am blogging, but I guess you know
that as you are reading this.  They say you are not a writer unless
someone reads your work, and I am happy to say I received my
first comment on one of my blogs.  Someone out there is reading
them.

But the biggest change I am making in my life is really scary.
I have put an offer on a house, not just any house, but a four-
bedroom three-bath house.  Right now, I live in a two-bedroom
two-bath condo.  It's big enough for me, I don't need anything
bigger, certainly not twice the size.  But if you gotta go, go big!

I spent the morning with the realtor going over page after page
of the contracts, the addendums, and the condition report, until
we finally came to the bottom line, the line that says 'signature of
the buyer'.  I guess that was me, my palms were sweaty, and my hand
shook a little but I signed the paper.  The agent gave me my copy,
shook my hand and said he would let me know as soon as he got
an answer from the sellers.

So here I sit and wait for something that I don't know whether I will
be sad if I lose or sadder if I win.   When I bought my condo, I said
that I would never move again, I said they would carry me out of here
feet first.  It has been a very nice home, but I have never felt 'at home'
for years, so many years.  When I married, I moved into my husband's
home, it was a nice house and soon I made it mine.  We were happy there,
it was a family home and we had lovely family, two boys and a little
girl.

Then fate stepped in and our son, Michael, was killed in an accident.  By
then the other two children, David and Ann, were on their own, David to
his own apartment and Ann to college.  Suddenly the family home wasn't
anymore.  We didn't know if it was harder to stay with the memories, or
leave and take them with us.  We chose to leave.

But you can't move away from the pain, you take it with you wherever you
go.  That first move led to a series of eight more moves.  The houses all
seemed perfect when we bought them, but after two or three years they
became just empty shells, that, no matter how hard we tried we couldn't
fill them.  And our lives became a quest to find a 'home'.  The kids had
scattered to the wind, across the county.  Then one day, Ann called, she
had discovered a lump, it was cancer, stage four.  We spent Christmas
with her in Oregon and then, reluctantly we drove back home to Arkansas.
All the way home we couldn't speak of what we knew was coming.

By New Years Eve my husband had worked himself into such a state, and
by his birthday, January 28th, he was gone.  I knew he could not face
burying his baby girl.

And by that August, Ann was gone too.  Suddenly I had to leave, I had
to go back to my roots again, but there were no roots left, they had been
ripped out years before.  So the dog and I settled in our little condo
in Madison Wisconsin, a new start in a new place.  I buried her ashes
in the little piece of ground next to the condo.  I'm happy here, I am, it's
still not home but it's comfortable.  So why am I still looking for a place
to call 'home'?  I don't know, but there is still an emptiness that I have to
fill, right now I fill it with work.  Maybe someday...
we'll see what tomorrow brings.

I'm just sayin'.

If You Remember the Sixties...

The completion of that statement goes something like;
If you remember the sixties, you weren't there.  Well I
remember the sixties; I was there and I was cold-stone
sober and drug free though them all.  And the way I
remember them, they make today look like a church.
picnic.

For all the hand-wringing and hair pulling of today,
the world, and especially the United States, have survived
much worse.  For one thing there was the Great Civil War,
but if that is too far back for you, lets jump up
100 years to 1968...

The year started badly with the war in Viet Nam, and
the Tet Offensive.  The North Viet Cong army, 85,000
strong, attacked over 100 cities and military bases in
the South, shattering Americas belief that the war was
going well.  And by February, American casualties
totaled 500 or more a week.

March brought us face to face with what the war was
doing to our servicemen.  On March 16th, the extent
of the massacre at the village of My Lai was revealed.
Between 400 and 500 unarmed men, women and
children were gunned down, lined up and photographed.
Exhausted and facing opposition from the Democrats
for his handling of the war, Lyndon Johnson announced,
on March 31st, that he would not run for another term.
Leaving the field open for Humphry, McGovern, and
Robert Kennedy, a fateful group.

Then on April 4th, Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated in Memphis TN, sending shock waves
across America and the rest of the world.  The shooter,
James Earl Ray, was apprehended in London's Heath-
row Airport and quickly extradited to the US and just as
quickly tried and sentenced.  Robert Kennedy gave a passionate
speech calling for unity.

And on June 5th, after winning the California presidential
primary, Robert Kennedy was gunned down on live television
in the basement of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
All this was leading up to and culminating with the
Democratic National Convention  August 26 thru 29,
in Chicago.

While the Democratic delegates gathered in the Interna-
tional Amphitheater, tens of thousands of protesters gathered
in Grant Park on the city's lakefront.  The peaceful demon-
strations were soon disrupted by police, in riot gear, who
tried to disperse the crowd.  Hundreds of young demonstrators
were beaten and arrested.  And a new lexicon entered our
vocabulary: Hippies, Black Panthers, and Chicago 8, became
household names.  Hubert Humphry was nominated by a widely
divisive Democratic Party.  It was four days that rocked the world,
and it would be years before the wounds would finally heal.

In November, during the Mexico City Olympics, the tumult of
the preceding year came to a head when two black athletes, who
won a gold and a bronze medal, raised their fists in a Black
Power salute during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.
The outrage just further widened the gap that was forming
between the black and white population, despite the work done
by LBJ with the Civil Right Act of 1964.

November of that year had Richard Nixon wining the presidency,
and George Wallace, the third-party candidate and avowed
segregationist, garnering over 13% of the vote.  The year ended
with 16,592 Americans dead in the Viet Nam War!

If you are exhausted just reading this, you should have tried living
thru it.  Those years changed America, and not for the better.  But,
we survived, we adapted, and we came out of those difficult times
with a new resolve to work harder to close the gap between black
and white Americans.  Funny thing about gaps though, they never
really stay closed for long.

Today it is the man in the White House that, instead of calling
for calm, unity and reassurance, is once again stoking the fires
 of segregation.  Turning white people against those people
of color, and Christians against Muslims, he has emboldened
 the far-right white supremacists, encouraging them to violence.
Instead of seeking unity across the globe, he has disparaged our
allies and encouraged our avowed enemies.  His coarse and crude
ad hominem attacks of persons he perceives as being against him,
are broadcast everyday via Twitter to his tens of thousands of
followers.

He has single-handily changed American discourse, and debased
the office of the presidency.  He seeks no council, relying on gut
emotion to guide him, most times erroneously.  His wild swings
of contradictory decrees confuse and frighten our allies.  For all
appearances, he makes 'shooting from the hip' look like a marks-
manship contest.  The question is, will we come out of this better
than we were, or will we be forever cursed with a country and a
presidency that no longer commands the respect of the world?

I'm just askin'.