Random memories and thoughts

See the two red spots? Those are cardinals. That is about the best I can do with bird photos.

I was sad to learn of the passing of Maya Angelou on Wednesday. I admired her a great deal.

In thinking about her, I got out my copy of her poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she wrote for and read at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in January 1993.

I was teaching English at the time. I videotaped her reading and used it in class to aid in discussing the poem with my students.

Here’s a lovely part of that poem:

"Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am that Tree planted by the River,

Which will not be moved.

I, the Rock, I, the River, I, the Tree

I am yours--your passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need

For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,

Cannot be unlived, but if faced

With courage, need not be lived again."

From "On the Pulse of Morning," by Maya Angelou

***

It has been rainy and stormy off and on this week. I hope Larry and I will be able to be out and about a bit today.

I also need to check in more with my garden and see if there’s anything ready to eat!

***

I love my times of sitting quietly, listening to my breath and to the sounds around me. Sometimes I get uncomfortable—physically uncomfortable, bored, distracted. But in the end, I feel better after even a 10-minute meditation. It helps with intrusive thoughts and makes me feel less anxious.

***

I started updating my blog information since I’m gaining a year today (I am turning 51 today). I decided to leave my age off the About Me section. I’m not ashamed of it, but I don’t think that’s the first thing people are interested in knowing.

I found that I needed to update other pages, too, including the page about my cats. It hurt to have to change it to reflect that Larry and I don’t have two cats anymore. The last time I updated that page, Sam was still with us. I miss her, and all my babies, so much.

***

I’ve been thinking about my life (yes, I’m a thinker). I know it is in part due to my birthday. I suppose getting older makes many of us think about the past and wonder about the future.

Some of what I’ve been pondering is what I really want to say with my writing. I love to write and, I say with gratefulness, I can write well enough, though there’s plenty of room for improvement. But what do I want to say? What do I want to say?

***

And where in the world did May go?

Looking back: The little red chair

When I was a small child, my paternal grandfather lived about a mile away from us.

One day he walked up to our house carrying a little red chair that had been in his family. He wanted my father and his children to have it.

I was the youngest and the only daughter, so I ended up making the chair my own.

When I was growing up, I kept it sitting in front of an old vanity that I had in my bedroom until I left home. I could sit on the chair and brush my hair and “primp.”

 I liked the story behind the chair. My grandfather, who was born in 1885, used it to learn to walk. Someone would turn over the chair so that it set steady on the floor, and my grandfather would push it across the floor.

Apparently, someone cut the legs down short so the chair could be used for this purpose.

You can see where the chair back and the top of the front legs are smoothed down from rubbing against the floor.

Granddaddy didn’t have an easy life when he was young. His father died when he was two years old, and his mother died when he was four. He had three older siblings. Apparently he lived with different relatives growing up, eventually living with his paternal grandmother.

Granddaddy in 1889, when he was four years old.

Granddaddy when he was a young man.

The chair has been painted red since I can remember. I don’t know why someone painted over the wood with thick red paint. Perhaps it was to brighten it up for children.

Now I keep the chair in either our den or living room. It’s currently sitting in the living room, providing a seat for a stuffed snowman that I’ll keep out a few more weeks.

I have an old doll that would probably look better on the chair than this stuffed snowman.

(Note: Do you think I should try to remove the red paint and show the original wood? Would that hurt the wood?)

I have other pieces of furniture plus other treasures that have been in my family a long time. I’m trying to record their stories so I don’t forget and so my nieces and nephews and other family members will know their meaning.

And I have so many family stories to record, including my father’s writings and letters he wrote his sister during World War II.

Not all my memories are good, but that’s the way life is. The good can be remembered, and the bad can be learned from.

Do you have any pieces of furniture that have been in your family for a long time?

Random 5 Friday: Leaves and Christmas preparations

I’m so happy that this week Nancy of A Rural Journal is again hosting her wonderful meme, Random 5 Friday. During her break, I have been posting randoms on Friday, but it’s not the same without Nancy.

Check out her blog HERE, and find other bloggers enjoying sharing their random facts and experiences.

One

Larry got up the last of the leaves Wednesday (yes, we still had leaves in the yard) and then put up the lighted trees he made last year, along with the lighted Santa. I like having a festive display in the yard.

Two

We never know the exact day the town truck will come by to pick up leaves. While Larry was working on the leaves the other day, he looked up and saw the truck. The driver slowed down in front of the house but then drove on by. Larry thought he had missed it, and we’d have the leaves down by the street for a while.

But later that day, the truck came back to get them. I thought that was a great customer service by the town.

Three

When I was at Avoca last week, I saw some vases with tree ornaments in them. 

I thought it was a pretty and simple way to decorate. So I tried it at home.

Four

Another little decoration that gets pulled out each year is this snowman that plugs into Larry’s laptop. He turns different colors.

For reasons he doesn’t know, Larry’s dad called him “Frosty” as a nickname when Larry was a boy. And Larry also loves snow. So we have several snowman decorations around the house, and they bring back sweet memories of Larry’s dad, who passed away seven years ago.

Five

I finally—finally—finished shopping and decorating. I want to do a little cooking, just simple dishes to enjoy.

One thing I didn’t get done is Christmas card writing. I’ve decided it’s OK. 

Memorial Day and thoughts on my father



My father in uniform, probably on leave at his home.



I think of my father on Memorial Day.

Actually, I think of my late father probably every day, but my thoughts of him are particularly strong on this day that we in the United States honor those who sacrificed their lives for their country.

My father served in the Army as a medic during World War II, mostly in the Pacific. He was wounded on September 30, 1944, but survived and came home and built a life with my mother.



My father somewhere in the Pacific on Aug. 21, 1945.



It was on Memorial Day 1996 that my father first expressed to me his thankfulness for having made it home when many of his fellow soldiers did not.

That gratefulness fit with the rest of his life: he never bemoaned growing older, never complained about an upcoming birthday. He was always proud of his age.

I was not very close to my father when I was growing up. We grew more comfortable with each other during the last few years of his life, before he died in July 1997.

He wrote down his life story at my request. And after his death, letters that he had written to one of his sisters while he was in service came to light.



A postcard my father sent his sister in 1942.



These written documents have helped me to know more about my father than I learned while he was alive.

Years ago I scanned the letters and gave copies to my brothers and my mother. I want to go back and catalog them better.

I also want to transcribe his whole story (I’ve done only part of it) and distribute those to family members, too.

I know there are still things to learn about my father and my family as I delve deeper into his writings.

That is not an always easy task for me, though. I had and have a troubled relationship with my family of origin. Some memories are painful.

But I don’t want that to hold me back from the truth, from the story of my father, and through his story, part of the story of my family.

It will be a project worth doing.

With that, I leave you today with wishes for a safe and peaceful holiday.

How have you preserved family memories and mementoes?

Random 5 Friday: I remember a lot of things

I’m linking up with Nancy’s A Rural Journal for Random 5 Friday. Today I’m sharing five random facts about my childhood.

1. I am the youngest of three children. I have two older brothers. Though my immediate family was small, I have a large extended family. My father was the sixth of nine children, my mother the third of ten. Their parents also had large families. So I have many first cousins, first cousins once removed, second cousins, and on and on.

2. I grew up on a farm in central Virginia. When I was very small, we had beef cows, milk cows, pigs and chickens. I remember my mother making butter, gathering eggs and pasteurizing the milk in a small pasteurizer on the kitchen counter. I also remember the milk tasting like green onions if the cows had eaten the wild plants.

3. I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle until I was about 8 years old. My father was a rural mail carrier, and he bought a blue bike from one of his mail customers. He brought it home and called me out on the front porch to look at it. The next day, my second oldest brother taught me how to ride it.

4. I loved jewelry even as a child. In the baby picture above, I’m wearing a cross necklace and a baby ring. I still have both pieces of jewelry. I was allowed to get my ears pierced right before my twelfth birthday. I had it done at a local department store. The piecing was free if you bought the 14 karat gold earrings, which were eight dollars.

5. I was a bookworm as a child (still am). I especially loved mysteries and devoured Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books. I loved going to the public library in Rustburg, the small village and county seat about six miles from the farm. Sometimes when my mother had her hair done in Rustburg, my brother and I were allowed to walk to the library from the beauty shop, and she would pick us up when she was finished.

Thank you for joining me on my walk down memory lane! If you’d like to join the Random 5 Friday link, go to A Rural Journal.

Please share one fact about your childhood in the comments section. I would love to read about you!

Halloween memories

   I hope all of you in Sandy’s path are safe and weathered the storm well. My thoughts and prayers are with those who were injured and killed in the storm and with those suffering from the aftereffects of the storm.

  We got through the wind just fine. It wasn't very bad, and we're very grateful that we didn't even lose power.

***

Since Halloween is today, I thought I’d write a bit about some of my Halloween memories.

When I was a child, I was afraid to say “Trick or Treat.”

I would either let my brother or friends I was with say it, or I would mumble it myself.

I was very shy and timid, and it took all my courage to even walk up to the door and hold out my bag for the candy. To speak out loud? Well, that was too much usually.

I wasn’t afraid of the spooks that might be out and about on Halloween—I was afraid of the people handing out the candy, even though they were people in my community.

But I still enjoyed Halloween—getting dressed up and, the best part, getting candy, which I loved.

We lived out in the country, so we had to load up in the car and drive from house to house to trick or treat.

I remember the year I had a store-bought costume of a princess. It had a blue dress and a mask of a golden haired girl with a crown.

Not many people saw my costume because that year, I wouldn’t even get out of the car. My brother had to go by himself to the doors of the homes we visited. Some of the people put in extra candy for me when they found out I was in the car.

One year, my brother was in the hospital on Halloween. I was staying with my great-aunt. Her daughter took me trick or treating with her daughter. I didn’t have a costume, so my aunt and cousin dressed me in odds and ends to make me look like a man.

Another year I wore an old purple dress that was my mother’s and dressed up with lots of jewelry and make-up and went with some friends of mine.

They knew people I didn’t know, so that year I went to more houses than I ever remember going to. I ended up with a bountiful supply of candy.

I’m sorry to say that I still love candy, too much, and eat too much, especially when it’s around the house and the office like it is now, in preparation for trick-or-treaters.

  What is a Halloween memory that is special to you?