Thoughts like plump fuzzy snowflakes falling from the heavens

Zoe and I are bird watching,

probably for different reasons ;)

but we're enjoying it just the same.

Plump fuzzy snowflakes

are falling from the heavens,

and melting as they touch the ground.

Blue jays bully the pesky grackles,

but the two doves stay put

until the mockingbird appears.

It's always a colorful smorgasbord of feathers

at the feeder each morn

as the sunflower hearts disappear too rapidly.

I hear it's peeps and am delighted

to find my eastern towhee

still hanging out in my neck of the woods.

Purple finch, titmice,

a pair of black-capped chickadees,

and a noisy Carolina wren flit about.

Fresh chilly winter air

refreshes my inner spirit,

even though it all looks a bit gloomy out there.

A downy woodpecker makes its way up the tree,

as a group of slate-colored juncos

mess about on the ground.

The uninvited house sparrows

push out the white-crowned sparrows,

while a pair of cardinals wait in the bushes.

As a goldfinch lands at the feeder rim,

Zoe looks at me with those intense eyes

asking if breakfast is only a myth.

So I must pry myself away

from my window of many delights,

but I do so with a reluctant sigh.

A very nice beginning

to a most wondrous day

that just happens to be my birthday.

Massacre on Hobson Pike

Decisions came hard for her.  She was still parked on the shoulder with her engine idling when the yellow gas light popped on and instantly complicated her indecision.  Rats!  She stared at those twenty-six bloody bodies on the road (she had carefully counted them all), and the acid reflux from her churning stomach was gagging her.  Fumbling with the door lock, she barely pushed it open before her lunch she had spent thirty-five dollars on and devoured two hours ago was lying on the ground.  Great!

She sighed.  She was trapped in her little red car, because to straddle that console with her two chubby legs was not a plan that would ever occupy her head for even one second.  She was going nowhere without her tire rolling through all that crud, but she had to go somewhere, anywhere fast.  She looked at the car clock again - twelve minutes and still no one had driven over the top of the last hill or the hill beyond to join her in her predicament.  The engine was running on fumes, her cell phone was still sitting on her kitchen counter charging, and she had to so desperately pee.

She carefully drove back onto the road with the noise of upchuck flinging off her back tire, and grimaced.  She stopped.  She sucked most of the air right out of the interior of her little red car until she thought her lungs were going to explode; and then raced across those crunching bodies, over the next hill, and into the setting sun.  She put on her sunglasses, dug into her purse with her right hand, and fetched out a stale piece of sugarless gum to calm her nerves.  A semi, she thought.  It must have been a semi-truck barreling through a flock of birds.  It was a bad omen, all that carnage, and she knew the rest of her day was going to be shit - and it was.


The flock of birds was real...
the rest pure imagination.

Magic on Wings

Woke up this morning...

wandered into the kitchen

for a glass of ice cold water.

Lacey was stuttering

at the sliding glass door,

you know -

that there's a bird, there's a bird

kind of stuttering

when she sees feathered food

just beyond her reach.

It was a male Eastern Towhee

checking out the sunflower seeds

I left on the deck railing last night.

This is a first for me.

What a nice way 

to start a cold winter day.

Zoe and Lacey

Sometimes

when birds are involved

compromises must be made.

So, what is the point of it all - of living life?

Whisked off on her first and only airline flight with just the eighty-some years of her life which Deb could cram into one suitcase, mom was uprooted from hers and our late dad's home to live in Deb's household in what must have been the most quietly shattering day of both of their lives.  Deb was the one who had to drop everything when dad and mom had emergencies, and she was the one who looked after them as dad was dying.  She was the one, because she would still have her job to come back to if she left it, and she could scrape up the money to do it.  She's had an altered life because of all this, a life she hadn't counted on living.

Shadow and Sugar, the two felines of mom's life were given to a lady Deb hastily found, and to this day no one knows if this person kept them, found them homes, dumped them out on their own...no one knows.  Mom cried about this for years every conversation we had on the telephone.  Each time I lied to her and told her they were okay, but always figured worst case scenario in their demise.  It would have been great if Deb had kept mom's cats with her, but Deb was forever so coldly over-practical.

Sitting next to my husband on the flight to Reno, I wondered if Deb was right.  Was I just being crazy?  She said it was stuff I could live without.  A year after the house sat abandoned, the new buyers agreed over the telephone to save in one of the rooms of the house everything on my hastily drawn up list. A list of what I could remember in five minutes off the top of my head that I thought was important to me.  As I flew on that plane through the clouds, I worried if it all was worth the cost and trouble, but I also knew that for some reason, I needed to complete this journey.

When someone tells you it is never a good idea to revisit a place that isn't yours anymore, believe them.  Floors were torn out and being replaced; all the furniture was gone, even the old art deco bedroom set that mom and dad had from the beginning of their marriage; the lovely green painted wood cabinets in the kitchen were being sloppily repainted yellow; and things I had forgotten to asked to be saved were already dumped - gone forever.  Pushing away the disappointment and shock, I sat myself down into what had been mom and dad's bedroom with my load of cardboard boxes we had just purchased from the post office, the bubble wrap and shipping tape from the Wal-mart by the airport, the newspaper from the local grocery store, and began to pick, wrap, and pack into those cardboard boxes from the clutter that covered most of the floor - the clutter that represented all that was left of my life there.

Mom's neighbor from across the street bought the place - we talked, they were nice, and they left me alone most of the day even though they were constantly in and out of the house.  My mind was rushing 180 miles an hour with decisions, then wrapping as fast as I could the outcome of those choices, with my husband driving the finished packages to the post office to be mailed to ourselves.  A day to fly in, rent a car, and drive to my home town; a day to wrap and mail; and a day to fly out.  It was insane and exhausting, poignant and exhilarating.  The neighbors left for the day and time was desperately running out.

Choices had to be made - some practical, some from the heart, some better safe than sorry, some no rhyme or reason - there's never logic with emotion.  Choosing what to leave behind, the rest was thrown into boxes to pack in the car to take back to the motel. When I decided to leave that room, we were alone and the sun was still above the horizon.  Walking through every room in the house, closets and drawers were opened and closed, but all was empty except the kitchen.  We grabbed a few things from the cupboards to add to the carload.  Saddened, I welcomed the outdoors.

Scrounging around in the enclosed area that housed the graveyard of my parents rock collecting years plus dad's tool shed proved that everything had already been picked over.  As a last minute thought we dragged the cover off the opening to the basement, and were surprised that all sixty some years of crap was mostly still there.  Overwhelming, with so little time to dig through boxes covered with desert sand from years of sand storms, a box picked out miraculously held a little two drawer cedar chest that I recognized as mom's.  Opening one of the drawers, her wedding band laid alone in it.  The little chest went with me.

Under the wood steps we removed some junk and pulled out a cardboard box stuffed with old photos and sand.  That went with us also. Her old trunk, I think it had originally been her mom's old trunk, was still there with all the needlework, linens, quilt tops, and saved memories of her and her mother's life.  As a child, she had lovingly taken me down those steps one summer and told me the stories of everything that was packed inside that mysteriously wonderful trunk.  She never would let go of any of it, no matter how hard I pleaded, and everything was still there.  I was old.  All those ideas I dreamed up of how to use its contents when I was young no longer existed, but most of its contents was stuffed in paper bags to take with us.

In the final moments the next morning, all unpacked treasures in our motel room were painfully placed into the dumpster before we drove away to fly back home.  In less than a week all boxes arrived almost at the same time - a curious sight most likely for any mail person.  Realizing that whatever would be sent to mom would never leave Debs house again, the excruciating task of deciding what not to send began. Acknowledgements don't exist with my family, so I still don't know if I chose well for mom.  Some things of hers that I kept I sent to her later on.  Some things of my own I kept I sent to the trash bin later on.

My little stash from that house is packed with memories.  The cheap art deco vases mom bought when she was young, two quilt tops either my grandmother or one of my great aunts hand stitched, the hand sewn apron my mom always wore, an embroidered and pink ribbon batiste baby dress that was either mine or my mom's, my tiny white majorette boots, the pig cookie jar dressed as a sheriff with badge and cowboy hat that was always filled with peanut butter raisin oatmeal cookies, the bean pot mom served baked beans in, mom's fancy silver thimble and wood sock darner she used to darn the toes and heels of our socks, the piece of wood mom held onto that her dad gave to her because it reminded him of a face...

...the vintage marbles picked out of her gallon jug marble filled door stopper, her milk glass old jar collection to add onto mine that we both acquired forty years ago sifting through boxes in the back of an antique store we visited together, the crystal rabbit-daisy frosted glass toothpick holder-pink opaline toothpick holder-pair of white porcelain parakeets-gifts to her in my twenties because she never bought for herself anything she liked (these should be with mom, but they stayed with me), lots of photos-letters-writings, my youngest sister's glass insulator collection, the last felt cowboy's hat dad wore, and a quart jar of sand from the yard that was converting back to a desert.

No regrets, but I no longer think I know what life is all about.  We aren't indispensable in the grand scheme of it all.  It's like we're put here as window dressing.  The earth doesn't require us; and bad weather, pestilence and disease seems to level the playing field quite often.  Some religions teach we are the only creatures walking this earth that have souls.  I find that exceedingly difficult to believe. Whether monstrous or angelic, history always has two sides to every action and reaction.  The number of individuals remembered by all probably amounts to no more than .000000000001% of all that have lived, if even that. Material wealth is remarkably fragile.

Chosen to live life, we have been promised nothing.  We seem to have two choices - positive/negative, but within these two choices lies an infinite numbers of levels we get to play with.  Could be why our language has so many adverbs and adjectives.  We're not perfect, after all, we have the capability to lie-cheat-steal on one level or another; but goodness doesn't require perfection.  It just requires the choice to do it.  Is there more to life than this?  If you believe in fiction, there might be; if you believe in nonfiction, there might be; otherwise, I haven't the foggiest clue. 

DARN IT!

Know that phrase 'put the cart before the horse'?

Well...

I feel like an old nag head butting an army tank through a field littered with rocks, and my bruised head is killing me.  

Logic has never been a big deal breaker when it comes to choosing my own little black hole of detention that I sometimes loving call THE JOB.

Perhaps, I should have changed that strategy a few jobs back, but I didn't. Hindsight is so useless ;(

My demons are playing with the curling irons today, and have once again fired my tired noggin to a crisp.

Three hours of lectures flying over the top of my head, and I'm ready to enter camping reservations for our park into the new system.  Ya, right!

Why wait until all is ready for direct online access by the customers - logic is so terrifically over rated.

Takes talent persuading a customer to choose a number out of thin air for their campsite location.

The cheat sheet isn't quite right, problem solving's too scarce, reports translate incorrectly to fiscal services templates; feels like Mickey Mouse is mickey mousing all over the darn place, and I need to so desperately ESCAPE!

But, hey!  It's a 24 hour 7 day a week operating system, and I'm a one person office 8 hour 5 day a week type of gal.

It's beginning to creep into my weekends a bit, cause none of my other duties have evaporated into the stratosphere like I willed them to last night. Rats!

Two weeks down, ten more to go before they THINK it will all go live online.

So...

I'm high tailing it to Frugal MacDoogal Wine & Liquor off Division Street to invest in an intoxicating case of Chateau Ste Michelle Chardonnay.

See ya...!

The Ins and Outs...

Domestic Bliss 

It's come to my attention that I have been negligent in the production of an all about me and my materialistic self post. Unlucky you :'(   My domestication has been about as blissful as stale moon pies and fizz-free RC Colas.

My teenage years were plagued by mom and dad's repeated threat that they were going to shovel through and trash all those heaps of crumbled clothes, scattered papers, books, pencils, pens, magazines, newspaper clippings, letters, cards, and last week's lunch; to see if my floor was actually still there.  Of course, they never did.  I didn't either, so I was always a messy little teenage twerp.

Moving out on my own, I blossomed overnight into a controlling domesticated freak.  My ten years younger sister proclaimed that she could eat right off my spotless floors, they were that excessively clean.  I never did catch her plopping down on the floor to lick up food she had just thrown there (I would have almost killed her), so I'm sure she was joking - wasn't she?

I did have this perfection quirk that kicked in just after I escaped all parental supervision.  I became my own worst enemy, slaving to the tune of the Dishpan-Washing Machine-Vacuum Cleaner-Dust Rags Blues.  It felt as if a piece of my mom's soul had torn itself from her disapproving heart to haunt me in my adult life.

I toiled in sacrificial compliance and meekness on the home front for decades, until I was staring at my old age impatiently waiting for me above the near horizon, and a strange thing happened - my brain finally relinquished a tidbit of wisdom.   

Mulling over my last fifty years, I had to agree I was an idiot! With this revelation, my housecleaning flipped from sweep-dust-mop to dig-retrieve-destroy.  I tried trashing the clutter from my existence - poof!  Well, not really poof!  More like pooooooooooooooof.

Years it took to go through my bargain basement menagerie, salvaging a bit here, stashing a bit there, then tossing here and there into the trash heap.  Do you really understand how hard it is to just let go of things?  It's downright near impossible!!!  

Finally free from a lifetime of clutter, a strange thing has happened once again.  My husband now calls me high-end,  high-maintenance.  Who?  Me???  My brain assures me it's just called finally getting what I really want - much less, but much better ;)

Oh...

I wouldn't advise eating right off my floors either these days, unless you relish a bit of lint and fur mixed in.

Latique Crystal Cat   
Birthday, Christmas, and everything-in-between present

from husband for 2012.

Complicated Webs Life has Woven

I love blogging.  I loved blogging.  It's complicated.  I thought I would have lots of friends.  I sort of had lots of "friends", but they dropped like flies by the wayside and now there are almost none. Not satisfied, I'm moving on - priorities are changing - I want more, not less.  

While I have those I love and animal friends that have warmed my heart over the years, if life had offered me a second chance to get it right, I would have chucked it all to travel down that path - but life's not that simple.  I live with the basic tapestry I foolishly weaved in my youth, and add extensions onto it as I try to salvage the mishmash of my experiences to create a masterpiece with flaws.

Granted I may be the only one that sees my shortcomings, but I do know what they are.  While it is hard to forgive, I find it impossible to forget.  I must choose not to fixate on this to any great extent, as I'm positive that someone up there who "loves" me would give me Alzheimer as my mode of forgetting.  Some things are better just left as they are.

While I'm not ready to flush my blog completely out of existence, a post will most likely never appear until after a long nap.  I'm a dabbler of all that is creative, but for now I'm a writer and I want to see how far I can push that concept.  As with anything I take on, I approach it with a passion to be the best, to push it to the edge to see if I fall off or miraculously sprout wings.


Off to see the Wizard

My workroom is the room that has never seen any work except that of the vacuum cleaner sucking up all that feline fur that lovingly coats everything.  We have affectionately dubbed it the "Cat's Room".  It has a four foot high gate across the entrance with one of the bars removed so the cats can freely move through it, the dog cannot.  It is their escape from a canine that acts before he thinks, and has been known during his excitement to have unintentionally trampled a feline or two.  

This room has problems.  It's always had problems.  It's not a space that feels good and collects clutter like cat fur to static electricity.  I like maxing out with my environmental consciousness, and have arranged or enhanced my home and gardens for health and happiness.

Years ago I worked out all my Feng Shui charts, but don't even ask me to explain the concept these days.  The methods of finalizing my charts is lost from memory.  I'd have to study it all again.  I'm researching divining and space purification, as this room needs the negativity traveling through it to be cured.  It's a death trap for creativity.

The complications can be overwhelming when one's money point and artistic space are in the same noxious energy filled room. Perhaps it contributes to the feline's many health issues...perhaps.  I feel that since we are part of the universe, we are to some degree attached to everything in the universe.

In younger years I studied my astrological link to the skies all the way to my houses in houses, if I remember it correctly.  I traveled farther than most would venture to complete whom I was in the realm of the entire cosmos.  All I remember of that experience is that I am totally water...totally.  Sometimes I feel as if my soul holds the sum of energy, positive and negative, of all existence. It's why I need to create; it's also why I need to push away at times and just remember to breathe deeply.

Even when uncluttered this room looks complicated.

Craft supplies are stuffed in every drawer and box.

Passions for beauty and reading, although I haven't read

a novel in years - only short stories.

Contemplation corner for feline dreams 

and roguish aspirations.

A computer of my own in the near future.

Hot Chocolate on a Cold Winter Day

Discovering my storehouse of knowledge on becoming a published writer is empty, I've had to cram my head full of reading to soak up a bit of the culture of the writer's world.  It's a battle to not let myself feel inferior; to not just walk away.  I'm tired of all the complexities of life's battles, yet here I am treading water with liquid up to my eyeballs once again.  I hope I never learn to give up.

The short story world is splitting at the seams with talent, semi-talent, no talent; it reeks of submissions past their shelf life being shoved into the trash compactor.  Dissecting my three short, short stories; I've begun patching them up to stand up to the talent out there.  I began to look at the possibility of a short story, but the determination to cough up 8,000 words of perfection seems out of my reach.  

A novel - what am I thinking - 120,000 words is a hell of a lot of words.  It's unfathomable!  Yet here I am again reading up on novel writing.  I'm mulling over my short story idea, which on paper is now 1152 words.  I cannot even figure out how to outline the events from beginning to end.  I play it over in my mind rerun after rerun, working out the conversations and scenes in my imagination and under my breath, and even speak the words out loud when husband isn't around.

Last night I wrote on paper the outline for my short story turning into a novel.  I wrote it out at 2:00 in the morning in the bathroom after brushing my teeth.  I can create this story, but how, who knows?  I'm going to tackle it right after I boot out that bad karma that's festering in the Cat's Room my workroom.  

Where is that Alternate Universe when I need one?

Blog Post about Feng Shui

...with dreams of sugar plums dancing in my head

It's that time of year
-when magic's in the air.

         The Story of the Holly Sprig

         - Arthur Upson, St. Nicholas Magazine,

                c. 1907, Words to a song)

              "I'd be the shiniest green,"

              Wished once a sprig of holly,

              "That e'er at Yule was seen,

              And deck some banquet jolly!"

              "I'd be the cheeriest red,"

              Wished once the holly-berry,

              "That e'er at board rich spread

              Helped make the feasters merry!"

              The life within them heard

              Down dark and silent courses,

              For each wish is a word

              To those fair-hidden sources.

              All Summer in the wood

              While they were riper growing,

              The deep roots understood

              And helped without their knowing.

              In a little market stall

              At Yule the sprig lay waiting,

              For fine folk one and all

              Passed by that open grating.

              The Eve of Christmas Day

              It had been passed by many,

              When one turned not away

              And bought it for a penny.

              Hers was a home of care

              Which not a wreath made jolly;

              The only Christmas there

              Was that sweet sprig of holly.

              "Oh, this is better far

              Than banquet!" thought the berry;

              The leaves glowed like a star

              And made the cottage merry!

My Christmas Letter

Throwing cares away for even a day would be delightful, but this phenomenon of sweet innocence is reserved solely for children and pets that are deeply loved.  My own personal world orbits around me warmed by my happiness or cooled in my despair.  It is nurtured by my attitude; whether it is uplifting or downtrodden, positive or oppressive.

My household reflects the heart of me.  It is the measure of who I am.  I want it to shine outward as a thousand burning suns and to glow within as a new moon starry night.  I persevere on my journey to create a quality of existence that soars to the heavens for each gift of life that enters in. It's not a passage to be taken lightly.

As a child I had others to protect me, but as an adult I am the protector, and invincibility has never found its place by my side.  I stumble, I fall down, and I get back up and move on.  I've learned that life is not forged for the faint of heart, for it thrives on the backs of those who take chances.

I feel nostalgic this holiday season, as I sit at work reflecting on whatever drifts into my thoughts.  It's hard to quiet my soul and patiently wait for the minute and hour hand to get unstuck and fly around to that 4:30 mark and freedom; freedom to go home and fry up breakfast for dinner, and remove the clutter to make way for all that glitzy holiday menagerie of decorations.

Christmas is...well it's Christmas; but each of those 24 days leading up to that 25th day we all celebrate in so many different ways, well...they're all simply magical.

Merry Christmas and love this holiday season!

Yvonne and Vic

Our feline trio: Zoe, Andee, and Lacey

and

A dog named Dustin