Living in the Present

My son is staying with his grandfather, working with him six days a week, crabbing. Another effort to keep him out of trouble. He is staying in an old hunting camp, certainly not luxury accommodations, but the scenery is beautiful.



There is a pond with a dock where he goes in the evenings to throw out fish food. Most of the fish are still kind of tiny, although we saw an ugly old gar fish that was a good size. The water was too dark to get a good picture of him.

Tonight he called from the dock and said he was playing around with the alligators, said he was going to jump in the water and try to pull this four foot gator out of the water. I said "Oh my gosh, son, don't do that. That water is too dirty."

No, I told him he'd better stay on the dock, that little gator might have a mama underneath there, looking out for her baby.



This bird was wedged up in the tree. He is dead. I wonder what happened that he died like that.



I left my camera for my son and father-in-law to take pictures. My son told me he got a picture of the alligator and of a crab the size of a dinner plate, the largest one he has seen so far. When we get the pictures developed I will post them.

It's hard work, they get started around five in the morning. As my son says, with a trace of irony in his voice, when it gets dark, that means it's time for bed. Not much time or energy left for getting into trouble.

My father-in-law is a retired school teacher/coach and a full-blooded Cajun. He and my son have never been really close in a traditional sense, but there has always been an odd bond between the two of them. Hopefully this time spent together will be good for my son.

Tomorrow they will probably cast for shrimp and fry some up for supper. What a life!



He's not out of the woods yet, (are any of us ever really out of the woods?) but he is in a clear spot and this mama is learning to live in the present, looking neither too far ahead nor too far back.

The Eyes Have It

Connie, over at Dawsonwood, wrote today of lighting a 2000 year old lamp. I started thinking about light, how it sometimes comes and goes in our lives.

Friday morning, at my local grocery store, the manager was helping the cashier by bagging the groceries when he looked up at someone behind me and his face lit up and he said “well hey, boo, what you doin’ here?” And a voice answers, “buying diapers”. Then the manager hurriedly shoves the last item in my bag and practically runs in the direction of the voice from behind me, saying “hey, wait a minute, give her to me”. It did not take eyes in the back of my head for me to know the voice was holding the man’s granddaughter. I thought to myself, “self, there is sunshine everywhere you go, if you will just open your eyes and pay attention.”

I have seen the glow of this lamp, have felt its laser sharpness piercing my soul, boring through judgmental and sanctimonious parts of me. I have seen that light shine like a diamond, a small pinprick of brilliance bringing me hope when I thought all was darkness. I have basked in the full out brilliance of this light, squinted my eyes in the face of it, and I have bathed myself in its warmth.

This morning (again), I decided that every day, I will look for the light in that day, because always, ALWAYS, there is something to be grateful for, something to smile about. I have been looking too long at the empty half of the glass. I will look, and see, and appreciate the full half of the glass. Yes, I will.

Playing Again

Altered collages from my journal...

I have a non-blogging friend I am trying to reconnect with, a full and busy life is the barrier, and I understand, but I grieve the loss none the less.



I want so badly to feel connected to others, and yet I keep a very wide protective space around myself.



Is a picture really worth a thousand words? Not in my book! However, words fail me right now, and so I resort to using pictures in an effort to keep my fragile blogdom connections intact.

I have been quietly reading your blogs, thanks to www.bloglines.com. It's just that I am still trying to get myself adjusted to the loss of the 40 hours a week I now spend at work. I'll get my "sea legs" eventually!

Sigh...

I got a job, BTW. It started out being part-time, then moved to full-time. That and family issues have kept me away from the computer.

I read May Sarton's Plant Dreaming Deep, and when I saw the old fashioned pocket with the signature page was loose, I could not resist pulling it completely off the book.

I drew the three women and did a little watercolor number on them.

My Photoshop skills leave a little to be desired.

Yeah, Right

What does it mean? Who knows? Who cares? I drew the chair, the other stuff is glued on. Wish I had some of those Lydia E. Pinkham tablets to banish the bad days. Wonder what was in them?

We've got a guy around here who does motivational speeches and his little motto is "no bad days". Everybody has bad days, buddy. The trick is, not to get swallowed up by them.

Secrets

Here's another interesting site: www.postsecret.blogspot.com

People send in anonymous post cards with their secret written on them. A few of the cards are funny, many are poignant, and you wish you could just give the person a hug and tell them that it will be all right. There are also a fair share of cards where you'd like to give the person a smack up side the head and ask them, "what were you thinking?"

Since I'm too lazy to make my own post card up and send it in, I thought I'd post a secret or two here.



No, it's not really true that I hired a lawyer, but I did swallow my pride and practically got down on my knees and begged the library lady to lower my fines. They cut them in half, and I still owed enough that I could have bought three, maybe four, of us, lunch at McDonalds. I do feel so much better now that I can check out library books again.

I am reading two books of poems, one by May Sarton and the other by Charles Bukowski. I also checked out Plant Dreaming Deep, by May Sarton, and another book on creativity by Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit. There was a novel I wanted to get too, but, alas, I could not remember the title. Anyway, the four books I got were over my limit as a reforming library patron.

Here is another secret, terrible, but true. I just hope and pray my readers (all three or four of you!) will chalk it up to bad taste and will think no less of me for it.

In My Mother's Garden

Or maybe, "I Think Spring is Here, Thank God"

When my grandfather died in December of 1985, something came over me, and the next spring, I felt compelled to plant a garden. It was a small space, based on the principles of square foot gardening. I planted cucumbers, tomatoes and bell peppers. If I had had a little more faith in the square foot gardening method, I probably would have planted pink-eyed purple hull peas. I don’t understand why my grandfather’s death drove me to dig in the dirt, nurturing vegetable plants that way, but doing so help me endure my loss, and I felt like I was honoring my grandfather’s memory.

That’s not me in the picture. I was probably the one who took the picture. That’s my sister, standing there barefoot with her hand on her hip. That was back in the repressive days when respectable little girls wore dresses everywhere, even to the country, but that is a whole ‘nother post! The peas are the bushy things to the left. The bare ground was probably where watermelons were going to be planted. The dog's name was Sport.



It seems my mother felt the same need when my brother died in December of 1994. Sometime in the spring of 1995, my mother planted a tree in his memory. Then she dug a small flower bed and filled it with flowers. Back then she had a lawn with a few trees and lush St. Augustine grass covering the ground. Today she has a garden filled with plants and “rooms”, a veritable sanctuary in her back yard.

In my mother’s garden, there are weird things. Bowling balls, squatty little frog statues and roosters made of beans. I think I remember my mother and a friend of hers gathering all these colored beans and corn and tediously gluing them to the burlap to form this lovely work of art. And it all comes down to this, the beloved work of art now residing in her garden, the beans slowly rotting off. (Is that a metaphor or what? How many things do we value and then cast off?)



In my mother’s garden, there are little statues of children scattered about, most often depicting two girls and a boy, as we once were. My sister and I entertain ourselves by choosing which image best represents each of us. She is always the angelic-looking one. One of us seems to have lost her head, probably me.





In my mother’s garden, there are flowers. Flowers like my brother that seem to smile and greet you with a friendly “Hi, there”,



flowers like my sister, beautiful and deceptively delicate



flowers like me, decidedly sturdy-looking, that seem a bit confused, who are not sure what they are supposed to be (orange? pink? yellow?). Flowers with weird names too. This one is called chicken-bush. I have always had a fondness for its confused nature.



In my mother’s garden, there are sentimental things too. This is the pulley that was in the water well at the house where she grew up.



In my mother’s garden, there are places of prayer. Places to wrestle with a mother’s grief over the loss of a son. Places to intercede on behalf of a grandson. Places to thank God the blessings of a new season.