One day I only sorted a single box, the next day I powered through six. Negatives and family photos defy intentions. Nevertheless, I have made progress even during a “Very Bad Week.”
My upcoming 10k, diet, and writing. A body and a cherry pitter. Regaining control?
Continue readingA few days ago I ran five miles and began sorting boxes. Gary emptied the attics last month. Six months ago I began running again. Two years ago I decided enough was enough and I would eat better and lose some weight. We began isolating from Covid in March 2020.
All the boxes stored in the north and south attic went into the largest bedroom. Then we emptied the huge closet in that room and everything from under the bed came out.
Maybe I should keep it to myself. But no, that would not do. I read most of it aloud to Gary. Then I composed an email, but kept adding to the Bcc. So here. Here it is. It’s unlikely that any (none?) of my family will read it, but sending it as a link in an email probably wouldn’t change that.*
I am calm in desperate situations, sometimes passionate in discussion, but quiet at my core under stress. Pressing down fear, anger, frustration, and other emotion in fraught situations is almost automatic. (Most people who think they have seen me angry have no idea.*) I learned to suppress those emotions when I was being teased, bullied, and otherwise harassed in childhood and adolescence. It is a skill I have fallen back on throughout my life when dealing with mentally ill relatives and grief. And injustice every darned day.
[intended as] First post in over a month. Retirement, running, carving, canning, Facebook, and reparations, in no particular order. And the skink.
A friend of mine, someone I know only through our mutual blog posts and a handful of emails, the exchanges of notebooks and weaving… lives in a deeply red community of a deeply red southern state, the one blue dot in a red sea. She has found herself in situations where people say what seem such outrageous things that she is too flabbergasted to respond and in situations where she knows she is being deliberately baited. Walking around blue becomes an act of courage.
I get that.
This is probably not the best way to come back from a month of silence. I meant to write about wood carving and jam jars and a train ride, our bivalent booster and books. I’ve started that post. Instead…
I meant to write this post the other day, which was the one-year anniversary of receiving the keys to our Portland Condo. Instead, I baked, worked on a manuscript for a friend, napped, ran two miles and walked another.
About running at nearly seventy…
for Ruth
Roses, choosing a home, The Flight of the Mind, and walking, in no particular order.
Continue readingNext month is our 48th wedding anniversary, but today is the 50th anniversary of living together. I announced our intention to my mother via a letter sent from Kansas where I was traveling with my step-grandmother. (It was cowardly. While I was old enough to move in with Gary, I was too young to tell Mom face to face.) I learned a lot about wool on that trip.
In her essay, “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” Roxane Gay quarrels with labeling Cassidy Hutchinson a hero for her recent testimony:
“It took courage, I suppose, for Hutchinson to do the right thing. I can imagine she was facing a lot of political pressure, and perhaps even danger for coming forward to share what she knew about the January 6th insurrection. … Let me be clear. Cassidy Hutchinson is not a hero. The bar for heroism must be higher than doing the bare minimum before it’s too late to salvage what remains of one’s future. … Let us not forget how she is perfectly fine being part of a party that demands the surrender of her bodily autonomy and is also fine with that circumstance for the rest of us… “
—Roxane Gay
Is Cassidy Hutchinson a hero?
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Some things are worth mentioning: the freedom to marry the person you love, food, clean air, water in streams, the compassion of people you know and also of the people you do not know. Children, uncles and aunts or third and fourth cousins, the devotion of grandparents, the expectation that if I fall someone will help me rise to my feet. If I am bleeding someone will bandage my wound. I might travel north to another state to visit old friends. I may worship, read, visit a theater, and laugh out loud.
None of these things are mentioned in the Constitution.
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