Here I begin

After years of blogging on Divatribe's site as Black Crow, Blue Sky, I knew I needed a change and more room to express all that I was feeling and seeing and learning about life in my 66th year.

This is it. I begin on a Thursday in July, and I'm at work, and tonight and for the next six days, I'll be going home to my second job: house- and dogsitting. It's good for me to be away from my own home now and then, because when I finally do get to go home, it's really delightful.

Yesterday after work I stopped at a craft store to buy yet another ball of cotton yarn. I've been happily knitting dishcloths and facecloths all this summer, because I love working with the different colors and completing a project within a few days. While I knit I listen to CDs from the Great Courses company. This summer it's been the Civil War, in all sorts of detail. I've learned so much that I never knew before. I had an ancestor in the Union Army and another ancestor on the other side of the family, a Baptist preacher who was a recruiter for the Union Army.

Slowly this summer I've grown to comprehend what it must have meant to live in Knoxville, Tennessee, nominally a Confederate state, but where most of the sentiment favored the Union. The bloodshed of the war is horrible to read about. If my high school graduating class had suffered proportional losses, it would have meant that out of the 200 students, 40 would have been killed in combat and another 120 wounded, sickened or left suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. And what of the women? There would have been many widows reduced to ruin. What a well of loneliness. No wonder the general environment of the South tends toward the morbid. In fact, I always think of the South as a place where terrible things happen.

Perhaps next I'll listen to a series of lessons on meditation by Pema Chodron. It's the complete opposite of sadness. Although most of us carry around a lot of negativity in the form of memories and fears, we can change that. We can train our minds to be calm. We can cultivate gratitude to carry us over the rough spots.

And at the end of it all, we have a stack of nice dishcloths. What a great idea!