Children are really helpless at the hands of adults. If you have ever been a child, you can identify with the feeling of absolute powerlessness and the feelings of hatred it can induce in children.

Yesterday, my daughter and I tried to get my little granddaughter dressed and into the car for a fun trip to Old Salem. Fun for whom remains under discussion.

Anyway, Bea did not want to go. She resisted getting dressed, had to be carried to the car and forced into her carseat. All the time she was weeping and saying she wanted to stay at home.

Well, we got about halfway to Winston-Salem, and finally gave in and took her back home. Turns out she really was sick and there was plenty of evidence of that that I will not go into here.

My daughter and I have been cursing ourselves for the past 24 hours for making Bea go when she so clearly did not want to. We have apologized over and over to her. We have groveled. We have been very angry with ourselves for imposing our will on her.

This brings up a lot of memories for me that I would rather not go into here. The thing is that I am learning, learning, learning. There are times when children have to do what their parents tell them to do, and there are times when the parents need to back off and listen to the children.

We have decided to delay the day trip to Old Salem for Bea for a couple of years. As Amy says,

"Bea doesn't know from Moravians!" Oh, isn't it so?

And Amy revealed that she was only going to Old Salem to please me. She doesn't really care deeply about the Moravians, either. Who knew?

My biggest mistake is assuming that people are as interested in history or whatever as I am. I just have to get over that. And it's definitely OK not to care about the Moravians. Care or don't care, it's OK! Was this vital lesson worth a lost day's vacation? You bet!

Footprints

Wow, October.

The kids are taking one more weekend at the beach, as the autumnal colors are
already beginning to show on the Piedmont. I love the dry spareness of autumn and winter, after the lushness and humidity of summer.

My son-in-law Tim has been doing some work on my house this week, enclosing the laundry room that used to be open on one side to the raw underpinnings of the house. Looking over there at the view from under the house used to be very scary. There could be snakes or spiders living over there--or worse yet, ghosts.

We leave footprints wherever we go, as well as other traces of ourselves. A camera with a heat detector can photograph the very air that we warmed with our bodies after we've left the scene. If you watch CSI, you know that DNA and loose hairs and fuzz from our clothes can prove clues to where we have been. A lot of criminals have been caught that way, by a careless fingerprint or a discarded paper coffee cup left at the scene of the crime. "Be sure your sins will find you out," is a saying that I grew up on. Best then, to just be good all the time.

If my life were seasonal, I'd be in Autumn now, for sure. I can feel the colors ripening in my spirit, even as my skin and hair fade to shades of winter. If I were a vegetable/fruit, I guess I'd be a pumpkin. Or maybe a gourd, with a lot of loose seeds to rattle.

And I'm very conscious of the footprints that I'm leaving as I travel through this world. Others have traveled before me, and shown me the way. I honor them, and I try to be worthy.
This week I watched a documentary on Harlan County's (Kentucky) tremendous and history-changing miners' strike of 1974. I felt as though I were watching my kin.
The people in my family who were grown-up when I was a child were a lot like the Appalachian folk who appeared in the documentary, gold teeth, missing teeth, lanky build, pale skins, salty language, and all. I am like them. They are me.
My great-grandfather Frank Reed was a farmer in the summer and a miner in the winter. He had six children and a wife to feed. I know that he struggled. My grandmother has told me about seeing the miners come down the road in the predawn hours with their headlamps shining. They left some big footprints for me to follow.

We are responsible for doing all the good we can in this lifetime. The Universe will guide us if we let our consciences be clear and open and innocent, like children. We know what we ought to do. God help us do it!

The artist at her work

As you can probably tell, this is my granddaughter at the beach at Avon, putting the finishing touches on her sea turtle made of sand. All of us scoured the beach for the fragments of shells that make up the turtle's back. Bea thought of giving it eyes, nose and mouth. The seaweed, presumably, is the turtle's lunch.
Words cannot explain how much I miss seeing her from day to day, because she's growing so fast and changing so much. I love to see how her mind works.
I brought a student paint set, some brushes and some watercolor paper to the beach thinking that if it rained, Bea would enjoy doing some painting. On her first try, she dipped the brush in black paint and applied it lavishly to the paper, creating a very large dark shape of many tones. She resisted (rightly, I think) my suggestion to add another color to her painting. She wanted just the black against the white. That picture is now on my refrigerator, where I see it every time I go into the kitchen. I see a lot of thought and direction in that black shape now. I see the dark patch in the middle of it and the lighter patches around the edges. It's very Zen.
On another painting, she painted one front and one hind leg of what I suppose was going to be a dog or something. She studied her painting intently, and then remarked, "The other legs are on the other side of the paper." Of course!
Last evening, I went with my friend Bonnie to a poetry evening at the Nasher Art Museum, which featured a lecture and reading by a famous American poet named Jerome Rothenberg. Dr. Rothenberg spoke on the poetry of Picasso and read some of Picasso's poetry and some of Gertrude Stein's poetry, as well as his own. As you can imagine, Picasso's poetry is utterly incomprehensible. Dr. Rothenberg, however, read it with such passion and vigor that the sounds virtually leapt out of his mouth. The result was that I as a listener began to feel, after a while, a pleasant heat in my brain, as if it had been vigorously massaged. I explain this by saying that when I heard these nonsensical poems, my brain lit up like a fireworks display frantically searching for some meaning or some connection in the juxtaposition of words. This seems to be the whole point. Dr. R. also showed us a series of slides depicting concrete or found poems, in which the poet/artist simply arranged letters or symbols or words on a page. If you didn't know it was supposed to be a poem, you might have assumed that it was a typesetter gone mad. Visual poems also included collages of junk and leavings and fragments of words and strips of newspaper and even twigs and bits of string. Fascinating!
What I love most about it is that Bea has been doing this sort of thing since birth. Wasn't it my Bea who snipped off the cat's whiskers? What better "word" for a poem, since cat's whiskers arouse all sorts of feelings in the viewer, to say nothing of the poor cat, whose face looked unbalanced for weeks until his new whiskers grew in. But such is art. Oy vey!

The Best of Times

Yes, I am back from the Outer Banks, and yes, I am a different woman. Boy, did I ever need a vacation!

When you work from day to day, seemingly 24/7, you can so easily lose perspective. I get so locked in to my routine that I deaden myself to changes needed. For example, on a typical work day, I get up, make a cup of coffee and some kind of quick breakfast (instant cereal, frozen waffle, etc.), then go plop down in the recliner and turn on the TV. I watch the local news, which is just about as interesting as watching my hair grow. Who bloody cares what the temperature is or whether it's going to rain or what the traffic is like? If I could find something else more interesting to watch, I would. The point is, I feel like I can't just eat without having something to entertain me, and I can't read while eating because I would be likely to get food on the pages of my book or magazine. Ick!

However, since I've some back from being away from TV news for a week, I realize that I can actually eat my food without having the TV on. Wow! What a revelation!
The other thing is this: When I'm in my usual routine, I do absolutely crazy things like mop the kitchen floor even when it isn't really dirty, but just because it's Saturday. And if I don't get it mopped on the weekend, I'm perfectly miserable every single day until I finally get it mopped. It weighs on my conscience like a dirty rag.
But after only one week at the beach, not mopping, I can now easily choose to sit and knit awhile or paint my toenails or read Newsweek or by golly, just sit and rest, without mopping. How did I become so compulsive about mopping the kitchen?
The truth is that I am not alone. There are a lot of us locked into silly meaningless routines because our brains have gotten into a rut. A vacation gives us the chance to rethink why we do things the way we do. Do I mop because my brain is full of guilt and anger over things that happened years ago? Am I trying to purge old regrets or stall off depression? What is this brain-clutter that I call thinking?

As my favorite poem states:
"The new life begins when you can sit still,
even if only for a moment,
and feel the waves of your own breath
rising and falling, ebbing and flowing--
an ocean of diamonds in the center of your chest."

Yes, the moments are diamonds, beyond price, and we should waste none of them. While I was at the beach, an old friend died of pancreatic cancer. Do you think, if she could come back to advise us, she would say, "Be sure and mop your kitchen floor?"

Soon -- to the beach!

Can't wait until Saturday when we all go to the beach together. It's going to be wonderful to have a whole week with my family, including my granddaughter Bea.

I haven't written a post since July 14, mainly because I've been so busy dogsitting in addition to working full time that I haven't even had time to think. But the hardest work is now over and life is opening a door on a new experience--taking a full week's vacation for the first time in years.

I'll be bringing a couple of British novels and a bottle of gin, since I just learned from the New York Times this morning that a moderate amount of alcohol seems to prevent or at least delay Alzheimer's. Coffee does, as well. Does anyone know about chocolate?

My old classmate writes that he is appalled at seeing photos of a recent reunion of our grade-school buddies. He's feeling the same feelings I go through every time I go to a reunion: Who are these old codgers? Surely I'm not as old as they are. But the answer is, yes, you are just as old as your buddies. So get used to it. None of us wants to get old or deteriorate or die. But what are you going to do about it? That's just how it goes. Pass the gin!

Blood is thicker

Have I said lately how much I love my family? My girls are just the finest women in the world, and you can quote me on that.

I love to think about Amy and Sara when they were little. I remember the first photo we ever took of Sara. It was on a sunny spring day and we put her on a baby quilt outdoors. In the photo, her older sister Amy is bending tenderly toward her. Sara was just the best thing that ever happened to us as a family. Watching her grow up, with all her talents and all her charm, has been a total joy.

Today there are problems to be dealt with, but I know that we as a family can handle them. We are thinking positively and holding no malice against anyone. It's just one of those painful transitions that families go through now and then.

And, as I said to Amy, who is a mother herself now, this is parenthood. It never ends. My own dear mother is no doubt looking down anxiously from heaven to make sure her loved ones are being cared for properly. God just makes us this way.

My dogsitting job is almost over -- one more day and then I'll be home. I look forward to being among my own things again, simple as they are: dishes, potted plants, books, photos. They're what spells home to me. And Sara will make her own home, and it will be just as sweet to her.

We're all holding each other in the light and sending love to each other. We'll get through this.
All about us are opportunities for a fuller, happier, more prosperous life--and we are ready to claim the blessings that lie before us like clover in a field.

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!