Creative energy

I've been trying to find the energy in spring to move forward. I wanted to take a serene approach but somehow my attention span is leaving me in the mind space of quick response - like a graffiti artist - hit and run. It's called bombing - not that I'm so hip - I just teach contemporary art - so I have to know what's going on. It is not my usual forum - but I am not sure what is usual anymore. I must be born again, after all.

Weather or Not

What is it with the way weather affects our moods? I am trying very hard to be cheerful and light-hearted and it feels as though the clouds from the gloomy outside are making their way into my head. I know every day cannot be SunnyDay or HappyDay, but wow, this one is rough. The flowers are out and they are trying their beautiful best to cheer us all up. (It's difficult to be depressed in a path of daffodils and tulips and roses and forsythia, but rarely are we, on any given workday, standing in such a path of petaled loveliness. Unless we work in a flower shop or a garden center.) But there is something to be said for being able to wear sandals, and skirts with no pantyhose, and short sleeve tops, and no coat. Break out the white shoes and linen capris. Then again, maybe the sun needs a break. There is a lot of pressure on the sun – everyone wishing for sunny days for their softball games and weddings and picnics and birthday surprises and jogs with their dogs. Maybe the sun needs some time off. And maybe the clouds need some on-the-job experience. We don't exactly wish for clouds too often, unless there is a ball game we hope will be rained out. I guess it's not too fun being GloomyDay – no one really wants it or asks for it too often. Bummer.

My goal for the day is to be glad to have this GloomyDay. It's overachieving and underappreciated. And having more than once been an overachieving, underappreciated myself, I think it needs to be accepted and – although it's hard to do wearing long pants and a coat and regular shoes with socks – embraced.

Good/Bad

When I was in high school and college, I was one of the Good Girls. Never smoked, never drank, certainly never touched the "other stuff" that the other kids were into. Smelled pot, but only in the bathrooms. Had no idea what acid or mushrooms or cocaine even looked like, let alone felt like. I left that stuff to the Bad Girls. And I tried to never associate with them, because I was very concerned about studies and grades and what my honors teachers would think and what my honors peers would think. My schools were hotbeds for all the bad stuff, so needless to say I was in the extreme minority. And oh my goodness, didn't all that stuff kill brain cells and cause permanent damage?

Now looking back on it - I did the right thing at the right time - I suppose.

And now that I'm grown up with a grown-up Honors life and grown-up Honors children and we're all trying to make the right grown-up Honors choices, I sort of wish I had steered off the path at least once. I'm not talking about being a full fledged Bad Girl, but maybe once in a while doing a Bad Girl thing. Like smoking in the girls' room. Or trying pot. Or at least befriending one of the Bad Girls. After all, they could not have been all that bad all the time. They just did not make the same choices as I did, and vice versa. And whose to say that I made all the right choices? Being Good was good, but it was also boring. And maybe I would have been a good friend to a Bad Girl. Who knows?

In the meantime, I'd love to try some pot.

Riding the Waves

I know the Baroque period is filled with images of the Rape of Europa (with reference to the mythological scam of Zeus appearing in the form of a bull to the maiden Europa). There is a fabulously ornate version of the subject in the Philadelphia Museum of Art collection. It has been hanging in the same place since the museum was erected in the 20s.

As youthful museum aides during our high school years, my friend Linda and I were in the museum every Saturday performing assigned tasks like wrapping Christmas cards to be sold in the shop and pointing patrons to the ladies room. In exchange we could roam the museum in the late afternoon discovering all of the treasures.

One Saturday we turned the corner to see the white bull fantasy. The bull was bedecked in flowers, hovered over by troops of cupids, wearing a goofy expression on his bovine mug. We had no idea about the apocryphal story of seduction. We laughed explosively. We couldn't stop. We laughed so hard a laugh that we couldn't walk or stand. We were simultaneously doubled over in mirth and pain, afraid the museum guard would toss us out.

Maybe we were hysterical with adolescent intuition about sex (mythological or physical). Today, every time I think about human sexuality (from fable and from experience) I feel similarly transported. It is goofy, after all.

Great

One of my neighbors had this tremendous, gorgeous tree in her front yard. Gorgeous to us neighbors, perhaps, as it was grand and rich with foliage, and the shade was lovely. Not so much gorgeous to her, as she was the keeper of the tree, thereby the raker of the leaves and the pruner of the branches. I'm talking major tree work. Well, this past February - after so many years and being very tired of the upkeep required - she had the tree cut down. Removed entirely. The roots shaved down, and the stump gone. Aaack. It was a bit of a shock, seeing all of that space, all of that grass and remains of the Great Tree That Was. Well, lo and behold, last month something popped up from where the center of the trunk had been. I thought it was a piece of stray paper that had fallen out of someone's trash, and blown across her yard. Very odd. A closer look showed that it was a bud. Huh? How can this be? A little green bud popping out of what used to be a huge tree, from a spot thought to be dead. So I waited a few days. Then something bright red popped through the green. Holy smokes, it's a tulip. A perfect, pint-sized tulip. Honest to God. Bright cherry red, with the greenest of leaves. Taking quite a chance to root and grow on the site where something else had been - strong and lush - something that had been cut down. A bit risky, eh? But isn't that a good thing? That piece of ground was meant to be something, meant to be the support system and foundation for something great. Yes the tree was great. But isn't the tulip as well? To grow and to blossom is great - no matter where or when - and no matter how it happens. And great in size is not to be measured in inches or feet, but to be measured in strength of the spirit and beauty of the soul. So much that is beautiful and great blossoms from whatever was.

So the next time I am feeling like that tree - cut down and nonexistent - I need to know that I can always choose to root again from that very spot. I can choose to be the tulip.

Taxes, toads and tomatoes

So the taxes eat us up, the toads fuck us up and the tomatoes are a fruit that sustains us.

When I worked in a place that took my taxes out automatically, it was painless. But as a fellow crone pointed out, they get to keep the interest and use my $ all that time too. (Not to mention spend it on WAR) But writing a check for taxes at this time of year is devastating if you (that is, me) thought you were managing financially on your (my) own. This is the one year anniversary of my divorce; I am happily going it alone. But oh my God, how will I continue this into old age, dementia, etc.? How can I possibly make enough money to live to a ripe old age? Maybe I am in my ripe old age right now....

Well, Fiona, your toad may have fucked you up in the past (if I remember correctly) but it seems like this is the perfect and appropriate approach at this time in all our crone lives. I, too have a friend that is hopeless "partner" material, yet once or twice a year we really enjoy each others' company. That suits me. I just would like a few of those cowboys, not just one! (Or Indians would be fine, too)

As for tomatoes, I am looking forward to summer and the richness which tomatoes represent for me. They are a symbol of summer. At one time my sisters-in-law and myself tried to start a business called Hot Tomatoes, a name I somehow found appropriate. (It turns out that there is a swing band in Denver with that name. ) Can crones be Hot Tomatoes? Oh yeah, especially with toads....

Another Tale of Two Cities

Well the story is always in the telling. And the moral of the story is something we have to work for - at least that's the way it is in the more subtle (i.e. confusing) real life dramas (funny, I wrote traumas the first time around). I wrote a comment to  Sioban's post - check it out.

More Stories PLEASE.

Immersed

in genealogy as one of the paths to enough self-realization to be able to be a more evolved human.

Maybe. I just know I have been searching for and reading anything I could find to state fully that members of my family, some of my kin, no matter how distant, were slave-owners. I tried to talk to my Dad about it at the nursing home. It's my Mom's family, not his (so far). Mine, regardless. I know, of course, that talking with Dad is sometimes "like herding kittens," but he is often sharper than expected. Am I seeing selective dementia? Or did her genuinely want to talk about the pizza I had brought him? How does his brain work at this time of his life? Maybe it's his folksy way of acting as if he never heard me to be polite. (The subject being impossible to process?) Maybe he just couldn't absorb or offer any more sorrow.

The good news is that Georgia may actually have some family that isn't so WHITE. We may have wonderful new relatives that we know nothing about. It would be so interesting to meet them if they had any family history to share to put the puzzle together.

The bad news is how it may have happened. The fear that rape was a part of my family history is worse to me than finding out that there were suicides. And I may never know more; it may not be part of the written record. Which is why it would be great to talk to someone who might have some stories.

Another Crone from Hawaii sent this to me. It's been around in the past, think. But it really resonates with me right now.

'THE WORLD'S SHORTEST FAIRY TALE!

Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl 'Will you marry me?' The girl said: 'NO!'

And the girl lived happily ever after and went shopping, dancing, camping, drank martinis, always had a clean house, never had to cook, did whatever the hell she wanted, never argued, didn't get fat, traveled more, had many lovers, didn't save money, and had all the hot water to herself. She went to the theater, never watched sports, never wore friggin' lacy lingerie that went up her butt, had high self esteem, never cried or yelled, felt and looked fabulous in sweat pants and was pleasant all the time.

The End

Mother/Nature

Last October I planted about a hundred flower bulbs, because well, when you're a new homeowner and have a new yard, it is your job to read all about your new yard and its possibilities, and you plant bulbs in October. I had never even seen a bulb, let alone planted one. But off I went to the nearest home and garden center, ready to learn about and load up on bulbs. Digging through the bags of bulbs, with full-color pictures of the bloom-to-be on the labels, I made it my mission to see that each of these little brown almost-rounds things end up in the ground, x-inches apart and y-inches deep, with the pointy part up, according to the directions, and so forth. When all were planted, my knees and back and arms ached from squatting and bending and digging. I watered the fresh mounds of earth, all the while telling each little mound how much I loved planting it, that is was very special, and it was concealing a little miracle. That it had a lot of sleeping to do in the next few months.

Then came November. And December, and the holidays and the cold weather and the snow. I worried. I would look at the spots of snow under where I thought the bulbs were, hoping that they were snuggling and cozy and sleepy. I hoped that they could hear me, whispering words of affection through the frosty ground. I even talked baby-talk to these hidden beings, not caring at all how it must have sounded to any neighbors curious enough to watch a woman tiptoeing all over a frozen yard. Here I was living in the moment of the winter, so curious about just when and how Nature would show itself to me and to my yard. Praying that I did in fact help to turn this piece of yard into a garden.

Then came The Thaw. The time when there is no more black ice on the sidewalks and street. No more frost on the mailbox. No more unannounced snowflakes. Just cool, post-Winter/ pre-Spring air.

Then came Now.

I'm walking out to my car parked in the driveway, looking at my watch and hoping I would not be late for work. I glance at the curve around the driveway and the walkway, and stop, and my heart seems to skip a beat. Little green stubs of things popping up from the earth. Spaced here and there, oddly enough x-inches apart and probably y-inches deep. Oh my God. It worked. They're here. Maybe they heard me. They must have. They did not freeze. They stayed cozy and slept and snuggled in the ground. And now they are popping up, at their own pace of course, and on their own terms. But here they are, and here I am, and they are miracles and they are glorious and I am the lucky one, getting to see them first. And I look up to the sky and say Thank You, and I look back at the ground and say Thank You. And then I get a bit giddy and I giggle and feel wonderful from the inside out. Then I think how it feels so much like when I had my children - giving birth and seeing a miracle happen right on the spot. And feeling like the luckiest person on the planet. And I think of how every woman, with or without the childbearing part, is a mom to all that she plants and nurtures and cares for, and all that grows and promises to be a miraculous being.

April