Category Archives: Essays

Wheat

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When he wasn’t ranching or farming or drinking coffee in Mack’s Cafe, this is where my father could normally be found.
At the Amana Colonies on a visit to my sister who was attending Cornell College in Iowa. As you can see, my father cleaned up well.
ANTIQUE JAR

(To get a larger view of photos and to read captions, please click on first photo and arrows. To get back to read the essay, click on X at upper left of photo screen.)

Wheat

A stalk of it usually extended from between his teeth when he was out inspecting a field come June or July. It collected in his pants cuffs and in the hat band of his broad-brimmed work hat.  Bags of it wintered in a huge pile that filled our garage one year when there had been a good crop and all the barns and silos were full to bursting. The cars stood outside in the gravel driveway just off the alley and behind the garage that winter and our house was strangely empty of mice as they took shelter in the garage instead. Our outside cat grew fat even though he rarely came to the back door to be fed.

Ours was a little ecological system all its own.  Mice feasted on  grain spilled from burst seams in the garage. The cat feasted on the mice and we feasted on the steaks of Black Angus cattle who had eaten the ensilage from wheat stripped of its grains.

If I have always worked hard to furnish the bread and butter of my life, it is wheat that has furnished the dessert–my college education, my first car and, after my dad died and I inherited 1/6 interest in the farm and ranch, my first house.

Our lives were run by wheat and cattle.  During the summer, no time for family vacations. Wheat and cattle were my dad’s alarm clock. He rose before sunrise every morning and was often asleep in his chair before sunset, wheat spilling out of his pants cuffs or high top boots or stuck by the hooked spines of its beards to the fabric footstool in front of his rocker.

He slept hard, my father, and rose early to insure everything worked to the cycle of the nature that had surrounded him from the time, as a three-year-old boy, he had stepped off the Union Pacific train that had brought him and his mother to the little South Dakota town both he and later I grew up in. As they descended the metal steps, my grandmother had held one hand down to grasp the hand of my three-year-old father. The other was extended upward, holding a cage with two canaries. My grandfather and teenaged aunts were there to greet him and my grandmother, who, even though she had been the one who decreed that they should leave their safe security in Iowa to claim a homestead on the Dakota prairie,  had not traveled by wagon, but instead had sent her young girls and husband on ahead to prepare a way for her and her youngest.

My grandfather––a Dutch immigrant who was not a farmer, but rather a baker better suited for working with wheat in its miled state––did what most people did when my grandmother issued demands.  He complied.  It made for a hard life for them all–fighting the harsh South Dakota winters out on the plains as well as prairie fires, plagues of grasshoppers and schizophrenic weather that could furnish either drought, unseasonal rain or hail–all of which could ruin a wheat crop. So that later, when I asked my dad why he never frequented the games parlor where the other men played poker and lofted a beer or two, he said that he had no need for games of chance. His whole life as a rancher and farmer had been the biggest gamble of all.

My grandparents never did learn the correct formula, but my father, surrounded by the prairie from age three to seventy, learned its secrets well. Enough to buy out his parents as well as others who tried and failed. Enough to ensure the comfort of his wife and children and his grandchildren. Enough to die at what, now that I am nearly  69,  seems like the young age of 70.

Year after year, as he tilled the rich South Dakota soil to plant the grains of wheat he’d saved to seed a new crop––he seeded my life as well, along with that of my mother, my sisters, my nieces and nephews–all of our lives growing and prospering from those millions of shafts of grain that he planted and watched over and harvested and stored and replanted over a period  of fifty years.

The WordPress prompt today was “Grain.”

Controlled Chaos

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The other day in a comment to another blogger, I said something on the order of how I think life is cyclical.  We go from the intuitive state of children to the increasingly rational world of the adult and then, as we retire and age (or age and retire, depending on how anxious we are to do so) and get on to the next stage, we start evolving back into the state we were in as children.  We perhaps start to forget details of the present in favor of remembering vividly details of our past. Our present seems to fall into an increasing sense of disorder as our past comes back with a strange clarity.  In the farther stages of dementia, this seems to be true as well.

Judging by the fragmented comments made by my sister who is experiencing the journey of Alzheimer’s, she seems to be going backwards through her life.  In her mind, she was for awhile once again married to a husband from whom she had been divorced for twenty-five years.  A year later, she was talking about her high school boyfriend as though he was waiting for her; and this year, when given a baby doll, she sat rocking it and calling it Judy.  Eleven years older than me, I’m sure she was remembering me as a baby.  More proof of my theory, because she has had three children and five grandchildren since she rocked me in that long-ago rocking chair, most of whom she doesn’t remember.

All of this speculating is a roundabout method of preparing you for what I really want to talk about, and that is the topic of “chaos.”  As we age, our rational mind seems to give way to intuition–forgetting details like what we are driving to town to do or what we came from the bedroom to the living room to find. Instead, we wander from task to task as we get distracted by whatever our eye falls upon, much as we did as children.

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In a similar fashion,  objects collect on the table-like headboard of my bed and on my night tables. Have you ever seen the room of  a teenager?  A perfect example of chaos.  Dirty clothes and caked ice cream dishes are swept under the bed, dirty clothes are in piles mixed in with the clean ones delivered by mom a week earlier, magazines, electrical equipment, soccer balls and school books all seem to be placed in the same category and spread evenly over the surfaces of the room.

The bedroom or playroom of a toddler or child seems to follow the same organizational plan:  Leggos, the detached limbs of G.I. Joes or Barbies, coloring books, plastic kid-sized furniture, trikes, blocks, kiddie computer games, unmatched socks, clothes outgrown months ago, plastic trucks and assorted game pieces from kiddie games cover the floor as though organized by a tornado into the perfect organizational plan of a child: chaos.

So it was in the house of my oldest sister.  Every year, more piles appeared in her bedroom.  Her kitchen drawers were a jumble of knives, jewelry, old electrical receipts, diamond rings, half full medicine bottles, plastic lids to butter tubs, photographs, drawings her children had done twenty years before, unused postal stamps and corroded batteries.

When I visited a few months before she went into a managed care facility, hoping  I could facilitate her staying in her house for at least another year, I reorganized her house–– putting labels on all her drawers.  In the bedroom, I sorted out a tangle of necklaces, rings, earrings and bracelets.  In doing so,  I discovered  23 watches–all dysfunctional.

“Betty, why do you have so many watches?”

“Oh, they all stopped working.”

“Did you exchange the batteries?”

“Oh, you can do that?”

Now I look at the boxes of slides and photos of the art work of my husband and me–sorted and condensed from four boxes  into two boxes, then abandoned unfinished when I needed to use the dining room table to entertain guests. Now the unresolved mess resides between the bed and the closet in my bedroom. Sigh.

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There are junk drawers I’ve been shoving things into for 15 years thinking one day I’ll sort them.  Boxes of miscellaneous papers I packed up 15 years ago to bring to Mexico still sit untouched in my garage.

Like the rest of the universe, having come from the chaos of childhood, I seem to be returning to it and I wonder what the solution will be.  Perhaps, as many of my friends have, I will start shedding the accumulations of a lifetime and simplify my life so there is less in it to be transformed into chaos.  Or, perhaps as has been my pattern for the past 15 years, since divesting myself of most of my possessions to move to Mexico, I will continue to collect thousands of little items for my art collages, dozens of bracelets, rings, necklaces, earrings–even though I wear only a few favorites.

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Perhaps I’ll continue to buy the books of friends, the paintings of talented Mexican artists, huipiles from the market, woven purses and alebrijes from beach vendors, gelato makers from the garage sales of friends.

I have a special fondness for one basket vendor who sells the lovely baskets made by his family in Guerrero. I have them in every shape–square, obelisk, round, rectangular–as well as every size from coin purse to three feet tall.  Yet I keep buying them because I admire his perseverance.  For the fifteen years I’ve been here, he has traversed the carretera from Chapala to Jocotepec, laden front, back and to each side with these baskets.  He wears five straw hats piled neatly one on top of the other on his head.  Baskets nest within other baskets or are threaded onto a long cord and worn diagonally over his chest.

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He is a a master of organization–and to query about any basket as one sits at at table in the Ajijic plaza  will invite his ceremony as he divests himself of baskets to display them.  Soon the floor around your table will be covered in so many baskets it seems impossible that one man has been carrying them up and down the ten miles between the towns on this side of the lake–all day and for years long before I moved here.  His is an incredible sense of organization that is the opposite of chaos, and in admiration, if I am unable to persuade visiting friends to buy his baskets, I always buy something myself.

Back home, I fill one with outgrown underwear, another with scarves, another with old keys and padlocks I may one day need.  It is as though his organization rubs off on me as I fill baskets, instilling some order into a life potentially chaotic–but at the moment held within the confines of normalcy.

Ten years ago, my other sister opened my junk drawer in my kitchen and declared, “There is no excuse for anyone to have a drawer like this.”  Because I know of no one who does not have a drawer like that, I was somewhat surprised, and was especially surprised because before her visit I had more or less organized my junk drawer.

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But now I look around and realize I have a number of those drawers.  In spite of the basket vendor’s good example, my sense or organization seems to be veering toward having a special drawer to thrust categories of things into: batteries, items of clothing, kitchen tools, jewelry.  Controlled chaos––the way of the universe and certainly the seeming course of our lives. For some of us, at least.

(If you are dying to make out exactly what is in these drawers, clicking on the photos will enlarge your view.  Snoopy!)

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/chaos/

Dare I Tell How I Excel?

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                                                judy 3

                                                     Dare I Tell How I Excel?

No matter how much we might admire ourselves, there is something off-putting about revealing the fact. For some reason, by pointing out our own good points, it makes others less likely to admire them.  The one place where this fact of life is not true is in the resume,  where we can revel fully in revealing to the world how absolutely wonderful we are.

Some of us exercise our right to brag by the family wall.  Here we can display our successes as well as the successes of the families we have raised and  dynasties we have sired via photographs that show us at our most beautiful and successful periods of our lives.  Pictures with presidents or other celebrities,  awards and impressive vacations may all rub shoulders on this family wall.  By placing them in a prominent place–in entryways, offices, studies or staircases––we insure that they call attention to themselves without having to actually do so orally.  Thus we retain our humble natures while more subtly revealing to the world what superior human beings we really are.

The Christmas letter is another invention wherein we seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to toot our own horn.  The result is probably a lot of mail that, once quickly scanned if read at all, is quickly relegated to lighting the Yule Log. How much good news goes up in conflagration during the holiday season has never been calculated, but I can imagine that a good many gain a bit of satisfaction by sending these notices of how well their friends’ lives are going up in smoke.

So, when given the opportunity by WordPress to extol my own virtues, I must demur.  Luckily, in this cyber age, we need not call attention to our own virtues, for Google is always there to do it for us.  If we are lucky enough to sport an uncommon name, both the laudatory and shameful facts of our lives are there for all to see for the price of a few moment’s time and a little patience in sorting through the hundreds of thousands of bits of information available when our names are typed into the subject bar.

It is true that most of these bits of information probably do not apply to us at all, but the search for the ones that do can be as satisfying as a scavenger hunt, and the prize is, that in addition to all the good bits, we get to dig out the little bits of scandal or failures as well.  And who doesn’t like a little bad news sprinkled in with the good?  It gives a certain flavor to a life, as well as comfort that perhaps our own life–as boring, humdrum and plain as it may seem in comparison––isn’t quite so bad after all.

The Prompt: Toot Your Horn–Most of us are excellent at being self-deprecating, and are not so good at the opposite. Tell us your favorite thing about yourself.

 

Why We Believe

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Why We Believe

I think the reason why I believe is probably at the root of it the reason why we all believe in something.  It is just such a miracle that anything exists and that I get to be a part of it. What are the chances out of the entire universe that I would be born  at all, let alone born to the time and place and parents that I was? And what are the chances that I would be healthy and have the benefit of an education and that I would find the courage to live the life I want to and continue to have that courage into my sixties and I hope my seventies and eighties and nineties.

I can understand why it would be hard to continue to believe in the magic of life if one were ill or abused or confined or physically handicapped, yet people do continue to hold onto every scrap of existence.  Life is such an incredible thing and to not appreciate it when we have every reason to appreciate it is such a waste.

There is so much cruelty and oppression and greed and poverty and disease and sadness in this world.  Yes, we do what we can to fight it, but an additional and very important way to fight it is to be as productive and happy as we can be.  Polarity demands its opposite and the world changes for the good by holding onto as much of the positive as we can.  Living it.  Promoting it in others.  Helping each other.  Good mothers and fathers do this every minute of every day and those of use who don’t have children can do it by trying to be surrogates for those children and those adults who need our care and help.  This help may be given in an organized fashion by volunteering and donating or by the way we treat others in our every day life.  We can be observant. We can be helpful.  We can be as kind to each other as possible, given that we are human and feel anger, fatigue, frustration and hopelessness.

At the end of the day–even the worst day–we get to choose whether to give up or to continue to believe, and even if the choice is to give up, we have one more chance.  I think dreams are messages and reminders we send to ourselves–little boosts encouraging us to listen to that deep part of ourselves that will always believe, even if it has to go on without the support of our conscious minds.  It is the part we get to when we write or draw or paint or dance or sing or play an instrument.  That is the importance of the arts.  They connect us to our beliefs.

So when I find myself floundering, whatever time of the day or night, my easiest way to find a reason to keep going is to do what I’m doing now.  To write. Or to make art out of whatever I find around me.  For in this aspect, art imitates life.  It is simply looking around for what we can find around us and making the best of it.  Someone once says “It is the job of the artist to take the detritus that the world creates and to hand it back to the world as art.”  That is exactly what I do in my “found art” collages.  And this, at the end of the day, is enough for me to believe in.

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Click on any one of the images to enlarge and enter gallery.  Can you find “Lord Love a Duck,” a pheasant, frigate birds, the ballerina, puffin, a seal, a sea bird, wild pig or “Found Heart?”  I just realized I left out my favorite, so I’m going to add it below.

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The Prompt: In Reason to Believe, Bruce Springsteen sings, “At the end of every hard-earned day / people find some reason to believe.” What’s your reason to believe?

The Time to Be Good

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The Time to Be Good

In a study by Oxford Online, associated with the Oxford English Dictionary, “the” was found to be the most frequently used word in the English language and each of the other words in my title was the most common word in the English language for its part of speech. It is no surprise to me that the word “the” heads the list. “The” creates specificity. It helps us to define and narrow the field. It wins us precisely what we want. Ours is an era of so many choices––a plethora of brands of everything from potato chips to lipstick. Don’t even get me started on coffee. Starbucks alone maintains that it offers 87,000 combinations of coffee choices! Reason enough to need a bit of “the” in our vocabulary. Plain coffee Americano decaf with soy milk and stevia? That is “the” choice I make every time.

“To” is indicative, I think, of our modern need to be elsewhere. A Ted Talk that I recently viewed showed a video that depicted all of the airplane flights occurring simultaneously, then all of the ships enroute. If it had tried to depict commuter traffic, I’m not so sure that much of the U.S. would have been lit up, rendering any distinction between vehicles or routes to be impossible to make out. We drive to work, to play, to school, to recreational facilities. Then on the weekends we drive elsewhere to “escape,” but in doing so, are trapped in more traffic. In airports, we watch people coming off a plane to come “to” where we are as we await the opportunity to board the same plane to go “to” where they just came from. We are almost constantly going “to.”

I was surprised that “time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language, mainly because, with all of our labor saving devices, somehow we have less time rather than more. If someone disagrees, please, please inform me of how you have managed this. I no longer even have time to read unless I listen to an audiobook and combine my reading with other activities such as driving, working in the studio or kitchen or while trying to fall asleep at night.

So why is the word “time” so frequently used? As I tried to figure out why, a number of phrases I’ve used in the past 24 hours swam into memory. While preparing to leave for two months at the beach, I have almost constantly worried about not having “time” to arrange for everything I needed to arrange for in order to leave on “time.” I won’t bore you with the list, but it is long and varied and has kept me so busy for the past two weeks that I found my “time” had run out last night. I was due to leave this morning, but had not found time to say good bye to best friends, let alone time enough to write this blog and finish packing. So I delayed my departure by a day in order to gain “time” to depart in a more leisurely fashion. I made “time” for things important to me, such as this essay I am writing right now and the possibility of saying good bye to friends such as Audrey, whom I haven’t seen for weeks because neither of us has had the “time.” Perhaps it is our complaints of having so little of it that cause us to overuse the word?

The most commonly used words that I am most heartened by are best when combined. “Be good.” What better advice for each of us and what message is most needed in a world of cyber shaming, corporate greed, Isis and the seeming impossibility of gun control, let alone control over the kids and crazies who refuse to exercise control? It is a selfish world we live in. “Be” is too often considered in regard to only ourselves. But “good?” It seems to be an aim that more and more of us yearn for—hoping to combine it with “be” in order to restore sanity and love and caring for our fellow human beings––whatever their skin color or religion or social group or national background.

Perhaps in our choice of most commonly used words, be they conscious or unconscious, we are all sending ourselves a message. Like a crossword puzzle, we just need to combine them in the right way. It truly is the time to be good!!!

(If you’d like to see other most commonly used words, go HERE.)

The Prompt: Morphing—Language evolves. The meaning of a word can shift over time as we use it differently—think of “cool,” “heavy,” or even “literally.”Today, give a word an evolutionary push: give a common word a new meaning, explain it to us, and use it in the title of your post.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/morphing/

Saved!

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The Prompt: Sink or Swim. Tell us about a time when you were left on your own, to fend for yourself in an overwhelming situation — on the job, at home, at school. What was the outcome? For once, I’m going to take the prompt literally.  I wrote about this in January, so I’m going to use a rewrite of the tale I told at that time.

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Saved!

Although I’ve never had a child of my own, I love children; and from a very early age, my eye in any social situation was always drawn to babies. When I was little and my mother would take me along to meetings of her Progressive Study Club, I would always stand in the bedroom to watch the babies spread out on the bed by their mothers, surrounded by their coats.  In a similar fashion, I notice babies in restaurants and on the street––  especially babies who are facing backwards over the shoulders of their parents.  I love seeing what they are looking at––who they are communicating with through their eyes and their smiles.  I love it that babies have a private life even in the company of their parents.

In this modern age of child abductions and pedophiles, parents might find this creepy, no matter how benign one’s motive is in watching their children; but in my case, if they have not forgotten, there are two sets of parents who should feel very grateful for my interest in their children; for although I have never birthed a child, I am responsible for the presence of two children, now grown to adults, who would not be here but for me. In both cases, I saved a baby from drowning.  Both times, although there were other people in the proximity, they were in social situations where no one noticed what was going on as the baby nearly came to harm.

One of the times was at a housewarming party given by my boyfriend’s son in California.  We’d all been given the tour, including the garden and hot tub, which was up on a raised patio out of view of the house.  As we stood in the living room talking and drinking before the meal was served,  I noticed that the toddler of one of the couples was not with his mother. Looking into the other room, I saw he wasn’t with his father, either, and I suddenly had a strong feeling that something was wrong.

I ran out of the house and into the garden just in time to see him at the top of the stairs leading to the hot tub.  He toddled over to the side, fell in and sank like a stone.  I ran up the stairs, jumped into the hot tub and fished him from the bottom before he ever bobbed to the surface.  I remember the entire thing in slow motion and have a very clear memory of the fact that it seemed as though his body had no tendency to float at all, but would have remained at the bottom of the deep hot tub.

The parents’ reaction was shock.  I can’t remember if they left the party or if they really realized how serious it was.  I know they didn’t thank me, which is of no importance other than a measure of either their inability to face the fact that their child had been within seconds of drowning or simply their shock and the fact they were thinking only of their child.

Strangely enough, this had happened before, at a stock pond just outside of the little South Dakota town where I grew up.  Everyone went swimming there, as there was no pool in town.  When I was still in junior high, I’d just arrived when I saw a very tiny girl—really just a baby—fall into the dam (what we called a pond) and sink straight down under the very heavy moss that grew on the top of the water.  Her mother had her back turned, talking to a friend, and no one else noticed.  I jumped in and fished her out, returning her to her mother, who quickly collected her other children and left.  Again, no word of thanks.  It is not that it was required, and I mention it here only because it happened twice and, having not thought about this for so many years, I am wondering if it wasn’t embarrassment and guilt on the part of the parents that made them both react so matter-of-factly.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/sink-or-swim/

Listed or Listless

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The Prompt:  Have you ever made a New Year’s Resolution that you kept?

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Write it down!!!!


Listed or Listless?

Of course I have accomplished my New Year’s Resolutions.  A few times.  Once I did a project with a friend where we each wrote down what we wanted to accomplish.  I believe I had eight things.  Since we illustrated our resolutions, my quotes of what I wanted were scattered throughout my illustrations.  Shortly after we did this, she moved back to the states and in time I forgot my little artwork.

A few years later, I found it when I was cleaning and reorganizing my studio.  I looked at my page, turning it this way and that to read the resolutions that twisted around and through the colored sketches.  I was surprised to find I’d accomplished every one, including losing weight, getting a book published (actually by the time I found it, I’d self-published three books), and finding a partner (now a friend, but nonetheless, I managed to reenter the dating scene after years of still feeling married to my deceased husband.)

I don’t remember what the rest of my resolutions were and a new search of my studio didn’t result in finding it.  Perhaps it requires actually cleaning and reordering the studio to warrant this reward; but, this exercise taught me what I’d learned long before and forgot.  Writing resolutions down has a sort of magic.  I think it moves them to a different, more active part of our brain.  Even though that part of the brain might still be in the subconscious regions, somehow our written-down resolutions sit there as little telepathic cheerleaders, urging us onward to action.

Lest I grow too listless again, I think perhaps it is time to make another list!!!

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/resolved/

In The Dark

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In The Dark

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Lush Night

Remember that delicious walking, arms linked, down the middle of the gravel road in your pajamas at five in the morning when you were twelve? That first slumber party in your safe small town when you all stayed up all night for the first time in your lives? That eerie first sight of the sun coming up when your head had never hit a pillow since it went down?

You knew then for the first time the delicious pleasures of being a night owl— of finding time that everyone else was wasting through dreams. And you have been an aficionado of night ever since. All of your term papers and exams studied for at the last minute, all night long. Books written, poems written mostly in the dark while towns and cities around you slept. That power of having all of your time for yourself with not a chance of phones ringing. Some magic happening once you had the world to yourself so ever afterwards you have survived on as little sleep as possible.

During your party years, dancing and drinking till three, then going for breakfast with the single crowd and driving straight to school at six. You were invulnerable.

Even married, sneaking out of bed once he’d fallen asleep and working in your basement studio all night long, sometimes sneaking back to bed before he awakened, at other times caught. “It’s nine in the morning! Have you been up all night again?” Feeling that little terror, like a vampire caught by light.

Then at 54, with no more husband, no more job necessary, with a new country and a new studio above ground, guilty pleasures no longer needed to be hidden— watching light after light go out as you sat piecing art together in your studio—until suddenly,
impossibly, light after light went on again so you were going to bed as your neighbor was arising to start his day.

Then, improbably, at 62, internet romance entered your midnight-and-after world as
every night you were serenaded to sleep from 1500 miles away by an equally night-addicted lover bard at two or three or four a.m.— or whenever pillow talk led to it. Skype became your love letters and your trysting spot ––night swaddling that intimate invisible union through the dark air that had always been magic for you, but which now joined you to another instead of sending you into the single space where you united with that within you which you kept separate from the world.

Now as always, united or alone, at night you know exactly what it is you want and live it, with no busy world to lead you elsewhere.

 This is a rewrite of an earlier response to this prompt, and here is yet another piece i wrote on this topic: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/06/25/re-tired/

And here is another one about waking up in the morning!: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/02/25/head-shots/

The prompt today was, “Are you a night owl or an early bird?

Eye, Eye, Eye, Eye!!!

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I tried to do today’s prompt, and even chose one person to mention, but then I couldn’t go on.  When I went through the list of incredible blogs I read every day, I just couldn’t pick three and leave out the rest, so instead, I am going to tell you about my pretty exhausting day.   Later, I will post my long list of admirable blogs along with the mention of one new blog I think you should read.                        

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                       Eye, Eye, Eye, Eye!!!

Two days ago I noticed that one of the lenses of my favorite pair of prescription reading glasses was missing. They are an especially beautiful shade of green—something I have found to be rare in glasses—and a good shape on me, to boot. I looked everywhere for that lens, with no luck.

“I’ll have to take special care of my only other pair of reading glasses,” I thought, as I woke up and put them on to peruse the blogging world. I had them on at the dining room table a few hours later during Oscar’s English lessons and half way through the lesson, Yolanda appeared with my lens to my other pair of glasses, which she had found under my bed! I was overjoyed and put it in the case with my “one-eyed” pair of glasses.

Oscar was finished so we went out to play fetch with Morrie. I’m hoping Oscar and his big brother will come play with Morrie while I’m gone, so was trying to make sure they would bond before I left. When I grew dizzy watching the toy soar out to be brought back by Morrie, I realized I still had my other reading glasses on, so I took them off and held them in my hand. One thing led to another and I soon started seeing dead palm fronds, candy wrappers the workmen had left, and other detritus on the ground. I put the non-organic trash aside to take up to the house on my return trip, but collected the other in my hand, taking it up to the gazebo to throw over the fence into the jungle of my “empty” lot next door. Although I’m on a hill so the ground of the next lot is from twelve to twenty feet below me, the castor beans have grown up taller than the wall and obscure the view from where I stand. I tell myself again that I need to find someone to clear the lot, then go up to the yard and return with another two handfuls of dry plant matter to throw over the wall before I give up and go back to the house.

As Oscar prepares to leave with his mother, I want to check once more that I’ve given him the entire assignment that will keep him busy for the three weeks until my return. It is then that I realize I don’t have my reading glasses! They are not on the table, desk, in the kitchen or bedroom or bathroom or on the porch. I then remember taking them off and holding them in my hand when we were throwing the fetch toy for Morrie. I check the terrace table, the gazebo, the bodega, the bodoga and every outside surface. Then I remember collecting the dead plants in both hands and throwing them over the wall, and I have a sinking feeling that I know where my “extra” pair of prescription glasses are!!!

There is no hope. The spare lot is a huge one with dense undergrowth and castor bean plants too thick and close together for navigation. There is zero chance I would find my glasses. I check my kitchen clock. An hour and a half before I have an appointment with Eduardo to give me an estimate on painting and concrete work. I jump into the car in my pajamas that look just like clothing––sans makeup or combed hair—and take off for my eye doctor who is blessedly open, since he splits his time between Ajijic, 6 km. away, and Guadalajara—a good hour away. I find two pairs of frames I can stand, have the assistant put the lens back in my green glasses, ask the two women in the waiting room to advise me on which frames I should buy, and order the glasses. They will be ready on January 4, when the office reopens after Xmas. I pay my deposit and drive back home, hoping I can keep the green glasses––and their lenses––intact and in sight for the three weeks until then.

I get home at 2 and Eduardo shows up soon after. We spend a good three hours discussing pool steps, the little terraza that needs to be built down around the gazebo to keep me from tripping over buried pipes and tree roots that jut up from the ground around where I have to go to turn off the irrigation system, the paint and salitre repairs and pool repairs. I explain to him that I need estimates and that my present contractor Chino will also be giving estimates. It is hot and I get dizzy in the heat, so pull down the blue canvas “wall” in front of the terrace. It is then that I hear the doorbell. I’ve been with people all day, and groan as I go to once again herd all the dogs into the back yard, secure the gates and go to see who it is. It is Chino, with the iron gate man! I usher them back to the backyard and introduce them to Eduardo, who comes out from behind the blue canvas “wall.” Chino looks questioningly at me and then I see the cans of paint we’ve pulled from the new cabinet to try to figure out paint colors. I feel like a wife caught in the act—with a different contractor!!

We retreat back to our seclusion in the shaded patio, which now feels almost secretive—as though we are trying to hide something. Chino leaves, letting the dogs back into the front of the house as he opens the gate.   I offer to give Eduardo a ride down to town, thinking finally I’ll have a bit of time to myself! It is 5:30 and I’ve been rushing around, seeing one person after another all day. I haven’t even finished the Daily Prompt!!! I go into the house to have my first private moment alone in the bathroom before getting in the car to drive Eduardo down to town, and then . . . the doorbell rings again! I cannot answer at the moment and pray that perhaps they’ll give up and go away, but no, the doorbell rings again. Then, a long pause, and it rings again.

When I am able to answer it, the dogs flock around me, barking. “Who is it?” I shout over the wall. I never unlock the door without asking.

“Luis!” someone calls back to me. I have an artist friend named Luis. Plus two plumbers, one electrician and various other acquaintances. I decide it is plumber Luis, who loaned me his propane tank and to whom I’ve been wanting to talk.   I tell him to wait while I put the dogs away, do so with some difficulty, having to close two gates behind them and secure a doggie reward along the way. I unlock the gate to find, not Luis Plumber but Luis, Pasiano’s son, five-month-old baby and wife I’ve never met. They’ve trudged up the long hill to show me the baby. I’d delivered a present to Luis a few months before at his workplace—selling rugs along the careterra––and he’d said they’d bring the baby to see me. We stand. I hold the baby. The wife is hot so I turn on the fan. I don’t think to offer them a cool drink, not realizing at this point that they haven’t driven. I am thinking only that I’ve promised Eduardo a ride down the hill and that I’m dying for some time to finish my blog and be on my own without people.

I’ve been with people since 8 a.m. this morning with no space. I am dizzy with fatigue and the hot afternoon sun. I don’t even ask them to sit down! We talk for a while and I then ask where they are going next. They say to his father’s and I ask if they want a ride there. But, when we arrive, I can tell Pasiano is not there. I tell Luis he’d better check and when he does it verifies what I’d guessed. Do they want to come back to my house or to visit his mother in San Juan, I ask? I’m taking Eduardo there and then we can go visit his mother and I’ll drive them back to where they can catch the bus; but they say no, to leave them off at the bus stop. Eduardo asks if I want to see his studio. I do not! I leave him off and go to Ajijic to pay my phone bill, since we have discovered my cell phone has been cut off. By now it is 6:30 and I am desperate to be home alone swimming or blogging or doing anything but driving, making decisions or talking to other people!!!

As I get out of the car, I realize the sun has gone down and with it the temperature. It is actually chilly outside. Luckily, I’ve brought my suede jacket which I put on. I go into Oxxo to pay my phone bill, grab a Coke, and go back to the car. As I do, I absently stuff the phone bill and receipt into my coat pocket, but meet with some resistance. I reach in and draw out . . . my spare pair of glasses! I then remember that I had put my jacket on when we first went out to play with the dog.

I must have put my glasses in the pocket, then taken the jacket off as soon as I got back in the house and so when it came time to look for my glasses, it had totally slipped my mind that I had had pockets to slip the glasses into after all! I turn the car on and drive home cushioned by the security that even though I’m slightly more worried about the state of my memory than I was this morning, at least I have the cushion of three pairs of reading glasses I’ll have to lose before going into a tizzy the next time!!!

IMG_9482                              Luis, Hernando and Alejandra. Happy family.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/press-it/

Roar

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Roar

The ceiling fans turn above five women. One holds an almond cookie in her mouth as her hands adjust her notebook and reach for her pen. She moves the rest of the cookie into her mouth with the hand that has finished turning to the correct page, then brushes away the crumbs from the glass table. Another woman sits hunched over a tablet in her lap. She is wearing a black swimsuit and sits on the white canvas cushion of a rattan couch.

A third taps on her computer—a fact that has driven her former sofa neighbor out to the terrace to write––that tapping too distracting. Next door, the crash of chisel on concrete furnishes a counter-tempo to the gentle tapping of the keys. The ocean swells in a continual basso…the notes and words of a plaintive Mexican song straining in over the fence as well. The sparseness of the view––sea dunes, succulent ground cover, crashing ocean and sky–– is augmented by so many sounds that they blend into a cacophony that can be overlooked…or underheard, as the case may be.

I am the fifth woman, and as the other four write about whatever world each is in, their imagined voices fill my thoughts to a point where my own voice is lost. I can only record what I see and hear. It is as though my own imagination has been sucked up by the morning, lost in the profusion of thoughts of others that grow like liana in my mind.

The blades on the fans spin. Tiny upside-down crosses are formed by the bolts that secure the glass globes of the lights below the fans. Like crucifixes the tortured have slipped free from, they stand useless as metaphors but necessary in actuality. All of the crucified have scurried away…survivors of someone else’s bigotry or fears or cruelty.

Some of the survivors climb up the legs of the coffee table and pull themselves onto my computer keys. They jump on keys to say, “We have voices that will not be stilled. We sacrifice that bullies may be overcome. We expect you to resist as we do. Frightening as it is, it is the only way. Life is choice after choice and those choices, if easy, are not worth making.”

I take over. Brush them like crumbs from my keyboard.  I get to choose how profound my life will be, at least on the page, and I don’t want to write about crucifixion, church bombings, the Paris massacre, the San Bernardino shootings. I have six friends who live in San Bernardino. I haven’t checked Facebook. I don’t want to know.

I want my senses filled with tappings and poundings and too-loud strains of music and where the fridge will go in the tiny new sleeping/feeding room I’m having constructed for my dogs. I want another almond cookie, and a sip, two sips of hazelnut coffee. Some of us have to have a happy life. Some need to go on in spite of the slaughter, greed, small-mindedness. We win in this way. Something exists in spite of the horrible chaos some would make of the world.

We win by fighting, but we also win by being. By remaining. By choosing to be happy. The ocean roars and sometimes I must roar, also. But not always.

Note: No, my essay above was not written to the prompt.  I did start a poem on the WordPress  life-line subject of fortune-telling, and I’ll publish it later, but on my way to posting it, I found this snippet written in response to a prompt at the three day women’s writing retreat I went to last week, so I want to publish it, too. (HERE is a link to my poem on the subject of fortune telling.)