Month: December 2024

Who Will be the Glue?

| Flower Roberts

The question everybody asks right after “Are you ready for Christmas? is “What are you doing over the holidays?” This question had an automatic response until recently.
Now that Daddy is gone and Mama’s in a home, the answer is more complicated. There is no grandmother’s house to travel to.


Our children are grown, our cousins are scattered. Our aunts and uncles are not so spry and energetic anymore. Who will be the glue?


I am going to nominate my sister. She has a house all to herself. Nobody makes messes or gobbles up her food as fast as she makes it. Her house is already decorated. She is nicer than I am anyway and everybody knows where she lives.


Somebody has to be the family glue! She talks to everybody on the phone. This makes her the family favorite, so I think she is the most logical choice for our holiday hostess.

Everybody meet at her house around 10:30 Christmas morning. Bring your favorite dish and a gag gift. You out-of-state folks may need to pack sleeping bags. All pets welcome.

Don’t mention this to her though. I want it to be a SURPRISE!

FLOW

The Chicken Wire Ball

| Flower Roberts

I should not carry things up the steps. My helpful family tried to assist with decorating by hauling everything Christmas upstairs to our greatroom. Most of what came up was obsolete decorations, old strings of dead non-LED lights, Christmas cards labeled 2017 through 2020 and momentos that I just can’t seem to part with.

These things encircled me as I sat on the couch planning my strategy. The circle seemed to slide inward until I could not move. This was proof of two things.

  1. A serious purge of everything Christmas is needed.
  2. If nobody can recognize the currently used decorations, then nobody really cares. Hi Ho!

One thing among the Christmas chaos stood out above the rest. It was a beachball sized chicken wire ball I made years ago and never finished it. This rusty monstrosity has been hanging overhead in my workshop for years.

Why would anyone think this piece of junk needed to be hauled upstairs and placed at my feet like an offering from the Magi?

I asked Mr. Flower to plug it in. The lights did not work. I laughed outloud.

This chicken wire ball is the perfect symbol for the past five years in our family. If you are a loyal follower, you may remember that I spent Christmas Eve of 2019 in the ICU with my daddy watching all the blinking lights on his monitors. He did not get home ’til March, but when he did, he popped a Christmas music CD into the player in the living room which drowned out the instructions that the therapist was trying to give us.

My sister thought this concert was sweet. I found it irritating…of course. We saved all gifts to open when he got home. What would Christmas be without Daddy? We know now…Never the same.

So the chicken wire ball is the perfect example of postponed progress. Sometimes life sidetracks you so you end up doing things way past when you expected… Like listening to Christmas music in March.

I put new lights on the chicken wire ball today. I plugged them in before I wound them around and around that rusty orb. They are bright white so as to shine brightly.

I think it looks nice out there lighting the darkness. I hope Daddy can see it.

FLOW

Slapped by a Book

| Flower Roberts

I knew that I would find something useful in the Brianna Wiest books. I have been backtracking decades into my past for the book that I am birthing. It has to do with men making choices for the women they love. I started out focusing on three events but it has morphed, as all writing does.

I am trying to understand my present-self based on how my former-self handled these paternalistic events. This is not as boring as it sounds.

As I am trying to find ways to get out of my own way to figure this out, I stumbled upon the title, The Mountain Is You. This caught my attention because all my journeys seem to involve climbing uphill.

The slap came last night from page 147. I usually write OUCH next to something that is painfully true. This paragraph hurt so badly that I had to reach for a highlighter.

The slap of epiphany.

The heading of this section is ‘ Letting Go Of Unrealistic Expectations.’  This was calling my name loudly. The gist of it was IF you cannot love yourself UNTIL you have risen to your idea of perfection, then you have NOT healed the wound.

There went my weight-loss, beautification, start a new, lucrative career plan for 2025. Bummer. I was looking forward to all that surface-level self-improvement torture.

Changing what’s on the outside is so much simpler than doing the work of fixing what is broken inside.

So here I am at the base of this mountain preparing to climb to a new, improved, happy self and this guru, Brianna Wiest, says I must find my happy place BEFORE I start climbing.

Well damn!  I guess I will just keep digging for gold in myself. I do find a nugget once in a while.

What a relief!

FLOW

Finding a Pearl

| Flower Roberts

A pearl is formed because the oyster is irritated by a tiny object, such as a grain of sand, that gets trapped between the oyster’s mantle and its shell. To relieve its discomfort the oyster secretes layers of mother-of-pearl (nacre) around the grain to smooth it and soothe the irritation.

I have been looking for a pearl. The grain of sand was shame. Layers have been formed to protect me from this event. The surprise was not the grain of shame. It was the stories I told myself to soothe the hurt.

I saw those layers this morning. That one event shifted my thinking. It changed how I saw myself. The shame sent me in a different direction. The consequence was unintended, but the result caused a shift in my identity and goals.

The term Pearls of Wisdom has a whole new meaning. I did not want this pearl, but I needed to find it to move forward.

Be careful what you say to your daughters. Pearls are made from pain.

FLOW

Pearl from cover of Tears of a Mermaid by Stephen G. Bloom, a great book

Exposed by Ink

| Flower Roberts

I am a pencil person. I even put an extra cap eraser on new pencils. I write more freely knowing my mistakes can be erased.
Why would anyone want to keep their mistakes in plain view? It seems stifling to have to be careful so as not to make permanently visible mistakes.

I did not like the Pen Only rule in chemistry lab. I was insecure enough without being forced to share my mistakes. It seemed mean to make it mandatory to keep messy marked-out methods in my lab book.

The reasoning behind the rule was that one should learn from mistakes. By examining the method used, one could correct mis-steps for a better outcome. This did prove to be of use at times, but all those corrections ruined the neat and orderly appearance of my lab notes.

I did not want anyone to know how many wrong turns it took for me to get to the right place. It was embarrassing to have my scribbles graded along with my data. I suspected that my mess was messier than other students’ messes. I was ashamed of my Pen Only work. It could never be perfect.

I appreciate preserving my methods and mistakes now. I learn more from meandering than from going straight for an answer. There is a lot of wisdom set down on paper in doodling. Mind wandering can discover covered-up treasure.

I still love my erasers. Neatness has its place. But if you are writing something important, you might want to use a pen and keep those booboos handy in case you accidently uncover something magical by mistake.

FLOW

Write to Remember

| Flower Roberts

I am grateful I have always had the habit of writing things down. I carry little notebooks wherever I go. If I forget to pack one while on a trip, there is a ‘ journal emergency’ which involves finding the nearest store to buy any strang little book that suits me.


The process of writing has always helped me remember events better.  During the years of Rose’s epilepsy trauma, I took notes on everything Rose. Having accurate records of all seizures,  drug changes and hospital stays was an important first step to writing our book, Seizure Mama and Rose by Flower Roberts.


I am using my writings again. This time I am going back over forty years. The culmination circles have called me back to my younger self. Critical choices were made at this time in my life. I was not brave enough to stand up to contradictory forces. The evidence is there on yellowed pages in my own handwriting. I let others sway my decisions because of my indecisive, pleaser self. Doors were closed.


Things in the present have circled back. I have tried to ignore this. I have other aspects of my life that need my immediate attention, but pauses keep taking me back. Something needs finishing, healing, forgiving…


I do not know where this journey will lead. I need to understand my former self and circumstances. I need to look at the past to move forward. Choices are being made. This time I want to own them.

FLOW

Page 234 from 101 Essays that will Change the way You Think by Brianna Wiest

Is Your Life a Line or a Segment?

| Flower Roberts

I envision time as a conveyor belt. Babies get born onto the belt, old folks drop off the belt when they die. The rest of us ride along on the belt. Living our lives as we move forward.

The on and off is not really an isolated event. Folks are there to greet the new arrivals. They planned and prepared for more life. Riders on the belt do things that affect others. Those effects do not end when that person drops off the belt.

So there is a beginning before the start and after-effects after the end.

That is a line.

A segment starts at a point and ends abruptly. There is no future beyond the segment’s endpoint. There is nothing else. This is a self-centered point of view.

If you live like a segment, you are in the now and focused on progress and finishing well.

If you live like a line, you appreciate the head-start you were given and feel obligated to leave a legacy for others after you are gone. This is an integrated and interdependent viewpoint. Things are never really about just you.

Which are you?

FLOW

A New Bridge

| Flower Roberts

There are pieces of pink and orange ribbon fluttering in the trees.


Trucks drive through the woods.


Workers in hardhats wave as we pass.


Holes are being drilled to find bedrock.


A new bridge is coming.

Where will the foxes go?

What will happen to the coyote den on the hill?

Coyote den

Change is coming to our woods again.

Hill above the river.

More humans mean less trees and animals.

We do not choose change, but it comes.

Uncertainity is inevitable everywhere.

FLOW

Neglect Leads to Rehab

| Flower Roberts

Do not assume you can neglect your green babies and get away with it. There will be consequences that you will have to address sooner or later.
I parked my Schlumbergera collection under a giant camellia in April and did not turn, feed or water until October, due to surgery and an accident. Did I really expect perfect shape and blooms in December?

Before bag treatment.

No. I just hoped we would all survive. I did and they did, but the results are not pretty.
I feel as lop-sided as they look. I do think their month in a plastic bag helped with hydration.


They are blooming. These are the best looking ones.

The best of the bunch.

The others are pitiful.

Plants not under bag.

It’s almost time for some rehab. I will let them bloom through the holidays before pruning and repotting.

Since I do not care for more plants, I will lay the twisted off segments back in the pot from which they came for a few days. Then dust segment ends with root-tone dust and repot the plant and its segments at once.

That way I do not mix up the colors. That’s just me being OCD.

Neglectful FLOWER