If you could go anywhere for seven to ten days, where would you go?
I have this choice for my 40th anniversary this June.
Help me decide.
I get overwhelmed by too many people. I want to be surrounded by unusual plants and animals.
I love to swim and snorkel.
I do not care about getting dressed up or eating fancy food.
If you know of such a haven, send me a name of the place.
FLOW
The three generations of women before me ended their lives with dementia. My great grandmother’s demise may have started when her husband was killed by a train when his truck stalled on the tracts which crossed through their farm.
She heard the crash. Then she spent her remaining years moving back and forth every six months between her daughter in Ohio and her daughter in North Carolina. I remember sitting on her bed at Gran’s house going through a photo album of old black and white photos as she talked about each photo. I was too young to understand how sad this was. I have those photos now.
My gran’s confusion started when she inherited a house full of thousands of lovely things from her aunt.
There were enough treasures in Aunt Ethel’s house to fill all Gran’s daughters and granddaughter’s houses with unusual furniture, clothes, art, jewelry and dishes. This sorting overwhelmed her brain at her time of grief and years after.
My mama has dementia now. Maybe her trigger was worrying about my daddy’s health. She hovered over him like it was her hobby. It was hard to witness a brilliant woman turn into a shadow.
I have been overwhelmed since clearing the family home this past summer. We sorted through sixty-three years of everything. The heirlooms went to the mountains. Many boxes came here.
When I am home, I feel their presence. I must sort them to be free. So here I am again, evaluating, burning, consolidating. Will I ever be done? Or will my brain balk at the task and slowly shut down to protect itself.
I cannot leave such a burden for my children, especially Rose. Her museum is already full.
Mama FLOW
It is time for me to isolate myself and write away past traumas. I cannot move forward with this load of pain. More is coming and I must adjust and adapt. Like the Junk Bug, I must maintain a balance.
I have done this before. In my first book, I told stories of Rose’s seizures and surgeries and how we navigated through the many trials. I wrote it for other mothers, but it served as a catharsis for me. It is not sad. It is our stories of strength, determination and resilience.
The stories are still coming. I hoped Rose would help write the sequel, but her stroke two years ago has left her in a serious funk. If you follow my other blog,
Should They Look Through Our Looking Glass?
you know I am against enabling and spoiling. These are a way of making a parent feel better because they cannot fix the real problem. It backfires big time. Do not go down that rabbit hole.
Here I go again. Writing away my emotional load. It is how I cope. It is who I am.
FLOW moving forward.
I have a scrolling addiction of sorts. I have unfollowed 70 people. I am making a screen -time rubric. I ignore reels unless it has baby animals or octopi on them. I ignore adds except for plants and shoes.
I have a meta account with my real name and a yahoo email. A twitter account with my author name and a different email. I also share both blogs on tumblr and LinkedIn as well. Tumblr has author name. LinkedIn uses my real name.
I wanted to ditch all social media. I need messenger to contact certain friends and our mountain neighbors. I ditched X, but then writer’s groups said I needed it.
The rubric should help me stay on task, but all those ads, reels and recipes are the temptation that sucks me in.
I am in love with Poppy the baby pygmy hippo! Do not look her up. You will get addicted.
I know some of you are adding Bluesky. Will it solve anything or just add another task?
I am looking for free-lance writing jobs, which has added even more screen time.
I would appreciate input from any of you. I need to use my time more efficiently. My eyes and brain need a break from chaos.
I will also lock my phone in my safe while home. Blah. This started when I fell down and had hip surgery. Hi Ho
HELP
BLOW caught up in the on-line flow.
I do not believe that time is linear. I used to, but not anymore. Things are coming back around. There is something biblical and magical about forty years. I will not pretend to know why. All I know is it is the time in my life for things to circle back and complete what was started.
I noticed this happening on its own. I wrote things down and took pictures. We called these events the work of the Universe. Things appeared. Things moved. I just observed without involvement.
Now, I am helping the Universe reconnect to the people and places that are most important to me. Forty year circles are forming under my guidance.
I will keep documenting as this happens. At some point I will write about it. The book I am writing is about circles in the past generations of my family. The past circled back to cross the present. Maybe you have seen time circles, too.
I never imagined such things when I was young. Everything seemed to move fast and forward. Everything was new. Now, there are deja vu events and things seem oddly familiar.
It is amazing to witness these circles. Time seems to slowly swirl around as it goes by. What was truly important comes back to you, if you cared enough, if you loved it enough, if your heart has held onto it.
What was lost returns in some form. Circles are eternal. I do not know how or why…
I just know it is so.
FLOW
I grow both types of Mother-of-Thousands for their big, showy foliage and sweet, little leaflets along the leaf margins.
I do not bring all the parent plants inside for the winter. It is much easier to pull off leaflets to grow for next spring.
I just toss these in pots with other plants that I do haul inside. THE tiny plantlets get bigger over the winter. Then I repot the best ones in spring.
Sometimes I bring in a parent plant or two to watch it bloom. This is Kolanchoe laetivirens. It has grayish orange, bell-shaped blooms hanging down to form its lovely candelabra.
Please note the leaves may be toxic to pets and children. Also, if you live where there are few freezes it can be invasive.
FLOWER
It was always there under the oaks in the shade. Beside the hammock and behind the swing. It was a site for all kinds of action for over sixty years.
Daddy made it long, wide and heavy. We could fit eight friends on it to play ship at sea.
We painted rocks on it. We set up our Sizzler race track and raced cars on it.
We ate on it and played under it. We climbed all over it. We read sitting on the top while the dogs napped underneath.
Daddy hosted his group of Lunch Bunch friends there. They ate tomato sandwiches and water melon. Sometimes he made peach ice cream.
The squirrels gnawed the wood down. I guess it was all that salty goodness that dripped down from all those lunches. The wood rotted and moss grew on it.
After the auction at Enwood, a junk hauling company came to clear everything that was left.
It took three, big men to load that rotten picnic table into the trailer full of debris.
I stood in stunned silence and looked at our old table upside down among the junk.
It seemed wrong to not have some sort of farewell ceremony for it. It started to rain. The crew rushed to finish.
That fixture from our childhood got hauled away that day. I felt grateful for all the use we had gotten from it and grateful that the giant, rotten picnic table was no longer our problem.
Enwood is sold. Daddy is in a bluebird blue urn in the mountains. Mama is in a home being perfectly taken care of. I am truly grateful for that, too.
We had over sixty wonderful years under those oaks on Enwood.
Time marches on.
FLOW
I have looked at these photos of the Junk Bug many times. I clearly remember the afternoon I saw the tiny fluffy mess walking along the deck railing. I was so mesmerized by it that I did not think to take a picture for quite a while.
The load it carried was many times bigger than its body underneath. The junk pile is the Green Lacewing Larva’s camouflage. It is a hunter and hides under its load so its victims will not recognize it as a threat.
It attaches lichen, detritis and the body parts of former victims onto its back. This is not a random packing either. This camouflage must have balance.
I realized this when the bug moved from a horizontal position to vertical as it crawled down the side of a post. It seemed the pack on its back would cause it to backflip off to plummet to its death, but it took the move in stride.
Balancing a load is the lesson here. Carrying past hurts and future worries is something I have done as an adult. Writing our book about Rose helped me put down those stories I thought I had to carry. Our blog,
seizuremamaandrose.org
has helped continue this process. We got a message of appreciation from another epilepsy mother last night. It helps to turn all that hurt into help for someone else.
I wrote off a huge part of that load. Now I am writing to heal again. Ditching more of my camouflage, so I can move on to the next stage of my development. Just like the Junk Bug eventually dumps its load to become a beautiful and helpful Green Lacewing.
Its time to quit balancing this load and spread my wings and fly.
FLOW
This Appple Blossom Amaryllis has subtle colors, so it does not scream if planted in a perrennial bed.
Whites look great against greenery with other white flowers.This one will go in partial shade, surrounded by ferns near our small fish pond.
I have many bright Amaryllis in the garden. I refer to these as the clowns. I still love them, but they do scream for attention. See link below.
FLOW
floweralley 