Author: Dame

Now that I have your undivided attention, I’d like to tell you about my day. I’m fussy about books that make it into my home library reference collection, and always borrow from a library first before anything makes the cut. “Making Things” @_making_things is one such book with the kind of making we can do to resist the demands (where we can) of the capitalist society we live in. Making useful everyday items that are also beautiful in their utility and simplicity, doubly so, considering many of the tools and materials needed we tend to already have handy or can improvise or repurpose with basic camp-craft skills and supplies, many we can make ourselves or find at the local hardware store, thrift shop or craft store. With @bookshop_org offering free shipping this week, it’s a great way to support independent bookstores, and do an activity/craft that is fun to do and can revive flagging spirits. It’s called craftivism.
After reading in print, I turned to my iPad and whoops, slipped right into social media. Thank goodness for @thecurvycapsule post on history and current events, in which she mentions the Reichstag Fire. I’d heard of the Reichtag Fire, and the post prompted me to do my own reading and research because it echoes so much of what my coterie and I have been discussing on the daily for years now. I began with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s account of the Reichstag Fire, followed by a Harper’s Magazine @harpersmagazine essay from 2017 by journalist Marsha Gessen entitled “The Reichstag Fire Next Time” (prompting me to add James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” to my book queue). I continued with a Smithsonian Magazine @smithsonianmag piece from the same year by Lorraine Boissoneault sharing more on the story of the fire.
I love having deeper, more thoughtful and meaningful discussions about these topics and while it can happen here on Instagram, many times it’s happening so fast, I can’t process it as well as I can by actually reading well-written works of interest. Hence, I engage; I disengage. I love history, both learning it and living it, but reliving it? Especially another Reich. No thank you.

What to write about? It’s hard for me to continue to post sentiments here that appear oblivious to what’s happening in the world around me. One thing I decided on my latest break is that while I don’t care to perpetuate trauma drama as a regular thing here (I’d much rather shoot my mouth off in my local community, within my family and so on, where I might actually have more impact), I do want to remember the suffering that continues around the world, sanctioned historically by my own government as well as those of other countries. How will we atone? Our latest atrocity being the rampant “legal” slaughter of human rights here on our own turf, as our flawed democracy continues to decline. Still, the sun rises, the sweet peas are blooming with mad abandon, and my dog comes in from the garden, with much of its detritus, seed pods, twigs, leaves, and the like clinging to her fur, and she makes me laugh. It’s these little things that provide momentary solace. That, and my knowing that there ARE others out there paying attention too, trying to keep their hope afloat, sometimes sharing their moments of joy, other times speaking to despair. The wabi-sabi, ying-yang of our human existence here on Earth. Sometimes we just need to know we are not alone, and let others like us know they are not alone. When we no longer know that, that is the time for true despair. Yet we’ll still cling to our tattered hopes, won’t we?

It’s pouring out today and tomorrow my son turns 40. We’ve had a complicated relationship for years now, something I feel a lot of sadness about, but I have no idea how to reconcile with him anymore. Reconciliation between two people is an exchange, isn’t it? And how do you do that when mental health issues also come into play? Without the process feeling like someone’s getting beaten up, and experiencing a lot of pain? How do we find a better way … of being, of relating? Without a long, gentle conversation, perhaps while doing enjoyable activities together, I’m not sure that is something that will ever be possible with him again. Playing a board game, or cards, doing a jigsaw puzzle, maybe someday camping again? It’s been difficult to accept, it may always feel that way, but as his mother, it is so very hard remembering who he once was on his way to becoming — just a sweet, kind, gentle boy who loved nature, music, and make-believe play — yep, hope is not something it’s easy for me to let go of where my child is concerned.

About the desk trip — it’s really a time trip, but the portal is my desk. Something about being at a desk puts me in a trance, puts me in the zone, and the next thing I know I’m tripping through time and once again swept up in the never-ending story of it all. I sit at the one I have now every day, sometimes staring into space, daydreaming, or crossing my arms on it in front of me, to put my head down for a rest, and I think of sweltering Spring mid-afternoon “naps” in Catholic elementary school. Those nuns were on to something, you know?  Siesta.

My mother’s been resting now in her forever plot for seven years today, and I think about her.

She bought me my first desk, an unfinished desk that she finished in an antique off-white she was so fond of in her early furniture refinishing days. How she must have worked on that desk, thinking of how excited I’d be when I saw it. How she even managed all of what she did with the four of us girls, over the years. At that time we were all under the age of almost six. She got me that desk for my sixth birthday, my dad away at sea a lot in those years (Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs, Suez Canal, Mediterranean, supposed to be gone for two weeks on one “tour” only to have it stretch into two months).

Years later, I remember her telling me how I cried because she got me a desk for that birthday. Six years old. What six year old wants a desk, right? My twenty-six year old mother had to have been misinformed, surely? But then she had nothing to go on really, her own mother having died when she was seven, before she’d even had a chance to cry over much of anything yet.

I did some of my best daydreaming in school at a desk, and a lot of that as I’ve grown older has turned into some of my best writing, as well as some of my worst. It feels good to sit at this designated place where I gather my thoughts, make my lists and give my brain a rest from trying to remember it all. It turns out not only do I WANT a desk, but I NEED a desk — even if it’s only a tray in my lap. So thanks, Mom, for that first desk. And Mom? Just so you know, I still have it — it sits in the basement holding my laundry supplies.

My Irish cousin died the other day after a few months of illness. He was 84, a farmer, who farmed the ancestral farm, ReenoGreena, Glandore, County Cork. I met him and his wife, Anne, for the first time twenty years ago on my first visit to Ireland. He was at that time the age I am now. He had one grandson in particular who loved farming as much as he did, and I’m hoping his farming legacy continues through many future generations. For the brief moments I spent with Pat and Anne on my visits, I truly appreciated their down-to-earth demeanor and their ability to see through pretense. My mother was another soul who recognized pretense, and I believe she would have got on with them quite well. How can you not feel comfortable with folks who have no use for lofty pretense?
I watched Pat’s funeral service live-streamed from his parish in Ireland this morning. Normally, I have no use for traditional funeral masses as I have little use for the Catholic Church these days, but this experience surprised me. It was actually a beautiful ceremony. I’ve been to so many services that lack personality and the personal. His was not the case, his daughter Siobhan’s eulogy, even the priest’s words, captured the spirit of my cousin; upon reflection now I can see it soaring amidst the flying buttresses of that church.  Although I didn’t know Pat well, I felt a peace and comfort hearing about his life of family, farm, community and church, his absolute faith in the miracle of baler twine and vise-grips as an all-purpose fix-it, not only for hay, but also for trousers in need of a belt or coats with broken zippers.  To have lived an entire life, amidst the beauty of a familiar landscape on ancestral lands, surrounded by the stories and the people he shared that life with, ah, what a rich, full life indeed. Who cares about fame and fortune with a life like that?  To hear that a local schoolboy, when asked what he wants to be when he grows up, answered with “a Pat Hurley,” fills me with a longing for a life that we Americans know far too little of.
”You can fix anything with baler twine and vise grips, and if you can’t, it’s not worth fixing.”
-Pat Hurley, ReenoGreena

Just made my afternoon pot of tea, and figured I’d try to write a little something. My writing mojo has been fits and starts lately, so I figure best to start where I am to get it going again. And where I am at the moment is parked in the lounge chair again because it’s day 3 of my latest bout with Vertigo. And I’m not talking the Hitchcock movie. The last time I had vertigo, the Epley Maneuvers I did worked almost immediately. This time is taking a bit longer. I tell myself to enjoy the spells when they happen — my friends and I used to sneak into local carnivals, flirt with the carnies and then ride for free on the most terrifying thrill rides — sometimes two or three rounds on the Zipper or the Bullet before the guys would finally give us a break and let us off.It was a blast and the annual county fair was our playground for the duration it was here, so yeah, I tell myself, hey, this Vertigo thing can be just as much fun as those wild rides, yeah? And a heck of a lot safer. (As long as I’m not standing.) Here’s to putting a positive spin on things, right?

September’s French Postcards will be available today – Sunday, September 25th.

Returned home from a few days away yesterday. My dad will be back late from Ireland tomorrow, and today I sweated bullets in his flat, sorting through stuff that’s been lingering in boxes throughout his condo, gathering dust for the six years since my mother died. He has drawers, shelves, his attic — any possible nook imaginable with stuff cram-jammed everywhere. Stuff he’s been holding onto for my sisters, me, grandkids, in the event one of us wants it, or “needs” it. No one’s shown up to claim it, he simply doesn’t have the space to store it, and looking at these dusty boxes and unused home wares all the time…becomes a constant drain whether we’re aware of it or not. Old habits die hard though, he was a supply officer in the Marines, so he’s like the lady with the pocketbook on the old show “The Price is Right,” when the emcee asks for the most obscure thing and some lady in the audience waves that she’s got it. That’s my dad. Before you buy something, ask Dad. He might have it.
It’s hard going through this kind of stuff alone, representing several different lifetimes of a family’s experiences — history, travels, and varied interests — all accoutrements meant to enhance daily living and hopefully spark joy, but joyful use is not happening when it’s in boxes. My parents had lots of cool stuff — vintage and eclectic, collected from years of moving, travel, and my mother’s interior decorating passions. I’m basically curating, anything I keep must be used and cared for — I’m thinking stewardship, not ownership. “Curate!” Such an overused word of late, it sounds rathe “twee” and smug to me sometimes, unless we’re talking art and history, libraries and museums. But I love the word stewardship a lot, much more so than ownership, in relation to the things we own, the land we live on, the spaces we reside in. On so many levels, cultivating stewardship, just makes more sense to me, and is making it easier for me to part with things, as I wonder who their next steward will be.