Last day in Hartwell, Georgia

On this sunny Saturday, we took a drive through a town called Gumlog where I saw my first moonshine still.  Gumlog--a town with Stumpy's Gas: you can't make this stuff up.  A bit further down the road is a Barbecue joint with a sign of a pink pig: Barbecue Pork and Chicken Ribs.  Without a comma there, one can only assume that this is the only venue for chicken ribs in America!

Here's how a still works: They boil the mash in that big yellow barrel.  Then they keep it in the thumper above before sending it through the worm for distilling.  When it comes out, voila!, it's moonshine--so named because they could only do it by the light of the moon.  

Then we returned to Shirley's in Toccoa for one last soul fool meal--delicious!

The little girl with the red-bead braids that we'd seen sing in church, it turns out, is Shirley's granddaughter, McKenna.  The other girl with the elaborate braids is Cookie.  "They aren't even related by blood," Shirley tells us.  "They were babies didn't nobody want so my daughter took them on to raise.  We're trying now to get together enough money to have them adopted."

Mike told Shirley we'd enjoyed her church service and she said, "I just love praising the Lord."

James Brown, Godfather of Soul,  lived in Toccoa and his "real wife" still lives there.  He was a janitor at the school down the road and used to dance and sing with a mop and broom, no music.  

Then we drove to Demorest to see Mike's friend Debbie who is remodeling a house all on her own.  I was impressed by her ability to do everything it takes to turn a ramshackle old house into a gem: lime green and yellow with black shutters and a black metal roof.

After Demorest, we drove to Cornelia and had burgers and milk shakes in a great Fifties-style diner called Fenders.

Just now, Ginger, one of Mike's friends, brought us the most delicious cornbread I've ever tasted--thick cornbread with jalapeños and cheese and bacon.

It's been a terrific two weeks here in North Georgia at Lake Hartwell! 

A Seventy-Year Journey

Mike never throws away anything--or anybody, for that matter.  Ex-wives, parents, teachers--even the principal of his high school who had many occasions to paddle him ("Six licks or call your mother")--he likes them all.

Last night, I asked him if I could look at his high school yearbooks and he brought out a box stuffed with books falling apart and half-eaten by silverfish;  handwritten love letters from old girlfriends (remember those?); a picture of him and a brunette beauty on prom night; a letter from his mother imploring him to do his best in college.

There was a turquoise stone on a chain given to him by Helen, his first girlfriend.  He talks to her often and loves her still, of course.  "If I had been a better kisser, Elmo wouldn't have gotten you," he likes to tell her.

I looked at his elementary school report cards and a newspaper clipping of a time when he was camper of the year.  In every photo, he's smiling.

His teachers commented on what a kind boy he was, what a pleasure it was to have him in class, and they asked his parents to read to him and try to interest him in reading.  "He tries so hard to read out loud that he gets breathless," one teacher wrote. Because he stuttered, he was teased--but after a while, he decided to just laugh along with them and the teasing stopped.

Fun was and is Mike's primary interest--not reading.  He has hilarious stories about high school and I have none to trade with him.  For me, high school was not particularly fun--probably because my boyfriend throughout high school was a college boy. Getting in trouble was never a deterrent for Mike if there was a spark of fun on the horizon.

I looked at his baby pictures, a picture of him sitting in the lap of the Easter Bunny, a picture of him on a horse, wearing chaps.  His German daddy ran away from home in the fourth grade, jumped out of the window at school and was on his own growing up.  "He was a brilliant man, just not educated," Mike says. "The day after that picture was taken, Daddy bought me a black stallion that was wild as hell."

Sitting beside Mike, looking at his life in pictures, reading the words of affection written to him in his yearbooks was enough to give me emotional whiplash, back and forthing from one age to another--just as I feel when I thumb through pictures of my children: my daughter a baby, then a bride, then a two-year-old; my son a Little League player, then a firefighter, then a baby in diapers again.

While Mike's teachers wrote glowing reports of him and his kindness, they marked him down on deportment.  Apparently, young Mike was a nonstop talker--no surprise to me.  He loves talking with old and current friends on the phone.  Countless times I've heard him say to one of them, "If you need anything,  just call me."  His mantra: I'll do anything for you.

He was class president in junior year and built his first car at the age of 15.  He loved music and worked hard, mowing lawns and refinishing furniture he found at Goodwill.  He spent lots of time on Beale Street in Memphis listening to the blues and buying his clothes at Lansky's where Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis bought theirs.  His classmates wore jeans and khaki pants, madras and oxford cloth shirts; Mike wore red pants and powder blue ones and "wild" colorful shirts. To be able to afford the clothes and cars he liked, he worked every day--mostly at his Dad's die shop downtown. He learned the trade--or as he says, the "bidness."

Traveling back in time, I wish I'd met him earlier.  I think I might have learned how to have a lot more fun!  Nobody makes me laugh as hard as Mike does.

We all live our lives day by day, the changes incremental and barely noticeable.  But when all the years are compressed in a box of pictures and letters, it's like watching a movie in which the scenes flip back and forth, herky jerky.

Seeing the people and places that shaped one man reveals so many endearing facets of him.  I've read that we change all the cells in our body every seven years, but the imprints of the man are there in the boy he used to be.   Mike is still that little boy who stutters and clowns around, who is unconventional, works hard, and who starts every day with music.  He has the huge heart of Pancho (his childhood nickname) and he believes that this chapter of his life is the best yet.

"How many street rods have you built in your life?" I asked him.

"Ah, hell, I don't know.  Probably about ten or twelve.  But this is my last one, the best set of wheels I've ever had."

It took him two years to build this car and inside he has a plaque that reads: "Dedicated to those boys of the 50s and 60s who dreamed, designed, engineered, and built their custom cars.  Mike's Last One"

Mike made this "sofa" out of a 1956 DeSoto

.

Engraved on this mailbox: "Mike loves Linda forever, 2007."

Mike's prized Street Rod
1951 Chevrolet Body on a '77 Monte Carlo chassis
'57 Corvette grille, '59 Cadillac tail lights,
'51 Pontiac hood ornament, custom orange and white leather interior,
 exterior painted orange and silver metallic, with lake pipes

Finding the exit ramp

As a result of my last post, I have had two illuminating conversations--the first via email from Betty:

"The messages we give children often become the messages they give themselves.   Those old messages run around in our brain.  Sometimes it's difficult to find the exit ramp for the messages that don't serve us well.  I'm trying to practice being kinder to myself, gentler with my self-talk.  How we feel and think about ourselves impacts how we feel and think about others and that affects the way we relate to one another."

Mike put it another way:  "Sometimes you get something stuck in your mind and it's like a scratch on a record.  Every revolution, you hear it.  You can keep listening to the scratch and being annoyed by it, or you can take the record out and clean it."  

Kind, Smart, and Important

"You is kind, you is smart, you is important."   Adelaide, the maid in the novel, The Help, said these words over and over to her "last" white child in Jackson, Mississippi.

I read the novel and saw the movie when they first came out, but when I watched it with Mike, I saw it with different lenses.  I cried.  This time, the movie touched me even more than the first time around.  Besides, I have a granddaughter myself now, so hearing those words spoken to a little girl made me wonder: what kinds of mantras make girl-child stronger for life?

Mike was a little white boy raised by a feminist mother and a "colored" woman named Laura.  His mother fought for civil rights in Memphis.  Laura was a "cotton picking machine built for picking cotton," he said.  Strong and built low to the ground, she could pick twice as much cotton as anyone else.

When he got out of line or fought with his brother, Laura would hold him so tightly that he couldn't get loose, then spank him when he did.  She never yelled, didn't have to--her physical strength kept him in line. Yet even now, the mention of Laura Taylor, whom he loved and who loved him, brings tears to his eyes.

Not all little girls are pretty, and not all little boys stay in the lines, but we all need to hear that we are kind, smart, and important--or whatever qualities the adults in their lives hope for them to carry for the rest of their lives.

Another aspect of the movie that touched me deeply was Adelaide's saying, "Nobody ever asked me before what it was like to be me.  "But once I started telling the truth, I was free."

This line inspires me to see one of my roles in the lives of children as asking what it's like to be them.  What do you love?  What matters to you?  What hurts you? And then, just listening to what they have to say.

But I'm also--thanks to the movie--going to think of a mantra of my own for the children in my world.  "You are kind, you are smart, you are strong."  Or: "You are creative, curious, and caring."

Children believe what we tell them, so what we tell them should be words they can hold on to when everything falls apart--which it will, in every life, from time to time.

Who's Her Mama?

It's been a beautiful week here at Lake Woebegone--actually, Lake Hartwell.  Even after a wreck that could have killed him (we've gone back and seen the tracks) Mike met me in a battered truck and led me back to Brown Mule Farm, very slowly, on ice.   Bruises don't get this man down.  The barn was decorated and candled, with fresh flowers, when we arrived back here on Monday night a week ago.  "I'm just so glad you're here," he said, smiling--after being turned 360 degrees and spun, knocked out, and bruised hard on both sides.

When we went to the eye specialist and he found out that he probably has glaucoma, he left hugging the nurse and joking, "Don't tell Linda any rules, Darlin', she'll make me do 'em." (Rules like nightly eye drops, for example.)

We've enjoyed some of the best Southern cooking in North Georgia-- beans, cabbage, cornbread, biscuits and ham, macaroni, barbecue pork, potatoes and all the foods we both grew up eating.  On Saturday, we went to Shirley's Sole Food in Toccoa--a little hole-in-the-wall buffet with fresh homemade food.  Shirley serves the locals, then at closing time, she feeds leftovers to the homeless people.  She's started two homeless shelters and she plays gospel music in her restaurant.

"I can tell you've been with black people a lot,"
Shirley told Mike

We love gospel music--the genuine black music that rocks little churches all over Georgia--and Shirley invited us to her church on Sunday to hear some good stomping and clapping singing.  I wrote down the name of the church: Greater Hope.  "When my mama was a girl, it used to be called Little Hope," she said. "But we changed it to Greater Hope."

The woman in the red hat is Big Mama.  (I noticed that all the younger women are called Sister--Sister Shirley, Sister Laverne, etc. and the older women are called Mama.)  Big Mama is a perky 90.

The little girl with the red beads in her braids is three--Elena's age.  After Sister Shirley's impromptu opening sermon ("I've got mine, y'all are on your own!")  and before the singing and preaching started, this little girl wanted to stand up and sing.  Flanked by six or seven of the sisters of the church, she took the microphone like a pro and sang, clapping along.

The sermon was about "being grounded" in the truth, even when "nobody don't like you and everybody's talking about you." At the end, he said, "That's the message, now you go out and be the message."

Throughout the service, I watched the little girl with the red beads  First, she snuggled up to one woman and I assumed that was her mama.  Then she got up and moved around the pews, sitting with one, then another, then another.  Everyone patted her and wiped her nose.  "Which one do you think is her mama?" I asked Mike. "I have no idea," he said.

A baby was similarly passed from one lap to another, even had her diapers changed by a church sister three rows up.  It made me think of the adage, "It takes a village to raise a child."  The children in Greater Hope play musical pews, moving around as they like, all the sisters and  mamas treating them like their babies.

Mike had tears in his eyes when he told me, "This takes me back sixty years."  As a boy in Memphis he went to stomping and clapping church with Laura, the family maid who was like a second Mama to him.  When we were recognized as visitors, he stood up and told the story of going to a church about half the size of Greater Hope with Laura.  As he talked, everyone was smiling and there were a few "Amen"s. "We love you and hope you'll come back and be with us again," the preacher said.

After church, we had delicious lunch at another soul food restaurant--Mama Lynn's in Lavonia.  Mama Lynn, the cook and owner, is also the preacher at a gospel church.  At four yesterday afternoon, they were having a big service--including a truck load of white church people who were "coming to praise God in an all-black church."

Mama Lynn's husband Ron and the waitress

The Big Chill

Mike and I are watching this 1985 movie tonight--while it's in the single digits in North Georgia.

I drove in on Monday night and was just 20 miles from Mike's when he (driving to meet me on the Interstate to guide me over the black ice in the dark) spun himself on the ice and wound up in the ditch.  We were talking on the phone when it happened, he telling me to pull into the parking lot at Dad's Diner, when suddenly I heard an expletive, then the phone went to static.  We were a mile apart at the time and I called his name over and over, but he didn't hear me because he had passed out in the accident.

Somehow he wound up in the backseat and suffered bruises and sore shoulders, but he's overall okay. The truck is quite badly damaged, but we made it back to Brown Mule Farm by ten.  Carlene and Mike had both been calling all day, cautioning me about the ice storm.  I was intent on getting here and--foolishly--kept driving, oblivious to the seriousness of black ice until I got close and the ice got thicker and trees were snapping in the weight of the ice.

Except for the truck and Mike's bruises, we're okay--but I have a new respect for ice on the roads.  If I could do it again, I'd do things differently.

"Interestingness hunter-gatherer"

This site brainpickings.org is terrific!

Here's what you'll find out about its creator (born in 1984) in her own words: "Hey there. My name is Maria Popova and I’m a reader, writer, interestingness hunter-gatherer, and curious mind at large. I’ve previously written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, among others, and am an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow."

Among other things, she discusses books and writers--so when you go to her site, you'll wind up going to the library or ordering books and following her tracks to other sites.

My journey tonight has taken me from Brain Pickings to On Being (with Krista Tippet in a rare interview with Mary Oliver) then back to BP to a page on the power of journal-keeping, then a review of Anne Lamott's newest book,  Stitches.

Here's a snippet from this week's newsletter:

The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. We act out of those stories, reacting to their realness. William James knew this when he observed: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese"

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Singing Hymns and Taking Pictures: 550 Miles

     I only do it on the road, and only when no one else is within hearing distance: I turn on one of those gospel channels and sing one song after the other at the top of my lungs! Whether or not I agree with all the words, I know them all from years of playing them in church growing up, and with substantial road noise, I sound pretty good.

     By the time I got to Vicksburg (550 miles from my driveway) (looking forward to watching Masterpiece, only to discover my Best Western doesn't have PBS) I was hoarse and happy.  When Mike called to check on me, I offered to sing one for him, but he declined my offer rather vociferously.

     It's been a beautiful day, driving 35, then Highway 79, to Highway 20. (Interstate 20 is 350 miles from my house.)  When I got here, I asked the clerk at the desk for suggestions of places to eat and she told me Cracker Barrel and a buffet are just one exit up.  "Which do like better?" I asked--to which she answered, "I  ain't never ate at any of them."

     Every hundred miles I stopped--or when I couldn't stop, took note of where I was.  I know this route so well it's a larger version of driving around a hometown.  But I wanted to pay attention this time to mile markers, to get a sense of how far certain places are from others.

     100 miles: Hutto, Texas--a quiet little town with a lot of nice brick buildings, most of which were out of business.  Flat lands, a train that wends its way right along the highway, silos, leafless trees, silver sky.

     200 miles:Marquez, Texas.  

    300 miles: Rusk--just by the sign for Rocking S Ranch.

    400 miles: the 30-mile marker on East 20, just east of Shreveport.

    500 miles: the 130-mile marker on East 20, between Monroe and Vicksburg

    550 miles: Best Western Vicksburg

     Several times, I had to do a U-Turn to photograph something: a field of cows; trees reflected in water; solitary crumbling, peeling, sagging buildings; barns with breezeways framing fields and trees; silos and trains....

The house is gone; only the outbuildings remain.

Just on the other side of the tracks

     I brought along a new journal I'd been saving for my next road trip.  On the cover, there's a quotation by Thoreau: "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

     Every few pages, there's a drawing of a vintage camera and a quotation about photography--most of which apply to writing and drawing:

     "Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second." Mark Reboud

     "You don't make a photograph just with a camera.  You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved." Ansel Adams

     "A good photographer must love life more than he loves photography." Joel Strasser

     "You don't take a photograph.  You ask, quietly, to borrow it."  Unknown

     "Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever....It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything." Aaron Siskind

     "Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow." Imogene Cunningham.

"Love inspires impulsiveness"

When one thing changes, everything changes, I've noticed.  Move a lamp in a room and the whole room opens up with new possibilities.  Decide to chuck responsibilities and go for what feels right--stress dissipates!

I've gotten so many wonderful e-mails and send-offs yesterday and this morning!  As Diana (who knows) said, "Love inspires impulsiveness."

My Topo Chicas yesterday also brought such joy and enthusiasm.  It was a great way to spend Valentine's Day! Cindy brought a delicious cake and Jennifer brought each of us a beautiful bottle of cranberry cordial that she'd made.

I woke up to texts from Mike that made me smile: "We three got up early because our tails started wagging and woke us up!"  (Mike and his two dogs, Mo Jo and Copper)

I'm doing a last-minute touch up on the house because Carlene is coming home with me in early March and I want the house to be spiffy.  We're going to have a great road trip back and then be here in time to celebrate Nathan's birthday and spend time with Elena at her second house.

Love inspires a lot of things--impulsiveness, open-heartedness, vitality.  I feel rich today--so many good people to love.  Heart day continues on and on and on.

A Heart For All Of You

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY to ALL MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY who make life so beautiful!

I didn't send personal cards to you--but I made an impromptu one out of my bottle cap collection--while eating a late breakfast and getting ready for my Topa Chicas at one.

I'm leaving in the morning for a spontaneous road trip--to Georgia where I hope to see some snow.  I'll be with Mike for a couple of weeks, then Carlene is coming back to Texas with me, leaving there on March 3rd.

The car is packed and I'm throwing in all my winter clothes--which seems rather strange on this beautiful spring-like day.

The Heart Of The Matter

According to the GPS on my phone, Mike and I live exactly 1100 miles apart, door to door.  And yet, even eleven hundred miles apart, he has made this my favorite Valentine's Day!

I have gotten so many packages and cards over the past month leading up to Valentines Day that I'm calling this Valentines Month.  He's sent dancing boots, a beautiful pearl ring, a silver charm bracelet with a heart charm, a red heart finial for the lamp he made me in October, and several  frames for new glasses he thinks will look good on me.  He knows exactly what I like and spends his days finding ways to show me what Mike Love looks like!

When Elena came over, she saw two packages at the door and said, "What?  More presents from Mike? He sends us a lot of presents, Yenna!"  It's been fun having her here to share the opening of presents--she pronounces everything "beautiful."  Here she is wearing a pair of my cat-eye glasses:

My Valentine and I are different.  I'm a reader; he's a dancer.  I'm a minimalist; he's a collector.  I'm rule-conscious (either following them or feeling guilty when I don't); he lives from the heart, eating, driving, buying, doing whatever he feels like. "No rules at Brown Mule Farm," he says.

If a friend or stranger needs something, he's there.  If we're shopping behind someone who doesn't have quite enough money, he pays.  He recently ordered a generic class ring from eBay for Rocky (a mentally challenged man who works for him who never finished high school and has always wanted a class ring.)  Rocky speaks in a way that few people can understand, but Mike can.  "B- B- Best friend," he said to Mike this week.

Last week, he took valentine cards and sweets to the women at the bank and post office.  He still gets calls every day from friends, some of whom he's had since high school. He lives from his heart, often intuiting something that's bothering me long before I know what it is.

The differences between us may be what other people notice, and--in fact--they may account for our break up seven years ago.  But what drew us together the first time--and again in October--is beyond lists of similarities and differences.

Feeling seagulls on our last trip to Georgia

He never met a dog he doesn't like.
Here he is with Nathan's Skippy at Christmas

I love my Valentine because of his happy heart and his creative ways of expressing love for me.  I love his strength and his vulnerabilities, too.  I love the heart of this man, eleven hundred miles away who calls me "Sweetheart."

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY, MIKE!

Valentines When You're Three

"Why do we send valentines?" I asked Elena as we were making cards on her magic carpet yesterday.

"Because we love peoples," she said.

I draw the hearts; she colors them. "But I can't make the words, Yenna!"

"I can make the words.  You just tell me what to say.  What do you want me to put on Daddy's valentine?"

"Happy Birthday," she said.  "And you're welcome.....And put I love you."

When her Aunt Day was exactly her age, she said "make" for "write," too.  One day she came home from Sunday School so excited as she wrote L O V E.  "Mrs. Gibbs taught us how to make love!" she said.

"Do you have a present for me?" Elena asked yesterday--eyeing the cabinet where she knows I hide presents.  I gave her a copy of The Wizard of Oz  and she "read" it in the car all the way to Helotes.

At this age, reading means looking at the pictures and asking questions.  "Why is that lion crying?" (He's a cowardly lion, I said.  He's afraid of everything.)

"Why he's afraid?" she asked.  "I'm not!  I'm not afraid of anything."

"Why is Toto jumping on that man?  Who is that man?  Is he the daddy?"

"He's the uncle.  Dorothy and Toto live with her uncle and Aunt Em."

"Why do they live with them and not their parents?"

"See how I'm not scared?  I can climb super high!" she says, as we are playing on Nathan's school playground.

But Nathan is not there; he's at his other house this week.  "I don't have another house," she said.  "But I used to have another house."

"Well, my house can be your other house," I say.

"Of course!" she says.  It's as easy as that.  Elena now has two houses, too, just like Nathan.

An essay by Opal Ruth Prater

I always used to love the NPR program, This I Believe.

Even though it's no longer part of the regular programing on KSTX, I was happy to discover that it's still available online and podcast. Every episode is a short essay about the writer's belief.

In honor of Valentine's Day, here's an essay by Opal Ruth Prater about her love for her late-husband:


I found the shirt hanging on the back of a chair in the cook shed when we came home from the funeral. It had been a beautiful day when he last wore it. We had cut the last of the corn, gathered pumpkins, and picked the last of the green beans. Then he took the kids down the ridge to pick apples, and the warmth of the day combined with the heat from his labor forced him to remove it.

There it hung on that old, straight-back chair, mocking me with its emptiness. With a cry, I snatched it up. It smelled of sunshine and fresh air, that wonderful outdoorsy scent of my husband emanating from this final source. I buried my head in it and cried, as I had been unable to cry before.

My children gathered around me, their small hands patting, trying to comfort me. These four beautiful children were now my only reason to go on, and from them I drew the strength to dry my tears.

My husband, Dusty, had had a heart condition, one that could be controlled with medication, the doctors told us. “He should live to be an old man.” When he lay down in the yard that lovely fall day, he was only forty-one years old. Our idyllic mountain home became a lonely, haunted place.

Days passed slowly without Dusty there to laugh with me, read to me while I cooked supper, and rub my back until I fell asleep at night. When things got really rough, I would slip out to the cook shed, bury my face in his shirt, and cry out my sorrow and frustration. That was as close as I could get to the lost half of me.

Then the day came when we had to go out for groceries. It stormed while we were out and delayed our trip home, so we went to bed right after our return.

The next morning, I went out to the cook shed for a few moments of meditation before the children woke up. Some of our goats and sheep had taken shelter in the shed from the previous day’s storm, and they had knocked Dusty’s shirt off the chair and trampled it underfoot. I grabbed it up, but its wonderful, comforting smell was gone.

Fifteen years have passed since my husband’s death. My children are grown, and I have to admit that they turned out pretty well. I still catch myself thinking, “We didn’t do half bad, did we, Honey?”

I heard someone say of a departed husband, “I loved him.” How do you get to the point where you can speak of that love in the past tense? If that love is past, why does the memory still have such power to invoke both happiness and sadness?

I believe that as long as I am alive, Dusty’s memory will live in me. I see his eyes peeking out at me from my grandson’s face. I find something of his spirit in each of our children.

My husband’s death affected our family greatly, but his life impacted it more. He will live as long as one of us is alive to remember and to love him.

And sometimes on a warm fall day, I catch that outdoorsy scent of fresh air and sunshine, and my face is buried in Dusty’s shirt once more. Although I know he sleeps, I hear his shout of laughter somewhere just ahead, and I think he waits for me.

I believe that love is stronger than death.



Opal Ruth Prater and her late husband, Dusty, raised their four children on several hundred acres of land about three miles from the nearest blacktop, with no electricity or running water. Ms. Prater still lives among her beautiful southwest Virginia mountains, with her children and grandchildren closeby.

The best thing about buying a toaster oven....

Is painting the box and styrofoam it's packed in:

Being an artist is exhausting!

Speaking of Little Things...

Elena and I just saw Paddington--and it was a visual and storytelling treat.  If you don't have a little one to take, grab somebody else's little one and go!

"Is it time to be quiet and courteous?" Elena whispered to me after the announcement to be quiet and courteous.

Then she sat in my lap and cuddled up, sharing popcorn with little M&Ms sprinkled in, just like we like it, and watched from start to finish with only a few questions: "Why he's doing that?" and "Is she a bad girl?" and "Why he's brushing his ears with a toothbrush?"

We'd bought a little stuffed flying pig at the toy store next door, and from time to time, she had to pick it up and show Pig what was happening on the big screen. When the threat of taxidermy came up for poor Paddington, I had to tell her that the bad girl was trying to turn Paddington into a stuffed animal like Flying Pig.

Paddington gets in quite a bit of trouble in the Brown's house, but in the end, even Mr. Brown had to accept their new family member, Paddington.  "This family needs that wee bear as much as he needs us."

Little Things

In our forty years of friendship, Joy has rarely appeared at my door without a bouquet in her hands.  Last week, she--lover of all things blooming--brought me a tiny jar of flowers that spent their last pretty days on my table.

Sharon, also a lover of all blooming things, always brings flowers to writing group.  The last tiny bouquet lasted (incredibly, to me) two whole weeks.

Yesterday morning, a black Honda pulled into McDonalds about the same time I did and I gestured for her to go ahead.  When I pulled up to the window, I was told that the stranger in the Honda had paid for my drink.

Later in the day, out shopping with two friends, one bought a smooth stone heart and a bakery cookie for each of us.

Often (on the spur of the moment) my friend Freda calls to say she's made a certain dish and invites me over to share it with her.

Or Jan shows up at my door with a cookie or a slice of quiche from their dinner.

Or I share an idea with Carlene and she "thinks about it" with me.

Or I'm missing Day and the phone rings and it's her voice saying "Hi, Mom!  What you doing?"

Whether a little no-occasion present, a voice message that you want to listen to more than once, an email from a friend or a random act of kindness from a stranger--it's often the smallest things that infuse a day with color and make it bigger.

We might call a thing "little" because it doesn't cost much--but think of all that goes into the making of a single flower or poem! Think of all the mysterious paths it takes for something beautiful to land (seemingly so effortlessly) at just the right moment.  Think of the big love in every "tiny" gift from one person to another.

I love the poetry of Billy Collins.  Yesterday's Writer's Almanac poem was one of his--but I'd have missed it if Kate hadn't taken the time to forward it to me:

Adage
by Billy Collins

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.