that's mrs. mediocrity to you

Last Friday, at the end of a long crazy week that was filled with its share of doubts, I received a lovely surprise. Jennifer Morrison, from realia, bestowed upon me the Sunshine Award: I was touched and honored and it came at such a perfect time, after one of those days when insecurities about my writing had reared their ugly head.

So first of all, I must say thank you, Jennifer, from the bottom of my heart. This really means a lot to me. I love the tag line over at realia: Pay attention – there’s a story wherever you go. So true.

And second of all, I want to say thank you to you, yes YOU, the one being kind enough to read this. Your comments and encouragement and kindness continue to amaze me, every day. It means so much to me, truly.

And thirdly, I thought that I should pay it forward a bit, and pass it on to a few of the people who add sunshine to my day. There are many more than I can list here, but these women were among the first people to comment here, to make me feel welcome, to make me feel that perhaps I do have something to say.

Debi, over at emma tree. She paints pictures with words, always. Her writing is poetry, pure and simple. She is the artist and writer that I imagined I might become way back when I was 13.

Beth, over at be yourself, everyone else is taken. The name of Beth’s blog captures her spirit exactly. I always leave there with a little smile on my face, she views life through rose-colored glasses.

Graciel, at evenstar art. She has encouraged me from the very beginning, she has a heart of gold, and I love her view of the world. I find peace and inspiration with her, always.

Julochka, from moments of perfect clarity. Early on, she featured me as a blog crush, and I was so surprised and honored, and I also love her way of looking at the world, profound and honest.

Thanks, to all of you. I am not setting any rules here, you may pass this along or not, I just wanted you to know how much you have meant to me on this journey.

There are so many others who have touched my heart, each in a different way. I appreciate you all, more than you can know.

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And I just discovered the pet parade over at red or gray today, so I thought that perhaps I should join in the fun, being a certified crazy cat lady and all. So here is “My Handsome Man,” my sweet Pepe, a truly gentle soul that came to us injured and starving and looking like a completely different cat three years ago…

I’m so glad he found us. He, also, has brought sunshine into my life.

Today it rains. It is hot and it is sunny, and then it is hot and it rains.  A cycle of weather I must live with.

It is has been so hot, for weeks now, that I stay inside. I want to be outside, I want to sweat and dig in my garden and pull the ten million weeds that call my name each time I open my back door. They mock me, these weeds. Point and nod as I walk by, I hear them: bad gardener, lazy girl, indifferent caretaker.

I give them the finger and go back inside.

The best time to weed is just after it rains, roots are easier to pull from soft, wet soil. I should go out there and do that right now.
But I won’t, it is late already, I need to make pizza for dinner, and tomorrow, I have an art show.

But if I could, I would go out there, right now, and start pulling. And when I finally finished, sometime next Tuesday, there would be a mountain of weeds, a foothill of dill, a backache, and a giant sense of accomplishment. Funny how something so simple can make you feel so good.

Next weekend, I am going to my friend’s house so she can teach me how to make pickles. She is 84 and has lived a life filled with extraordinary amounts of pain, both physical and emotional. And yet, she giggles. A lot. One of these days, on a different day, I will tell you her story. But she called me this week and she said, “The cucumbers are early this year, we have to get going on these pickles.” These pickles that I asked her to teach me how to make.

She is housebound, and most likely bored, and if I could, I would go and spend every day with her, so she could teach me all about 84 years worth of living, and how to make pickles and also how to crochet those amazing doilies. But for now, I had to tell her the pickles would have to wait, I have a show this weekend, I cannot go there until next week, when it is August.

I am going to learn to make pickles.

Sugar and spice,

salt and vinegar,

time and life.

Millions of miles have been traveled along this route.

The path I run on is an old rail trail that has been converted into a footpath. The markers have been left in place and I love that, both as a way to mark my own mileage, and because they make me think of the history of this place, all those trains, people, cargo, that have been here before me, all their stories, the lives and loves and loss and possibilities.

My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was at times, a hobo. This same track continued on into the town my mom grew up in and passed through an area near their backyard. She has told me stories about him, and the other men he sometimes brought home from the train. Bapa, as we called him, was also a drunk, in the very old-fashioned sense of the word, before they were called alcoholics. He was the Wild Irish Rose in a paper bag kind of drunk, and we didn’t see him much when we were growing up. He wasn’t a nice drunk, he was a mean drunk, and for that reason my mom kept him away from us most of the time.

He died when I was quite young, but the strongest memory I have of him is a day when he came over and sat at our kitchen table with his booze and he did get drunk, but not mean, and then my mom and the four of us kids had to help him upstairs to the bathroom. There are fourteen steps, and we went up two, down one. It took us about an hour to get him all the way to the top and by that time we were all crying tears of laughter at the things he was saying, and because we didn’t think we would ever make it to the top.

My other memory of him is that he always said, “Capiche?” after he told me something. And while I had no idea what it meant at the time, I somehow loved that he said it.

So I think of him when I am on this trail, wonder if he passed by this way, what stories he could have told about the people he met, the places he went, how he became the person I knew. I wonder how many times he passed this marker that says South 83 and thought that soon, he would be home.

My father’s father, my paternal grandfather, was among many other things, a well witcher. If you don’t know what that is, it means that he could take a divining rod, most often a Y-shaped tree branch, and find a well, deep underground. I never saw him do it, but my dad has, and he says that Gramps really could find water this way. This is one of those things that some people believe in and some people don’t, but I choose to believe that he could do it, that there was something special about him, this part of his legacy.

He was a tiny man, barely five feet, and always hunched over because he had polio when he was young. He probably didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. But he was a tough old man, he worked his whole life on a farm, hard labor. He was always working, always fixing something, always in his work clothes.

I don’t have too many memories of him either, he also died when I was fairly young. But I remember that when he and my grandmother visited, he always brought a paper bag of candy. He was kind, and gentle, and quiet. He was an old-fashioned man, a country man, a man who made do with what he had, who never got rid of anything in case he might need it one day. He was a man who could find water with a stick.

And I think of him too, now, when I am on this trail, and I keep seeing all these Y-shaped branches.

The trees along this path, that fold their arms above me and around me as I move through them, are trees that might have been saplings back then, when my grandfathers were alive.

These trees hold many secrets, and sometimes they whisper,

telling stories of those who’ve been here before me.

And I listen. I always listen.

My sister took this picture of my dad last year, and we both love it because, as we say, “It’s classic Deetz.” Somehow, in this picture, I can see him as a little boy, sitting there just like that.

We all call my father Deetz these days, when my son was little he started calling him D.T., no one is really quite sure why, but it stuck, and over the years it evolved into Deetz. Now everyone that is any part of the family calls him that.

I have a lot of memories of fishing with my dad. When I was a kid he would load all four of us into the station wagon and off we would go, probably giving my mom a much-needed break. My brothers and sister and I caught a lot of sunfish in those days. Once, just once, I caught a bass. And I was so excited, but then so disappointed when I had to throw it back, because it wasn’t bass season. Of course, someone else always had to put the worm on the hook for me, my dad did it, mostly, or sometimes my brother, but I didn’t ask him very often because he also liked to torture me about my fear of worms and would usually dangle one in my face first.

Once, we went fishing after a long rainy spell, and the big old station wagon got stuck in the mud. I mean really stuck. It took hours to get out of there, all four of us pushing and laughing hysterically and then getting mad and then laughing some more as the wheels just kept spinning and we would move an inch or two, and by the time we got home we were all covered in mud, and that was not a good day for my mother.

Another time, we went ice fishing. I don’t remember catching any fish that day, but I remember that for some reason my brother decided to fill his hole back in with chunks of ice right before we left. And me, being the klutz that I always was, immediately forgot that hole was there, and as we were walking back to the car, my leg slipped right down into it. My dad instinctively grabbed for me, catching me by the hood of my coat, and pulling me back out almost instantaneously, so I was saved from a complete dunking, or worse. But, oh my, was I cold. We had to go to my grandmother’s house, which was closer than ours, so I could get out of my wet clothes. Nobody was very happy with my brother that day.

Sometimes just a few of us went, sometimes it was just me and my dad. And as I got older, a lot of times I didn’t even fish, I took my book and sat near him and read while he fished. For some reason, I love those memories as much if not more than the ones I have of actually catching fish. We didn’t talk much, you have to be quiet when you are fishing, but we sat there, together, each doing the thing we loved best.

My dad is the most patient man I have ever met. He is quiet and sweet and selfless. For my entire life he has given himself to his family. He has always, always been there for me. Putting worms on my hook, driving me to the mall when I was a teenager, and then sitting there on a bench while my friends and I shopped, helping me fix anything in my house that has ever been broken, giving me advice when I have asked for it, and just being there, silently, when all I needed was that.

My dad has always been there to grab my hood and pull me up.

My dad is my hero.

Happy Father’s Day, Deetz.

or, when life overwhelms, run away. And yes, I know these aren’t ducks, they are geese, but sometimes a girl gets to take a little poetic license, doesn’t she?

I seem to have depleted my batteries recently, and I just wasn’t running properly. I knew this, but couldn’t seem to break the cycle. So when my mother-in-law asked if I wanted to head up to the Thousand Islands with her and my sister-in-law and niece for a girls overnighter, of course my first thought was “I can’t do that, I don’t have time,” but then my second thought was, “Don’t be stupid.”

So I said yes and dropped everything, knowing it would all still be there, on the floor, when I got back. I never do things like that, but I knew that I really, really needed this one.

And off I went, and for the next day and a half I did only silly, relaxing, fun things. I giggled a little, I guffawed a lot. It helps when you have a silly eighteen-year-old with you and she does some really funny, crazy things. I also read a whole book. (Okay, I had started it the night before). It wasn’t even that great, but I lived within its covers for hours and hours anyway and that was its own little escape within my escape.

I never really used to believe in burnout, or at least I never believed it would happen to me, but lately I have begun to grasp the concept. Just in time, though, I am also starting to grasp the concept that no matter how much you have to do, every so often you need to simply stop everything and have some fun. Fun for the sake of fun.

They kept asking me what I wanted to do, and I kept saying, “I don’t care, I am just so happy to not HAVE to do anything.” But mostly I was thinking that I’d like to be sitting in a chair with my feet up, reading. We walked the little towns, we shopped, we ate, we went sightseeing. And then, finally, we sat in the hotel room and I read while they watched their shows  (there were a lot of them). Basically, I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to do the whole trip.

Well, except pay $12 for a friendship bracelet that is essentially a piece of string with four beads strung on it. I almost refused, I thought it was ridiculously expensive, but we were all supposed to get one, together. So I bit my tongue and plunked down my cash, and now there it is on my wrist.

But it might just end up being the best twelve dollars I ever spent, because every time I look at it now, I think of how hard we all laughed at 11:30 that night when my niece went to take a shower and was scared by a tiny little spider and dropped her glasses in the toilet. And she was appalled and grossed out and there was some gagging and it was just so funny and we laughed until we snorted because she is the kind of girl who would rather throw her glasses away than fish them out of the toilet.

And then, of course, we were on a roll, and we laughed hysterically for the next hour and probably kept everyone in all the rooms near us awake, but we just couldn’t stop and we didn’t stop and we all fell asleep with smiles on our faces.

And during the night I dreamed silly dreams

while all those things I left scattered

at home on the floor

moved themselves back into place.

How did that old song go? We learn the truth at seventeen…
I loved that song, then, but I realize now that there is so much you haven’t learned at seventeen, so many truths the world still has to show you.

My niece is seventeen today. And for her gift, she requested a post about her, humble girl that she is. So, I thought I would share a few of the things it took me longer than seventeen years to learn…not that I’m finished, yet.

Don’t give up too much of yourself for love. Ever.

Your heart will be broken, more than once. But you will survive. You will do more than survive, you will grow, each time.

The world is a tough and crazy place. It is also wonderful. It will,
at times, knock you down. But you will always get back up.

Be confident. And when you are not, fake it. It almost always
turns into the real thing.

Be sure to laugh, every day. I mean it. There is always something to laugh at, even if it is yourself. (Just call if you are ever short on possibilities, you can laugh at me.)

Stand tall. You are already tall, so don’t slouch. Stand up straight. Tower over life.

Don’t give in when you know you are right. Not right as in correct, right as in righteous. And understand the difference.

Learn how to compromise. It is a valuable tool that makes life easier. For everyone.

Learn how to forgive. It is a valuable tool that makes life easier.
For you.

Dance. Sing. Be happy. Without caring what anyone else thinks. Whenever and as often as you can.

Live with grace. Say please, and thank you, and always hold the door open for the next person.

Never stop learning. Keep asking questions. The more you learn,
the less you know.

Make waves. Especially when standing still is worse than the problem.

Go out into the world. Explore. Expand your horizon.

And most importantly, eat lots and lots of pickles.

Happy Birthday, Goofball.