My daughter and her significant other arrive two nights ago and we open packages and stockings yesterday morning. Lots of laughter and chocolate and much contentment. Now I have a climbing harness in pale green! We did not climb yesterday, I was too tired. We did go for a park walk on an old golf course and had a delicious dinner. It is lovely to all be gathered here and trading stories and jokes and family silliness.
Today I am up early. We will drive down to see my two aunts and my uncle. The great aunts and uncle to the kids. A very delight!
Taken in Echo Canyon in the Colorado National Monument, Thanksgiving, 2024.
Austere choice
Why do I still feel sad when I think that I am best off with my cat and that I should eschew dating. Why do I feel like I am rejecting love? I don’t have that sort of love. It’s not like I am rejecting anything. I am rejecting looking for it. I am rejecting active interest in a partner other than my cat. What is wrong with that?
I do not ever want to reject hope. I am not trying to reject wanting. Hope and want are the deep and terrible ache for the Beloved. I do not reject that. I am still open, Beloved, to what you send, though getting more particular in middle age. A writer says that he uses a pencil and a pad, because no better tool has been invented. I take the same approach to wanting love. If the relationship is more work than my cat, for less love, why bother? It seems silly and until I go home to the Beloved, so far, I am best off with my cat.
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The first thing Sol Duc does when we go out for a walk, is roll on the sun warmed dusty sidewalk. The house faces south.
I am still thinking about Friday’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: failure. Now that I am middle aged (by my clinic definition, which put over 90 as older), I think the biggest failure of my generation is a peaceful world. For me, a peaceful extended family. I am good friends with my father’s family and my ex-husband’s family. But the maternal family, well. I have thought about that for the last two days: could I have changed that?
Yes, but at what cost? My sister followed the “family rules” on that side. She is dead from cancer. My mother also followed the rules and died younger than me from cancer. I can’t say that the rules cause cancer. But doesn’t our culture say over and over, be yourself? To fit in the family diaspora, I would have to play the triangulation game and gossip about others as they have gossiped about me. No, thank you, no. I don’t want to. They seem to need a family member to hate and have chosen me and labelled me and call me angry. I think they are silly and emotionally immature. At the very least, I would have had to keep my mouth shut and accept them gossiping about me.
The family failure and untrue gossip, with no one ever asking for my viewpoint, mirrors the US culture. Split and needing someone to hate. At this rate, we’ll need the hippies back, with flowers and joy and counter culture and dropping out. Someone fun, at least until the drugs wear off. Someone to say, we need joy back, we need friends, we need love.
It’s not just my failure though. The family failed. They make cruel choices and target people. It happened in my generation, my mother’s, my grandparents. I wonder if it is happening in my adult children’s generation. Who is the next target? Who will refuse to counter-gossip and fight with each source? My adult children are not part of it at all, because I had less and less interest in spending time with mean gossips and I did not want to expose my children.
Lies and drama and meanness and gossip. I hope my adult children’s generation does better. We went to Wicked on Thursday. I did not like it much. Too much drama. Why do we want drama? The world seems more and more surreal. Give me the lovely hike we did on Friday instead, Echo Canyon.
I came close but no cigar I want a mind that I can love hand holding mine in the car I send a quiet prayer above Love of nature, kind to friends not afraid of their own dark Lust to learn until their end willing to risk to build an ark Curious but not controlling Not addicted to booze or drugs Intense at times and others strolling Opinions, laughter and lots of hugs My heart open yet I don’t faint I think I am waiting for a saint
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I wrote the poem yesterday, but I have used up my memory in wordpress and now I need to go through and delete things. Any advice, Martha? I know you did it. It seems that I have to delete the post and the photograph, or is that not true? Advice welcomed.
I search my photographs for gloves and it comes up with two: foxgloves! Well, strictly speaking, that is a form of glove, right?
Rainshadow Chorale sang the Rachmaninovff All Night Vigil yesterday and we get to sing it again today! It is so gorgeous. Exhausting too. The rhythms are unfamiliar, the measures are all different lengths, the time changes all over the place and it’s in the formal Church Slavonic language from 1915.
I still loved singing it and will enjoy it today. Here is the 12th of 15 movements.
My daughter took the photograph in March, 2020, before lockdown.
Return again to friends and home and stumble My house wraps around me familiar then grief There is so much grief here: death makes us humble Mother, marriage, sister, father, time a thief Has stolen them and more to come, a long lived life Means loss on loss. Memory wells up, deeps swells We thought we would be different, wise, no strife Yet the world burns, children bombed in warring hells Our children know our failure and our malice We thought we’d be adults and show the way Our intentions of a wired on-line palace Yet anger and greed now rule the day As a child adults are drunk confusing fools Now my adult children wonder why we are such rigid tools
We did not have a television until I was nine and my little sister was the excuse for watching Sesame Street. We watched this sequence and asked my mother if we could make Sesame Street Soup. We wrote down the recipe and it was delicious.
The soup in my picture is not Sesame Street Soup. It is a Thai influenced soup, with lemon grass and coconut milk and fresh basil and fresh corn, from September 2023.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
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