Tag Archives: friendship

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teen toys today

Um, you say, these don’t really look like toys.

I had friends visit last week. These are the thirteen year old’s toys: he enjoys fixing cell phones and computers and asked if we had any old game platforms. I talked to my son and the thirteen year old is taking the ones he wants. And what was he working on in the picture? Replacing the broken glass in my cell phone.

Now many of you are jealous and would like this teen to visit you. My cell phone has a lot of parts and many tiny screws. There was only one left over and the phone is working fine and the glass is unbroken! Wow! Toys of mine that were used in explorations and repairs included my vacuum and I provided the super glue.

I thanked him with a comic book subscription, since we share an enjoyment and appreciation of comic books.

One of the most useful toys I had growing up was a china doll. Useful you say? Yes. We sewed doll quilts and doll clothes and made our own furniture and hoped for the tiny books in the Cracker Jack boxes. How is this so helpful? Surgeons asked where I had learned my stitching techniques. It was quite delightful to reply, “Doll clothes.” It really did help. I made one old fashioned dress with miles of ruffle, all hemmed by hand. In the 1970s I was embroidering my jeans and adding studs and we dyed t-shirts with melted paraffin and crayons. My sister and I nearly burned down the kitchen once, but we did learn which techniques to use to stop wax fires.

I am not sure who made this dress for the doll. My grandmother Katy Burling sewed doll clothes for us and helped us make patterns and nine patch doll quilts. My other grandmother Evelyn Ottaway could knit the tiniest doll clothes on knitting needles: I still have some of those as well. A tiny stole knit out of a furry yarn and lined with brown satin. My mother was an artist and loved crafts as well but NOT sewing. Pottery yes, sewing no.

My daughter promptly illustrated her lack of the packrat gene by putting half the furniture and stuff away and having a spare and elegant doll house. She learned to sew but does not like it much to date.

What childhood toys and ideas contributed to your adult skills?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: toy.

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Pandamnit “friend”

I had a friend during the pandemic. A very close friend. The friendship developed over a year.

It ran into trouble. I got my fourth pneumonia. He said, “I need to return to my real life.” I should have walked away, but he had promised. “We will always be friends.”

The adult part of me knows that always and never are lies. But the small child connection to the Self wants to believe, oh so badly. The adult notes “That is a lie. You are lying to yourself, because I don’t believe always or never.”

The child has eternal hope.

A year later, abandonment. The adult is cynically unsurprised. The small child part weeps.

And my church is melting down. Me too. I wrote a peace poem and promptly got into a fight. Devil’s fall up to angels and then they fall down again. A peace poem sets me up to fail. The ends don’t justify the means and I may resign from the church.

The fallout from the pandemic is only starting. Everyone is grieving, everyone is hair trigger.

Peace you and anything you have lost in this Pandamnit.

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peace you peace me

I forgive you faster then past trauma
choose to let go of all the drama
you told me that I should let go
I am letting go of you and want you to know

I am letting go of all the past trauma
family fighting, intolerance, stupid drama
breathe in love, breathe out love
peace be with you, olive branch and dove

let the fight or flight gently fall away
breathe in peace and air all your day
breathe slowly, five out, five in
muscles relax and face in a grin

sending love whether you respond or not
forgiveness for harm and grief and loss, all rot
I am choosing peace and choosing to breathe slow
your friendship is deeply valued, I hope you know

peace you peace me peace all our friends
kindness is contagious and laughter among friends
I still have hope in the earth, breathing in and out
peace earth, moon, sun, peace within and without

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float

I took this with the zoom all the way out. We’d argued about whether it was a log. I said it was not a log. I was correct.

This creature is definitely bouyant but is not floating in the picture. He or she is lying on a high sandbar or piece of rock. There wasn’t room with the others, or perhaps he or she eschews the crowd.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bouyant.

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let go

I don’t let go of friends easily, partly because I had a difficult and scary childhood, where I was passed from person to person in my first year. Three times, a nearly complete change of adults. By the third time I wanted to be independent at nine months. A nine month old cannot really be independent.

We went to live with my maternal grandparents when I was three. I don’t remember much from that year. My mother said I would lock the child gate at the top of the stairs and stand there and cry. My imaginary friend, Dazo Freenie, was the one who shut the gate, so I couldn’t open it again when that happened. This was an old house with 14 foot ceilings and a fireplace in every room. My mother was recovering from tuberculosis and the second child, and she says she hated climbing those stairs to unlock the gate. I do not remember this, though I do remember Dazo Freenie.

What I remember was a moment in the garden. My maternal grandmother, Katherine White Burling, was out with me. There was a bush with berries. She told me they were currents and that I could pick and eat them. I was not to pick anything else and eat it: only from that one bush.

I was beyond thrilled to have a bush that I could go to when I needed food. I did not understand that it would not produce year round. I think I figured that out later. I was three. I had to let go of the idea that I had that food source. Sometimes we think we have something very very special and it turns out that we don’t. Then we have to let go.

Blessings.

The photograph is one of my son and daughter-in-laws pet rats. They rarely live beyond three years. Then they have to let them go.