Spring Has Sprung

Ah, spring.  At last there are some faint signs of hope.  The tired brown grass has suddenly turned bright green, sprouts of green are poking up through the soil in my flower beds and around the shrubs, and if you look very hard, you can see teeny tiny buds along the scrawny limbs of my cherry tree and Japanese red maple. While I'm happy to see these hopeful portents, I'm less happy at the thought of spring cleaning.  I'll admit it - I'm no fan of housekeeping.  You probably won't find me renting a steam cleaner and going at my carpets and rugs. Best leave that to the top rated carpet cleaning companies, I say.

And as much as I love my two furry rug rats, they are indeed hard on the flooring and furniture.  Between muddy paws and the occasional potty accident which leaves a very unfortunate urine odor,  my household furnishings take quite a beating.  Since between them they only weight about 25 pounds, I can't even imagine what it's like to have a big dog running the house - or two, or even three like some folks I know.

At this point, I'm trying to decide whether to call the carpet cleaners or just have it all ripped off the floor and go au natural, with the addition of some beautiful Turkish rugs.

But you know what?  It's such a nice day, I think I'll just go hang around outside and worry about it tomorrow.

How about you?  What are your biggest spring cleaning challenges?

Come to the Pond

Mornings at Blackwater

~Mary Oliver

For years, every morning, I drank

from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,

the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me

from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is

that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is,

and you are capable

of choosing what that will be,

darling citizen.

So come to the pond,

or the river of your imagination,

or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.

And live

your life.

from Red Bird: Poems by Mary Oliver (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), p.57.

~With a nod to Third Story Window where I read this poem in my blog wanderings this morning.  It fed my soul, so I'm sharing it with you in honor of April and National Poetry Month.

And now I'm going out on this warm afternoon in search of a pond.

Soul Sustenance

Lots of stuff going on over here, and because I've come to think of you all as friends of a sort, even though I've never laid eyes on most of you (with the exception of two or three), I feel like I want to tell you all about it.  Isn't that how it goes with friends?  When stuff happens in your life, your thoughts immediately turn to those people who help support you, hold you up when the crappy things happen and lift you even higher in those moments of triumph? Right now, two of my BFF's are out of touch one on vacation in the Desert, the other taking up residence in the Far East. So as the circumference of my real world network narrows, I feel even more drawn to all of you in the virtual world. Here's the deal - yesterday, I resigned from my job.

For those of you who know how much I hate fear change, you'll appreciate the kind of cataclysmic event this is. My 10 year anniversary at this company will occur next week, so for the past 10 years I've been working in the same small office.  I started out at the very bottom rung of an (admittedly) very small ladder, but have worked my way to a nice, upper management spot within this quite successful and growing company.   It's a good job, as part-time jobs go, and the people I work with are amazing - there aren't a more supportive group of women anywhere.

So why leave?

The 10 year thing is key for me, I think.  It was 10 years into my job at the high school that I began to get the itch to move on, that "been there done that" feeling that made every day, every rehearsal, every concert, a struggle.  If I'm honest, I've been feeling that way  here for more than a year or so.  I started out in this job as a medical technical writer (of sorts) but have since become "head of the department" which really means I do a lot more paper shuffling than writing.  I've been able to handle it mostly because it was routine and easy and I could get it all done with a minimal effort.  And because when my husband lost his job in 2009, we really needed every bit of extra income we could get.

But in the last six months, business has taken a decided upswing.  And that's all great - we've put some significant time into creating new marketing materials and a website, which I was really excited to be involved in.  The effort has paid off, and the business is growing by leaps and bounds.

Which means I have LOTS more paper to shuffle.

Recently, I turned 55 years of age.   I don't want to shuffle paper anymore.

Many years ago, every Wednesday night, I would trip down the basement stairs at my piano teacher's house.  I'd take my seat at her Baldwin grand piano, and she would settle into the dining room chair placed just slightly to my left.  She would lean back against the chair, close her eyes, smile, and say "alright."

Then I would start to play. Perhaps it was Beethoven (the Piano Sonata #3 in C Major) or Chopin (Fantasie Impromptu or Waltz Brillante in E-flat).  Once, for a very long period of time, I was working on the Brahms Rhapsody in D minor (a bear of a piece for a tiny girl with short, stubby fingers!)

When I finished, if I was very lucky and if I had practiced very hard, she would sigh deeply and say, "That feeds my soul."

Feeding the soul.

Perhaps it's selfish and unrealistic in today's world to hope that your job will also feed your soul.  How lucky am I to work where I'm not only paid well, but respected and valued?  How happy do I really expect to be?  It's a JOB, after all - shouldn't I just suck it up and look elsewhere for soul feeding?

Well, maybe.  But then again, I'm 55 years old.  How much time do I have left for soul feeding?

So I took the leap, hoping and trusting that the universe will provide me with the right opportunity, as it has done so generously in the past.

My dear husband wrote me a very nice note today.  In it, he said he was proud of me for taking this step, and he encouraged me to take some time to think about what I wanted to do, knowing that he would support me in whatever decision I made.

Friends, those words fed my soul.

For it is with the grace of God - and the people who love us and stand by us- that we move forward in life, and do those brave and daring things that give us sustenance, that allow us to grow and change for the better.

Thank you all for listening -it was good talking with you.

Recipe Book

When you bake a cake you have ingredients: sugar, flour, butter, baking soda, eggs, milk.  You put them in a bowl and mix them up.  But this does not make a cake.  This makes goop. Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg

In the small notebook I carry around, I often scribble down ideas for personal essays or blog posts, perhaps a word or phrase, maybe a reference to a magazine or newspaper article.  Sometimes in the local cafe or coffee shop,  another patron sparks my interest - perhaps their appearance, or their manner intrigues me, and so I make note of that, thinking they might appear in a story or poem sometime down the road ( when I have time to "really write").

This collection of ideas and thoughts become like a recipe book for my writing.  Combined with structure and grammar, they are the ingredients for the stories I'd like to tell. But putting them all together into an edible product is not as simple as methodically placing them onto the page.  They need what a cook might call a binding agent, something that links them together -  the focal point of what you're trying to say.

Your writing recipe also requires flavor, something to spice up the goop of ingredients you've stirred up.  Spice comes from the details - saying your father liked cars is bland and ordinary.  Saying that he spent every Sunday afternoon washing and waxing his powder blue '57 Chevy, rubbing it tenderly with soft, worn out cotton t-shirts, creates a much tastier sentence.

Look through your writers notebook (of course you have one by now, right?) and make a list of all the ingredients you've jotted down.  Is there anything that binds them together, a common thread which you might use to link some of these ideas into a coherent piece of writing?  Are there ways you can add more details to spice up your ideas?

Foundation Garments

When I was a very little girl, I was simply fascinated with my mother's girdles.  If you're younger than 40, you might not even know what a girdle is.  Women in the 1940's and 1950's referred to them as "foundation garments."  They were like a huge pair of rubberized underpants that squeezed your stomach and hips into a nice, smooth shape.  (For you younger women, think of industrial strength Spanx.) You really had to work to get into a girdle, wiggling, pulling, and straining, shifting your weight from one leg to the other until you got all your various rolls of fat smooshed into place. Sounds pleasant, doesn't it?

I got the biggest kick out of watching my mother put hers on every day - and yes, she wore the thing every day, under the housedress that cinched in at her waist and flowed out in a puffy skirt which fell just above her ankles.  My mother had a nice figure, and the girdle supported her in all the right places, so her waist looked tiny, her stomach nice and flat, and the folds of her voluminous skirt lay gracefully around her hips.  I have to admit, they did great things for the shape.

Girdles came to mind because of the book I'm reading - No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a history of the "Home Front" during World War II.   Goodwin, writing about the various shortages and rationing during that time, notes that most American women were happy to conserve on foodstuffs, and nylons, and gasoline, and whatever else it took to support the Boys overseas.

But they drew the line when it came to their girdles.  You see, girdles were made largely of rubber, and rubber was in very short supply because the Japanese had conquered the rubber producing countries (Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.)  According to Goodwin, when this rubber shortage threatened the continuing manufacture of girdles, a "public outcry arose."   The government gently suggested that women "grow their own muscular girdles through exercising."  Women countered that "neither exercise nor any other known remedy" could restore aging muscles to the "their original youthful tautness."  Journalist Marion Dixon argued that "without proper support from well fitted  foundation garments" there was no way that a woman over the age of thirty could "stand erect or do any physical work" without tiring.  "Certainly Uncle Sam would not want women to wear garments that would menace their health or hamper their efficiency, especially during wartime when every ounce of energy and effort is needed," Miss Dixon concluded.

Believe it or not, the government caved.  The War Production Board deemed girdles to be "an essential part of a woman's wardrobe," and, as such, could be manufactured despite the rubber shortage.

Score one for foundation garments.

Although I was fairly intrigued by girdles when I was five years old, by the time I was a teenager,  I was plenty happy to forgo the whole foundation garment experience in favor of panty hose ~ although my mother was scandalized by the whole idea (which was, of course, part of their appeal.)

But I did wear a girdle - once.  The dress I picked out for my bridal shower  had a straight skirt and was very clingy.  My mother suggested it would look "so much nicer" if I wore a girdle underneath it.  I agreed - admittedly, I had put on a bit of weight at that time and could benefit from some smoothing out in the figure department.

I suspect she was hoping I'd be converted and take to wearing foundation garments under my bell bottom blue jeans.  But let me tell you dear reader, the four hours I was squeezed into that girdle were the most miserable four hours of my short life to date.  I came home from the bridal shower, peeled off that rubberized torture garment, and stuffed it into the trash can.   Since that day I can happily say the most constricting foundation garment I've worn is control top panty hose, and I only wear those on rare occasions.

The rubber industry is safe as far as I'm concerned.