Ted Albers, all dressed up and ready to go serve his country.
To honor my many family members who have served in the military …
To honor my dear surrogate grandfather, Ted Albers (RIP), who was drafted into the Army at the age of 34, captured at the Battle of the Bulge, and held as a POW under the end of WWII …
To honor my husband, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran who flew in P3s looking for Russian submarines …
To honor them, I’ve made a donation to The New York Bar Foundation’s fundraiser to assist veterans in need of legal services (https://nylawyerslovevets.swell.gives/).
Don’t just thank a veteran for his or her service. Hug them. Hold them close and tell them you love them. Support them. Make sure what they fought for is not denied to them.
I have a favorite pond near where I work. It’s small, roughly a half mile in diameter and shaped like a stretched-out kidney. It often plays host to dozens of pond sliders (turtles), minnow-like fish, and large birds such as blue herons and egrets. The pond sits across the intersection, diagonal to my office building. When my knee was in better working condition and I could go for daily long walks, I’d always start off at the pond, taking the asphalt nature trail (there’s something oxymoronic about an asphalt nature trail, isn’t there?) past the overly expensive McMansions and along the larger pond which they call a lake and then back down to my office.
When my knee was better, I walked with a fairly fast stride. These days, not so much. As my stride slowed, my awareness of litter increased. That awareness was also peaked by two writers I follow, one through WordPress and one through Medium. Jan Priddy describes picking up trash amongst little pretty things like sea glass on the beach near her home: https://janpriddyoregon.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/gathering/ Tammy Hader muses about what she can and can’t control, noting “All I can do is pick up the trash and keep on walking”: https://medium.com/journal-of-journeys/one-person-at-a-time-starts-with-me-6058bece64b0
Inspired by these two writers, I set about to grab a grabber and a trash bag and see what kind of difference (if any) I can make to the pond. My first time out resulted in this interesting haul.
My first haul picking up trash around the pond.
It was a windy day so I had to use pine cones to keep the bag from flapping around while I took the photo. My hands were also bare and, since so much of the trash was mucky, I chose not to play around with the contents. But you can see the rather large lager can, prominent among the muck, my prize, if you will.
At the time, the water level in the pond was low, making it a perfect opportunity to get to trash that would otherwise be under water. While I was dismayed to see the beer can, my heart was truly broken by all the bits of plastic I found. I’m sure most of those bits were blown in by the dumpster from a large apartment complex that sits on the other side of the pond.
My heart was broken but my spirit was strong in its resolve to continue the practice, especially since I filled almost two-thirds of the 13-gallon trash bag. I brought that bag home and put it in our own bin, not trusting the bins around my workplace to be secure enough.
I imagine I was an odd sight, shuffling along the water’s edge, grabbing bits and pieces of trash. A coworker on a walk stopped to see what I was up to. I mentioned the turtles and fish and my fear that all this trash was harmful. He smiled and said it was a nice thing I was doing. I think he was sincere as one time, when he and I were literally crossing paths, we stood together for a few moments to admire a hawk in a tree.
An elderly man also stopped. I recognized him from previous encounters when he’d be walking one of his dogs and he would talk to me about looking out for poisonous snakes. He’d make a point of killing a snake if it were poisonous because people, especially children, might get hurt. He came over to tell me to watch out for snakes. I assured him that I was and he moved on and let me get back to sweeping the tall grass with my grabber.
I suppose the best part of this experience was finding and removing all the junk I found. There was something else, though, something deeply felt but not seen. Walking the edge of the pond, carefully placing one foot in front of the other as my eyes focused on the water and the muck and the grasses, looking for anything that might bounce light from the sun, I lost sense of time. I felt myself recede from the world I have to inhabit most of my waking hours and emerge into another one, a world of tiny objects like cigarette butts but also of insects, of algae, of water that’s green and brown. My world slowed down along with my breath. I only knew the time, and the fact of when I needed to return to the other world, because I wore a watch. Without the watch, I wouldn’t have known if I had been out there for ten minutes or a full hour.
I’ve become somewhat addictive to this process now. A few days later I went out to the pond again, this time with smaller, grocery store bags. I went around the pond’s perimeter and was disappointed to find myself filling those bags. I did scan some bushes on the other side of the trail and found a couple of beer bottles, but most of what I found was along the pond’s edge. Including a rubber ducky.
My second haul from the pond. Yes, that is a rubber ducky in the middle.
I don’t know if the turtles appreciate my efforts, but it does my heart good to see them around the pond with a little less danger of getting trapped in a plastic bag.
So it seems I have a new mission in life. The third time I went out, my knee was feeling better so I took a regular walk, picking up trash as I went. Most of it was paper but it still filled my grocery bag. It was still worth picking up and hauling away.
I’ve since treated myself to a new grabber, this one with a longer reach.
My new weapon for my #makeAmericabeautifulagain campaign.
It’s 40 inches, six more than my original grabber which I’ve gifted to my husband. Given that I’ve risked falling into the pond twice, a longer grabber is necessary.
I know I can’t control what other people do, but I can control what I do. If I can’t stop people from littering, I can pick up the litter and dispose of it properly. What do you do to give yourself a sense of control over a problem when you know you can’t control the problem itself?
Wendy wishes she could control my camera and shut it off.
NYC Parks Are Using a Designer’s ‘Tree Font’ to Plant Secret Messages with Real Trees
Inspired by the nature around her, artist Katie Holten recently developed the New York City Tree Alphabet. Each letter is represented by an illustration of a different type of tree found in NYC. The letter A, for example is depicted as an ash tree, and the letter O is illustrated as an oak.
Holten is one of the first creatives to become an NYC Parks artist-in-residence, where she was asked to explore “the intersection of art, urban ecology, sustainability, nature, and design.” Holten’s resulting NYC Trees font is now available as a free download to anyone who wants to write secret messages in tree code. Not only that, but the NYC Parks Department plans to actually plant some of the messages as real trees in parks and other public spaces.
I always think of Friday the 13th as a lucky day for me, even if the luck only extends as far as nothing bad happening on that day. This Friday the 13th started off ominously though, putting me in a funk that lasted all the way to bedtime when my luck finally changed.
As I do every morning, I was sitting with a cup of coffee in my favorite corner of our couch, a heated wrap around my neck to ease my cervical arthritis. I had been fairly upbeat the day before, since Thursday is the day before Friday which is the day before the weekend. Those two days a week–Saturday and Sunday–I practically live for. But I digress.
So I’m nestled in the corner, sipping hot coffee, poking around on my iPad as the fog from my brain slowly clears when I sniff and my sinuses contract. I quickly shoo away the first thought that comes to mind. “No, no, no! I do not want to deal with this. Not this early in the morning!” I proceeded to ignore what my nasal passages were practically screaming at me, forcing me to breath deeper as the scent overwhelmed my senses, yet I recoiled at the thought of the obvious.
Finally I took my last sip of coffee, put the mug down, the iPad away and got down on my hands and knees. Granted, I did have to put my nose practically into the thick pile of our area rug, but there was no denying it, no way to ignore it.
Cat pee. Old cat pee. I looked up at Maxine, innocently curled up on the back of the couch.
What? Who, me?
Maxine is now 14 1/2 years old and lately we’ve been having some issues around her “inappropriate elimination.” Long story short: we resolved some of this peeing in all the wrong places by doubling her dosage of Cosequin. Cats, as many of you know, are stoic creatures. They keep their pain to themselves; if they choose to let you know, it’s often in oblique ways such as peeing in all the wrong places. Our theory is that Maxine, due to her age, probably has pain or at least discomfort in her hips and the trip from the back porch or from the living room to the nearest litter box is a road too far. When we doubled her Cosequin (that is, giving her a dose with her morning meal as well as her nighttime meal), she perked up, became more alert and interactive, and ceased to pee in the living room. (The back porch is still an issue, probably because she has to use steps and a cat door to get in and out.)
But apparently that didn’t mean that we had found and cleaned up all the places she had peed on in the past couple of months. So the morning of Friday the 13th, before I went to work, I pulled the area rug from the living room, wrestling it from underneath a rather large ottoman and rolling it up so I could drag it into the garage where it can stay forever as far I’m concerned. I’m a bit of a skeptic when it comes to getting rid of the smell of cat urine; fortunately, my husband has taken on the task of soaking the porch rug with Nature’s Miracle, sucking up the residue with a shampooer, and repeating … indefinitely.
That was the start of my Friday the 13th. The rest of the day was filled with angst. I could barely motivate myself to answer emails. I didn’t go for a walk during the workday because, as per summer in Florida, it was too effing hot and humid. A twenty-minute promenade around the complex leaves me with sweat stains in all the wrong places. I almost blew off going to the gym after work. I’m glad I did go since I needed to work off some negative energy, but the road trip from my workplace to the gym is like the highway from Hell.
Eventually I made it home, disgruntled and peevish (my husband’s word). He had spent the day cleaning the porch rug. We had dinner, drank wine and watched an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. We got ready for bed. What happened next returned the luck to Friday the 13th.
I flipped open my iPad, something I don’t often do right before bedtime and I can’t say why I did it this night. But I did. On the screen, a series of email notifications bubbled up. One was from Z Publishing. The subject line was “Your Submission Decision.” The first sentence of the email read “We at Z Publishing House would like to congratulate you for having your writing accepted into our upcoming Florida’s Emerging Writers publication!”
It’s all a blur after that. I think I started shouting. My husband ran into my room. I read him the email. We’ve been celebrating every since.
Way back in April, I received an email from one of the staff at Z Publishing, inviting me to submit some of my writing for their upcoming series of America’s Emerging Writers. She had visited my blog and thought I might be interested. Well, that was an understatement. I did a quick search on Z Publishing, found a forum on Reddit that pretty much verified the entity as legit so I went to work. I managed to pull together five short short stories–the word count is 1250–and sent them in. I had only a couple of days to meet the early bird deadline, and my husband remembers very well how I closed myself up in my room tweaking those short stories to fit Z’s requirements … and still make sense.
Ever since I have been waiting. Now I know that three months is not a long time to wait to hear from a publisher, but I don’t do this very often. Well, actually, I don’t do this. I can count on one hand the number of submissions I’ve made in the last several years.
The publication date is September 6, with preorders available starting August 6. At that time, I’ll join their affiliates program and will be able to provide you all with a link to Z Publishing so you can purchase Florida’s Emerging Writers or any book that strikes your fancy. I will get a commission for any sales that come through that link. That’s icing.
The cake is the publication of one of my stories in a printed book.
The luck of Friday the 13th has been redeemed.
One last thing: I really owe it to ALL of you for being part of my life, for encouraging me, following my blog, reading and sharing my stories and WIPs. I know this is a very small success, and I won’t stop here.
Some of you know that I practice yoga at a studio. A few weeks ago, a student I didn’t know started attending the two classes I take each week. I found her presence to be a little unsettling. She was … to put it delicately … expressive with almost every pose she made. Her rather energetic sighs and enthusiastic exclamations distracted me from my own effort to relax into a pose. I wondered why she was so loud and talkative. I thought maybe she was new to yoga and didn’t yet understand that most students prefer silence. Well, at least I prefer silence. All I want to hear is the instructor as she guides me through a vinyasa.
Then one morning I was checking Facebook and a message from the yoga studio owner pops up. As I read it, my face flushed with embarrassment … and shame.
Turns out the expressive student who I will call Grace (not her real name) is recovering from a long illness, an illness that could have killed her and that has left her with brain damage. The message from the studio owner was prompted by complaints from other students. She felt obligated to help all of us understand Grace’s situation, in part because Grace so loved practicing yoga and in part because she and Grace were very close friends.
Grace was once a yoga instructor herself, at the very studio I attend, and she is well-loved by many there. I thought long and hard about how to respond to this news. Finally, I wrote back to the studio owner:
“Thank you for your post on Grace. I’m too embarrassed to admit publicly that I was initially unsettled by her comments and expressiveness during the few classes we’ve shared so far. I didn’t know who she was and thought she was just a very vocal person at first. But then I observed how the instructors responded to her … no, not really responded, but reached out to her. Every instructor, from the one teaching the class to the ones practicing, responded to Grace with a tender, loving kindness that made me realize there was something very special about her. I guess it’s that joy that people feel when they get back someone they thought they had lost. And I observed Grace … her warmth, her genuine friendliness to everyone around her, her joy when her body fell into place with the pose. When she smiled, her whole face would light up and you’d think, “this person loves life.” But I could also see the confusion sometimes, the withdrawal and quiet. It breaks my heart to know that the confusion is from her illness. What I learned from your post and my observations of the wonderful instructors at the studio and especially Grace, is that the studio is a safe place for everyone. I’ve always thought of it as such; the one place I can go and be my clumsy, flaky self without anyone criticizing me. But it’s not all about me and it’s not just for me. If the studio is a safe place for me, it has to be for everybody. Before I read your post, I struggled with that tension of wanting my safe, quiet place and sharing it with Grace and her enthusiasm. After reading your post, I realized what a hypocrite I am. One of the many things I LOVE about the studio is the sense of humor everyone shares, the willingness to laugh at ourselves, to let go of the pressures of the day and just Be. I read your post a few hours before my Yin/Yang class. Grace was there and I rejoiced in every word and sound she uttered. As so many have said, Grace expresses what we all feel: she gives voice to our joy when a pose feels right, our bafflement when we forget which is right and which is left, and that sweet peace as we yield to savasana. I truly look forward to practicing with her. And thank you for making the studio what it is: a place of healing and joy and laughter.”
I wanted to share this because I still haven’t completely forgiven myself. Yes, the next time Grace turned up in one of my classes, I made a point of saying hello to her. Nothing more. Not yet. She was quiet that night and I could only hope it was because she was feeling peace within herself, not confusion.
Here is a powerful essay by an extraordinary woman. For any woman who lives with a scarred body, this essay is a must-read.
I’ve been revisiting my issues around my own scars, what they mean to me, what they say about me, how can I see them as beautiful since I have no choice but to live with them because they will never fade away. After reading Dana’s essay, I think I can now embrace them.
The first question on the intake questionnaire was, “Why have you decided to have boudoir portraits taken now?” My first thought was, Why has it taken me so long? After everything my body has been through, it is long overdue. I’m not getting any younger, after all. I’ve already begun to list the organs I have left that I am able to live without.
During my senior year in high school, I performed in a play of one-act monologues: Talking With, by Jane Martin. My monologue was called “Marks”. A woman, unmarked by life, is cut by a suitor in a parking lot. Surprisingly, her scar would bring confidence. So she began to wear her life upon her skin, tattoos for those who touched her. Little did I comprehend the prophetic nature of those words as I spoke them.
I want to celebrate the body I have today, battered and…
Jeri Walker is a freelance editor and writer that I got to know a few years ago when I was trying out a new (for me) social media site. I’ve since ended my relationship with the social media site but not with Jeri. She welcomed me from the start and when I first visited her blog, I was impressed by her professionalism and focus. She offers many tips and tools that are down-to-earth (not that pie in the sky “buy my book and you will soon have hundreds of thousands of new followers and readers” blah blah blah). She conducts in-depth interviews with established writers (self-published and otherwise). Her blog is WB Word Bank at jeriwb.com and I recommend you bookmark it.
She even has some of her own writing available for purchase at Amazon. I really enjoyed her collection of short stories Such is Life. You can read my review here. Suffice to say, her stories reminded me of an early Joyce Carol Oates. You can also visit her Amazon author page here.
Jeri is a truly exceptional person. She’s resilient, having weathered, survived and bested a childhood and marriage that I know would have sent me far over the edge and into the void. And, of course, because she is so tough, she has breast cancer. In her words:
“my type of breast cancer is a triple-negative breast cancer. That means it can’t be helped by hormone treatments of estrogen or progesterone. Such cancers also do not respond to targeted Herceptin protein treatments. It does tend to respond well to chemo. Nope, rare bird that I am gets a type of breast cancer only seen in about 15 percent the women diagnosed.”
Life can be so pathetically unfair. And I know Jeri is one of many who steels herself to do what she doesn’t really want to do: ask for help. But there’s a gift for those of us who have decided to give her a little support. She’s writing it all down. We get to read all about the cancer diagnosis, the treatment, the side effects, her mental state, her love, her play with art to make meaning of all this. We even get to see her boobs.
What? You’ll have to go to her campaign to see her boobs!
Some time ago my husband and I went south to visit my 93-year-old mother who is spending the winter with my 72-year-old sister. I note their ages because in their presence I often feel like a 12-year-old, not the 59-year-old I really am. Believe me, the 59-year-old struggles to be free! To be honest, we had a very nice visit. Every time I see my mom, I marvel at well she is, both physically and mentally. My sister is well, too, but she supports Trump (enthusiastically) so enough said about that.
One of the high points of our visit was a trip to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Dali Museum. Frida Kahlo is one of my favorite artists. The exhibit was nicely organized with photos interspersed with paintings, drawings, and interpretative signs. An image of Frida and Diego Rivera was projected on one wall, making them larger than life, which, in fact, they were. A loop of documentary clips played in one corner of the three-room exhibit.
First, the photos:
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Some of you may know that Frida suffered much physical pain and disabilities in her life. She contracted polio when she was a little girl, which left her right leg shorter and thinner than the left. Then, when she was only 18, she was in a bus accident and suffered near fatal injuries: broken pelvis, ribs, legs, and collarbone, to name a few. Although she “recovered,” she experienced pain and declining health for the rest of her short life.
HellShe had originally planned for a career in medicine. The bus accident changed all that, and though the accident left her with a world of pain, she left us with a world of wonder, color, and expression.
Some of the paintings in this slideshow are not for the faint of heart. Frida painted what she felt, what she lived.
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I hope you have enjoyed this visit to the Dali Museum and the Frida Kahlo exhibit.
On a more personal note, I am experiencing some “life events” right now. I know my blogging has been spotty and I am more and more AWOL as these events suck up my time and energy. All is well, at least on my home front, but I’m just … busy-busy-busy. Know that I will do my best to catch up with you all and that, at a minimum, I think of you all often.
My husband recently bought a new tent. One that you can actually stand up in. One that unfolds like an umbrella, making assembly easy-peasy. If I were taller, I could probably put the tent up myself.
Our new tent (courtesy of LL Bean) with a tarp as a front porch.
To test out the tent, we spent a couple of nights at the campgrounds of Torreya State Park. The park is only about an hour driving distance, yet after 26 1/2 years living here in north Florida, we’ve never camped here. We’ve hiked; the park has some fine hiking trails, although the bugs can be murderous during the (long) hot and humid summers. We elected to go during the Christmas holiday weekend with our fingers crossed that it would be safe to be outside.
View from the vista point a few yards from our tent.
We had beautiful weather, although we had hoped for cooler temperatures. It was high 70s, low 50s, which anywhere else would be perfect. In Florida, however, that can mean that armies of mosquitoes patrolling the skies, striking with and without warning, wreaking havoc and tears of frustration. Yet … aside from a few slow-moving, large mosquitoes that showed up at dusk and then promptly disappeared when night fell, we were practically mosquito-free. Will wonders never cease?
Trees in late afternoon light.
I like trees. Although they can make stargazing difficult, generally I like trees and there were some interesting specimens that I don’t see often in my own neighborhood, such as the American Beech. We have one that my husband planted in our yard a number of years ago; however, we’ll likely be dead before it reaches the height of the trees at Torreya.
We almost cut our camping in trip in half. Our first evening, neighbors at the nearest RV decided they wanted to listen to some (loud, obnoxious, contemporary) music while they cooked their dinner outdoors. It was the strangest mix of country and rap I’d ever heard and the music-lovers were roughly our age so … not only were we perplexed but we were also annoyed. We came to the campgrounds to enjoy the singing of birds and the sighing of the wind through the trees; apparently they didn’t and, while that is their choice, they were ruining the respite we had been looking forward to.
Fortunately, once their cooking was done and they were ensconced in their RV, the music was muffled and eventually all was quiet. We went to bed feeling hopeful. Although I woke often during the night, I experienced a state of near bliss finding myself in soft darkness, the starry sky visible from our open front flap, a light breeze lulling me back to sleep. At one point in the night, however, I was awakened by my husband shooing something away from our picnic table.
Forensic evidence of an intruder in the night.
We had left a bit of trash on the picnic table, enough to encourage a little thievery. Fortunately, this critter took off as soon as my husband hissed at him, unlike the raccoons we used to encounter at Big Basin State Park in California, who would bring their entire families to our campground while we were cooking hot dogs, assuming an invitation to dine and ignoring our demonstrative entreaties to “go away.”
The night was so quiet and the next morning so peaceful, we decided not to leave. Instead, after a repast of mushroom and cheese omelettes and copious cups of coffee, a little knitting time for me and photo processing time for my husband, we went on a hike.
Interestingly, this is a simple pattern. Yet, I spent part of the weekend ripping out and then redoing rows because my counts were off. Sometimes simplicity is complicated.
We hiked the Weeping Ridge Trail which took us to a waterfall that had a mere trickle of water, but was still worth the visit. We detoured to a side trail which followed along floodplain forest and then back up to the road and eventually our campgrounds.
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(All the years I’ve been blogging and only now did I figure out how to do a slideshow …)
It’s a good thing I like trees, right?
I hope you all have had a holiday season that brought you joy, peace and happiness.
My mother is one of 12 children. She is 92 now. In all likelihood, she’ll see her 93rd birthday in late October. She was a middle child, but now she’s the oldest, having survived six of her siblings. The youngest girl, my Aunt Edith, is in hospital now. Dying. From cancer that appears to have metastasized to her bones. She is 83. The circumstances of my aunt’s decline are sketchy. We had seen her last October, as feisty and full-bodied as ever, but, frankly, looking a little older than my mom. My aunt has had knee surgeries and other ailments; my mom, nothing but a cold here and there and a bit of skin cancer that was quickly dealt with.
My mother considers herself blessed. She has no explanation for why she is so healthy relative to all her siblings, why she almost seems to grow younger as they continue to age.
Talking with my mom over the phone can be a surreal experience. On one recent call, I just listened as she discussed her sister’s deteriorated condition, interspersing bits of details and questions (collapsed lung, lesions on her bones, dehydration, eating more now, where will she go next, why didn’t the doctor know) with observations on the variety of birds she feeds, the gray squirrels that entertain her (don’t forget, there’s also a red one), the lilies she planted last week showing shoots already, the two chipmunks that accidentally drowned in a bucket she keeps outside to catch rain (and that was too bad because she thinks chipmunks are cute). I could have listened to her forever.
There was dying (my aunt), living (the birds and squirrels), death (the chipmunks) and birth (the lilies)–all in ten minutes or so. I wasn’t marking time. Perhaps without intending to, she gave me perspective. Things don’t make your life. Life makes your life.
My mom lives in a double-wide which she loves, although it’s beset by boxelder bugs and mice. She lives quite frugally and she’s says it’s by choice, but really, it’s how she has always lived. She wouldn’t know how to splurge if given the opportunity. I sometimes call her Moneybags because every so often she hands out large checks to her children and grandchildren. She’s “spending down,” trying to make sure there’s nothing to quibble over when she’s gone. I roll my eyes. The money is appreciated but it’s listening to her talk about her birds and squirrels and the occasional woodchuck that I’ll miss.
I’m feeling pretty philosophical right now and wish it could be my constant state, but it takes effort. For now I’ll just hold close her short monologue, replay it in my head whenever I feel bitter or tired or sorry for myself.
It might work because this morning we saw a fledgling pileated woodpecker in our backyard, the first one I’ve seen in many years. I couldn’t wait to call my mom and tell her.
Marie at 1 Write Way 
