Loose Leaf Notes

The best part of this essay would have been if I had been up early enough to hear it aired today on WVTF Public Radio. But I can still listen and so can you because the radio station has it posted on their website. You can hear me reading it HERE.

It was probably the last time this year that I or my husband will mow the two acres of grass that surround our log home off the Blue Ridge Parkway. But that wasn’t the best part of mowing the lawn this past weekend. The best part was the perspective it gave me.

Unlike in summer, it’s cool enough now to mow at a leisurely pace. I putter around as if our rider mower was a convertible with the top down, and I was taking a Sunday drive. From the far corners of our yard, I can see our property from new angles, take it all in from a distance, and appreciate the life we’ve made.

I love knowing that, as I mow, my husband is in our woods with his chain saw getting us firewood for the stove this winter. I feel grateful when I pass by the shed he built to store wood, equipment, and gardening tools. Watching out for the golf balls left in the yard from his putting and chipping practice, I take in the pungent smell of the wild mushrooms that I’ve inadvertently run over, and make a mental note that some of our roses should be replanted in the spring to a sunnier part of the yard.

The vegetable garden looks dead, full of dried up corn stalks and plants that have gone to seed, but I know there’s still food growing there, a few cool weather crops, lettuce and turnips. Butternut squash, once hidden by the lush growth of summer, is finally revealed. The pumpkins for Halloween have turned from green to orange, and although most of the butterflies have moved on to warmer climates, my zinnia flowers are still bearing their attractive colors.

Avoiding the plastic bucket used to mark a yellow jacket’s nest in the ground, I smile as I pass by our clothesline full of laundry hanging in the mid-day sun, glad to have made the choice not to own a dryer. The lowering sun this time of year casts a golden glow, making our yard shine with a richness that’s not noticeable during other seasons.

Careful not to mow too close to the lamppost in the wilder part of our yard (that I have named Narnia), I run over small crab apples and twigs that have dropped to the ground. I duck under branches as I wind my way back out into the open, feeling nostalgic when riding by the spot where the soccer goals used to be. For over 10 years they were a landmark in the landscape of our yard and in our lives. Countless neighborhood games were played here when my sons were growing up. It was just this summer that my husband loaded the goals in his truck and took them over to Floyd’s Blue Mountain School, knowing they would get more use there.

With our dog Jasmine looking on, I frown as I think how summer has too quickly slipped by. When I ride by our sprawling rope hammock, I regret the missed opportunities to spend time in it. The bird feeders need to be filled. The deer have been munching on our youngest fruit trees, and we still haven’t built the deck on the east side of the house.

But a wide smile returns to my face as I turn a corner and notice something new. The oldest apple tree in our yard has produced fruit for the first time. I circle around to whiz by it again so I can count the number with my eyes. More than a dozen, I see.

Brushing aside the sticky tangle of a spider web dangling invisibly from a branch of pine, I shift into low gear and steer the mower towards the shed to park it for the last time this year. The roar of the engine, like summer itself, comes to an abrupt halt. In the quiet that follows, my mind drifts to the future, remembering the taste of apples baked in Thanksgiving pies.

Posted by Colleen at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

The following aired as a WVTF radio essay on June 15th.

“Mom, what do you want to be when you grow up?” My son Josh asked me once when he was a little boy.

I smiled and indulged him with an answer, “Probably a farmer.”

Both Josh and his younger brother Dylan regularly gave thanks to the farmers when we shared what we were grateful for around the dinner table. Although we didn’t come from a farming background, it was considered a noble vocation in our little family, which is why it seems fitting that Josh has grown up to be a farmer of sorts.

He harvests clay from the land. His market crop is the pottery he creates. With his homemade treadle wheel he makes pots and fires them with wood in a hand built kiln.

Born in Texas and raised in the Mountains of Virginia by a mother from Massachusetts and a father who was born in England, there was really no telling what direction Josh might take in life. I’m not surprised that he’s an artist. He’s been making art since he was old enough to hold a crayon, but the farming connection is one I’ve only recently fully recognized.

Living in the country now, outside of Asheville North Carolina, Josh is a good-old-boy with a twist. In his beat-up truck, he hauls clay instead of manure, bricks instead of animal feed. He carries a racquet for racquetball on the rifle rack in the truck cab. He’s currently building a kiln, the way a farmer might build a barn. He lives in a trailer, but it’s an Airstream called “the land yacht” that looks like a spaceship and has a disco ball hanging from the middle.

“The house is gone,” he told me over the phone the other day. He was referring to the old house on his property that he and some friends recently took down and salvaged for parts.

“You had the bonfire? Did you have friends over to help?”

“Yeah, the Volunteer Fire Department, and now I’m a member,” he said.

“You’re a fireman!?” I asked. "Are they going to train you?"

“I know something about fire, mom,” he reminded me.

After we hung up I remembered that when Josh was four years old he wore a yellow thrift shop slicker, rubber boots, and a red plastic fireman’s hat for weeks at a time. I pulled out the article titled “Building Community” that Josh had recently written for The Log Book, a pottery magazine. In it he described how fire was what first sparked his interest in woodfiring pottery. He wrote: I was mesmerized by the fire – the way it moved through the kiln, its long flames pushing their way through the waves with a velocity that bordered on violence, yet contained a sensitivity that left nothing disturbed.

Okay, a fireman makes sense; he works with fire everyday, but it also makes sense for another reason.

Many of us here in the rural county of Floyd are transplants – artists, crafters, musicians, herbalists, organic farmers – who dropped out of the mainstream to live a country lifestyle in community with others of like mind. During the 70’s and 80’s when the influx first began, locals and newcomers were like two distinct and separate communities. Since then, there’s been a more integration.

It was the kids of the Floyd alternative community who first paved the way for a meeting of the cultures. It wasn’t an easy thing to do and many of them felt like outsiders when they finally made the move from home-schooling (or The Blue Mountain School, our parent-run-cooperative) to public school. Josh and his home-schooled peers had a tight knit community of their own. They were proud of their upbringing, but they also knew the sting of being considered different. Eventually they earned the respect of the local community as they excelled in sports, acted in high school plays, dated local kids, worked at high school jobs, and became salutatorians and valedictorians of their classes.

Josh’s roots are diverse, but he’s grounded in the Appalachian Mountains, the bio-region that includes his childhood in Virginia and his current home in North Carolina. I’m not surprised he’s on the volunteer fire department in the rural town where he lives and belongs. Once he gets more settled, he’ll grow a good garden, and maybe even have a goat and some chickens.

Photos: 1. Josh at home. 2. Josh and girlfriend, Anna, working. 3. Burning down the house. 4. Josh on the tractor. See "The Tearing Down the House photos HERE.Scroll down HERE for more posts about my Asheville Potter Son.

Posted by Colleen at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

The following essay is the one that recently aired on our local PBS station, WVTF, and it appears in its entirety here. You can listen to me reading it at the WVTF website.

When I first started blogging in March of 2005 many people asked, what’s a blog? Less people ask me that same question today; I like to think because my answers have been informative, but I know it’s more because blogs are in the news, everywhere these days.

The word blog, short for web log, is a web page that’s updated daily. Sometimes referred to as citizen publishing, blogging appeals to my sense of self-sufficiency. It’s like having my own online magazine that I post an editorial to each day. As a writer, it allows me to hone my skills, build a readership, and create a time-capsule record for my descendents, all at the same time.

Although I have some computer savvy friends who have helped me out along the way, most of my computer skills are self taught and ongoing, which is why I was at the Floyd library recently checking out a book on blogging. While doing so, the librarian looked up from her task and asked me, “Have you ever read a blog?”

“Yes, I actually have one, I confessed.

“Isn’t it tedious? There are so many of them,” she continued.

“You find the ones you like; in the same way you’d check out only one or two magazines,” I said, gesturing to the magazine rack. “You don’t have to read them all.”

On the ride home from the library that day, my conversation with the librarian continued in my mind and went like this: “Let’s say you check out a gardening magazine,” I said to her, “and in it find an article you like. Wouldn’t it be great to have instant access to its author? With blogging you can, because it’s interactive.”

My imaginary librarian was listening and nodding her head now.

“As one blog discovery leads to the next, before long networks and communities are formed,” I told her. “Blogging friendships are often based on what bloggers have in common, but sometimes they are based on differences. This past year I’ve made some unlikely blog friendships that have given me glimpses into lifestyles very different than my own.”

“Tell me more,” the expression on the librarian’s face seemed to say.

“Well, there’s the pony-tailed artist, chemical magazine editor, who works in New York City and lives up the road from where the Sopranos is filmed; there’s the performer, playwright, and composer, living in Los Angeles, who has an engaging personality and lots of famous friends; and a free spirit raising twin daughters in Istanbul who’s blog mission statement reads, “trying to save the world before bedtime.” Some of my blog friends live near oceans and post seacoast photos that ease my homesickness for the Massachusetts peninsula I grew up on. Of course, regional blogs are on the top of my daily reading list, and there are several good ones right here in Floyd,” I told her.

She was smiling, with her eyes slightly widened, and so I continued.

“After two of my brothers died a month apart in 2001, I wrote a book about it,” I explained. “Some readers come to my blog to read my writings on grief and loss, a subject I continue to explore.”

“And you’d be surprised,” I went on, “how many people follow my Scrabble games at Café Del Sol via my blog. More than one reader has commented that Floyd is like the acclaimed TV show “Northern Exposure,” Southern style, especially after the entry about the deer that crashed through the Café Del Sol window and thrashed about, wrecking the place. There was a photo included with that entry of the boarded up door, bearing a sign that read: Café Del Deer Crossing, and Bambi Was Here.”

She laughed before getting more serious. With a slightly wrinkled brow, she posed a question, one I had heard before. “Don’t you feel exposed putting your personal writing on the internet?” My imaginary librarian asked.

“Sometimes, especially in the beginning, I did, but then I asked myself ‘What difference does it make to a reader whether they read a commentary I wrote in the Roanoke Times or on my blog?’ I consider every posted entry to be a published document and keep that in mind.”

“Mostly, I blog because I love to write, and I know that when you share what you love to do, it grows larger in you. I think I was always a blogger just waiting to happen,” I said in conclusion.

By then, I was pulling into my driveway and up to my house, anxious to get to my computer and check my blog comments for the day.

Post notes: This was written before Vanx cut his hair.

Posted by Colleen at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

“I heard your Mother’s Day essay on the radio! Good job!” Rob, the owner of Oddfella’s Cantina said to me as I was coming through the Cantina door on my way to meet my husband for lunch.

“It all started with you, Rob,” I surprised him by saying. He looked confused, so I explained.

Two summers ago, our local newspaper announced a Father’s Day Essay contest. Fellow blogger, Fred from Fragments, was appointed to organize the contest and asked me to be a judge. As it turned out, only a handful of people submitted essays, but we did have readings of those and others at the Winter Sun Hall during our town’s “Spring into Summer” weekend event.

During this period of time, Rob had been hosting Spoken Word events at the Cantina featuring members of the Writers’ Circle I belong to. On one such evening, he took to the stage himself and read an excerpt from a book he was working on. We all knew Rob was a talented musician and actor, but a writer too? He blew us away.

At the Father’s Day Essay readings, Rob read an essay about his father teaching him to dive. I was so impressed and struck by the way he was able to communicate a tender love for his father, mixed with the regret of what his father wasn’t able to give him that I vowed then to write about my own father.

The essay I ended up writing, titled “Let Me Clue You in about My Father,” became a turning point in my life. I had written “The Jim and Dan Stories,” a book about losing two brothers a month apart two years before. I was still immersed in missing my brothers and trying to penetrate the mystery of death. Writing my father’s story and honoring his service as a WWII vet got me excited about writing again. There are other things to write about besides Jim and Dan, I remember thinking. How cool to write about someone I love before they die.

I didn’t know when I watched my dad from my mom’s kitchen window reading the essay with tears in his eyes last summer that 4 months later he would be gone. Knowing he had read the tribute and was touched by it was the fulfillment of the highest purpose writing it had served. But the words I wrote about my dad rippled out further than that.

“Let Me Clue You in about My Father” was my first essay submission to WTVT Public Radio, and it was accepted. I was invited by WVTF Morning Edition host into the radio station to read it, and it aired last Memorial Day. But there’s more…

The affect the essay had on my mother caused her to wonder out loud if I would write one for her. After a few false starts, I did write a tribute to my mother, which aired on WVTF this past Mother’s Day. During the year I was working on telling my mother’s story, my father passed away, and the Father’s Day essay came into play again when I read to a church full of people who loved my dad as part of a shared family eulogy.

My Father’s Day essay, initially inspired by Rob, seems to have a life of its own. It was recently purchased, along with photographs of my dad, by The Hull Times, the newspaper in the town where I grew up and my mother still lives (for what I call a “Boston price”). The Times published it last week for Father’s Day, the first one that my siblings and I have experienced without a father. Although it was emotional day for all of us, it’s good to know that my father’s story is being told and that his memory lives on.

Post Notes: 1. The first photo was taken in Oddfella’s Cantina of my husband, Joe (left), my sister Sherry and her husband, Nelson, when Sherry and Nelson were visiting in the fall of 2004. Rob is on the far left, playing music on stage. 2. The second photo is of my father, mother, and me at The Pine Tavern on their last visit to Virginia in May of 2002. 3. My sister, Kathy, has written a Father’s Day piece called “Who Put the Honey in Your Heart?” You can read it on her blog here.

Posted by Colleen at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The following is the uncut version of an essay I wrote about my mother that aired on WVTF Public Radio on Friday. For some behind-the-scenes details on the writing of and recording of it, see Things That Make Me Need Extra Deodorant. You can go to the WVTF webpage to hear me reading it.

Last December a co-worker came to our home on the Blue Ridge Parkway bearing a festive basket of Christmas fruit. Our tree was up and Christmas lights hung from the windows. Upon stepping through the door, she glanced around once before settling her eyes on the white-painted bookcase where a collection of framed photographs was displayed.

“Who’s that beautiful woman?!” she gasped. Picking up a photo of my mother as a young woman, she said, “She looks likes a movie star. Is it Natalie Wood?”

The image my friend held in her hand was similar to one in my mother’s high school yearbook, which my siblings and I leafed through as children while giggling at the “old fashioned” graduating class of 1944. And when we found the boy my mother had a crush on whose name was Jake, someone, although no one ever confessed to it, wrote “Jake the Snake” next to his picture in loyalty to our father.

My mother, Barbara, the oldest of three children, came from a family of divorce, which was very uncommon during the time she grew up. She was raised by her father in a repressed German Lutheran home in Squantum, Massachusetts, and from an early age she carried a heavy weight of responsibility, which became a theme in her life. First, as the hardworking eldest child in her father’s home, and then as the mother of 9 children and the wife of a man who struggled with alcoholism for most of their married life.

When my mother met my father, the youngest of 11 from an affectionate Irish Catholic home, she was as interested in his family as she was in him and would later say, “I’m surprised I was even able to recognize what a loving family was.” Although, she was deprived of a mother for most of her growing up years, she must have received her mother’s love as a baby and toddler. I believe this because of the way she loved her own babies. Babies brought out the best in my mother. But soon we were a brood…. One of us wet the bed. One was afraid of the dark. One had temper tantrums. Another would only eat cucumber sandwiches, while yet another was failing in school.

My mother was the physical center from which everything happened in our family. To use her own manner of speaking, she “doesn’t miss a trick.” Although it wasn’t easy as a child to get one-on-one time with my mother, when I look at an elementary school picture of myself, I see now that it was her hands that buttoned up my dress, brushed my hair, and hung a string of pearls around my neck so that I would feel special for school picture day. And she cared for each of us that way.

As children, we thought homes stayed clean on their own and didn’t recognize all the work my mother did. It was only when we got older and went to other people’s houses or had homes of our own that we realized how lucky we were to have a mother who cooked and cleaned so well. One of the benefits of her father’s German work ethic, I suppose.

The trait I admire most about my mother is that she continues to learn and can admit her own past mistakes. I also admire what she does for others, such as driving my uncle Vinnie back and forth to his cancer treatments years ago, planting flowers in other people’s gardens to cheer them up, and taking care of her last two grandsons so my sister could go back to work. It was because of the bond forged with her youngest grandsons that she was able to express regret for some missed opportunities of quality time spent with her own children when they were young, probably because there were so many of us.

This year my mother turned 80. She’s still a stunningly beautiful woman, even though when I asked her why she doesn’t go to the beach, 4 houses down from her house, she told me she won’t put on a bathing suit because, “Who wants to look at these old legs?”

Now that my own children are grown, I have more time to spend with my mother. She likes to travel and in the past few years we’ve taken short trips together, short because she hasn’t wanted to leave my dad home alone for too long. This past summer, my sister, my mother, and I drove to New Hampshire to visit an aunt. It was then, while driving through New Hampshire’s White Mountains that I was surprised to find out that my mother had been skiing before. “I’ll try anything once,” I remember her saying.

Four months after our New Hampshire trip and 2 months before my parent’s 60th wedding anniversary, my father died unexpectedly. We were all heartbroken, and our grief was complicated by the previous loss of two of my brothers, just 4 years before.

It was hard to imagine my mother without my father; but as the months passed by, her new life began to emerge. In the midst of loneliness, she carries on, and after caring for others all her life, her time now is her own.

I recently called her to see how she was. Her news was exciting. After reporting that she now knows how to use the TV remote, VCR, and copy machine, all things that my father wouldn’t allow anyone to touch, I learned that she has a new kitten, is planning a trip south with girlfriends and to attend my youngest son’s wedding here in Virginia in July. I was most surprised to find out that she has plans to get a computer. I didn’t know my mother cared for cats or was interested in learning to use a computer.

I told her I loved her and hung up the phone, knowing that her “try anything once” attitude was seeing her through. I smiled as I relished the thought that it’s never too late to get to know my mother better and to learn something new about her.

Post Note: With the encouragement of my father, my mother was re-united with her mother as an adult. Both she and her mother suffrered the loss of each other, but fortunately, because of their re-union, my siblings and I were not deprived of our grandmother's love. You can read more about my grandmother in a tribute my sister wrote here.

Posted by Colleen at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

The steep switch-backed descent from Bent Mountain into Roanoke is enough to make a person queasy. I could hear the watch on my wrist ticking as I drove down it on my way to the WVTF Public Radio station to record my latest essay. Resisting the urge to distract myself, I did not turn on the radio (even though I knew The Diane Rheems Show was on, one my favorites that doesn’t pick up in my house). I wanted to stay calm and focused.

But I wasn’t.

When I first started recording my essays last year, I could almost convince myself that it was just me and Beverly, the WVTF Morning Edition Host, who were listening as I read. Now that I was about to record my 5th essay, I knew better. All the calls and emails I received from people who had heard me on the radio, and the friends who stopped me in the street to say ‘good job’ were fresh in my mind.

But my nervous condition started long before the ride down the mountain.

After I wrote an essay for my father’s 80th birthday in tribute to his service as a WWII vet, which aired on WVTF last Memorial Day, my mother said to me, “I hope you’ll write one for me when I turn 80.” I started to sweat right then and there.

My father, who died this past November, 4 months after he read the essay I wrote for him, was a colorful and funny character, easy to write about. Not only would my mother be harder to write about, but I’ve never been good writing on cue or dealing with performance pressure.

Last summer my mother turned 80 and I didn’t have an essay written, but I promised her I’d have one by the following Mother’s Day. After my initial resistance, I began to see writing something for her as a challenging opportunity to honor her life. During a month long visit with her and the rest of my family that same summer, I spent a week alone, camping with my laptop, and was determined to write the piece.

And I did. I had the whole thing flushed out, first in scribbled notes and then on my computer, and I was actually excited about how it was coming along. “Ma, I’m almost done with your essay!” I later told her.

Not long after that, I fried the USB drive that had the Mother’s Day Essay on it. I was devastated to lose the progress I had made and, even though I still had scribbled notes, I seemed unable to face the piece again. As the months flew by and I got no work done on it, I realized that losing what I had written about my mother paralleled some of my early childhood issues. I was separated from her and all my family members on two occasions (for a month each time) before the age of 1.

It was a struggle to regain the momentum that I had lost, but I eventually did. And now I was about to read a tribute to my mother on the radio and was hoping my voice wouldn’t quiver.

“Oh No! It’s 7 minutes long!” Beverly announced after the recording was made. Seven minutes was twice as long as the station's recommended time for a morning essay. Not only did we have to perform emergency surgery on the piece, Beverly discovered a grammatical error which we set about to correct. (Whew! Nice save, Beverly.)

After the reading, on the drive home it was hot, and so I cranked up the car’s air conditioning. I decided to stop at The Tanglewood Mall, where I sat for awhile on a bench watching all the people who didn’t have to read an essay on the radio that morning. Then, I went into TJ Max to try on a few bathing suits. That was a mistake. Looking at myself in a bathing suit for the first time since last summer only gave me something new to sweat about.

Post Note: My Mother’s Day essay was will be aired this Friday on WVTF at 6:50 and 8:50 am. I’ll post the text over the weekend for Mother’s Day.

Posted by Colleen at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

“ “Wherever you are is the entry point.” Kabir
The following essay about living in Floyd is the one which aired on WVTF public radio this past Friday and first appeared in my book, “Muses Like Moonlight.” It appears here in its entirety. For the radio reading, I cut paragraph 5, about Bo Lozoff, in order to keep to the 3 minute reading allotment. The sentence about moonshine and pot was cut as well. Although I mentioned it to point out the sense of self-reliance that some Floyd old- timers and new comers may have in common, it is too often an image of negative stereo-typing here, and so it was appropriate that it was cut.

I moved to the country 20 years ago with homesteading on my mind. Although I never lived in a solar home without indoor plumbing, as some of my neighbors do, I learned early on about woodstoves and where water comes from (besides from out of the faucet).

It was here, in the Virginia mountain county of Floyd that I learned to grow and preserve much of my own food. I grew herbs and made medicinal tinctures, home-schooled my young sons, and rarely saw a doctor. Here, farmers and back-to-the-landers live side-by-side. (Some have said that hold-out moonshiners and underground pot growers do too.)

The longtime natives and the mostly Yankee newcomers have more in common than was originally thought when the newcomers first began to arrive in the late 70s. What we have in common has something to do with being independent – something to do with a sense of place and working from where one is.

In Floyd we have locally famous artists, potters, wood-carvers, writers, and musicians; alongside well diggers, saw-millers, hunters, and home builders. We also have midwives, herbalists, dousers, and rites-of-passage ceremonialists. Is it any wonder that I publish my books from my log cabin home, from a make-shift office that used to be my son’s bedroom, which is why Grateful Dead posters still hang on the walls?

My husband is a counselor and one of his mentors is Bo Lozoff, author and co-founder of the Prison Ashram Project – a project that teaches meditation practice to prison inmates. After years of “in house” publishing, Bo’s latest book was published by a mainstream publisher. On a recent visit to the Human Kindness Foundation in North Carolina, where Bo and his wife live, Bo told my husband that mainstream publishing isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. He can’t get copies of his new book without buying them, which creates a problem since one aspect of the Prison Ashram Project is to make Bo’s books available to inmates free of charge.

What if everyone who had a talent got a big name contract and became a world product; what would small towns do? In my small town, old-time country is the traditional music, and we have many talented fiddle players and such. We also have talented hip hop reggae musicians and others who produce their own CDs. We’re famous for the Friday Night Jamboree that happens at the Country Store each weekend and, more recently, for our annual world music festival, known as “Floyd Fest.” Where else but in Floyd could you learn from an old-timer how to forage ginseng one day, and then meet Wavy Gravy, the Woodstock clown with an ice-cream flavor named after him, in town for Floyd Fest, the next?

I’ve met visiting shamans, renowned authors, teachers, and musicians in Floyd, but it’s the grassroots talent that we’re best known for. Just as Floydians are inventive about how they make a living, they’re creative about providing their own entertainment. Not only is there a varied local music scene here, but as a writer, I don’t have to leave town to participate in Spoken Word events because our downtown restaurants and cafés regularly host them.

I like the hometown feeling of personally delivering my books to local shops, or getting hand written cards with mail orders. I like working from my home, going to my computer, as I did recently, and finding an email from a reader in bold print, announcing: “I LOVED YOUR BOOK!!!!!! (The Jim and Dan Stories). And I value the fact that I have an ongoing dialogue with my community through the pages of the Museletter, a homespun local newsletter that has been my writer’s training ground for the past 20 years. Because of it, I have a small, but supportive, local audience that knows me as a writer and poet.

Every town needs a poet or two, just as it needs an auto mechanic, a grocery shop owner, and an “in house” band. Every town is a microcosm of the whole world. If we stay where we are and invest in our own community, the whole world eventually comes to us.

Post note: You can still hear my reading of the essay at the WVTF website. You may have to download realplayer to hear it, if you don’t already have it. Also, there is a Spoken Word Open Mic Night at the Café Del Sol this Saturday night at 7:00. For those who live nearby enough, come sign up for a 5 or 10 minute slot or just come to listen and enjoy.

Posted by Colleen at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

When “Life in the Rural Fast Lane” was originally posted at “Loose Leaf” on April 5, a reader humorously asked where the accompanying photo was (in reference to the line where I say that because I have no visible neighbors, I can garden topless if I want to). More recently, the essay appeared in the program for the Floyd World Music Festival, commonly known as Floyd Fest. The graphic artist's rendering that went with the piece also zeroed in on that line, causing me to be affectionately nicknamed “the naked gardening lady” by some at the festival. I also got a “thanks for the plug” thumbs-up comment from my egg man, Ed Gralla.

Life in the Rural Fast Lane

I live in a one stoplight town. I get my honey from the woman who works the front desk at the Community Action Center and my farm fresh eggs from the Gralla-Shwartz family. Some of the egg shells are actually light green and the cartons have feathers and pieces of hay in them. I also grow a lot of my own food and my husband stocks the freezer with wild venison. Last year my potato crop was so prolific that I was still eating them in May. All the stores here take my checks without asking for identification and some will cash personal checks made out to me. It cost $5 to fix a flat tire (up from $3 just a few years back) and a haircut at the local barbershop is $7. Because I have no visible neighbors, I can weed my garden topless or sunbathe naked on a lounge chair – one of my top criteria for Paradise. My water is from a well. It’s pure and tastes good. I can’t hear any traffic.

If you’re thinking I’m out in the sticks, here’s the flip side of that:

I’m 6 miles from downtown, but because there’s no traffic or speed limits on back roads, it only takes me 8 minutes to get there. I can sometimes ride to town without seeing another car, but if I do see one, it’s customary to wave even if you don’t know who it is. Once I’m in town, my anonymity is over. Everyone says hello or stops to talk. After a few hugs and conversations, I can get a meal with capers in it, or start a pick-up game of scrabble at the local café. I can visit any number of art studios, shop for clothes that I actually like, buy organic produce, or antiques. I love to dance so I’m thrilled that we have a monthly Contra Dance, an active Dance Free, and of course there’s always Friday night flat footing at the Country Store Jamboree, competing with Irish night at the local Cantina. I attend a weekly meditation satsang and a bi-monthly writers’ workshop. My husband goes to yoga and martial arts classes. This summer will mark the 4th anniversary the World Music Festival (Floyd Fest), held just a few miles up the road from my house. A few months ago the Leon Russell Band played here. Before that it was Maria Muldaur.

When I first moved to Floyd in 1985, friends and family worried that I might be isolated in the country. My answer to them is where the term “life in the rural fast lane” first came from. In truth, sometimes Floyd living is so overwhelming that I stay home for days on end, schlepping around in my sweatpants, not wearing shoes or brushing my hair, talking to the dog on the walk to the mailbox. More criteria for Paradise, as far as I’m concerned.

Posted by Colleen at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Technically, the first day of summer isn’t until June 21. But who really thinks of June as a spring month? My blogger friend, Fragments Fred, recently asked his readers, “When Do You Know It’s Summer?” Although, my childhood is the source of my most vivid summer memories, some are continuous and transcend time and age…

I seem to know summer through my bare feet. As a girl, I remember how they hurt, walking on our long gravel drive-way. It didn’t occur to me to put shoes on in June. And if I had, how would my feet ever have gotten tough enough to withstand the rest of the summer?

Growing up on a peninsula in Hull, Massachusetts, my whole body was immersed in water for most of the summer. My feet would flap like flippers through the cool dark liquid bay, while I imagined I was a seal or a mermaid. I recall the feeling of sand through my toes and the sticky residue of dried salt water on my body and in my hair. I can still remember my revelation when, as a young girl, I licked my own skin and tasted the ocean.

Summertime meant being outside at night, something that didn’t happen much when the weather was colder. Feeling as though I was a character from the storybook “Where the Wild Things Are,” I played flashlight tag and relieve-o with my 8 siblings. We lived close enough to our neighborhood friends to call out for them to join in. Although, I was hardly ever alone, when I was, I marveled at the stars, moon-shadows, and the fireflies that lit up the night. I remember the dew drenched grass on my feet and then, because it was dark, stepping on something sharp. I probably screamed louder than I needed to, because howling at night somehow seemed normal.

My feet knew the paths to all my friend’s houses. There were back yard shortcuts to all the best places. Braving the sticker burrs and overgrown fields, we foraged for wild food because our appetites were fierce in summer. We put sugar on everything back then, the mashed up wild blackberries, and the sour rhubarb-like fruit that we called bamboo. I even knew which flowers tasted good (purple crown vetch), but I didn’t tell anyone that I ate flowers.

I often walked barefoot on the paved road to Hull village, just outside our own Stony Beach neighborhood, because the playground was in the village and there was a larger pool of friends to play with there. It was less than a mile, but seemed longer on foot, and sometimes the pavement was too hot. Sometimes the tar would melt into a soup and I would poke it with a stick.

It was safe to roam the whole of our small town, to run down hills and on the granite boulder seawall, to pedal bicycles, jump from swings, and climb trees. In the summer our feet barely ever felt linoleum or carpet. The cuts and bruises and the splinters they endured was a small price to pay for our summer freedom.

My Irish ancestors were a poor and rural people who often wore no shoes. Is that why I feel more myself when I’m barefoot? Perhaps the reason I chose to live in the country, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, is because being barefoot fits the country lifestyle, and I learned as child that I was an extension of nature, meant to feel the earth beneath my feet.

But My 4th grade school teacher, Mrs. Neville, didn’t understand that. She scolded me for taking my shoes off under my desk. It was probably late May and almost summer. What did she expect? Even if she could have managed to get my mind on long division, my feet had another agenda. They knew something much better.

Feel free to share what makes summer for you?

Posted by Colleen at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Elvis Presley...No, it's my dad in Germany during WWII...

These days my dad spends his time playing the lottery, whistling down grocery store aisles, or patronizing the local video store. I like to brag that he has more movie videos than a video store does, and when I told him he should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for his collection (to which he has started to add DVDs), he answered, “I just want the pain, not the fame.” Everyone knows to leave him alone on Tuesdays. That’s the day he copies videos in one of his designated rooms that looks like a TV studio. He has several scissors and lots of tape spread out on his cluttered desk, ready for his favorite part of the Tuesday ritual, making his own video jacket covers using his prized “color copier.” He loves to have the latest movies to give to his kids when they come to visit, guaranteeing his popularity, as if he had to try to do that. ~ the excerpt that got cut from "Let Me Clue You In" (Read the completed essay here).

Posted by Colleen at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The following is the essay I wrote about my father, which aired on WVTF Public Radio for Memorial Day on Friday, May 27. The radio station cut this version slightly to fit in their 3 minute format. I had intended to post the old black and white photo of my dad in Germany during WWII (and I'm sure he would prefer that one in which he does look like Elvis Presley), but I wasn't able to upload it. I'll try again later.

In a family photograph of my father, taken in Germany at the end of WWII, he’s standing in his army uniform holding a blonde German child in his arms. Her hair is parted down the middle, pulled tightly into two braids. She looks happy. When I was a little girl, I formed an opinion about that photograph. Regardless of the fact that I hadn’t been born when it was taken, I wondered why he was holding her when he should have been holding me…or one of my brothers or sisters at least. We all agreed that my dad was handsome and looked like Elvis Presley back then.

He was an artillery soldier in Patton’s army, and he always maintained that the only reason he survived the war was because of the big cannon-like gun he stood behind. Standing behind his “Long Tom,” surviving the war when so many didn’t, is probably where his trademark saying began: “Somebody upstairs must like me.”

When he joined the army with 3 of his brothers, he was 19 years old and would later describe it like this: “We thought we were going to a football game.” However, his rudest awakening about war wasn’t the deadly combat he witnessed and participated in. What he saw at the end of the war when his regiment liberated Buchenwald Concentration Camp changed him forever, causing him to suffer from what is known today as “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” “I can’t believe that human beings are capable of such things” he would say about the holocaust, while shaking his head back and forth, with tears in his eyes.

My dad, Robert Leo Redman, was the youngest of 11, born in South Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in North Quincy in a strict Irish Catholic home. After the war, and for most of his adult life, he struggled with alcoholism. In spite of this struggle, he supported his nine children and wife as a lifelong ironworker, and, when we were old enough to understand, he made sure we were educated to know that alcoholism is a disease, a disease of the soul, he believed.

Although my dad never made it past the 10th grade, because he joined the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCCs) to help support his family during the depression, he’s one of the smartest men I know. He eventually got his GED and passed with very high scores. But it isn’t his book knowledge that I remember the most. My dad taught us some of life’s deeper truths, like the fact that bullies act tough because they actually feel small inside. He also gave us practical advice, such as, “Don’t use vanity license plates or bumper stickers on your car, because cops can tag you easier that way.” He had a lot of experience avoiding cops, and it wasn’t until I was in my 40’s that, realizing I had nothing to hide, I was comfortable enough to boldly spell LET IT BE on my license plate and even risk a bumper sticker.

Robert, who was known as Bebe when he was young, was the first one to cry during a sad movie and the first one ready with a kiss for no reason, or a wet “raspberry” that we would promptly wipe off. He went around the house singing songs from the 40s or reciting nursery rhymes that no one else in our neighborhood seemed to know. (I think he made half of them up.) He was, in his own words, “an operator,” which I understood as a reference to his street smarts. And he had the lingo to prove it. For my dad a beautiful woman was always “a hot tomato,” people who didn’t know what they were talking about were “blowing smoke,” “hatchi katchi” meant “fooling around,” and so did “hot to trot.” He wasn’t bigoted, except maybe against homely girls in favor of the pretty ones. And he never tried to hide the fact that the reason he tuned in to TV football was to watch the cheerleaders at half-time.

But we feared my dad’s wrath as much as we enjoyed his playfulness. Another of his trademark sayings that all his kids remember was, “I WANT THIS PLACE LOOKING LIKE A MILLION BUCKS BY THE TIME YOUR MOTHER GETS HOME…OR HEADS ARE GONNA ROLL.” The stress of raising so many kids on a working class salary and the burden of his emotional wounds were taking their toll. By this time he was looking more like Jackie Gleason and sounding like him too.

Continue reading "Let Me Clue You in about My Father" »

Posted by Colleen at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)