Loose Leaf Notes

I’m full to capacity from working on a major, long piece of writing. Only flashes of poetry and sketches of words with no goals are allowed on today’s word diet. When I finally slowed down enough, and emptied myself of distraction, this is what I saw:

Joe in his camouflaged overalls and wool hat, coming back from the mailbox, standing still in the middle of the dirt road driveway reading our finished tax forms with the dog at his feet, drinking from a puddle.

Watching hail pelt on the top of my black CRV from the second story bedroom window while onions mixed with pesto are sizzling in the skillet and it’s almost time to add the tuna steaks.

Wayne Dyer on PBS, quoting Lao Tzu, I’m watching with a pen in my hand and an envelope to scribble on. Joe’s face is bathed in sunlight and his eyelids are growing heavy. I used to love the rainbows reflected off his full head of black hair. Now that he’s graying, they’re harder to see.

On the way back from town after renting a movie, knowing I still need some down time, I notice the evening sky and the new moon shaped like a pink lip-glossed smile. I never get tired of seeing the moon, or the sunset go down behind Buffalo Mountain, like I never tire of seeing crocuses and daffodils in spring.

Post note: The above was prompted by Sunday Scribblings, the subject: experiment. The sketch pad belongs to my friend, artist Karen Limke.

Posted by Colleen at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Gonna take a sentimental journey … Gonna set my heart at ease … Gonna make a sentimental journey … To renew old memories … ~ lyrics from Sentimental Journey, made famous by Doris Day in 1944

He was whistling along to the 1940’s music playing on the car tape player. I was sitting next to him with a video camera in my hand. It took him a few minutes to realize I was taping, and he broke out in a big smile when he did. Although, at the age of 78, he was starting to get lost easily while driving, his body knew the twenty minute drive from his home in Hull to North Quincy, Massachusetts, where he grew up, and he did it without thinking.

After a stop at the cemetery to visit the graves of his parents and most of his ten siblings, we headed to the Germantown housing projects, which were brand new when our family moved there in 1950, the year I was born. My earliest memories of Germantown are sketchy and few because by the time I was four years old we had moved to Hull. I do remember seeing maggots in the fenced in garbage cans in the back yard, and putting a stone in my mouth while playing in the yard and wondering if my mother, who I thought was omnipresent, could see me. I swear I remember my father in his Navy uniform and the emptiness that existed when he got shipped out to the Pacific Islands after the war, even though I was not quite three years old when it happened.

From Germantown our Sentimental Journey continued on to the big Victorian house with the round tower that my father grew up in. My eight siblings and I simply called the house “Clive Street,” after the street it was on. My memories of Clive Street are plentiful and clear: a wooden spiral staircase; fireplaces; tea at the kitchen table with my Aunt Gertie and Uncle Bernard, my father’s two unmarried siblings who inherited the house. It used to be green, the same color my father painted our house in Hull, probably because it made him feel at home. Now it was beige and was well past its glory days.

I was filming with the video camera when a Chinese woman came running out of the Clive Street house shouting at us in Chinese. I tried to explain – pointing to my father in his shorts being held up with suspenders and a WWII Veterans cap on his head – that he had grown up in her house. She didn’t calm down until I said the one word that allowed her to understand: REDMAN, our last name. “This was the Redman’s house,” I was saying when her confrontational manner shifted.

She motioned to the back yard and gestured for us to follow. As we walked behind her and passed the house, my father and I looked in the windows. Obviously under construction, the house was gutted, cluttered with junk, and papers with Chinese writing on them were strewn all over the floors. It was like a dream sequence turned into a nightmare. I wondered how my father was feeling.

In the backyard she brought us to a chain link fence that bore the name REDMAN. My father explained with tears in his eyes that his older brother Joe had made the sign more than seventy years ago. He graciously posed while I snapped a picture but then abruptly headed back to the car. Once back in the car together, he told me that seeing the house the way it was made him feel sick. Although our sentimental journey was bittersweet, we were both happy to have made it and talked about it fondly for years after.

Post notes: The Sentimental Journey took place a year after my brothers Jim and Dan died and three years before my father passed away. Besides the few sites mentioned above, we also visited my father’s high school, the church where he and mother were married, the first house they lived in, and more. This post was written from the Sunday Scribblings prompt “TIME TRAVEL.”

Posted by Colleen at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

Bonsai poetry
clipped to the root
A flower for the muse

Post notes: This weekend’s Sunday Scribblings' prompt, "Passion," caused this to bloom. Another poem about passion is HERE. The photo of the rose was taken by my blogging friend Naomi Caryl.

Posted by Colleen at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Suddenly awake in the middle of the night, a resounding thought comes to mind: Now I know how easy it was for Heath Ledger to accidentally kill himself.

Granted I was only juggling aspirin, vitamin C, and herbal sleep aid supplements for my flu symptoms, but it was pitch dark, I was groggy, and I couldn’t remember what I had already taken. Impatient and only wanting to sleep through my misery, my arm became Heath Ledger’s, feeling around the bedside table for something to take. I could almost hear his voice say, “Oh, shit,” when he understood what had done, and I wondered if I was only twenty eight years old and under Hollywood star pressure would I likely have something stronger than tryptophan (nature’s own serotonin uptaker) and Valerian within arm’s reach?

Now I was really doomed. My mind had been activated and the thinking continued, not what I wanted to be doing at 3 a.m. I started thinking about how the more diluted homeopathic remedies are the stronger they are supposed to be and how so many mainstream medications end up having a rebound effect, causing the very symptoms they are treating. I remembered this past summer when I took heavy duty painkillers for a painful abscessed tooth. The first pill gave me such relief, but when it wore off I felt worse than before I took it and soon needed a larger dose to get the same result.

My arm kept groping, as I thought how far down the rabbit hole we have fallen, with drugs being sold on TV like they were candy, vaccines being developed for everything imaginable. No one is supposed to get old or be sick anymore, I thought.

I found a cough drop. Unwrapped it and popped it my mouth. I don’t remember what happened after that.

Post note update: The morning after channeling Heath Ledger’s arm, I checked Sunday Scribblings and discovered that the weekend writing prompt was “SLEEP.” Feeling the prompt was custom made for me, with pen in hand, I began the exercise. Now my hand is being inhabited by author of Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg. Coaching me not to let the pen lift of the page, just write … keep your pen moving … she said. “But Natalie, I’m so tired. I didn’t sleep well last night,” I complained.

Posted by Colleen at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Whenever I look in my fridge, I think about The Newlywed Game and Bob Eubanks. Eubanks, the host of the 1960’s game show, asked contestants questions and couples had to guess what their mates said. There was one question I've never forgotten: What’s the oldest thing in your fridge? At the time I was a teenager, and the idea of things rotting in a corner of someone’s fridge was disgusting to me. My mother kept our family refrigerator sparkling clean. I assumed it was easy to do. I didn’t know I would grow up to be one of those people whose cleaning policy on messes behind closed doors would be: if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, until, of course, it starts to smell. And I had no idea at the time that Eubanks' question would stick in my mind and come back to haunt me.

The Bob Eubanks fridge question is like another one asked by my grandmother. I went to church with her once and when the service was over, she asked me what the sermon was about. I remember feeling put out that she would quiz me because my parents were not in the habit of doing that. She may have only asked the question once, but it was enough to make me listen to sermons after that and prepare my answer for what it was about if anyone should ask. Not only that, but the same thing happens when I hear a lecture of any kind. I have an imaginary grandmother in my head quizzing me and a game show host asking me about my housecleaning.

But Bob Eubanks has never been enough to get me to clean the fridge when it gets really bad. For that I use an imaginary visit from my mother who still keeps a clean fridge, or one from my grandmother. It motivates me every time.

Post Notes: Typing this in my upstairs office Saturday morning, Joe woke up and called up to me, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” “Bob Eubanks and the Guilt Trip, that’s what,” I answered. “What? What’s that, the name of a new band?” “No, it’s a new blog post that oddly came from a Sunday Scribblings prompt, “fridge space,” I answered.

More Sunday Scribblings on Fridge Space are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

1. After my first marriage broke up, I rented a big house on Route 8 in Floyd and took in a few roommates. During this time, a very nice guy came knocking at the door one day to see me. But the attention made me feel awkward.

Guy: Do you want to go out to eat Friday night?
Me: Why? I don’t know if I’ll be hungry then.

2. A phone conversation with my Scrabble Poet friend Mara
sometime in 2007 went like this:

Mara: I have a date.
Colleen: Not like a fig but like a real date, a boy/girl date?
But wait a minute (knowing her last partner was a woman and the one before that was a man). Is it a boy or a girl?
Mara: Well … that depends.
Colleen: Oh no. This could be very complicated.

A blind date that didn’t work out HERE. A date that did and is ongoing is HERE

Post note: “Date” was a Sunday Scribblings prompt. Read other Sunday Scribblings posts using “date” as a prompt HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

My friend Luke says I dance like a pollinating bee going for nectar. I dance like I write poetry, freestyle. Sometimes I dance outside the box. With my eyes closed, I may step on your feet. I need room to spin.

I’d much rather dance at a wedding reception than catch the bouquet or eat cake. I’m always hoping they don’t play “Jeremiah was a Bullfrog” or spend too much time on The Twist. I dance to the Marcarena but I don’t know the steps. I gave up steps and haven’t used them since dancing at The Surf Ballroom in Hull, Massachusetts, back in the day when slow dancing was a safe way to get close to boys and fast dances had names like The Bump, The Boogaloo, The New Yorker, and The Philly.

I think of dance as my sport. Before going out dancing at night, I make sure to rest during the day. I bring water and a high protein snack and get ready for a dancing marathon because once I get up on the dance floor I don’t sit down until the band takes a break. I don’t have to have a partner. I don’t want to talk or socialize. I land on a spot on the dance floor and then raise enough energy that I begin to orbit. Endorphins are released. It’s hard not to smile. I like to translate music into movement like I translate the world into words.

Post notes: The above was written from a Sunday Scribblings prompt. The photos are of me, Mara, and Joe dancing on the Poet’s Soapbox at Floyd Fest. The action video that will turn you on your head is HERE. My Dance Free Poem is HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

My feet is my only carriage, so I’ve got to push on through. ~ Bob Marley

The following is a Sunday Scribblings prompt, scribbled in my notebook while sitting on the porch soaking up the last of the yesterday's sun.

My hand is walking across the page. It gets more exercise than my legs these days. But I fantasize about long walks through deserts where my life depends on my ability to do it. I love stories about the slaves who walked these mountains on their way to freedom. The Lord of the Rings is a favorite, read out loud to my sons when they were young, that's based almost entirely on walking.

I once wanted to walk the Camino, the 500 mile pilgrimage trail in Spain, after reading Shirley MacLaine’s book of the same name. I planned what I would carry, what shoes I would wear. I have a book on my shelf titled "Best Irish Walks," and another called "Inn to Inn Walking." But not only have I not gone on any of these walks, I haven’t read either book.

I’ll walk to pick apples or on any beach. I’ll walk for a good photo opportunity or up my long gravel driveway to get the mail. I used to take long walks when I lived in Massachusetts, but I was always bothered by guys driving by and yelling comments from their car windows, or pulling over to try and pick me up. Now older and in the country in Virginia, I tell my husband thank-you after he nudges me to take a walk with him and I do. I like to walk with my neighborhood girlfriends, but we only do it a few times a year, and when we do it’s more for talking than for walking.

I plan more walks than I actually take. On the other hand, (pun intended) my hand springs into action at the slightest writer’s prompt. So why isn’t my handwriting in better shape? My signature is an unreadable scrawl that looks like a doctor’s. Does my left hand feel left (pun intended) out of the writing workout? Do my legs?

I can’t help but think I should be walking right now instead of writing about walking is like.

Post Notes: In the spring I wrote THIS about walking, the New Year’s Resolution that I denied making.

Posted by Colleen at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)

My pocketbook is not a purse. Where I come from a purse is a small handbag that you take to a formal event, like a prom. A pocketbook is more substantial. And mine says something about my personality as a survivalist with security issues who likes to be prepared because I never know if I might become homeless, have to sleep in my car, or fend off an attacker. It’s a back pack style, brown leather with lots of compartments to hold things I need and might need.

This morning, before I checked the weekend Sunday Scribblings prompt and saw that it was “I carry,” I had been thinking about the pocketbook that “I carry” or one of a similar model that I buy over and over. The train of thought began when I picked up my back pack pocketbook from the kitchen floor and it triggered a memory of the winter I visited my sister Sherry and her husband Nelson. Dressed warmly in overcoats, boots, hats, and gloves, we went on hike up to the Blue Hill Weather Observatory where my brother Jim, a BHO volunteer who passed away in 2001, has a dedication flag flying in his honor. Nelson videotaped some of the hike, and later when we watched it back at their house, we all laughed at how funny my back pack pocketbook looked strapped to my back and rocking back and forth as I walked. We decided that it looked like I was carrying a ham for Sunday dinner and from then on we called my pocketbook “the big ham, which should not be confused with the full sized hammers, also called “big hams,” that both my sons carried around when they were little, the way other kids carried teddy bears.

Art Linkletter, TV host of “Kids Say the Darndest Things” and other old time shows, liked to talk to kids. He also liked to mingle among his show’s audiences and look into women’s pocketbooks. I don’t remember what the point of that was or what TV show it was a feature of. I was young then. But I never forgot it because ever since I’ve always thought someone could ask or demand to look inside my pocketbook at any moment. Would I be ready? ‘What would Art Linkletter think of this?’ I ask myself when I find something odd and old buried at the bottom where pens and quarters always collect.

I think of my pocketbook as a mini suitcase for every day travel, and if Art Linkletter where to explore the contents of it he would find some rather ordinary things, like a comb, a wallet, a mirror, a chapstick, and lipstick. He might also find a part of my lunch, a container of water, a small flashlight, a whistle, a magnifying glass, and remedies for ills; such as lavender oil, Bach flower remedy, aspirin, and vitamin C. If my pocket book was big enough, I’d probably carry a blanket because I never know when I might be stuck in snowstorm or want to lie on the sand at a beach.

I’m not all that serious all the time, and so I also regularly carry a kaleidoscope and a small plastic container of bubble from the latest wedding I’ve been to. Items like that come in handy when I have to wait in a doctor’s office for an hour or when I run into a cranky child whose day needs lightening up. And I always carry a small camera and a pocket notebook because if I do get stuck in a snowstorm, a doctor’s office, traffic jam, or an airport I would probably want to start recording the event, work on my memoirs, or, at least, write a blog post like this one.

Post Note: I never carry THIS.

Posted by Colleen at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

I was trying to figure out where I could go to get away from what the doctor was telling me. I wondered why he hadn’t taken me to a private room to give me such devastating news. Dan only had a 2% chance of living; they weren’t going to perform liver transplant surgery with those odds, he said. The words 2% were the equivalent of a death sentence, but he spoke them as though he were giving me the fat content of a carton of milk. ~ excerpt from A Box of Kleenex, HERE.

The word “hospital” is related to “hospice” and “hospitality,” all words that might conjure thoughts of “guest,” “care,” and “death.” For me, death is what I associate most with hospitals. Even though both my sons were born in hospitals, it’s the hospital deaths I’ve experienced that stand out the most. Because of them I became intimate with hospital settings, after spending many days in patient rooms and waiting rooms in an altered, yet heighten state of awareness.

In 2001, my brother Dan was desperately in need of a new liver. First, he was deemed too healthy to be a priority on the liver transplant waiting list. Then, when he took a sharp turn for the worst and was hospitalized, he was determined to be too sick to withstand the surgery. I remember the doctor discussing dialysis after Danny’s kidneys shut down. “It’s like putting new brakes in a car when you really need a new transmission,” he said.

Spending the last few weeks of his life in the hospital, Dan endured many painful procedures and interventions. The interventions might have given me and my family more time to get used to the idea that he was dying, but they also could have weakened him to the point of accelerating his death. He had two liver doctors, a kidney doctor, a lung doctor, a stomach doctor, a pain management team, a physical therapist, and an occasional surgeon taking care of different body parts, but no doctor oversaw the person Dan was, except for the priest, but he was more interested in Dan’s soul.

When my eighty-one year old father was hospitalized four years later after a car accident, he initially seemed fine. Later, an X-ray would show a fracture in his neck vertebrae. Even though it was never determined if it was an old fracture, a result of the accident, stable or not, doctors decided he would need to stay in the hospital and wear a neck brace as a safety measure.

My dad’s worst nightmare started when he was given Haldol – a powerful antipsychotic drug, sometimes used as a chemical restraint – for agitation. The Haldol led to heart irregularities, which led to more drugs. He eventually contracted pneumonia, as a direct result of hospital interventions. After being bedridden for five weeks, and surviving in spite of it, he was helped out of bed for a wheelchair ride, given by my sister, Sherry, on what turned out to be the last day of his life. Nobody was able to tell us what caused his death that evening, but I suspect a blood clot, created from being immobilized for so long, stopped his heart.

What the hospital staff didn’t know when they treated my dad for agitation was that my mother regularly read him horror stories out loud about people dying in hospitals from medical errors and secondary infections. Yes, he was agitated; he wanted out of the hospital in the worst way.

Some popular treatments create symptoms worse than those of the illness they are treating. The side effects from one drug can lead to another drug being prescribed, bringing on even more troubling side effects. One could argue that drugs don’t cure illnesses but that they only suppress symptoms. Some drugs have a rebound effect, which means that they eventually bring about the very symptoms they are treating. Others are prescribed only to be recalled later when it has been determined that they have killed people.

A well known 1999 study shocked the country with its findings when it was announced that hospital errors kill 195,000 people each year. A few years later another study found that about two million infections are acquired in U.S. hospitals each year, killing about 90,000 patients yearly. More recently it was reported that deaths from adverse reactions to prescription drugs have more than doubled in last ten years. Last week we were told that the cough medicines, linked with the deaths of some young children, are not only risky but that they aren’t even effective treatments.

So why do so many of us still religiously trust modern medicine? Why doesn’t my insurance company cover the alternative treatments that have proven helpful to me? Why are parents sometimes forced by courts to use standard medical practices when the record is so bad? The Institute of Health, National Academy of Sciences, which reported the number of deaths by medical errors in 1999, said that those deaths exceeded the number of those due to motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, and AIDS. Considering that, and the latest alarming findings, is it any wonder that a number of Americans refuse that flu shot that still contains mercury?

Years ago women pushed for family-centered birth practices that wouldn’t pathologize birth. As some were moving towards midwife assisted homebirth options, birthing centers sprung up throughout the country in response. At the same time, families and health care practitioners were advocating for more family-centered and humane deaths, and the hospice movement was born. But what about everything that exists between birth and death? Could we resist the urge to pathologize health care?

Dr Robert Mendelsohn, author of Confessions of a Medical Heretic, has made the statement, “I believe that more than ninety percent of Modern Medicine could disappear from the face of the earth – doctors, hospitals, drugs, and equipment – and the effect on our health would be immediate and beneficial.” I agree that we’d be better off returning to simple remedies, using the handful of drugs that have proven themselves over time, and letting nature take its course when appropriate. For all our drugs and medical procedures, we don’t seem any healthier, or at the very least, we seem to have traded the plague and polio for diabetes, cancer, AIDS, and autism.

In Medelsohn’s book, first copyrighted in 1979, in a chapter titled “If This is Preventive Medicine, I’ll Take My Chances with Disease,” he discusses the risk of childhood vaccinations, all three of them. Now there are twelve childhood vaccines that the CDC recommends and that most schools require, with more being developed every day. It worries me that because some vaccines are administered more than once, most children have received twenty-three vaccines by the time they are two years old. And why has it been left up to parents to fight for safer vaccines? Why are they expected prove a link between vaccines and autism, or other adverse reactions? Shouldn’t it be up to the makers of vaccines to prove they are safe?

I do appreciate the care given by individuals in the health care field and the success stories of modern medicine. But I believe, on the whole, the system is unacceptably flawed, to the point where being in the hospital is like playing Russian roulette and following a doctor’s every order has the potential of making us guinea pigs for pharmaceutical company profits.

Post notes: The following thoughts have been brewing in me for a long time, but I found myself avoiding the enormity of such a complicated subject. I was hoping the Sunday Scribblings writing prompt would be one about umbrellas, since I have some great photos of me with my purple one out in yesterday’s rain. But the prompt was “hospital,” and it acted as nudge, causing these words to finally converge.

Posted by Colleen at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

I love that life is stranger than fiction and that it gives me some good stories to tell, which is why when I saw that the Sunday Scribbling prompt for this weekend was on jobs, I decided to write about my most unusual job. It wasn’t a job that paid much money or furthered a career. It wasn’t stimulating, exciting, or good for my ego. It’s a job that’s been more fun to talk about years later than it was when I was actually doing it.

As unlikely as it would seem that a 5 foot 1 inch 115 pound woman would have a job as a night watchman, for nearly a year in the mid 1980’s I did. I carried a flashlight and made periodic nightly rounds at one of Floyd’s past ethanol plants. It was a job that appealed to the introvert in me, and I liked that – except for the all-night schedule – it didn’t disrupt my life. During the long quiet hours of solitude, I moonlighted at my moonlit job, making jewelry to later be sold in shops and at craft fairs. While stringing beads and wrapping silver wire around gemstones and crystals, I listened to music and sometimes felt inspired to get up and dance. A few times I brought my young sons to work with me. They loved to explore the big hollow drums and other processing equipment. Once I had to deal with the arrival of large Mac truck whose driver ended up sleeping in the truck’s cab until morning. Another time one of the day workers showed up drunk. He proved to be harmless enough, but at the time I didn't know if he would be. Occasionally friends dropped by. Once, a few of us sang and played music together inside one of the huge hollow drums to test out the acoustics. It was wintertime, too cold to doze off inside the plant. When I became too cold and too sleepy to be active, I’d sit in my car with the heat on, listen to tapes on the latest wild new age subject, and maybe enjoy a snack. Welch’s grape juice and pretzels, picked up at the Express Mart before work, were an important part of this job. I sipped and snacked into the wee hours of morning while I studied the night sky, trying to fathom the enormity of it. I became a friend of the moon and thought of it as a giant looking glass. I was a night watchman who watched the night. I studied the stars closely. I wanted to see them move, but inevitably my eyelids grew heavy and I would fall into a nap, only to wake up later, surprised to see that some stars had slipped every so slightly off the night’s enormous table.

Post note: My list of jobs is HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Hello my name is Colleen and I’m wearing a white wrist band with blue stars on it. It’s funny how a wristband can either mean that you probably had some fun last night or that you have recently been in the hospital.

I got my first manicure on Friday. It was for a story I’m writing for a newspaper magazine insert on skin care. My nails were rough and dirty from digging potatoes when I went to the spa to get them done. I said to the woman, “I guess I’m not the type who cleans the house before the maid comes.” I’ve never had a maid, but I never had a manicure before this either, so I think the analogy holds.

The manicurist rubbed so much cream on my hand that my wedding ring came off. Once in the winter when my hand was cold it fell off into the snow. It was nighttime and we had to wait till the next day to find it.

Last night I dreamt that my back hurt. When I woke up it really did. I wonder if it had anything to do with the dancing I did last night. Once the band starts playing, I don’t sit down until they stop. But when they take a break and start up again, I’m usually too tired to dance the second set. I snap my fingers when I dance, but only the ones on the left hand. The right hand fingers can’t snap and I don’t know why.

This morning my hand is writing a short piece for a Sunday Scribbling . The prompt is “Hello My Name is …” I thought I would write more about my name, or maybe the band I danced to last night, but this is what came out when I started to write. Maybe my hand was feeling cocky because of the manicure and wanted to show off, even though just one day later my nails are dirty again.

The name of the band is Sonic Safari. The name of the polish on my nails is called Privacy Please. Today I’m going to Roanoke to visit my son Dylan and his family. I wonder if I should wear my wristband.

So what does your hand want so say?

Posted by Colleen at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

It’s not a serious collection. Not like my seashells, which are spread out all over the house, collecting dust in the corners of my attic, and stuffed into plastic bags in junk drawers next to thumb tacks, screwdrivers, calculators, and old keys. I don’t think of myself as a person with a collector’s personality. I don’t like knickknacks, more things to dust. It just sort of happened. It only took one. Soon there were others.

My eldest son doesn’t much like my cobalt blue mugs because he’s a potter and can make better ones. My husband likes to add to the collection by bringing home new ones. His frequently have pictures of lighthouses on them. We have one from Radford University where he got his Master’s Degree in counseling. It says “RU” and currently has a chip on the lip.

The thing about my cobalt blue mugs is that they have to SAY something. My very first one said HULL, the small Massachusetts beach town I grew up in. I was visiting my parents when I saw it in their house. I admired it and my mother gave it to me.

I was sad when my HULL mug broke, and when I later tried to replace it, the closest I could get was a “Hull Lifesaving Museum” one with a picture of Hull’s historic seafaring captain, Joshua James, on it. I bought it at the Lifesaving Museum, which used to be the Coast Guard Station, right next to the house I grew up in. I found a second mug just like it at a yard sale across the street from the Life Saving Museum. I used to know the family that lived in the house where the yard sale was, and so I still call it “the Ottino’s house.”

One cobalt blue mug I have came from the Goodwill Thrift Shop. It says “Coffee is only for Closers.” I bought it because it was cobalt and because I knew I’d enjoy thinking more about the saying on it. I imagined that it once lived in a realtor’s office, that someone got it as a commission gift. I wondered how it ended up in the thrift shop. Did someone get fired? Someone needier than me probably should have had that mug. I don’t drink coffee, I didn’t sell anything, and don’t need anymore mugs for tea. I just liked the cobalt color.

I regret that my cobalt blue mug from Aspen that I got for a cheap price in a souvenir shop broke the first year I had it. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back that way. I don’t think I have any with lighthouses on them anymore. I still have my most elaborate, most expensive, and most recently acquired cobalt blue mug. It has a celtic knot design on it and was purchased at the Café Del Sol. I have a small matching cobalt blue teapot that my sister Tricia gave me as a gift.

I wonder if this post will cause friends and family to shower me with cobalt blue mugs.

Gone to make tea … Accompanying poem is HERE. More Sunday Scribblings on the "collector personality" is HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

The secret to writing a book? I think it’s this: Take good notes and write often enough that it starts to accumulate. ~ Colleen, from The Jim and Dan Stories

As a writer, the most important discipline I’ve learned is to take notes when the dictation of writing begins. I drop everything, resort to writing on my hand if I can’t find a pen, pull over when driving if it starts coming too fast because trying to recreate it later is a waste of time. It’s never as good as the way it first comes through, in an original voice that I clearly hear as if it was being dictated.

I don’t know where it comes from or what makes it start. Sometimes I start receiving dictation while I’m working on something else. It’s like watching a TV show and the newscaster breaks in with a message. I grab a pen and write it down. I don’t have to know what it means. It’s not the time to fuss about where it will be used or to complain about the lack of wages it will earn. I know who my boss is. I do my grunt work. Write it all down on anything I can find. Some writing starts in a notebook and ends on the side of a popcorn box scribbled in a dark theater.

Maybe if I do my job long enough, eventually I’ll be promoted, have more say in the process of writing, institute a more predictable schedule. But for now I don’t ask too many questions. I just transcribe the words I hear in my head like I don’t have a choice. That’s my commitment to writing. It’s what being a writer means to me.

Note: More Sunday Scribblers writing about writing HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (26)

The only physical thing I have left from my childhood, other than photographs, is a pink ponytail diary with the lock broken off. Everything else was left in my closet and burned to the ground with the rest of our house when it was taken by the town through eminent domain. I was ten years old with neat unbroken handwriting when the entries, mostly written in pencil, began. I remember being afraid to commit my thoughts to pen. A pencil with an eraser felt much safer.

Once, many years later, when I was teaching a children’s creative writing class at the Blue Mountain School (a parent-run cooperative in Floyd), I brought in my diary and read passages out loud to the students. I must have been trying to emphasize the importance of keeping a journal because creative it was not. There were no signs of a published writer in the entries. In fact, it was so bad that the children laughed uncontrollably, but I was thrilled to have an early record of my own written word, however untalented it might be.

The diary started in January, which tells me it was probably a Christmas present. I did a lot of ice skating, along with taking care of “the babies” (my brothers Johnny and Joey), going to Mercurio’s Village store, church, drill team practice, and school; the childhood record reveals. There were several accounts of fights and make-ups with my best friend Laura and many melodramatic entries about my boyfriend at the time, Richard. Bad words were crossed out and secret codes were not revealed. A couple of pages had been torn out.

On January 20, 1960, I wrote a historic account of when we got flooded. This was not the time that the Coast Guard (who happened to be our neighbors) had to row us out in rescue boats, but it was the time when we went to the Memorial School where soup was served, cots were set up, and my family was interviewed for a story in the Patriot Ledger newspaper. A photographer took our picture, a family of nine then (before Bobby and Tricia), in hats, scarves, and mittens. We girls wore kerchiefs tied around our heads which fit with the refugee look the paper was going for. Jimmy, the big brother, was tying Danny’s scarf, a pose I suspect that the photographer suggested. “In front James, 14, adjusts the scarf of Daniel, 9, as Cheryl (Sherry), between the two, looks on,” the caption read.

“Dear Diary Today is Friday,” I wrote. “We got flooded and had to get vacuumed.” (I guess the word “evacuated” hadn’t shown up on a school spelling or vocabulary list yet.) Then there were several lines about how cold my feet were, how Jimmy and my mother went back to the house in hip boots for blankets, and how my father followed to check on them while the rest of us waited in the car.

I recently picked up this diary again to see if there were any entries about my brothers, Jim and Dan, who died in 2001. I found them on page 3: “My brother and stupid sister went bowling. Me and Danny will go next week.” Now I was hooked, as I flipped through the pages to see if we went the next week. Three months later in an entry from March I wrote about going bowling with my mother and father. Danny wasn’t there, or wasn’t mentioned. Did he not want to go? Was he bad that day?

There were a few entries that mentioned Jim, like this one: “A real handsome boy came down to play with Jimmy.” Or this one, “I had to go and lose my temper at Jimmy in the car. He called Richard a nut. I threw my pocketbook at him and yelled, ‘I hate to say what you are!’”

My sister Kathy was mentioned more often. She was called “stupid” or “big wheel” during this period, because she was a teenager and I was not. But when she let me go with her and her girlfriends to the Loring Theater in Hingham, where they usually had a Jerry Lewis or Elvis Presley movie showing, she was cool. “Me and Sherry played house all day. Boy was it fun. We changed everything around,” was an entry that revealed how far I really was from being a teenager as hard as I was trying to be one.

I loved seeing Jimmy and Danny’s names written in pencil in my ten year old cursive penmanship. I was disappointed that there wasn’t more written about them, but my mind was on boyfriends not brothers back then. The Richard thing didn’t last, but Jim and Dan did, not for as long as I would have wished for, but for as long as they could.

Post Notes: The above was adapted from a passage in “The Jim and Dan Stories” for the Sunday Scribblings prompt “Dear Diary.” For a photo of my updated diary, go HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

I’m working this weekend, providing respite foster care for a man with developmental disabilities, and so I wasn’t planning to do my regular Sunday Scribblings. But then, while stealing some time on the computer as my friend was listening to his weather radio, I found myself reading a blog post that gave me goose bumps. “Aha! There you are,” I said as I studied the shivered flesh of my own arm and took it as a sign, knowing that “goose bumps” is the Scribblings writing prompt this weekend.

From my point of view, getting goose bumps is always a good sign, a reminder that I’m more than my mind, more than my physical body. I think of goose bumps, shivers, and chills as emotional sonar, a function of the higher part of myself that can’t be logically explained. Just as sneezes and spontaneous smiles always feel good to me, so do visceral reactions, even when they move me to tears.

Art galleries are places that hold mine fields of emotions that can set off a series of goosey reactions in me, everything from shivers up my spine, to invisible blows to my gut, or feelings that I’m coming unglued. I’ve been known twitch in the presence of good art, like a geiger counter for beauty, even a terrible beauty. And a poem like THIS ONE can make my eyes water with emotion, as it did yesterday when I read it, because it stirs my own appreciation of family history, beauty of the land, the bittersweet reality of living and aging, and love.

This morning it was the nostalgic lyrics of a country music song that pricked through my exterior and set the chain of bumps in motion. As a northerner transplanted in the south, I had been living in Virginia for 15 years before I discovered I liked country music. Stuck in an auto shop waiting room while getting a new muffler put on my car, I found myself watching the Country Music Channel that was tuned in on the shop TV. Song after song gave me shivers. I knew that shivers alert me to pay attention to a truth being told. When I get them, I listen.

The lyrics to the country music song posted today by Susan at Patchwork Reflections started out quirky and innocently enough … We were born to mothers who smoked and drank … Our cribs were covered in lead based pain …. But soon they went on to describe drinking from a garden hose instead of from bottled plastic; playing outside instead of inside on video game; having only 3 TV channels that we had to get up to change; and I was transported back to my childhood, to people and places I hold dear. I was struck, as if by lightening, with goose bumps.

I like to be surprised by the power of emotion, moved to feel in a visible way. I think goose bumps are good for the soul. As a writer, I often don’t know what I’m thinking until I write it down. As a human being, I sometimes don’t even know I’m having feelings until the goose bumps on my arms give me away.

What gives you goose bumps?

Posted by Colleen at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Rarely do they give yes or no answers.
The answers are more like sun or moon.

Post Note: Sometimes I go to the oracle for big picture feedback. Other decisions, like whether or not to play Sunday Scribblings this weekend, are easier to make. Read more entries created from the prompt "decisions" HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Hold on to your hat and Click HERE for my video contribution to the Sunday Scribblings subject of HAIR starring me and my sister Sherry.

Posted by Colleen at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

By the time the rhododendrons bloom pink along the Parkway, by the time the orange daylilies line the dirt road to town; it feels more like midsummer than summer’s first day. The fireflies are already here. The tomatoes are not far from red. I’m already in flip flops and my sundress with palm trees floating on magenta islands in Caribbean blue rayon.

By the time I’m picking yellow crookneck squash and squishing squash bug eggs from the underside of their leaves, by the time I’m wading through rows of corn almost as tall as I am, and admiring the blossoms of zinnia planted from seed; it feels more like midsummer than the summer’s first day. I’ve already eaten my first handful of blueberries, rinsed pool water out of my bathing suit, painted my toenails burgundy wine, and booked my flight to Massachusetts in time for my brother Joey’s 4th of July cookout.

Post note: “I have a secret” is the theme of this weekend’s Sunday Scribblings. Can you guess what secret I revealed in the above? Meanwhile, THIS is a fun clip from the old TV show called "I've Got a Secret."

Posted by Colleen at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Pink-haired street poet
last lion on the block to be picked
to prove that his rhyme is as big as his roar
that his appetite for words is not to be feared
as he shouts from his corner, “People,
your war is more uncivilized than the jungle!”

The following was written from the Sunday Scribblings prompt, “eccentric." ~ I’m so eccentric that I just spent an hour writing a forty-eight word poem about a pink lion when I wanted to be cleaning my kitchen or doing my Sunday Scribble. My pink lion is a poet named Elliot who was up for adoption HERE. I named him “Elliot” after a one time member of my writer’s workshop, also a poet, who died a couple of years ago.

Elliot, the man, was a bit of a curmudgeon who walked hunched over with a cane and lived on a monthly disability check. Some people thought of him as eccentric. He wore a purple beret and liked to stick a flower behind his ear. The floor of his car was covered with pistachio nut shells. He collected things – t-shirts, ink pens, plastic bags, magazines – to the point of hoarding. His poetry was raw, sometimes disturbing, and worthy of publication. He hated what was happening in Iraq.

Occasionally Elliot posed for The Floyd Figures Art Group to earn a little pocket money. One of the last times he sat for them, the artists decked him out in kingly attire; a royal robe, a crown on top of his long mane of hair, his cane took on the look of a staff, his long beard gave him a renaissance air.

After he died, our Writer’s Circle held a memorial spoken word night at the Café Del Sol for him. Sketches and paintings of him, done by the Figures Group, were scattered throughout the café. One lion-like image of Elliot, titled “Poet King,” sat prominently on an easel by the poet’s mic.

At the Shameless Lions Writing Circle where adoptions were taking place, I was hoping to find a lion with a purple beret like the one that Elliot wore, but there was only one lion left out of forty-eight of them, and it was pink. At first, I wasn't impressed, but I felt sympathetic to the fact that he was the last lion waiting to be picked, and soon I was feeling a bond.

But I had to write a forty-eight word tribute in order to be eligible for my lion. While I was composing the above poem for the last lion waiting on adoption somebody claimed him. His new owner named him Johnny Cash.

Should I ask for visitation?

Post Note: I guess I scribbled after all. Update: The follow-up to this post is HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

The following was written from the Sunday Scribblings prompt “spicy.”

What do you do on the hottest day of the year?

You could go to your local health food store and stock up on hot cayenne pepper because you gave your supply to your son for his construction site first aid kit. You know that cayenne can stop bleeding better than anything else, that its sting is never abrasive. You like to put a few drops of its tincture into an eye cup full of water to treat dry eyes, and you know that it can prevent heart attack as well or better than an aspirin, so you don’t want to be without it.

You’re committed to getting some cayenne, even knowing that you have to drive the seven miles to town in the truck camper because your husband took your car to work. But it’s okay, you figure, because you can use the camper fridge to store the vanilla ice cream also on your list. You wear your bathing suit under your clothes because it’s hot and the country club pool is open.

The air conditioning in the store is running full blast, so you take the time to linger at the bulk herb counter. Whole, root, seed, powder, you notice a couple of herbs you’ve never heard of before, like schinsandra and cubeb. You think of the little girl you know whose middle name is Lavender and imagine what other poetic sounding herbs would make nice names for children, as you bag up your cayenne and resist the urge to sneeze.

“Marco Polo! Marco Polo!” the kids splashing around in the pool call out, causing you to think of the explorer who traveled the world in search of discoveries and exotic spices.

By now the day has heated-up to sizzling. Stretched out on a lounge chair, you sip a cold drink and prepare to immerse yourself in the cool blue pool water. The first dunk of the year on the hottest day so far gives an otherwise routine day a refreshing tropical twist.

Posted by Colleen at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

The following was written for a Sunday Scribbling prompt of “simple.”

At the end of the day it’s the simple pleasures I remember; peeling and eating a juicy sweet orange, watching yellow finches at the birdfeeder, walking to the mailbox with our dog Jasmine, making a joke that my husband laughs at, a hug, a smile, a cup of tea.

Last night I walked barefoot in the grass and stared at the moon. The sweet smell of valerian flowers wafted in the air while I jumped on the trampoline as if I was a girl. This morning my husband and I saved a black snake that was tangled up in the blueberry netting in our garden. I held the netting while he used scissors to painstakingly cut about a dozen places where the snake was wrapped tight. The task wasn’t necessarily simple or pleasurable, but watching the snake slither away at the end of it was.

Even the lowly act of weeding my garden is something I enjoy (but I wish I could say the same about cleaning my kitchen). As I stoop and bend over with the sun on my back, pulling up one weed at a time, I find myself smiling and thinking of all the people in the world who have done, and are doing the same. It’s a simple and solitary chore done without tools, artificial chemicals, noise, or monetary pay.

I’d like to quote a section of “The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You,” a book I read nearly twenty years ago, but my copy is with my son in Asheville. Today I played Scrabble (another simple pleasure) with an older friend who lives alone. She remembered the book but didn’t have a copy either.

The book tells the story of a criminal who, after being injured in a car accident, finds himself being nursed back to health by a primitive tribe of people. Following his recovery, there’s a scene in which he’s preparing a seasonal vegetable garden with a member of the tribe. It’s this scene I remember as being formative in shaping the way I think about our modern world.

They are plowing a field with a stick. The criminal complains about how slow and backwards it is to use a stick. He describes a powerful tractor and all it can do, expecting the tribal man to be impressed, but he isn’t. The tribe member points out all the labor and resources that go into making a tractor, from mining the metal and the petroleum to run it, to how many steps and people are involved in building it. What about the plant where it’s built? What’s the electricity bill like? Is the plant polluting our air and streams? Did the tractor builder have to hire someone to take care of his kids while he worked?

By the time one tractor is built the field will have been plowed, the seeds planted, the harvest gathered, and a blessing will have been said at the table before eating.

At the end of every day I like to review what I’m grateful for. It’s almost always the simplest of things; soaking up the sun, feeling the breeze, noticing sky’s shade of blue, seeing my first spring butterfly, remembering a kiss, or the voices of children.

As with the end of a day, I suspect that at the end of life it will be the simple pleasures that I look back on with fondness and consider to be the making of a good life.

Posted by Colleen at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)

The following was written via a prompt from Sunday Scribblings.

I woke up this morning trying to remember my childhood closet. What was the door to it like? Did it have the same clear glass doorknob that the door to my bedroom had? If I could see the doorknob, remember the feel of the cut facets in my hand as I turned it, why couldn’t I see the closet and what was left inside it?

I willed myself to remember some of the clothes I wore in high school, bought in Quincy Square with babysitting money. There was a brown dress with yellow piping and a star on either corner of the collar, and the blue navy suit I was photographed in for the yearbook. I imagined how they looked hanging from the closet pole on wire hangers, and me flipping through them on a typical school morning, trying to decide what to wear.

My mind wandered up and down the streets of Quincy Square (a bus ride away from the small town of Hull) in and out of the stores I used to shop in as a teenager. I saw the big glass windows full of well dressed mannequins, the hairdresser’s shop my mother took me to once with a “Walk-ins Welcome” sign out front, and the alley tucked between two stores that led to the public parking lot. But even though I often find myself thinking about my childhood closet, I can’t remember any details about it. I have a sense of missing the stuff inside it, but I can’t remember what that was. Was the floor green linoleum like the rest of the room? Wasn’t it cluttered with a pile of junk?

Eminent domain means that the government can take your home away if they deem the land its on is needed for a another purpose. When the town took our family home and burned it to the ground, I was twenty-one years old, a working girl with an apartment in Quincy, jingling my tambourine at Boston Commons concerts on the weekends, making candles and sticking them in wine bottles, and enjoying some pot induced giggles. My family home was like a first kiss I had moved on from. The fact that it was going to be burned to the ground seemed like a rumor I didn’t have to believe.

“I don’t want to see it burned. I can’t bear too,” I said at the time. That was true enough, but not going home before the fire to collect a few things from my old room seems thoughtless and lazy to me now.

If I had a second chance and could do it over again, I’d go back to my bedroom of fifteen years and look through my stuff in the closet. But what would I find? A few pink spoolie curlers tucked into the closet corner and covered with dust? My first writings, crumpled up notes that someone has passed to me in school? An old beat up “Name That Tune Game” that I got for Christmas when I was ten, or the plaster of Paris handprint I made in kindergarten? Surely there would be a Barbie doll and some of the hand-made doll clothes that my grandmother made for my sisters and me before she died.

But it’s the things I can’t even imagine that I miss the most. The things I’ve forgotten so completely.

Posted by Colleen at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

The following was written for the Sunday Scribblings prompt, ocean.

The back burner on my stove makes a faint whine that reminds me of a foghorn. Its deep and distant drone is like a lullaby I remember from my childhood. “The ships are all safe and the children are warm and loved,” it seems to say. I wait for the lighthouse to swing its spotlight by and shine on me. But I don’t live there anymore.

When it's foggy where I live now on Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway, the rolling hills can almost look like the ocean with wave upon wave rippling out into the horizon. The vultures and crows could almost be gulls, and the twinkling lights from Martinsville could be those of Revere Beach on the north shore of Boston.

I like the salty smell and taste of sweat on my skin when I’m working in the garden in the summer because it reminds me of the ocean and the bay I swam in as a girl. Immersed in the salty water then, I used to wonder what it would be like to meet a mermaid or to make a raft strong enough to travel the length of Hull, the narrow 6 mile Massachusetts peninsula that was my home.

The ocean is in my blood, but not all my memories of it are fond. As a teenager, sometimes I would sit on the seawall at night and stare out. I felt lonely and small against the bigness of it, immobilized by the monotonous lapping of the tide against the shore. At those times, the ocean was like a blank slate where nothing existed and the foghorn sounded hollow and desolate. Even on a clear night, a full moon boldly hanging, causing the water to shimmer wasn’t enough to cheer me up.

Five years ago I saw the Pacific for the first time. From an overlook ledge, my travel mates were convinced that the brown shapes littering the beach below were scattered pieces of driftwood. But I had a hunch, so I waited patiently while my girlfriends hiked on. After fifteen minutes one of the shapes began to move, and I knew that what was thought to be driftwood was actually seals! My friends came back when I called out to them, and we hiked down for a closer look.

Later, driving on the coast of Oregon, we pulled over to peer down at the plunging view. Exhilarated and excited by the sight of the giant sea stacks, I shouted out, “I’m in remission!” referring to the limited energy I’ve been dealing with for most of my adult life.

At the ocean I’m like a kite buoyed by the wind and cleansed by its wild whipping strokes. But if I’m up too high for too long, I crash down hard. Eventually, I seek soothing green, still and uncluttered space, my own quiet place in the country.

Post notes: The first photo is one of me and my sister Sherry, taken by her husband Nelson in Gloucester, Massachusetts, 2005, first posted HERE. The second one is up the road from where I live here in Virginia. More Sunday Scribblings are HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)

The following was inspired by a Sunday Scribblings prompt "Wings."

Back in the 50’s, before ipods, video games, and Disney World, skipping stones and feeding ducks was a common weekend activity in our family. We piled into a car without seatbelts and ended up somewhere that seems dreamlike to me now. My grandmother’s husband, Frank, was a fisherman who new all the best duck ponds. Dressed in my Sunday best church clothes, which back then included a bonnet, I remember being fascinated with the shimmering green heads of the mallards. I didn’t like it when they misbehaved, fighting for the chunks of stale bread that we tossed in to them. I didn’t believe that the pretty ducks were males and the females were plain until someone pointed out the baby ducklings following behind their brown feathered mother like cars in a train.

The adults in our group usually huddled together to talk. Some smoked cigarettes. Absorbed in studying the baby ducklings, I could hear the peripheral sounds of rocks splashing, sticks swishing, and the excited voices of my brothers and sisters playing. I was impressed with how ducks could both swim and fly and watching them is what probably gave me the idea to later answer “a duck” whenever someone would ask the proverbial question ‘if you could be any animal which would you be?’

Sometimes Sunday donuts were passed around and we were instructed by the adults not to feed them to the ducks. Skipping along the pond shore with a jelly-filled donut in one hand, my other hand would be collecting the downy wisps of feathers strewn along the bank. A blue iridescent one would be worth finishing off the donut to free up my hands for a closer inspection. Inevitably my black patent leather shoes would get mud on them. Occasionally some would splash up on my white socks that were neatly folded over at the ankle to show off their frilly laced border.

Post notes: Feathers continued to play a role in my life. For a long time a mobile of seagull wings hung in my living room. I made feathered earrings, sold them, and wore them. One summer I wore a crow feather in my hair for weeks in a row. Feathers have also been dropped in my path as if from angels during times of upheaval or grief. You can read about such feathers HERE and HERE. Read more Sunday Scribblings HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

A Sunday Scribbling:
Like the broccoli and kale starts I’ve been planting in my garden, I was taken from the safety of the greenhouse of my childhood and transplanted somewhere else.

I used to lie in bed at night as a young girl and think about life. Why in the world would I want to go out and find someone to marry to make a new family with when I already had a good family? Why would I want to find a stranger to live with when I was happy where I was?

Pulled up by my roots, I didn’t want to go, but eventually I yielded to something larger than myself and made the move from Massachusetts to Texas in 1978 because my husband at the time had work there.

The Texas transplant didn’t fully take, but I was nourished for the years I lived there. I loved the fields of bluebonnets, but not the hot weather. I loved my first husband’s family, but not the lack of hilly landscape and seasons. I loved the early days after my sons were born, but not being so far away from my own family.

After seven years and with two young sons, my first husband and I set out for Virginia. Drawing on my love of Annie Oakley and Daniel Boone, we headed for Virginia to homestead and home school our sons. We were young and adventurous and sought like-minded souls rooted in a vision of community.

Like a goldfish that was taken from a bowl to a fish tank and then to a river, in Virginia I was out of the pot. With acres of green space and others who were plowing and planting in the same garden, I have grown in ways that the girl could not have imagined. Although, the first marriage wasn’t meant to last, the move to Virginia led me to Joe, the true love of my life who I would not have found had I stayed in Massachusetts.

My sons are rooted here and I am rooted to them. But my own roots trace back to the place of the green house, and so the theme of my life has become being town between two places. One has mountains, one has an ocean, and both have family.

I dream of Hull the way I imagine my Grandmother dreamt of her homeland in Youhal, Ireland. I have a recurring dream of walking the length of Hull, the way we used to as kids when we spent all our money, including our bus fair, at Paragon Park and had no way home but to walk. I think I’m the only kid in my family, or all of Hull for that matter, who grew up when Paragon was still there and never rode on the roller coaster. I always played it safe, not like my reckless brothers.

My childhood home was green. It was taken by our town through eminent domain and burned to the ground. Like our green house at 10 ½ Spring Street, the sewage plant building that now stands in its place faces the Hull Village Cemetery, the place we played and sledded as kids before it was so filled up with gravestones, the place where two of my brothers and my father are now buried.

My brothers feel so far away, not because they’re dead now but because they are buried in Hull and I’m in Virginia … Danny and I shared a dream of buying a beachfront condo in Hull, so we both could spend extended time there. I’m still in Virginia, but Danny is home now. If you stand at his grave, lean forward and look to the left, all the way down Duck Lane, you can see the ocean.

I am rooted in two places, but in one place my roots go deeper.

Post Notes: The following was written via the Sunday Scribblings prompt “rooted.” More Scribblings are HERE. The italicized excerpts were taken from The Jim and Dan Stories, the book I wrote in the first six months after losing my brothers. More about that is HERE. My other Sunday Scribblings are HERE. Spoken Word tonight at the Café Del Sol.

Posted by Colleen at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)

If you google the word “secret,” you’ll discover, like I did, that the Law of Attraction DVD “The Secret” has overtaken “Post Secret” for most popular clicked on site. You’ll be surprised to learn that Secret Deodorant is more popular than Victoria’s Secret. You might start repeating the Secret Deodorant jingle … but secret is for women … while you consider whether or not to click on the Victoria’s Secret site and see what the models are wearing … or not. You follow the trail of intrigue on to pages on the secret service, secret worlds, and secret recipes. You might whisper the word “secret” as you click and remember the time you were someone’s Secret Santa or the time you fooled everyone on Halloween with your disguise.

If you google the word “secret identity” you could uncover a video of the same name and be held captive for five or ten minutes watching while thinking about Superman and Clark Kent and wondering what it’s like to live a double life. If your husband comes in the room you can ask him, “what’s your secret identity?”

“What do you mean? What’s yours?"

"I don’t think I have one.”

“Neither do I."

"But I know what Victoria’s Secret is?”

“What?�