February 20 – A Wired Life

by Susan Wittig Albert

From my journal, February 20, 2008 (published in AN EXTRAORDINARY YEAR OF ORDINARY DAYS)

Yesterday was not an ordinary day.

For the dozen years that we’ve been on the Internet here at our house in the Texas Hill Country, we’ve been on “dial-up.” I could grow old, very old, waiting for the monitor screen to fill.

But that’s changing. Yesterday, we had a satellite dish installed on the house and I am now plugged in to the wide, wide world. Now, the signal whizzes 23,000 miles up to the satellite and back down to my desktop in less time than it takes to type a sentence. Fully wired, always on.

So? Does any of this make me a better writer? Without a doubt. The facts I might be tempted to guess at if it meant a trip to the library (or even a trip to a bookshelf in the other room) are now as handy as a Google search. The writing is more richly detailed, more comprehensive and accurate, more up-to-date.

And having email makes it easy to reply to readers, a task that many writers have found difficult. In her journals, May Sarton complains bitterly about having to write (by hand) replies to “friends of the work.” In his memoir, LIFE WORK, poet Donald Hall says that he solves the problem by spending a couple of hours every evening dictating, then turning the dictation over to a typist. I spend an hour a day–sometimes morning, sometimes evening–cleaning up the email. Yes, it takes time. No, it’s not a burden. I’m just glad that there are people out there in the world, reading what I’ve written and caring enough about it to tell me what they liked–or didn’t. (Which they do.)

But now I wonder: am I am too dependent on the Internet? What would I do if it went away? How would I do the research, read newspapers, pursue information? Would I have to go back to using what we contemptuously call “snail mail”?

Hope it never comes to that. I wouldn’t care to responsible for what might happen.

Susan Wittig Albert is the best-selling author of four mystery series and several works of nonfiction. She founded the Story Circle Network in 1997.

February 18 – Walking Into Love

by Susan J. Tweit

When I married the love of my life, Richard, he came as a package with Molly, his bright and often willful four-year-old daughter. Almost from the first, Molly and I began taking walks. We walked to the nearby park with its swings and slides; we walked downtown to the library and the food co-op; we walked to the university campus to meet her dad after work. Sometimes we skipped hand in hand; sometimes we walked fast to stay warm; sometimes we dawdled and counted sidewalk slabs.

We were unwittingly following in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, who extolled the delights of “sauntering,” exploring one’s home ground on foot. Although our walks were not, as Thoreau prescribed, completely without itinerary, the ambles Molly and I took honored the spirit of sauntering: our aim was simply to get outside together and see what we found.

We walked to experience the journey, not just to reach the destination. If arriving at a particular place had been our sole objective, we would have used the car.

Traveling on foot forced us to slow down, allowed us slip away from our too-harried daily routines, to listen to whatever came up and share what we encountered.

We traced ant trails, sniffed ground-hugging violet blossoms, picked up autumn leaves, craned our necks to decipher the shapes of passing clouds; we watched crows jockeying for position in nighttime roost trees and spotted fireflies signaling in blips of green light.

And we grew a relationship: joined by marriage rather than by birth, Molly and I had to negotiate disparate family cultures.

Walking gave us a territory of our own, a place we could start fresh away from the disputes that regularly rocked our blended household. Rambling with no agenda forced Molly and me to leave our baggage at home, allowing us to meet relatively unencumbered.

And a funny thing happened: When we strolled arm-in-arm, people commented on our “resemblance.”

Molly, with her father’s elegant height, high cheekbones, and dark hair would look down at me, half a head shorter with red-blond hair and freckles, and giggle uncontrollably. Clearly, they were seeing something we could not see.

Walking brought Molly and I together, stepmother to stepdaughter. Walking also re-connected us to the natural world, restoring a source of mental and spiritual renewal available to all who ramble.

What we didn’t expect, though, was that those thousands of steps would walk each one of us right into the other’s heart. The resemblance people see in the two of us is under the surface rather than an outward one: it’s the love we share.

Today is Molly’s 32nd birthday. Happy Birthday, honey!

(Excerpted from Walking Nature Home, A Life’s Journey, by Susan J. Tweit)

Susan J. Tweit is the award-winning author of twelve books (including her memoir, Walking Nature Home: A Life’s Journey, and Colorado Scenic Byways, winner of the Colorado Book Award), hundreds of magazine articles, radio commentaries and newspaper columns.

February 9 – P.E.

by Linda Hoye

From my vantage point on the stretcher in the Emergency Room I could see my name on the whiteboard at the centre hub of the ward. Scrawled in the box next to my name were two letters: P.E.

‘Your lungs are full of clots’, the E.R. doctor had said. Blood clots in my lungs. Pulmonary emboli. P.E.

I had been relaxing at home the day before, recovering from gall bladder surgery a few days earlier. I felt good and, as I had said to my husband the night before, if it wasn’t for the odd feeling in my chest I would be as good as new.

A friend arrived to pay a visit that afternoon. By the time I descended the stairs from my living room to the front door when she arrived I was out of breath. After we climbed the stairs and I sat back down on the sofa, I was so winded that I couldn’t talk for a few minutes. I caught my breath after a few minutes and we enjoyed our visit.

Later that evening she called me on the telephone. After our visit, she had an appointment with her doctor and happened to mention to him my breathless state.

‘It’s probably nothing, but it might be a blood clot, and she needs to go to the hospital.’ She relayed to me the words that her doctor had said to her.

I like to think of myself as strong; I don’t give in to sickness easily and would have paid no attention to second-hand advice from my friend’s doctor if it hadn’t been for two words. Blood clot.

My dad had died of a pulmonary embolism after surgery when I was in my early twenties and less than two years later Mom had died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. My birth-mother, I had been told, had collapsed one day, also the victim of a pulmonary embolism.

When the E.R. doctor told me that I was experiencing the effects of a pulmonary embolism I was stunned. As I waited in the Emergency Room to be admitted to the hospital and saw those two letters scrawled next to my name I considered the events of the past twenty-four hours.

Had my friend not come to visit she would not have known of my breathlessness; had she not had a doctor’s appointment later that day she would not have had an opportunity to mention my situation to a doctor. Finally, had she not said the words ‘blood clot’ to me I would have shrugged off her concern and not sought medical help.

After six months of taking blood-thinning medication and enduring weekly blood tests to monitor the clotting tendency of my blood I was fine; I have no physical effect of my experience with pulmonary embolism. But I will never forget the experience and wonder at the reason why I was spared the same fate as my parents.

Perhaps there was something left for me to accomplish.

Linda Hoye is a full-time HR Management Systems Analyst, a part-time writer, and a full-time and fanatical grandma. Linda and her husband have four children and two brilliant grandchildren. She maintains a website at http://lindahoye.com/.

February 6 – Blogging, Tagging & Drawing

by Betty Auchard

Twelve years ago as a new 68 year old widow, I started a to-do list: find out how to start the lawn mower, how to put gas in the car, and how to use the computer. I learned all that, and even won an award for writing it down in my first book, Dancing in my Nightgown.

Today after writing my second book, I’m still learning new things, such as how to act cool on a social network. Strange new terminology is sneaking into my vocabulary these days. Words like Facebook, blogging, bookmarking, and tags have replaced TV, pleasure reading, goofing off, and baking cookies. I have no time for these things because my days are filled with learning the language of cyberspace. I must say that surfing the net is the most convenient trip I’ve ever made—I don’t even have to get dressed or leave the house to reach my destination.

Although we hear that online marketing is the way to go when promoting a book these days, my heart just wasn’t in it at first. I was posting articles on my blog like a robot doing homework when it dawned on me that I had to find a way to blog cheerfully. The next thing I heard was a little voice saying “Illustrate your blog posts”. As a retired art teacher, I must say this felt invigorating to me.

The first drawing that came through was a Thanksgiving memory, and the image was so fun to render that I couldn’t wait to draw for my next post. Since then I’ve illustrated five of my blog posts. My new mission is to find the most popular tags and keywords and let them be prompts for new stories. I think I can do that. Can you?

At 75, Betty Auchard wrote the IPPY Award winning memoir, Dancing in my Nightgown: The Rhythms of Widowhood, endorsed by celebrity widows Jayne Meadows and Rosemarie Stack. Last November, she released her childhood memoir, The Home for the Friendless, endorsed by Josh Braff. Betty’s stories and essays have been published in the San Jose Mercury News, Today’s Senior, The Senior Voice, and Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul series. Blog with the author at www.bettyauchard.com and join her fans on Facebook.

February 2-The Past is Present

by Judy M. Miller

There’s a small storm coming, purported to dump inches of the cold, fluffy white stuff overnight. One of our local weather-people shared the news with me during “a.m. drive-time,” on my way home from dropping the younger three-quarters at school this morning. Before we left for school, the weatherperson said it was going to be a “dusting.” How quickly things change…and don’t.

Upon arriving home, I began to sort through the kitchen, wiping down counters, washing dishes and sweeping the floor. Then I ventured into the mudroom, to take a load out of the dryer, warm and ripe for folding, and move the washed load into the dryer and fill the washer again. Yes, typical domesticity, but something other than obligation fueled me. My mental “to-do” list began to tick through my head and then it was interrupted by a conversation that I had with my mom decades ago.

It was a hot, humid, late summer afternoon. I was very young, around the age of seven or eight, and a severe line of thunderstorms was coming in, full of hail and the possibility of tornadoes. I had already slept through one tornado the year before and was surprised and grateful, as my great-grandmother said I should be, to be alive the next morning after seeing the damage it had caused in our neighborhood.

I was picking up and cleaning my room, without being asked or nagged to do so. After finishing I went and helped my mother in my brothers’ room. Aware that this was not my usual M.O. or how I usually felt I asked, “Mommy, why do I feel like cleaning and putting things away?”

“Oh honey, there’s a storm coming. It’s what women do–making things secure and tidy before something might happen, a way to prepare so that they can focus on the important.”

“But, Mommy. I’m not a woman.”

“No, you’re not, but you’re practicing to be.” And she smiled.

I mulled that over. I was not excited to become a woman. I liked being the tomboy who could keep up with and often beat my three brothers at their own games, so I addressed the other part of her comment, “What’s important?”

“You and your brothers are.”

And I smiled and felt all warm and mushy inside, like the best-ever caramel and hot fudge sundae–with chopped peanuts. Affirmation of my mother’s love, a comfort to me then and always.

The little things matter. Loved ones realize when you make the effort to “prepare,” so that you can take the time to provide the comfort and focus. Perhaps we’ll have to burrow in tonight or go late to school in the morning. But what I do know is that we can be together–safe, warm and loved–enjoying the fire in the hearth while Mother Nature covers us in a blanket of white.

I think I’ll make a pot of soup…

Judy’s work appears in parenting and adoption magazines, A Cup of Comfort for Adoptive Families, Pieces of Me: Who Do I Want to Be? and Chicken Soup for the Soul: Thanks Mom. She presented at the Stories from the Heart. Judy is an adoption educator and coach, blogs at The International Mom and Grown in My Heart.