She stayed near the plant that she was hatched on and enjoyed munching all throughout the days of her life. Some days brought sunshine, some brought rain, but everyday brought the birds, those enemies bent on her destruction as they intended to make her their morning meal.

As she searched for her own meals, she did her best to leave the largest leaves untouched for they provided a canopy-covering blocking her from the birds’ view.

Leaving those leaves untouched was the hardest during the hottest days as new leaves became even more scarce. But, “Safety First!” she always told herself.

One day as the sun was coming up over the horizon, her body started to warm and her stomach urged her forward. A thought began to form in her mind that it would soon be time to change.

She had no one with which to discuss such ideas so they just continued to roll around in her head and eventually settled in her heart. This inevitable feeling that, ready or not, something was going to happen. Would it be warm and wonderful or scary and painful? She knew warmth from the sun and she knew fear from the birds. The extent of pain had been limited to hunger pangs and she really had no idea what “wonderful” even meant.

She began to worry if she would even be able to endure the process or would she die in the middle? Not knowing exactly what was coming, who long it would take or if she had the right stuff to make it through gave her serious pause for thought. And if she didn’t make it, what was death anyway? No one lived to tell about it so she was really at a loss. The question she came back to most was whether the leaves would still be there waiting for her.

She was pretty sure she had reinvented herself at least once before because she had this vague memory of a very small, sort of round and hard place that had once enclosed her. This gave her a bit of confidence that if she had gone through some sort of change before she could endure again.

As she crawled along gobbling leaves, she caught her reflection in a pool of water. My how large she had become, no wonder she felt so sluggish, that she had been moving somewhat slower these days.

Then it happened. She suddenly lost her appetite and she felt completely unable to move. Even her legs began to lose their grip on the leaf stem. She thought she was going to fall all the way to the ground, but somehow she remained stuck tight to the twig her last meal was connected to.

Even though it was the middle of the day, the sunlight began to dim until she felt herself enclosed again in a place altogether dark.

As time passed, although without the sun and moon to mark the days and night, she really lost all track of time and began to feel sort of mushy in the middle. She wondered if this is what becoming fat and flabby meant. She could no longer feel all of her legs and began to wonder if they were even still there.

This was becoming a bit too much so she decided to give her mind a rest and take a nap. Maybe things would be clearer when she woke up. Her nap turned out to be an epic sleep rivaled only by Rip Van Winkle, and when she awoke she knew that the world and her body, as she had known them, were forever changed.

Her legs no longer felt so stubby, they now felt much more long and slender and even though they were folded under her she knew there were no longer so many of them.

Her body seemed to have firmed up again and was no longer quite as big as it was before.

She tried to check out her jaws for chewing and found them replaced by a curled up straw. How was this going to work?!

Her whole body began to hum and vibrate and shake and as she began to move, thin shafts of sunlight reached her eyes. This went on for some time and she began to notice an ache on the back of her body. Something strange seemed to be stuck there, and no matter how she moved, she could not dislodge the things causing this ache.

These things felt sort of wet but the sun seemed to be working its magic on them. As they began to outstretch and dry, they gave her a fluttery feeling. She stretched out her long thin legs and began to walk around on them. She had no desire to eat the leaves she now walked on, but as the lovely flowers came into view her curled up straw started to extend and she probed the middle of the flowers and found a delicious sweetness, such as she had never tasted before.

She saw another flower and as she wondered what that one might taste like, without even realizing it, her wings began to flutter faster and she rose up from the place she had been. It took her a little bit of time and a few attempts to get herself where she wanted to be to taste the flower she saw. I turned out to be just as delicious, but a slightly different kind of taste, she drank deeply and then spied another flower, and another. This was glorious, she flitted about from one to the next enjoying each for their own special flavor.

With her belly much fuller than it had been in a long time, she decided to really get the hang of this fluttering thing. She learned to rise and fall, but never in a direct straight line. It was always sort of bouncy as she flitted along.

Then she noticed her old enemies, the birds. She knew they were still not her friends and would still have her for lunch, but she had this knowing that even though she did not have the big leaves for cover, she had other ways to outsmart them and keep herself safe. For she had been fully transformed.

I caught a butterfly in a net today and wondered what she thought of me as I contemplated her before setting her free.

The End.

She loved the rocks. Some sparkled in the sun. Some were smooth and flat and fit perfectly in her hand. Some were rough and jagged and she knew she must be more careful when handling these. Some rocks were gray and dull, some white or brown or black. The ones she liked best were mostly red with lots of sparkles.

As the little girl grew up, her collection of rocks had grown too. She remembered the story of how each rock had come to her.

One day, it dawned on her that she wanted to begin sharing her lovely rocks. So she filled her pockets once again and went on about her day. A couple times she had her hand in her pocket and almost pulled one out to offer to the person standing before her when something dark came over them which scared her. So she left her rocks in her pocket and quickly went on her way.

Once, she offered her most prized rock. It was accepted, but she witnessed her rock being cast aside. Never even looked at, much less admired. This was the deepest pain of all, but she bore it and tried to make the best of it.

Quite a few times she picked just the right rock out of her pocket and upon offering it, the looks that came over the faces of the would-be recipients, as if she were all-together strange, before their actual verbal rejection, made her very sad indeed. She put her rocks back in her pockets.

Suddenly, she noticed the weight of them. They now seemed heavy and burdensome as they never had before. She considered throwing the lot away. In fact, she had both of her fists full.

But just before she did, a man stepped out of the forest and asked her what she was holding and why there were tears in her eyes.

She was hesitant to speak, she chose her words carefully, for she feared another harsh response.

Somehow he recognized that she must have been dealt with in a way that had hurt her. So he spoke gently and reassuringly to her and listened as she opened her fists and told the story of rejection connected with each of her rocks.

He listened intently and then the old stories started to flow from her of where she found each rock and why she loved it so. Her rocks were light again and beautiful and together they filled their pockets with the rocks that were now theirs 🪨🐝

🌳🌲The End🌲🌳

For the last few weeks, Dierdre has been learning a lot about who she is, where she is and what it is she needs to do. The “Who” includes lots of facets, some more sparkly, some more mundane. Some have been part of her from the day she was conceived, some picked up only recently. Some of the “Who” is connected to the “What” that she does.

She is a girl, daughter, sister, friend, classmate, student, teacher, wife, mother, grandmother, coworker, child-minder, tutor and Dierdre is a writer. Just as an artist is the one who does the thing. Just as the person who paints is a painter.

Dierdre has this need to let the words flow from her mind and body through her arm and fingers which guide the pen on the paper. Sometimes what flows out is sweet and flowery, or cute and funny, although that has been very rare. Mostly it is more like vomit which cannot be stopped nor kept inside nor returned. And so it comes out and lands all over the pages of every notebook and piece of paper she can find. And with the purging comes a sweet release, a needed clearing out of all the things that have been sitting around her and inside her, and some of that has been taking space in her for decades. So Dierdre remains in this unsettled place till all the purging can be completed.

Even the platform she uses to send her writing into the world seems to be doing its own form of purging. For Dierdre’s subscriber count has started to go down. This should cause a panic as Dierdre worked so hard to build it up, writing “Notes” spaced out throughout each day and writing “Posts” every three to four days. But it feels strangely O.K. as she is sure all of those subscribers and followers are not actually reading what she writes. But those that have blessed her by reading and engaging in conversations with her are the gems she has been searching for all her life. For these are the ones that answer Dierdre’s most fundamental question of all, “Where are the ones, the unknown someones, who can hear her lonely voice as she attempts to have a conversation with them?” For Dierdre believes in the power of words. Their power to cleanse, clarify and connect or to damage, delude and destroy. Their vital life-force or the kind of death that is sometimes worse than dying. Words are the very blood that flows through her veins.

These are the people who are becoming more known to Dierdre as she reads their words. Just as one-way streets can be very empty-feeling with its endless string of individuals moving along, scribbling words on pages as they go. Dierdre seeks the two-way streets, or better still, many roads that converge on the same spot. This is where she can finally build a community of those she can hear and who can hear her. This is where she can Carpe diem, not seize by force, but enjoy the ripe fruit, the finely formed words, well-thought and fully expressed, of each day, as she gives and receives them, for there is no guarantee of tomorrow.

Dierdre realizes where she really “lives” is in the town square, but on the roof top for she needs the fresher air and the more all-encompassing point of view, some space and peace and quiet. It is here in the dark quiet wee hours of the morning that she can best hear her own words, get them out and get them set down on the page. It is in the full sun of the day that she can read and take in the words of her companions and engage with them. The dark hours of the night are for sleep and dreams and giving her mind time to sort it all out.

Dierdre’s wish for us all is grace and tenderness at moments of vulnerability, especially when it is not expected. For eyes that can both see your own page and also the pages of other Pilgrims you meet along the way. For joy and laughter and light-hearted banter and for words that fortify, strengthen and build up both the giver and the receiver. In other words, friendship, companionship and love.

What Dierdre has never had, but has always longed for with a yearning so deep sometimes all she can do is weep, is a man, her man, her soulmate.

Listening to the songs on the radio and watching movies have given Dierdre the idea that such a person does not exist. He is simply a figment of her imagination. They are called “love songs” and “romantic” films but the type of romance and love that they portray comes in the night, usually involving some adult beverages, and goes with the morning light. Or they tell the story of loving someone who, no matter what you think to do, will never love you back. There are the stories of cheaters, affairs, forbidden and taboo love. There are moving on after toxic relationships stories and many stories that glorify casual, no strings attached, with multiple hook-ups that didn’t mean anything. Dierdre has seen both men and women wake in the morning with that sinking feeling of not really knowing where they are and who is laying next to them. Some try to sneak out, some go for more and still others invite more people to join the good-time.

To further confuse things there are stories that play out everyday of women who act like men and men who act like women. The idea of the archetypal masculine and feminine are watered down with the idea pervasive in Dierdre’s culture that gender is fluid and what actually shows up on the outside of the physical body has no bearing on what is believed in the mind.

Dierdre has seen the story play out where people get married because of an “Oops! Baby” and stories that seem to get the biggest round of applause are for the character with the most notches on his bedpost.

“And they all lived happily ever after … The End.” is a line from many, many books Dierdre has read to the children in her care. But who are all of these that get this fairytale? Did Skinny June? Did Max or Bonnie or Stacy?

This so rare and elusive treasure. This one needle in the huge haystack. This pearl of great price. That rare bird or hidden gem. That one in a million, like catching smoke. This is who Dierdre is still looking for, is still hoping to find, even though her heart breaks a little more everyday with the realization that he may be too far away for him to come get her and their time too short to have more than a fleeting taste. The tragedy of only finding him at the last moment, and yet she still seeks him. In fact, her archetypal personality test named her strongly as a Seeker. How fitting. But she wants to be a Finder.

She knows this type of love exists. She has witnessed it three times in her life. Two stories ended tragically, the third is still ongoing.

Dierdre’s cousin, Dutch, was the front man for a Blues band. He met the love of his life in high school. She was a cute little cheerleader, but smart. She went on to work in retail at a high end store common in malls back in the day and he joined his dad and brother at the used car lot they owned. His dad was a locally famous Jazz drummer, so Dutch was a natural. And became equally famous as a Blues musician and singer-songwriter, although he mostly did cover songs at the gigs he booked.

Dutch got an earache that wouldn’t seem to let up so he planned to go to the doctor “tomorrow”, but he didn’t get his tomorrow. The infection had spread the short distance to his brain and he was dead.

Dierdre can still see that look Dutch and his wife always gave each other as they moved throughout each day of their lives together. A look like they were seeing deeper than just the surface. Like they were looking at each other’s soul. To this day, Dutch’s widow still gets that sparkle in her eye each time she talks about Dutch and remembers him, even though she still so keenly feels the lose. They were always touching each other. Not the needy groping, that may have taken place behind their bedroom door, but just tender, seemingly accidental, brushes against each other’s bodies. They could be chatting away with company, but if you looked closely you could see that their real connection, their real focus, their undivided attention was on each other and the chatting or serving guests or raising their children were all secondary to their great bond. There really was always only those two people in the room. They both smiled easily and laughed along with the stories each would share. They genuinely liked each other and exuded joy. They always looked out for each other and took care of each other, defended each other and supported each other. Both took care of themselves in the way they dressed and smelled and ate, for each other. They took trips together and shared lots of adventures.

In Dierdre’s mind, Shakespeare never penned a better tragic love story than the one her cousin and his wife wrote. And Dierdre still aches that it had to be a tragedy and it plays on her mind that her own story will end as the tragedy of never finding her one great love, lover, companion, other half or that if she ever really does, it will be at the end of one of their lives.

Dierdre knew a couple who had been married for over 40 years. But this was not the love story. She was raised as a sickly child and he was the strong, silent type. She wanted someone to take care of her and he wanted someone weak that he could dominate and control. She loved that he was the strong, silent type but then constantly complained that he never talked to her. He wanted a companion for his new adventures he was now free to take. She whined and moaned so he went by himself. I guess you should be careful what you wish for, you just might get it, and they each got what they thought they wanted. Listening to her daily moans and groans and “oh woe is me” drove him to out-of-town fishing trips, which happened more frequently as he hit retirement age. While on one such trip he chanced, or was it planned? we will never know, to run into a former co-worker he knew from when he worked in that office before transferring to the one he retired from.

It did not surprise Dierdre that two old people could be so passionate in their love, for Dierdre burns with that same passion, but she has not yet found her man to share it with so she must contain the heat of it.

This former co-worker had always been attracted to him, but she felt that since he had a wife, he was off-limits. Now all these years later, her passion is rekindled and while he is still married to “Moaning Myrtle”, they begin playing with their fire and before long, he comes back from his most recent fishing trip with the announcement that he will be divorcing, remarrying and moving to his fishing hole permanently. With fresh wails released incessantly, he made short work of getting out of there.

But the new couple would come back to visit his adult children occasionally and this is how Dierdre was able to watch the whole story unfold. Of the two adult children, the oldest, his daughter, was born Deaf. Dierdre had become an uncertified ASL Interpreter so accompanied her best friend, this Deaf daughter, to help smooth the rough edges when meeting her new step-mom. Her mom and dad had never learned to sign and they raised their daughter in the Oral Method. When the daughter reached college age, she went to a Deaf college where her eyes were opened to this whole world of Sign Language. Later, she would start teaching Sign Language Classes and it was at one of these rounds of classes that Dierdre entered this picture.

Dierdre, from a young age was fascinated with sign language. She had an encounter with a Deaf Peddler when she was about twelve years old. June was grocery shopping, with Dierdre and Max following behind the shopping cart, as June made her way across the grocery store parking lot to put her groceries in the trunk. This man, holding out a business-like card approached them. Frantically under her breath she instructed Diedre and Max to quickly get in the car and lock the doors. Diedre complied, but not before taking the card from the man’s outstretched hand.

After they got on their way out of the parking lot and down the road a ways, June finally settled her fear and drove the rest of the way home much more calm. So Dierdre took a look at what she held in her hand. It was the American English Alphabet and above each letter there was a small line drawing of a hand and fingers in various positions. Dierdre was hooked. She studied this card and practiced making the handshapes for each letter. Being a naturally good speller, after all those years of nightly drilling spelling words, she increased the speed at which she could move from one handshape to the next to spell out words. Since this was long before she would meet her Deaf friend, and learn the Rochester Method, she created her own rules of how to use this fingerspelling she learned from this card. For example, Dierdre decided you should make a diagonal slash in the air to separate words. She brought this card to school and taught a couple people there. She taught them so well in fact that Dierdre was able to cheat on a history test with her friend across the room. Since it was a multiple choice test, it was easy to hide your hand from the teacher sitting at the front of the room with half the class having their desks facing the middle of the room slightly angled toward the teacher and the other half of the class doing the same. This created a center isle down the middle of the classroom. So Dierdre and her friend just kept their hands low and it was easy to sign “one / c”, “two / a”, “three / d”, and so on.

A few days later, the teacher kept Dierdre and her friend after class to question them as both got exactly the same questions right and wrong on their test papers. But with them sitting so far apart, opposite sides of the room even, he could not figure out how, only that they must have cheated. Neither revealed the secret and Dierdre now had the power of a language all her own to share with her friends.

Years passed, Dierdre graduated college as a double major in Early Childhood and Elementary Education, receiving Teaching Credentials for both age groups. She got a job as a Kindergarten/First Grade Teacher in the same school she now works for on the daycare side. This was 1982, the year she got married.

June lived and worked at a hospital in a larger city about an hour south of Dierdre. This was the same city where June bought her house after her divorce from the man who loved screwdrivers. The nursing home June currently resides in is in the next city over.

While June was working in that hospital in 1982, there was a flyer someone had put up on the hospital bulletin board for a phone number to call if you would like to learn American Sign Language. June took one of the tabs with the number written on it and called Dierdre when she got home that night to tell her all about it.

June knew Dierdre would be excited as Dierdre began sitting with the group of Deaf people at church after she had received that card from the Deaf Peddler. None of them talked to her, but she watched the church interpreter and picked up one sign, not fingerspelling the letters of the word, but an actual hand motion you could make that meant a word so you didn’t have to spell everything. That sign was “God”. Dierdre began getting books that had sign language in them. At the time she did not understand the difference between ASL, American Sign Language on one end of the spectrum, SEE Sign, Signed Exact English at the other end, and the thing somewhere in the middle, PSE, Pidgin Sign English. Learning sign language from a book is not the easiest thing to do because it is hard to tell, sometimes, exactly what your hands should be doing to produce these words.

By this time, Dierdre had now moved to a new place and she knew no one Deaf so she did the best she could trying to figure it out and putting it all together. So here it is 1982, Dierdre is at her first teaching job and just before the school year begins, she made home visits to all of her Kindergarten pupils to help soften the transition of the child going to school for the first time with a lady there they did not know.

One of the families she visited was the home of a set of twin boys. One Hearing, one Deaf. The Hearing one, who would be in her class, waited in the house with his mother, the Deaf one stood in the driveway. Dierdre was so excited. This was the first time she could actually use her fingerspelling to communicate with an actual Deaf person. So she made the handshape for “H” then immediately the handshape for “I”. He was five years old. He had not learned any sign language yet as their family also believed in the Oral Method, and he couldn’t spell anyway so he just stood and stared at Dierdre. During the home visit Dierdre met her student and also got information about his Deaf twin. The mother explained that none of them had ever learned to sign, but she planned to, someday, so she and Dierdre made a loose plan to learn together. This never happened. In fact, the Deaf twin is now a grown man married to a hard-of-hearing wife. They have a daughter nearing the end of high school. Dierdre was his interpreter many times while his hearing daughter was in grade school at this same school in which Dierdre started out teaching. The mother has still not learned to sign and uses the Oral Method to communicate with her son to this day.

By 1985, Dierdre got tired of waiting for this mom and called the number to see if the classes were still being offered. They were, only the beginner class was now being taught by one of the adult students of the Deaf lady whose Dad would divorce his wife and marry his fishing trip friend. Dierdre signed up for the class, excelled and was introduced to the Deaf lady early on. There was a Deaf Awareness event being planned and the beginner students all worked with the hearing teacher that Dierdre started with. But the hearing teacher wanted to pass Dierdre on to her Deaf teacher. So she asked the Deaf teacher to show up at the end of class one night. She introduced her to Dierdre and left. It was very awkward but Dierdre managed to communicate with the Deaf teacher and a friendship was cast which lasted for many years before ending.

So Dierdre got to see with her own eyes how these two old people, just beginning their great love affair interacted with each other. He always opened the door for her, helped her on with her coat, even teasing her by grasping the coat sleeve near the bottom of it as she tried to put her hand and arm into the sleeve, and laughing with each other when she discovered the reason for her difficulty. She was a vibrant woman and he a virile man.

As dementia started to work its terrible effects on her brain, she voiced her great regret that she let him go all those years ago instead of fighting for him to divorce then and start their life many years earlier so they would have had lots more time together. He died not long after her. They said “old age” but Dierdre could see it was a “broken heart”.

The third time Dierdre witnessed this deep soulmate kind of love between two people was from 2014-2017. Dierdre was teaching at a school in the next small town over. This was a classical education school and Dierdre fit right in with the two other teachers who were getting this school up and running again. Dierdre worked there till 2017 when it was discovered she had rectal cancer and she had to quit teaching to endure surgery to remove it from her body.

But for the years she taught there she was the teacher of the first through third graders as well as the PE, Physical Education, teacher for Kindergarten through eighth grade and English as a Second Language to two boys adopted by one of the families. They were from China, although unrelated. The younger boy was the age that placed him in Dierdre’s first through third grade room. The other boy, more like fifth grade, but having hardly any English, was placed in Dierdre’s room to see if she could get him speaking and understanding English.

Having no training whatsoever in teaching English as a Second Language, she leaned heavily on her sign language skills and hands-on activities to get him proficient enough in English that he could move back up to grade level.

Another student that Dierdre had in her first through third grade classroom was the son of an old local legend Folksy/Blues/Classic Rock singer/guitar player who had married one of his groupies. While you could see the love and appreciation in his eyes for his wife, the real evidence of their soulmate status was in the eyes of his younger wife who always looked on him with such adoration and care. She took care of the whole business side of booking gigs, merch, web sites, bookkeeping, instrument maintenance as well as getting all equipment to each gig, set up, sound checked, taken down, packed up and brought home and unpacked. This was all on top of household duties and the vast majority of care for their son they had together as well as preparing meals and managing the old man’s diet and really every detail of his life so he could focus on his music. His deep appreciation for and respect of all she did for him permeated their life together. It is a beautiful love story which continues to this day, him being 78 years old.

So Dierdre knows it exists, this connected sort of affection and passion. She has seen it. She knows its essence, its heart, its depth, its life-altering change that those rare few who find it have experienced. Dierdre lives a version of it in the place where her soul now lives. Down that forest path to that stone cottage with the big central fireplace, near the pond where the big rock sits in the shade of one old oak, this is where you will find Dierdre writing the stories that only she can tell 🐝

🌺 The End 🐝

Epilogue

Dierdre’s trajectory is catapulted toward the stars

The trip is not aided by bikes or fast cars

The fuel is not found in pubs or in bars

~~

Her baggage is light

She left it all behind

Her future is bright

Her companions so kind

~~

For this is not a solo flight

Come join her if you dare

Bring your pen and paper

You are always welcome there

~~

The in-flight meal is always ready

Daily fare includes

Sun and Moon, Wind and Rain

Your portion size, you’ll choose

~~

The path is strewn with flower petals

Like bread crumbs left to guide

Like Pilgrims we will walk together

Moving side by side

~~

The joy is in the journey

And in the destination too

If you’re brave come join us

Be a part of our Crew

~~

Cast your fears aside

Keep your eyes on the prize

Writing your own story

Your dreams to realize 🌺🐝

Stacy, the youngest of June’s four children, and favorite by far, while receiving many perks connected with this status, also had to endure and bear the weight of it, for it truly costs something to be June’s favorite.

Working in the world of money, Stacy embodied the thing that June truly put her trust in. Careful money management and saving, allowed June to amass a small fortune. There were three banks right down the street from the house she lived in after divorcing the man who loved screwdrivers, and she was proud of the fact that she had two of the three “maxed out”. She had nursing home insurance so when the time came she could go to the one of her choosing, one that did not smell like pee.

Yes, Stacy was the favored one, for Bonnie had married a man known for shady deals, and an uncanny knack for making money off the backs of others. So while Bonnie and her family were able to wine and dine all over the globe, June resented Bonnie’s husband, and thereby Bonnie, for his perceived ill-gotten gains. For June had prospered through hard graft, living within her means and diligently saving. Max and his wife both had computer related jobs but nothing extravagant, and Dierdre working in childcare while her husband worked in construction and janitorial services, always struggled to find two nickels to rub together. June had no respect for any of them.

After college, Stacy married a man, with whom she would ultimately become incompatible. She was actually incompatible from the start, but thought marrying him could somehow sway things. He embraced some of the tenets of his religion pertaining to having a large family, but told Stacy he really did not care what she believed about the doctrines his religion taught, even though he believed that not correctly adhering to those doctrines would damn her for eternity. Stacy did not want children, she rejected his religion, and it did not take her long to divorce him.

While growing her money was always the central theme of her everyday life, Stacy also put great effort into her all-female soccer team, her canine companions, hiking and forestry. Ever the architect of another woman’s dreams, she built a life suited to her desires.

She lived across the country from June, but Stacy would come to visit in June for her birthday and again at the end of the year. They would go to the best restaurants, always on June’s dime, and talk into the wee hours of the morning, with June hanging onto every word Stacy said and telling her how smart Stacy was and so good with money. Not keen on sharing Stacy’s visiting time with anyone else, June did allow Dierdre and Max to join them for one meal while Stacy was in town. Bonnie, who lived down south was exempt.

Every few years June would treat Stacy to a trip to another place on June’s Bucket List, visiting places like Hawaii, Australia and countless other iconic places.

Each visit would always end with lots of tears from June’s eyes and much talk about how much Stacy would be missed by June till she came to visit again. Besides being well supplied while Stacy was in town visiting, June would send her back fully reimbursed for all expenses paid.

The many weeks between the visits each featured one full-length phone call which Stacy endured for what would seem like hours. Mixed with equal parts of June talking about herself and listening to Stacy do the same. Really! Two peas in a pod, this arrangement went on for years.

Then June’s health seemed to be diminishing and Stacy had to make more frequent trips in to accompany June to doctor visits and lawyers to get Stacy set up as the one person in complete control of June’s money, health and every other life decision. June always perked up so much when Stacy was with her that it was easy to be suspicious of the real extent of her decline. Stacy would go back to her home again and June would again stop eating, and at only about 90 pounds soaking wet, it didn’t take much to seem dramatic on her small frame.

A world-wide pandemic hit all shores of this world and June masked up and hid indoors. She would have her groceries delivered. She canceled all family get-togethers. She would speak to anyone that went to her house from inside the upstairs window down to the driveway where a visitor was to remain. Except Stacy, of course. Masked up and holding onto Stacy’s arm, June went to restaurants and all the other things she always did with Stacy when she was in town.

At some point, the doctors said that due to the effects of years of smoking, June had had a small stroke. She was no longer able to write in the beautifully precise handwriting she had always done, but with rehab and therapy she regained most of her skills. Dierdre was probably the only one who really noticed as she was the only one out of the four siblings who ever cared about actually putting a real pen against real paper and communicating through the handwritten word. June was famous for her handwritten lists of all types. Addresses and phone numbers, birthdays and anniversaries, each in their appropriate books, shopping lists, to-do lists, chores to be done by the children before she got home, paper checks written to pay bills, time sheets she had to submit for the nurses on her floor, recipe cards, full holiday menus and so many other things she wrote by hand.

Unlike Max with his computer and Bonnie and Stacy being born into a much more technology focused world, these three did not have much use for the handwritten word. June also refused to learn any type of computer skills no matter how much Max tried to convince her it was the way of the future. June only eventually allowed Stacy to get WIFI set up in her house because Stacy demanded it so that she could continue working when she was in town for a visit.

Although June finally quit smoking after several attempts following the stroke, eventually the damage she had done became apparent in her breathing. Stacy ordered home health nurses to visit daily as she could not be with June full time as her prestigious job in the investment banking world required her to be in office and around the world as the head of a particularly large segment of investors.

The nurses would report their findings to Stacy and they became increasingly alarmed at June’s breathing difficulties. They strongly urged Stacy to have June transported to the hospital, which she did and then flew in to see for herself. June was eventually discharged to a nursing home for rehab with the intention, in June’s mind, of going back home. Stacy had other ideas. Believing June would never recover sufficiently and with diagnosed early stage onset of dementia, Stacy arranged for June’s placement in the nursing home they chose on one of the previous visits. Her room was in the assisted living wing. There are other wings set up specifically for dementia care and full nursing home care.

During the course of making all these arrangements, June was asked if she would like to move out west and live by Stacy. To everyone’s shock, she refused. She did not want to change doctors was the reason she gave.

Having more down days than up, Stacy decided to sell June’s house. Of course this meant removing all the items from her parents’ house that she had packed floor to ceiling downstairs, as well as everything she brought with her when she moved there in 1983 and everything she had accumulated since.

Stacy arranged for her three siblings to each go through the house and note on a spreadsheet which items they particularly wanted and Stacy would do the same. Dierdre went through and saw all the things she could have used when she had a young family but was told she could not have them then. No need of them now, especially since she had fully embraced the minimalist lifestyle. Max went through and although he wanted lots of things, his wife followed behind, constantly asking Max where he planned to put it since they were down to just narrow pathways in their home. Bonnie, still residing several states to the south, chose items that had come from her father such as a set of dishes, rosewood handled dinnerware, a brass dragon with a concealed lighter in the head and a brass sculpture of a deity all obtained when he was stationed in the Orient. Stacy didn’t want any of it as she had all of her things already that were much more classy than anything that would be pulled out of boxes or backs of cabinets or stuffed in drawers.

A huge dumpster was ordered and most everything found its final resting place there. Dierdre, in shocked disbelief, watched as Bonnie and Stacy went through all the scrapbooks ripping out certain photographs and chucking the rest of the lot in the bin. She held her tongue as Stacy had the final say on everything, as she held the legal document to prove it.

With Stacy at the helm, June’s money seems to be holding out as she continues in her private pay private room in assisted living. Dierdre chats to her mom occasionally, hearing the same sentences again and again. Max visits rarely as the bickering with his mother begins almost as soon as he walks through her door. Bonnie comes up for a visit every few years and Stacy continues with June and December, being sure to have scheduled all her mother’s doctors appointments for either of those two times.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the richest, smartest, most open-minded, most capable of them all?

Well, it depends on how you define riches, smarts, open-mindedness and capability. And Dierdre, Max, Bonnie and Stacy each have very different definitions 🐝

Living and growing up in a house with a mother and three sisters, with the occasional visits from his mother-loving Grandma and silent Grandpa caused a certain kind of twist in his thinking that would affect his whole life.

June had been forced into being both mother and father to all four of her children out of necessity. Single-parent households, while championed by single parents, often leave a lot to be desired. Mentoring schemes sounded great in the ads, but never materialized.

So Max grew up without all those typical guy skills like how to change a tire or the oil in his car. He did not know how to build anything or even make minor repairs. Swinging a hammer or wielding a wrench, both literally and figuratively, were never to be part of his life, nor was any sort of military service, so he focused on computer skills and eventually got a job, through the influence of June, at the hospital where she was head nurse. She meant well by helping Max in this way, but also robbed him of that special kind of self-respect, even pride, of being a strong, capable man.

Max turned out to be very emotion-driven and seemed to fit in and find his place among a group of other men and women, along with their children, who called everyday life, the real world, “mundane” and came together regularly to live out a sort of fantasy, medieval life.

It was as if the Dungeons and Dragons game he was obsessed with in his teens, had come to life, and he got to create his persona including his name and a version of who he was and what he did. He chose fighter and chainmail maker. Accepting only authentic practices and period-garb, he created his “weaponry” and protective gear. He would battle other men similarly clad. If he managed to strike his opponent in the leg, his counterpart would have to continue fighting while hopping around on one leg. The “fighting” continued till a winner was determined to be the lone survivor of the battle.

He pledged allegiance to his king and queen of the kingdom he lived in in the mundane world and enjoyed going to balls and events sponsored by the local chapter of this organization.

He became very skilled as a chainmail creator, even creating some very evocative pieces of a sexual nature, popular with a certain subset group who participated in bringing to life that side of medieval life. He dabbled in leather work, making the various bags and pouches to hold his tools and supplied, although he did not hunt, kill, skin or tan the hides he used. He received orders and sold items from his booth at various weekend events the society sponsored.

Deciding early on that Max did not want to have any children of his own, ever, he married a divorced woman with a teenage daughter. Sometimes it was hard to tell who the biggest child was in that house. The mother and daughter fully embraced Max’s world and participated whole-heartedly in his way of life. In the mundane world, his wife, too, worked at a computer job doing billing and coding for a doctor in his office. In their medieval weekend world she and Max practiced and taught medieval dance.

June’s parents had both died and now there was a whole household full of furniture for June to deal with. Try as she might, she could not bring herself to let go of any of their more personal possessions. Since Max now lived in his own house with his wife and her daughter, June packed his room on the lower level of her split-level home, as well as the adjoining room, from floor to ceiling, making any normal use of that space impossible. The girls had all, also, already moved out, so it was no hardship for June to just live upstairs.

This inability to part with anything found its way into Max. He, too, began hoarding items, never able to make a decision about anything, everything being so emotionally charged, that they stopped inviting people over. His wife’s daughter was so relieved when she got married and moved out as it was such an oppressive atmosphere in that house. The daughter has expressed, multiple times through the years, that the thought of having to clean out Max and her mom’s house, when the time comes, is totally overwhelming.

While June’s health held, she would have family get-togethers. She always made sure to prepare a chocolate pie for Max alone. Never quite satisfied with this, he would argue over the last piece of pizza with his nephew, who was a child.

With all the changes in the economy, downsizing happened and Max found himself unemployed. He eventually got on as a greeter at a big-box store and had to plaster on a smile for the hours he was at work to conceal the fact that he had actually become a frustrated, angry, old man whose voice always carries a hint of a whine 🐝

It’s not that they looked like each other, they didn’t. Dierdre looked like her father and Bonnie looked like their mother. Each the oldest of the two sibling sets bound together by half blood and a legal form. No they did not favor each other in face, but they had a connected bond deeper than blood and time.

Being only two years old, Bonnie could not have done what she did and said what she said because she had heard the stories. So when it happened, June and Dierdre experienced something they could never quite name in the past. It was as if time were repeating itself. For it was, literally verbatim.

Dierdre had one vivid memory from the time when she was two years old, with a baby brother, Max. Their dad, out of the Psyche Ward for just a short time after June had committed him on the day she gave birth to Max, was at home and standing in his and June’s bedroom. This bedroom sat at the end of the hall. The door opened into the room and swung to the right against the closet. To the left was the bed pushed tight to the wall at the top. Across from the foot of the bed was the far wall with their dresser against that wall. There was just enough space to walk into the room, walk along the edge of the bed, turn to the left at the end of the bed between the bed and dresser and turn left again to the small space between that side of the bed and the window wall.

Dierdre’s dad was standing in front of the window while June sat on their bed propped up on her pillow. He was yelling at June and June was crying. Dierdre heard it. She ran down the hall and jumped onto the bed. Wrapping her arms around June’s neck, she told her dad to leave her mommy alone and stop hurting her.

On that winter day thirteen years later, Dierdre and Max were home from school. Dierdre was playing in the front room with Bonnie and Max was playing with Stacy close by.

June had walked down the hall from the bedroom she shared with the man who loved screwdrivers more than life itself. She was standing in the front room and he followed her down the hall. He was yelling at June and June was crying. Bonnie heard it. She ran across the front room and wrapped her arms around June’s leg at the knee. Bonnie told her dad to leave her mommy alone and stop hurting her.

In that instant, June and Dierdre looked at each other. Time stopped. He even stopped yelling as he could see no attention was on him. The world stood still as June and Dierdre, both speechless, continued to stare at each other. They felt the enormity of the weight that comes with finally understanding that even though time had passed, the patterns were repeating.

Although Bonnie was too young to understand it at the time, the bond between her and Dierdre was forever forged 🐝

Longing To Belong

Dierdre pushed herself back from the table. She had to escape, but it had to be executed quietly for if she caught their attention, she would never be allowed to leave.

In her mind, she had already gone there several times during the day. That spot near the pond with the big old oak tree. It was her happy, peaceful, quiet place where she could roll her thoughts around in her head, stretch them out and make sense of them.

She had a family or rather, they had her. Sort of like the junk drawer that never gets cleaned out, she was among the possessions her family owned. Not the fancy, expensive, cherished things they had on display, just part of the drawer full of things that gets rummaged through now and again.

The door was just around the corner and soon everyone moved the other way to the kitchen and to the den. This was her chance. She got to the door, opened it slowly, passed through and shut it gently. She made her way across the yard to the far corner and passed through the gate.

It was safe now to run as fast as she could all the way down the lane to the place where the road split off. The main road headed into town, but the side road narrowed to a path through the trees.

This was her favorite part of the walk so she slowed down to enjoy every bit of it. Just a short way in, she noticed the air was cooler on her cheeks which had grown quite flush from running. The scent of the trees hit her and she filled her lungs deeply.

At first, it was quiet, but as she slowed her pace and calmed her breathing, she started to hear the familiar sounds of the birds that made this part of the woods their home.

The shade here under the trees danced with the patches of sunlight that managed to make their way in, and she found her favorite stick she left propped by a tree.

She walked with the stick like a pilgrim on the road. It gave her an air of dignity and helped her to lift her head, straighten her back and unhunch her shoulders. Her mission was to arrive at the pond by the oak and she became more resolved with each step to reach this spot and partake fully of all that it offered.

Her thoughts were all a jumble, but as she felt the steady rhythm of her hickory stick, these too began to calm and she started to sort through them. It always came down to the same thing - Why did it matter so much that she had no place she felt she truly belonged?

She had tried to fit in in lots of different ways and places, but each time she felt tolerated never celebrated the way the others were. It was as if she were invisible, so she learned to use that to help her slip away. Out here, she didn’t have to feel the sting of rejection as there was no one else around.

Any time she had to leave, no one begged for her to stay, nor even suggested they would like to go with her.

The end of the path through the trees opened up to a clearing and there was her pond and the one lone oak tree.

Like her, it stood by itself, apart from all the trees in the path. It stood near enough to the water to benefit when all the other trees seemed to droop in the heat. She took off her shoes and socks and rolled up her pants legs and waded into the pond. The water was crisp and clean and soothing to her feet.

She started to notice more things about the oak compared to the trees on the path. While they were all bunched together, the oak seemed to have room to spread its branches. It grew far taller than all the other trees who constantly had to compete for nutrients from the soil, rain and sun.

And her oak seemed to know who it was, not part of a group, but a thing of beauty all by itself. She wondered if she could ever feel this way about herself. Not needing others to hold her up. Not needing companions to chat with, and standing tall in her own truths.

And yet, the longing to belong persisted. By this time, she had reached the big rock that sat on the side of the pond nearest the oak. This was the spot on which she always sat, and today was no exception. Propping her hiking stick against the oak tree she hopped up on the rock. She unrolled her pants legs so they could begin to dry in the air and sun. She put her socks and shoes back on and laid back on her rock. She watched the clouds float past her overhead and tried to see pictures in them.

She knew she would have to head back soon, so she shut her eyes for a bit. She even managed to not think about anything for a while and relished this experience.

As all pilgrims must, she could not remain on her rock top, so she hopped down, picked up her stick and headed for home.

Home, or rather the house she lived in, would remain so for the time being, but one day she would create the space where she finally belonged 🐝

Part 2

Dierdre’s Burning

Dierdre was married on a summer’s day in June over four decades ago. The day was swelteringly hot and the long white gown kept all the heat in.

She had simply traded one narrow-perspective family structure for another. Taught rigid rules of right and wrong. Proper things about which you could speak. Appropriate places a respectable person could go. So all the heat was kept in, contained, managed, submerged, hidden, glossed-over and ignored.

She spent her days caring for the children and shuffling the bills from pile to pile. Some days she slept away, hoping tomorrow would be better. If the children had something to say, she was hushed until they spoke. Though the injustice of it all sat in her throat, she had to keep all the heat in.

Family rules were established for the children and Dierdre had to be the enforcer. No swimming suits without shorts, no walking to the library unattended, turn your eyes away at the hint of anything remotely sexual on TV and limit sweets. She would scream and cry at the sky, but in front of them she had to keep the heat in.

Friends were few, if you could call them friends at all. They were all a part of the influencing group of men whose wives repeated all the men’s lines. Each kept a vegetable garden, canned, cooked, cleaned and kept their image spotless. Dierdre’s world was nowhere near that as rot and decay set into the wood of their house. Splinters from the floorboards threatening to puncture the hands and knees of her children as they crawled around. Hand-me-down furniture set in rooms that never saw fresh paint. She endlessly rearranged the furniture trying to feel like she had something new, but change was never appreciated. She did it anyway, as it was the one thing she had control over. Dierdre was quick to offer to put it back, if that was required, but usually did not prove necessary. There were other people’s houses to build so hers crumbled around her and she had to keep the heat in.

While other families went on yearly holidays and summer vacations, Dierdre’s plans were always shot down as there was neither time nor money, money nor time. She could pick which order she said them in, but regardless, it meant no trips.

Other families had birthday parties, Christmas parties, and summer gatherings. Dierdre’s children had a few parties when they were younger, but eventually no Christmas gifts were given or received any more, no birthday presents or parties were bought or planned and the heat of the guilt Dierdre felt for wanting to receive gifts had to be kept in.

Eventually the children all grew up and left home so Dierdre had to go back to work. Having spent her years raising children, she got a job in childcare. In the beginning everything seemed to run according to common sense and reasonable expectations. If the children were instructed to participate in an activity, they did so. If the children were told to act more polite and dignified, they complied. Then, for reasons she could never quite figure out, the culture shifted. The children made demands that Dierdre was expected to meet, regardless of the fact that she could clearly see this would not ultimately be in the children’s best interest. The children began refusing to do anything they did not want to do and were not afraid to look Dierdre, and the other workers, right in the face and tell them that they can’t make them. Dierdre tried to reason with the higher-ups and explain her discomfort at following this new agenda, but was offered two choices, swallow the heat of it or find employment elsewhere. Dierdre had no car, so was stuck working here as it was across the street from where she lived and besides, it was the only daycare in the whole town.

Now, the problem with keeping the heat in means you eventually get burned. And burn she did! All the dreams she had as a little girl. All the hopes of life as a wife and mother. She watched each ship sail without her being on it. Her desires for love and affection all burned away.

But Dierdre remained. Light and free and boundless. Gone was the baggage she had to carry. Gone were the expectations of beliefs and practices. Gone were the judgements and demands that shackled her. For Dierdre now lives in the world she creates with her pen and paper. Her mind free to flow where it will. Dierdre now sings in the rain and stomps the puddles. She exchanges stories with the birds, bees, butterflies, turtles and squirrels that visit her flower garden and she provides water for their refreshment. She takes her hickory stick and walks whichever way she chooses.

Dierdre finally belongs … to herself 🐝

Part 3

June

Although they would never speak about such things, they both felt the same. They wanted, no needed, this baby to be a boy. It was long before the days when people could find out ahead of time, so they had to wait.

The time came on a day in early June. They left the farm and went into town to the local general hospital. What could have been a routine delivery turned out to be anything but routine and resulted in a total removal of all future possibility of having more children. So this child would be the first, last and only child this couple would ever have.

The mother received her baby with joy regardless, but the father was so disappointed. All the help he dreamed of having at planting time and harvest time and butchering time, not to mention the daily work involved on a farm with both animals and crops, were gone in that final push. Not that he was in the room to see it, but when those two words were relayed to him, “girl” and “hysterectomy”, he couldn’t help but drop his head.

For lack of a better idea, they named her “June”. As she grew she learned the language her parents spoke at home and the language of the preacher, the teacher and the people in town at the country store. She accompanied her dad to the barn to help gather eggs, but never did any real farm work. She would climb up the side of the grain silo and holler, “Huehnerscheisse” and when they got back to the house, her mom always said, “Ach, June!”

Her school friends gifted her with the nickname, “Skinny”, so it was no wonder that all her attempts to be useful for her dad resulted in some version of, “You’re just a girl” or “Why couldn’t you have been a boy?!”

It was no surprise then that she dreamed of getting off the farm and moving to the big city. She eventually achieved this when she headed off to nurses’ training. She did well and got a position at a hospital. She got married to an orderly who worked at the same hospital. He had been married before, to another nurse, with whom he had a boy and a girl.

Although she suspected some sort of issue with him, June was sure she could fix whatever was wrong. She had a daughter, Dierdre, and a son, Max, with him, but he would not be around much. In fact, she went to the floor of the hospital that contained the Psych Ward and had him committed, then went to the Maternity Ward and gave birth to Max. He would be in and out of the Psych Ward a number of times and even pick up a drug and alcohol problem that landed him on the streets after June divorced him when Dierdre was two and a half and Max was six months old. He ended up dying in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1979.

June got up before dawn every day to get herself and her children dressed and ready. She put on her white nurses’ uniform with white hose and white shoes and prepared her hair, held in place by generous amounts of hair spray, to receive her white nurses’ cap when she arrived at the hospital. June chose either her green or blue eye shadow and pink lipstick that she carefully blotted using a square of toilet paper folded in half. The final touch was a spritz of Estee Lauder perfume on her neck and wrists.

While she drank her cup of instant coffee, leaving a perfect pink lip on the rim, and smoked her Kent, which picked up a perfect pink pucker, she got Dierdre and Max dressed and gave them a bowl of cereal to finish before leaving the house to drop them off with the babysitter. They would drive away from the house, but most mornings June had to head back home to check the ash tray and the stove knobs.

Once the kids were dropped off, she headed to the hospital where she was a registered nurse and donned her white nurses’ cap. Dierdre and Max would walk to and from school with the babysitter’s sons so they were taken care of till it was time to pick them up in the evening. June would drill spelling words and memory work with the children after supper of scrambled eggs and toast or some such meal. She would pin her air up in her pink curlers and put the pink scarf on her head.

To save money, June closed off the second bedroom of her small house in the city. She would sleep on one side of the double bed and Dierdre and Max would take turns between the middle and the other side. She would tell them a bedtime story till she fell asleep. One night she began telling them about Daniel from the Bible who was thrown into the lion’s den for refusing to bow to the king. Only this night, her mind drifting towards sleep with thoughts of her day persisting, she said they put Daniel in a wheelchair. Of course, this got the kids all excited and they poked her in the back telling her what she had just said.

Being very careful with her money was a way of life for June so it was especially hard when she would arrive home from work to discover her ex-husband had broken in and stolen all the food and milk she had on hand. He did not limit this behavior to just June. He would go to his parents wanting them to give him some bread, man and beating them up when they refused to turn over the cash.

June always paid her bills on time and set money aside for a vacation every summer. She would take Dierdre and Max down to the farm to be with their grandparents while June and her mom sewed school clothes for both of them. Without fail, June endlessly droned on to her mother about all the things she did at the hospital. You would get the idea that the whole hospital would collapse if June were not there. Her mother fed this by always saying how smart June was and that they were just dumb farmers. Then they would head to Wisconsin Dells, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee or some other equally exciting place. June was a big fan of AAA TripTiks and had the Triple A agent map out their route in their handy maps and she marked all the sites they wanted to see in the book that went along with each location they were headed to.

Always on the lookout for things she could put in the scrapbooks, June was careful to save souvenirs from each place. Napkins with the name of a restaurant, post cards purchased at gift shops, anything small and flat. These, along with all the pictures she would get developed from the rolls of film from her Kodak Instamatic Camera would be divided and sorted and arranged and organized and carefully placed in scrapbooks. This activity went on for many months after arriving back from the vacation. June would carefully place the picture corners on each photograph, lick it and place it into the scrapbook. She would then write and write about each picture, each napkin, each post card. She could relive the whole trip with each entry she made.

Birthdays always included a family party, a cake and presents. And June was always well prepared for Christmas Eve. The story always went the same way – Santie Claus won’t come if you don’t go to church. While Dierdre and Max got settled in the car, June went to go check her ash tray. When they arrived back from Christmas Eve service at church, Santie Claus had already been there. All the presents were opened and June and the children ate sloppy joes with potato chips and French onion dip.

During the first eight years after her divorce, June went on a few dates. One man took her and her kids to the drive-in-movies. He played in the park with them, pushing the children on the swings or spinning the merry-go-round for them, and took them to the concession stand to get snacks, then back to the car for the movie.

June met another man who was in the military. She brought him down to the farm to meet her parents. They both warned her that something was off with him. Convinced that she could fix him, she went ahead and married him. For quite a while he was stationed three hours away, so he only came home on the weekends. He enjoyed screwdrivers, so she made sure to have the necessary ingredients on hand. He legally adopted Dierdre and Max when Dierdre was ten years old and Max, eight. Then he got transferred down south, and he was home every night. Turned out that screwdrivers were not a thing reserved for weekends.

They had two daughters, and June continued to work in hospitals and home health as they were stationed in various places. Yearly trips to the farm continued as did June’s attempts to convince her father that she was important through all the hospital stories she told. Her father always remained quiet and her mother continued to listen with rapt attention. Her husband’s red face and the screwdriver in his hand was the proof of her parents’ warning.

June remained married for eight years and then divorced him. By this time she was now a head nurse and Dierdre and Max had headed off to college, leaving the two younger sisters at home.

Since June had never seemed to convince her father of her worth, she set her sights on convincing each of her now grown children that she was the most important figure in each of their lives. Ever driving wedges between the siblings, turning each of them against the others, she was now the center of each of their individual attentions.

Eventually the siblings figured it out as they began to compare notes and a degree of resentment grew in each of them toward their mother, and so much time had passed, and they all lived far apart, so the siblings would never really be that close.

All those years of smoking finally caught up with June’s lungs and dementia began stealing her memories. But she continues to talk about herself, still trying to convince someone, anyone, her long-dead dad, maybe even herself, that even though she was a girl, she had value 🐝

Part 4

The Day Their World Stood Still

This day had started like so many before it, with too many screwdrivers. Dierdre was fifteen years old and Max thirteen. Bonnie was two years old and Stacy just six months old.

It’s not that they looked like each other, they didn’t. Dierdre looked like her father and Bonnie looked like their mother. Each the oldest of the two sibling sets bound together by half blood and a legal form. No they did not favor each other in face, but they had a connected bond deeper than blood and time.

Being only two years old, Bonnie could not have done what she did and said what she said because she had heard the stories. So when it happened, June and Dierdre experienced something they could never quite name in the past. It was as if time were repeating itself. For it was, literally verbatim.

Dierdre had one vivid memory from the time when she was two years old, with a baby brother, Max. Their dad, out of the Psyche Ward for just a short time after June had committed him on the day she gave birth to Max, was at home and standing in his and June’s bedroom. This bedroom sat at the end of the hall. The door opened into the room and swung to the right against the closet. To the left was the bed pushed tight to the wall at the top. Across from the foot of the bed was the far wall with their dresser against that wall. There was just enough space to walk into the room, walk along the edge of the bed, turn to the left at the end of the bed between the bed and dresser and turn left again to the small space between that side of the bed and the window wall.

Dierdre’s dad was standing in front of the window while June sat on their bed propped up on her pillow. He was yelling at June and June was crying. Dierdre heard it. She ran down the hall and jumped onto the bed. Wrapping her arms around June’s neck, she told her dad to leave her mommy alone and stop hurting her.

On that winter day thirteen years later, Dierdre and Max were home from school. Dierdre was playing in the front room with Bonnie and Max was playing with Stacy close by.

June had walked down the hall from the bedroom she shared with the man who loved screwdrivers more than life itself. She was standing in the front room and he followed her down the hall. He was yelling at June and June was crying. Bonnie heard it. She ran across the front room and wrapped her arms around June’s leg at the knee. Bonnie told her dad to leave her mommy alone and stop hurting her.

In that instant, June and Dierdre looked at each other. Time stopped. He even stopped yelling as he could see no attention was on him. The world stood still as June and Dierdre, both speechless, continued to stare at each other. They felt the enormity of the weight that comes with finally understanding that even though time had passed, the patterns were repeating.

Although Bonnie was too young to understand it at the time, the bond between her and Dierdre was forever forged 🐝

Part 5

Max

Men raised by women without the regular, positive influence of a good man would be the subgroup in which Max found himself.

Living and growing up in a house with a mother and three sisters, with the occasional visits from his mother-loving Grandma and silent Grandpa caused a certain kind of twist in his thinking that would affect his whole life.

June had been forced into being both mother and father to all four of her children out of necessity. Single-parent households, while championed by single parents, often leave a lot to be desired. Mentoring schemes sounded great in the ads, but never materialized.

So Max grew up without all those typical guy skills like how to change a tire or the oil in his car. He did not know how to build anything or even make minor repairs. Swinging a hammer or wielding a wrench, both literally and figuratively, were never to be part of his life, nor was any sort of military service, so he focused on computer skills and eventually got a job, through the influence of June, at the hospital where she was head nurse. She meant well by helping Max in this way, but also robbed him of that special kind of self-respect, even pride, of being a strong, capable man.

Max turned out to be very emotion-driven and seemed to fit in and find his place among a group of other men and women, along with their children, who called everyday life, the real world, “mundane” and came together regularly to live out a sort of fantasy, medieval life.

It was as if the Dungeons and Dragons game he was obsessed with in his teens, had come to life, and he got to create his persona including his name and a version of who he was and what he did. He chose fighter and chainmail maker. Accepting only authentic practices and period-garb, he created his “weaponry” and protective gear. He would battle other men similarly clad. If he managed to strike his opponent in the leg, his counterpart would have to continue fighting while hopping around on one leg. The “fighting” continued till a winner was determined to be the lone survivor of the battle.

He pledged allegiance to his king and queen of the kingdom he lived in in the mundane world and enjoyed going to balls and events sponsored by the local chapter of this organization.

He became very skilled as a chainmail creator, even creating some very evocative pieces of a sexual nature, popular with a certain subset group who participated in bringing to life that side of medieval life. He dabbled in leather work, making the various bags and pouches to hold his tools and supplied, although he did not hunt, kill, skin or tan the hides he used. He received orders and sold items from his booth at various weekend events the society sponsored.

Deciding early on that Max did not want to have any children of his own, ever, he married a divorced woman with a teenage daughter. Sometimes it was hard to tell who the biggest child was in that house. The mother and daughter fully embraced Max’s world and participated whole-heartedly in his way of life. In the mundane world, his wife, too, worked at a computer job doing billing and coding for a doctor in his office. In their medieval weekend world she and Max practiced and taught medieval dance.

June’s parents had both died and now there was a whole household full of furniture for June to deal with. Try as she might, she could not bring herself to let go of any of their more personal possessions. Since Max now lived in his own house with his wife and her daughter, June packed his room on the lower level of her split-level home, as well as the adjoining room, from floor to ceiling, making any normal use of that space impossible. The girls had all, also, already moved out, so it was no hardship for June to just live upstairs.

This inability to part with anything found its way into Max. He, too, began hoarding items, never able to make a decision about anything, everything being so emotionally charged, that they stopped inviting people over. His wife’s daughter was so relieved when she got married and moved out as it was such an oppressive atmosphere in that house. The daughter has expressed, multiple times through the years, that the thought of having to clean out Max and her mom’s house, when the time comes, is totally overwhelming.

While June’s health held, she would have family get-togethers. She always made sure to prepare a chocolate pie for Max alone. Never quite satisfied with this, he would argue over the last piece of pizza with his nephew, who was a child.

With all the changes in the economy, downsizing happened and Max found himself unemployed. He eventually got on as a greeter at a big-box store and had to plaster on a smile for the hours he was at work to conceal the fact that he had actually become a frustrated, angry, old man whose voice always carries a hint of a whine 🐝

Part 6

Stacy

The richest and smartest of them all, or so she thinks. The most open-minded and capable of them all, or so she thinks. The most loved and adored of them all, by June, yes, this she is.

Stacy, the youngest of June’s four children, and favorite by far, while receiving many perks connected with this status, also had to endure and bear the weight of it, for it truly costs something to be June’s favorite.

Working in the world of money, Stacy embodied the thing that June truly put her trust in. Careful money management and saving, allowed June to amass a small fortune. There were three banks right down the street from the house she lived in after divorcing the man who loved screwdrivers, and she was proud of the fact that she had two of the three “maxed out”. She had nursing home insurance so when the time came she could go to the one of her choosing, one that did not smell like pee.

Yes, Stacy was the favored one, for Bonnie had married a man known for shady deals, and an uncanny knack for making money off the backs of others. So while Bonnie and her family were able to wine and dine all over the globe, June resented Bonnie’s husband, and thereby Bonnie, for his perceived ill-gotten gains. For June had prospered through hard graft, living within her means and diligently saving. Max and his wife both had computer related jobs but nothing extravagant, and Dierdre working in childcare while her husband worked in construction and janitorial services, always struggled to find two nickels to rub together. June had no respect for any of them.

After college, Stacy married a man, with whom she would ultimately become incompatible. She was actually incompatible from the start, but thought marrying him could somehow sway things. He embraced some of the tenets of his religion pertaining to having a large family, but told Stacy he really did not care what she believed about the doctrines his religion taught, even though he believed that not correctly adhering to those doctrines would damn her for eternity. Stacy did not want children, she rejected his religion, and it did not take her long to divorce him.

While growing her money was always the central theme of her everyday life, Stacy also put great effort into her all-female soccer team, her canine companions, hiking and forestry. Ever the architect of another woman’s dreams, she built a life suited to her desires.

She lived across the country from June, but Stacy would come to visit in June for her birthday and again at the end of the year. They would go to the best restaurants, always on June’s dime, and talk into the wee hours of the morning, with June hanging onto every word Stacy said and telling her how smart Stacy was and so good with money. Not keen on sharing Stacy’s visiting time with anyone else, June did allow Dierdre and Max to join them for one meal while Stacy was in town. Bonnie, who lived down south was exempt.

Every few years June would treat Stacy to a trip to another place on June’s Bucket List, visiting places like Hawaii, Australia and countless other iconic places.

Each visit would always end with lots of tears from June’s eyes and much talk about how much Stacy would be missed by June till she came to visit again. Besides being well supplied while Stacy was in town visiting, June would send her back fully reimbursed for all expenses paid.

The many weeks between the visits each featured one full-length phone call which Stacy endured for what would seem like hours. Mixed with equal parts of June talking about herself and listening to Stacy do the same. Really! Two peas in a pod, this arrangement went on for years.

Then June’s health seemed to be diminishing and Stacy had to make more frequent trips in to accompany June to doctor visits and lawyers to get Stacy set up as the one person in complete control of June’s money, health and every other life decision. June always perked up so much when Stacy was with her that it was easy to be suspicious of the real extent of her decline. Stacy would go back to her home again and June would again stop eating, and at only about 90 pounds soaking wet, it didn’t take much to seem dramatic on her small frame.

A world-wide pandemic hit all shores of this world and June masked up and hid indoors. She would have her groceries delivered. She canceled all family get-togethers. She would speak to anyone that went to her house from inside the upstairs window down to the driveway where a visitor was to remain. Except Stacy, of course. Masked up and holding onto Stacy’s arm, June went to restaurants and all the other things she always did with Stacy when she was in town.

At some point, the doctors said that due to the effects of years of smoking, June had had a small stroke. She was no longer able to write in the beautifully precise handwriting she had always done, but with rehab and therapy she regained most of her skills. Dierdre was probably the only one who really noticed as she was the only one out of the four siblings who ever cared about actually putting a real pen against real paper and communicating through the handwritten word. June was famous for her handwritten lists of all types. Addresses and phone numbers, birthdays and anniversaries, each in their appropriate books, shopping lists, to-do lists, chores to be done by the children before she got home, paper checks written to pay bills, time sheets she had to submit for the nurses on her floor, recipe cards, full holiday menus and so many other things she wrote by hand.

Unlike Max with his computer and Bonnie and Stacy being born into a much more technology focused world, these three did not have much use for the handwritten word. June also refused to learn any type of computer skills no matter how much Max tried to convince her it was the way of the future. June only eventually allowed Stacy to get WIFI set up in her house because Stacy demanded it so that she could continue working when she was in town for a visit.

Although June finally quit smoking after several attempts following the stroke, eventually the damage she had done became apparent in her breathing. Stacy ordered home health nurses to visit daily as she could not be with June full time as her prestigious job in the investment banking world required her to be in office and around the world as the head of a particularly large segment of investors.

The nurses would report their findings to Stacy and they became increasingly alarmed at June’s breathing difficulties. They strongly urged Stacy to have June transported to the hospital, which she did and then flew in to see for herself. June was eventually discharged to a nursing home for rehab with the intention, in June’s mind, of going back home. Stacy had other ideas. Believing June would never recover sufficiently and with diagnosed early stage onset of dementia, Stacy arranged for June’s placement in the nursing home they chose on one of the previous visits. Her room was in the assisted living wing. There are other wings set up specifically for dementia care and full nursing home care.

During the course of making all these arrangements, June was asked if she would like to move out west and live by Stacy. To everyone’s shock, she refused. She did not want to change doctors was the reason she gave.

Having more down days than up, Stacy decided to sell June’s house. Of course this meant removing all the items from her parents’ house that she had packed floor to ceiling downstairs, as well as everything she brought with her when she moved there in 1983 and everything she had accumulated since.

Stacy arranged for her three siblings to each go through the house and note on a spreadsheet which items they particularly wanted and Stacy would do the same. Dierdre went through and saw all the things she could have used when she had a young family but was told she could not have them then. No need of them now, especially since she had fully embraced the minimalist lifestyle. Max went through and although he wanted lots of things, his wife followed behind, constantly asking Max where he planned to put it since they were down to just narrow pathways in their home. Bonnie, still residing several states to the south, chose items that had come from her father such as a set of dishes, rosewood handled dinnerware, a brass dragon with a concealed lighter in the head and a brass sculpture of a deity all obtained when he was stationed in the Orient. Stacy didn’t want any of it as she had all of her things already that were much more classy than anything that would be pulled out of boxes or backs of cabinets or stuffed in drawers.

A huge dumpster was ordered and most everything found its final resting place there. Dierdre, in shocked disbelief, watched as Bonnie and Stacy went through all the scrapbooks ripping out certain photographs and chucking the rest of the lot in the bin. She held her tongue as Stacy had the final say on everything, as she held the legal document to prove it.

With Stacy at the helm, June’s money seems to be holding out as she continues in her private pay private room in assisted living. Dierdre chats to her mom occasionally, hearing the same sentences again and again. Max visits rarely as the bickering with his mother begins almost as soon as he walks through her door. Bonnie comes up for a visit every few years and Stacy continues with June and December, being sure to have scheduled all her mother’s doctors appointments for either of those two times.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the richest, smartest, most open-minded, most capable of them all?

Well, it depends on how you define riches, smarts, open-mindedness and capability. And Dierdre, Max, Bonnie and Stacy each have very different definitions 🐝

🌺 The End 🐝

The time came on a day in early June. They left the farm and went into town to the local general hospital. What could have been a routine delivery turned out to be anything but routine and resulted in a total removal of all future possibility of having more children. So this child would be the first, last and only child this couple would ever have.

The mother received her baby with joy regardless, but the father was so disappointed. All the help he dreamed of having at planting time and harvest time and butchering time, not to mention the daily work involved on a farm with both animals and crops, were gone in that final push. Not that he was in the room to see it, but when those two words were relayed to him, “girl” and “hysterectomy”, he couldn’t help but drop his head.

For lack of a better idea, they named her “June”. As she grew she learned the language her parents spoke at home and the language of the preacher, the teacher and the people in town at the country store. She accompanied her dad to the barn to help gather eggs, but never did any real farm work. She would climb up the side of the grain silo and holler, “Huehnerscheisse” and when they got back to the house, her mom always said, “Ach, June!”

Her school friends gifted her with the nickname, “Skinny”, so it was no wonder that all her attempts to be useful for her dad resulted in some version of, “You’re just a girl” or “Why couldn’t you have been a boy?!”

It was no surprise then that she dreamed of getting off the farm and moving to the big city. She eventually achieved this when she headed off to nurses’ training. She did well and got a position at a hospital. She got married to an orderly who worked at the same hospital. He had been married before, to another nurse, with whom he had a boy and a girl.

Although she suspected some sort of issue with him, June was sure she could fix whatever was wrong. She had a daughter, Dierdre, and a son, Max, with him, but he would not be around much. In fact, she went to the floor of the hospital that contained the Psych Ward and had him committed, then went to the Maternity Ward and gave birth to Max. He would be in and out of the Psych Ward a number of times and even pick up a drug and alcohol problem that landed him on the streets after June divorced him when Dierdre was two and a half and Max was six months old. He ended up dying in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1979.

June got up before dawn every day to get herself and her children dressed and ready. She put on her white nurses’ uniform with white hose and white shoes and prepared her hair, held in place by generous amounts of hair spray, to receive her white nurses’ cap when she arrived at the hospital. June chose either her green or blue eye shadow and pink lipstick that she carefully blotted using a square of toilet paper folded in half. The final touch was a spritz of Estee Lauder perfume on her neck and wrists.

While she drank her cup of instant coffee, leaving a perfect pink lip on the rim, and smoked her Kent, which picked up a perfect pink pucker, she got Dierdre and Max dressed and gave them a bowl of cereal to finish before leaving the house to drop them off with the babysitter. They would drive away from the house, but most mornings June had to head back home to check the ash tray and the stove knobs.

Once the kids were dropped off, she headed to the hospital where she was a registered nurse and donned her white nurses’ cap. Dierdre and Max would walk to and from school with the babysitter’s sons so they were taken care of till it was time to pick them up in the evening. June would drill spelling words and memory work with the children after supper of scrambled eggs and toast or some such meal. She would pin her air up in her pink curlers and put the pink scarf on her head.

To save money, June closed off the second bedroom of her small house in the city. She would sleep on one side of the double bed and Dierdre and Max would take turns between the middle and the other side. She would tell them a bedtime story till she fell asleep. One night she began telling them about Daniel from the Bible who was thrown into the lion’s den for refusing to bow to the king. Only this night, her mind drifting towards sleep with thoughts of her day persisting, she said they put Daniel in a wheelchair. Of course, this got the kids all excited and they poked her in the back telling her what she has just said.

Being very careful with her money was a way of life for June so it was especially hard when she would arrive home from work to discover her ex-husband had broken in and stolen all the food and milk she had on hand. He did not limit this behavior to just June. He would go to his parents wanting them to give him some bread, man and beating them up when they refused to turn over the cash.

June always paid her bills on time and set money aside for a vacation every summer. She would take Dierdre and Max down to the farm to be with their grandparents while June and her mom sewed school clothes for both of them. Without fail, June endlessly droned on to her mother about all the things she did at the hospital. You would get the idea that the whole hospital would collapse if June were not there. Her mother fed this by always saying how smart June was and that they were just dumb farmers. Then they would head to Wisconsin Dells, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee or some other equally exciting place. June was a big fan of AAA TripTiks and had the Triple A agent map out their route in their handy maps and she marked all the sites they wanted to see in the book that went along with each location they were headed to.

Always on the lookout for things she could put in the scrapbooks, June was careful to save souvenirs from each place. Napkins with the name of a restaurant, post cards purchased at gift shops, anything small and flat. These, along with all the pictures she would get developed from the rolls of film from her Kodak Instamatic Camera would be divided and sorted and arranged and organized and carefully placed in scrapbooks. This activity went on for many months after arriving back for the vacation. June would carefully place the picture corners on each photograph, lick it and place it into the scrapbook. She would then write and write about each picture, each napkin, each post card. She could relive the whole trip with each entry she made.

Birthdays always included a family party, a cake and presents. And June was always well prepared for Christmas Eve. The story always went the same way – Santie Claus won’t come if you don’t go to church. While Dierdre and Max got settled in the car, June went to go check her ash tray. When they arrived back from Christmas Eve service at church, Santie Claus had already been there. All the presents were opened and June and the children ate sloppy joes with potato chips and French onion dip.

During the first eight years after her divorce, June went on a few dates. One man took her and her kids to the drive-in-movies. He played in the park with them, pushing the children on the swings or spinning the merry-go-round for them, and took them to the concession stand to get snacks, then back to the car for the movie.

June met another man who was in the military. She brought him down to the farm to meet her parents. They both warned her that something was off with him. Convinced that she could fix him, she went ahead and married him. For quite a while he was stationed three hours away, so he only came home on the weekends. He enjoyed screwdrivers, so she made sure to have the necessary ingredients on hand. He legally adopted Dierdre and Max when Dierdre was ten years old and Max, eight. Then he got transferred down south, and he was home every night. Turned out that screwdrivers were not a thing reserved for weekends.

They had two daughters, and June continued to work in hospitals and home health as they were stationed in various places. Yearly trips to the farm continued as did June’s attempts to convince her father that she was important through all the hospital stories she told. Her father always remained quiet and her mother continued to listen with rapt attention. Her husband’s red face and the screwdriver in his hand was the proof of her parents’ warning.

June remained married for eight years and then divorced him. By this time she was now a head nurse and Dierdre and Max had headed off to college, leaving the two younger sisters at home.

Since June had never seemed to convince her father of her worth, she set her sights on convincing each of her now grown children that she was the most important figure in each of their lives. Ever driving wedges between the siblings, turning each of them against the others, she was now the center of each of their individual attentions.

Eventually the siblings figured it out as they began to compare notes and a degree of resentment grew in each of them toward their mother, and so much time had passed, and they all lived far apart, so the siblings would never really be that close.

All those years of smoking finally caught up with June’s lungs and dementia began stealing her memories. But she continues to talk about herself, still trying to convince someone, anyone, her long-dead dad, maybe even herself, that even though she was a girl, she had value.

She had simply traded one narrow-perspective family structure for another. Taught rigid rules of right and wrong. Proper things about which you could speak. Appropriate places a respectable person could go. So all the heat was kept in, contained, managed, submerged, hidden, glossed-over and ignored.

She spent her days caring for the children and shuffling the bills from pile to pile. Some days she slept away, hoping tomorrow would be better. If the children had something to say, she was hushed until they spoke. Though the injustice of it all sat in her throat, she had to keep all the heat in.

Family rules were established for the children and Dierdre had to be the enforcer. No swimming suits without shorts, no walking to the library unattended, turn your eyes away at the hint of anything remotely sexual on TV and limit sweets. She would scream and cry at the sky, but in front of them she had to keep the heat in.

Friends were few, if you could call them friends at all. They were all a part of the influencing group of men whose wives repeated all the men’s lines. Each kept a vegetable garden, canned, cooked, cleaned and kept their image spotless. Dierdre’s world was nowhere near that as rot and decay set into the wood of their house. Splinters from the floorboards threatening to puncture the hands and knees of her children as they crawled around. Hand-me-down furniture set in rooms that never saw fresh paint. She endlessly rearranged the furniture trying to feel like she had something new, but change was never appreciated. She did it anyway, as it was the one thing she had control over. Dierdre was quick to offer to put it back, if that was required, but usually did not prove necessary. There were other people’s houses to build so hers crumbled around her and she had to keep the heat in.

While other families went on yearly holidays and summer vacations, Dierdre’s plans were always shot down as there was neither time nor money, money nor time. She could pick which order she said them in, but regardless, it meant no trips.

Other families had birthday parties, Christmas parties, and summer gatherings. Dierdre’s children had a few parties when they were younger, but eventually no Christmas gifts were given or received any more, no birthday presents or parties were bought or planned and the heat of the guilt Dierdre felt for wanting to receive gifts had to be kept in.

Eventually the children all grew up and left home so Dierdre had to go back to work. Having spent her years raising children, she got a job in childcare. In the beginning everything seemed to run according to common sense and reasonable expectations. If the children were instructed to participate in an activity, they did so. If the children were told to act more polite and dignified, they complied. Then, for reasons she could never quite figure out, the culture shifted. The children made demands that Dierdre was expected to meet, regardless of the fact that she could clearly see this would not ultimately be in the children’s best interest. The children began refusing to do anything they did not want to do and were not afraid to look Dierdre, and the other workers, right in the face and tell them that they can’t make them. Dierdre tried to reason with the higher-ups and explain her discomfort at following this new agenda, but was offered two choices, swallow the heat of it or find employment elsewhere. Dierdre had no car, so was stuck working here as it was across the street from where she lived and besides, it was the only daycare in the whole town.

Now, the problem with keeping the heat in means you eventually get burned. And burn she did! All the dreams she had as a little girl. All the hopes of life as a wife and mother. She watched each ship sail without her being on it. Her desires for love and affection all burned away.

But Dierdre remained. Light and free and boundless. Gone was the baggage she had to carry. Gone were the expectations of beliefs and practices. Gone were the judgements and demands that shackled her. For Dierdre now lives in the world she creates with her pen and paper. Her mind free to flow where it will. Dierdre now sings in the rain and stomps the puddles. She exchanges stories with the birds, bees, butterflies, turtles and squirrels that visit her flower garden and she provides water for their refreshment. She takes her hickory stick and walks whichever way she chooses.

Dierdre finally belongs … to herself 🐝

In her mind, she had already gone there several times during the day. That spot near the pond with the big old oak tree. It was her happy, peaceful, quiet place where she could roll her thoughts around in her head, stretch them out and make sense of them.

She had a family or rather, they had her. Sort of like the junk drawer that never gets cleaned out, she was among the possessions her family owned. Not the fancy, expensive, cherished things they had on display, just part of the drawer full of things that gets rummaged through now and again.

The door was just around the corner and soon everyone moved the other way to the kitchen and to the den. This was her chance. She got to the door, opened it slowly, passed through and shut it gently. She made her way across the yard to the far corner and passed through the gate.

It was safe now to run as fast as she could all the way down the lane to the place where the road split off. The main road headed into town, but the side road narrowed to a path through the trees.

This was her favorite part of the walk so she slowed down to enjoy every bit of it. Just a short way in, she noticed the air was cooler on her cheeks which had grown quite flush from running. The scent of the trees hit her and she filled her lungs deeply.

At first, it was quiet, but as she slowed her pace and calmed her breathing, she started to hear the familiar sounds of the birds that made this part of the woods their home.

The shade here under the trees danced with the patches of sunlight that managed to make their way in, and she found her favorite stick she left propped by a tree.

She walked with the stick like a pilgrim on the road. It gave her an air of dignity and helped her to lift her head, straighten her back and unhunch her shoulders. Her mission was to arrive at the pond by the oak and she became more resolved with each step to reach this spot and partake fully of all that it offered.

Her thoughts were all a jumble, but as she felt the steady rhythm of her hickory stick, these too began to calm and she started to sort through them. It always came down to the same thing - Why did it matter so much that she had no place she felt she truly belonged?

She had tried to fit in in lots of different ways and places, but each time she felt tolerated never celebrated the way the others were. It was as if she were invisible, so she learned to use that to help her slip away. Out here, she didn’t have to feel the sting of rejection as there was no one else around.

Any time she had to leave, no one begged for her to stay, nor even suggested they would like to go with her.

The end of the path through the trees opened up to a clearing and there was her pond and the one lone oak tree.

Like her, it stood by itself, apart from all the trees in the path. It stood near enough to the water to benefit when all the other trees seemed to droop in the heat. She took off her shoes and socks and rolled up her pants legs and waded into the pond. The water was crisp and clean and soothing to her feet.

She started to notice more things about the oak compared to the trees on the path. While they were all bunched together, the oak seemed to have room to spread its branches. It grew far taller than all the other trees who constantly had to compete for nutrients from the soil, rain and sun.

And her oak seemed to know who it was, not part of a group, but a thing of beauty all by itself. She wondered if she could ever feel this way about herself. Not needing others to hold her up. Not needing companions to chat with, and standing tall in her own truths.

And yet, the longing to belong persisted. By this time, she had reached the big rock that sat on the side of the pond nearest the oak. This was the spot on which she always sat, and today was no exception. Propping her hiking stick against the oak tree she hopped up on the rock. She unrolled her pants legs so they could begin to dry in the air and sun. She put her socks and shoes back on and laid back on her rock. She watched the clouds float past her overhead and tried to see pictures in them.

She knew she would have to head back soon, so she shut her eyes for a bit. She even managed to not think about anything for a while and relished this experience.

As all pilgrims must, she could not remain on her rock top, so she hopped down, picked up her stick and headed for home.

Home, or rather the house she lived in, would remain so for the time being, but one day she would create the space where she finally belonged 🐝

I share my attempts at this, new to me, form of poetry. I hope you enjoy 🐝

I ate the last one

But left the bag in the fridge

Poor sod after me

~~

I waited too long

Did not take the time to look

TP roll empty

~~

Groups of three or four

But one pulls all of the weight

All get the same grade

~~

Old folks often say,

When forced to use computers,

“Where’s the ‘On’ button?”

~~

I’ll arrive early

Maybe I can get in quick

They overlooked me

~~

Paper gown turned round

Easier to keep it closed

Defeats the purpose

~~

Anticipation

Mailbox way down by the road

Junkmail every day

~~

Checked the eggs in store

Grandkids helped unpack the car

Every egg was cracked

~~

Two-lane road for miles

Stuck behind a slow tractor

“Joys” of farm country

~~

Paying for each text

At least put some effort in

Say something useful

~~

Open up the fridge

Mouth watering for my lunch

Co-worker ate it

~~

Required meeting

“Nothing” was actually said

Could have sent e-mail

~~

Teacher droning on

I’m trying to stay awake

Eyelids close instead

~~

Trying to sneak in

Shoes squitching at every step

They hear me coming

~~

Studied every page

Different questions on the test

Study guide useless

~~

Driving down the road

Driver’s head invisible

Granny at the wheel

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Take the garbage bins down to the curb, wait for them to be emptied and bring them back in again. Sweeping the floor everyday, washing the same clothes every week, cleaning up the kitchen multiple times a day, all have the reputation of being mindless work.

Not like the more involved jobs of totally overhauling a closet or a room or a house or a life. These all definitely take concentrated mindful awareness to accomplish.

Those seemingly mindless repetitive jobs allow for a totally different kind of mindful possibilities. While doing those jobs, your mind is free to wander off and think about what you will cook for dinner, sure, but could be so expanded as to see yourself on a beach, for example, reading the messages you find in the bottles that have washed up onto the shore.

I used to think that repetitive tasks were boring, I now embrace them willingly.

I often think about the train and the people on board and what their lives must be like. Where they are headed. Where they came from. If they will be going back.

This night, however, I am thinking about the tracks. They were laid down long ago by people who are no longer living and follow a very specific course. They provide a route from point A to point B with no deviation possible. It is a fine plan, it works well, it accomplishes a goal.

Most parents imagine a similar type of track that their children will follow. Be it family traditions, career paths, thought patterns, habits, beliefs or likes and dislikes.

In the beginning it seems like we have created little Mini-Mes, but then the differences start to show up. Wanting to eat differently, dress differently, interact with the technological world differently than our non-high-tech world allowed.

They start to listen to a different kind of music, adopt a whole vocabulary specifically designed to be understood only by their peers, want to go places and do things that were illegal in our day.

All this fundamentally changes them into people we hardly recognize. They not only are not on our track, they are not even on the same planet, it seems.

Then the friction really sets in. “You are my child, it is my choice what you do and where you go!”

“It’s my life, my decision, mine to do with as I choose!” Both statements are true.

I have lived both sides. I have been the child of a mother with a very firm track imagined for my life, which I rebelled against and made very different choices. I have been a parent who had a very specific structured way I expected my children to live their lives, and spent quite a lot of time very hurt when they chose differently.

While the track is essential to get the train where it needs to go, I am coming to the conclusion that a better picture for families is roads, with main and side streets, which can all end up at the desired destination, but allows for each to take the path they choose. Roads also include highways which allow them to get out of town and do something completely different with their lives.

These roads are available not only for the children, but also for the parents who may want to change the trajectory of their lives.

Then the grown children become like the parents trying to tell Mom and Dad what is expected of them and putting us on the track of how they think their parents should finish out this life. “You are my parents, it’s my choice what you do and where you go!”

“It’s my life, my decision, mine to do with as I choose!” And just like that the roles are reversed.

There are a couple of overpasses that are on the highway route we travel when driving to Chicago. The way they curve and flow brings such joy and inner peace as we drive on them. While the driver drives, I sit in the passenger seat and move my body gently to the left as we enter the curve then move around to the front as we complete the curve, then settle back in my seat.

When it comes to styles of art, I am wildly attracted to Art Nouveau with all of its curves. No sharp geometric corners, just flowing lines. Spiral wooden staircases hold endless fascination for me. What is at the top? What is at the bottom? And Art Nouveau wooden doors beckon me to enter even if it is only a picture on a page.

Curving, flowing handwriting is the manner in which my thoughts tumble out, not the geometric blueprint lettering, in all caps, that the architect uses.

If I leave my hair to dry naturally, it curls in lovely ways. If I brush it too soon, or let my hair get too long, all my curls are straightened. I hesitate to mention the round fullness of my physical features.

The curvy shoreline, the waves of the ocean, the liquid-like shapes of the clouds, the rounded rock formations, the spiral of the nautilus shell, the twists of vines, the seemingly meandering flight of the bee as opposed to the straight flight patterns of aircraft in the sky, the arches of animal horns and muscular contours all suit my natural aesthetic.

The decorative woodwork at the tops of my bookcases or the back of my rocking chair, the curves in the overstuffed leather sofa and recliner, the pillows over the hard rectangular armrests of my zero-gravity chair, the curvy wooden spindles on the chair backs and legs, the curves of the vases and glass items around me all bring the curved lines to my indoor environment.

Many other items in my immediate surroundings include door and handle knobs, marbles, coins, buttons, baoding balls, singing bowls, the cylindrical tower floor fan, the wavy side up in Mr. Cat’s scratching box, woven baskets, crocheted creations, the rumpled blankets, even the wooden shoe, all possess those pleasing curved lines.

I am working hard to bring the sharpness of my tongue, the abrasiveness of my attitudes, the jaggedness of my impatience, the curtness of my replies, and the rigid structure of my beliefs, into a more rolling rhythm of grace and soft flow that resonates with my spirit.

I am learning to trade the architect’s script where everything is perfectly lined up, capitalized, both alphabetically and monetarily, and contained in strict boxes, for the flowing handwriting where lines loop, connect and breathe, and I soften, bend instead of break, release the armor of perfection, wander without a strict destination, uncoil the knots of tension to stretch out and create a space where I am completely in tune with my own rhythm.

It is the place that we

Have borrowed so so many

Books and DVDs

~~

Last night was a special treat

With my youngest son

To sit and eat

And watch “Excalibur!”

~~

John Boorman’s version

From 1981

With it

A new tradition we have begun

~~

Next weekend we will sit and watch

Fight Club from back in the day

Ever mindful of the rule

If it exists I will never say

~~~~~~~~~~

This is just a small ode to my local library. I have used this place to request books for over 40 years now.

Books I have used to homeschool all my children and books about things I am interested in.

They also have DVDs and we still have a working DVD player which has sat unused due to streaming options available these days.

The library is only a few blocks away from my house so I walk there to pick up and return my selections and it is fun to see the familiar faces of the librarians.

There is an interesting feature at the bottom of the print out I receive when checking out an item. It tells how much money I saved by using my library for this particular time, this past year and how much I’ve saved since I began using the library, $18,876.14!

I am assuming that figure is from the time they converted from actual cards in the pockets inside the cover of the book stamped with the due date to this machine that sends out this long strip of paper that is sticky on the back like post it notes kind of sticky.

I have a special type of library card as a homeschooler from back in the day which I was allowed because I always returned my items on time. This special type allows no limit on the number of items I can check out.

I have had many printouts that were longer than my yardstick. These days they are so short they fit on the cover🐝

My mom was a registered nurse and there was an urgency in her voice as she bent my toes and spoke to me about waking up. I can still hear myself saying, “Leave me alone and let me sleep.” Eventually I came around and was back among the living.

It was the summer of my 16^th year. It had to be the summer because I had never missed a day of school since I started Kindergarten at age 5. I would go on to graduate from high school with perfect attendance all the way through.

I had had fibrous bony matter growing between the joints in both of my ankles for years and it had finally gotten bad enough that the slightest touch or bump caused excruciating pain and my feet had hardly any movement left in them.

It was just after the school year finished that I entered the hospital to have all that bony matter cut away and the bones sawed flat and connected together with metal clips so that my ankles would fuse together.

I had the summer to recuperate so that just before the next school year started I could be put into weight bearing casts and start school on crutches.

The humiliation of having to use a bed pan was bad, but when the plastic bed pan developed a crack and pinched my cheek each time I raised myself up added insult to injury. But the plastic one was cheaper than the metal one and it would only be for the summer and we had not foreseen the crack, so plastic it was.

My wheelchair was a bit of a makeshift thing as well. Instead of the leg attachments, they had stuck a piece of rebar into the tubes on both sides and laid a piece of plywood across that with my legs resting on a pillow on this surface. It was quite cumbersome, but I wasn’t going anywhere. It was only for the summer and those fancy leg attachments were expensive.

I stayed in my room and went back and forth between the wheelchair and my bed. Everyday I was given a salad with torn up lunch meat and cheese with Italian Salad Dressing to help control weight gain from inactivity.

Summer was nearing its end so it was time to get my new casts. As they were cutting off the old plaster casts, they assured me I need not worry as cast cutters cannot cut skin. They lied. The smell was awful as the casts came away from my hairy legs.

My new casts were also plaster with an affixed rectangular rubber block on the bottom. I was fitted with crutches that went under my arms and had a small bar to hold onto to move the crutches forward, then swing my body through then move the crutches forward again. Even the towels and washcloths wrapped around both the parts under my arms and the small bar handles did not stop the chaffing.

Once school started, I was allowed to leave my classes 15 minutes early so that I could navigate the hallways without the crowds that flooded the halls between classes. I got to have a helper carry my books and papers and pencils for me.

Ahh! The good old days. Real books, real pencils in my hand moving across real paper. I was very fortunate. I continue to this day, writing my mind onto real paper with a real pen, held with the correct grip and forming letters in the correct manuscript handwriting. I am also skilled at reading and writing cursive handwriting. I actually had a typing class in high school on a real typewriter where I learned to type using proper finger positioning. This has served me well as I transcribe my hand written pieces to the laptop to share with the world.

Future summers held future surgeries to remove bone spurs and eventually to remove the metal clips as they had begun working their way out.

I was left with limited movement in my fused ankles, but I can walk unaided. Can’t run, but I can walk, so walk, I do. I no longer drive, but that’s to do with an eye thing called depth perception. To me, those semi-trucks on the highway were way far away so I had plenty of room to merge. Only they weren’t and I didn’t and I got angry horns blown at me as they had to hit their breaks to avoid hitting me. I gave up driving and we moved near my job so I can walk to work. It’s a small town so I can also walk to the library, bank and grocery store.

There have been other difficult periods in my life where I felt the same sentiment of being left alone to sleep the time away, but much healing has occurred and here I am at 3 a.m. wide awake and writing this memory 🐝

Being so touched by the ache of responsibility, even as a child, the alcoholic’s step-daughter had to care for her younger brother and two half-sisters as their mother could not find the way to deal effectively with him. Mom had to go to work.

As she grew there were times when the step-daughter felt she would chuck it all in, just disappear, one way or another. Her mind would carry her to a pristine place untouched by all the shame. This place where adults were loving and protective and children could be children.

The responsibility became even heavier for the step-daughter as she was always blamed for his drinking. If she wouldn’t be such a smart-mouth, he wouldn’t drink so much.

She had called him out for hurting her mommy and in so doing became the target and scapegoat. The threat of backhanding her or getting his belt was carried out regularly.

One time, while sitting at the dinner table he backhanded her so hard her head flew back and hit the window behind her chair, for she was resisting cleaning off her plate. She did not like stuffed green peppers, but there were “starving children in Africa” so she had to eat every last bite. She suggested wrapping it up and sending it to them and this is what brought the back of his hand across her smart-mouth throwing her head against the window, daring the glass to break.

It just did not make any sense how her stuffing herself with this nasty-tasting food would help starving children anywhere, but such was his logic. Her brother had eaten till he up-chucked and had to continue eating anyway.

Then it was chore time. She and her brother took turns washing and drying the dishes. Then she had to iron his undershirts and boxers. Of course, she had made some remark about the logic of ironing garments that were hidden by his uniform. She carried the scar of the burn on her arm where the heavy iron pivoted too far in her hand and touched her skin. The scar has faded with time, but lives on in her memory.

Many years later, she learned the word for it, “Disfunctional”. Her family was disfunctional. It was toxic dressed as normal, and even all the years after he was gone, her mother continued to call her a smart-mouth because she questioned illogical reasoning.

She is me, and I still carry the weight of it all. I still have to remind myself that the chaos created by the illogical actions of others is not my job to fix. They may be operating from a place of their own emotions and unhealed trauma as no one escapes this life unscathed.

I have shifted from fighting all the chaos created by illogical actions in the world around me to protecting my own peace and self-preservation. I write about it for my own healing by translating chaotic memories into structured, logical sentences to help my brain file the trauma away as past history rather than active threat. I write about it in the hope that someone else may be helped by what I went through.

I’m a “Pot Head”, but not the kind you might think when first hearing this descriptor. I am a radically open garden bed and my mind and heart are designed to receive, nurture and transform whatever lands inside me. I am full of rich soil so every conversation, piece of artwork or emotion lands as a seed that has the potential to grow into something beautiful.

The boundary between me and the world is exceedingly thin so I absorb the energy around me instantly.

I don’t cling to rigid identities and find I am able to reinvent myself when the soil of new perspectives is allowed to mix and settle.

While I feel things deeply, I let them filter through like water through the walls of a terracotta pot. The heavy stuff eventually drains through me rather than stagnating.

The dangers come into play when there is a deluge of heavy emotional rain which attempts to wash the soil of my boundaries away, leaving me empty, exhausted and destabilized.

Since my gates are always open, toxic weeds have a chance to get a foothold. Whether in the form of people, ideas or environments, I must be fiercely selective about who I let plant seeds in my mind and regularly spend time in solitude to pull out thoughts and anxieties that belong to other people, not me. I must also reinforce the clay of my pot by saying “no” to keep my structure intact.

I have found physical movement to be the best way for me to flush out my vessel. This is aided by literally shaking my hands and arms and gently bouncing my body. This releases the tension I have absorbed.

Regardless of how deeply I might love someone, I cannot let them dump their toxic garbage into my open pot, so I protect myself because I don’t have the capacity to hold their negativity.

The most important thing for Pot Heads to remember is that we own the soil, not the seeds. We are the containers. We control the boundaries of our hearts and minds. The seeds are only temporary. Other people’s moods, problems and criticisms are just external objects dropped into us. We choose what grows. Just because a seed lands, does not mean we are required to water it, nurture it or let it take root. We have the ultimate power to evict anything that threatens our inner peace.