Category: Journaling My Days

I journaled for years on paper and I expect to be doing it in some form until my last days. In short summary, I teach mindfulness to parents of kids with challenges; I garden as often and as much as I can in Wisconsin and I am working through the threads of grief six years after my husband’s death. I am very grateful for finding and chasing the joy in this unexpected life.

coming home

Home.  I have chewed on the concept and the actual location of the place for a long time.  I have lived in places where I never felt at home, sometimes gradually finding enough of my people in those places to hold on and not wither away. I lived in places that felt like home, left them with every intention of coming back, never to return. There are places in-between—places where I felt some connection with the air of the place and made important friendships. Boston is one of those places. I moved from Jersey to Cambridge in the middle 70’s to live with David. He had been at Brandeis, dropping out to play in the pit band of the show, Lenny, and then just staying on.  I liked the city then and the neighborhoods in Somerville and Cambridge where we lived.  I was willing to move back to somewhere around here after we finished our degrees. David wanted NYC as home and very certainly, I fell in love with NYC and had no regrets. 

We never returned together to Boston, and when we left NYC for the midwest, I forgot that I had feelings for Boston, the place. 

And I did not quite realize, when I lived in Madison for twelve years, how much that had grown to be a home. It was a hard place to leave. Not the home that I came from, I will never be a midwesterner but the place with the people who supported me, and Julia, those first years of her with us and all the years after David left.  

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a visit

We are going to be in Madison for a few days very soon. If any of my dear Madison peeps are going to be around and available, I’d love to see you. Please let me know!!!

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another mother’s day

I brought my laptop to Julia’s year end recital at Berklee. Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education.  I will not get much time to sit and type but I was pretty sure I would want to get it out as soon as I sat down. I do and we have some time until recitals begin. 

This year the musical step taken is that Julia will play her cello without me sitting with her. This is the step forward after a few taken back. Back in Madison, when Julia was playing with Martha Vallon, she always played without someone sitting with her; however, when Julia emerged from Covid shutdown, she was not willing to be on the stage alone, not willing to do her own counting or take full responsibility for what she was playing.  I see some change now.  It has been a long way back.

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hands off rally

[Just in case an FYI is needed: Boston held one of the estimated 1,200 “Hands Off!” protests around the United States on Saturday protesting the actions and policies of Trump and Musk.]

It is 4 pm, ukelele ensemble time at Berklee, and we made it!

We left home just after nine this morning to get downtown and a hoped-for parking space near the Berklee building on Fenway. We scored that parking space and left instruments in the locked car. Then we walked to Boston Common, grabbing breakfast at the Eatery before we made our way to the Embrace Memorial to meet our FUUSN group.  When we got there, the crowd was crazy big and I had no idea of how we would find them. The memorial seemed to be the place that everyone, just everyone decided to meet. Thank goodness, for a very tall friend!  It was good to find a pod of friends to walk with.

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friday status

Hard week for me and for Julia, but our challenges pale in comparison to what is being inflicted upon young people who our universities invited here to study and practice being Americans.  Since law school, I have put a good deal of faith in our legal system, checks and balances, respect for the law, the ethics of judges. I don’t always agree, in fact, the republican packed Supreme Court disappoints me regularly; but I’ve believed in the process. That belief that is shattered daily. There is no way to keep up with the barage of awful news, but miss one day and life as I’ve always known it may turn completely upside down. No hyperbole at all.

This was not what I began to write but it is very hard not to follow rabbits down deep holes.

Today, I need to reset from the overwhelm of the week.  I am privileged to be able to sit back and take stock and right myself. I am aware of that.  

Morning painting after Julia was picked up, some writing, a quick vacuum of floors that have gotten very dirty in some unknown way, folding four, or is it five, loads of clothes (temporarily giving up on getting Julia to notice that an over full laundry basket is a good sign to wash clothes). I have reading for next week’s classes and writing that needs to be finished, but the sun is out, the gardens need cleaning and the sadnesses need airing before the day is finished. 

What was personally challenging and hard for us, for me should follow soon.

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micro-climates

“A microclimate is a local set of atmospheric conditions that differ from those in the surrounding areas, often slightly but sometimes substantially.” ~some website

I’ve never noticed that I had one in any garden I’ve made.  My neighbor, Maria, had one. Along the side of her house that faced my side door in Madison, daffodils bloomed at least a week before the rest of the neighborhood or my front or back gardens.  The thing about her microclimate was that she did nothing to it.  I mean, the bulbs were planted and the bed cleaned and tended, but no special watering or fertilizing went on. Those daffodils just returned year after year a week or so earlier than any others.  And I was able to step outside of my side door in the early spring and be greeted by their absolute glorious yellow-ness.

And I’d like to report that I may have my own microclimate right by the stairs off my back porch.  I noticed it last week. This is my third spring in this house–during the first one, I was still unpacking, last year, it was the front garden bed that I paid most attention to, this spring, I have the eyes for smaller things.

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just a few thoughts and words

Once again, to begin again, to begin again and to wonder if it is possible to begin again, and to wonder what is possible in the long run other than the daily round.

I feel like I have been very far away.  Every so often during the last weeks, I’ve had the slight impulse to write something, a slight burst of energy. But all energy has been spent doing work for my UU church’s annual pledge drive (“APD”).  I am on the pledge drive team, such an unlikely position for me to take up. It is far out of my comfort level and the changes that have been made to the drive this year have pulled the work only further beyond my ken. However, I’ve had the chance to work on a few parties and thank goodness, parties are in my bailiwick. Two parties in two nights last weekend, and I admit I was quite flattened by exhaustion. The APD has one more big blow out of a party this weekend, and then the work shifts in nature.  There is at least another month to it but no more entertaining.  

And so, I start this way, writing about the pledge drive and the parties because it is where I can start.  At the moment, I am far from she who writes every day and sometimes comes up with something thoughtful.  I haven’t looked at the memoir in months and have only been working on a few thousand words of the novel at a month. I have not been keeping written tabs on daily life or Julia’s doings.  

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february

It has been a whole month. So much has been left undone and much of that has fallen aside. Right now, there are no projects needing completion and no tasks that I’ve scheduled. So many naps, staring at ceilings and walls, much too much junky tv, a bit of reading, some writing, and last week the beginning of walking outside.  Yesterday, I logged a bit more than 5,000 steps.  Not that impressive, I know, but if you saw my numbers for the last month, it looks like I climbed mountains yesterday.  

I went to chuch services last week and will again yesterday. I still have very little voice—a month of coughing can wreak havoc on the vocal cords—so no choir yet.  Maybe this week.  I miss choir practice. 

I’m still not feeling up to driving but again, perhaps this week. It has been a focus issue and then also exhaustion. As I began to feel more like myself last week, writing was not easy.  Not the physical act but the focus needed.  I have it for short amounts of time, but not for what I needed to produce anything. However, what I wanted to do almost as soon as I was able to sit up for long periods of time was to indulge in some mindless beauty and do something with my hands.  

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new year’s day

I lay on my red couch in the sun.  I imagine that the sun, as well as the gallon of water and coconut juice, not to mention my kale salad lunch is healing me. 

It is another quiet day right that began right after Julia left for her program and Ed for his daily round. A few texts, a Facebook message, a phone call—that’s all that break the quiet. I am reading Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, for a new HILR class that begins at the beginning of next month. The book—memoir or fiction—is beautiful.  I  read slowly to savor the metaphors and adjectives. The sentences, every single one, is rich dessert. Or perhaps it is the protien rich mind meal that I need to pick up where I have left off of on the callendar’s new year’s day.

Today is my new year’s day and a strange one it is at that.  Never before have I needed so much to recover and heal, never before have I so much needed to nap—well, that is probably not true but this nap need has probably laid dormant for three score and ten years.  

I have great gratitude today for today and yesterday and tomorrow and for those who people my life when it is very small and when it grow again bigger.  

It is all very good.

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off oxygen

This morning I woke up ready to take off the oxygen. Just ready.

Healing was looking good on Sunday. The nurses and techs were encouraging me to move about the house, to do a few things, nothing extravagent but easy chores.  Christmas still needed to be put away. Ed and Julia had brought up my 4 christmas boxes and I had taken down a little bit a few days before.  I needed to straighten the boxes, put away garland and some of the lights, and then tackle the tree.

And I felt ready.

These sick days have found a rhythm of nurse and PT visits and meals and phone calls and email.  After lunch and a nap, I was ready to tackle christmas. I was puttering when a pain crept up in my chest. It bloomed on the right side of my chest and radiated into my jaw. It was not intense but present and different from anything I had felt before.  I debated whether to call the nursing line, remembering vividly the mistakes of not calling that David made.

And I called.

I relayed my information but the nurse was not too concerned.  She said she would push up my afternoon visit but to otherwise just continue as I was.  Then, 20 minutes or so (my time awareness of the next few hours fractured. It was 20 minutes, it was 2 hours.  I wasn’t 2 hours but it might have been much longer than 30 minutes). Then, the pain happened again. More intense this time, longer, and did not immediately fade.  It retreated very gradually, especially in my jaw.

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