Tag Archives: life lessons

I Learned the Secret to Everything In Aunt Nancy’s Basement

(Some assembly required)

Aunt Nancy’s small farm house had a basement. Our cookie cutter suburban tract home had no basement. Maybe this is why I spent so many hours each summer exploring the dark crannies and nooks of this mysterious underground room.

This wasn’t the spooky basement that popular culture had prepared me for. Aunt Nancy’s basement was neat and orderly. A magical place where glittering canning jars with jewel-tone contents were stacked to the ceiling on strong wooden shelves. A place where bunches of onions and braids of garlic were tacked onto the supports for those shelves. Along the bottom, crates of winter squashes, apples, and potatoes lay nestled in protective nests of shredded newspaper and straw.

In one corner a scrap of carpet covered the floor, and atop it sat a few broken down armchairs and an old sagging couch. Stacks of board games and old magazines sat on a shelf. Dubbed “Twister Corner” by my auntie’s family, this was where we all went when funnel clouds threatened. It was also where my cousins and I played when it was too dark or too rainy to go outside.

One set of shelves in Twister Corner held something different, though.

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Why I Write In Analog

There is power in writing slowly

Hardwired by generations of ancestors who worked their sweat into the soil before the break of dawn, I set about my morning tasks under a still-dark sky. Unlike those that came before me, I do not work the cold ground or tend to warm beasts. No, my hands brush across smooth paper and encase the comfort of my warm pen.

It begins with three cups of coffee and then I switch to Irish breakfast tea. The steam powers my hand as it moves across the page. The blank page is my fertile field. The pen, my spade. The day has begun.

I write in analog.

No laptop. Not even a typewriter. 

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I Remember In Flowers

A mother’s love isn’t always guaranteed

The flowers are the electric yellow of margarine. These blooms are the technicolor adverts in glossy women’s magazines telling me I can hardly believe they aren’t butter.

Momma collected women’s magazines and spread them across the coffee table like a bouquet, but I never saw her read one. Momma had no time for things like reading. Instead, they collected dust until years later an adolescent me peeked inside to decipher my own womanhood.

Yellow flowers made Momma happy. Yellow was the color of the sunflowers that made Momma think of her childhood home in Kansas. Momma loved that home and Momma hated that home. Even at three years old, I knew these simple truths.

I was always wary of Momma.

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I Paint My Poverty In Beauty

By doing so, we become rich

I am grateful to love old things. Corners worn smooth through years of love and use. Patches and mending threads give proof of adoration to well-worn garments. Repairs and mending are nothing more nor less than a bandage on a loved one’s knee, a kiss and a promise that all will be well again soon.

Old things, like you and I, are perfect in their imperfection.

All I can do is imagine the dissatisfaction and unhappiness for those that depend on the new and shiny, the unobtainably trendy, to bring them joy. Especially when their income is as paltry as ours. It must be painful to covet clean lines, Pottery Barn dreams, and the plastic haberdashery of the finest modern design.

Loving old things lends us the privilege of genteel poverty. Castoffs from a century ago, sometimes less and sometimes more, feel luxurious compared to particle board knock-offs of modern designs.

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Escaping the Tower She Built

My mother’s fears imprisoned me

The world, from my earliest memories, was made of forest paths that led to dark woods, full of wolves and witches. I knew that the glowing windows of the houses up the hill held ballrooms and gentlefolk being plagued by curses and intrigue. In the corner of every room lurked a Georgie Porgie ready to make me cry, or worse.

I was not yet five, but I had memorized nearly every nursery story my father read to me. Every damsel in distress, every rhyme, every Victorian moral that they contained. My impressionable young mind devoured each new tale as a guidebook to navigating the adulthood I was constantly reminded was my eventual lot.

Never mind that the forest paths that terrified and tempted me were little more than wooded verges separating tract homes from strip malls.

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Forget the Grind, Hustle Culture, and the Great Lock-In

It’s time for an Industrious Revolution

Whether you call it grinding, hustle culture, or the newest moniker to hit the internets, the “great lock-in,” it all boils down to the same thing — trading away your life energy for things you have been to told to want and need for the benefit of billionaires and shareholders who, frankly, don’t give a damn if you live or die.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the general masses have been trained to grind away as many waking moments as possible to “earn a living.”

I have a secret to tell you. That’s right, lean in and I shall whisper it: No one needs to “earn” a living — it was granted to you the moment you emerged from the womb. Living, that is, not all the detritus and stuff that comes with it.

As animals, living isn’t something we are meant to earn, but to take. We take the air we breathe as we need. We should be able to take shelter where we can find it, although certain greedy human animals have done what they can to take more shelter than they need so they can fool the rest of us into thinking we need to earn it.

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Without Effort, There Is No Contentment

The homespun foodie’s week in review, Oct 5–11

Nothing in life should come without effort, with the exceptions of sleep and love.

I know that I harp on the same ol’ themes over and over —

  • There is enough for all of our need, but not all of our greed.
  • The simple things are the best things.
  • Waste not, want not, and be fulfilled.
  • We are not main characters in the tableau of life.
  • Good food, good people, and hope is what makes the world go around.

These themes may be simple, perhaps even a bit old fashioned, but I shall take them any day over the current world themes of greed, consumption, hate, and destruction. Call me a curmudgeon, but those viral videos of destroying things for “ASMR” or unboxing things to engender envious consumption or behaving badly simply to encourage engagement really upsets me. They aren’t just a symptom of the hatefulness of the billionaire class that has destroyed modern culture, they are also direct cause of it.

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Taking the Time to Live a Longer Life

Musings from the bus stop.

The journey begins pleasantly enough. I walk down the lane, leaves crunching underfoot. First I crunch through a collection of maple leaves which are satisfyingly crispy even after yesterday’s drizzle.

Next, my feet wade into a sea of yellow heart-shaped leaves. It is the cottonwoods, whose pleasant fragrance reaches me before I see the first impossibly tall trunk. Looking up, I realize our lane winds through a copse of these giant grandmother cottonwoods. Large and wise they tower above. I have driven this lane a thousand times and never noticed them dancing alongside the pavement, ensconced as I was in an aluminum, plastic, and steel cage.

I am disappointed in myself, but also thrilled to have finally made their discovery.

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Let’s Defund the Billionaires

I’m robbing them of my life energy, and you can, too!

You have heard it said before: if you don’t know what they are selling, then the product is you. Your attention, your custom, your life energy.

Does the Zuck care if you are there for pictures of your nephew or to find out about community happenings? No. The point is to get your eyes on the screen, your fingers scrolling, your brain reeling with things to buy or to believe or to fund.

Angry, sad, dissatisfied? Good, the easier it is to sell you and sell your wallet to the highest bidder.

Does Walmart and Kroger care that you simply want to feed your family a wholesome meal? No, they want your life energy to come to them via impulse buys, in store or in app, and they will tempt you with corn syrup, sugar, and bright colors so that you buy, buy, buy until you die, die, die.

As far as I can tell, we only get this one life. I want it to be my own, to live and to share with those that love me back. Not to sell, unknowing and unwilling, to a billionaire class that can never have enough until they learn what it is like to have too little.

Greed is nothing more than addiction under a different name, and none are greedier than a would-be oligarch that is rarely told no.

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On Wings of Death, Comes Life

The promise of the owl

It is not the sound that draws my eyes heavenward, for there is no sound.

It is not movement, for in the gloaming, movement is almost as invisible as the silence.

No, it is something more primal, more visceral, more animal in nature. It is the caution of prey that draws my eyes upward, bred deeply into my human animal psyche from a time when our rodent-like ancestors cowered in burrows, hiding from that which would destroy.

Dark wings blot out the pale moon-lit sky, all the more terrifying for the soundless silence screaming out.

Predator. Harbinger. Guide.

The barred owl alights on a nearby post, eyes like all-seeing saucers reading into my soul. 

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