how 'bout the weather

One last blog to hit my mark. And hopefully, Prof. Renfroe, this gets in under the wire! The weather this year has been so different from other years in Charlottte. I have been here almost eleven years and I love the weather here. I think my fellow Massachusetts classmates can relate! But this January started off dark and cold and gave way to a chilly February. March didn't warm up much at all and we've had so much rain. That's a good thing since the rain helped end our drought. But April has been unusually cool - I've been wearing my sweats every day and usually by now I have shorts out. Is it me? I haven't been outside much because I work doggone long hours. I turned on the weather channel tonight to see what the weekend will be like and I'm happy to report 80s are on the way! woo hoo! I love the heat. I love days with sunshine and blue sky and there haven't been many this year that I can recall. Well, not much else going on. Weather good. Blogging done. Hope I made enough comments throughout the semester but I have to go figure out where that count is stored. It's been fun. And Andrew, I too enjoy saying, "Gotta work on my portfolio!" See you all tomorrow night. Bye for now. My portfolio awaits!

Auntie Anne

A lady of grace and dignity, Auntie was also a bit of a hellraiser in department stores if she did not get her way. She had been a nurse in the first world war and a school teacher for forty years so you didn't mess with Auntie even if she stood only five feet tall. When my mom was 14, Auntie took her in, giving her private voice lessons and enrolled her in a girl's boarding school where my mom flourished. She sent my mom to college but in her second year, my mom met my dad and decided to leave school. Auntie was none too pleased with what my mom did and disowned her. Every possession that Auntie had collected in her travels abroad went to the catholic church. She sold all my mom's costumes that she'd worn on stage - beautiful gowns from operas that my mom performed in were auctioned off to the lowest bidder because Auntie was furious with my mom for marrying a non-catholic and livid for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

But after my dad died, Auntie came around. The first year after we lost my dad, Auntie sent a truck load of toys to us. Not what we needed! We had just moved from Miami to New England and it was cold that year! We needed ski jackets and leggings and boots and warm socks, but we did have a fun Christmas that year. My mom explained that we needed necessities, not frivolities. And so Auntie obliged. She would catch us enjoying something and before long, we would see cases of it at our door. For instance, once we visited her little apartment in Boston and one of my sisters loved the canned rice pudding she served us. None of the rest of us liked it, only that one sister who to this day still has undeveloped taste buds... Later that week a truck pulled up to our house and delivered 20 cases of canned rice pudding. Plain, vanilla rice pudding, 24 cans per case. Those cans went out across our town for every food drive that year and the next. There was only so much rice pudding one girl could eat. None of the rest of us could stomach the pale yellow stuff. We stacked the cans in the cellar (it had a dirt floor so it wasn't a basement). We had a flood that next spring and I remember going down the cellar stairs and there were cans of rice pudding floating all over the cellar with labels unglued and fading and slowly sinking in the water. I took cans with no labels after the flood to school dances, to football games, every event that required canned goods was graced with a slightly rusted, silver can of rice pudding.

Once Auntie was visiting us and we ran out of toilet paper and she commented how we must go through a lot of it with such a large family. Sure enough! A truck stopped at our house with a huge delivery of toilet paper. We had to store it in the attic and in all of our closets because there was a pallet of toilet paper that had to go somewhere and the cellar was off limits. Every time I see a pallet of toilet paper at WalMart stacked up on the upper shelves, I'm reminded of Auntie and her ability to amuse us in her desire to help us. Had to give her credit, though, she was trying to provide us with some necessities rather than frivolities.

But that bolt of green denim had to be the most amusing. We had come in from playing outside and Auntie mused aloud how many pairs of dungarees we must go through in a year. A few days after her visit, here comes a truck with an entire bolt of green denim! My mom stored that bolt of fabric in numerous places around the house. She was unwilling to throw it away, but couldn't decide what to make with it. We would not surrender to green jeans even if the fashions of the wild sixties went to bizarre colors! We would not be Captain Kangaroo's sidekick. That bolt of fabric from Auntie became a tent our mother made, which became a memory we hold close to our hearts; a fleeting remembrance of friends and laughter and a girl who became a woman who still asks us today nearly forty years later, "how many mothers make tents?"

I have Auntie to thank for some of the threads of my childhood. Auntie is to thank for the woman who became my mom. Living with a mother who was mentally unstable, my mom was able to escape the turbulence and desperation that was her home life into a world where Auntie protected and nurtured her. Through her twenties, Auntie did not speak to her. Through her thirties and beyond, Auntie was there with her amusing quirks and hilarious deliveries of necessities. She was a little dynamo of a woman who saw the world change from horse-drawn carriages on the streets of Boston to airplanes that could carry one across country in less than a day. She lived from the start of the twentieth century until the end. I wish I had known her better.

The big green tent

And there we were desolute for something to do on summer vacation. Long days of weeding the garden were not satisfying a teenager's soul for excitement. My sister and I planned the whole thing and took it to our mother for approval. We wanted to invite two girlfriends each for a backyard camp out. We had a tent the family used each summer. It was large enough for six to sleep comfortably. My parents always slept in a pup tent. When we reached our teens, the boys also got a separate tent. Anyway, we took the plan to our mother and she approved. We were ecstatic and called all our friends.

She pulled out the tent from the summer before and it had been chewed up by moths. So what to do now everyone has been invited. She had a bolt of green denim her aunt had sent to make us dungarees (that is what we called blue jeans back then! lol) but we wouldn't be caught dead in green jeans. My aunt's pecadillos will make up another blog post! So she finds the bolt of green denim and designs a tent - with screened windows and a zippered door. My mom sewed all our clothes so a tent was nothing, just straight lines. While she was busily making the tent, my sister and I took care of all the household chores. My sister's girlfriend Sandy (who seemed to live at our house) helped my mother by holding the growing tent. Mom's sewing machine was a big professional Bernina so it could handle the heavy fabric. Sandy would 'walk' the material from the front porch where my mom had the machine into the living room and back. The tent became a big green monster! When it was finished we needed ropes wrapped around tree branches at each end of the roof to hold it up. We staked the corners at the floor. It was a massive tent that all of us could stand up in and not have to bend over.

Before long, my brothers were involved and we pulled out the other tent and it was in great shape. So my brothers invited their friends. We had four boys and six girls in the back yard all under 14 not including my younger siblings. We cooked outside. My mom charged everyone a dollar a day for food but we went through that by breakfast. We played in the pool and chased each other. I still had to weed the garden every day but it wasn't so bad with all my friends helping. One of my girlfriends had a transistor radio (pre-iPod days lol) so we got to sing along to great songs while we worked. And we figured if we got up early and got the weeding done by 9am, we'd miss the heat of the day. Maybe that's when I became an early bird. I"m up at the crack of dawn every day.

I wrote a story about that week and submitted it to a couple of magazines. It never went anywhere, but Sandy told us years later that our home saved her. She laughs when we get together to reminisce and she'll ask every time, "How many mothers make tents?" I'm not sure, but mine did. And it was a BIG green tent!

Animal Vegetable Miracle

Started reading Barbara Kingsolver's book for another class. Lauren, I think you would find it particularly interesting. It turned me off during my first read through last Christmas, but I pulled it out again now it's time to read more closely and write a reflection on it for class. I realized how brave the family was to leave their home in Tucson and settle on a small farm in Virginia with the goal of eating only things they could get locally. It got me to thinking about my childhood. We had a square acre of a garden and I hated it. As a kid, my main duty during the summertime was to weed that garden. Every single day I had a set number of rows that I had to complete. When I finished my weekly chore, it began all over again. I hated weeding, bent over in the hot sun is hard work. But we also had an above-ground pool. So that was refreshing after hours of weeding the garden. We had lots of fun in that pool. I'll write another post about a camp-out I had involving the pool. Fun times. But back to food - that garden of ours fed our family of nine all winter long. My mother canned tomatoes, so many tomatoes! And the corn tasted like nothing else! We would pick it, husk it, cook it and in less than 15 minutes we'd eat it. Yum. I think today's generation misses out on some of that hard work and good eating. Our little plots of land aren't big enough to grow enough to feed the family for a winter. And so Kingsolver takes her family back to her roots in Virginia to help her kids understand what it means to eat locally. It was a neat experiment that involved the whole family. And it has prompted me to plant some veges this summer. My little seedlings are sprouting nicely and I hope to have some fresh green beans and cukes this summer. And I have to thank Ms. Kingsolver for that.

How much is public vs. private

I've been debating with myself about posting a work-related topic, but every time I re-read my draft, I edit it a little and then hit the save now button instead of the publish post button. Why? It's just too sensitive. I wrote a long post about what's been going on in my work life lately (lots of churn and change and uncertainty) and it's too nerve-wracking to publish. If someone at work finds it, it's possible it would have repurcussions for my career. Negative ones, I might add. And so I wrestle with my feelings and opinions in private because I cannot write about it 'in public' on my blog. What's unfolding at work has caused me sleepless nights and chewed up nails. I am happy and grateful I have a job, but what's been going on really bugs me and I want to scream through the written word, but instead I just save it. Edit. Save it again. And so what is happening to me in public at work has to remain private. Or my feelings about it need to stay private, saved in draft form to never see the light of publication. It's a shame because my opinions are strong ones on this topic and I cannot voice them. Unless I want to lose my job and then that would begin a fully new post that a future employer might not appreciate. I'll just keep my thoughts to myself but it leads me to wonder. Just how much can be stated without fear of repurcussion> and does that mean we really have lost our freedom of speech. Food for thought....

Night at the Moulin Rouge

Ah, the joy of a good movie. And one with music is just a delight! Baz Luhrmann is quite the director and this is a topsy turvy look at a can-can theatre. With Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor singing beautifully, I find myself immersed yet again. This is probably one movie I can watch again and again and never grow bored with it. Yes, I am a hopeless romantic and I love musicals. Whether it is Sound of Music, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, or any number of wonderful productions from that bygone era, I love the toe-tapping music and the dancing! Some of the dancers of old were so beautiful to watch. Not only beautiful but fun! Who can't smile to see Gene Kelly tap dancing in roller skates? Or the amazing pairing of Cyd Charise and Fred Astaire in Bandwagon. I saw Astaire interviewed one time and he said Charise was his favorite partner. I hope the tv show Dancing with the Stars is bringing back ballroom dancing. It is beautiful to see a couple flowing almost effortlessly across the dance floor with a connection only those two have. Just lovely. But dancing and singing together blending two bodies and two voices to make a story with not only words but music, ah. Such is beauty. Thank you, Baz. That was amazing!