Creative Nonfiction Archives

Find Your Way

Finding My Way-3
I can’t believe that it’s been 3 years since I lost my grandma, my friend. My memories with her are still so vivid…

• Garish orange, yellow, and green Tupperware stashed in her cupboard containing cookies stale from summer’s humidity.
• Her fingers, knuckles swollen with arthritis, clutching a hand of cards.
• Red raspberries we cousins snuck from her bushes.
• The taste of her lemonade. No one made it better.

And later . . .

• Her laughter crackling over the phone when she told me the stories of trying and failing to live up to her mother’s expectations.
• The citrus smell of Constant Comment tea as we sat at her little table talking . . . especially after I found out my parents were splitting for good.
• Her still form in the casket across the room. I couldn’t bear to get closer and really see.

This last weekend, before it registered that it was the anniversary of Gramma’s death, I started going through my grandparent’s WWII era papers. My grandfather’s sprawling notes about airplane props and engines, my grandmother’s diary from her college days, his denied request to be trained as a helicopter pilot in the 1950’s.

It makes me think about the differences between my life and theirs. The things I wish I had and the things I’m glad I don’t.

Despite the fact I’m not quite done with my first book, I’m beginning to see pieces of the next one. Maybe I’ll find her again in it and get one last word of advice. “Find your way, sweetheart . . . find your way.”

Regardless, I’m thankful for the things my Gramma taught me and looking forward to talking with her again some day.

Love you Gramma. See you again soon.

There’s Something About Tuesday: Ordinary

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Ordinary

I can hear the whir of the dryer just under the sound of the kids playing soccer in the front yard. Dinner isn’t made. It’s five o’clock. And I can’t make myself worry about it. I’m having too much fun watching the kids laugh as they chase the ball—my girl with focused determination and my dude with antics and laughter.

The sun is breathing the first heat of spring and my skin soaks it up. Sometime within the last few days the daffodils have shot out of the ground and the buds have tipped, nearly bursting with their glorious yellow skirts. And the robins, frogs, ducks, heron, and other fair-weather friends have returned in full force creating a symphonic cacophony of summer sounds.

I can’t get enough.

Except,

In two months time it will all be so ordinary. And it’s a shame that the wonderful ordinary will go unnoticed.

I’ll be tempted leave behind the wonder when the everdayness wears the glory thin.

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So today, I challenge myself along with you to remember. Remember the blackness of the ant crawling across the sun warmed deck. The fluffiness of the first dandelion gone to seed. The smell of fresh air and dirt stained kids.

Savor today. Taste and see that it is good.

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Now it’s your turn. Share your favorite wonderful ordinary with the rest of us…

Trust, Sweat, and Tears

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Trust, Sweat, Tears I sat on the edge of my son’s bed, hands shaking, stomach roiling at the thought of what I had to do. String thread through my fingers, a loop hung in the middle.

His eyes were wide, tears brimming. It had to be done and there was no one else to do it.

The only reason my son sat still as I reached into his mouth, was because he trusted that I loved him . . . and it was, after all, only a tooth that needed to be pulled. Continue reading “Trust, Sweat, and Tears” →

Why I Hate Christmas

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I’ll be honest, most of the time I love Christmas. It is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year.

But the Christmases of my distant memory are often haunted with darkness and loneliness—a desperate longing unmet.

Perhaps that’s why I work so hard to make Christmas full and bright, as much for my kids as for my husband and me. A celebration of all the good, happy, pretty things.

Red and green. Gold and silver.
Polished up kids, on the best behavior.
Shiny packages, bright with promise.

For the most part, and for most December 25ths, the magic glitter of Christmas works. But any one day can’t live up to the burden consistently and it frays at the edges, threatening to rip open from the pressure of little sleep, excess sugar, and packing in too much in too little time with too many people.

It’s a wonder we ever make it through without falling through a chasm—a la Griswold Christmas.

Continue reading “Why I Hate Christmas” →

There’s Something About . . . Clouds

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Today is cloudy, some might say dreary . . . okay, most days I would say it was dreary.

But I’ve been trying to look deeper into those things that look ugly, and I realized something–

There’s beauty inside that grey.

The sky is blanketed, in wisps of deep purple, whispering over blue and grey. Somber, cool, quiet.

I struggle to see that beauty sometimes, but I realized the other day that without the clouds, the beauty of sunrise and sunsets are just missing a little something. It takes some darkness, some flaws to paint a really amazing sky… Continue reading “There’s Something About . . . Clouds” →

Beauty from Ashes: a Metaphor of Hope in a Time of Terror

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There is a core of who I am that is tangled in music. I grew up going to symphonies, playing in some of the best bands and orchestras in the state. I was through and through a clarinet-playing, band geek.

My life has a nearly constant musical score running underneath.

There I am with the pep band. Apparently I have no pictures of me ACTUALLY playing. You'll just have to trust that I did. — There I am with the pep band. Apparently I have no pictures of me ACTUALLY playing. You’ll just have to trust that I did.

I write to music. Sing snippets of Broadway, Mother Goose, Louis Armstrong, Simon and Garfunkle, and even “Uptown Funk” to my kids.

Soaring melodies, growling tympani, rising arpeggios, staccato xylophone—they draw pictures, speak words I cannot always form coherently. You know what I mean?

This weekend I went with my mom and sister to our local symphony’s live presentation of Disney’s Fantasia. The overlap of the art of film and music reminded me of the fear and destruction happening in our world. In short, it undid me.

A little over halfway through the program came the music of one of my favorite ballets, Stravinsky’s Firebird. It isn’t a piece most modern Americans are familiar with, but I love the unexpected twists and the drama it sings.

http://enchantedgal.deviantart.com/art/Flowering-71685983

In Disney’s take, a mighty elk, king of the forest, wakes Spring – Life personified, beautiful fluidity. Blue and green swirls. Life exalts in melting the snow and playing with the birth of flowers and butterflies, but is shocked when a mountain, an extinct volcano, resists her efforts to sprout in greenness.

In the center of the bowl is a form, dark and frozen. When she touches his misshapen face, the firebird comes crashing to life. Foaming fire. Slashing into the sky. Delighting in destroying everything Life has created. Reducing everything to ash . . . even Life herself. Continue reading “Beauty from Ashes: a Metaphor of Hope in a Time of Terror” →

Beautifully Diverse

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My daughter is studying the Native Americans in social studies. This week her class started studying the Eastern Woodland Indians, specifically the Cherokee. This amazing people group assimilated into the European colonies and, in many ways, looked exactly like their neighbors.

But they weren’t. They were different.

And that difference allowed people’s greed for gold to forcibly remove the Cherokee and other Native Americans from their land, enduring disease, exposure, and starvation. The Trail of Tears.

When I told my girl the story of the Cherokee, she stared at me, confusion pulling her eyebrows together.

“Why?”

In her wide-eyed innocence, “Why?”

Why, indeed?

You see, my girl is an artist and she understands that in art, in beauty, contrast and difference is celebrated and encouraged. That which makes something different, is core to making it beautiful. Continue reading “Beautifully Diverse” →

On Real Beauty

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The light bends golden across the horizon.
Yellow leaves twisting golden in the breeze.
Distant sounds of laughter call me out

To join the dance

The celebration
Of coming winter
Of summer’s dying

A remembrance
Of predictable pattern
Of persistent change

In the beautiful death of one thing
Comes the shimmering new life of another.

When I realized that the late afternoon light was the perfect golden tone for pictures, I grabbed my camera for a selfie. It didn’t even occur to me to not fix my makeup.
Continue reading “On Real Beauty” →

Into the Darkness: A Story

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I lay in the darkness. Eyes closed. Willing myself to sleep.

But rest would not come. In the next room, I heard the baby cough. I held my breath, body tense, wondering if she’d need me.

Glancing at the clock, I groaned. The red numbers read 5:32. I’d fed her, changed her diaper, and put her back in bed an hour ago. But I’d been lying awake since then, bracing myself, trying not to wake my husband, not quite sleeping. It was easier to get back up if I didn’t fall asleep. And sometimes, sometimes, I had to get back up.

Continue reading “Into the Darkness: A Story” →