Monthly Archives: April 2016

A Simple Reminder

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All friendships have an energy, a momentum that carries with it an implied understanding.  The bonds of those friendships can be stretched taut like an elastic band but, when the tension is finally released, that friendship continues to maintain its original integrity and strength.

I am fortunate that I have several of those friendships in my life.  As circumstances have occasionally dictated, some of the parameters of those friendships have been forced to change but the feelings contained within that framework have always remained the same.

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When you find a pearl in a sea of oysters, you grab it and you never let it go. I don’t need to have a lot of friends in my life but I do need to have real friends, friends who know that my silence speaks louder than my voice, friends who laugh with me because they share my humor and friends who know that they will never have to search for my heart because they will always find it on my sleeve.

Friendships don’t happen by accident.  We are drawn to people who are meant to be in our lives because they teach us things about ourselves. I will never underestimate the power of a true friendship.  And, though I try to tell my friends as often as possible that I love them, a simple reminder never hurts.

Dirty little secrets

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Muted secrets,

poignantly apparent,

bereft of understanding.

Walls painted in silence,

ceiling fans churning the absence of dialogue.

Silence is not always golden.

The reticence can stain.

Neglect is a dirty color.

But silence breaks,

and whispers become a symphony of sound.

microstories263

Yes, I can see it. No, I’m not neurotic.

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I’m a cloud watcher.  I can only sunbathe for so long before I feel like I will spontaneously combust (thank you blood pressure medication) so I move my overheated body under the canopy of my deck umbrella and watch the clouds go by.  They never cease to amaze me.  Whether it is the pattern in their wisps or the shapes I see in their billowy contours, I can cloud gaze for hours.

I have not been able to watch the clouds lately,  however, because the sky has been a solid, monochromatic grey.  Perhaps because I am so accustomed to looking beyond what I really see, recently I have been seeing faces in the strangest locations.

This morning I rolled over, still shaking off the remnants of my slumber, and faced my closet.  A shirt that was at the top of the laundry basket was piled in such a way that the aged face of a man stared back at me from the shirt’s folded elbow.  For some reason, I couldn’t avert his keen focus on me and I stared back with the same intensity.

He seemed familiar to me.  And this is not the first time I have discovered a genial visage in a random place.  It happens more frequently than I should probably admit.

I have since discovered that this phenomenon has a name – Pareidolia.  There are many people, like me, who have the ability to see faces or animals in a benign object.  An extreme example is the woman who sold a 10-year old grilled cheese on eBay for $28,000.00 because it supposedly had the image of the Virgin Mary on it.  Some people see a cinnamon bun below, others see Mother Teresa.

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Whatever the reasoning behind this strangely named anomaly, the writer in me enjoys the visits from these odd characters.  I’m sure one day they will insert themselves into a story line somewhere along my writing journey and I will be grateful for their intrusion into my reality.

Time for audience participation – cinnamon bun or Mother Teresa?

Never let me go

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otters

I held you in a dream.

You became a part of me,

as if my body never ended

and you were merely

an extension of me.

And though I felt like I was floating away,

you were there

to pull me back to you,

to hold me in my slumber,

to keep me in your embrace,

to never let me go.

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**I saw a video of these otters slowly drifting apart and coming back together.  They inspired this poem.

Back in the saddle

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It happened.  Winter finally ended and the deluge of a new reality is seeping in the front door.  Today, the lodge officially opens for business and life, as I know it, will drastically change for the next six months.

No longer will I be able to hear my dog snoring from the corner of the office.  The dark days of winter, which seemed so cold and lonely, are a thing of the past and our first group arrives today, marking the beginning of a very busy season.

I am always torn this time of year.  Being busy is wonderful.  I enjoy interacting with a myriad number of personalities and I do enjoy engaging more in the active part of my job.  However, the increase in my hours at work means a decrease in my creative hours at home.  My reading suffers, my dog sees me far less than I would like and my blog always seems to take a bit of a back seat while I am perched high in that saddle, ready to ride into action.

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But I shall carry on, knowing that the sunset of my busy season is a mere six months away and the idle time, which can sometimes seem monotonous, will once again be waiting for me to bask in its splendor.

 

Cut and dry

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Perhaps I spent too much time worrying.  After all, it wasn’t my problem but I couldn’t seem to stop ministering to his lack of self-control.  I care more than he ever did and in the end I divorced the bottle, not him.

microstories262

We’re both shaken up

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“Happiness is a warm puppy.” ~ Charles M Schulz

~~

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I have had the pleasure of sharing my life with this beautiful creature for the past 8 1/2 years.  She has been my companion and my confidant without question.  Last night she had her second seizure in exactly six months to the day.  I must admit I handled this one much better than the first but it is still a very traumatic event.

It is a horrible sensation to feel helpless, unable to control what is happening to the one living thing that has given me unconditional love since we first laid eyes on each other.  The only thing I could offer her in the moment of her worst distress was the return of my unconditional love.

I remembered to remain calm.  I kept her out of harms way as her body remained rigid under the gentle touch of my hand.  Once the sound of my voice could be heard again, she began to relax.

You don’t have to have a child to feel like a mother.  I lay in bed after she finally went to sleep, hyper-vigilant to the point that I remained awake for hours after the event.  I listened for any odd sound in her breathing and for any strange noise similar to the commotion that originally alerted me to the seizure at the beginning.  Once I did drift into slumber, any unfamiliar discord woke me with a slight panic but the puppy continued to snore softly in her bed.

This morning, she is the same puppy in a dog’s body.  She is full of energy, eager for her walk and her treats and acting happily like nothing ever happened.

We see the vet in a few days and fingers crossed we get a relatively clean bill of health.  I’m not ready to imagine my life waking up and not seeing that face.

The passage of time

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clock and butterfly

Second hands tick,

the incessant sound of time passing

yet, time seems to stand still.

 What feels like a year,

is simply a collection of days,

falling into a pattern of weeks.

The metronome of life

chimes steadily in my head,

gently reminding me

how slowly time can pass.

But time marches on

and, even though it feels like an eternity,

the perpetual movement of time

always pushes forward.

~~

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A healthy debate to interpretate

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Spelling mistake aside (because it is an inside joke), the subject line of this post refers, in both parts, to a lively conversation I was a part of at the dinner table last night.  The age-old debate of whether men and women can really be friends circled around the table and the argument became quite animated.  There was a noticeable divide between those who thought men and women could be friends and those who thought the dynamic of sexual, or chemical, energy disrupted any potential of a platonic relationship.

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Since I have many cohorts of the male persuasion (sans benefits), I was vehemently arguing the fact that men and women can, indeed, be friends.  And now, as I sit in my darkened living room writing this post, it is difficult to have a Star Trek movie in the background talking about “Nebular penetration” as I argue for the chastity of an idealistic friendship. However, it is a fitting continuation of my earlier conversation.

Perhaps I am slightly obtuse when it comes to reading signals, but I am relatively confident that I am able to decipher whether or not a man has intentions beyond a nonphysical affiliation.  I have always had male friends and I have never had the slightest doubt that those male friends see me as just that, a friend.  But some of my litigious dinner companions made every effort to dissuade me.

Our conversation became heated at times but we continued to volley the notion of platonic friendships back and forth until the strings on our metaphorical racquets unraveled.  We eventually had to concede the match and nobody was declared the winner.

I came home with the same point of view I had during our impassioned debate.  I truly believe that men and women can be friends – no strings, no ulterior motives, no hidden agendas.  Convincing the others involved in that discussion may be a no-win situation but I will continue to maintain my opinion and defend it with all the intensity I can muster.

So now, I have to ask…..where do you stand on this debate?  Can men and women just be friends?