Writing Reality

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The Anti-Healthcare Method

The Friday night before the 2019 Thanksgiving week, I drove the five-minute ride to our local hospital’s emergency room with my husband—as he was in and out of pain along his rib cage from the xiphoid process of his sternum outward. He’d had an annual about mid-August 2019 and as protocol for a routine physical—he was to have an endoscopy early December 2019. It was scheduled for the extension of that routine examination done in August. My husband always had good health, healthy habits for the most part. He was healthier than most Americans. He was not on any medication as of then, at age sixty-three years old. We rarely went out to eat. He drank plenty of water, he was well within his weight with his height of 5’10” at about 165lbs. He ran four to six days a week, did pushups, sit-ups, lifted weights at home when there was no landscaping to be done by him for our home. He was a high school teacher and was on his feet most of the workday. He’d built a chin-up bar in our backyard and ...

No. I Won't.

Recently, I'd started a new job. One of our daughter’s friends parents stated, "Wow! You are really enjoying this like you had with the service in AmeriCorps last year." I remarked, "Yes, mostly young people ages 18-34 pretty much. They're just so nice. They're kind." Anyone knowing that I grossed upwards of $150 per hour for 28 years having my own business would be stunned that I've chosen this job at near minimum wage for a few reasons. No. It's not a bucketlist. Nope. It's a break from writing. Too, it helps with the extras for my living and I've always worked outside our home regularly until sometime in 2021 till May of 2023. I've been working outside and inside the home in caring for others since age eleven. Then in the workforce since age fifteen cleaning grease vats for $1.50 per hour. Illegally as that was. Basically, I've always worked. I've always earned some money as an adult from pennies to having the ability to pa...

Leaving 2024...

Leaving 2024 on the back burner... 1. Cleaned out our attic by 50%. 2. Redesigned our side and front landscape, took about 40 hours or so. Neighbor Tony gave me a days worth of his time during the final stages. And towards end of 2023 another person gave me a couple hours and helped me get the correct design for what I wanted to do. 3. As mid-Spring arrived, I spent days refurbishing our backyard area where I'd dumped extra sticks and leaves over past four autumn's. Now there was two inches of new topsoil underneath the most recent leaves I'd left there. 4. I'd built a 30 pound Lavender outdoor chair for that new area in the back, took about 120 rocks and created an outlining border to separate lawn from the chair and new bird bath area I'd also put together. Neighbor Frank helped me carry the new chair from our deck to the back location which was just before his backyard property. 5. Sawed down a 30 foot maple growing in our backyard hidden inbetween some hem...

Perfectly Imperfect

We will always have the poor with us. We will always have the haves. We will always have skirmishes and wars. We will always have illness and death. Yet at the end of each day we have a choice. Do we reside with anger? Or do we hold Peace within us? These thoughts always come to mind, nearly every day. What perpetuates them is my own living to do better in thought and action every moment in all of my living. I have been this way since I could remember, as I see every day, every hour, every second as January 1st. Perhaps, the eternal 'goodie-two-shoes' effect brought on by my witnessing of people's hatred, greed and suffering early in life. We could also suppose it'd arrived from a life we could not remember in years past. I had a supervisor once accuse me of being so busy that no way could I have time to ponder. I explained to her, "I ponder much." She shook her head in disbelief. My mind had been on automatic-pondering of thoughts. As it always has b...

Where's Another Jimmy Carter

And just like that he'd passed. It's always those moments, you'd wondered how would it feel after someone you'd met once, yet held in high regard passes. Held in high regard not always for their leadership in office, yet their earnest drive to better humanity. I'd hoped he'd been able to vote in the 2024 election. I prayed for him to have the ability to vote in the 2024 election. I prayed in earnest. His living weighed heavy on my mind. Yes, I understood how important his ability to vote was important to not only himself but somehow to the country. It was his final public statement. And it mattered. In 2015, just months before I'd met him he was diagnosed with cancer. That day when I saw him move, it was as if the years he'd accumulated had fallen away as his stride with a pep in his step showing no sign of aging nor stopping. That same day my husband had marveled at Mr. Carter's movement with ease. President Carter's books helped give me some g...

From "Picking Grapes"

From "Picking Grapes", a Memoir Yes I picked grapes for nearly ten hours at age eight with my dad at a wealthy homeowner's property. They seemed kind. They had an English Sheepdog. We weren't picking the grapes for the homeowners. We were picking them so my dad and one our neighbors who'd just purchased a liquor license together could make their own wine. I can say at the time as well many years later I hadn't known anyone to pick fruit or any other gardened product till about 30 years later when I met the Grandfather of UltraRunning, Ted Corbitt. Ted and I chatted for over two hours in his Manhattan 9th floor apartment. He told me that he'd been born on a cotton farm in South Carolina. Ted, a brilliant, kind soul told me he'd picked cotton for the first time when he was about age ten. He said his mom could out-pick anyone in picking cotton. Well over 100lbs of cotton in an hour with regularity. Although I hadn't known much of picking cotton on t...