THE JOB THAT NEVER ENDS...




This shows the old wood I've used to edge my trail. At first it was just to show me the deer path back when we first bought the land. To the Lake, it's half our land/woods, and half someone from NYC who doesn't mind my keeping a path open for walks.
Trees fall, and I either saw them and move them or build the path over the downed tree. Using the dead wood means I'm always replacing, making repairs, and scolding Bear for carrying off a branch for his "wood-carrying addiction." ;-)

"All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should
have been more specific." ~Jane Wagner

Sometimes I wonder where my being non specific about what my goals are. Was it when I was about seven years old and started collecting things. They say it's a good age to get children interested in collections... like coins or stamps. But my dad, who collected stamps, missed the age when he finally tried to get me interested in that hobby. No, when I was about seven, my best friend, Julie Foley and I, would traipse through the woods in back of people's houses... down where it was convenient to dump stuff, and found all kinds of treasures. It was then I started collecting keys. The house-key kind was far and few between, so I also started collecting the keys one opened cans of ham and Spam... Really. What the fascination was I do not know. I might just as well have collected dust bunnies from under my bed. I finally quit when while unwrapping a key from that savage tin surrounding it, I cut one finger badly. I realized then that it wasn't worth that to collect that type of thing... but don't remember collecting anything else--or wanting to.

I do keep cards with personal messages or really funny or poignant ones, but haven't really "collected" things, and heard about a child's interest in doing so was when they were about seven. I've been collecting the States Quarters for my grandchildren since their coinage started. This year my granddaughter Amelia, and grandson Willem become seven, so they get the collections saved for them... complete up to DC and Northern Mariana Islands.

How did this come up? I guess while I was kicking twigs off my trails and shoring up the downhill sides of my paths in the woods this morning. They are nice trails, but it seems that it's the one thing I did well in life ... "I was a Trailblazer." It seems like another useless thing to me, but probably as valuable to me now, that collecting the Spam keys was when I was seven.

Why I Don't Like Magnolias

Spring bursts its buds
and color reigns in
Crocus; tulips; and
Magnolias

After a week
These flowers shrug
their petaled clothes.

... Tulips and Croci
leave them on their beds,
While Magnolias toss them
on the ground
For Mother Nature to
Clean-up...
Knowing very well
That Mom N. is old
And it hurts to
bend her knees.

SO, Mrs. Nature
... just ... lets ... them
... Sit in the Sun,
Hoping a lawnmower
Will swoop them up.

BUT...
Instead, they wither
and brown...
Looking like trash
that escaped the bags
on pick-up day.
----
NOTE:
[I thought I'd share the above--my first entry of 2010--written in my "Gardener's Notebook" given to me by my stepdaughter, Trese, back in Spring of 1998. When inspired by the Nature of the season and growing things I'll write an entry - sometimes several in a year - prose or poem... or skip a year, and then be inspired by just heard news of something growing - a pregnancy of a new grandchild; or the crazy spring of 2002--much like this year's spring; or the wettest July 2003 in PA in 40 years; ... a question to a grandchild, Carly when 3 yrs. old, spring of '05, about what kind of flower (a violet was), "A PURPLE!" she responded. Bits and pieces throughout the years.]

"We continue to squander life with all our criticisms and complaints instead of appreciating what a great gift life really is..."


Today I was writing in my journal sorting things out, as I'd been a happy person all Saturday, then suddenly, on Sunday I was a Bear! It's like I have a split personality, and when I'm in the negative mode, everything looks different, even my marriage. I wrote from both modes this morning realizing for the first time that if the negative person in me got her way, she would never be happy. It's just not in 'her' disposition. I have been thinking all these years... even back when those moods were brought on by PMS, and, like Roseanne Barr's one liner, I too thought, "That's the only time of the month when I can truly be myself," even now when it's something other than PMS... But either then or now it has always been fmy negative personality vying for leadership, and I've been letting it do just that.

What I can't understand is how I can be so positive one day and so negative the next... everything was sunshine and happy days; then another day my negative self would emerge, and watch out: I hate my life, my everything. The dogs make me impatient. Everything makes me impatient. Impatient was the Neg's first name.

I just finished reading a book called Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. I think that book was the key to my finding out that what my negative self was seeking is not going to happen. I'm not going to be loved and left alone. I may get my wish, but not the love part... just the left alone part.

The book is like one of short stories, but all about this small community on the coast of Maine, with some of the stories sharing the character of Olive K. and other neighbors they have in common, much like everyone's life being one of those stories. Sometime our friends and neighbors are in our story and sometimes there's just the two of us in front of the TV, watching the same show at times just because the other likes it when you really do not, and always conscious of us being alive to each other. It seems so real to me, and reminds me of real hometown stuff like when I was on Peakes Island in Maine where I vacationed many summers in my youth.

All these stories have an interaction between characters who--when I think about it now--are having the same battle with their negative self. Near the end of the book, Olive sees that a woman who is constantly at odds with her husband, doesn't realize as Olive Kitteridge has, once becoming a widow, that she was having all these negative problems, not with her husband, but with that negative part of herself, and she rues the days she's wasted in negativity rather than enjoying life--hers and the lives around her. She knows this woman who constantly complains will also discover this truth too late. She said something to the affect of, 'We continue to squander life with all our criticisms and complaints instead of appreciating what a great gift life really is for us all.' I think I'll buy the book and look up that part and write it down. I want to realize that gift now, before it's too late.

Now I suddenly realize that self is just plain negative, and getting her way would be a disaster. That person doesn't like anything in her life. If I allowed her to reign, I'd be alone... like that neg' person wants... and would still be so damned angry at everything that not only could I never be happy, but I wouldn't have a friend in the world. No one likes a negative down in the mouth complaining bitch. That's what I'd be. I had this heart to heart talk with the constant spirit within me asking the negative part of me what would make me [the Neg. one] happy. The answer was 'nothing could make me happy, because I wouldn't be the Neg. personality if I was happy.

So today, after having written that and figuring out that the negative personality would never be happy even if it got it's way, I decided to try to squelch that side of my personality. I just need to have a handy pair of invisible rose-colored glasses that I can 'put on' when I feel myself sinking into that well of complete lack of joy.

Sincerely,
Me