Here I come
Ready
or not.

Good bye dear
cottage on the hill.
you kept me sane
during times of insanity.
forever grateful
I will be.
Good bye my lovely
friend.

@junemoon
2009

Mine.
no one claims to know the particulars
you know, like the when or where
or from whose pairing
i may have sprung
an offspring.

Nonetheless

I am here.
and
today
I said it was my
birth day.

@junemoon
2009

“I just don’t know what I would say about you. I wouldn’t feel comfortable.” That’s what a clinical supervisor told me recently when I asked whether she would provide me a letter of recommendation. This supervisor went on to explain that after all, we had only worked together for approximately thirty days. I felt as if I had been slapped. Slapped across my face. Events from the past month, clinical, professional, and personal between the two of us, clicked rapidly through my mind’s eye. I responded, “yes, that’s true. We haven’t worked together very long. However, I believe that one can learn a lot about another person in just thirty days.” This supervisor asked if I wanted her to reconsider my request. I responded, “No.” I mean, what kind of letter of recommendation would I receive based on the initial answer. Limited. Limited in thinking, limited in breadth, and certainly limited in depth. Again, “No thank you.”

Since that conversation, the concept of what one can glean in thirty days about another individual has continued to dance around in my consciousness. My initial belief has not changed. I think that we reveal many things about ourselves in every interaction, even when we intend to be a blank slate or in our best attempts at neutrality. We expose our true selves through action, word, and deed, each and every minute of each and every day of our lives. Traits such as kindness, empathy, loyalty are conveyed full force in a single moment. A mean heart bared in a second.

So give me a month with almost any person that I have known thus far, whether at work or play, and I believe I could tell a person a thing or two about that individual.

The question many bloggers face from time to time is whether to post their thoughts or share their experience when neither the thought nor the experience is particulary pretty or positive or uplifting or whimsical, or inspiring. Today when faced with that particular conundrum, I decided that I would post my thoughts and experience, pretty or not because this little blog is after all my own creation.

There are several holidays or Special Days on the American calendar that I don’t particularly embrace or relish ~ Valentines Day, or as I usually refer to as Stupid VD day ~ St. Patrick’s Day (I don’t like the pinching deal) ~ Mother’s Day. Today is the latter.

I think some adoptees might understand my non-relishing of this day. This day, after all, is meant to honor and acknowledge our mothers, our ommas, our first mothers, our second, third or fourth mothers; and when one does not have that particular longed for connection with their omma or mother, the day can sting. In my life, most Mother’s Days have passed without undue angst or sadness creeping into my conscious psyche. Not so today.

I woke this morning with a yearning in my chest, where my heart was beating out a steady thrum of longing for my first omma and regret that my relationship with my adoptive mama could have been different. Later in the morning, when my daughter called to wish me, her first and only mother, a Happy Mom’s Day, the tears sprang to my eyes. I let them fall, after I had wished her the same ~ my daughter, mother of three. I let the tears just spring up and rode the wave of longing and missing and wishing for my mother’s embrace. The wave washed up on the shore of today and has left me feeling a little bereft.

I have lived long enough to know that this wave is just part of living and remind myself that I have ridden out much bigger storms and choppier seas than today’s spring barrage. Still, my thoughts and experience are not pretty and I don’t think there is any worth in trying to gussy them up as life is what it is and the longing in my heart, simply a strand of the tapestry of my life.

I am in awe when the wild things, both animals and I suppose humans, dare to make themselves known in a city. Even in Alaska, when bear, moose, porcupines, or skunks saunter through the downtown area, I stand in awe. I mean how different a city is to their country way of life.

This morning I awoke to the sounds of wild turkey calls, lots of them. I drifted in and out of sleep as every time I flipped over, I found another comfy place to slumber. Finally, those turkeys called loud enough and long enough that they actually called me out of my nice warm and cozy bed to peer out the living room window. And there they were, marching two by two up the road. I would say they were a sight for sore eyes or that their beauty was astounding but that would not be truthful. Wild turkeys are not exactly beautiful to my eyes but they are certainly an entity onto themselves. Wild turkeys most definitely seem brave and maybe even a little entitled. When cars don’t give way to them on the road, they call out as if to say, ‘how dare you? move out of our way! don’t you know that we’re Wild Turkeys?”

The day was filled with wild turkey calls and the road in front of our cottage was transformed into Wild Turkey Lane, as they continued to march along at various intervals throughout the day. I am not sure where they were headed ~ perhaps there was a Wild Turkey Wedding taking place nearby, or a funeral, or graduation ceremony. Maybe a Wild Turkey Fair. Whatever the event, I am glad that the wild made themselves known today. This City Woman’s spirit soaked up a little bit of their wildness and that was a good thing.

Learning to like a place takes time. For me, a good deal of time it would seem. Yesterday I took a step toward appreciating where I am, the third or fourth step in this diresction that I have taken in the past almost eight months. Like I said, I take my time.

We have a lemon tree in our drive way. Not smack dab in the middle of the drive way. No. A tree by the silvered-over-time wood fence at the end of the drive way. For some reason the leaves of this lemon tree stay mostly yellow, as if it’s not getting enough nourishment or maybe getting too much. Anemic. But there are lemons. Always. or so it seems to this woman who hails from the north.

Earlier this week, the doorbell rang and when I opened the front door, there stood my partner in crime with his arms and hands laden with lemons. These lemons lounged about on the kitchen counter for two days. Meanwhile, the lemons weren’t exactly just lollygagging around. No. They spent their time calling out to me. Softly at first ~ “come pick us up, inhale our heavenly lemony scent.” But then their calls grew more insistent ~ “come on lady, we came in here to make some lemonade, get the lead out.” Finally, they started talking what amounted to lemon smack talk ~ “so a little squeezing must be too hard for you huh, Lady? Why didn’t you just let us rot on the ground, stay on our tree? We don’t want you coming near us anyway. Keep your paws to yourself. We’re just chillin’ here in your cluttered kitchen.”

So it was that yesterday, I flung down the book I was reading, jumped up from the eggplant colored velvet loveseat on which I’d been stretched out, enjoying the sun pouring through my south facing window, to answer the lemon’s call. It was a first for me, making fresh squeezed lemonade using lemons from my own driveway.

In the middle of making this batch of lemonade, I stopped, and sent up a prayer of gratitude to the heavens above for that moment in time of contentment and appreciation, for the lemon tree, the lemons, my hands, my rented cottage. My life. A lesson learned, again, of place and appreciation.

I just witnessed a simple gesture of love (or maybe just plain lust) by a Tom Wild Turkey for not only one but two Tina Wild Turkeys. Yep, right here in my neighborhood, smack dab in the middle of the road. Before I besmirch any turkey’s good name, let me be clear that the simple gesture of love did not entail Wild Turkeys Doing It. The show did, however, involve Mister Tom Wild Turkey putting a mighty colorful and might I say, awe inspiring display. He spread his tail feathers, wide, optimally displaying bright gorgeous hues of reds, oranges, and browns while simultaneously puffing his chest up and out so big that his chest actually drug on the pavement, making a scuffing sound. And, Mister Tom Wild Turkey did the tail feather spreading and the puffing two times over in the course of two minutes max. Talk about Mister Turkey Lover!

Not that either one of his love interests saw, much less appreciated, this proclamation of wanton abandon as they were Turkey walking pretty darn fast ahead of Mister Amorous Tom Wild Turkey. But I have a suspicion, that both Tina Wild Turkeys knew they were being woo’ed.

In the midst of current local and world crisis, my faith in life, at least the lives of other species, has definitely been renewed.

green light
all set to go
and then
what do I spy?
only a big grey mottled
spider.
traveling at a half-run
pace
across my sand colored Berber
covered hall floor.
Interruption.
to my day.
Big Time.

@junemoon 2009

So time does, indeed, march on.  It always has and I guess it always will.  But always is an awful long time moniker, don’t you think?  and the image of time marching, well it sort of conjures up a military style image don’t you think?  I can see time now, in its camouflage fatigues and shiny army boots high stepping forward, the epitome of the march of time.  I suppose that is what times does, it marches forward regardless of those humans who fall along its path.  I mean seasons come and go while vegetation pushes up from the soil, unfurls, blooms, produces its fruit, withers, rots and returns to the soil, all the while aided by the march of time.  Babies of all sorts and species are conceived, gestated, born, cherished or not cherished, move through childhood, early adulthood, middle and late life stages, contribute (or not) to the lives around them, die, and return to the soil.  All the while time continues its forward march and for as much as I can tell, it does not slow its beat, mourn the comings and goings of mere mortals or beloved dog companions.  Is time heartless?  Most likely.  and really given its forward motion, would we want it to pause at each passing, each season.  Would we want time to be influenced by human frivolity, our outrageous acts, our puny efforts to exercise control over its automated self?