I studied Literature at college, so I have whole passages and epic poems carved into my brain: Tennyson's Lady of Shallot, Poe's Raven, Goethe's Der Erlkonig, and a dozen of Rimbaud's poems, I can rattle them off for you... then of course I still know almost every song that hit the charts during my growing up years between 1970-1985, and as a parent I know all the Disney songs too, and very likely all their screenplays as well ("Once upon a time there lived...")

 
What I wish I could learn by heart? Mobile phone numbers for my husband and daughter, so I wouldn't need the speed dial in an emergency. Doctor appointments...what I'm supposed to be doing today. Where I put my glasses. All these passwords I need for the computer.... oh boy. The 40's have their moments. Unfortunately, I'm forgetting them all as they happen.

Weird, or perhaps not: the day you ask this is the very day the final paperwork arrived from my mother's estate. She's been gone over four years now, with my father, brother, and oldest sister, all my grandparents and aunts and uncles, every one. Now the house I was born in, grew up in, and went back to every Christmas, is gone as well. I miss the feel of it, the smell of it, the return to childhood every time I stepped through that door. It was hard, but I said goodbye. Home is where the heart is. I've got a sweet husband, three kids, and enough good fortune to keep me smiling... my heart's fine. Home's right here.

Folded towels. I know it's stupid, but I can't help it, and I will come out of the towel closet right now, and say I love a well-folded towel. When my husband gets to the dryer before me and folds them first, I wait until he's not looking, then refold them all because he doesn't care about towel-folding and I do, and I know it's too trivial a thing to even mention. But I can't bear to see edges showing, and I like them to be all the same size when folded, all stacked neatly on their shelf. When I go to someone else's house and use their bathroom and see towels like that, I think WOW--now THERE'S good towel. I know it's odd, I know it doesn't matter how towels get folded, but I don't care...a well-folded towel just makes me feel good inside, like all's well with the world. Maybe I've been possessed by a demon who's a fan of Martha Stewart, who knows? But meanwhile my towels look gooooood.....

I send letters often, though they're typed; they're query letters and cover letters to submissions to editors. In this part of the world not everybody wants e-mail.

Personal letters? I do send postcards and cards often; my handwriting has become terrible so I rely on those, to limit how much I have to say LOL.

I like a handwritten letter in an envelope best of all. E-mail is nice to keep in touch, but there's nothing like a REAL letter.

Today, when stopped by a Garda (a cop).

ARGH! I lied right to his face to avoid a thousand-euro fine, and he let me go sweet thing that I am, but now I need to go to confession on Saturday or it's the flames of Hell for me and I'd wanted to sleep in on Saturday because I'll be in the hospital on Friday for minor surgery and it's not fair all because the stupid Garda had to stand in the road on my way home from photographing the lovely trees in the park.

They're lovely trees. It was worth it.

There's a poetry competition for Tanka running now for a few more weeks; I blogged about it on my Stony River Farm blog, and even had a go at the form myself (knowing full well I was probably embarassing myself) and invited anyone to leave one of their own.

A friend left one about the hidden beauties of a rainy day that made EVERYTHING better, absolutely cheered me up from the 'blahs' I've been feeling, and is really beautiful. All the work of blogging is suddenly paid off tenfold.

I haven't liked poetry for years mostly because I can't do it well, and wish I could do it better. Now I'm inspired to keep trying, and to remember to keep looking for the hidden beauty in *everything*.

(Thanks Hayley!)

If you care to Tanka, please join in! The shared poems and contest details are on this post:
http://stonyriverfarm.blogspot.com/2008/09/tanka-you-very-much-maam-and-i-hope-you.html

I could even almost (gasp) like the rain...

After my mother died, we found a plain cardboard box in her room that held an assortment of odds and ends in plastic bags. One bag held a bundle of letters written to her from her brothers while they were away at war, in Europe during the second World War.

By that time, all her brothers had passed away as well, but sitting down on her bed with those letters, I could hear all their voices again. The everyday moments they related to their little sister (Remind Mom to send me more socks, stay in school and work hard, my bunkmate snores and I'm so tired) left me full of wonder about the hour when she saw this letter for the first time too, just out of the postman's hands, brand new, when they were all young.

'God takes with one hand and gives with another' is so familiar we forget it, but in some moments it's poignantly true. My mother never spoke much about her childhood years or how close her family was growing up, but reading her old letters gave me an extra glimpse into her life and somehow made death feel less final and less obliterating, and I found some comfort.

Now, I never throw away letters from family and friends; I let them live in a box in my closet, as my mother's did.

This question deserves a lot of thought and a good long thoughtful post, but that's not in the cards today! Maybe a while from now I'll come back to it and muse over it more.

I have a poor memory, maybe from the fibromyalgia, maybe from just being a flake, or maybe from seeing what it's done to [someone in my family] to be constantly digging up the past. It's turned her into a monster, and what can the rest of us do, except get hurt, when she won't let it go?

So I walk away from the past , and since the present is a bit difficult these days, look forward to the future, making lots of plans and enjoying the work that will make it even better than what I've been living before.

Still, the present has its treasures: when you've got kids, there are reasons to hold on to every precious minute and breathe it deep.

We've been here two years, almost to the day. We closed at the end of August and moved in a few days later.

We'd been looking at houses for a few years, looking for something we could afford that wasn't too dismal. Every week during that time I would drive home from the estate agent's office, which took me past a lovely big stone house with a sunroom on it, surrounded by trees and gardens, just on the road but mostly screened from it, with a big FOR SALE sign in front of it.

Well, I'd think. It must be lovely to be able to afford something like THAT.

Then one day I was flipping through one of the regional property magazines, and...THERE was the stone house. The price wasn't half what I thought it would be. It was still out of our range, but maaaaybe....

We went to look at it. My heart broke the moment I walked in the door. It was rustic in a beautiful way: ceiling beams, great stone fireplaces, original windows with those deep, deep sills you only get with four-foot thick stone walls. It was cool and quiet inside and ...*home*. I knew that if we couldn't have it, it would be the house I remembered all my life, to wonder about.

"I need it," I said.

Oh no, my husband's face said.

Even better, it had two acres with it , three stone outbuildings and its own river, and no neighbours in sight; the ones just beyond the hill were famously nice. And, it was only two miles from the village; we could walk.

The down side was, there were only two bedrooms and there was only a shower, no bathtub, in the bathroom. Still, that's what kept the price down, so we scrambled to find the cash. We pulled it in from everywhere, to add to our savings of five years, and sold a car. We were just a thousand or so short, when we remembered something wonderful: the annual respite care grant would be coming in, in just two weeks, giving us exactly enough for the down payment. So we offered.

I still love it, which is a good thing because I hate moving. We've been fixing it up, adding a bathtub and a new water system, etc., and I've sworn that if I ever move out of THIS house, it will be IN a box, not carrying one. (I hope that's not for a long long time!)

LOL

My blog, I think, has been my best gift to  myself recently; I re-launched it in June. Since then the occasional hour I take out of my day to work on it, is another small gift to myself

In a large family stuffed into a small house, that's 'my' private place when a physically private place wasn't possible: the time I take to fiddle with it and post to it always feels like a gift, too.

Comments from visitors always make me smile or feel less alone out here in the rural wilderness, so it gives me a much-needed lift each day.