tree

My photography prompt for 12/17/13 is "tree". We're in the middle of December, so it is no surprise that many people posted photos of their Christmas trees. But lots of people went in the same direction that I did, which was to take a photo of a regular tree.

I might have taken a picture of my own Christmas tree if I had one. This is the 5th or 6th year in a row that I didn't put up a tree. I got rid of a fake tree some years ago when I was relocating from one state to another. The tree had seen better days and I figured I would just get a new one at my new destination. But then I didn't. Every Christmas, I vow that I'll buy a new tree in the sales just after the holiday. But then I don't. Even more peculiar, I keep buying ornaments for a tree I don't have!

But back to photography, I'm really drawn to tree bark and the way in which trees are constructed. I'm fascinated by the way the tree functions. In my original picture, I took a photo of a tree trunk that featured peeling bark and all sorts of marks and imperfections. I realize that I have no idea what species this tree is. Maybe I'll go back and figure it out later.

While I was on the same walk, I also saw a palm tree that I found equally interesting. The trunk of the tree showed several places where the fiber of the tree was simply shredding itself and separating from the tree in a very stringy, lacy way. I have no idea why the tree does that, but it makes for an interesting photo.

This brings to mind the wide variety of personalities of humans. We're all scarred and peeling in various ways. But what really sets us apart from one another is how we view others.Too often, I focus on the imperfections that people display. What I should be keenly aware of is that they are there at all. What does this person bring to my life that is important for me to see? Behind their scars, what is there? And more importantly, what do I have to offer them?

almond pecan popcorn

In 1975, my last sibling left home to go to college. That left just me & Mom at home. From that point until 2002, I lived with or near Mom and we spent almost every Christmas together. For the first few, my sister who is a year older came home. But after she finished college, we didn't see much of her, just as we didn't see much of my older siblings.

Mom and I had traditions. One tradition was to buy each other entirely too many Christmas presents. It was ridiculous. And once I had a child of my own in 1987, the outrageous gift-giving reached a fever pitch. One Christmas, we counted almost 100 presents under the tree, all for the three of us. Some of those came from other people, of course. But it was still insane. And we largely kept it a secret from my other siblings. Once I started working and had a decent income, I could not stop myself! Every time I went shopping I would see just ONE MORE THING that I would convince myself would make Mom happy. And she apparently had the same problem. It was almost embarrassing. Over the decades, I think I bought her the entire Pfaltzgraff Winterberry holiday china collection, including the gravy boat and the three-tiered desert tray.

Another tradition was Neiman Marcus Almond Pecan Popcorn. Oh, delicious candied popcorn with sweet pecans and almonds mixed in! It was so good! If we didn't eat it all before the day I had to get in the car to drive home, she would pack up half of what was left in a plastic baggie and send it home with me. My son was lucky if he got any at all.

We also ALWAYS had Almond Roca, her favorite candy. Each piece is a perfect foil-wrapped morsel, which could easily be consumed in one bite. But I always bite off half and set the other half daintily on the opened foil. Then, I slowly eat the first half before popping the second half in my mouth. And when my brain registers that the second half is almost gone, it tries to convince me that if I glance over at the foil that the second half will still be sitting there waiting for me. It never is. But I always check, just in case I got distracted and just THOUGHT I had consumed it.

What else? Oh! Mom always made cookies. We had chocolate chip cookies and cardamom cookies. But the best cookie she made were her Russian tea cakes or wedding cookies, as some people call them. The little balls of cooked dough (butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, salt, chopped pecans) were cooled and then rolled in confectioner's sugar. Oh, who can eat just one ... dozen?

Mother always had her train set assembled and going around the Christmas tree. She loved Norfolk & Western and the one with the Chessie cat. As my son got older, he lost interest in the train set. I often wonder what became of it.

We would listen to all kinds of music and watch the Nutcracker on television. If A Charlie Brown Christmas came on while we were there, we always watched it. And Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (with Burl Ives) was a must if it happened to be on while we were there. But mostly I remember listening to music.

We always attended Christmas Eve service somewhere. During the years she was in the pulpit, it was at her church, of course.

On Christmas morning, we always started with V-8 juice and some kind of sweet roll. Then we opened presents! Woo hoo!!!!! Then we cooked all day. Yes! For just the three of us! Turkey, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, rice & gravy, crescent rolls, cranberry jelly, olives and pumpkin pie for dessert. Then we always worked the new puzzle that Santa had brought us.

Depending on when I needed to be back at work, I might stay one day or up to one week after Christmas. So sometimes we got to do after-Christmas shopping. We always tried to hit the Hallmark store first thing in the morning on December 26th. The deals!!! And there was always some type of artists' cooperative to hit to find pottery or other small objects.

We had a lot of fun. I loved asking Mom to tell me stories from her childhood. There was always something I hadn't heard before.

In 2002, Mom decided to go live with my oldest sister and my brother-in-law in Colorado. It happened around the same time that my son left to go live with his father. And that was the end of our Christmas traditions. I honestly didn't realize how much it meant to me until the time came when I didn't have it any more. I've spent more than one Christmas day alone since then, declining invitations from people I knew but didn't have a close relationship with. That was probably stupid. I told myself that I'd rather just stay at home in my pajamas, which was true. But I think I was just missing my Mom.

Oh, the complexity of the mother/child relationship. Mom has issues. Heck, I have issues! But for that 25+ year period, we were good friends. I knew most of her secrets and she knew most of mine. But I didn't know her as well as I thought I did and we weren't as close as I thought we were. Because once she moved to my sister's house, our connection pretty much disappeared. I understand more about why and how that happened now, but back then it was pretty mind-blowing.

You never know, from one year to the next - or from one moment to the next - whether you will continue to have what you have now. The advice I have isn't new or unique. Enjoy now. Love each other. Show appreciation. Because you just never know!

far from home

French Polynesia is the only place I've ever been where I accidentally paid $47 for a t-shirt. The exchange rate was fluctuating rather wildly while we were there and we could not do the math in our heads fast enough. On the island of Bora Bora, we rushed over to see Bloody Mary's, a restaurant and bar that is entirely too far from the dock where we were to board a catamaran for a sunset cruise around the island. So when we finally DID get to Bloody Mary's, we had to rush through the gift shop for souvenirs, then leap back into the waiting taxi to get back for our cruise. The ride back was long enough to pull out a calculator and figure out that we had just purchased some outrageously priced tchotchkes. Oy.

But that champagne sunset catamaran cruise around the island is in my top five life memories. It was amazing. I will never forget the feeling of being stretched out on my belly on the sail and trailing my hand in the water. The sun slowly sank. I enjoyed my champagne and assorted nibbles of fruit. But looking into that water, I felt farther from home than I have ever felt. Of course I was in the southern hemisphere, so technically I WAS farther from home than I had ever been. It was truly amazing.

r is for ...

I don't even like peanut butter flavored candy. But there I was in the store, walking down each aisle with my camera in my hand and muttering "R is for, R is for, R is for" under my breath. When I saw the bright orange packaging of the Reese's candy, I had that AHA feeling. I rearranged the shelf a little and took five or six photos.

Back home, I was unsatisfied. But then arrives the familiar feeling that explains clearly why I will never be a world famous photographer. When a great photo happens, I've overjoyed. But when a photo fails to ignite my passion, I'm not one to force myself back out into the trenches to try again. This will do for now, I think. And I move on to something else.

The same could be said for many of my more creative endeavors, or attempts at creative endeavors. I get ideas. But I don't complete most of them. I need a creative partner - or two. Right about now, for instance, I could use someone to finish this blog entry.

it's (almost) always sunny in Phoenix

Living in Phoenix, Arizona is like being on vacation. Everywhere I go, there are remarkable views. Sunny days are on order approximately 310 days out of the year. If you suffer from seasonal affective disorder, move to Phoenix. Cured!

These last few days, however, have been very odd. Freeze warnings at night and sweater weather during the day. Last night I woke up and stumbled to the linen closet to drag out an extra quilt to throw on my bed. When I woke up this morning, before I opened my eyes, I questioned whether I had dreamed it. But no, there it was!

I've been bragging for years about eating Christmas dinner out by the pool the first winter I lived in Arizona. It was an amazing experience that convinced me that I really wanted to live here for the rest of my life. But it doesn't look like we'll be doing that this year!

What helps me to survive the brutal heat of an Arizona summer is imagining the winter months with my doors and windows open to let in the warm air. I've only had a few weeks of open window weather, so far, and I'm feeling cheated! I hope it gets warmer soon.

jekyll island sunrise

When I look at photos I've taken of sunrises and sunsets, I'm always acutely aware of what a luxury it is to be in a place to take such a photo. I'm sure there are people who live their entire lives without every seeing a sight like this. I feel special, but with a tinge of guilt. How did I get this lucky?

it'll be fine, just fine

My best friend, Jane, has always handled crisis with grace and aplomb. She waves away the worst predictions with her signature phrase, "It'll be fine, JUST fine!" I once fussed at her about this tendency of hers to expect the best. I went to her with some work-related crisis, suggesting that something awful was just around the corner. She replied, as usual, "It'll be fine, JUST fine!" Exasperated, I said, "Jane, you ALWAYS SAY THAT!!!" Without missing a beat she replied, "And it always is."

alcohol

My paternal grandparents were teetotallers and did not even allow spirits of any kind in the house. My maternal grandmother liked a glass of sherry every evening. My mother almost got arrested at the nursing home because she fought so hard for her mother to continue having her evening glass of sherry.

My own relationship with alcohol is not so black or white. As a teenager, I smoked pot. Alcohol was just not interesting to me. I recall drinking some beer, but I favored Miller ponies (the shame!) because there was a small chance that I might actually finish one before it got hot. When I did get to the point where I might have a mixed drink, I liked a Pina Colada. Clearly, I wasn't in to alcohol!

So how did I end up married to an alcoholic, you might ask? He was abstaining from alcohol when I met him because he was living with an older cousin who was a recovering alcoholic. Never in a million years did it occur to me that he might have a problem. When I met his family, I cheerfully answered, "I'm a drug and alcohol counselor" when asked about my career. Only much later would I be able to make sense of the stunned silence that followed my response. My new husband's mother was an alcoholic who had been married five times - to five alcoholics. My husband's father, absent from his life for years at the time I met him, was one of those five alcoholic husbands. My husband's sisters were both drug addicts, addicted to crack cocaine. My husband's brothers were alcoholics, although the oldest had managed to completely distance himself from the family and was clean and sober. My husband was considered to be the only healthy member of the family. He had never mentioned any of this during our short courtship.

After our first son was born, I encouraged him to find an activity to do outside the house. He joined the office bowling league and promptly started coming home drunk on Wednesday nights. I'll spare you the ugly details. After an attempt at marriage counseling, thwarted by his mother who told him "there is NOTHING wrong with you!!!", the marriage was over.

But my relationship with alcohol pre-dated my fiasco marriage. My father's second wife was a raging alcoholic who was typically drunk by about 3 p.m. every day. My sister and I first visited the new couple when we were 9 and 10. The next summer, she became enraged at me and sicced her German Shepherd on me. I narrowly escaped mayhem by climbing an apple tree. My father came home from work, rescued me and took me to the airport to send me back home to my mother. My father and I were estranged for a few years after that and only reconciled after that marriage ended.

You could say that alcohol has not been kind to me. So why do I have alcohol in my cupboard? For one, I love to cook. The Pioneer Woman's Whiskey Glazed Carrots are amazing, so Jack Daniels is an absolute MUST have. My sweetheart likes a good screwdriver, so I keep Ketel One and orange juice in the house for him. The other bottles are the product of having people over for dinner and asking them what they like to drink. I also keep red and white wines on hand, just in case. But if left to my own devices, an open bottle of wine will eventually be poured down the drain. I just don't drink.

One of my favorite takes on alcohol is a song written by Sofie Livebrant & Svante Sjoblom and recorded by Brad Paisley:

Alcohol

I can make anybody pretty
I can make you believe any lie
I can make you pick a fight
with somebody twice
your size. . .

Well I've been known to cause a few breakups
and I've been known to cause a few births
I can make you new friends
Or get you fired from work.

(Chorus)
And since the day I left Milwaukee,
Lynchburg, Bordeaux, France
Been makin the bars
Lots of big money
and helpin white people dance
I got you in trouble in high school
but college now that was a ball
you had some of the best times
you'll never remember with me
Alcohol, Alcohol

I got blamed at your wedding reception
for your best man's embarassing speech
and also for those naked pictures of you at the beach
I've influenced kings and world leaders
I helped Hemingway write like he did
and I`ll bet you a drink or two that I can make you
put that lampshade on your head . .

(Chorus)

turtle

Roberta and John. They were my two little turtles when I was a young girl. I named them after my mother's widowed secretary and her dead husband. That sounds terrible how I've written it just now. But at the time, it was really sentimental. I have no idea how old my mother's secretary was, but we called her "Granny B". She was very sweet and I adored her.

Every day, when I got out of school, I walked about a half mile from the elementary school to my mother's job. My sister and I were supposed to walk together, but we were mortal enemies then and I walked really fast to keep ahead of her. As a result, I always arrived first and got lots of attention from Granny B before my sister finally walked in. I convinced myself that Granny B liked me best.

So when I got turtles, I rushed to tell her all about them. She asked me if I had named them. I hadn't. So I asked her what her real name was. She said Roberta. I asked her what her husband's name was. She said John. And that was that. My turtles died. My mother, with her typical mix of self-absorption and neglect-is-good-for-children, hadn't bothered to do any research on the care and feeding of turtles. They probably starved to death because they didn't get proper nutrition from whatever I was giving them.

Since then, though I continued to love turtles, I kept my collecting to the non-breathing brand of turtles. My mother, once again, was the source of my very first turtle. It was from Mexico and carved out of marble. I'm many decades and dozens of turtles down the road from that first one. I've had to cull the collection several times because people have given me some horribly ugly turtles over the years. But I've also had some wonderful ones. I even had a little padded turtle footstool until one of my pets destroyed it. Sigh. I really liked that footstool too.

Somebody asked me today, why turtles? Long after I started collecting them, I learned that the turtle is featured in lots of creation stories. That's pretty cool. The tortoise beat the hare in a race because he was slow and steady rather than rushed and careless. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The turtle is awesome. But why did I start collecting them? I honestly don't know. But I once came face to face with a green sea turtle at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. He was swimming around the tank and came to a stop just in front of me, seemingly ignoring all the other humans. He moved his flippers to maintain his position and mere inches apart, we gazed into each other's eyes. I felt like I was looking into the eyes of time. He seemed to be saying to me, "Hey, I know you. I've known you for a long, long, long time." My whole body relaxed and it felt like I was being called to swim out to sea. Or maybe he was just asking me to take him back out there. Who knows?

I've had similar encounters with turtles since then. Each one feels the same. I feel a kinship, which sounds really stupid. but it feels real. I am a turtle. How I got in this human body is not explainable.

silver

"Don't gain the world and lose your soul. Wisdom is better than silver or gold." (Bob Marley)

I've never really had a strong and lasting desire for things. Every now and then I'll see something that I want and I'll really want it for a while. But it usually passes. I like silver more than I like gold, even though I know it isn't as valuable.

"Silver and gold, silver and gold, I'd rather have Jesus, than silver and gold. No fame or fortune, nor riches untold. I'd rather have Jesus, than silver and gold." (Kirk Franklin, Silver and Gold)

No, my lack of desire for things isn't borne of any religious belief, none that I can identify anyway. If I was forced to tie it, I would be more likely to tie it to Buddhism. Most people think that the Buddhist view of wealth is one in which it is renounced. But that's not really true. It's okay to have wealth, provided it is gained through right living. If one is exploiting others in order to gain riches, the wealth would be frowned upon. And once one has wealth, the expectation would be that one would freely dispense with it to help others. Getting too attached to material goods is the greatest obstacle to good living. So maybe that's what I've been after. I don't ever want to be so attached to something that I can't turn it loose.

"Silver is produced from lighter elements in the Universe through the r-process, a form of nuclear fusion believed to take place during certain types of supernova explosions. This produces many elements heavier than iron, of which silver is one." (Hansen, C. J.; Primas, F. (2010). "Silver Stars". Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 5: 67.)

The silver rush in the 1800's was responsible for an increase in westward movement in the USA. The first big find was the Comstock Lode in Nevada, which led to lots of crazy people rushing to get to the location in hopes of striking it rich. And some did. Comstock was just lucky to be there at all. He was actually left there to be caretaker of the cabin belonging to the Grosh brothers, who had earlier found both silver and gold at the site. But this was just a decade after the gold rush in California and they were intent on getting there, so they left Comstock at their cabin and headed west. They both died, so Comstock claimed the cabin and the land around it. But the Grosh brothers didn't get credit for the find. Neither did Comstock. Such were the vagaries of the day. None of the original miners really made any money. No, the real money was made by the money handlers in San Francisco, who manipulated the value of silver in order to amass huge fortunes. Some things never change.

"Genius without education is like silver in the mine." (Benjamin Franklin)

My father's maternal grandparents were quite wealthy. My grandmother, the eldest of six children, was encouraged to get all the education she could. She was born in 1891, so going to college was rare for women of her generation. Only a few women's colleges existed and she went to three of them. Papa Joe (my great-grandfather) enrolled her at Winthrop College (of which he was one of the founders) and Converse College, both in South Carolina where the family lived. But after that he sent her to Smith College, because he also wanted her to have an education at a northern school. So she ended up with two bachelor degrees, one from Converse and one from Smith. Grandmother was a smart woman with knowledge about many things. She and Granddaddy then went on to send all five of their children to college. By the time we came along, it was just expected that we would all attend college. In my family, education is critical. Learning and a thirst for information is one of the main gifts we have as human beings. To deny it is to wither on the vine.

"For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class." (Hans Konig)

Wow. That sounds familiar. Today we have the wealthiest of Americans getting richer, the poorest Americans getting poorer and a disappearing middle class. What's different about us is that the richest are using a new strategy of convincing the people with not much that the poor are trying to steal it from them. While the people with not much are focusing their angry eyes on the poor, the rich steal them blind. It's amazing that it works.

I dreamed last night of a giant escalator to heaven. The sides shone silver in the light of the sun. It had multiple stages where people would get off for examination. The one I noticed was for evangelicals. I got the sense that since they claimed to know God better than anyone, that their examination would be specifically detailed. But it seemed that it wasn't going well what with all that judging and excluding that goes on in those circles. Their faces looked shocked. Further up the escalator were some children. They were playing on the moving stairs. I wanted to tell them to stop because their feet might get caught. I even wondered if there was an emergency stop button at the bottom and the top, just in case.

That escalator looked almost inviting. But I'm not ready to get on just yet.