One of my favorite phrases in the whole word is "What if?" These are the words that wriggle into my brain while I'm driving, showering, falling asleep; when I read an interesting magazine article or hear an intriguing interview on the radio. They are the trigger for almost every story I've ever wanted to tell, the first two words that begin it all.
What if...
Patience, practice, perseverance, procrastination, perspective, I guess most of the things I need to work on in life begin with the letter P (besides laundry, of course). But luckily, I've always had an abundance of passion. When I think of all the things I want to do, all the things I want to learn, I'm grateful that this river will never run dry.
Sometimes I like to imagine all the jobs I'd love to have. I've been lucky enough to have some of them, while others I'll just have to wait to try out in another life.
- psychologist (although maybe I need my own first)
- doctor (even though I grow faint at the sight of blood)
- artist (in any and every medium)
- woodworker (making craftsman style furniture)
- professor (art, English, I'm not picky)
- costume designer (give me an elaborate Victorian dress and I'd be happy)
- novelist (YA, middle grade, adult fiction... throw in a little memoir)
- horse breeder (on a mini horse ranch of course)
- architect (designing cozy cottages)
- poet (why can't I just BE Billy Collins?)
- screenwriter (just don't make me move to L.A.)
- actor (if only I could memorize the lines)
It's times like these that I really do wish for the chance to live a hundred lives. What job have you always dreamed of doing?
The rain this morning has washed away
the dust of the every day that clogged my vision,
uncovering a new world.
Outside the window the leaves
of the rose bushes still hang heavy
with tiny silver orbs.
The dog has decided to bring the wet inside.
His coat is dusted and the underside
of his belly is soggy and brown,
but the rain has awakened something in him too
and he prances on the slick linoleum,
before finally laying his head down
on the ground between his paws.
Looking up at us with those kind eyes.
We walk out the kitchen door
and stop to breathe that cold, wet air.
Even the mountains have noticed
the difference and to celebrate,
have dressed themselves in lacy white collars
that would make Victorian women swoon with envy.
The dog trots happily down the sidewalk,
unaware that the world has changed,
that bits of the sky float in the gutters;
puffy white clouds
and bits of blue.
I'm going to try to hop back into the a-z challenge. After a rough week, my inclination was to post about nostalgia, but heck, I need a break from the weight of memories. It's time for something a little lighter.
It might seem strange, but I've always had a little obsession with people's noses. For some reason it's the feature that I usually envy most in other people. Maybe it's because I've always been a little self conscious about my own nose. I've never considered it to be huge. As I've grown, I've started to like it more and more for it's slightly beak-like pointiness. But when I was a little girl all I wanted was a cute little button nose that turned up at the end.
My best friend, Jenny's older sister had a button nose that I quite admired. Sometimes when I was lying in bed at night I would hold the tip of my nose between my pointer finger and thumb and imagine that when I woke up in the morning it would be shaped like a gentle ski slope.
Over the years I've admired many a nose and at times I've even considered having a nose job. But time and again I've realized that I like my nose just the way it is because it's mine.
Is there a part of yourself you've always wanted to change?
I'm sorry for the interruption in the A-Z challenge, but the past week has been extremely difficult. Not only did my grandma die on Sunday, but last night my husband's father died after complications from a heart attack that he suffered last Monday. Needless to say, I might be taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging for a bit.
Take some time to enjoy your loved ones and give them an extra tight hug!
In 1987, when I was ten, my dad married Marilyn vos Savant. He was smitten by her, attracted to her porcelain beauty, her jet black hair and most certainly seduced by the celebrity of her behemoth mind. At the time, she was touted as the world’s smartest person.
And of course I was star struck too. We had a soft-back copy of the Guinness Book of World Records that we kept on the bookshelf in our family room. Inside I liked to look up Marilyn’s name listed under the highest IQ on page 29. On the opposite page was a photograph of the woman with the “world’s smallest waist” and I was often distracted from reading through the entire paragraph about intelligence quotients, mesmerized as I was by the woman’s 13 inch midsection. There was also an entry on “longest fingernails” and “lightest girl”— Lucia Zarate, who only weighed 4.7 pounds at age 17. Her tiny, doll-like features were both frightening and intoxicating. And somehow,
seeing Marilyn’s name beside those other anomalies made her brilliance seem not only legitimate but exotic.
My sweet little 96 year old grandma died this morning. Four and a half years ago she moved from Connecticut to Utah to be nearer to us. For most of her life she lived in Connecticut, but after her kids grew up and moved away and many of her friends and family died, she decided that her life might be more exciting if she was around me and my three little kiddos.
As much as she loved being around us, she still longed for home. It may have been the home she lived in for more than fifty years that she longed for, but we often thought that the home she truly wanted to travel back to was the one that existed in 1940, a home with kids and her "best beau", the love of her life.
I don't blame her. I think the home I'll always long for is the one I'm living in right now. This place. This time.
