On the Sunny Side of the Street

Washing Dishes at Fifteen

Venice, Florida

Long time no see, Blog Girl.

What happened is that my leg healed, and I got my life back.

And I have been driving and walking and being able to pull weeds and stuff.

And what is true is that my routines are my guide through each day, and I could not rely on them when I could not walk, so I turned to writing to pass the time.

Yes, I like to write, and I need to express myself if only to the anonymous reader, but if I was going to write well it would take too much time, so today I am just writing just because it feels good.

My routines save me from myself in lots of ways.

And maybe I will get back to more regular postings because I won't have to try so hard to sound like my writing is good.


Because in this, my sixtieth year, I am trying hard to let go of much of the perfectionist trip which was strangling my insides.

So I might just start posting whatever comes up that seems important to post.


And that will be enough.


Because I am enough, and you dear reader are enough.


How long and curvy the road to acceptance of oneself.

Later.

P.


And now a little Judy Garland to cure what ails ye. She always does the trick for me.

My relationship with weight

Until I was thirty-five I never even thought about my weight. It was a part of me that i took for granted like I did my big blue eye, my a bit too large nose and the bump at the base of my hairline that Mom said I got because I fell when I was a baby and got a splinter of wood in my head. It used to be a thing we had- my mom and me- I would ask her over and over again, "Mama, tell me again how I got this bump on my head."

And she would tell me the story about the fall from the counter and the wood and all. And she must have told me this story dozens of times, and she never got impatient or told me that I had already been told about the bump. Instead she just would smile and start up in her higher- than -nomal - story -telling voice and say, "Well, when you were a very little baby...."

And I would look at her and move closer to her so that I could smell the best smell in the world to me at that time which was my mother- and I feel so secure to hear my mother- the whole of my little girl universe- tell me a story that I had heard so many times before and as I lay my head about her breast I knew that there were endless retelling of this silly little story awaiting me in the days again.

I was at the age then when I had not learned that I would grow up into an adult. Adults were as different to me as my kitty Agamemnon was to me.

The very idea that I would enter the world of adults was about as real to me that I would grow up to be a lion tamer.


Those early days hen there is no need for distraction or denial to quell the thunder that often sounds in the distant regions of my mind especially when i am tired were magical days. it is said that as we grow older the greater the attempt we make to engage in those activites that pleased us so as a child the more peace we will find. Food for thought, huh?

My life in my little lavender bedroom with the built-in curlicued shelving would never end.
I would always wake up to the sound of Mama's perculator beside which was the everpresent can of FIND THIS TYPE and we would go down to the basement to do the laundry.
I was too little too help, but my mothere always took the time to explain all of the different machings in the basement that she used to wash clothes the agitator, the wringer, the rinse tub,
the wringer again, and then the clothesline. Some clothes had to be sprinkled with water from a coca cola bottle with a stopper in it. That was my job. Sprinkling. It made be feel important not that I was getting to be a big girl.

And then the clothes and I sprinkled them Mama put them in the dark closet, and then the next day would be the day the ironing board came out, and I would sit and play on the floor with my dolls while steam came from the sprinkler clothes. Ironing day was a good day because I could play on the big braided rug that had all these colors in it, and I could even just lie down on that rug and at the level of my mother's legs and feel secure that Mama and the iron board would be there for many hours.

DEad Man's Curve

Sometimes ya just can't take much more

at least for awhile

When i was very young my memory of the first bad thing was when i found my teddy bear doll in the tiny woods behind our house. We lived in one post ww 2 suburbs of Kalamazoo north of Main Strett and called Westwood. The neighborhood still contained heavily wooded vacant lot which I am sure have long since been developed, but as a child who was born just a few years after the war ended my mother and father were of the first young couples to set up housekeeping there.

Behind our house was what I referred to as the woods, an dyou know how everything seems larger and more mysterious when you are a small kid. So, see, these woods were big and full of undiscovered mystery to my seven year old mind.

I lost teddy one day in what was probably one of the last days before the days became horrificly and short, cold and confining. Perhaps it was an Indinan Summer day.- a day in which one can drop the wool sweater and perhpaps enjoys one last days of shorts- a surprise sort of look up number ofhours for Indian usmmer. prefaced by weeks of what appears to be the end of anything resembling warm weather. And all of a sudden it is warm again and great joy is taken because you know it is swan song for summer. It is a bittersweet sort of loveliness. It is that last truffle from the box you received for a birthday. It is chords in a Strauss waltz which reminds you of mother. Indian summer is all of these things.

story of tedddy in the ice

then go into mels dx, identiy theft, party, accident, trip, medical maze, leg, suicide, and turning 60

I best steer my mind away from the dangers, of course, that is the wiset tack, and I am getting there by returning to the things that continue to save me.
They are the easily accessibly things- cats, funny movies, cleaning house, walks, weights, errands, yardwork, exchanges with a neighbor who is walking by, visiting my favorite haunts in this city which is my home