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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| "Memories are forget-me-nots gathered along life's ways, pressed close to the heart in a perennial bouquet!" Clara Smith Reber Write about your memories that mean the most to you. I think that the memories that mean the most to me all involve family. There's something remarkable about childhood. When we are very young, we live with our eyes pointed toward home. We focus there, and my home was a good one. I don't remember a time before my next oldest sister was born, but I remember talking with her long into the night and games and stories. My family was my entire world, and when I went outside the home, it was always with the idea that I would come back, because that's where life was. But somewhere in there--I'd guess I was about eight or ten, life changed, and I lived on the outside, and home was a refuge from life. Then, my memories were about the things that happened, and they were all about the outside, the friends that I had, school, books, reading, writing--everything that mattered happened when I was out in the world. |
| Look at your hands. What do they mean to you? What is the meaning or emotion hiding in each line, blemish, wrinkle, scar, or the lack of those things if you have perfect hands? This is an interesting prompt, mostly because it's been a while since I've truly examined my hands. I remember an art class when I was a senior in high school. We were given the assignment to draw our hands. Some people took time and made a large hand (usually a left hand because the right was used to sketch) filled with lines and shading. Me, I took that paper and drew about twenty hands in various sizes, all lefties. I went for quick and impressionistic instead of slow and detailed. So . . . here goes. I don't bite my fingernails any more. I used to. I don't remember why I did or why I stopped, but I was an adult at the time. Right now, I have fingernails clicking against my keyboard as I type. My pinky fingers don't look alike. There's a story behind that. When I was very young (toddler) I accidently shut my finger in my parent's filing cabinet. My left pinky is a bit deformed as a result. In the center of the back of my left hand is a little round scar from the IV they had in me when I was in the ICU. There's two more on the inside of both elbows and another in the middle of my left forearm from where they pushed iron in me a couple of years ago when I was severely anemic. It was black and reminded me of demon blood and took a long time to push. But I felt better with some actual blood in my veins. On my left wrist (and a few random places on my left hand that I can't find any more) are three small scars over the veins where I put my hand through a pane of glass on a door. I was trying to close it at the time. That one took a while to bleed, which means it wasn't arterial, but once it started, I couldn't get it to stop. That was a scary one. But I cleaned up the glass. I was twelve when that happened. I don't paint my nails. I dislike random things catching my eye and drawing my attention. I also don't wear rings. I have a bracelet that I wear sometimes (especially if I'm going to be traveling on my own. It's a med ID that Mama got me. She gets nervous. I don't play an intstrument. My sister has told me in the past that it's a shame I don't play paino because I inherited my grandma's long fingers. They aren't very long, but I can span about an octave easily and can add another third if I stretch. |
| I lost my 20 year old cat today to cancer. I'm heartbroken. She was with me through 2 rounds of cancer, my move to New Jersey and my head injury. We've been through a lot together. The prompt is about losses in your life. This is a difficult thing to think about. I mean, I've had little losses. Losing games or contests--which I don't like to do, by the way. I don't like how it feels to be in competition with someone else. I lost places a lot as a child. We moved. we haven't moved in a while now, but when I was growing up, I lived in twenty-five different apartments and houses in my first twenty-five years in periods of no less than four weeks and no more than eight years. I don't know though. In some ways, that didn't feel like loss because each old friend lost with distance was the opportunity for new people and new friendships. It was change more than anything. But I still wonder about some of my old friends. I wouldn't even know how to look for them, now. I can't think of loss without thinking about death. I've lost all of my grandparents and one nephew. They all were difficult--I remember losing Grandpa by inches as the Alzheimer's took bits of him away for the last few years of his life. I didn't go to his funeral. I was away at college. I went to his wife's funeral ten years later, and that was disturbing. I think I prefer celebrating life rather than viewing a person who is gone and small and so still. Too still. Caleb, my nephew was hardest. We lost him before he had the opportunity to live at all. It hits me hard, especially around his birthday and his death day five days later--both in April. Right now, it's raining and my fingers are way too slow to capture my thoughts, and it's my niece's birthday (she's six today) and she's miles away and I'm not going to be seeing her and I'm feeling lonely for my nieces and nephews. It's difficult being so far away. Pictures of a baby climbing on his feet for the first time aren't the same as being there and laughing with him. I'm feeling that loss most of all, today. |
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