Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.


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Katie says – I went camping with my Mama

This is my big tent.

Katie here!  Mama says she got a new blog!  And it took her forever to let me on.  Yes it did.  A whole week!  So anyway…I haven’t been to my school in like THREE WEEKS!  Mama has been having adventures of her own and I got left behind at a kennel!  NOT FAIR Mama!  So I told her, yes I did, I told her she better shape up or I was going to go find a better Mama.  One who took my on adventures!  And did fun things with me!  And played with me all the time!  That is not too much to expect, me being a princess and all.  No it is not.

And do you know what my Mama did?  She put up the BIG TENT!  We got to go camping!!!

Nothing but sky and trees.

She didn’t put the rain flap on because she said it would be like sleeping under the stars and it was!  It was wonderful!  Ok, there weren’t any stars because it was cloudy…but there wasn’t any rain either, so Mama and I slept really good!  I slept upside down most of the night on my pile of pillows.  Hey!  Let me show you around my tent!

Come one in!  It’s a little messy right now because Mama hasn’t made the bed yet.  You know how Mama is.

Come on in, there’s room for all of us!

Of course my spot would be right here, on the blown up bed with my own personal window.  And the good pillow of course.

My favorite spot.

Oh!  Mama says I have to get OFF the bed.  Geesh.    OK, it’s true this tent has a little window just for me.  And that Mama put lots of pillows for me next to it.  I guess it’s just as good.

Yep this window is pretty sweet.

See?  It just perfect for me!

Those tent people sure know how to please a dog!

I didn’t want to go back in the house this morning.  I’d rather stay outside and play, take a nap in my tent, then play some more.  Oh wait.  Did you say that my breakfast was inside?  Coming Mama!

Did you say SUPPER?!

Mama says we can camp out again tonight!  I can not WAIT!  But I gotta get a nap in first.   Adventures are so exhausting.


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Searching for the ends of the earth

The ends of the earth at Point Pelee in Canada.

Karma continues to challenge us with photo hunts.  She gave us extra time to find our own personal ‘ends of the earth’ and it’s a good thing she did because here I am coming in at the last second with my choices. (Make sure you click on the photos to get a better view.)

The inspiration for this hunt came from our trip to Point Pelee in Canada earlier this summer.  Point Pelee is a piece of land jutting out into Lake Ontario.  From the sky it looks like a sharp edged triangle but when you’re there it feels like a very small version of Cape Horn, South America, with waves come toward it from two directions.

While we were in Canada we also visited a more famous location – Niagara Falls – where I had another ‘ends of the earth’ experience as we stood just at the edge of the falls, looking down at the Maid of the Mist tourist boat.

The ends of the earth at Niagara Falls.

Traveling to another Great Lake two years ago we explored Lake Huron, and at one point walked through tall marsh grass, our feet getting more and more wet as we got closer to the lake.

Looking for the ends of the earth.

It was easier going at Tawas Point State Park where the ends of the earth was more evident.

The very ends of the earth at Tawas.

But since Karma’s challenge I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for some ends of the earth photo opportunities closer to home.  It wasn’t easy without being near a large body of water.

You can see the ends of the earth just past that last stand of trees.

Or maybe the ends of the earth are even closer to home.  Maybe right down at the end of our road?

Can you get to the ends of the earth from here?

But in the end I felt like I needed to find the ends of the earth in Northern Michigan, on my favorite lake, Lake Michigan.  We gazed out over the lake from a platform built above the dunes at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park.

Extending the ends of the earth just a bit further.

And we traveled up to the very tip of Michigan’s little finger, the Leelanau Peninsula, to see the very ends of the earth, where someone had perfectly expressed my feelings about this part of the country.

I heart Lake Michigan.

I could go on and on talking about very special places where a person can experience beautiful ends of the earth.  But it’s getting late and Karma’s deadline looms.  Thank you once again Karma, for keeping me observant.  And for giving me another excuse to travel, always on the lookout for something special to capture.

Can’t wait for next time!


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Man, moon and hummingbird

Last weekend two things made me sad.  I heard that Neil Armstrong died and so did one of my hummingbirds.  Katie and I were sitting on the deck reading a book.  Well.  I was reading and she was napping.  The hummingbirds were buzzing around, chasing each other away from the feeder.  A female hovered right in front of my face and stared at me for a bit.  I wasn’t sure how many hummers we had, they moved so fast; zipping through the trees, over the house, back again to the feeder.

When I got up to go back into the house Katie sniffed at what I thought was a leaf on the deck, but wasn’t particularly interested.  I glanced over at the leaf and realized with a breaking heart that it was one of my hummingbirds.  There was a tiny spot on the window, and the poor bird was lying dead on the deck.   I was overwhelmed with grief out of proportion to my actual loss.  I love watching my hummers at the feeder.  They are there because I put the feeder there.  This poor little female was dead because I put the feeder there.

I picked her up and stroked her soft feathers.  She weighed nothing at all.  But she was beautiful.  The sun made her feathers glow, and I took her down the hill and put her on a nest of thistle fluff at the base of an oak tree along with a flower from the garden we passed.  I wanted her feathers to glow with the last rays of the sun just a little longer.  One last time.

I cried the whole time I mowed the yard.

When the sun slipped behind the trees I buried her, along with some flower petals and a bit of goldenrod, beneath our butterfly bush.  That evening I sent her on her way and hoped she and Mr. Armstrong were both flying over the moon.  The next day a male and a female hummingbird visited the feeder.  I wonder if they miss her.  I do.

Tonight as I watched the full moon swing up into the night sky I thought of them both.  And I winked, just the way his family asked us to.  God speed to you both Neil and my little one.  God speed.


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A piece of real life infiltrates work

Mom and Dad in 1992

Today was the first day back to work for a friend whose father recently died.  We’ve known each other for more than twenty years, and I’d met her dad a couple of times.  Two weeks ago she stopped by my cube to tell me he was sick and they were going to go to the doctor.  Two weeks ago next Saturday he died from stage 4 cancer.

This morning she stopped by my cube again to thank me for going to the funeral.  And as conversations go at times like this we talked a bit about her dad, what I remembered about him, where she was in the process of sorting out the estate, how things were going.   Then she looked at me and said “Of course this was a lot different than what you went through.”    I thought about that for a bit.   She’d barely known her dad was ill and four days after the diagnosis he was gone.  Four days.  I just didn’t think that was any easier than us finding out dad and mom were gone instantly.  She was still in shock.  She hadn’t had enough time to deal with it, with her extended family, to talk to her dad, let alone sort out her own feelings.  When I told her that four days was as much a shock as instant death her eyes filled up with tears.  She said it really hadn’t sunk in yet.  I nodded that I understood, and told her we could get together after work any time.  But inside my head I was thinking..’except on Tuesdays when I have band, and Saturdays when Katie goes to school, and…

…and then I shut that voice in my head down.  Because haven’t I been in her shoes?  Both parents gone, a little lost, a lot hurting.  Didn’t I have friends that came from across the state to just sit with me and listen to my story?  Didn’t I have a friend who called me every night during the week I was in Alabama after Mom died?  She called me every single night from California to see how I was, when all I could do was sob hysterically into the phone in response.  Don’t I still have friends who will listen to the story when I need to tell it, even though they’ve all heard it before?  And can’t I extend that same love and friendship to this new orphan?  Of course I can.

She was one of the friends that held my hand and listened eight years ago when our world came crashing down.  Now her world is upside down.   And whatever night she needs to talk I’ll be there.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a band night or an obedience morning.  Sometime down the road her loss is going to hit her; once the paperwork is under control, the house is cleaned out, the siblings leave for their distant homes the loss is going to hit.   And that’s when it will be time to pass on the support I received.  Because that’s what friends are for.

Thanks Mom and Dad, for bringing us up with enough sensitivity to recognize hurt when we see it…and for teaching us that last lesson when you had to leave eight years ago – that nothing is as important as the people in your life.  But boy change is hard.

So…lesson learned.   I sure wish you could come back now.

On their wedding day


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Change is hard but…

Image

Change is hard.  Especially if you’re of a certain age.  If you remember changing television channels by getting up and turning the knob – and even then there were only 3 stations to choose from.  If you remember when television stopped broadcasting after the late shows, and families ate dinner together without the TV on at all.

This week the server that supported my blog crashed.  We don’t know if it can be fixed.  I’m probably not even explaining this correctly; those that know me know that technical things…especially computer technical things…are not my strength.  So this whole create a new blog thing is pretty intimidating.

Regardless, I’m starting on it.  I think it’s pretty boring right now, but I’ll figure it out.  My biggest concern is finding all of you again.  So if you have contact with other people that you know used to check in on me, let them now I moved.  And I’ll try to figure out how to put a blogroll on this, and work on finding all of your blogs as well.

Change is hard.  But one thing we can all count on is change.  Over the years I’ve tried to figure out what my blog was about. It started out being about a woman who quit her job and went back to school at 50, then about her new career.  But after the new career was knocked off track when the economy tanked and I ended up unemployed it morphed into a dog blog with a side order of other stuff.  Then the other stuff took over.  I guess the most you can say about it was that it changed.

And so this blog is born of change.  I expect more of it in my life.  Change is hard for me.  But just think, without change I never would have heard of blogging, would never have met all of you.  So I’ll work at living with change as long as you’re all along for the ride.

Couldn’t do it without you.


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October Photo Hunt

Karma threw a real challenge our way for her October Photo Hunt.  She’s looking for photographic images of idioms.  You know idioms, those funny little sayings that we use without thinking.   She wants us to find three.  Carol already has already posted; Scott and others have too.

It’s getting late, the deadline is October 31st.  So here you go.  Don’t forget you can click on the photos to make them larger…the better to see the amazing detail!  LOL!

I’m not going to label them, at least not right away.

That’s so you can have more fun trying to figure out which idiom they might be.

And in case they’re not that obvious to you, which would be my fault not yours, here are the answers!

1.  Let sleeping dogs lie.

2.  Birds of a feather flock together.

3.  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Karma is giving out extra credit – if we post something something for Halloween…

…so here’s my neighbor’s house at dusk.  He’ll take these lights down on November 1st and start putting up his Christmas lights.  We get to enjoy holiday lights without any of the work!

 


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Katie says

Katie here.  Mama says she’s too tired to write this morning, and she has to go to that stupid Weight Watchers meeting anyway.  I hate Weight Watchers because Mama doesn’t eat all those good things anymore.  And if Mama doesn’t eat that stuff, then she can’t accidentally drop that stuff.  So what Mama doesn’t eat, I don’t get to eat either!  How unfair.

Anyway, here it is Saturday already and she didn’t even post the pictures from the excellent adventure we went on last Saturday!  It was a beautiful day, unlike today, and we had the park all to ourselves.

Mama even let me run a little bit without my leash!  Of course I always came right back to her when she called me.  She called a lot, if you don’t mind me saying.  I think she should trust me more, but you know how Mama’s are.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to go back to the park today.  It’s supposed to rain.  And Mama seems so tired all the time.  Do you know she came home from that work place last night and went straight to bed?  No playing with my bunny or my ball or even with my frog!

I just don’t understand.  When I used to go to work, um, I mean school, I always had a good time.  Mama just needs to learn to have fun no matter where she is right?  Unless it’s the groomer.  I don’t think anyone can have fun at the groomer.

Anyway, that was my excellent adventure last weekend.  Guess I’ll go take a nap now.


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Went for a walk

The smell of leaves, simultaneously dry and damp, takes me back to my walks to grade school almost fifty years ago.

Robins pull dry fruit from the crab apple trees.

Children are playing across the street in the school yard.  Girl in Pink, obviously the leader of all Girls in Pink points finger at girl in Not Pink:  “We won’t play with you if you keep doing that!”

House wrens swarm up from goldenrod seeds along the bank of a rain swollen creek.

The sky toward the city is glowing as if the sun is setting in mid afternoon.

The clouds ahead are low, gray and in waves, as if the ocean has turned upside down and frozen solid.

The sidewalk at my turning point beckons for me to continue on, but there is too much to do back in my beige cubicle so I turn around.

Past the playground again.  The girl in Not Pink is sitting near the teachers.  The whistle blows and all the children run toward the school.

A worn out orange basketball sits on the sidewalk just ahead of me.  I lob it back over the fence into the playground.

Back past the woods where lots of golds and reds are still glowing deep in the protected interior.

Something runs along the leave covered floor beneath the trees sounding larger than it actually is.

A runner dressed in purple approaches from behind, flat footed feet slapping the sidewalk.

Ears are cold.

I climb up the three flights of stairs to my beige cubicle.

Sweating.