Just Reflecting On Life

Things…It Boils Down To Things

April 10, 2013 By Brenda

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There are things about me that I just can’t figure out. Things that, given my nature, seem preposterous.

Such as my fixation on tiny houses and wanting to shed some of my belongings.

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This sweet little cottage is The Whidbey house, by the way. And it’s cuter than a bug’s ear.

Sure, it would still be fantastic to have chickens in the back yard rather than the front yard, where they are here. Or anywhere for that matter. But it seems downright roguish to have them scratching dirt in the front. Like thumbing your nose at the world.

Because here, here they are even more special somehow.

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I think that maybe as you get older, your belongings somehow get heavier and heavier to lug around. Just looking at them, knowing dust is collecting on them by the second and you’re going to have to whip out the dust rag sooner rather than later, seems more tiresome than it once did. I once dusted and cleaned with gusto.

And then to top it off you know your allergies will flare up.

It seems as though there must be something more important in life you should be doing. That you need to be doing.

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Me, a person that could possibly win records for being able to stash more things in a small space than most people could conceive of. Seems kind of odd, doesn’t it? Like I’m two people split down the middle.

I’ve always loved those tiny houses. Maybe because I never had a tree house or a play house or a doll house. Or even, as a kid, a room to call my own.

But after I injured my ankle nine months ago, and the healing has not gone as expected, everything suddenly got more tedious. I began to look at these things around me in a whole new light.

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Don’t worry, you lovers of red and cozy and collections and cottage style, I am never going to be a minimalist, though those people interest me no end. But I just want less of it. Instead of two TV’s, I’d probably just have one, for instance. Instead of four or five different styles of flat ware, I’d pare down to one.

Nothing earth shattering.

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Just leaning a bit in the other direction. Not having shopping for treasures be the pinnacle of my month. Not salivating every time I see something red and wondering, wondering, wondering, fast as lightning, where I could put it.

Not trying to squeeze in even more.

There is more a question of need involved. There is more the feeling of being stifled somehow, and needing to take off layers of coats that are weighing me down. Not to mention heating me up.

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If not for this injury, I might never have gotten to this place in my head that is mentally whittling down my possessions as I sit here with my ankle elevated. I would have thought the tiny houses were cute but really not practical. And I still don’t think 100 square feet is practical for me and the pupsters. I’d run into myself coming and going.

But 500-600 totally is. In fact there is something whispering in my ear: It’s a challenge. See if you can do it. See if you could pare it all back and still have your favorites (of which there are many). And still not have much to dust that would take more than five minutes a week.

I think I am at the threshold of something new and exciting. A new phase or chapter. I think I am ready to let go of a lot of baggage that is weighing me down. And not the material kind.

But parting with some of the material possessions would signify what I need to let go of. I think I could draw a deeper breath and feel…lighter.

You get to the point when you have to know something is going to be worth it to hand over your time. Because time is not infinite. The clock never stops. It just keeps ticking along, your life molding itself into a slide show that rushes by before you can even take note of every memory.

You know you’ve stopped many times to smell the roses. But life becomes even more precious and you want to take even more time to do just what your heart desires. To pause at all the little things that make up a day and then is quickly gone.

As one of my very favorite writers, William Faulkner, said: “Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

I think things happen for a reason. Though I may never know what it is.

I just need to know that I took the deepest breath I could muster. And felt light as a feather for having done so.

Filed Under: decorating, Just Reflecting On Life, small house living, Tiny houses Tagged With: Just Reflecting On Life, The Whidbey House 71 Comments

Waiting For Winter To End

March 2, 2013 By Brenda

Yesterday I brought my indoor fairy garden into the living room, so it could get more light. It is growing in leaps and bounds. I love to look at the vibrant growth and the new leaves.

I stand at the back window and gaze outside. I never got a chance to clean up after the plants out there died. It is a jumble of dead stalks and piled leaves. Kind of makes me sad to look at it. Any other year, it would have been cropped and tidied up and waiting for the first spring flowers to push through the earth.

But this year, this year was different.

I am not accustomed to being so sedentary.

I saw my ankle doctor yesterday. The MRI was clear. Now he’s ordering bone density tests. I wonder, all the time I wonder, what this is going to turn into. It gives me a whole new appreciation for people who have difficulty walking. Or who can’t walk at all.

The house isn’t getting the care I always give to my home. I feel guilty as I look around and see dust on the floors. I am not one to let things go.

But soon, through the dead stalks and piled leaves in the yard, I know that nature will still do it’s thing soon. Amid the brown will be strong tiny shoots of green. And maybe by then I can tidy it all up, the way it deserves.

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A Fairy Garden & A Ray Of Sunshine

February 21, 2013 By Brenda

While the snow is gently falling outside, I am glad I took the time about ten days ago to create this indoor fairy garden. I was missing the green of nature so much that I just needed to dig my hands in some dirt.

So here it sits in the dining room, while we sit, me and the pupsters, watching the white flakes fall ever so gently.

It does cheer me up a bit with it’s little fairy and turtle and small plates and such.

Tuesday, on my birthday no less, I sat the afternoon in H&R Block doing my taxes. How those folks add up all those confusing numbers and know where to put them in their appropriate little white boxes I do not know.

And it didn’t help a bit that the sweet elderly woman I had to pay $550 to to add those strange figures up kept muttering: “Oh, this isn’t good. This is going to be bad. Bad.” Occasionally in that 90 minutes she would look up at me, and with her yellow marker she would draw a circle. She’d push the marker down on it for emphasis.

“This,” she would announce. “Is the happy face.” She’d shake her head. “And this,” she’d say again. “Is the unhappy face. She drew the faces, and one of course had a smile like sunshine. And the other was upturned in obvious grief. She drew arrows to the figures on her sheet that made up my income for 2012.

I kept asking: “How bad???”

“I don’t know yet. Bad,” she’d say.

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. Judy was home with strep, poor thing, and thus I was alone. I drove through Wendy’s and ate a burger on the way to do my taxes. No birthday fanfare. Cold gloomy weather.

And I just could not take one more…BAD.

I will admit, though sheepishly, that I sat in the chair across from her in her cubicle (thank goodness at the very back) and I silently began to cry.

I think I was crying about a lot of things. But BAD just brought it all to the surface.

She managed to miraculously come up with all these deductions so that at least I could swallow. And walk out without tears running down my face. How can you make so little and have to pay so much?

I am in a whole new world now. One in which figures in little white boxes bring me to tears in front of a perfect stranger. One in which I have no idea what all I was supposed to keep tabs on and receipts for. Fifty-six years old now, and I’m about to barf up the Wendy’s burger right across the little yellow faces on her pad of paper.

As I drove to the grocery store to pick up a few things before the bad weather swooped into Tulsa, my mind running a mile a minute, I was thinking about such things as: “Will I be able to buy Abi’s Prozac? Hell, will I be able to buy the little pills that help turn my upside down comma into an upturned ray of sun?”

I stood in the coffee aisle and hesitated before I bought my little box of K-cups for my beloved Keurig coffee maker. I’d pick one up. Put it back. Finally I tossed it in the basket.

After all, it was my birthday. And I’ve spent the last year and a half trying to figure out how to turn down-turned commas into sweet little smiles while my world seemed to unravel.

Come hell or high water, by the skin of my teeth, I have somehow managed to make lemonade out of lemons. And I’ll survive this too.

I wonder if I’m the only client who has sat across from her in tears? Perhaps that is why she began, in her 34 years with H&R Block, she’d proudly told me early on, to look down discreetly at a pad of paper and draw faces while the person across from her tries to pull her 56 years of life together.

Then yesterday morning my eldest daughter unexpectedly called me. She’s emailed a couple of times, but I’ve just been, well, too reticent to go there. Anger and pride and hurt mixed up together I suppose.

After my initial surprise at hearing her voice after all these months of silence, something inside of me seemed to let go. Like a tight fist was in my chest all this time, and I was totally unaware of it. And then the fist relaxes and unfolds.

A weight falls off your shoulders you didn’t even know was perched there. There is suddenly a ray of light at the end of the dark tunnel.

And it was at that precise moment that I thought maybe, just maybe, things were going to be all right after all.

Filed Under: Just Reflecting On Life Tagged With: fairy garden, Just Reflecting On Life 67 Comments

Life In Three Layers

February 3, 2013 By Brenda

I made this little crazy quilt a long time ago. You can let your creativity go wild with abandon when you’re working with all these stitches.

I guess they call them crazy quilts because there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how they look. Just a bunch of fabrics sewn together and highlighted with stitching. Like roads that look like they’re going nowhere, but somehow manage to intersect.

Fabric and buttons and thread have made up a big part of my adult life. At about 30, I yearned to have a quilt. But I couldn’t afford to buy one.

So I just started sewing one day. I didn’t have a sewing machine. So everything I made was sewn by hand. I made quilt after quilt. Mostly simple patchwork.

I found true serenity sewing through the three layers, making the quilt sandwich, and binding them together into one piece. I remember my kids kept asking me when I was going to do something besides simple squares.

I just smiled. I liked the way squares find their way back to their beginning. So I just kept cutting square after square. It was peaceful. Cutting squares from fabric scraps. I’d make a template for the sewing line and use a pencil to draw around the clear plastic.

Then I’d line them up on the floor one after another and form a row. I’d sew that one together and lay some more out, and do it again until I decided it was big enough.

By the time my girls were grown up, I branched out to other patterns.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to that place. When I spent my days planting herbs and flowers and sitting on the back porch watching the yard birds.

And oftentimes in the afternoons I’d walk around the corner to an elderly neighbor’s house. She was also a quilter.

One day I went there, to their little farmhouse that set on the edge of the city I lived in then, and she’d made me this big beautiful white doily. The one you often see in the middle of my table.

I wish I’d known then what I know now. That life was really pretty good there, and I shouldn’t have yearned for more all those years ago.

But I was still a young woman, and my husband traveled a lot working.

A man from the past looked me up and called one day from another state. Another chapter of my life. And I foolishly let my heart lead me where my brain probably knew I shouldn’t go.

More led me to years of turmoil. Maybe karma would be more apt. For I truly believe that when you hurt someone, somewhere down the line, it will come back full circle.

Lots of things have happened in the past year or so. People I thought I knew like the back of my hand, ended up turning my heart inside out. And since I just can’t bear to put any more tread on my heart right now, I’ve chosen to stay to myself. To choose not to seek more.

I think I’d rather spend my days alone than be turned inside out again. You know, there comes a time when you just have to do that. You have to put your hand up and say to yourself: Stop. No more.

Sometimes you have to choose a solitary life where the lines are penciled in. And it’s safe not straying outside the lines.

Every year about this time, I mention my mother. Her birthday was a few days ago. If she’s still alive. Sometimes I look across the room at the woman in the frame I picked up at an antique mall. My junk store relatives, I call them. And I pretend that is her. Because I wouldn’t know her if we passed on the street. And I’d just like to have a face for the woman who gave birth to me and left soon after.

Mothers and daughters. Daughters and mothers. A bond like cement. Until cracks appear and weeds grow up between them and push them apart.

More is not always a good thing. For me, more will have to wait until my heart is mended back together. Sewn in sturdy straight lines and knotted off like my quilts.

Filed Under: Just Reflecting On Life, quilts Tagged With: Just Reflecting On Life, quilts 42 Comments

The Power Of Color

January 20, 2013 By Brenda

I am convinced that color is essential for our well being. At least it is for mine.

Especially for those who suffer from depression, which has been on the periphery of my life for as long as I can remember, color is therapy.

In fact, I think they should have color therapy for depressed patients. Maybe they do. I’d like to see what the brain indicates when objects of bright color is placed in front of them. If there is a slight rise in blood pressure. If something gone dim briefly lights up.

This I know because as a teenager, colors did not seem bright to me. They were muted, distant. But when I began medication and therapy, colors began to flash at me. See me, see me, the hues said. I was always here, but you just didn’t see me. Because something in the brain was keeping them at a distance.

Color, you might say, saved me.

And along with color comes textures. I love to feast my eyes on wood. Variations and striations that make up the whole. I hate to see every piece of wood colored with white paint. For we lose those little tell tale maps that move throughout the grain of wood. Which, in itself, is beautiful to me.

When I am worried about finances, things beyond my control, I must work with color. I have to get in there and touch it and rearrange it and feast my eyes on it. It is my connection to the world oft times.

I might lose my place and rise up like a balloon and bob in the wind. But what keeps me tethered to earth are the joyous colors I see in the sky and the birds and the trees.

I guess that’s why I cover my walls. Plates, knick-knacks, anything and everything. I smile when I look around and there is a plethora of color surrounding me. I don’t think I could live any other way.

It beckons you out of the darkness, that slippery hole that is so easy to fall into. And is ever so hard to get a foothold to crawl out of.

May color always be with me, my path through the rough times. Leading me out of the dark and into the light.

What does color mean for you?

Filed Under: Just Reflecting On Life Tagged With: color, Just Reflecting On Life 36 Comments

Cold & Blustery Morning After Christmas

December 26, 2012 By Brenda

It is very cold here, but we didn’t get the expected snow. However, I will be staying in while it’s this cold out.

Each morning I have my cereal in these colorful bowls I found at Marshalls a few years ago. It is fun to get to the bottom of the bowl and have the flowers there to greet me.

I’m trying to get myself into a crafty frame of mind. I just can’t settle on what it is I want to do though.

Do I want to work with paper or fabric or felt? Or a mixture?

I’m rather proud of myself. I have managed to keep the poinsettia alive that Judy picked up at Home Depot about a month ago for 99 cents. I don’t seem to have very good luck with these plants normally. And yes I know they are toxic to animals, so I keep it up high.

I’m a little tired of seeing holiday things. So I’m happy that things will be getting back to the every day. Do you get to feeling that way? Like you just don’t know if you can look at yet another wreath or Christmas bauble?

Every morning when I walk into the kitchen, I am greeted by my rows of kitchen items. I love to see these vintage jars all lined up like soldiers at salute.

So what is it you’re going to be up to today? Are you going to brave the after Christmas throngs in the stores?

Or stay in, try to keep warm, and light some cheery fragrant candles?

Linking up to Nita’s Mod Mix Mondays at Mod Vintage Life.

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Shaken & Mystified

December 20, 2012 By Brenda

The response to my post yesterday has me questioning why we even have free speech. Why I have spent the last six years of my life blogging most every day. Why I have always been there to help anyone and everyone with their blogs or blog design, out of friendship and community.

Yesterday I made a statement that, in my eyes, was taken out of context. I cried many tears over the comments rendered yesterday. I felt like blood in the water amidst sharks.

I have not served in the military forces. But I appreciate each and every member of those men and women who dutifully serve our country. THEY are the ones who should have the assault weapons to protect themselves. THEY are the heroes. This country, albeit shaken and divisive, is not truly at war in the true sense of the word. Although you wouldn’t know it by the fierce and driven anger.

I have considered deleting my blog after this. I’m so tired of those that strike back as though they personally have been targeted. I have learned that you cannot have a discussion over something so tragic as what happened last week without those that will twist your every word.

And I will reflect today on what is good and wholesome in this world.