Paradise

Tags

age, choices, decisions, dice, gamble, life, opportunities, paradise

He looked at the two of them. On the outside, they looked the same. He picked one up and weighed it carefully in his hand. He picked up the other one and closed his eyes, using his body as a balancing scale. They felt equal. He put them down, the black dots on both staring at him like alien eyes against the smooth white surface.

His mother had told him to go to his room and take a chance. Risk a little. He knew that meant go clean his room and be surprised at what treasures could be found in the process, but he wasn’t into chances, which lead him to consider the concept of chances and risk taking, gambling, which led him to the back of the top drawer of his dresser where he stuffed everything and anything that didn’t belong anywhere else from the last time he cleaned his room. And his mother was right. He did find treasures. He found the baseball he and his team mates had signed three years ago and gifted each other for being the worst team in the little league championship. He found the pocket knife his grandfather gave him a few years ago, and another, and another. His grandfather always gave him a small pocket knife of some kind for every holiday, birthday, and just because. Gramps never went anywhere without his, but he’d lost bits of pieces of his memories, so they’d all learned to be surprised at the repeat gift giving of pocketknives, thrilled he could even remember what one was.

He found some old candies, a moldy ham sandwich from a couple months ago when he’d gotten up in the middle of the night when he was hungry. When he bumped his knee on the dresser sneaking back into bed, he’d tossed it in the top dresser drawer and covered himself up and faked sleeping when his dad came in to check. He’d fallen asleep and forgot about the sandwich. Well, that was trash. But it was a treasure, green fuzzy hairs and white spores forming across the meat and into the crust. he gave that a quick look over, recorded the finding for future reference on how not to store food, and tossed it.

At the back, behind shiny silver and white gum wrappers were the two tiny cubes. He brought them out and set them on the top of the dresser like precious cargo, and studied them. These represented chance. Opportunity. Choices. One role, it would be a number that could change a life. Maybe. But they didn’t work alone. You needed them in games to drive the players forward, or back, he realized, depending upon the flip of a wrist and the skitter of the plastic across the cardboard game board. He’d gone with his family to a fundraiser with gambling games. He’d been fascinated with the roulette wheel, a role of the dice combined with chips on a number and a steel ball that bounced across the spinning forces to a matching number, or not, causing more sighs and moans than shouts of success. So they didn’t work alone. He wondered how he should use these to take his own chance.

He picked them up and shook them in his cupped hands and tossed them up into the air, really taking a chance, and a risk. They came down in two places, one turned up 6 on a pair of sweaty sports socks. The other tilted 2 and 4 up on a pile of homework waiting for his attention. Six was higher than 2 and 4, but also a combination of the two numbers, but he decided that a single die over a pair of dice won, and liked those odds better. He picked up the dirty socks and put them in the hamper and ignored the home work.

Going Home

Tags

divorce, family, home, identity, life, prompts, stories, travel, writing exercises

This is a story based upon my writers group prompt to write about going home. The story is a form of fictionalized truth.

“Life happens while you are making other plans.”

Sometimes that old cliche nags at me, especially when it comes to the holidays.

Holidays sneak up on me. I don’t know why. They happen the same time every year. You’d think the habit of the holidays would somehow incorporate itself into my schedule better. Alas, it’s three weeks before Christmas and I’ve not done a thing in preparation. There won’t be any going home for the holidays this year.

Home. That mystical word. Home and family. A mixed metaphor in my life. Home is a word that has haunted me from my earliest memories.

As a child, holidays were spent with relatives and friends, homes where I felt special and included, a part of something, a feeling I never had in my own home. Home was a place of divisiveness, arguments, unjust accusations, punishments that drove us into our various corners. Alone time was cherished, sought, welcomed. Togetherness brought frustration, anxiety, and the desire to flee.

As an adult, having two homes is a sign of wealth. In childhood, it is a sign of divorce, separation of state and state, each one with their own rules. Divorcing as began my trip through puberty, home meant confusion, uncertainty, mines, and theirs. There was the place where I spent my school days and a second place where I spent my weekends and summers. Step parents with children enlarged the family. I became theirs and ours rather than mine.

Feeling as if I had no home, no roots, I turned to travel, moving easily from place to place. It was just a bed. A temporary roof. Keep the suitcase packed, just in case.

Newly married, new husband and I took the art of living on the road to a new level, traversing North America and the world for years on end. We’d rest for a day or two, maybe a month, occasionally longer. Then on to the next job, next adventure.

The question of home arose on a daily basis.

“Where are you from?” is a common question in the traveling world.

For me, it became a question of “where did you grow up,” “where did you spent the majority of your life,” “where did you just come from,” and other between-the-lines answers sought. What was the answer they really wanted. What did they really want to know about us and our “home” that would help them define us in their community and world.

When falling in love together, my husband had a hard time first saying the words “I love you.” Understanding deeply my sense of lost self, he would hold me close and say “Home is where Lorelle is.”

Over the years his words sank in. Home is where Lorelle is. HOME is where Lorelle is. Home is WHERE Lorelle IS.

He taught me that home is where you make it, so I’m going home to me now.

Let Me Sleep Before I Go Go

Tags

alarm clocks, alarms, home, husband, life, sleep, time

From two prompts in a writing workshop. The first is a gift that changed your life and the second was based upon a participant arriving late and saying, “Waking up is hard to do,” a joke on the song “Breaking up is hard to do.”

In my marriage I have only asked for one thing. Sleep.

You may think this is a simple request, one typically found in many busy family lives, up at all hours of the night with the ills of young children, racing around between the commuter routes of workers, hobbyists, and sporting play fields. Late nights spent fighting or loving, working our way through the hills and valleys of a life loved and lived.

Alas, these are not the reasons I seek my gift of sleep. I actually don’t need much sleep. Yet I treasure every moment of shut eye I can get.

My idea of a perfect day is to rise before the sun and go to bed long after the sun sets. I live quite well on 4-6 hours a sleep, often barely getting three, though four or five is better. Gifted with the energy of a bulldozer and the enthusiasm of a hummingbird going after a feeder, I plow my way through life, awake the moment the alarm goes off, usually before, and dreading the time I have to stop for the day and lay my head down on the pillow.

My husband has other ideas on sleep. He workshops the sleep gods, and does an amazing job. For him, the best sleep comes early in the morning about two hours before the need to arise arises. It begins with the first beeps of the alarm clock. This is when his morning worship begins.

In the chill of the morning, my eyes fly open at the sound, totally awake. It is usually an hour or two before I really need to be awake, but the deed is done and my motor is running.

I watch as his arm creeps out from the warm cocoon we’ve created to bang the top of the clock. As the clock shakes with the impact, I see that it is six in the morning. I’m awake. Totally and irrevocably, no matter how hard I may try to return to a dream state.

He’s still asleep. Though the decades-long habit, he is barely conscious enough to accomplish this task. He’s started his early morning ritual of prayer to the gods of the night, sleep, and dreams.

For the next hour to two, I will watch him snore, hear the electronic beeps that go off with regularity every eight minutes. His arm slip out of the warmth to slap the clock as he sinks back into his “best” sleep of the night. I should get up, get moving, get my “go on” as my mother called it, but I’m fascinated by the ritual and determined to get just a few more minutes of my own.

Living with him, I wake up furious and impatient realizing I’ve lost those extra minutes when I could be in a mentally relaxing and healing state as the man is beside me with the quick trigger slamming arm.

Over the years I’ve tried everything to change his habit. I’ve switched from the beeping to annoying buzzers. I even tried annoying morning news radio then stopped. I don’t want the first words I hear in the morning to be reports on murder and mayhem by individuals and governments.

I put my foot down, literally, and poked and prodded him from the bed. I even hung my feet outside of the warmth of blankets to gather the cold within them before putting them to his backside to propel him from the bed.

Nothing worked.

Recently, I decided to change my attitude of battle about this denial of my rights to sleep to my appointed time to rise. Instead I lie in bed and watch my beloved morning snoozer snooze a little longer. I snuggle up against his warmth and think warm and loving thoughts. I grab my smart phone and catch up on my reading, email, or blog, wrapped in his warm embrace.

After twenty years of waking with anger and hate in my heart at the loss of a precious hour or two of sleep, I’ve found safety and comfort in these hours, listening to his soft snores and the rhythm of his deep breaths. While he snores, I realize that the greatest gift I’ve been given is time. Time to love, and time to be loved.

Stormy Day

Tags

death, hope, life, mortality, trees, weather, winter

Found out this morning that the husband of a friend of mine had died a few days ago.

I’d battled the blustery rain and wind to this meeting, braced with the first breath of winter in the Pacific Northwest, then stunned by the news. I’ve tried all day not to think about it, but the storm had other plans.

I fought to handle the car in the stiff side winds after the meeting. I dashed through pouring rain into the store to pick up some items for our two Thanksgiving dinners, one for us on the official day, and the holiday party we were throwing a few days later for friends. Leaving the store, the pouring rain had gotten braver and I was drenched through my coat within two minutes as I unloaded the cart and filled the back of the car.

Kalon, our house mate, texted me that the lights were blinking on and off and asked if he could park his new BMW car in the garage as there “branches falling from the sky.” Before starting the car, I replied affirmative and asked him to meet me when I drove in to help unload the groceries.

If I didn’t have a clock in the car, I would have thought it was near sunset. The dark clouds blocked out the sun and the rain took care of the rest. Branches were on the road everywhere, but small and easily ignored. The water alongside the road was threatening to cross the road, but the current swept it downstream.

As I climbed up the foothills towards home, I came to the T in the road near the pallet mill. Water gushed over the drain pipe and onto the road, a gray mass of slit and sludge. I swung wide at the shallowest point and drove through, water spraying outwards, tires whizzing under me.

Thrilled to be past it, but nervous about the onslaught of the storm, my mind flipped to my friend. She’d made a serious life-changing decision a while ago to put her 95 year old husband in a care facility, but it was gut wrenching. A few weeks ago, she’d gotten a call from the facility informing her that her husband was on the way to the hospital as he’d fallen down in his room and had laid there for many hours before anyone found him. He’s injured himself quite badly but had retained consciousness. No one had responded to his cries. In a place like that, sometimes it’s all you an do to ignore the cries, but this was unconscionable.

He’d been repaired and was recovering, last I’d heard. Rehab and some good care and he’d be back to normal, as normal can be with those injuries and that age. She’d spent every minute she could with him, helping him, feeding him, reading long hours to him. Another friend told me that they’d really hoped it would make it through Christmas, but life had another plans.

My heart broke for her and her family, but it also weighed on me as it does when you face morality in others. My father died a few years ago, leaving the family a mess with poor planning and bad behavior by family members. My mother, on her second (or third?) husband, just finished a few weeks in Hawaii to celebrate her 75th birthday in style (and warmth). My step-mother works hard in Arizona caring for her daughter and her children as well as aging neighbors, and she’s not a young thing. Many of my family members are aging, and I wonder what the future holds for them, as well as my old self.

I send a voice text to hubby to warn him to be careful of the water on the road and turn the corner on the street towards home to find small tree branches on the road. I get out and clear them, and drive on, wetter than I was before.

I turn down the long hill of our driveway, thankful to see that it is clear so far of trees. I check the neighbor’s driveway that Ys off from ours for fallen trees and it looks clear. We keep an eye on our older neighbor, helping where we can, but secretly. He is fiercely independent and wants to do it all himself, so we pick up tree branches and keep the driveway clear when he isn’t around.

I turn the corner and there lay a huge tree across our driveway, a couple hundred feet from my door. I texted my husband about the tree and then our house mate to get him to come help me. I grabbed purse and umbrella, finally giving up against the downpour, parked the car and made my way over the tree and towards the house to change into working clothes.

Kalon and I tried to get the chain saw to start while carrying on a third-party conversation via text messages with my husband. He kept insisting he’d come home and deal with the tree, but I was a veteran of the chain saw, so why bother. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the saw started, so I gave up and told him to come home. He wanted to anyway. A chance to chop up a tree? Are you kidding. I’d hate to spoil his fun and do it myself.

Then I realized how much I still needed him. Sure, I always needed my best friend and husband, but I realized how truly precious he was to me. I always need that reminding.

Don’t we all.

Is the World a Better Place?

Tags

elections, life, obama, political, politics, president, romney, vote, voting

The entire 90 minute commute to work was painful as my body refused to relax and drop my shoulders from above my ears. I tried screaming at the radio, calling them short-sighted idiots, liars, and time-wasters, among the more colorful names I really used, and still tension wracked my body.

It was the day of the election and returns were starting to come in that late afternoon from the East Coast. Mitt Romney was sweeping the south and east. Fear and anger gripped me.

Couldn’t people see that the Romney as governor of Massachusetts was not the Romney running for US president? Couldn’t they see the manipulation, the switching sides to benefit whomever he was talking to rather than staying consistent and steadfast in his true convictions and beliefs. He was once a strong advocate for same sex marriage and abortion, but switched sides as he went after the religious right, an archaic group who still believe the founding fathers were the same Christian believers as they are today. Not true. The founding fathers were Deists. They believed that god did what he set out to do and left us behind to be caretakers. The religious extremists of the United States have rewritten history, including their own, determined that past and future presidents must bow to their will in order to win their votes. And Romney did.