Loose Leaf Notes

1. “I feel like an island.” That’s what I said to Joe when we were in  Massachusetts and I looked at a picture of the Redman siblings that was taken at our niece’s wedding.

2. We used to be 9 but now we are 6. I was the third oldest before we lost our two oldest sibliings, Jim and Kathy, and the brother just under me, Dan, so I’m the oldest now and the lost siblings around me seem to symbolically separate me from the rest of the line.

3. Our two days on my hometown pennisula after the wedding included a sentimental journey by bike through the lengh of the town (Hull) where an air of saddness permeated my visits to old haunts and left me with a surreal feeling of being marooned from my childhood, a magical place in time.

4. The home I grew up in was taken by eminent domain by the town and burned to the ground to make way for a sewage plant. I didn’t stop to take a picture of the plant when Joe and I passed by on our bikes. I had my big cry over that years ago.

5. We did stop at our second family home that was sold to another family after my dad and then my mom passed. Joe asked me to pose in front of the house (that still had the wooden seagulls on the porch that my dad made) for a picture but that felt too sad, like posing with a gravestone.

6. It was strange to stay in a hotel and not my mother’s house while in Hull. The hotel, the Nantasket Beach Resort, was built on the site of the old Surf Ballroom where I grew up dancing to live bands when all the girls loved to slow dance with the boy they liked.  They had a “Surf Ballroom” venue room on the 3rd floor of the hotel. More nostalgia to ponder.

7. I walked to the site of our town’s old Paragon Amusement Park that was taken down in the 80s and took some pictures of the now empty old Putt Putt Golf attraction, which I called the Putt Putt Golf Graveyard.  The people of Hull saved the Paragon carousel and I always visit it when I’m home and usually take pictures. This visit I walked around the carousel ground looking for my sister Kathy’s memorial fundraising brick and found it.

8. It wasn’t all nostalgic. There was plenty of in-the-present fun both at the wedding and in Hull and in particular when my sisters came to visit to swim in the hotel pool and eat the best shirmp cavatelli we’ve ever had via the chef at the Red Parrot, now called The Parrot.

9.  I also had a great visit with my fisherman brother John, the only sibling still in Hull. His home is his castle and he has all his gear, comforts and paperwork spread out around his favorite chair, just like my dad did.

10. Joe and I did visit actual gravestones, my parents and brothers Jim and Dan, which Johnnny now takes care of. I have lots of pictures of those but never have enough of Hull sunsets. This one was taken of Joe and I at the A Street Pier (notice the Boston skyline in the distance) by a young man who gives tours at the Lifesaving Museum, which I remember well when it was the Coast Guard Station. The museum is right next to the sewage plant where my childhood home was. I told him about our house and he mentioned Floretta Vinning, an influential figure in Hull history who lived where the sewage plant was in the late 1800s. I asked him to please include the Redman home and several other family homes that were taken in  the late ’70s to make room for the sewage plant in his tours.

11. “Mad Max City” is how I describe driving to Boston and in the city. So much of what I remembered was gone, but my favorite fountain by the Boston Common that I saw every day when I came up from the Park Street subway on my way to the boutique I used to work at was the same.

12. Joe had never ridden on the swan boats before.

13. Make Way for Ducklings is on my reading list!

Check out Rachael and Adam Get Married HERE and The Pilgrims Were HERE.

______________Thirteen Thursday

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– These are 13 of my favorite photos (one video) from my niece Rachael’s wedding in Massachusetts and the first photo of me and my siblings in order of birth as 6. We used to be 9. I’m the oldest now.

______________Wordless Wednesday

A deepening practice of reflecting and saying more with less was the inspiration behind Katherine Chantal’s new book A Year of Haiku.

“I have known of the Japanese poetry from of Haiku, 5-7-5 syllables, for decades, even writing a few occasionally. Often my poems are long, so I gave myself a challenge. Why not distill each of my poems into a haiku?” Chantal said.

“In the vein of philosophy, psychology, soul work and breathing in my beautiful surroundings, this book was born,” she writes in the book’s description.

 Walking with the clouds / Gliding through brilliant blue skies / My palette deepens

Chantal’s first published writing was an article about the homebirth of her first two sons (twins), which appeared in Mothering magazine in 1977. More recently, the mother of five sons and five grandchildren has authored A Tea Poets Journey, The Seven Gateways to Kindness and A Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent and her new book of haiku, all of which are available for sale on Amazon and at The Floyd Country Store.

Humans are adept / at living above the surface / Will you get below

In A Year of Haiku 83 pages of haiku poems with six on each page are separated by categories titled Word Speak, Mother, Birds and Other Beings, Loss, Sorrow and Joy, Miscellaneous Musings, Inside Out, Aging Living Soulfully and Death.

In our culture, it’s / difficult to see beauty / in aging folks, TRY!

The book concludes with pictures of her and her sister Judith, who the book is dedicated to, as children and adults.

 Pointing to the moon / Is the moon pointing at me? / We both feel the pull. 

Chantal writes in her dedication to Judith, who is living with a condition that affects language abilities: “Her gift to me of Haiku Mind by Patricia Donegan has inspired me to write this book of 365 haikus over the past year. While words are slipping away from her, we continue to grow, share and love ever more, as we say less to on another. We have been together since I was born, since before I even uttered a word and she had only a few.”

I do not have a / creed. If I did, simply put / “What does Soul ask me?

________Colleen Redman

I didn’t waste anytime ordering a Mayflower IPA made right here in Plymouth and poured in a Red Sox glass by a Jamacian native named Shireen.

Later, it was the first time Joe and I had a Bailey’s Colada that matched the first one we had on the island of St. Croix in 1988.

It was my first time doing kareokee in public and Tom Petty’s Last Dance with Mary Jane.

The Ranger at the Plymouth Rock verified that the Pilgrims did not stop in what is now known as Plymouth because they ran out of beer (mead),.

This is the a replica of the ship that my friends’ Jayn Avery and Diane Geissler came over in.

I lived in Plymouth for a short time in the ’70s, and so it was an emotional revist with this rememberance of Massasoit holding a peace pipe, which has always moved me.

We collected rocks on the beach and named them all Plymouth Rock.  before getting ready for my niece’s wedding the next town over.

Hotel perk.

Making Joe.

In the Matrix Clone Room

Seeing spots

Where am I? Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room at the D.C. Hirshhorn is a psychedelic experience.

Doors lead into other worlds at Laurie Anderson’s Weather exhibit also at the Hirshhorn.

There are doors and there are golden canoes for this kind of travel.

I am in the womb of the ultrasound (that’s what my friend Laura said when she saw this picture) of mother crow.

No side effects here, just one door that leads to another.

1. I have my cake and eat it too.

2. The power went out the day before my birthday, May 16. The power company said the estimated time for it to come on was midnight, so power for my birthday, May 17, alright.

3. It happens every year but this is the first year I got orchids on my gourmet carrot cake by Invisible Chef Kelly Erb.

4. HERE is the first shot of my Kelly real deal birthday carrot cake taken in 2005 when my blog was brand new.

6. Joe’s bee picture (above) that he made at a Spikenard Bee Sanctuary retreat is titled, “There’s a buzz about you today.”

7. Having a birthday right after Mother’s Day is a little like having a birthday after Christmas.

8. We squeezed my birthday in the day before a long road trip and in between me scrambling to get control of a mouse infestation in the attic crawl space where the mice were living and where I found a notebook of old poems from when I was a teenager and in my early ’20s that I had completely forgot about.

9. I was finding my voice but it was often more dramatic than truthful, more romanticized, and I was trying to be older than I was. I found a manuscript I had submitted somewhere called Blue Drummer and one of my first poems titled China Cup.

10. From author Matt Labash: “Read more than you write.  I once had a sickeningly prolific friend say that he now writes more than he reads. This made me never want to read him again.  It’s your duty, as a writer – any kind of writer – to always keep filling your tank. And you can’t just do that by huffing your own fumes. You have to always be on the hunt for things that inspire, that amuse, that somehow open up the world to your readers.  If nothing can capture your imagination, how are you supposed to capture the imagination of others? There’s no surer way to do this than to make a habit of reading writers who are better than you.  In my case, that gives me a large pool to choose from.  The more good words you pour into your funnel from others, the more good words are likely to come out the other end.  If you’re a writer, you’re forever a student – you don’t get to graduate.  So keep reading.”

11. I read more when I was younger and lately have thought of myself as a moderate reader who writes more than I read. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I am an avid reader, but one who reads articles and news stories, who researches more than reading novels and literature, who enjoys music and song lyrics, who reads memoirs of artists, writers and poets, who is inspired by art shows and jumps around from subject to subject that interest me, psychology, dreams, quantum space, language, flowers, politics, fashion, history and more.

12. How come age isn’t like art or poetry? / How come it’s hard cold facts? / A labeled box that never fits / A branded number that follows your name / And just when you get used to it – it changes!

13. China Cup: I’m a piece of china made in heaven for you / My cup is blue with some chips and cracks along the glass / If you’re gentle I’ll last a lifetime / But if you’re unkind I may break this time

____________Thirteen Thursday

_______Wordless Wednesday

-The following first appeared in The Floyd Press on May 12, 2022.

Art admirers were mesmerized by the vibrant colors and swirling textures of Anna Pittman’s alcohol ink art featured in Pitman’s Saturday exhibit at Deer Park Farm’s Shanti Meditation Hall in Pilot.

One attendee of the May 7 event asked Pittman how she goes about creating such patterns.

“Did you use a brush?”

Pittman said the paintings were moved by her breath, a straw, a hair dryer, or maybe the pads of her fingers.

Director of The Breathing Space, Pittman offers online Hatha Yoga classes and teacher trainings, meditation and self-awareness programs and classes, as well as counseling and coaching out of her home in Blacksburg.

She had never made art before immersing herself in the alcohol ink medium with the challenge of doing one painting a day as a meditative and therapeutic practice that she refers to as “play.”

Pittman said she doesn’t know ahead of time what will be created, but once a theme emerges, she goes with it. Occasionally, she uses a stencil, a permanent marker, a foam sponge, or she overlays acrylics onto her work, which she describes as an emerging process that involves following a fluid flow.

For more than a year Pittman has been posting art with titles like Morning Musings, Big Moon Night, Spring in Progress, Beauty is a Message and more on her Facebook page, where she sometimes asks her followers to suggest a title. “I feel like in ten years, I’ll be where I want to be,” Pittman said about her emerging art process.

Various sized paintings done on photo or yupo (a synthetic paper made from polypropylene), some framed and some applied to canvas, were offered for sale by donation at the exhibit.  Attendees enjoyed a spread of refreshments that included teas, tomato cheese bruschetta and roasted vegetables from the Deer Park Farm’s gardens. __________Colleen Redman

-The following is the poem I wrote and read at my friend Alwyn Moss’s (November 3, 1926 – April 21, 2022)  memorial service at the Quaker House in Blacksburg, where there was music, poems and Open Worship sharing and story telling. The second poem I read, First Tree (a gingko) is one of Alwyn’s from Remembering Their Names- A Gathering Time, her poetic legacy. 

Where the Grass is Greener

“I never found a 4-leaf clover”
she told a lover in a dream
then repeated it to me
and I heard it as an epitaph
her essence distilled
in depth mythology

I imagined that I pressed one
into her frail open hand
the one from my brother Danny’s wallet
that I took from his apartment when he died

It was sealed in cellophane
embossed with gold letters
‘Good Luck’ wishes for its lucky owners
Still hinting green and faintly scented
the way her Yorkshire tea
almost smells like kelp

He needed the purchased luck
for the hope of a liver transplant
when he wasn’t sick enough
to be high on the waiting list
and then was deemed too sick
to survive it

And what would she spend her luck on?
To save her songbirds? Her feral cats?
To write a new poem
reach age 95?
To drink tea with friends
squirrels and wrens
on her patio?

She never found a four-leaf clover
or saw the Everglades
but she remained faithful
and left behind a windfall
in the name of nature’s holy spirit

Will we all need a lucky ticket
to arrive where the grass is greener?
And will we remember
the luck that brought us together
the lived-out days
and the ordinary ways
we gave our time
and our love
to each other

Colleen Redman

First Tree

There was only one tree on the block
where I was a child. A single messenger
from woods I rarely saw.
A pale slim thing set in some sand and earth
behind a ring of metal spokes.
By who? What angel set it there?

Not maple or an oak
but some kind that could breathe
despite the gas and dust and howls of sirens
from the hospital six lanes across Broadway.

Winters the leafless stalk shed half its bark
Leaving dark patches on the paler skin below.
In spring the miracle!
And more the miracle on that bleak block
Of dirty brick and cracked concrete;
sprigs of green coming out in long twirls
Until there they were, flat and clean
like open hands above us as we played.

Love? For that?
Even the branches were too frail to climb
Although we tried. Yet decades later that single tree –
erect and small in the long corridor
of grey lives in my eyes
holding my childhood on its thin arms
like laundry on a line:
first snow that turned the pavement slippery but fun.
The moist dim basement where giant cockroaches lived
under the old washing machines.
The wheelchair child’s shrill laughter,
full moons over the water towers

Ah tree, you made the world a promise
Your quiet breath at night beneath my city window
helped me sleep, entered my dreams,
told me secrets from another realm.
Still remembered…the secrets have come true.

Alwyn Moss

Read Alwyn’s obituary HERE.

We were lucky to have know her. She may not have found a four-leaf clover, but “the secrets have come true.” Thanks, to all of her extended chosen family who manifested her memorial as Alwyn wanted and took care of her in her last years better than some with biological families, which Alwyn didn’t have.

Picking a poem for a reading
is like playing spin the bottle
when you’re 13 years’ old

Do you want to be picked?
Are you rewarded with a kiss?
or happy with your lucky miss?

_______Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. One of my nicknames as a girl was “colly dog,” but I’m actually more of a watchdog because I follow the news like a hound.

2. Some people knit. I thrift shop and then spend hours sewing the clothes I found to make them fit.

3. Looking for shoes on Amazon is like looking at suspects in a police line-up, and they keep posting duplicates to trick me.

4. We just got a new electric massage chair and I’ve started to enjoy teasing Joe with ‘you’re going to get the chair!’

5. Mother’s Day Love.

6. Sheryl Crow wrote THIS song for her sons and it really chokes me up.

7. When I image googled Lady Slippers (a wild orchid) to see what colors they come in, actual lady’s slippers for the feet came up. More from Name That Bloom HERE.

8. Cinderella’s Lost Lady Slipper / If the shoe fits, wear it / If the song lifts, hear it / Don’t wait till midnight.

9. “Falling in love can be exhilarating, but it isn’t the secret to happiness per se. You might more accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happiness—an exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us… the secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love. This does not mean just sticking together legally: Research shows that being married only accounts for 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life. The important thing for well-being is relationship satisfaction, and that depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment…” More from The Type of Love That Makes People Happiest – The Atlantic, HERE.

10. You vow not to forget love’s lasting imprint when life has been spent and time no longer counts you. More HERE.

11. We discovered the lady slipper croppings off the Blue Ridge Parkway at the Smart View Recreation Area, which the National Park Service said was named for the “right smart views.”

12. On the Smart View trail you will find this Trail Family Cabin, no relation.  “Built by W. J. Trail in the 1880s, the cabin is typical of the early style Appalachian cabin. “This one-room cabin style was common in the area. Oftentimes the initial home was a simple structure—people needed a decent shelter fast so that they could move on to other activities that sustained their livelihood. Over time, as families grew and became more established on the land, extensions would be added to the house or a new home might be constructed nearby. Once this cabin no longer served as a home, it was used as a barn.” -National Park Service

13. “When I haven’t any blue, I use red.” Picasso

____________Thirteen Thursday

_________Wordless Wednesday