Loose Leaf Notes

The following year review was done by excerpting the first line or two in one post of each month from last year. You can click on the name of the month for a full accounting.

January – Big hair, MTV and mothering babies.  That’s what the 80’s were to me.  And then came a move to the country, a first marriage ended and a new love was found.  It was a time for community, for creating our own celebrations, for home-made, home-schooled and the harmonic convergence.

February – Hollywood movie stars are larger than life in our culture and sighting one can be as if a dream archetype has bled through into everyday life.  We wake up from such a dream encounter and want to report, ‘I just saw a giant, a unicorn, or maybe Drew Barrymore.’  Yes, it’s true, and it was completely close-up and unexpected.

March – In the same way a baby puts everything in his mouth to see what is like, I put words on paper.

April – I was in the Sun Music Hall Green Room waiting to go on stage, taking notes with someone’s brown eyebrow pencil while listening to the emcee tell jokes, and the act before me tune up their instruments.  One of the stage managers asked me if I needed an extra chair and an extension cord, which worried me a little because I was about to read poetry (unplugged).

May – You can see two lighthouses from the beach where my mother lives and the late afternoon sky is as pink as a baby’s nursery.  The sign at the beach pathway entrance says ‘these dunes aren’t made for walking,’ which I can’t read without thinking about the old Nancy Sinatra song ‘these boots are made for walking’ and singing the refrain ‘one of these days these boots are going to walk all over you.’

June – We scored a lot of grandparent points with our grandsons this weekend when they came for an overnight and discovered our new chicken coop-full of hens. The fresh blueberries ready for pickin’ in the garden also didn’t hurt.

July – All I can say is that it was strange to be working on a story about the Artful Ambiance of Floydfest for the local paper and an American Championship Wrestling Show in the same weekend.

August – The Floydfest dust has settled.  It’s too overcast to go the pool.  I don’t feel like doing much because I didn’t get enough sleep last night after a storm knocked the power out, causing me to remember the movie Wait Until Dark and imagine that a prowler knew I was home alone, cut my electric lines and was wanting to get inside. But the sun comes up the next day, regardless, and the chickens start squawking to get out of the coop early.

September – Shouting out “dolphin” at Bethany Beach is not the same as shouting “fire” in the theater. But soon the word catches and spreads. Fingers point, necks crane.  Only the seagulls scream.

October – Was it just last year that my hair was purple and I felt like that was the real me. Or was last year the one I dressed as “A Little Bit Yoko and a Little Bride of Frankenstein?”

November – The elderly man that used to wave from his garden as I drove by on my trips to town has been gone now for several years.  His house is for sale for a second time and the grass has grown over his vegetable plot, a long rectangle of plowed earth that was lined with pink flowers in the summer.

December –We got some baklava in our mailbox, homemade by our neighbor.  I cooked the venison tenderloin that Joe hunted, while he and a friend were building a winterized coop for our chickens.

________________2100 Rear View Review is HERE.