Loose Leaf Notes

1. Hat’s off to my grandson Bryce who graduated from high school last week. It was the highlight of the month of May for our family. Watch HERE. 

2. Last Thursday, I was fangirling these Epperly ladies (pictured below), renowned quilters who make a quilt together each year to benefit the American Cancer Society … more to come…

3. I’ve been reading quantum physics and ancient teachings on the nature of the universe that speak of reality as a mental construct, that the laws of nature are not constant but rather inherited habits that strengthen with repetition, that science is catching up since quantum physics has proven that observation alters matter.

4. A few things happened this week that made me feel that the construct of reality was fraying, wavering, not holding. For one example:  I was interviewing the above women for a story for Floyd Times and was recording it on my phone that I set on the porch floor where we were. When it was over and I went to get my phone, it seemed as if it had vanished in thin air. We literally looked everywhere and tried to call it without luck. I thought maybe I was losing it or we thought maybe it fell through a dimensional vortex.

5. Back at home, Joe pulled up Apple’s “Find My Phone” and we could see it was there near where I had left it, but we still couldn’t find it, until we went back to look and made the app make the phone beep. We discovered it was lodged in a floor crack, even though we checked that and no other phone would fit through. It took one ladder, two people and two spatulas to dig it out.

6. I didn’t know the word ‘spatula’ till I was older. We called it the “spanking stick” when we were growing up.

7. At our monthly Tea & Poetry circle at our friend Shirleyann’s Living Light Studio, I’ve been reading some of my favorite poems or older poems that want to be read from my decades old body of work. This month I read poems related to my brother Danny, who died at the age of 49. We shared a similar trauma of being separated from family for long periods of time when we were children. I often can’t fully feel my own trauma (most of mine happened pre-verbal), but his trauma has become tender trail for me to process how the loss manifested in our lives. I could barely get through the poems.

8. She heard about the snakes / that hid in the mouths / of merry-go-round horses / She cried but it didn’t matter / She slept under the bed / so no one could find her…   Her little brother / left his shoes in the closet / He wore a wig for a picture / and everyone laughed / He was away from home / for much longer than a summer / She didn’t know where he slept… Away From Home can be read in its entirety HERE. 

9. Another poem I read about Danny starts with… I’m already blindfolded / So I closed my eyes to see / I took the holy host / and saw the deepest truth / I didn’t learn to be independent / by being left alone / when rocking and shaking / was my only voice / I followed a tender trail / of my little brother’s trauma / when he was Hansel and I was Gretel…

10. Forge or forget?

11. And it ends with… I leave breadcrumbs in poems / and forge the unknown / I hope we all get home… When I looked at this poem on my blog just now, I saw the word forge and thought that I forgot to add a “t” for ‘forget the unknown.’ I was about to edit it as if it was a typo, when I realized the word ‘forge’ was right and what I meant to say.

12. Joe and our grandsons are on a cross-country road trip. Today I got texted pictures of them at the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and this is what I texted Joe back:

The St. Louis Arch? Tell the boys that before my brothers Jim and Dan died, they went on a road trip. They came here to visit and were next going to see the arch on their way to get Dan, who was sick, back to Houston. I remember asking them why they would want to see it, and the answer was to see how it was made. They were both metal workers, as was my dad. Danny was a metal fabricator. He was too sick and so they skipped it to get Danny home. Jim got him home and then flew back to his home in Massachusetts and died a week later in a metal machine shop accident. Danny died three weeks later in the hospital with me and my sister Kathy by his side. Losing them was the hardest thing I ever went through. You can read the book I wrote, “The Jim and Dan Stories,” on my blog. It was used in a grief and loss class at Radford University and can be found on my blog’s sidebar. category. My two grandsons are seeing the arch that my brothers never did. Two brothers again. I’m crying now.

13. Happy Trails!

__________Thirteen Thursday