Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Grace in Small Things #131: It's Always the Little Things

Grace in Small Things is a place I visit most days to list five things
for which I'm grateful. You can do it, too. Follow the link.

I've made it to #131:
1. This Book in which today I
cracked the spine, burned, spit,
and drew a purpley chair on a page
dripped candle wax on a page
smashed olives between pages
and tonight I'm sleeping with it.

2. This Procrastination thing. Always turns out to be for the best. Now if I could just roll with it!

3. This Magazine. I especially like the "Readers Write" section where readers tell stories on given topics. Real eye into the soul stuff.

4. This Woman who flounced around in Deep Water Aerobics today.

5. This Place where I work.

Where I was so happy to be tonight (and not just because I was procrastinating a deadline!)

Saturday, June 27, 2009

A Gift from Elspeth

LoLaSuzanne photo of flowers by the Rio Grande


Our simplest gesture or gift, freely given, without expectation of return, can deeply touch someone and lift their spirits. We never know.

Before I "went off to do my own thing" I used to work in advertising. Sometimes at lunch I would go and pick flowers with some of my friends/co-workers, then we would pile into my car and drive around, stopping to give flowers to random people standing at the roadside. Suspicious of being given something freely by a complete stranger, some people would either take a while to accept the flower or would not take it at all. Most people, however, were touched by the gesture and would accept the bloom with a smile and an expression of gratitude.

My clearest memory is of the old man standing on the sidewalk, wearing a suit, holding a large briefcase. I pulled my car over and one of the girls hopped out and gave him a flower. He thanked her and, as we drove off, I looked in the rear view mirror. I saw him smiling at the flower. Then he opened his briefcase and carefully placed it inside.

--Elspeth in Trinidad and Tobago

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Love Thursday #4: Traveller




He can't walk, but he can ride.

For more Love Thursday, check out Chookooloonks.


Sunday, June 21, 2009

Daddio




1. The way he called me Laurie when I was a little girl.

2. The way he built a dog "structure" for Tuck, my first dog.

3. The way he is conservative but genuine and open minded and fair.

4. The way he looks after my stepmother.

5. The way he looks after me.



Saturday, June 20, 2009

Recycling Daffodils


In 1926, men built Highway 21 right smack dab through the tiny town of Harmony, North Carolina and straight up Great Granddaddy's farm. The mules and plows kicked up the buttercups Great Grandma planted at the side of the country road and flung them to the wind.

Now ninety years later, they show up everywhere--the middle of the hayfield, against the gutter of the old Baptist church, and here next to cowpath way out in the pasture.

Great Grandma's Buttercups wind up in Pasture photo by LoLaSuzanne

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Love Thursday #3: Heir

my backyard gardenias passed down from a long line of grandmas (photo by LoLaSuzaanne)

My great great grandmother gave her six year old granddaughter Lucile clippings from her gardenia bush. Lucile nursed those budlings until they were big enough to plant around the brick farmhouse her daddy built.

Grandma Lucile eventually rooted clippings from the same bushes for her own grandkids including me. The smell of these June blooms in my backyard reminds me of my connection to this line of practical gardenia-growing women. The ones who, despite a scarcity of funds, found a way to share beauty all the way down to me. The original bushes, still at the farmhouse, are not as prolific as they once were but have progeny across the land.

At almost 98, Grandma can't see the buds anymore but when I visit her this week, I'm hoping she can still smell the clippings I'll bring along.

**Check out more Love Thursday at Chookooloonks.**

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Love Thursday #2 Being Goofy



Remember how you used to play with funny eye-glasses just to make your cousins laugh?

...and your little dog too?




Love Thursday is a Chookooloonks creation.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

New Under the Sun

Costa Rica photo taken by LoLaSuzanne


You think in your idle hours that there is literature, history, science behind you
so accumulated as to exhaust thought and prescribe your own future.
In your sane hour, you shall see 
that not a line has yet been written:
that for all the poetry that is in the world 
your first sensation on entering a wood or standing on the shore of a lake
has not been charted yet.
It remains for you;  
so does all thought, all objects, all life remain unwritten still.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walden: And Other Writings 

Saturday, June 6, 2009

June


"Each flower, leaf
And blade of turf --
Small love-notes sent
From air to earth."

-John Updike

Friday, June 5, 2009

At Home or Abroad


Choose

The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open hand held out and waiting.

Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

--Carl Sandburg


Thursday, June 4, 2009

Love Thursday #1


Thursdays, the soulful Chookooloonks publishes a post, a photo, and a song she loves. I'm not as prolific as she, but I'm inspired to have my own Love Thursday. 
 
Judge at six months.

I can think of no better place to start Love Thursday on LoLaSuzanne than with my favorite four-legged creature.  Especially today, when my little Judge has returned home after 4 days in the hospital. He's had spine surgery and now resembles Frankenstein's dog with his staples and shaved back, but he's home today! I'm confident he will recover fully as I've spent the last nine years under the spell of the resilient Judge.