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.**

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.

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 

June

"Each flower, leaf

And blade of turf --

Small love-notes sent

From air to earth."

-John Updike

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

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.

Direction

Making Peace

Human Peace Sign--Budapest--2006--Google Images

I don’t recall meeting my biological father until I was about twelve years old. My mom met my stepdad when I was four days old and he was the man who raised me as his daughter.

My two older sisters remember our parent’s marriage. I do not. They clearly resemble our bio-dad, but I do not.  This never bothered me, until I moved out of the house. As a child, I learned bio-dad wasn’t well thought of in our home and that he had been known to mistreat people once or thrice. The message I got was that he never deserved to be in our lives.

 No longer living at home, I made a decision to get to know my biological father better, to complete that missing part of my DNA. I knew we had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and migraine headaches in common.  It would take many years before I would find a more admirable connection with him.   

As I started my relationship with him at 22 years old, he would tell me stories about the feral cats that began showing up in his back yard.  At first it was one or two cats, then they began having babies.  Hearing about his wild cats was pleasing to me, and in some way I felt closer to him because of it.

Many years later, a feral cat showed up in my backyard.   His coat was matted and part of his ear was missing.  I made friends with this cat and his health improved. He let me pet him and care for him.   If you’ve ever nursed an animal back to health, you know that’s a special relationship.

Only recently did I make the connection that my fascination with animals, and taking care of them was something I shared with my bio Dad.  I’ve chosen to see his more admirable qualities, knowing that there is at least a little good in anyone if we look close enough.  

--Leah from The Daily Piglet

Thank your Lucky Stars

photo by LoLaSuzanne, outside Johannesburg, South Africa 2008

Serendipity

       --the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely

--wikipedia definition

Simple

my backyard LoLaSuzanne May 2009

I crawl out of the car, haul out purse, various files, loose papers, slam the door shut with my hip.  I catch a heel on the curb, throw out my arms for balance. Files somersault and papers billow out to horizon and float to lawn.  I roll eyes to sky.  I’m so tired I consider walking away. 

Instead, I pick it all up, drag myself to the front steps.  I'm forced to drop the whole business on the porch when I discover I have already misplaced my keys.  The guys painting the house stop pretending they're working and openly guffaw.

I sigh big.  As in everything-is-a-production big.  The keys turn up in my purse and I nod at the painters as I twist the doorknob. 

Inside, I promptly drop an earring in the toilet.  Failing to take into account the degree of misjudgment possible, I lean over the bowl, bump my head on the raised lid,  fall into the wall, and while steadying myself, use the commode handle for leverage.  The earring floats in a little circle before it disappears.

Through the den’s glass doors, I catch sight of one of the workers on the rear deck. His face is ruddy and wrinkled.  He’s sitting on my railing staring into my house. I almost march out to the deck and explode.  Almost. 

Just then the sun glints off the object of his concentration.  Oh.  The wind chimes. I collapse on the sofa and watch him watch the bells. He steps down from the railing and shuffles closer. There is no wind and I wonder what he sees in the stationary metal and glass.  With a single finger, he thumps the mobile’s center bar.  He's all grin and dimples as the bells and crystals sing at once. When the chimes quiet, he picks up his paint bucket and leaves the deck.

--LoLaSuzanne

(another version of this piece published in Moonshine, 2007)