Still In Love After All These Years

Love you Mom and Dad!

Storm Damage

Last Wednesday evening, a strong thunderstorm moved through the area in the middle of the night. It wrenched the branch off of this tree. Dad was kind of bummed, because he was almost finished cleaning up the yard from several other trees he'd taken down due to disease. On Thursday he began working on the removal of this branch. Trinity accompanied him. This tree had it in for him. When he was working on the tree on Thursday, removing one of the smaller limbs another branch smacked him in the face and whacked Trinity a good one too. She decided working so closely with Dad on this one was too risky. On Friday when he went to remove the main branch, Trinity hung back. Probably a good thing. While chain sawing the main branch off, it flipped around and smacked Dad in the face again, as well as the shoulder and his arm. He had a nasty cut on his face, but really his main concern was his arm. We took him to urgent care to make sure it wasn't broken. Thankfully it wasn't, and thankfully nothing worse happened.

More Great Quotes

Finished reading this book yesterday evening. Norman Maclean has a rare gift for not only telling a story but extracting larger life meaning from that story. Here are a few of the quotes that I appreciated in the last 100 pages or so.

"Maybe when you almost die before you live there
is a mechanism in you that makes you reduce your memories of death so most of life will not be based on death."

"...I recognized that, in the wide world anywhere, 'Now we know, now we know' is one of its most beautiful poems"

Yes...this I do know. After all the pain and suffering of struggling to learn a lesson, finally knowing can be both a relief and an agony. There are things that I have learned that others will not be able to understand unless they walk in my shoes, and the same is true for their life circumstances. But we can all learn compassion from the fruit of our suffering, which leads to a better understanding of love.

"...a storyteller should never look at a day as lost if he has learned something about how to tell stories, especially about how to make them shorter."

I guess this is part of what I took from my 5 years of working at NOAA. Some really interesting stories...

"This feeling, when generalized, is a feeling that you will be ready to write if first you can find the right friend to listen to your opening paragraph."

This has been part of my own writing struggle. I need the right friend to feed that creative passion and urge me along. Who knows, maybe it's not just one, but several.

God Touches: My thoughts and reflections

Chapter 1: "Creative Writing: Buzz Cuts, Bank Robbers, and the Big Chief"

In this chapter, Dan describes where "it all began..." for him. Just that first sentence alone got me to thinking about where it all began for me. The first grade. I remember writing my first story for the Young Author's Contest in our school. I pretty much plagerized a favorite story of mine about a rabbit, his family, and something about easter. I also remember spinning wild tails about my friend Danny (not the author of this book) getting himself into trouble in our class to my older sister each evening as we lay in bed. I'm not sure whether she believed my stories. She seemed to at the time.

By second grade, I was really developing as an author. I wrote my second Young Author's entry entitled "The Treasure of Being in the North Woods", a 42 page book complete with illustrated pictures on each page. This book was a little more original, as I actually aspired to be a trapper who lived in the north woods when I wrote this book (a factiod I later included in my autobiography in the third grade:). I did rip off complete sections from Jean Craighead George's "My Side of the Mountain", but I garnered a first place prize for this story. During these elementary years of my life, some of my best memories are of writing stories by flashlight in the walk-in closet with my brothers and sister, and reading our creations to one another. I enjoyed hearing their stories as much as I enjoyed writing my own.

In fifth grade, I wrote creative stories to read aloud in class during our creative writing time. My favorite part about this process was hearing the feedback of my classmates and feeling surprised when they laughed at a part that I didn't know was funny or elated when they laughed at the parts I intended to be funny.

In sixth grade, I completed my first novel entitled "Daniel". This story honestly was just a collection of my own personal fantasies. I wanted a dog. The boy in the story gets a dog. I wanted to run away and live in the mountains. The boy in the story runs away with his dog after his parents tragically divorce, and somehow manages to take a bus to the middle-of-no-where Montana and live in the mountains for a week. I was into tragedy. The boy's dog is killed in a battle with a grizzly bear saving his master's life. The boy is tragically maimed. Limping for the rest of my life, along with braces, and glasses were aspirations of mine.

Then came part II, an ill-fated second half to the book. I still think it might have taken first place in the contest, had it not been for part II. Part II was entitled "Twiggy and Me". Twiggy, apperently was the name I had chosen for a second dog, even though I still didn't have a first. This part of the novel, dealt with my fantasty of living in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. I wrote fantastic adventures of treehouses, neighborhood feuds, and a step-brother. I also wanted to be a boy. As a 12 year old tomboy, life looked so much easier and exciting as a boy. No more dresses, wrestling was okay, and boys could spit. That looked like fun. Even though I wanted to be a boy, I most definately was not one. As my sister will attest, I had quite a dating life between fourth and sixth grade. Thankfully, I have outgrown this phase:)

'Kay...back to writing. For several years I put my passion aside, finding life too busy. Around ninth grade, I picked it up again. This time I discovered poetry. As I dealt with a major depressive episode, poetry writing and reading became an outlet. It was also around this time that my good friends, The Nowikowski's, moved to Florida. I spent the next few years entertaining them with my letters. I'm sure they didn't know what hit them when the flood-gate of letters opened wide. At one point, they just confessed that they couldn't keep up, but would happily read. That was good enough for me. My goal was to make them laugh, and it was my great joy to learn that I occasionally succeeded.

My final writing episode in those pre-adult years was a semester of Creative Writing in High School. This was the first time I remember a teacher calling me a "Writer". He didn't even have to be told to know that this was my passion. The detail with which I wrote revealed the intentions of my soul.

Following High School, I attended my first choice college, DePauw Univeristy in Greencastle Indiana. My major: Creative Writing. I felt so lucky to go to that college. I felt like all my years of hard work were finally paying off. It was the tradgedy that I could not afford this university that sent my hopes and dreams spiraling. After many years of believing that I could not be a writer without some high priced degree, I have begun my craft once again over the past 5 years. You can see my effors at lisasroughdrafts.com.