Guest Post

Not at home today. Visiting on Dare to Dream.

And as soon as I get a few minutes for dreaming I will post something passably brilliant.

In the meantime, if you are new, you can check out some of my better pieces here. Unfortunately, I haven't updated my "best of" list in a couple years--since last time I posted with Whitney. Here's hoping something in the last two years could actually make the list.

Rediscovery

The Youngling found Jedi Knight's trains yesterday. The wooden Thomas tracks. They have been put away in a large box in his room for several months now because once JK became a Star Wars fanatic the other two followed suit  . . . and then to whatever next trend suited his fancy. In recent weeks I had considered putting them in the attic, lamenting that my youngest, five this week, had missed so many little boy phases in his rush to be a big kid. Anyway, without Mom's prompting, I walked in Youngling's bedroom to ask him to wash his hands yesterday and saw that he had built a large, rather disjointed, track all around the floor and under the bunk bed ladder. This morning I am sitting here, trying to find the ambition for my homework, and listening to his sweet little voice tell Thomas stories from the other room. A thing I have not heard around here in a long, long time. My heart is full.

My future career looks somewhat bleak at the moment and my years off-the-job will certainly not help, but as the tender memories of my oldest child (closer to eleven than ten) and the pattern repeated in my youngest, make me grateful down in my bones today for my decision to stay home. If I had not, then these sweet recollections would belong to somebody else, and Jedi Knight's childhood would be a blur of being too busy and too distracted. I don't fault any woman for working while her kids are young, I'm just fully aware of what a blessing it was to have the choice to be at home during the day.

The train moves on to the next horizon, but boy am I glad for the view from the rear door of the caboose.

A Classic?

One hundred and eighty-eight pages of The Catcher in the Rye to finally come up with a sentence free of profanity or sexuality and actually worth quoting, "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." The character who delivers this line says he is quoting from a book by a psychoanalyst named Wilhelm Stekel. Perhaps I should have read Dr. Stekel's book instead . . .

Sometimes . . .

You just need a good cry. This morning I had a moment. Four a.m. Listening to Indigo Girls while I ran newspapers. The whole world just seemed so terribly overwhelming for a moment, while at the same time the stars reminded me that it is really meant to be simple.

When did we make such a mucky mess of things? Complicate everything? How did everybody end up so angry and stressed out?

I had a remarkably lovely mother's day weekend with my mom in town. I know that real life can't always be like a vacation . . . but should real life constantly leave you feeling like you need a vacation?

No time to even ponder what desperately needs pondering.

She'll Be Comin Round the Mountain . . .

Okay, "she" is my mom. She isn't really comin around the mountain on six white horses, but rather on a plane. She isn't just coming when she comes, either. It will be 12:32, or Delta will have me to deal with. This is going to be a wonderful weekend . . . I feel it in my bones.

I'll post more on it next week, but in the mean time, please visit the website of my bloggy friend Whitney Johnson, who realized a lifetime dream of publishing a book this week. Many of you have probably read her stuff. Her book link is here. My copy is coming later today. I'm hoping to review it soon. Whitney has actually done a lot for me. Her encouragement has been invaluable and her enthusiasm catching.

Happy Friday

May the Fourth Be With You.

Five Things

In Mockingjay, Katniss is able to temporarily return to her bombed out home. She picks up a few keepsakes to take back to 12 with her.

1.  Buttercup. A mangy cat that belongs to Prim, whom Prim loves very much. She also picks up a ribbon to go around his neck.
2.  A leather hunting jacket. It belonged to her father.
3. A Pearl. It is one that Peeta gave to her during their last day in the arena--they found it in an oyster they had dived for.
4.  An illustrated book of plants. This book is both practical and sentimental. Her mother works in the hospital in their new district, and the knowledge in the book is useful. It was Katniss' father that collected most of the plant information. Peeta, in the brief hiatus between the first and second Hunger Games in which he and Katniss participate had been illustrating the book.
5. The wedding album. Her mother and father's, of course.

Katniss, a deeply flawed and troubled character, has more outstanding qualities then she gives herself credit for. One of these is loyalty. I think it shows in her selection of things.

What about you? You have a few minutes to leave your home with the likelihood that you will never return to it. Provided that your spouse and children are taken care of, and the 72 hour and first aid kits are already packed away in the car, what five items do you take with you?