A to Z Challenge: V Is For Victory

V Is For Victory

Earlier this week I wrote a post about things that have no value without knowing their back story.  This is another post about one of those things. 

When my mother died, one of the things I saved was an assortment of rocks and shells my mother collected as mementos.  Each object has a story, but because today's theme is "V,"  I will tell the story of the V rock.

My mother was English and as a child she lived in Harrow with her family.  During World War II her parents sent her to boarding school at the Marist Convent in Hythe to get her away from the bombing in London.  She had an aunt who was a nun there (Auntie Euphemia.) 


One day my mother went to the village with a group of students.  A German plane buzzed the town and fired its guns.  The girls all safely avoided the hail of bullets.  Later that day my mother wrote a letter to her parents and shared her afternoon adventure.  That was the end of boarding school for my mother.  Her parents brought her back to London; even with the Blitz, they thought it would be safer for her at home.

Before she left Hythe my mother went for a walk on the beach and found the rock that now sits with the other mementos in my back bedroom.  She told me that when she found the rock she knew with a certainty that England would win the war.  It was a sign.

V is for Victory.  

A to Z Challenge: U Is For Unchanged

U Is For Unchanged

I sometimes envy people who live in historic places.  There is something comforting about places that are untouched by time.  I don't live in one of those places.  Hermiston was incorporated in 1907.  There aren't historic buildings and I haven't seen any historic markers celebrating that anything notable ever happened here.  

The schools that my children attended have been torn down and replaced by modern buildings.  Even the Hermiston McDonald's has been modernized and looks nothing like the original fast food restaurant.  The old drive-in theater has been replaced by a multi-plex theater. The town has grown considerably since we moved here over thirty years ago, but, compared to metropolitan areas, it is still small. 

When my children were young, we had only one city park.  It is still there and the grandchildren and I went there last summer.  The play structures had been replaced with newer, safer equipment, but the trees that shaded us from the summer sun were the same trees that sheltered me when I was a young mother with two active children.  Thirty years later I sat on the same bench to watch my grandchildren play.  I told the granddaughters, "This is the park where Mommy used to play when she was a little girl."  They weren't impressed.  They wanted to go to the park with the castle play structure.

When the granddaughters come to stay with me this summer they will once again sleep in "Mommy's bed," their mother's childhood bed.  One thing that remains unchanged is that I always sleep well when the people I love are safely tucked in under my roof.

A to Z Challenge: T Is For Things

T Is For Things
 
When my mother died, my brothers and I cleaned out her house.  We each kept a few mementos, but the majority of her household goods were donated to a local charity.  The items I kept are not valuable; they are meaningful only to me, because I know the back story. 
 
Several years ago I belonged to a local writing group.  One of the participants was writing a series of pieces on the things that she owned and treasured.  These were ordinary items that took on significance because of their history.  In describing a toolbox that had belonged to her father, she wrote about her relationship with her father and his gift for using tools.  The piece was a glimpse into her childhood and her connection to her father.  She explained to our writing group that she was writing about her things because when she died her children would inherit her estate and she wanted them to know the significance of some of her favorite things.  She didn't want a piece of family history to become just an old toolbox in the estate sale.

Good idea, huh?  So today I write about one of my favorite things: my copy of A.A. Milne's, When We Were Very Young. 

 
My copy was published in 1925, so it was probably originally my mother's book.  My name is written on the inside cover in my mother's hand, probably because I used to take it to school with me.  I love the poetry and the word choices.  I love that the poems paint a picture of an English life that I had left behind when my family immigrated to America.  Now, I was almost 5 when we left England and what I picture of an English life probably has more to do with imagination than reality. 

When I read "They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palace- Christopher Robin went down with Alice,"  I hear my mother's voice.  When I read one of these poems to my grandchildren, I use the same tone and inflections that my mother used.  The book is one of my favorite things because it represents, to me, my childhood.

So when it comes time to clean out my possessions, I hope one of my granddaughters will choose to save this little red book from the Goodwill pile and will read it to my great-grandchildren and remember when Nana would read "They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palace..."

A to Z Challenge: S Is For Spam

S Is For Spam


With all the marvelous things that technology now does for us, why is it that we still get spam?  For a long time I didn't understand when fellow bloggers complained about spam, then someone in Pakistan or India or Russia discovered my blog and put me on the spam mailing list.  Everyday I am bombarded by ridiculous comments with links to commercial sites.

Because of participating in the A to Z Challenge there have been quite a few new visitors to my blog, but the spammers seem to have found the listing also.  Has everyone else received their messages? 

Sometimes the spammer comments are funny.  For "H"  I wrote a little piece about a woman who killed her husband with a hammer "for all the little things."  The spammer wrote "Plenty of useful information here. I am passing it on to a friend. Please also see my website..." What, exactly, was "useful" about whacking a spouse over the head with a hammer? Perhaps his friend also had an annoying spouse?

The A to Z Challenge post for "O" was about my home state, Oregon, and focused on my backyard.  The spammer said "I'm not sure where you get your information, but very interesting.  Please see my webite..."  Ummm, it's my backyard idiot!  I look out the patio doors; that's where I get all my interesting information.  Do they really think that we will fall for these canned comments?

Fortunately the spamming seems to hit my old posts rather than the most recent postings and my old posts require comment moderation.  Some old posts are hit harder than others.  For some reason Five Reasons Why I Voted For Obama seems to be a target for links for premature ejaculation treatments and penis enhancements...what's up with that?  My post Nana Tells the Truth About Nose Hair gets a lot of links to beauty treatments...well, maybe that one is appropriate, but I still don't believe it when they say "Everyone should read this post."  Yeah, everyone needs to read about my unsightly nose hair?

I've resisted moving to comment moderation, but I'd sure like some hints on how to stop the spammers.  Does it really do any good to identify those comments as spam?

Update:  I accidently published this a day early.  It was up less than 10 minutes before I had my first comment...a !#$%^  spammer!!!

A to Z Challenge: R Is For Recycle, Reuse, Retread

R Is For Recycle

In the interest of conservation (that's conserving my energy for letters S to Z), I've recycled and reworked a post from my early days of blogging.  It was fun to go back and reread some of those early entries.





Originally published August 23, 2010 on http://plentifulsufficiency.blogspot.com

School Shoes

 

 

 

In the late 70's the spouse and I served two years in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua. In so many ways that experience has impacted how we live our lives today. We went to Nicaragua as a twenty something married couple, and we came home a family, forever changed by our experiences. Our daughter, Sarah, was born while we were there.

We lived in a dusty little town in the north, El Jicaro. The spouse worked for El Banco National de Nicaragua and I taught English at the local middle school. Our first week in our new home we met Pedro, a skinny, barefoot kid who lived across the road. He and his even smaller, skinnier little brother hung around our house hoping to do chores and earn some money. We usually had something for Pedro to do. He knew where to buy the best tortillas, or when a cow would be slaughtered, or who had fresh eggs for sale. Soon his mother was doing our laundry and Pedro was our regular errand boy. One day we asked him what he was going to do with his money.

"I'm saving up to buy Rolters" he told us.

We frantically searched through our Spanish-English dictionary for "rolter."

"What are rolters?" we asked him.

"They are the best," he said "the best shoes. I want shoes for school."

Several weeks later he showed up at our door with a big grin, wearing his usual short pants with the ragged hem and a thread-bare T-shirt, but this time his outfit was accessorized with new shiny black leather-like oxfords.

"Look," he said "look at my Rolters."

We complemented him excessively on his Rolters. We had never seen a finer pair of shoes, we told him. From then on we rarely saw Pedro without his Rolters. They were his first ever pair of shoes.

I was reminded of Pedro this week when I took my granddaughter to buy shoes. We went from store to store fighting the crowds of back-to-school shoppers until we found shoes that were the perfect fit. She wore them out of the store, a big grin on her face, dancing happily. They are her first ever pair of school shoes; she starts kindergarten tomorrow.

I remembered Pedro and his Rolters and am grateful that my granddaughter will be wearing new shoes to kindergarten. It's a big step for a little girl.

The pink Chuck Taylor's were too big!

But the black strappy ones were just right

 

Update:  Megan is in second grade now and buying back to school shoes with Nana has become a tradition. This year we bought shoes for both Megan and her little sister.  Hunter started kindergarten this year.

Q Is For Quail

Q Is For Quail

I thought Q would be a challenging letter, but when I looked at a list of Q words, there were lots of options.    What first came to mind was quiet...yep, once again I'm writing about my backyard.  After being away from home, what I really appreciate is the quiet.  In the backyard I can hear the rumble of the river below and, this time of year,  I can usually hear the quail chattering.  

We have a family of quail who live in our yard.  Two years ago we found a nest in the bushes outside our bedroom window.  There were over a dozen eggs and we anxiously watched for them to hatch.

It is difficult to tell the size of the eggs.  To put it in perspective, the green plant material is blades of grass.

 

All but one egg hatched.  They quickly left the nest and we would watch the line of  fluffy marshmallow sized chicks march across the lawn following their mother. Over the course of the season we lost a few, probably to neighborhood cats, but by the end of the summer we had nine or ten juvenile quail.

 

A sure sign of spring is the quail reappearing in the yard.  We have a pair that are nesting under the pine tree.  I'm looking forward to seeing more fluffy marshmallows running around the yard.

P Is For Procrastination

P Is For Procrastination

I considered letting the title tell the whole story and leaving the rest of this post blank.  All day I've been mulling over P words and putting off actually writing anything. 

I do a lot of writing in my head; it's getting it down in digital form that's the challenge.  At night I lull myself to sleep putting sentences together with just the right words.  These perfect sentences rarely get written anywhere but inside  my brain.  During the day I frequently find myself thinking "Oh, I should write about that," but, again, I don't write it down.

Writing is not the only thing I procrastinate.  Maybe I enjoy the rush of trying to meet a deadline at the last minute?  Maybe I miss the days when I never had enough time to get everything done?  Now I have the time, but little urgency.  I've done quite a bit of travel this past year, always packing at the last minute, at 2:00 AM when I need to leave for the airport at 5:00 AM.  I know I procrastinate with the tasks that I don't enjoy.  Although I considered myself early with my taxes this year as I dropped them at the post office at 4:00 PM, a full hour before the 5:00 closing.  Most of the things I put off are not difficult, I just don't want to do them.  On the rare day that I make a "to do" list, it's almost a given that there will be distasteful task left undone.  They make it back on the list for several days before I break down and get it done. 

I am currently procrastinating the following:

• Drain and clean hot tub
• Make dentist appointment
• Clean out spare bedroom ( It's a hoarder paradise, storing everything that might come in handy or have a sentimental value, but it's the room where the granddaughters will sleep this summer.)
• Write Q-Z posts for the A-Z Challenge

Procrastination: it's a character flaw...and I have it!