This is my favorite picture from our trip to Colorado. Brent's parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and everyone came out to celebrate with them. I met some of the people that Brent knew as a teenager. One of the best treats was to have a few moments to visit with Brent's best friend in high school and his best man at our wedding--Don. Lauren and Meg, Anton and Jonathan were there. I tend to dread being with big groups of people--even people who I love very much--but it was a wonderful time. I turned 50 years old the day before the anniversary. It is strange to remember that I was born before Brent's parents were even married. Better to remember that he was born, grew up, and was smart enough--kind enough--to pick me to marry.

A month ago continued

I left off my last entry in the middle of the night. My sweet husband came to get me and so I didn't finish. I was writing about how everything I experience exists on the same plane. The heros in the novels, the prophets in the scriptures, the images in poems--what is good about one is good about all. Truth, for me, is found in all of my world, both "real" and "imaginary." I have a life described by Whitman's "gigantic beauty of a stallion, . . . Head high in the forehead, . . . tail dusting the ground, . . . His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him, . . . we race around and return. I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion, Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them? Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you."

The most passionate moments in my life have existed using both my real body and my creative mind. Jumping my horse over a real fence is just as vivid as reading about Whitman's stallion. I live both in motion and in thought--for which I am grateful. When I leave this Earth, I will take only what I can remember, what I am. This means that I will take my whole life with me, leaving nothing behind.

A month ago today

I noticed that it had been exactly a month since I last posted on this site. My other blog tends to lend itself to everyday inspiration--bunnies that have peed in the wrong corner, dishes, homework, cat-hair-dust-bunnies in the corners, rose mildew, over-due library books, the shedding habits of two Uromastyx lizards . . .

Brent sent me the site for an article about how people tend to open up on-line and expose things that they would never think they would (or I think they never should), but that article itself came from an on-line blog. For me, the world has always been one big blur. Literature, the tops of trees, a cake recipe, the plays that I have been in, trimming our pets' nails, science fiction stories, folding clothes, doctor appointments, laying by the pool and watching my rabbits explore behind my potted plants, movies I have seen--and movies that I have only heard about--

Brent and me Orlando Science Center Fall 08

I was looking for a picture of me--just me--that made me look the way I wanted to look--fresh, happy, without wrinkles and lines. Couldn't find one--doesn't exist. Nathan took some of me outside--but I had a wierd look on my face. The best one of that batch was the one that he took of himself, upside-down. It has come back to the point where I was 20 years ago: my children looked back on photographs of our family and would ask me why wasn't I there? Didn't I like being with them?
Time again for pictures of mom.