Five Years a Writer

Change is the one constant we can count on... Amanda June 30th : This day last year was my final day at my college-instructor desk.  The next day was the first day of my next chapter. Tomorrow, July 1st, will mark the end of my first 365 days as a retired person, a retiree. Whatever that means to you, for me it means having the time to explore who I am in this next chapter, in this Third Act, and what I'm doing as myself in my own time.  It turns out, the longer I am retired, the more things I am interested in doing in the time I now have.  Today, in addition to being a writer, collage artist, and community educator, I am also a writing coach. You can read about this newest identity I am evolving into  here . Holly The other day , Holly, the cat, pulled a disappearing act that caused my heart to lodge itself in my throat. I have written before about how she has gone missing or, to be more accurate, has hidden herself from our view. So, this time, I thought I kn...

Black cats: good luck or bad? She — let’s call her Joelle — was lucky to get the morning off, back on November 8, 2016, so she could cast her vote for Hillary. Her cousin was not so lucky; she had to take unpaid leave. She did, but it cost her wages just to cast her ballot.  She — let’s call her Marianne — was lucky that her appointment at the clinic in Salt Lake City, Utah was for the evening of June 23, 2022. She was able to get the abortion she had chosen. Her colleague’s sister was not so lucky; that woman’s appointment was for Saturday, June 25th and, by then, it was too late. The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs had come down on June 24th, upon which Utah made inducing an abortion a second degree felony,  and her appointment was cancelled. She  —  let’s just call her Doctor  —  was sitting at the kitchen table, large windows behind her, overlooking the extensive back yard. She bent down to pet the cat just as the bullet shattered the window; aimed at ...

Relationships are as fascinating as they can be fragile and fraught. Between the mere mortals that we humans are, the fine art of communication and commitment can challenge even the most skilled and careful among us. For this reason, I love the stories Joanna Trollope weaves in her books. They are always and inevitably about the trials and triumphs or failures of connections among and between people. Trollope, a fifth-generation niece of Anthony Trollope , writes about the English, a culture and a people that are my heritage. I like being immersed in families for whom a cup of tea and cold-buttered toast with marmalade can be breakfast. The characters tend to be ordinary contemporary individuals, living their lives while trying to navigate a change of some kind, sometimes introduced by a new person in the village or in the family, and sometimes by a change in circumstance — illness, aging, birth or death of a pivotal person relative to the protagonist(s). Put like that, it sounds so m...

I've run a 5-km race, so now I'll train for a half-marathon, and then a full one.  I've learned to ride a bike, so now I'll take on deep-sea diving.  I can draw, so next I'll learn to paint.  Sheesh!  Always more, always better, always bigger.  Why?  Why not be content with what we have in hand? With what we can do with ease and joy and satisfaction. Why not simply stay the course and do more of the same.  That's my plan, anyway.  A month of daily posts to this blog in May was exhilarating, challenging, fun. But daily posts are not sustainable for me at the moment and publishing something bigger than a blog overwhelms me at the moment, so I'm going to return to what I've done successfully in the past: weekly posts.  Because, sometimes (often?) doing more of what we have been doing, rather than forcing ourselves "to the next level", is, actually, what success looks like.  Look for me at the finish line, because, with weekly posts, I...

A Post a Day in May: Bonus post/June 1 #Determined: Amanda, about age 4 In April, I had wondered if I had it in me to take on the challenge of posting something to my blog every day in May. But then I realized that there was no way I could not take it on, because this year, for the first time, I would have all the time in the world to do the daily writing. There was neither rhyme nor reason for not doing A Post a Day in May this year. So I did it. Like many challenges, this one feels good for being finished, but it also felt good while being done. I enjoyed the daily deadlines, wondering who might read the piece and who might send a comment. I found my writing rhythm after just a few days and, while I did experience the panic of a day or two of ideas-drought, I slogged my way through it and discovered that, precisely because the blog needed something posted to it every day, I became adept at translating my daily living, observing and reflecting into short personal essays worthy of bein...

A Post a Day in May 31/31 My father was an early adopter of all things technology — radios, cameras, computers, iPads, gizmos of any kind, really, but he didn’t make it to smartphones. Though he was thoroughly intrigued by my iPhone — “It’s a computer in your pocket!”— he stuck with his flip phone, which he used as a phone. My smartphone, on the other hand, I use mostly as a mini computer and only occasionally as a ‘telephone’. And, it seems, I am not the only one. A recent CBC radio piece tells the tale: Younger people have a smartphone in their pocket, but they rarely, if ever, use it as a telephone. In fact, speaking on the phone makes them nervous, gives them anxiety. They prefer to text, instead. That way, they can avoid the ‘live’ nature of a real-time conversation — or, they can text the person to ask (in writing) when it might be convenient to chat on the phone. That way, there is no risk of interrupting something more important going on on the other end and, I suppose, being ...

A Post a Day in May 30/31 If you think English grammar is hard, you should try German!   My home-room teacher in my German middle school was shocked when I arrived in her class: a little Canadian German-speaking child whose name was Amanda. It turned out that, in Germany at that time, the name Amanda was very old-fashioned and only great-aunts and grand-mothers had it. But there I was, in the flesh, with that name, not a ‘great’ or a ‘grand’ anything, just a lively little girl. That teacher taught us grammar and, to make it fun, had created a character who populated the language exercises we completed under her tutelage. That character was named … Amanda. While learning grammar can be dull and bleak, our grammar classes were great fun, because the antics the teacher’s Amanda was getting up to in the sentences we parsed were all the funnier for having me share the name. I don’t remember the specifics of those antics, but I do give full credit for my appreciation of grammar to that h...