January 28, 2021- Listening to Seth Walker’s “Leap Of Faith.”

I have been meaning to come back and freshen this blog with some new material but it was on the “fixing to” list – until I wrote a story about my friend, Kimmie Rhodes, and she shared it on her blog and posted this as my website.

I do have a “real” website – that also needs a little sprucing up, but for now, in true Texas lingo, I am fixing to fix this one. Here goes.

ICYMI: My husband, Mark died in January of 2017. Two weeks later, the 45th president of the United States was sworn in. Suddenly my world had been turned upside down and what was bad was good and what was wrong was right, but the world kept turning and carrying me with it, in spite of my greatest efforts to get off.

Fast Forward to January, 2021.

I commemorated the fourth anniversary of Mark’s untimely death with the realization that I was no longer taking Xanax and waking up sad every day. In fact, I had not opened my eyes to a heavy sigh and the weight of the world in- well – I can’t remember when. Hmm. I checked my bathroom scale.

Nope. I’m still carrying my grief weight. Okay. One battle at a time.

But the good news is that things felt different. The sighs had turned into smiles and we crammed so many great memories into the time we had together that I am forever grateful.

But it had been a long four years. Seventeen days later, I got up at crack of early to watch the Pomp and Circumstance of the Inauguration of our 46th president, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. And something clicked. I felt okay again. Just. Like. That.

I am not writing about politics as much as bookends. I needed bookends for that devastating grief. I had a definite line of demarcation on January 3, 2017 at 4:46 pm. Everything in my world was defined as Before and After that date. But on January 20, 2021, I felt something more. I had bookends. Parenthesis. Brackets. A Finish Line.

So here we are today. January 28, 2021.

Enjoy this new blog about Adventure and Boldness. Rats and Bicycles. Courage and Good Wine. Resilience and Suitcases. Hand Tools. Road Trips. Music. Art. And Friends.

Sometimes all it takes is a “Leap of Faith.”

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An Original Introduction.  March 1, 2011

Okay. I’m here. I’ve been meaning to come here for a while but have been dragging my feet. I need the exercise and discipline of a journal.  And I love blank books and good pens that glide across the page.  But the reality is that I don’t sit down and write on paper for pleasure much these days, unless you count grocery lists or post-its. 

So a blog might be a solution.  My friends have them.  Janice, Mary Mikel, the Susans (Hanson and Albert).  I am a loyal reader. A subscriber.  I “take” their occasional blogs, as folks say in small towns when talking about The Paper.

Yes. If you are reading this, you probably know that I spent a long time as a  journalist, photographer and jill-of-all-trades. I spent about a decade as the Features Editor at an almost daily newspaper.  Actually when I took the job, I was called the Neighbors Editor (which management thought was a modern-day  step up from Women’s Editor,  but I kind of wanted to sound a little more uptown than that, and since I designed my own section, as part of the small-town newspaper job, I changed it from Neighbors to Features and no one noticed, or minded if they did.

That job was sort of like writing a blog or a multipage gossip column.  In addition to posting the engagement announcements and editing submitted wedding write-ups (who knew Alencon lace could be spelled so many different ways), and getting the obituaries in on time*, I had free rein with filling the rest of the section. And so we wrote to amuse ourselves, and garnered a few loyal readers and some state and national writing awards along the way in spite of ourselves.

(*I was once accused of RUINING a man’s funeral because he died after the deadline for the Sunday paper and we did not publish on Mondays. He was buried on Tuesday morning and did not have much of a turn-out.  Lesson: “Part of being a hero is knowing when to die.” – Will Rogers) 

“All the news that fits, we print,” was an in-house saying among the three of us who made up the Features Section. Gardening, adventures, book reviews, photo essays, interviews with famous or not-so-famous people, and self-indulgent columns about whatever popped into my mind were the order of the day. It was the best of….

I left that gig to take a dream job as editor of an edgy alternative newsmagazine. Politics, entertainment and social commentary was the order of the day. It really was the best of times,  great staff,  incredible writers (including the gang who came with me from the almost daily)  and an appreciative publisher who savored every word. After a while, the economy sunk that paper and began hitting print journalism in general. I fell into the most unlikely day-job. (Stop The Shooting, April, 2011)

Somewhere along the line, I quit having deadlines for writing off on tangents and rambling about whatever crossed my desk or my mind. And I miss it.

And so. Okay. I’m here. I am not promising much in the way of regular writing  or deadlines- or even much of interest to the masses. In sort of a stream of consciousness, I plan to write about  the most ordinary things like  backroads and graveyards, great love and baseball bats,  good music, quiet moments,  keeping score, getting the shot and taking a chance.

Once in a while, I might stumble across something that catches your eye. And you are more than welcome to hitch yourself to my wagon and come along.

Listening to: Guy Clark – “Maybe I Can Paint Over That.”