Things We Do For Love

Easter Eve, if there is such a phrase and I'm rhyming my head off, creating a sudo-magical, treasure hunt for my children.  As they sleep later, I'll hide their baskets.  Where they expect to find them when they wake, instead they'll encounter a note, well a series of notes actually.   They'll follow this lyrical, verbage towards their chocolate laden, plastic bins, stuffed also with shredded colored paper straw, jelly bellies and peeps.  This is high fun for me.  These are the things I do now a days.  These are the things I do for love.


While my printer is on and my laptop connected, I'm printing out other items as well.  Killing two birds or maybe two bunnies with one stone.  I'm filling out papers that require my precious signature.  They're for a lawyer and they are involved in the dismantling of things.  I realize, however ironically, these are also the things I do for love.  


Seems it does not matter whether we are putting things together, like an Easter Basket Hunt, or taking things apart, such as - lets call it an "establishment"; we are, for the most part, dealing with degrees of love.


There is a fly on my computer screen and I've no desire to kill it.  I can't swat a fly.  "She wouldn't hurt a fly", applies literally to me.  Long ago my Nana said that she'd "like to be a fly on the wall".  My mother told me this and now I am convinced that every ill timed, well placed housefly is in-fact my Nana come back from heaven to point something out to me.  So, because of the fly on my screen, I'm taking notice of my tasks this evening.   I'm realizing that both things, maybe all things I do, good and bad, happy and sad, right and wrong, weak and strong, involve love of some form or other.  
Everything I do is a thing I do for love.
Thank you Nana and Happy Easter... now shu fly

see you soon -

Looking at photographs from a friend's very recent visit.  

Parting IS such sweet sorrow.

A Decade: for my daughter, on her tenth birthday...

One decade ago today, I had my first child.

I expected a boy.  SHE was not a boy.

When they handed her to me; this tiny bundle, pink cheeked and dark eyed,  I experienced an instant and total change of heart.  I looked up at the doctor with conviction, almost in effort to say, 

"I meant to do that".   

She was, as it turns out, the very thing I'd wanted all along. 

No one moves me the way that she does.

Take your top off

Enlevez votre haut!
"Just take your top off, everybody is looking at us", he said with authority, though he was only 8 years old.  The child, visibly agitated, was begging me to attract less attention by removing my bathing suit top, while we ate lunch poolside at our little community swim club in the hills of southern France.   He was my little cousin.  I was here with him these months acting as his nanny, but it seemed like he was more in charge of me, then I of him.  However one thing was for sure; these were my breasts and I was 21 years old, not all that cozy with the idea of eating a ham sandwich topless in front of him.  Besides, I'd just noticed our mailman, who offered a brief wave and a crooked smile before he dove into the greenish water wearing an oh so small, black speedo.   Now there were two people I absolutely could not be half naked in front of.  That settled it.  The little boy would have to suffer through another day of me remaining in swim attire rather then out of it.  He was right though, I was standing out.  I looked around, noticed a woman contentedly slurping soup, watching as her unclothed, oblong breast narrowly missed dipping into her steaming gruel.  Ouch, that's going to leave a mark.

When I feel lost in my days, there is something I can do for myself - I can always go back in time and get lost all over again in my old days.
Today I'm in France, reliving my not entirely uncomfortable discomfort at being so very young and American, rather tall, with yellow-blonde hair and shaved armpits.  I had my incessant need to bath daily,  my white T shirts and coveted Levis, a talent for butchering the native language and getting away with it and an inability to simply go with the topless flow.   I have remarkable, vivid memories there for my convenient remembering.   On a day like this, it's a gift to get lost right here at home, inside myself... Merci beaucoup.  Je vous aime.
Thank you very much and I love you.

small favors

Sometimes taking a step back is the only way to move forward...

At the strangest times in my life, the songs my parents used to play come flooding back to me.  When this happens, I find it miraculous and a bit ironic, how, for no apparent reason; something long behind me, relates to something presently inside of me and then carries me through what lies ahead of me.   

This is what I would call a "small favor" and for it I am largely grateful.  

**Sail on Silvergirl**