Final Catch(up) in These titles mean nothing.

NoJoMo Day Twenty-two: Where would I live?

If I could live anywhere… I’d live in NYC. I’d live by the ocean. I’d live in the woods. A small place with privacy. Someplace I could afford.

NoJoMo Day Twenty-three: What I would change in my past?

Semi-odd, uncomfortable question. Most of my past I”m happy with. Some parts less so. So I sit here and think. I squint into the past. I look for things I could have done better. Things I shouldn’t have done at all. It’s a faithless endeavor and I quit.

NoJoMo Day Twenty-four: First memory…

My first memories are at Caton’s, the farm we lived at before we moved here. It was a little yellow house, my mother’s honeymoon cottage. There was a spring house and an old barn and the new hayshed on top of the hill. There were ‘baas’ which were sheep, and there was my uncle with a ‘clock on his arm’, the first wristwatch I ever saw.

NoJoMo Day Twenty-five: The kitchen of my childhood…

… of course is the kitchen of most of my adulthood and my present kitchen (at whose kitchen table I type these words - eternally). It had a wood range and a pump on the sink that pumped water from the cistern - which my mother quickly got rid of. The original chimney went up between the kitchen and the dining room. It was susceptible to chimney fires and we eventually took it down and the wall between the rooms and built a new chimney on the outside of the house. All this happened in the 1950s. We still had a wood range but it was a combination wood and gas range - a Copper-Clad - with gas burners on one side and a wood burning stove on the other - with an oven in between. My mother got a new Youngstown sink when water was piped to the house and a hot water heater was put in the basement. We replaced both the Copper-Clad and the Youngstown sink in the mid-80s when we ‘put in cupboards’. The kitchen though is the same. It will always be the same. As long as the house stands.

NoJoMo Day Twenty-six: To someone who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself…

This is a deep and hard question. I can think of teachers, of bosses, of relatives.... but I trickle off. I’m not even sure what it means to believe in me, or what it means to believe in myself. I’ve had people recognize my talents, my skills, my determination. I’ve lived up to their expectations. I have disappointed them. This is a question without an answer. Forgive me.

NoJoMo Day Twenty-seven: To those I love after I am dead…

I had a good and fortunate life. I hope I shared some good things with you. I hope I was grateful enough. I hope you have kind memories of me. Live your own lives the best way you can. Be honest and good and smell the roses.

NoJoMo Day Twenty-eight: Feeling independent…

I’ve never been independent. I’ve earned a paycheck most of my life, but I doubt it was ever enough to support me. I’ve counted on parents and teachers and husband and sons and neighbors and fellow-workers and friends to help me throughout all my life. I wonder if I even came close to giving back as much as I received.

NoJoMo Day Twenty-nine: An expert in....

I am not bad at grammar. I am fairly good with words in general. I am into certain forms of literature.

At the end of the second grade I had learned to read. I was not an early reader but after I could read I could read anything. There was an upstairs room in our house that had stacks of Reader’s Digests and Catholic Digests. The Catholic Digest was a lot like Reader’s Digest except it was Catholic. Catholic means universal and I suppose both magazines considered themselves instruments of the universal. Anyway, the summer between my second and third grades I read that whole roomful of Readers and Catholic Digests and after that there wasn’t anything I didn’t know.

NoJoMo Day Thirty: An ideal world....

I think maybe we already have an ideal world. I think we need to recognize it and do the best we can with the options in our hands.

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Asking for Roses

A house that lacks, seemingly, mistress and master,
With doors that none but the wind ever closes,
Its floor all littered with glass and with plaster;
It stands in a garden of old-fashioned roses.

I pass by that way in the gloaming with Mary; ‘I wonder,’ I say, ‘who the owner of those is.’ ‘Oh, no one you know,’ she answers me airy, ‘But one we must ask if we want any roses.’

So we must join hands in the dew coming coldly
There in the hush of the wood that reposes,
And turn and go up to the open door boldly,
And knock to the echoes as beggars for roses.

‘Pray, are you within there, Mistress Who-were-you?’ ‘Tis Mary that speaks and our errand discloses. ‘Pray, are you within there? Bestir you, bestir you! ‘Tis summer again; there’s two come for roses.

‘A word with you, that of the singer recalling–
Old Herrick: a saying that every maid knows is
A flower unplucked is but left to the falling,
And nothing is gained by not gathering roses.’

We do not loosen our hands’ intertwining
(Not caring so very much what she supposes),
There when she comes on us mistily shining
And grants us by silence the boon of her roses.

Robert Frost

Last updated November 30, 2014