These Hills Bring Peace

The first time I was ever exposed to the mountains of Tennessee I was about 16 years old and my parents took us on a family vacation in February. Snow was still lying everywhere on the mountains and I immediately fell in love with the look and smell of the land as it lay covered in white and was as tall as the eyes could see.

So when for my high school graduation present I was asked where I wanted to go the most, I chose the Tennessee Mountains. Every single high schooler I knew was headed to Panama City Beach to scream at the top of their lungs and heat their skin bronze in celebration of 12 years of their lives accomplished and finished complete.  I however, chose Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Once again, we would head off to the mountains and that’s where I would spend the next however many days looking at the land that made me feel whole and complete. I’ve never been quite sure what my attraction to trees, hills and green land is, but it fills a hole inside of me that I can’t really explain.

When I was growing-up, my grandmother spent several of her vacations with my grandfather in Helen Georgia. She would talk about it like it was the land of magical mountains and with the same mellow sounds of satisfaction when she spoke, that seems to perfectly match my own feelings.

This year I couldn’t quite make up my mind where I wanted to vacation; Savannah, Georgia was my first choice, I lived there as a small child at the age of four, and I wanted to go back and see it as an adult. But I waited too long to try and make arrangements/reservations so that will be a trip for next year on me and my husband’s 10^th wedding anniversary.

After a little more thinking and perusing the internet, Helen, Georgia was my next choice. I decided I wanted to see with my own eyes, what my grandmother found so enchanting about this special place. I’ve only arrived today, but I’ll tell you this, at the first sight of hills and grassy mountains in the distance, I was already in my own special place, as the sights and beauty began to fill that small empty hole inside of me that only the mountains seem to fill. 

Tomorrow we will venture out on foot and see all the sights that I have outlined in advance – Anna Ruby Falls, the Baby-Land General Hospital, and the Christmas Shops, the Old Sautee Store where I’m told the ice cream is to die for, and rummage through the rest of the shops galore up and down the beautiful streets of Helen.

But tonight I am tired from the drive and the little bit of tramping-around we’ve already accomplished walking the creek behind our hotel at sunset. So I’m headed out to my balcony overlooking my requested mountain view and thank the heavens and my grandmother above for this very special vacation memory that is unfolding as I write.

What If.......

What if I hadn't been born to my American, white parents? What if I was a black woman from Harlem whose son had been shot down by one bad cop in the name of hate and no good reason, would I then trust any cops, anywhere? Would I fear for my life because of the color of my skin? Would that always be one of my biggest fears?

Or as a white wife of a police officer who died, because someone walked up behind him, never knowing him, but knowing his job by the clothing he wore, and shot him in the back of his head leaving me without a husband, and my children without a father.

I wonder how I’m not a Syrian woman with a family of seven, piled-up in a makeshift boat, trying to travel hundreds of miles across water to safety, only to arrive and be scorned, looked-down-upon and spat-on in disgust; going sometimes days without food, sleeping in the street, and any hovel of a hole we could all fit into, and crying – crying for my hungry children who I thought I was helping to survive, but now, the struggle is still so very real.

I wonder all of these things until my heart breaks, because the facts are - somebody is all of these people - they are somebody to all of these REAL people that are dead now. How did we get to this point of hatred? How did we seemingly come so far, only to turn around and go back 40 years, back into the days of hate and violence being spewed from our hearts, our mouths and the guns in our hands?

I keep hearing and seeing Black Lives Matter everywhere – let me tell you something – all lives matter, every single one of them. For those of us fortunate to be born in the right place, in the right time, well Glory Hallelujah!  But all of us are not those people, and no, we shouldn’t feel guilty for our place in this life, but by gosh we should feel a definite responsibility to uphold our abilities to provide human compassion for those less fortunate, instead of walking past them in the streets of Greece (or anywhere else) with disgust on our faces because our vacations have been ruined by their will to stay alive at any cost.

What matters is WHAT WE DO FROM HERE – RIGHT NOW. And let me tell you, there had better be a plan, because otherwise we are Iraq and Syria and any other country that kills its own at any given time, with no laws, for no reason, and no consequences.

Our lives - ALL OF THEM - better start mattering and quickly, or we will surely, just kill each other off, one by one until there is nothing left of us. Maybe this is the 2nd coming everyone keeps talking about; maybe He is letting us take care of cleansing this earth ourselves, because we are surely not honoring the sacrifices He made so we could be here. 

The Current of Life Moves Swiftly

I know I’m not the only one who looks in the mirror and still sees a young woman who still listens to young/hip music, still laughs at bawdy humor, and who still dances in the car when she drives.

Some days I never see the wrinkles that shadow the corners of my eyes, the age spots on my hands that I prefer to see as new freckles, or the lack of strength in my hands when I can’t open jar lids anymore without the help of someone stronger. All of these changes I push to the back of my mind as if they didn’t exist; that is until reality intercedes and I am forced to acknowledge where I am in this thing we call our life-span and I silently accept that I’m not twenty-five anymore.

Sometimes it’s simply the events in our lives that force us to answer to our ages. Sometimes it’s the conversations when you’re re-telling old stories and the crowd surrounding you appears stunned that your story didn’t include covered wagons, and Cowboys and Indians, because the tales that you’re reciting from memory sound to them as if you’re an ancient relic.

And sometimes, it’s something as simple as your youngest child is six months away from being twenty-one years old, and your oldest child is eight months away from being thirty years old and the last conversation that you had with your oldest child he was saying he hoped he didn’t have a birthday crisis – and all you can think while he’s talking is – I hope you don’t either, because both of us cannot have a crisis at the same time.

From last May until even just recently, so many engagements have been announced, wedding dates set – and I mean by children! And if they’re not getting married, they already are married and they’re all having babies - babies that are playing tee-ball, and taking ballet lessons and starting kindergarten!

And the parents of these children wonder out loud, where has the time gone? How did their babies turn five years old this summer? Well let me tell you kiddo’s something, I wonder the same thing from time to time myself.

How did my two children become grown people, with grown-up jobs, and living grown-up lives? What was I so busy doing that I didn’t notice they weren’t wearing little boy sandals anymore, or that they now wear cologne that smells like those good-looking men that pass you in the mall, or that I’m no longer telling them they need to bathe with soap, they know when and how to shower all by themselves.

Slow down, work hard, but work less and play more. Be present for all those silly faces and conversations, make story-time a nightly regime, finger-paint with tiny hands, bake cookies, and on Saturday, play in the water-sprinkler instead of cleaning house. 

Because the next thing you know you’re looking in your own mirror, applying wrinkle- cream and wishing you could re-wind your own life, and used your own time a little wiser and made more memories.

Forty-two Inches of Addiction

Don’t do it, they said. You’ll regret it, they said. Once you start you cannot stop, they said. But it’s just this once, I said. I can stop anytime I want to, I said. I bought the attachments, I helped hook-up the instrumental parts to begin, together we contemplated our choices, and then we made our selection.

For better or worse, we began our journey with full acknowledgment of what the end results might be, but confident in our own will power, in that nothing but good could come of our actions. We never saw it coming, we never knew just how wrong we could be.

Our first journey would take us into the dark, secret world of motorcycle gangs, their families, their lives, and their destructible love for one another. At first I felt pure trepidation, it was so violent and unforgiving; their lives so strangled by their own honor code of kill or be killed. All I saw for days on end were crazy, delusional people; but then it all begin to change.

Suddenly they were all part of my family, their problems my problems, and their solutions, while not anything like my own; they suddenly seemed justified.  I was rooting for the men in cut-off sleeves and leather jackets, and their old ladies who dressed like era 1950; big hair, high-heeled pumps, and sass, loads of sass.

Sons of Anarchy gave me insight and wonderment, as well as confusion, as to who were really the good guys, and who were really not. I would watch til the bitter, but triumphantly sad end. Cheering for the bad guys, grieving that it was over, and reminiscing for all the lives I saw come and go in just three weeks’ time.

Afterward I was lost, my evenings were unaccounted for again, and my weekends empty; I know I said it couldn’t happen to me, but it did, so I delved back into the archives of shows gone past and found another family to follow, to love.

This family would lead us into the mysterious, powerful, and if to be believed, very scary world of The White House. Where the most powerful voices in the United States make all the important decisions, even the decisions about who will live and who must die, all for the good of the people. 

The president and his wife worked like well-oiled machines in their efforts to manipulate the world and how it is ran, and House of Cards would leave me to forever wonder and worry, if that’s the way the world really does work.

As if that view of the White House wasn’t enough, I’m now enjoying/worrying over another approach, where the scenes are run from behind the podium and the President is but a puppet being mastered with strings from a stage of corruption. Scandal is my latest viewing, we’re only on season two, so I have no idea just how much more my own conspiracy theories will be challenged in the days to come.

My name is Michelle, and I am a Netflix addict. 

The Pains of Progress

I have seen and heard things that cannot be erased. This is one more time in my life that I wish I had set-up a remote video camera and just left it rolling so the world could know, and hear all the things that I try and describe to you as first-hand accounts of all the folly that goes on in our home.

This weekend we are had our home fully re-carpeted and our one, lone bathroom re-floored. I paid the company, from where I bought all the carpet and flooring, an extra fee to move all of our furniture. I naively believed at the time, that this would relieve my family of most of the hard, physical work, therefore making this purchase of new flooring that much more pleasing when I was executing my sales-pitch to them in the beginning of this venture.

The reality of the situation is that I have three times the “stuff” than I have furniture, and I wish I could tell you what all I had to listen to in order to get the help and results from the men in my family in order to get all the preliminary work done.

Some comments were: “I should have hired me some girls from the elementary school down the road” from my husband to my son, plus “This is heavier than it looks now, so you’re gonna need to bow-up”, and “You just need to worry about your end, Big Daddy has this end taken care of” from my son to my husband, and lastly (in a higher pitch almost squeal) “Are you picking up your end or I’m toting mine and yours, plus the part that’s dragging?” It was one big bicker-laugh-fest between them all day long.

At some point at the end of the whole process, we were putting everything back in place, and suddenly, items that had been on top of my `etajere were no longer fitting properly. It seems with the plushness of the carpet, also came added height, which of course made the height of the furniture change. Between that, and all the arguing about the lights I have always had strategically placed all over it and comments about Fire Marshal’s being called, I was done.

It was suddenly all I could take and I sat down, trying to regulate my breathing and fighting back the tears from the frustrations of the day. But that wouldn’t last very long, my family rallied me back with jokes and laughter and we got it all done.

But I will tell you this, I’m not so sure all that decorating we do for Christmas is going to happen this year. I just got everything back where it belongs, and I’m just not up for that all over again. And because that holiday always requires furniture to be moved and rearranged as well, I’m even having second thoughts about my Christmas tree; I’m thinking a small table-tree might do. It’s August and that’s end of November, and I‘m thinking it’s going to be too soon, too fresh; but we’ll see. 

Freedom on Aisle Five

While I think Target is taking a move towards something that shouldn't have to be identified as a "happening event", I will say it's a move in the right direction. Removing all gender-based signs on their toy aisles is a step forward, but should actually be an unnecessary step into the future of gender equality/freedom. I have never understood the male/female labeling of anything, toys or otherwise.

When my children went to the toy section of any store to pick out something with their gift money, I never guided them toward any labeled aisle. They picked out what they wanted, they bought it, and we went home; no judgement. I took their choices to be whatever it was at the particular time that interested them, and if their choices were diverse, then in my mind, I knew so was their curiosity and thinking.

My paternal grandmother had one male, and two females as children and it seemed the toys she had the most of were “male-oriented”.  They were toys that originally belonged to my daddy when he was a little boy so I spent summers playing with Lincoln Logs and marbles, as well as learning cross-stitch and how to properly iron a handkerchief.

There was only one male grandchild in our immediate family, so all the female grandchildren played with them too, as did my grandmother, right there with us, in the middle of the floor. As was the usual, my wise, beautiful grandmother was ahead of her time in knowing that the only boundaries that restrict anyone from being anything, are the boundaries we set for ourselves.

Santa Claus must have also been equally intelligent, as there were years that he brought play vacuums and Easy Bake ovens into our own home and placed them under the tree. Mostly by request from small children with modern ideas, but also with confidence that the gifts would bring with them, the right lessons for the times at hand.

While I’m not a burning bra - women libber, I am a woman that worked in a man’s world for over 20 years and held my own every single day; with use of my mental prowess, not my physical strengths.  I never cared about digging ditches or building houses, but I always knew, that the choice was mine should I had wanted to do so.

In Gadsden County, you’ll see just as many young girls/women in hunting/fishing attire, standing next to the biggest bucks and the biggest fish. I’ve seen them out-shoot and out-fish, many a young boy/man, and stand tall with pride and dignity as they smiled for the camera with the biggest catch of any given season.

Both of my male children know how to take care of themselves, clean a house properly, and cook magnificently. Their future partners will be proud one day that while choosing their life partners, they will have found people who grew-up with their hopes and dreams unhindered and fulfilled, and their boundaries wide-open in all the right places. Equal opportunity isn’t just about jobs anymore, it’s about life.

Day of The Dog

Every person I pass on the street is dragging and in practical meltdown, their heads are in a permanent state of hang, eyes never meeting and mouths lacking the energy to curve upward in a smile, arms no longer swinging with enthusiasm, but instead limp by their sides like wet noodles.

Their clothes are a misrepresentation of who they usually are and how they dress. They’re headed to work, so certain clothing requirements are expected, but they’re so close to the edge of the dress code with their see-through linens and loose fitting attire, nothing that touches, clings or increases warmth, and no dark, heavy fabric that seems to boil the lining of the skin.

People sitting on park benches are no longer feeding the birds or enjoying the scenery; instead their heads are bent as if in prayer, and their shoulders slumped in near defeat. They no longer wave when others pass by - instead their arms are dangling in resignation that strength will never return. They no longer speak with greetings, for their vocal cords are on strike from the constant damp, dripping liquid that forms every morning and afternoon as heat meets humidity.

Even the lawns have resigned themselves to feast or famine with what nature provides as moisture, so dry for weeks that the grass and flowers are wilted and beginning to turn the colors of fall, but then, the rain comes. And it comes and comes, so much that everything is squishingly-saturated, bird baths are overflowing, rain meters have reached their capacity for measurement and even the animals, who just days ago were dragging with their tongues touching the ground, are now running for shelter and dry dirt to lay lie on.

But the people, they are reveling in the rain, so thankful for an excuse to stay indoors, away from the smoldering heat and anything that requires that they spend time in the dog days of summer. I have heard the saying “dog days of summer” all of my life, but I have never really known what that technically meant. So I googled it, and this is what I found: The dog days continued through the early 19th century to be perceived as foreboding a time of evil, wherein "the Sea boiled, the Wine turned sour, Dogs grew mad, and all other creatures became languid; causing to man, among other diseases, burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies." That my friends, is the most accurate explanation I have ever heard for the month of August.

I’ll admit I was ready for fall as early as May, because we sure didn’t have much of a spring this year, other than April and what it brings with it: blooming flowers, green-leaved trees, the fresh smells of dirt and growth – I could really care less if we only had one season, not necessarily winter, but surely not summer either.  Maybe if instead, we just had a season of cool mornings, warm afternoons, and cool, breezy evenings that run you off the front porch come sundown.

But I’m patient, and I hear September calling my name.