December 29, 2021

The year is winding down, and even though this tradition we have of celebrating a new beginning at the very end of December is much cherished, it is, in a way, artificial. But having said that, I think that we humans must have known what we were doing way back in the long ago, to set a definite end moment of the current year and create a “starting over point”, going forward.

I imagine there are a lot of people in eager anticipation of the end of 2021—good riddance they’ll say—and ready to blow the horns and shout, come on in, 2022!

That concept—out with the old, and in with the new—is the very reason that spring is my favorite season. After the relative stasis of winter, of course, comes the spring. Spring, with it’s tiny green shoots poking through the snow, gives us the reality of new life beginning, and a very real sense of “starting over.” When you think about it, the “new year” really should begin in the springtime.

I need to share with you something that I’ve thought about long and hard over the last few days. If life were a movie, it feels, especially lately, as if the movie we would be living would be Groundhog Day, as opposed to the one that the season of Christmastime tries to edge us toward—It’s A Wonderful Life.

But I digress.

It has become harder in recent months for me to keep up a positive attitude. I don’t think I’m alone in this.  And that is most unfortunate because now is when we need a positive attitude more than we have ever needed one to date. Therefore, desiring to be proactive, and on a positive note, I can tell you that the one thing I know for certain right now is that neither you, nor I, are the only ones who feel as if they have slowed down, as if they are just so damn tired all the time, and as if everything we aim to accomplish takes a ton more energy now that ever it did before.

It really is not just you and me, my friends.

I believe that this sense of brain fog and energy depletion we’re feeling should be recognized as the pandemic within the pandemic. Whether we’ve individually come down with Covid or not, this one, this pall, this miasma, we have all come down with. There is not a single person I’ve spoken to who doesn’t feel this way.

 I don’t know what the cure is, really. I imagine it’s going to be different things for different people. Seriously, I believe the choice before us all right now is this: perk up or perish!

To a certain extent, I believe that the cure for the dark ick hovering over us all must include some form of physical exercise. In times past, whenever someone was feeling tired, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “burned out”, others have recommended exercise. The maxim is that expending energy to exercise creates more energy. (That’s sort of like that truism in life that the more love you give, the more love you have to give).  I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, per se, as you well know from these essays. But I sometimes will take the time to look at where I am and what I’m doing with a view to perhaps making a slight course correction.

The course correction I’m contemplating involves physical activity. Heck of a time of year to decide on that, but there it is. I want to move more—not higher, stronger, faster. Just….more. Around the house, around the room, it doesn’t matter. I can put two feet in front of the other (I walk with a cane so technically that is three “feet” I am tottering around on) and just do it.

I don’t have to talk myself into accomplishing this—at least not much. What I do have to keep affirming, mentally, is that this isn’t something that will show any kind of instant results. This will take time. There are some small, particular improvements I am hoping to see, and I think if I begin today (actually I began yesterday) and move more each day than I have been doing over the last year, I should see some improvement by the end of March. In this household, the end of March is synonymous with the end of winter. So that would be as close to perfect as I can get.

Movement creates energy, and energy eradicates stagnation. Yes, my dear friends, this is just my opinion. I don’t care if anyone else believes this, or not. I only care about getting my butt in gear, and honestly, moving is the best way I know to do that.

Plus, keeping busy does guarantee that sleep comes easier. Trust me when I say that a good, easy sleep is second to exercise in curing whatever may ail you.

And I will also here admit that I need to add the adjective “earlier” to that. Staying up until the wee hours really isn’t good for one hoping to get an early start on the day with vim and vigor.

Wishing you all a wonderful 2022!

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 December 22, 2021

Here we are again! It’s almost Christmas of 2021, and it really doesn’t seem like a year since it was Christmas of 2020.

And as another wave of the virus surges, so does what they’re calling “virus fatigue”. I don’t think there are many people who don’t feel this modern-day miasma. I’ve been reflecting lately, and I really can’t tell you how many times in the 2010s I heard the warnings. Several learned, intelligent people, people of consequence, warned us that we were overdue for a major pandemic. They told us that it could be very, very bad. They told us to be ready.

Then, just as we were exiting that decade and entering the 2020’s, it came! The pandemic the ubiquitous “they” had been warning us about for years. And…we really weren’t prepared for this at all, were we?

Do you think that our habit of living life at ninety miles an hour, of arranging our society so that instant gratification is the norm has contributed to our lack of preparedness?

I do.

If you’re a parent, you inevitably recall times when your children “just couldn’t wait” for something—be it Christmas morning or arriving at your destination after an hours-long car ride. It’s that kind of impatience that I believe is gripping society at large right now. There are a lot of people interviewed briefly on the evening news casts who are positively whiny about wanting this over.

Which brings me to what else we are lacking in, and this is a biggie and an absolute necessity for surviving a pandemic, sanity intact.

From what I am seeing most people do not, by and large, seem to have an old-fashioned quality called “stick-to-it-ivness”.

I first heard that whining of “when will it be over?” sometime in May of 2020. This was after the general consensus was in March, that, hey, we shut everything down, and in a month, it will be over.  Really, people? A pandemic that comes and goes in a month, three at most?

When we learned there was a pandemic, David and I were absolutely terrified at first. We didn’t know if it was an airborne virus that could come on a wind, or if it needed some form of closer contact to spread. And, since the consensus was that older people, and people with “comorbidities” were most at risk, and we realized we checked both of those boxes, yeah, terror defines our original reaction well.

So we shut the door of our house to everyone who wasn’t one of the three of us, and we watched and we listened, and most importantly, we learned. Now, in our search for real, solid information we did stumble upon some “misinformation”, but for us, that was a pretty easy commodity to sort out. Like separating the wheat from the chaff.

We came to the conclusion that this pandemic would be with us for two, possibly three years. That realization didn’t make us at all happy, but it was what it was—and still is. Now, here I must say that in truth this pandemic could have been much worse. It could have been more “air borne” than it is, and—and this is a very big and—the scientists could still be searching for a vaccine. So, if we had to have a pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 is not the worst one that can imagine.

What we never once had on our bingo cards was that a whole bunch of people would refuse to be vaccinated. Or wear masks. Or social distance. We never once, in the beginning, could have imagined that people, en masse, would refuse to believe that the damn virus was even real.

Because of our failure of imagination, we are both beginning to wonder how long beyond our original estimate of two years this thing will last.

We have received two shots of the Moderna vaccine, and tomorrow, we get our boosters. If, in another 4 to 6 months, they suggest we get another shot, which is what they are doing in Israel right now? Well, we will be rolling up our sleeves.

We are no longer living in fear. We watched and we learned. And because we did, we are living in reality. Yes, we’re tired of it all. But that is something we just have to get over. Or endure. It is exhausting. But we’re not quitters, generally speaking. And since we want to stay on this earth for as long as God will allow us to do so, well, we’ll just do our best to carry on. We intend to live our lives, not by going ahead and, against best practices, “doing” this or that, and not by clinging to customs that used to be, as pleasant as they were.

We may not go out to dinner, or to parties. But we are keeping our attitudes as positive as possible. We are keeping in touch with family and friends. We are keeping busy.

This year, at some point we will attend small gatherings of family, and everyone there will be people who are also vaccinated. Until those two events happen, and, I hope, for every day from this moment forward, we are keeping the peace of that first gift of Christmas within our hearts.

And I can promise you that on Saturday, we will be communicating with our loved ones, and possibly watching some of our favorite Christmas movies. We’ll remember the joys of Christmases past—which, as parents of a child who is in heaven is something we have done for nearly two decades.

May your hearts be filled with love and laughter and the peace which is at the heart of this season. Merry Christmas, from our house to yours!

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 December 15, 2021

Thanks to the past weekend having been spent with three of our four great-grandchildren here for a sleepover, our Christmas tree is up and decorated.

It’s not a real tree that you’ll find here in our house. Our daughter developed an allergy to the real thing when she was a young teen. (She can’t even have one of those classic pine-tree air fresheners in her car.) The tree we have now we purchased a few years back, the December following the “great attic clean-up caper” that David and the girls staged one spring. This was back before our daughter moved in with us. It was a very well-organized effort, needed because over the last many years prior to that noble effort, they both—our girls, that is—liked to bring things here to “store”. That’s all well and good and we are always happy to help them—until the space runs out. So, they planned a mass clean-out of what was no longer needed/wanted.  We’d ordered a huge bin, and the three of them, working together, did a good job “cleaning up” the attic. The good news is, that there was a lot of space created and unwanted stuff gotten rid of.

Unfortunately, they tossed our Christmas tree out in error. Our daughter had mistaken our tree for her tree, which she had thought she had stored here. And during that great attic clean up she had decided, for whatever reason, that she no longer wanted it. There were a couple of other items in that clean up that we lost as well, including a small metal table that I had purchased to use when I needed to sort out my paperwork during tax prep season. The table had been bought the fall before, and it hadn’t cost much, but it had worked perfectly.

The tree we have now isn’t very tall—only about five foot high. Because I like that tree, the year after we acquired it I went out and purchased some miniature-sized decorations for it. We have lights, garland, and hanging ornaments. With small dogs in the house, we don’t bother with the tinsel or anything else that might end up going through a dog’s digestive track. The tree is pretty, and the little ones did a good job of hanging the tiny ornaments.

The snow that I wrote about a couple of weeks back melted, and then we got more snow. It, too, melted over this last weekend. On Monday, as I peeked around the corners of my computer monitor to see outside, I was greeted by bright sunshine, bare trees, and green lawns, mostly raked of leaves. I was blessed to see the exact same sight again yesterday, as well. I don’t know if this is real, or just perception, but it seems to me that two straight days of sunshine and blue skies lately is a rarity.  I tend to think its more the former than the latter, since we’re at the time of year when two lines have been added to the daily forecast screen at the weather network web site: expected snowfall and expected hours of sunshine. It looked so pretty outside Monday and yesterday. If it weren’t for the fact that it was only just a couple of degrees above the freezing mark, I might have been tempted to go and sit on the porch for a bit. The forecast for today tells me to expect 0 hours of sunshine, and possibly some rain. Since the skies are now grey and the street is wet, I’d say that’s an accurate report.

Because our local government will not collect yard waste again until the spring, one is left trying to decide what’s best: letting the leaves that are still there on the lawn right now stay there, to be covered by the snow that is sure to come again any day now; or does one rake, and bag, and then store those full bags of leaves in the outside storage spaces until spring?

Friends, that is a dilemma with which my beloved husband has been wrestling over the last couple of weeks. Or one that he says he is wrestling with. I think the truth is, he just doesn’t want to take the chance that any stored bags will somehow get wet, thus beginning their decomposition cycle. So, he really is counting on the snow to arrive soon and hide the unsightly brown, somewhat rotting former foliage from view.

My daughter is going to take me Christmas shopping in the coming week, so I can get something for the smallest two of our great-grandchildren. At two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half, they much prefer getting something to open on Christmas morning, and who can blame them for that?

The older two of our great-grandchildren look forward to shopping trips with their “nanny” where they can choose their own gifts. And, of course, there’s the plus for them that the after-Christmas sales mean they can get far more than they otherwise would have with the money gifted. And yes, at the age of eight, the oldest of the two can reason that out.

I know it’s lazy on our part, but we pretty much gift money to the rest of our family—kids and grandkids alike. It is lazy, but it is also the gift that always fits and never has to be returned due to a flaw in the manufacturing. That makes it a win-win for two older people who really don’t like shopping.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 

 

 December 8, 2021

I’m here to tell you that not all change is bad.

We live in a quiet neighborhood, with streets and cross-streets, made up of single-family dwellings with various types of front yards, and back ones, too. Our neighborhood is resplendent with mature trees of various genus. There is a sidewalk in front of our house. It used to be a straight and short journey to it, out the front door, three steps across the porch and then straight down the five concrete stairs to the sidewalk.

A few years ago, the town wanted to repair our sidewalk and wanted to know why we put our steps down from our porch onto their sidewalk. The engineer working for the town with whom we spoke seemed to suffer a disconnect; we explained that when we purchased this house in 1993, those steps had already been there, and we hadn’t even thought about the fact that they rested on a part of the sidewalk. He kept insisting that couldn’t be so because the blueprints he had on file didn’t show them.

This house is more than a century old, and only God knows how long those old concrete steps had been there.

The long and the short of the back-and-forth discussions with the town was that we had to remove the steps. But the gentleman proved not to be a total dork, because he suggested that the town crew working on the sidewalk down the street and scheduled to do the repairs in front of our house would likely remove our concrete steps for us in return for the donation of a case of beer.

David took a stroll down the street, and the bargain was struck. As it happened, we had to go out that evening, so we dropped the case off to them, and headed out, stairs mostly intact. I say mostly, because David and our son both had tried a jackhammer as well as a sledgehammer, on that behemoth of a staircase, all to no avail. The town’s crew were several and they had machinery at their disposal.

When we returned from our evening out, those steps were gone, as was all the associated debris. The neighbors thanked us for the evening’s entertainment. They sat out and watched those four burly men and their mighty machines struggle and struggle and then finally succeed where we could not.

All through the time we’ve lived here in this house, one thing has remained a constant: on the 16^th of the month and on the 1^st of the month, we have had to move our car from parking on one side of the street, to the other.

That is, until this past Monday.

I did wonder some when I was working yesterday, because I have just enough of my window available to me to get a gist of what is happening outside in front of the house. And yesterday, I watched David go down the new porch steps he and daughter built this summer to replace the old new steps he and son had made after the crew demolished and then hauled away the remnants of the concrete ones.

David walked across the street, and then seemed to be looking at the parking sign beside my car. Then he looked up and down the street. He was clearly confused about something, but I had no idea what. Then he returned to the house, but rather than retake his seat on the porch again with the dogs, he came inside the house, and to my office.

“I think you have to move the car,” he said. “There’s a no parking sign there.”

I blinked. It was only the 6^th of the month. Now I was confused. “You mean, no parking 16^th to 31^st.”

“No, I mean no parking, period. And it is the only parking sign there is on either side on the entire street.”

I texted my daughter, who’d gone out to the store and was due to return shortly, to let her know she needed to park on the house side of the street when she returned. And then, because I am just a tad anal, I called the town offices.

And I learned that because the snow plowing crew had been complaining for years how difficult it is to remove snow when cars are parked on either one side or the other depending on the day of month, a change had been mandated. Beginning when the signs go up, and going forward, we will only park our cars on one side of this street.

I will tell you that likely this sign was installed before Sunday last—the day I went to get groceries and then returned my vehicle to its spot right beside the parking sign that was now a “no parking” sign. I’ll tell all of you, but I am not mentioning to my family the fact that I never even looked at the sign or noticed the change.

Right now, though, I feel as if I have been given an unexpected Christmas gift. I will no longer have to trudge out on a cold or rainy day just to move the darn car from one side of the street to the other. And from now own, I won’t have to idle and wait for the groceries to be unloaded, either, because I then have to park on the other side when that chore is done. Nope, from now on my car will always be parked on our side of the street.

Yes, indeed. Merry Christmas to me.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 December 1, 2021

The last month of 2021 has arrived, and although this year hasn’t taken as large of a toll on me as 2020 did, I nevertheless won’t be sorry to see it go.

It snowed last Sunday beginning in the morning, and while I was certain that the wet kaka would be gone by the next day, it has remained. I had heard the dripping of melting snow as I left the house Sunday afternoon to get the groceries, and the white stuff was just so wet! However, it didn’t disappear over night, and I’ve the feeling we’ll see a lot of it in the next few months.

According to the traditions of this house, winter is defined as that season that stretches from October to March, inclusive. So hooray, the second month of winter is now history. The season is already one-third done!

The beginning of the last month of the year is also the beginning of the Christmas season. We’re not partying this year, but then, we never really do. There will possibly be two occasions over the course of this month when we will be amongst our larger family. In both cases, everyone has been vaccinated.

David and I have been careful, ever since the pandemic struck. In the early days, before we knew more about it, we were both, frankly, frightened. We’re older—David will be 70 next year. We also both have risk factors. I am diabetic (type 2) and have heart disease; David has COPD. It’s not at the stage where he needs oxygen, but he does have an inhaler he must use once a day. He also has a rescue inhaler. As we have paid attention and learned more about this novel coronavirus, our fear has eased, but we’ve remained vigilant.

We both, right from the beginning, figured this thing would be front and center for about three years, at least, before it was completely under control. What we didn’t count on was that so many people would play silly games, resulting in their refusal to take the vaccine. We thought most people were intelligent enough, and generous enough, to focus on the greater good first and get the shots.

I never could have imagined that in this modern age and in the year 2021, that the inmates would truly take over the asylum.

Sunday last was notable for more than the snow that fell. On that day, our two “puppies”, Missy and Bear-Bear, offspring of our beloved Mr. Tuffy, turned 2 years old. We didn’t have a party and nearly missed the occasion altogether. They’re both a couple of scoundrels if you ask me. They need a lot of attention and affection. They love their routine and are happiest when their human mommy and daddy are close by. But we love them, of course we do.

One day, when they were only about six months old, David went upstairs, his goal to tidy up our storage area. There were several empty boxes up there and he decided it was the day to thin the collection out. He thought it would be funny to let those collapsed, light-weight boxes slide down the stairs toward the waiting puppies. He thought they’d think that was a great, fun game.

They did not.

Now, although it happened only that one time (he swears), if he goes up those stairs in the morning when I am behind my closed office doors trying to work? Yeah, I get Missy scratching like crazy at one of those doors. Of course, I open it so she and her brother can come in and seek refuge with the one person who has never tried to terrorize them—me.

I will always stop writing so that I can pick them up and calm their little-doggie nerves. But that doesn’t mean I do so happily. It’s not their fault, after all, that they were frightened by being pelted with cardboard bombs at an impressionable age.

And, if it happens twice in one day, I become annoyed. Compromise, as you know, is key to any relationship. David and I have a deal. Monday to Friday, I claim the time from when I get up until noon hour as my exclusive working time. And it is work, and results in some income that we both use. If David wants to trek upstairs to get tools to do whatever or if he wants to do something totally outside of the norm, upsetting little-doggie schedules and psyches, then he can do so after the stroke of midday. By anyone’s standards, that is reasonable.

Trust me when I say that the puppies are not the only creatures in this house who like to cling to their routines.

The difference between me and our small dogs in that regard, of course, is that I tend to get a whole lot crankier than they do when my routine is interfered with.

And no, a belly rub and scratch behind the ears just doesn’t cut it as an apology.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 November 24, 2021

This past weekend, my husband finally had the opportunity to travel a few hours from home, to visit a friend he hadn’t seen face to face in 46 years. It was a year ago yesterday, when out of the blue I received a message on FB from this gentleman, who I recognized immediately.

A long time ago, beginning before we got married, David and this man, along with a few other friends of like mind formed a “car club”, rented space, and got together to talk all things vehicles. They would work on each other’s cars, and between them there had been no car problem they couldn’t fix. Those were the days of the back yard mechanic, before computer chips took over, and they used to spend a lot of time together. Fixing cars by weekend days, heading to the local watering-hole at night. Sadly, two of that group no longer walk the earth.

This old friend, whose name is John had sent a hello message to me, because I am a friend of another friend of his, and he thought the name “Morgan” was interesting. Once he knew who I was, of course, he asked about David, so I put them in touch with each other, electronically-wise.

They’ve been chatting through that medium on a regular basis ever since. (John lives in an area with almost no Wi-Fi or cell phone reception, so he doesn’t have a cell phone. And his Internet is dial-up.) It turned out they had one important thing in the here and now that they share, and it’s a powerful thing to have in common: they are both recovering alcoholics, both of them sober now for more than three decades.

This was a trip David had originally hoped to take in August, but life happened, as it often does, and he had to postpone the adventure.

His original plan had been to take a bus up north, because an eight hour return drive, with me as the driver, is quite simply impossible. This worked out much better, anyway, even if it was only going there on Saturday and returning Sunday evening. John’s son, who lives about thirty minutes from here drove, and David paid for the gas, which was much less than bus fare would have been.

The day before he visited a butcher shop in our area and purchased three T-bone steaks, what David calls “plate” steaks. A plate steak is one that takes up the entirety of the plate.

Our two young dogs (they’ll be 2 years old on Sunday so we can’t really call them puppies anymore even if they are still small) knew that something was up on Friday. And then, of course, we were all up and out of bed before daybreak Saturday morning. David left the house at 4:30 a.m. I, foolishly, had thought that likely by 8 or 9 I’d return to bed because 4:30 is just too early for this old woman to be awake. My days of functioning well on three hours sleep are in the past.

The dogs had a different idea. It wasn’t difficult for me to figure out their reasoning. You see, if we were behind the closed door of the bedroom, why, they wouldn’t be able to keep watch for their daddy, who was sure to come back through that front door any minute now…

I spent the first daddyless-day coddling the two dogs, Missy and Bear-Bear, who didn’t know where their daddy had gone, or if he would ever return. Of course, judging by their behavior, this is their state of mind whenever he leaves their sight, be it to go out and work in the upper back yard, walk a dog sibling, go out with the human-sibling (our daughter), to go with me to get the groceries.

These small dogs do not like change, period. Nor do they like to be without either of their two main humans, though it is their daddy that matters the most, and that is fine with me.

Also, the two of them have whining, howling and shivering and, of course, the puppy-dog eyes down to a very fine art. Fortunately, by 11:30 Saturday night they willingly accompanied me back to the bedroom, where we all three were beyond tired and able to enjoy a solid night’s rest. Of course, I took David’s pillows and placed them further down on the mattress. Missy immediately climbed on one and actually sighed. Bear tends to like to sleep close to me, and that didn’t change.

The next day was much better with only occasional bouts of whining and looking sad. Of course, all was well, sunshine, lollipops and unicorn rainbows around six in the evening, when the door opened, and there, at long puppy-last was the daddy of the family.

I knew that David had been a little worried, as this reunion approached. Not about the virus, because his friend, who has several “comorbidities” had been fully vaccinated, and like us practiced extreme safety. No, it was wondering about the person he would find when he arrived that had made him a bit anxious. That’s only natural because a person can change completely over nearly five decades. Happily, David found that once he was there, and they started talking, his worries faded to nothing. Helping with that was learning that John had felt the same way. But they liked each other’s company, and David hopes to go back to visit him in the spring.

I had thought that the dogs might be on alert for a couple of days post-trip, seeing as how the daddy just up and left them the way he had. I thought they’d keep him within their sight for every moment for the next week, at least.

But apparently, they’ve opted for a path of denial. I think they’ve agreed, between the two of them, that “we just won’t speak of this unfortunate incident, not ever again”.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 November 17, 2021

During the overnight hours on Sunday, we were supposed to get somewhere between ten and fifteen centimeters of snow (which is about three to six inches). When we awoke on Monday, there was maybe a half inch of snow on the lawns and the cars, but the roads were only wet. Well, except for right at the curbs. Because more leaves had dropped from the maple trees on the street, there was a slight accumulation of them against the edge of the sidewalk, and this of course made a nice receptive bed for the snow.

Our walnut tree is now completely naked of leaves. It is happily in sleep mode, or whatever it is that trees do in the cold to survive until the next spring.

When I was getting my second coffee on Monday morning, I picked up the long-handled ice-scraper with the brush on the end (remember that I mentioned to all y’all last week that I was going to ask my husband again to take it to the car, and which I did). I then took that snow and ice removal tool and put it right on my husband’s desk. He diverted his attention from the video he was watching on his computer, headphones firmly in place. And he grinned at me, and then went right back to his video.

And no, there wasn’t even anything sheepish or chagrinned in that grin at all.

It occurred to me as I headed back to my own desk in order to begin my writing day, that I really would have been just as far ahead to only have asked him a handful of times to take that scraper out to the car and then made that the end of things, entirely. What do I really care if it got out to the car or not? It probably will not ever be me who will have to use it to clear the snow and ice off the vehicle, anyway.

I guess old habits die hard. Or, in my case, I am suspecting that they will not die at all.

The electric fireplace in my office has been getting a workout the last week or so. I have it on, spitting out its warmth, for at least the first couple of hours each day. Once I feel warm enough that I know sweat will soon follow, I turn it off, to save both electricity and my sweat glands. But I will turn it on again if necessary. Provided that my office doors remain closed for the morning, I don’t need to turn the heater on for a second round.

Also on Monday, (after the ice scraper appeared on his desk), my husband decided it was a good time to do something else I had asked him to do a couple of times in the last few weeks. You see, last spring, when it became clear that I would no longer need my winter boots, he took them upstairs and put them someplace. Do I know where? No. And neither, apparently, did he. He looked upstairs, and then he came down, having decided that since he didn’t see them up there, they must not have been up there at all. He searched the bedroom, both my closet, and his. He searched in the entrance hall, where we do have a few pieces of footwear, including my older, brown suede winter boots that I will wear if necessary. They have been my back-up boots for several years now and I have worn them a handful of times. They’re not in really bad shape, but they’re not in the best condition, either. But in the case that my new boots get wet and cannot be worn for a time, they’ll do.

My new black boots were nowhere to be found.

My husband then informed me that I must have done something with those new boots because he couldn’t find them. I told him he was right; I had done something with them. I’d given them to him in the spring to take upstairs. So up he went again to look again, and since we’ve been married more than 49 years, I knew that at that point, he thought he was on a fool’s errand.

I am striving to be kinder so I will not make the obvious observation, here.

I texted my daughter and asked her if she knew where those boots were. She was upstairs in her bed-sitting room at the time. She replied that no, she did not. And then, unbeknownst to me, she opened her bedroom door and looked out to where she could see the rest of the upstairs including her father, and his version of looking for the boots. (I later confirmed what I already knew. He was simply standing in one spot and slowly turning in a circle, looking for them.)

Shortly after, he came down, a big smile on his face, my boots in his hand. He told me that they had been on a shelf and had somehow fallen behind something else and he just hadn’t seen them the first time he looked.

Of course, I thanked him for finding them. And I am not going to tell him that my daughter came down later and shared with me what had really happened.

The moment she opened her door and saw her dad standing there, “looking around” and looking befuddled, she glanced at one of two shelving units we have up there, used for storing things and asked him what that was, on the top shelf—in plain sight, waiting all by themselves, behind nothing.

Daughter said he has gotten a lot more creative in his combinations of cuss words. I guess that’s something, at least, to celebrate. And because I am being kinder, I won’t ever tell him of her ratting him out to me.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 November 10, 2021

In the last week, there have been rumored sightings of little, tiny bits of…pollen…. white pollen, in fact, floating in the air, landing on the hoods and roofs of parked cars, just generally mucking up the view. Of course, since I maintain that winter in my neck of the woods lasts from October to March, inclusive, the appearance of this pollen…aka kaka…aka snow, is not unexpected.

There has indeed been frost on the pumpkin, among other places over the last several mornings. Our beautiful, lush coleus in the back yard has been stricken, and is now just a very fond memory. I’ve made a note to myself to make sure both cars have ice scrapers in them by the end of this week. We have the scrapers—they’re the long-handled sort with brushes on the other end. But just because we have them does not mean they will of course be placed in the vehicles, to be at hand when needed. No, this is the sort of chore that must be scripted beforehand and then carried out scrupulously.

Another lesson learned through past experience which was not a fun lesson at all.

Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day in the U.S., and Remembrance Day here in Canada. It’s a day when we take the time to pay homage to those thousands of people who took up arms and then laid down their lives for our freedom. Here in Canada, most small towns and larger cities have ceremonies at their cenotaphs. I often tune in to the CBC’s coverage of the ceremony in Ottawa, our nation’s capital. I have even, on one memorable occasion, when on a long drive, listened to the coverage on my car’s radio. I was on a provincial, two-laned highway at the time, and I recall pulling over, then getting out of my car to stand quietly during the minute of silence. And I also remember feeling proud because as I looked up there were a handful of other vehicles in sight whose drivers had done the same thing.

I believe that we should spend time contemplating the awful toll exacted for the freedoms we are fortunate enough to have on more than just the one day a year. And I believe, especially lately, that this is a matter that grows exponentially more urgent the more unhinged our society appears to become.

How often have we tried, while raising our children, to impress on them the need to appreciate what they have in their lives? The food they eat and the clothes they wear and the toys they love and play with are theirs because they have parents who work hard to provide those things for them. We need to teach our children and many adults more specifically that the ability to have and to do, to dream and to be, are ours because those who came before us were willing to pay the ultimate price, and many of them did just that.

Those who have died in defence of our freedoms had rich lives ahead of them, bright futures possible. They had families, they had children, they had the world. They had hopes and dreams that they had dreamed with all their hearts since they were children…. but they also had a sense of duty. Being free, they accepted that the other side of that coin is responsibility. That seems to be a fact that too many people today conveniently ignore. They pretend that freedom is free.

It is not.

And so, those heroes who came before us surrendered what they had, including their futures, because the higher cause was just that important.

Now here we are, in this world we’ve inherited, with the responsibility to guard our sacred freedom that those who died have passed on to us. We must assume that responsibility in whatever way—in every way—that we can.

Yes, my friends, let’s think on these matters often. But more, let us prove ourselves worthy of the sacrifice they gave, so that we might pass this precious freedom on to the next generation.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 November 3, 2021

Here we are again in November! Golly, it seems like only a couple of months since we were here last time.

This past weekend, we were pleased that the son of an old friend came by for lunch. He’s about the same age as our oldest grandson, and a pleasant young man. In the course of our conversation during lunch, he commented that time seemed to move so fast lately. I assured him that as he got older, it would speed up even more.

This young man will be driving up north to spend the weekend with his dad mid November, and David will be going, too. It’s been more than thirty years since the pair have seen each other, face to face, but they have been in communication for the last several months.

I’ve given the matter of time moving fast some thought and I’ve decided it’s nature’s way of addressing boredom. In my opinion, a lot of life is a case of wash, rinse, repeat. Really, isn’t that in essence what life is? Life is living. Living requires repetition. A week is seven days—seven days of getting out of bed, seven days of getting dressed, seven days of making meals, going to work, home chores….and sometimes, we have variations on those themes. But basically, life is built out of all those accumulated little moments, repeated moments, and every breath taken in between.

November is the birth month of Wednesday’s Words. The first essay I wrote I posted to all the romance author related Yahoo! Groups to which I belonged in November of 2006. Yes, WW is 15 years old this month. Now, I have missed a handful of Wednesdays. There was that time we went on a cruise and there was no way I was spending what the cruise line wanted to charge me for Internet service in those days. I was and remain too frugal for that. There were also a couple of other occasions when we were on trips to one conference or another, and I think I was likely in the hospital a time or two as well.

But for the most part, I have been brazen enough to offer my opinion on everything and nothing (equally), once a week, for a decade and a half.

I’m trying to decide, as I sit here and think back over these last 15 years, whether I’ve mellowed over time, or instead, if I’ve let my inner curmudgeon be a little less “inner”. I can’t decide, and maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe that’s not something for me to ponder, but a matter for all y’all to think on, if you’ve a mind to.

As I write this, my husband is once more using his leaf blower to gather up the debris from our now nearly nude walnut tree. We have the schedule of when the leaf bags will be collected next, and that day is on Tuesday of the third week of November. And that is the last time this year that the county will collect yard waste, so he wants to get it all done. We have a wooden shed which he built a few years back, and we also now have, well, as of just last year, a canvas “garage” that he put up where our driveway used to be. Despite it being a garage by design, it’s used the way Canadians tend to use their garages, regardless of whatever material they have been constructed—to store their “junk”. He keeps his scooter in this enclosure. It also holds the summer back yard furniture, the lawn mower, various and sundry outdoor tools like the leaf blower—and, it is also the temporary storage area for the full paper bags of leaves and twigs.

It didn’t take us long to understand that those sturdy looking tan bags don’t stay sturdy once they’ve been rained upon. In hindsight it’s funny how we learned that little fact of life. The bags looked sound. But when David picked one up by placing his hands oh, about middle of the bag and lifting, the bottom of the bag stayed on the ground, the middle of it lifted, and the leaves simply rained down. Fortunately, we did have enough dry bags on hand and some time to spare before they needed to be at the curb.

The most expedient method to fix the issue was to turn the fresh, newly unfolded and opened bags upside down and then slide them down over the innocent-looking full but previously rained upon bags, and then turn them right-way up, thus ensuring no more broken bags.

Today he didn’t tell me he was going to do the yard work. That job included his once more climbing the darn ladder so that he could get leaves off the porch roof and then clean out those small eave’s troughs. He does that twice. On the north side of the porch and the south side. The only good thing about that is when he climbs up to clear the north side, I can see him out of the window of my office, right in front of me.

So at least for half of the job, I know that if he has a mishap, and falls off the darn ladder and breaks his damn fool neck, someone is aware of the situation and can call for assistance.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 October 27, 2021

It has been cold enough the last couple of days that I turned on the electric heater, one that’s disguised as a fireplace, which sits in my office. This room where I spend the better part of my day has two of its four walls as “outside” walls. This is an old house, more than a century old, and it has no proper insulation in these walls.

Even in the dead of winter it’s not usually too cold in my office. However, from mid September until May on any given day when there is a wind out of the north or north-east, that wind manages to penetrate the combination of plaster, lathing and aluminum siding.

While the “fireplace” that surrounds the heater is of a good size (standing about 4 feet tall and with a 14-inch-wide mantel on top), the heater itself is not very big. That’s okay, because this isn’t a big office, either. And I find that if I turn on my tower fan, and have it blow gently across the front of the fireplace where the heat comes out, well, the whole room warms up fairly quickly and fairly well. After an hour I generally turn the thing off, and remain comfortable for quite some time.

Outside my window, from what I can see of the outside around my very larger computer monitor, there are wet leaves everywhere. Some are still attached to the walnut tree, just waiting for us to clean up the ones already on the ground before they fall. However, the good news is that there are no more walnuts left to come down. Our daughter has gone back to parking in front of the house, because it has been cold and raining a great deal the last few days, and who wants to walk an extra half block in those conditions, when its not necessary?

Her diligence paid off and no falling walnuts landed on her brand new, pristine Ford Edge Titanium during the blessedly short season of nut-drop, so that’s something.

Because our daughter changed her eating habits and become vegan (well, she’s Vegan except for eating eggs and drinking milk) I am always looking for things I can make that she will enjoy. It’s been nine months now since she said goodbye to meat. Within two months of that change in diet, she was at the point where, if she accidentally ingested some beef grease—as happened once when she ordered a veggie burger at a burger place and they weren’t careful enough to cook it away from beef—then the result was she would feel sick pretty much for the rest of the night. She says she does feel better, overall, since she made the change in her diet. Our daughter is a very practical soul and will opt for the logical over the emotional every time.

I made a homemade vegetable soup on the weekend, which was a new soup to me, and it worked out well because it was gobbled down quickly. And then on Monday I made “meatloaf”, which seems to be this family’s favorite comfort food. Actually, I made two meatloaves. One for David and me with actual hamburger, and one for our daughter which had plant based “impossible burger” in it. Whenever I am preparing meat and meatless at the same time, I’m careful to use separate utensils so there is no cross contamination of the two. I do add the same nonmeat ingredients to her meat loaf as to I do to ours simply because when she was eating meat she really loved my meatloaf. She says hers is very good, and David loved the one I made for the two of us, so that was a success, overall. We have packages of mushroom gravy mix on hand now, because there are no meat products or by products in them, and it’s a gravy both daughter and daddy like.

It remains one of my purest pleasures in this life to cook food that my family loves to eat.

Sometimes, when I make supper, our daughter doesn’t want any of the several “plant based meat” she has on hand. So instead of one veggie with the potatoes or rice or pasta, I’ll make two veggies. These are on days when our daughter would have had an egg for breakfast or lunch, so it’s not a case of protein depravation for her. And she certainly doesn’t mind sharing the table with us when we do have meat. Now that I have a few dishes that I can make that we all three like that are meatless, supper time has smoothed out some for me. Of course, I can’t help but worry that our daughter may not be taking in enough protein. I just have to remind myself that she is a grown woman, and capable of monitoring that on her own.

As I look out at today’s somewhat pale dawn, I’m reminded that it's that time of year that tends to be wet and intermittently cold, when leaves litter the ground, covering grass and sidewalk, and what plants remain in the flower beds begin to die off.

It’s a time of transition, and a time when I become very conscious that life never really stays static for long. Everything always comes to pass.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 October 20, 2021

As October continues to play out, we have begun our seasonal chores for autumn. This past week, David spent the first of what I am certain will be several afternoons blowing and then bagging leaves. He exchanged the “summer porch furniture” for the fall and winter set. He also removed the covering he had on our porch floor this year—artificial grass. I didn’t care for that myself, but the porch is very rough concrete, and since we often have kids on it, we thought it might be a good idea to have something there. Along with the chairs, in the spring and summer our porch also has what looks like a doll bed, but which our daughter’s dogs use as their own porch chair. But only in the good weather, and she bought it because her dogs eschew laying on floors of any kind.

Sometimes it’s just my daughter and my husband doing the bulk of the outside work. And sometimes, as they did last evening, they have helpers.

Yesterday, being Tuesday, was the day that our daughter has her two grandchildren come for a while, after school. They stay for supper, and then she takes them home just before eight. And yesterday, we had an extra little one here, her great-niece and the youngest of our four great-grandchildren.

So yes, we did indeed have three little ones aged 8, 7 and 2 and a half with us yesterday. I love them, of course. I’m grateful that I get to see the three of them as often as I do. Being a great-grandparent isn’t as clear-cut a position as that of being a grandparent was. We are one step back from our previous role, and that is probably good for us, because we are that much older now, with that much less energy than fifteen years ago, when we helped care for our two youngest grandchildren.

Our second daughter worried some about us, when we had her two children here quite often while she was getting established in her nursing career. Shiftwork, in that profession, is inevitable, and until the children were old enough to be left on their own overnight, they would be either here, or with a former neighbor of theirs, from the days when they were apartment dwellers in the city next to us.

We had beds and dressers upstairs for them, so that they had a place to sleep on their overnights here. I would waken them in the morning, make them breakfast and help them get them ready for school. Their mom would come, and then take them to school before going home to bed. And she worried, as I said, that the kids were too much for us, but we didn’t think they were. And I’d remind her that she had her former neighbors, too, who would have the kids during some of her weekend shifts, so it wasn’t all on us.

That couple was just a bit younger than we were and had developed a good bond with the kids, and her. Our second daughter will be the first one to declare that yes, it takes a village, and that she remains grateful she had a good one.

All of my greatgrandchildren that live close by call me G.G. It’s a name that my daughter came up with, because her grandchildren had another great grandmother on their mother’s side. I kind of like the name, myself.

Yesterday afternoon, we had those three little ones here, and they were assigned winter preparation tasks in the back yard while my daughter supervised. After having harvested one last meal of green beans earlier in the afternoon, it was time to call an end to the gardening season for 2021. All of the plants were pulled from the table gardens, cut up, and placed into those brown leaf and yard waste bags. The outside toys needed to be washed, and then set to dry in their clean “toy basket”, which is a re-purposed laundry basket.

The littlest one was the most eager to lend a hand. “I help!” was said quite succinctly and often until the perfect “job” was found for her. She was assigned the task of washing the toys. And since playing in the water is something that she loves to do, she was a happy little camper, and she did a pretty good job for being only two and a half.

It was pleasant outside, so I had the back door open as I worked in the kitchen to prepare supper. I’d consulted with my daughter earlier in the day, with regard to the menu. Her grandkids are picky little eaters. The littlest one is not. The older two been here with us this past weekend and we’d had takeout with the two of them on Saturday night, and then grilled burgers on Sunday night. Therefore, I chose to make a full supper last night.

My daughter suggested something she thought they might eat—chicken Alfredo. I had all the necessary ingredients on hand. She, being vegan, would have only the noodles and the sauce. She was originally going to have some plant-based “chicken fingers” as well but changed her mind. Since my husband doesn’t like the dish at all, it wasn’t much more work to make spaghetti and meatballs for the two of us.

I also made a bit of garlic bread to go with the pasta, and that is another thing she thought her grandchildren would enjoy. And after their time in the backyard, which topped off their long day at school, it made me smile to see that all three kids cleared their plates.

I do enjoy having them here, and I am doing my best to get used to the sheer noise of them. One’s tolerance for general chaos seems to wane as one ages. But the truth is that the chaos of children—from high spirits to minor disagreements that seem so egregious to a child, are all a part of the package. Being older, I know now just how damned fast time passes and little ones grow up.

Every part of the experience of being in the company of children is precious—and it was wonderful to have that back door open as I cooked, listening to the songs, and the laughter, and the minor conflicts.

It was wonderful to steep myself in life.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 October 13, 2021

We have a large walnut tree, which is situated on what is technically town property (they own to a certain distance from the center of the road out) and stands at the northeast corner of our house. When we moved in here in the 1990s, the tree, which was mature at that point, had a wide “crotch” of three main branches that our kids could reach by standing on the porch railing, turning around, and then…sitting down upon it. They took turns using “the tree chair” as they called it. I think at the time it was the thing they liked best about this new house of ours.

That tree-crotch is now forever out of reach, a good six feet higher than it was when we moved in, nearly thirty years ago. Next year, David tells me, we’re going to have to contact a tree service to come in to cut back some of the branches, because there are some getting dangerously close to our roof. We did this once before a few years ago and knew at that time that we’d likely have to do it again.

The walnuts this tree produces are highly prized by the squirrels, but to us, they’re rather annoying. You see, being fall, the walnuts are beginning to drop from the tree, and a lot of them hit the main roof, then the porch roof, before finally falling to either the sidewalk or the street. The ones that end up on the street tend to explode under the wheels of the cars that drive past. As you can imagine, it makes a mess of the road until the street sweeper comes by—usually not long before the first snowfall.

Some walnuts do make it to our narrow front lawn. David ensures they are not in the way of the lawn mower by tossing them into whichever of the front gardens is closest, so the squirrels have easy access to the free food. They do gather them, too, because the walnuts tend to “disappear” from the gardens. However, the squirrels also wait until there are squashed walnuts on the road, and then run out for an easy, buffet-style on-the-spot snack.

I feel like we play a game akin to Russian roulette at this time of year when we walk outside under this nut-shedding behemoth. So far, no one has been pinged on the head by any dropping walnuts. But it’s been close a couple of times. I might resort to holding an umbrella over my head the next time I venture forth from the protection of the porch roof. At the moment, our cars are parked across the street, out of the range of fire, as it were. Come the 16^th they must be moved to this side of the street. Our daughter has decided to park hers further down the street at that time, since she does have that pretty red brand-new car and really does not want any walnut dents on it.

Aside from the possibility of either people or cars being hit by one of these round green missiles, the other problem is the dogs. When they’re inside the house, napping on furniture or on people (depending) in the late afternoon or evening, they don’t like sudden sounds. They really don’t like it when something goes “thump” on the roof, and then rolls. They don’t like it one bit. And they aren’t shy in letting us know this.

Trust me when I say we do not need one more thing to make those furry little critters bark. Fortunately, in just a couple more weeks, the season of falling walnuts should be over.

Two days ago, Monday, was Thanksgiving Day here in Canada. We tend to celebrate our Thanksgiving the same way our neighbors to the south do, with turkey and pumpkin pie and every other “fixin’” you can imagine. One difference is that the day after is not the first day of Christmas shopping. Yes, we have black Friday—when the U. S. has black Friday in November—because some of the retailers here are based there, and also because Canadians love good sales, too.

However, while Monday was Thanksgiving, we did not have our Thanksgiving supper then. We are having our family feast, in fact, tonight. With two family members who are in nursing, we have to be mindful of their schedules. Our second daughter is preparing the turkey as you read this, and I’m really looking forward to going to her home for supper tonight. She’s had some renovations done over the last several months. These were supposed to have been a surprise for us, as we were planning to have our family Christmas supper last year on December 26, 2020. Sadly, that didn’t happen because that was the first day of a several month’s long lockdown here in our province.

So tonight will be my first time visiting her house since before the pandemic—and the renovations. There won’t be a huge crowd, just family, and everyone except for the little ones has been vaccinated.

It’s one step forward to feeling “normal”, whatever that is. But mostly it’s a chance to spend time with family—and there’s nothing in this world that I love more than that.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury