A prime decision...

 July 27, 2022

One of the things I’ve been most grateful for in recent times is that I don’t seem to have much trouble keeping busy.

I have my writing, of course, and this encompasses fiction, as well as these essays. I have my routines, which is a more of a foundational factor, in way. You see, I have discovered that I possess one major flaw. There are likely more, but I will cite this one: I have just enough discipline to have a routine but not enough to manage without one.

Therefore, when I can, which fortunately is most of the time, I follow my script. Each day is set to begin with time spent on my devotionals. Then, I indulge myself in two or three games, to “kick start my brain”. One of these is wordle. Then I sit down, put butt in chair and fingers on keyboard (aka BICFOK) and begin to write. I have until about noon hour before certain planned interruptions begin. I fit a few household chores in between noon and one, and, of course, I have a bite to eat. Legs go up for about two hours once those chores are done. And then I begin my supper preparations. Sometimes, if the muse is tugging at me, I get in a bit more writing. At the very end of my day, that is when I tend to visit YouTube. I try very hard not to do it until the end of my day, because I know how undisciplined I am and therefore, how easy it truly is for me to fall down a rabbit hole or six. Best to find those rabbit holes when my creativity has shut off for the night.

Lately, I enjoy those “tweet collections” about a myriad of topics, most of them claiming to be hilarious. By the time I turn to YouTube, I’m at the point in my day when I would welcome a little bit of hilarious. Not too many of those collections have a lot of laughter inducing words, in my opinion, but I do hit upon just enough—and they’re always a surprise, so I really appreciate them.

Aside from surprising a bark of laughter out of me, some of these tweets also make me think. One thread that I took in recently was under the heading “Learning something new about your s/o as you work from home.” The concept is exactly that: tweets inspired by the “working from home” experience had by many during the pandemic. In a hundred and forty-four characters, these nuggets depict moments observed by one partner about the other that truly were, for them, revelatory.

In this vein, I can attest that my husband and I were way ahead of the curve. We not only “been there, done that”, we designed the tee shirt.

Reading some of those tweets took me back to those uncertain days leading up to my husband’s retirement at the end of November of 2017. This happened maybe a couple of years prior to the day he was looking forward to, but that I, in a way, was dreading. Up until he retired, you see, I’d had my house to myself every day, Monday to Friday, and for the previous fifteen years. There was a part of me that resented the fact I would no longer have that. But I did, of course, get over myself. Eventually. When the reality proved not to be quite as bad as I’d dreaded.

However, leading up to the time about which I was reminiscing, my husband had his own desk in my office. We flirted, briefly, with the possibility of our working side-by-side in this dedicated space, from the moment of his retirement to, well, eternity. Especially when he realized that his COPD wouldn’t afford him the ability to pursue the hobby he’d been planning on: restoring steam-era farm equipment.

He decided instead to explore another passion, and that was writing.

And then, came that long, unexpected Christmas break. He had a three-week stint of staying home for an extended holiday and if I recall, the weather didn’t lend itself to outings. We were in this office, the two of us, together, for many, many, many days.

That unplanned time together—call it a dry-run on his retirement or a sign from God—showed us what the future would really be like if we stayed the course we were on.

When David finally went back to work after that break, he had a new project to work on in his off time: he needed to set himself up a desk with his computer in a corner of the living room. A space that would be his where he could do whatever he wanted to do, in all the privacy any author—or budding author—could reasonably ask for. No, his space does not have doors. Mine didn’t either, at the time. That was another project, some two years later, when we were getting ready for our daughter and her dogs to move in with us. By then, he truly appreciated the concept of solitude.

We’ve made a lot of decisions, together, over the last half-century. And I can honestly tell you, the decision about having separate working spaces is one that we both continue to consider as prime.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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

Fifty years and counting...

 July 20, 2022

Last Thursday, David and I celebrated our 50^th wedding anniversary.

It really doesn’t seem possible that so many years have passed—and it also bends belief that, among all of our then close friends who married just before and just after us, we alone remain together.

To celebrate the landmark our girls, Jennifer, and Sonja hosted a lunch for us on Saturday. There were twenty-nine of us, spread out, and we were the only party in that part of the restaurant. It was a very nice afternoon, seeing some folks I hadn’t seen in years. Jennifer created an under three-minute video with pictures she found in our family “archives”, which was such a sweet thing for her to have done. And watching that video, I smiled and had tears—and realized that my daughter today looks like me in my thirties. That poor woman!

Now, you all know that I write romance. I’ve often commented, and I stand by the statement that being a writer isn’t what I do, it’s who I am. My first attempt at writing appeared in the form of a television episode for my favorite TV series—Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. That series that came out in 1964, when I was 10, and inspired a couple of firsts for me: the first time I sat down to write something; and the first of only a couple of times I sent a fan letter. In response to the latter, I received back a package with a letter, and some signed photos (of Richard Basehart and David Hedison, be still my little adolescent heart) and some pictures of the submarine, “Seaview”.

The only thing that stayed with me from that time in my life was the writing. I honestly had no idea at the time why I felt this great, pressing need to create stories and write them down. It wasn’t until much later I discovered that my dad had been a writer. Only a few examples of his work, poems and a couple of short stories—all written before the death of his own father when he turned 17—have survived his transition from student into a young man who had to quit school to support his mother.

When our own father died in 1963, there were many who thought my mother should have given a similar fate to my brother who was 18 at the time, and a senior in high school. My mother refused. She said that her husband would never have condoned such a thing. So my brother stayed in high school, and then went on to Teacher’s College, in those days a one year program. Then he spent the next several summers getting first his B.A. and then his Master’s degree in education. That decision of my mother’s resulted in my brother living a very good life as an adult.

But I digress.

I think there was a part of me that needed to write as a form of world-building. That was truest during my darkest years as a young adult, trying to cope with small children and a husband who was an alcoholic. Fortunately, after our eleventh anniversary, David came to the point of understanding he had a problem and did something about it. He has been sober ever since—39 years sober—and that one fact is the main reason we’re still together.

Why I have tended, as I’ve gotten older, to write romance is the same reason I never read or watch horror and am careful about what I do read and watch: I’m a sucker for a happy ending.

When I was just a bit younger, I used to joke that if I wanted tense drama and tragedy, tears and weeping and wailing, why, I would just write an autobiography. Looking back, I understand that while given as a dark-comedic line, and while not as well explained as I might have liked, there’s a strong thread of truth there.

Life is hard. Shit happens. And the best way to cope with both of those hard facts is to adopt as uplifting a mood and attitude as possible. Romance does that. It showcases the best we can be. In  my stories the good guys always win.

I know I present my heroes and heroines engaged in lovey-dovey relationships; but I never represent romance—real romance—as being all rainbows and unicorns. Relationships take work, whether they’re between a husband and wife, parents and kids, or friends. But it is work that is very rewarding and, I believe, work we were created to do.

Life isn’t, as that old familiar ditty would have it, “but a dream.” Well, unless you mean a nightmare which for some, it can be. But life is what we have while we’re here. It’s the only game in town, and if we want it to mean something, and if we want to survive it with our sanity in tact…. well, that really is a decision, isn’t it? In fact, I would say, it is the decision.

I’ve spent the last 17 years of my life using what I’d learned during the first 51 to write stories that, as one reader told me more than once, “hug the reader’s heart”.

Life really is what you make it, and I am determined to make mine, and my readers’, as fulfilling as possible.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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

 

When the morning routine is fractured....

 July 13, 2022

This past Friday was certainly an interesting day here in my neck of the woods. One of Canada’s three major telecommunications companies, Roger’s Communications, had what we’ll call an “oopsie”. And what an oopsie it was.

I awoke, as I often to do, to dog barking. I knew David was already up, so I was able, before my eyes had even fully opened, to guess that he might be outside on the porch with whichever dogs would have gone with him—and those that were left inside were barking.

It's sad, but true, that the first thing I do when I get out of bed—after the bathroom, of course, is to make a cup of coffee. But this particular morning, I didn’t go directly to my Keurig. I decided instead to head to the porch and frown at my husband.

You see, when I get up ahead of him, which is most of the time, I make a solid effort to keep the dogs quiet, or at least try to, so that he can sleep until he’s done. I was feeling pouty last Friday morning because I knew, when I was awakened that I hadn’t been done sleeping yet. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if the day doesn’t start off good, there’s not much hope of it getting better until bedtime.

I opened the front door and looked at him in full pout.  He appeared not to notice my pout. He said, “Good morning. Your daughter left you a note on your keyboard.”

Well, that was different. I grumbled my way to my office, and found her note, which read: “Good morning. Roger’s is down Nation wide. So you are left back in the dark ages. Love you.” (I later discovered that she had left the note on the coffee maker, because we both go there first thing.)

She wasn’t kidding. There was no cable television. No cell phones. No internet. And therefore no available information on what had happened and when we might expect it to be fixed.

That was what bothered me the most—the lack of information. Asking the proverbial question, “What’s Happening?” and getting no response. I asked David to bring the “clock radio” out of the bedroom. Now, to be clear, we haven’t used it as an alarm clock—and therefore as a radio—since hubby retired. I shouldn’t have been surprised that, having not behaved as a radio since the end of 2017 it had somehow forgotten how to do that little thing.

David played with it for a bit, and then, music! “It was on sleep mode, for some reason”, he said. Well, I looked at it and realized no….it hadn’t been on sleep mode before, but it was now. This was confirmed when and hour later the music stopped. It only worked on sleep mode, initiated by a little button which you press in the hopes of going to sleep before the music shuts off.

I eventually found a station where the DJ eventually said, “an update for those of you wanting one on the Rogers’ situation. They are making progress, but they have no idea what happened, nor any estimation as to when it will be fixed.” Yes, that in fact a non-update kind of update. I don’t blame the DJ of course for the update that was no update at all. I blame Rogers.

My daughter stopped in at about ten to let us know that there was a lot of upset going around in the community since folks who were Rogers subscribers wouldn’t be able to reach emergency services, and some hospitals were stopped up because they couldn’t discharge those patients scheduled to go home Friday as there was no way to reach those who would be waiting to come and get them, or to receive them.

And just to make sure disruption affected as many people as possible, debit card transactions didn’t work for the most part, either. You could use your credit card at those terminals, apparently, but not your debit cards.

David and I spent some time on Friday, each of us writing, and then we did some reading. We didn’t get frustrated. We just both of us figured out that if the problem was Canada-wide, well, it likely wouldn’t be fixed anytime soon. We had a similar upset last year, I believe, but it wasn’t quite as bad then as now. But that didn’t matter. We were patient. We adjusted. It was a quiet day, in a way. No noise from my cell phone at all, and David claimed the “silence” outside as he walked the dogs was somehow deeper and richer.

The cell phones were working for the most part by Saturday morning. So was the internet, although a few links were not. But the television wasn’t working properly until Sunday morning. And then, just to remind us how lucky we had been, it acted up all of Monday night, too.

And I suppose, that while I didn’t feel stressed going with no television on either Friday or Saturday, I must really have been. Early Sunday morning, we went out to get our groceries. We came home, put them away, and then went into the living room, turned on the TV, and tuned in to our usual “talking heads”, programs that we record so that we can fast forward through the commercials. And there they were! Our familiar broadcasters of all things news and politics. We were “in touch” at last!

We both were dozing off within minutes. Apparently, it wasn’t the information I lacked during the outage that stressed me—that stressed us both.  No, it was the lack of just the right droning voices to accompany our little afternoon catnaps.

Thank goodness, life is back to normal.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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

A few tears, and greenery...

 July 6, 2022

Yesterday I spent some quiet time reflecting on the significance of the day—this one day of every year that had rolled around once more. July 5^th, when I was a child, was my mother’s birthday. It never bothered her when I went out into her flower beds and picked her a small bouquet and presented it to her. She aways thanked me for the gift. Mother died at the too-young age of 57 in 1976. And then, the year after she passed, my second child, my son Anthony, was born on that same day.

If they were both alive today, they would be 103 and 45, respectively.

It’s impossible for me to think of Anthony as being 45. Because he died far too soon, he is forever frozen, in my mind’s eye, as a twenty-nine-year-old man. No, that’s not exactly true. In my recollection, he remains a teenager, because I understand that his journey to maturity and wisdom got stuck in a teenaged mentality.

I loved him with all my heart, and I still weep for him occasionally. But I was not and am not blind to his flaws. And I do believe it was a flaw within him. For some reason there was a connection in his mental processes that simply didn’t work.  

It is a human trait that tries to make sense of something that on its face appears senseless. We are always asking why things happen the way they do, but we often never know the answer.

I really don’t dwell overmuch on the losses I’ve experienced in my life. I know I’m not the only one who has lost loved ones. And while I still have been unable to know the answer to “why”, or to make sense of the situation, I have understood that I can give some meaning to these losses. They have made me more empathic. Knowing what it is to love and lose means I can relate to others who grieve. And I do believe that having experienced tragedy means I can show more humanity in my work. That’s something, at least.

Our daughter went out yesterday and purchased a few more plants to go in the front flower beds. She chose a few petunias, and some more coleus. I had, just a couple of months ago, believed that in the middle of June we would go out, my husband and I, to pick a few flowers to put in our front porch “window boxes”. We have several of those, and I was thinking about what I would like to have on display this year.

Now, my husband is a frugal soul. In the interests of total transparency, I need to tell you that “frugal” is his word. Mine, which he doesn’t deny but also does not prefer, is cheap. Yes, my husband has actually built up a bit of a reputation among family and friends for this, shall we say, interesting quality.

We here in Canada have a five-cent coin. We call it a nickel—so called because back in 1922, all silver was removed from the coin and it became pure nickel. The head of the coin is, of course, our Queen. The tail of the coin is a beaver. And I can recall one of David’s former coworkers saying he “squeezes his nickels so tightly the beaver screams”.

David’s response to that dig? “Damn right!” Friends, my husband is as proud of being frugal as he is of being a redneck. And most of the time, that’s okay. I have no real complaints of this quality and in fact, it makes it easier when we have to tighten our belts. Which we are doing now along with everyone else, but that is a topic for another essay.

And knowing all this, of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised a few weeks ago, on Father’s Day. Our oldest son and his wife dropped in, and it was a very nice visit. We had a few “boxes” of green beans left on the back yard table, beans David had grown from seed, and he convinced our son to take a couple to put into his own yard.

And as they were leaving, I went out onto the porch to wave good-bye, I noticed that our window boxes were hanging on the porch, and with greenery in them! And then I really looked at them.

Yes, those boxes held greenery. As in, green beans. Growing on my porch. And yes, I get it, and I really can’t complain, so I didn’t. Exactly. What I did, was I clarified that what I was seeing was real. “Green beans? On the front porch? In hanging boxes?”

“Yup. Now we don’t have to spend good money buying more flowers.”

Well, he’s got me there. But we’ll see how this all pans out. The bean plants are only a few inches high at this point, and of course, don’t yet have anything heavy growing on them to harvest.

We’ll see how those boxes hold up as a base, and how those bean plants fare in them, when they do.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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