Snow and choices...

 November 29, 2023

Yesterday we received our first snowfall of the season. For a time, it looked like a blizzard out there, but eventually the driving snow turned to a heavy floating-down snow, until finally tapering off around noon hour.

By then we’d received at least two inches, which compared to the lake effect snow that was attacking areas of Western New York State, wasn’t really much at all.

I’ve often said that the first snow of the season is yes, a beautiful sight to behold. And it is, as far as aesthetics go. But I’m one who requires a more substantial “uplifting aspect”, when it comes to the cold white stuff. For that I need only consider the winter calendar according to the Ashbury household. We are today only one day away from the end of November; winter is October to March inclusive on the Ashbury calendar; therefore, we are but one day away from being 1/3 the way through winter.

And we’ve only now received our first measurable snowfall!

In any given situation, we always have a choice. It can be viewed in a positive light or a negative one. It all depends on how you look at things.

We had planned to go out and get a couple of things yesterday. The snow didn’t interfere with that plan, but our daughter’s car being in the shop for it’s final free maintenance work did. Of course, since she has clients in the wider county, she needed a vehicle and so had the one I’ve been driving—which is actually her car. We don’t own a vehicle ourselves, not since my Buick died.

One of the items on our shopping list hopefully for today is a new pair of winter boots for me. I haven’t had a new pair in a very long time, and I really am overdue. It’s important for me to wear something on my feet that will be warm, and that has a really good tread. I walk very carefully all the time, and never more so than during the winter. I also want to be able to put them on and take them off by myself.

I did check the weather network to see whether or not we’ll be able to head out today; I think it’s a wait and see situation at the moment. It is possible we’ll get more snow squalls today, so we may give it one more day before we make that supply run. Fortunately, we have plenty of toilet paper, and sufficient coffee-making supplies on hand to tide us over.

When you get right down to basics those are the only short-term must-have necessities in life—although I usually phrase that thought a little more indelicately.

I know it’s not quite December, but I have already given some thought as to when we’ll erect our small Christmas tree. Normally this isn’t something that requires a great deal of thought. We put it up whenever.

However, this year we have that new kitten. And while he is technically still a kitten (not yet four months old), he is already bigger than our daughter’s teacup chihuahua. And as far as Smokey-kitty is concerned, life is comprised of three elements: food, sleep, and play.

And the greatest of these is play.

Therefore, my plan is to be more careful in selecting the miniature ornaments that will adorn our small tree. Nothing that is breakable shall this year go upon it. Luckily, I purchased a whole slew of tiny wooden and plastic ornaments shortly after we purchased the less than five-foot-tall artificial tree. Regular sized ornaments just looked ridiculous on it.

Now, my first thought was that we just won’t hang any ornaments along the bottom of the tree—and that might be an idea. But this is a fairly small tree, not even as tall as I am. We don’t, therefore, have a lot of room to work with. Maybe, I’ll try to ensure that nothing dangles below the level of the tree’s “branches”.  That might work.

Will Smokey-kitty consider the festive decor a source of exciting and endlessly diverting fun? Well, that’s something we can’t reasonably predict beyond a fifty percent probability.

We’ll just put it up, likely in a couple of weeks, and just see what happens.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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

Remembering and thanks giving......

 November 22, 2023

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 60 years! That’s hard for me to wrap my head around, likely because there are moments from that day that I recall so vividly.

I was a nine-year-old child in 1963, a fourth grader in a three-room school about a half a mile from my home in rural southern Ontario, Canada. Probably but for the major event in my life earlier that same year, the death of the American president would not have impacted me so strongly. But that other event had happened, and it had been the first, and most brutal piece of reality of four brutal pieces of reality that I believe most profoundly shaped me before I became an adult.

Going to school for me was a matter of walking. Looking back on that time in my life, I have snippets of memory, but only that. I don’t recall walking to school or back home again as a regular thing that I did, but I know it was how I got to school almost every day. I remember flashes of the playground. I recall the day I fell and split my head open against the post of the outside door, and my parents had to take me to the doctor to get stitches.

But for the most part, I remember two days with specificity during that year. I recall the day in January of 1963, the second day back after the Christmas break, when my Uncle Howard came to pick me up from school. I was surprised, wondering why he was there from all the way over in Brantford.

He’d picked me up to take me home because my father had died a couple of hours before.

And I remember the day, just ten months later that Miss Ritchie, the other teacher at my school, knocked on our classroom door, crying, because the American president had been shot.

We were sent home early that day—not a lot early, but there were no school busses at our school, we all walked, so we all walked home when sent.

I recall my mother telling me the next week, as we watched the President’s funeral on television, that President Kennedy had been nearly the same age as my daddy. I remember that because it was the first time my mother had mentioned my father’s death since it had happened.

Death really impacted my childhood, and in fact, the rest of my life. I don’t think I actually had much of a childhood after my father died. I was the youngest of three ranging in age from 8 to 18. I became more serious and very interested in American politics. I was 14 the year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. I do remember, at the time, believing that life as we had known it was over: the world was going to hell in the proverbial hand basket. Why care about what you would be when you grew up when there was nothing in our future but death and destruction?

Somehow, however, I grew out of that teenaged-angst stage. I left childhood behind and turned out to be only slightly neurotic, prone to expecting my loved ones to die at any moment. But otherwise, I became a relatively normal adult.

We who are alive right now cannot possibly analyze what the events in our own lifetimes mean in the larger story of our humanity. True analysis depends upon possessing a certain amount of objectivity which we’re simply not capable of attaining when it comes to our own times.  Therefore, we must blindly leave it to some future chronicler of events to weigh in on how major milestones shaped the world, going forward.

We can look back over our own development and make some guesses as to how we ourselves have been shaped by our own experiences. Yet we do so without certainty. Our emotional perspective will always cloud our ability to see the details clearly.

At this point in my life, however, I can honestly say one thing. I believe that as a result of so many losses over the course of my lifetime I have become more appreciative, more thankful for the people and the relationships I’ve been fortunate to have in my life. And I hope I never stop having an attitude of gratitude.

I wish my American friends a Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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

Time and blankets....

 November 15, 2023

We are already, today, smack dab in the middle of November. Can you believe it? Honestly the older I get the faster that time seems to fly. Things are moving so fast, that I really do need to sit down and relax sometimes just to try to get my bearings from all the whizzing and the swooshing. But that doesn’t slow the time either, because when I do that, I tend to doze off. Even if it’s only a short little cat nap, heck, I wake up ten minutes later and that’s another ten minutes that flew by so fast, I didn’t even see them.

And why do they call it a cat nap, anyway? The cat we now have, who is still a kitten at 3 and a half months old, will sleep for an hour or more whenever the notion occurs to him. One of his favorite sleeping spots, if I am in the living room with my legs up, is on me! During this so-called “cat nap”, I pick him up and move him if I have to get up out of my recliner, and he is boneless and continues to sleep through the entire maneuver. He doesn’t even care where I put him either, as long as wherever it is, it’s warm and soft and therefore, for sleeping.

Last weekend was a busy one for us here. We celebrated our second daughter’s and David’s birthdays on Friday (they were born on the same day, so we have a double celebration every year). We used to take the whole gang out to one of the local steak houses. However, this year, we decided that we could make it at home a lot better and for a lot less money than we could buy it out. A family steakhouse meal that was pricey before the pandemic is now beyond pricey and into the category of “forget it” now.

So, we had grilled ribeye steaks, baked potatoes, mushrooms and onions, garlic shrimp, and sweet kernel corn that had been home frozen. All very much tastier and absolutely less expensive than in any restaurant.

The other tradition with regard to these particular birthdays has to do with the cake. Ages ago, our daughter made pineapple upside-down cake for their birthdays. She made three cakes—one for each of the celebrants to have for their own, and one for the rest of us to share. That went over so well (in the opinion of the celebrants) that she has done this ever since. Also, it is the only time in the year that anyone gets pineapple upside-down cake.

Then during the weekend, our daughter’s grandchildren were here from Saturday morning till Sunday after supper. We had a guest for lunch on Sunday, and daughter took her grandchildren to the pool on Saturday and then to the park on Sunday. It was a very enjoyable time, but also, for those of us who will never see sixty-five again, an exhausting one.

We, all of us here in this house, appreciate simplicity. That is a very good and very basic thing for us to have in common. We don’t put on airs or stand on ceremony. We like to be comfortable, so we don’t fuss over the number of blankets found in our living room. There are times when we look around at the people and the dogs, each of us having some or all of our own blankets and accept that in those times, the Ashbury residence is nothing more than a flop house.

I take a couple of hours in the middle of the day—usually while David is having his nap (one that is like the cat’s in that it definitely lasts more than an hour and he sleeps very deeply). During that time, my daughter’s teacup chihuahua asks me to fix his blanket (yes, the smallest dog has his own designated blanket) so that he can enjoy Zeusie-grandma time. Lying beside me, mostly or completely covered by his blanket, he gets a good sound sleep, too. It is expected, of course, that during this time I “pat him” a few times by tapping my hand gently on his blanket-covered little body.

Apparently, there are more rituals to be observed in this house than one could easily count.

And to anyone joining us on any given day, we always issue a warning—if there is a blanket in your path, either on the floor or on a chair, please do not kick it or sit on it. Not, that is, until you check to make sure there is no innocent, sleeping critter completely hidden within.

Even the animals in this house are protected from unnecessary rude awakenings.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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

Be curious!

 November 8, 2023

Before sitting down to watch a video that purports to be “Funny/Very Funny/Funniest Memes/Tweets About A/B/C” it would be a good idea to first understand who concocted the compilation, and what it is in this world that they consider to be funny.

Now I can’t likely do that, really, but it has occurred to me that if I became a more astute viewer of compilations, I might get to recognize the “name” of the creator and whether or not the video is worth watching. This is a rule anyone can follow, if they have it in them to suffer through all those compilations that have no earthly connection to the concept of humor.

One more of those things in this life that I know I’ll never accomplish, because I really don’t have that brand of patience.

However, as I was doing my nightly stroll through YouTube on the weekend, watching interesting videos, I couldn’t help but think back to the days before we had something called the Internet. Today what I do as I scroll through various videos, or read different articles, is that I’ll often stop and google someone or something, because I want to learn more about some facet or another of a topic.

Sometimes I lose sight of what a marvel that, all by itself, is.

In the way-back machine, I used to also sometimes have questions and wonder about stuff…and what I would do back then, was I would make a list. And even back then when I was writing but not yet published, I would need to do research. So, about three or four times a year, I would arrange to go to a major library in my neck of the woods. A few times I went to the University library, other times just the huge public library in Hamilton. I would have a list of topics, and I would have those topics organized by relevancy (to my writing). I’d go and find a few pieces of source material, then I would hunker down in one of the cubicles they provided (at both libraries). I would sit and read and make notes—yes, with pen and paper—and then I would get up, exchange some of the books, and settle in once more.

These excursions lasted several hours, of course. I didn’t always find the answers to every question I had, but for the time that I was in that wondrous place of books and knowledge, I thrived. The bonus was that as a mother of three young children, my life for the most part was work and home; and once home, housework, cooking, childcare…not much “me time” in those days at all. But being busy for others was made that much more tolerable by the fact that I could look forward to going to the library for peace and quiet and knowledge whenever I needed to do so.

I count it as a positive that at my age, I’m still curious about things. I’ll be watching television, be it news or any other program, and I’ll hear a name or learn a little about a subject new to me and I’ll wonder….so I’ll make a note and check it out. I still learn things and want to learn things. And yes, it might also be true that I have to learn that thing more than once these days, because I already have so much knowledge crammed into my brain, that there’s not a whole lot of room left for more. So, I have to learn it a couple of times before it fits into my noggin. Sort of a version of jamming that dress into the suitcase until you can close it.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

One of the things I have never understood about humanity is that there are people who are not very curious about anything at all. I can’t imagine living my life that way. I really can’t.

To my way of thinking, learning about new ideas and new things, reading new books (though I do like to re-read my favorites), that is the spice that flavors my life. Something new. Something different. Something wonderful.

The probability that I’ll find that just around the corner? That’s the siren call that makes me look forward to getting up each morning.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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

A new month...

 November 1, 2023

Wasn’t it just a couple of days ago that I commented on our having arrived in October, and where the hell had the time gone? Well, here we are again, at the beginning of a new month. And while I don’t recall any great change in the environment accompanying the beginning of October, I can’t say the same for November.

It is chilly out there!

It’s not that we didn’t see this cold weather coming, because of course we did. But I can’t say that we, here in the Ashbury household, are prepared for it. We are not.

We did manage to meet the neighborhood demands of the season yesterday. But as we’re older, neither of us felt we could sit outside to hand out candies to wandering ghosts, ghouls, and goblins. We can’t have them knocking on the door, of course, because, well, dogs. Dogs that bark and get overly excited and want to go outside and greet the knockers. And not only dogs this year, but we now have that kitten (three months old next week), and kitten thinks he needs to discover this “outside” he can see but never touch. And while the closed gate of the porch successfully keeps the dogs safe, that darn kitten is small enough to go through the slats of the gate—and limber enough to jump up on the porch railing and jump down on the other side.

He is a very determined little critter.

David set up a candy bowl outside—on the walkway, so no one even had to climb the steps to the porch. He even set this cute light in the likeness of a dog on the step above it so that it shined down into the bowl.

The good news is that I managed to locate Halloween candy on Monday when I went to our former regular grocery store (no longer our regular store because their prices are outrageous). I had been to our local large mega store on Saturday, but they had no Halloween candy at all. They had large boxes of chips, but I didn’t want to hand out chips. Neither did I think Christmas candy, which they had in abundance, would do.

So, I bought two packages of candy, 50 pieces each, and was relieved to have plenty for the handout.  We don’t usually have a lot of takers in this neighborhood, and we always have a lot left over.

However, this year was different. There had been several homes in the neighborhood that had, over the last few months changed hands. And apparently, we now have quite a few children in the neighborhood.

And finally, the bad news: At least one of the new little gremlins came along and emptied the entire large bowl of candies into his/her bag. I guessed it was a new gremlin because we have actually left the candy bowl unattended the last two years, and that hadn’t happened.

David took more candy out to put in the bowl, and there was still some left when he brought it back in again once the parade of costumed children ceased. Not only that, but there was also enough in the packages in the house to give those who live here and suffer from the occasional chocolate craving something to nibble for at least the next few months.

The squirrels have done their part in removing the fallen walnuts from our yard, sidewalk, and roadway. Even with the great dent we made that one weekend in early October, I’d say the critters had a good walnut harvest from us this year. The leaves of that tree are nearly completely all down, now. Just in time for the neighboring maples to begin to drop their leaves.

We have a lot of yard work left to do, and since we can’t hope for warm days, hope for sunny ones in which to get the work done. The leaves in the back yard, especially, need to be raked, because ticks like to hide in them, and well, dogs.

I, for one, used to love to rake leaves in the autumn. I enjoyed the fresh air, the slight sting to my cheeks, and the sense of accomplishment when the job was done. Yes, even if more leaves fell and I had to do it all over again the next week, I still enjoyed the work.

Those days are behind me now, and I console myself—as I do with most things I can no longer accomplish—that I at least took the time to appreciate those moments as they happened.

I’m still doing that, of course. Only the moments themselves have changed. What hasn’t changed is the spirit of gratitude with which I embrace them.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

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