TToT: Muddy Puddles and Horizon Blue, #FamilyDay #ClimateChange #GuiltyPleasure #10Thankful

This past week broke records in Ontario, with temperatures well above average for this time of year.

February 20th was Family Day here in Canada and three days later we found ourselves even more of one than we already were.

Ten Things of Thankful #10Thankful

I was going along, having a hard time, with putting one foot in front of the other. Then I found myself, suddenly and pleasantly surprised by just how thankful I could feel again. Spring come early. But…wait…it’s still winter.

This song captures that energy Mya brings into the picture, a fresh and new perspective on so many people and things I was already thankful for. Blue skies as I look toward the horizon.

I was thankful for a violin lesson where my teacher seemed happy with some of the progress I’d made.

I know, for some, it’s hard to see this. I challenge them to pick up a violin and give it a try sometime, to see just what I’m up against. Yet, still I forge ahead with it because it is the most beautiful thing.

I’m thankful for pleasant surprises that come along to remind of what hope looks like.

My sister gave birth a week-and-a-half ahead of her due date. All was well enough, but I am still thankful things went smoothly, once they were helped along some.

I am thankful that my family have each other, that we live in a country like Canada with the healthcare available, and have access to safe medical facilities.

I am thankful for reminders that there is beauty and sweetness, whether that be the sound of a violin or the feeling of peace and calm holding a newborn baby brings.

I am thankful my nephew is a big brother to a beautiful baby girl. He is so proud and, at the same time, indifferent, depending on the moment he’s in, in his four-year-old world.

He can’t wait to be able to play with her, brother and sister, to jump in muddy puddles and go to the park with Grandma and Grandpa.

I am thankful both mother and daughter are doing well.

I am thankful that I get to share a middle name with my niece.

She brought good luck it seems, first with the warm weather on the day of her birth.

Not that I really think such weather is appropriate in February. So many celebrated getting to be out on patios and wearing t-shirts, but I wasn’t celebrating, if it hadn’t been for my other news.

I am thankful for that luck I speak of, as I sent a writing pitch out, quite unexpectedly on the day of my niece’s birth, and received what seems like an acceptance.

Nothing is for sure yet, but after my piece being published in Bustle last month, I am taking all of it as a sign of the kind of year I could end up having, though I had a few bad days recently where I feared none of that would ever again happen.

We have over a dozen family members born in the month of February and now we add one more to the list.

Mya arriving in this most excellent month, to be born as far as I am concerned (and her uncle Paul and her daddy too) in the best month of the year,
only the second in any calendar year,
I am taking this as proof positive that anything is possible. Really, anything can change from one year to the next, one month to another, and even from start to finish of a single day.

We started out 2017, February, and this week without her in our lives, for real, and within a day of the news she would come early, there she was.

Introducing: Mya Lynne

Here she is, a forever part of our family, and that’s really the only thankful I need.

And it’s a lesson, in life, that as a child is born, someone will die.

RIP Bill Paxton, director of this epic 80s music video, among his other notable film credits.

“They can’t play baseball. They don’t wear sweaters. They’re not good dancers. They don’t play drums.”
—Fish Heads, Barnes & Barnes

The Grimmest of Grims, #HarryPotter #TGIF #FTSF

I love Harry Potter. I was late to the party though, on becoming one of the obsessed. I was twenty-four to be exact.

I often say,
like here on my About Me page,
that my three most visited topics throughout my mind and my writing are birth, death, and love. At the heart of most of what I write, those are the three subjects that are fueling it all.

The Harry Potter books are about the transformative effects of love, but it is also, in many ways, a book about death, if you look at the books critically. It’s about a villainous wizard who is so afraid of dying that he does whatever it takes to make himself immortal. I understand that, to a point.

It is easy for many young people, as I often hear, to believe that they are invincible and that death is so far off that it’s pretty well preventable. Maybe a cure to death will be found by then, they think. Maybe I can avoid all the darkness of the unknown of death, for myself or those I love.

But is that what we really want?

I had a discussion once, on a long drive home with a boyfriend, about death. There’s the science that’s working to put a stop to the inevitability of death. There’s the discussion about aging and suffering that often accompanies an aging human body. Then there was the added level of disability and medical conditions we both knew a little something about.

Did we want to live forever? We were several decades, ideally, from death. I don’t recall how this conversation came up.

Suicide is heard a lot more about these days, while stigma and misinformation still exist. A sudden or not so sudden end to a life, by choice is a frightening topic for most people. It’s a reality faced, by friends and families, for many of us.

Then there’s the fact that I never had my own brush with youthful carelessness or exuberance in the face of death, thought to be yet many many years down the road of life.

I lost dogs, several by our family’s admitted rotten luck. I’d lost a grandparent when I was ten. It didn’t get any easier with age to accept that I wouldn’t see certain people again.

While most kids are going through puberty I was also going through multiple surgeries. Then my little brother followed my medical path in a similar fashion. I then truly worried for someone else more than I cared and worried for myself. I wanted to take his pain away, add it to my own, still in progress.

As we got older, some of his medical issues became more serious and life-threatening and I feared death more than ever.

I can’t say I ever thought, right as I found myself on an operating table and about to do the paediatric anesthesiologist’s suggested countdown from one hundred, that I might never wake up. I just didn’t think it. I wasn’t worried, in some strange way. I can’t say now how I would feel. I have been lucky to avoid surgery for anything in many years, but I will likely face it again in the future, unless a cure for kidney disease is found in the meantime.

Now I am past losing grandparents. I just lost an aunt. I fear losing my parents. I fear the topic even being breached, as when my father brings it up in a nonchalant manner, as I know he is afraid too.

I live with a lot of fear about many things. I wish this weren’t just one more of those. It is inescapable and Voldemort is just a fictional character, but it’s his strangely relatable characteristics that I found most fascinating as I read, as fear of death is universal. It’s his deeds to avoid it, with how extreme and evil they are, that make him one of the greatest villains in literature, in my opinion.

I would like to write an essay of some kind, but it feels like such a huge undertaking. I feel like it would, by necessity, end up becoming a form of college term paper. I am not experienced with those.

If I did write it, it would be about the theme of death in the Harry Potter books.

Through the obvious, as I mentioned before, but also through J.K. Rowling’s use of other characters and symbols, such as ghosts and a black spectral dog, which when seen in the wizarding world, means death is near.

This isn’t my favourite of the Harry Potter films, by far, even if Emma Thompson is one excellent actress. I just include this clip to show you, if you’ve never read the books or watched the movies before. Though the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, was one hell of a roller coaster ride when I first read it in 2008.

There’s some connection, a connective circle, as I mentioned dogs above, but I don’t know yet what it all is or what it all means.

I don’t know what that’s like when death looms ever closer, but I have come closer than many at my age and younger often do.

All these myths of black cats bringing bad luck and black dogs bringing news of demise. I will write about these things, as hard as they sometimes are to face, until the day I die.

This was
Finish The Sentence Friday
with host Kristi from Finding Ninee.

Read her feelings on the FTSF prompt for this subject if you can. They are lovely. As for myself, I have been away from this particular Friday prompt for a few weeks now, but I couldn’t resist coming back for this one.

Born Again and Forever Grateful, #FTSF

It’s strange, when you try to imagine the people your parents were and the lives they lived before their children came into the picture. I often try to envision it, with little success. My grandmother had diaries of her life and they’re one of my most valued treasures, for several reasons, but the details, no matter how minuscule, offer a window on what my mother was like as a child and young adult, way before she knew she would one day become the parent of four children, two of whom would be born with multiple disabilities. Sounds like a carefree time to me.

🙂

Well, like how I find it odd to imagine the days on which my parents met, got married, and had each of their four children, I find it inconceivable to think of the day of my birth. I was there for that one, obviously, but I do not remember, as if I wasn’t a part of it at all.

I was born via cesarean, as my mother had given birth to my older brother and sister previously. She had a medical reason for being unable to give birth naturally. All this, on that February day in 1984, it all progressed, as to be expected.

She decided to name me Kerry, a “K” name to go along with my big sister, Kim, born two years earlier. Also, the woman who gave birth to a baby boy on the same day, in the bed next to hers, her name was “Kerry”, spelled that way. This would set me apart from most with the same name, often spelled with the more common “C”.

I retell this naming story on occasion, but I would say, along with stories of the day I was born, there would one day be joined, one about my rebirth, thirteen years later.

The day I was born was a cold February day, but the day I was reborn was warm, sunny, and in early June.

Again, I remember none of it, strictly speaking. One moment I was one girl, small and ill, and the next, I awoke to the new life of a transplant recipient. I began, after being reborn, dopey, my new world slowly coming into focus. The beeping of ICU machines gave way to the warm, fuzzy feeling of the first summer of the rest of my life.

Now, one year ahead of my twenty year kidney transplant anniversary and I mark the date, another June fifth coming up fast. Next month signifies the start of my rebirth, as is the context for this FTSF post.

It’s a strange time of year for me, truthfully. As the date passes me by I feel a mixture of gratitude and anxious discomfort, at the state of my life, looking back on all these years hence.

I take stock on how far I’ve come since June 5th, 1997 and sometimes the weight of that milestone dawns on me with such ferocity. We all hit those monumental markers in life, occasions where rebirth is exactly the word we’d use. For me, June means rebirth, as spring is rebirth for so many plants and animals. I try to highlight the date, look on the life I’ve had since then, and adjust accordingly. This is daunting, when I can’t stop assigning to myself what my life should now mean. I don’t want to toss aside the importance of what that single surgery did for me. I can’t and never will.

Rebirth means something to me now, as my birth must have meant, more than thirty years ago, to my parents. It feels like an important starting place, but as yet, I haven’t decided where that might lead.

Host and sentence-thinker-upper:

Finding Ninee

&

Corinne Rodrigues

Why Oh Why, #FTSF

Two things happened this week worth mentioning here, now: a friend of the family passed away from a long-fought cancer battle and I secured myself a writing mentor.

You may wonder what those two events have to do with one another. Well, one is terrible and the other is exciting, but they are both big things to have happened.

They both give me pause, when thinking about my writing, why I write.

At the heart of life, the topics I write about: birth, love, death.

When someone passes away I am left whirling, in my own head, and writing helps me make sense of the nonsensical of life. Death is going to happen to us all. We can’t say when. We don’t normally have the ability to decide how it will end. I know I am a very small person, in a big big world, and I need a way to put the things that I don’t quite understand into some kind of perspective.

We won’t be around forever. I won’t. Life will pass me by, like that!

Sometimes, I wonder about my writing. I wonder about it and question it, like many writers, and I try to figure out why I continue to write, what makes me do it, again and again and again.

I write because it helps me figure life out. I write because I can, because I’ve been told I am good at it, by myself on good days, by other people, when I need to hear it, at just the right moment.

I didn’t see it coming. I’d wished for it for a while, but how did one go about acquiring a writing mentor anyway?

Sure, there were writers I admired, but I didn’t know how to approach them, to ask them if they would teach me or guide me or help me. I couldn’t decide how to make my request known, and so I continued to write.

This week, all the stars must have aligned.

On those bad days, I doubt my writing and the point of it all. I know writers do this all the time. I was not alone in this. I may ask it, in those darker moments when I feel like we’re all doomed to die and what’s the point of so much of what we do in the meantime, but then I get on with it and I don’t doubt it anymore.

I don’t know where it will lead me, but maybe it’s time I started to figure all that out too, to find a direction and take the steps necessary to do something with my writing.

Thanks, Kristi, for another excellent

Finish the Sentence Friday

writing prompt. I am figuring things out right now and FTSF always helps.

Finally, I am including my entry for a writing contest from last June:

How Writing Has Positively Influenced My Life

I did not win, but as long as I continue to write, to grow into my destiny as a writer, I am winning.