10,000 Steps

It's been a stressful three weeks, but things have settled down a bit with my parents' health worries, and we had a return of warm weather, so, whew! Wishing you all relief from your own worries, and joy in the changing season. I took a lovely walk with friends yesterday, full of light and color, as the leaves drifted down on the hiking-biking trail. Mary, with the fitbit among us, said, "10,000 steps." 

Reading helped during the stress, a way to step aside, as did doing crossword puzzles in old New Yorkers, passed along to me by my mom, for me to read and recycle. "Watch out," she said, "you can get hooked." I did. Going to and from the hospital in Peoria, we had lunch twice, and pie once, at Busy Corner, a popular eating place at, yes, a busy corner. And saw the colors of the changing leaves by the side of the road. A joy to my mom. Less so to my colorblind dad, but his joy was getting out of the hospital!

Reading books with colorful covers, too. Balladz by Sharon Olds and Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney, the latter in my stack of books to review for Escape Into Life. I need to 1) read slowly and repeatedly for a review 2) have a clear mind, ability to focus...so I am behind in this task. But I got the laundry done! Plus, these two books look great on my coffee table.

My own poetry waits patiently for me to get back to it. I have a composition book at hand for bits of inspiration. I flip back through the pages and see lots of actual poems there, awaiting revision and assembly. I have sent out a few things, received a few rejections, and one wonderful acceptance. A nice surprise. 

I'll keep on. Many more steps.

And Now I Spill the Family Secrets

Well, I had just fallen asleep on the couch, having finished Nightwoods, by Charles Frazier, a dark but strangely "cleans[ing]" tale (to almost quote from its final sentence), when my husband woke me to summon me to the latest emergency. So: 2 ER trips by ambulance in the same week, one for each parent. Both involving the nose, and blood, to make it a Random Coinciday in the blog. But we are getting through, with a little help from our friends, support from family, and polite and patient health care professionals. Thank you, OSF! Thank you, Devon, for the apple butter, Ellen, for the extra coffee maker, and Kim, for ongoing support and friendship. Thanks to siblings & their spouses and my own hubby, too! My dad got a lowdown ride in his Miata at one point. Talk about random!

I think I need a walk in the chilly sunshine. I will go mail letters at the P.O. and walk through the Sugar Creek Arts Festival, instead of the nightwoods. I will catch up on work and sleep when I can. And Now I Spill the Family Secrets, by Margaret Kimball, is a fascinating memoir & graphic novel I read for the yearround Adult Reading Challenge at the Normal Public Library. October is graphic novel month. I have had a pretty graphic October so far.

Some Tame Gazelle

...in which Barbara Pym anticipates Marie Kondo! 

I recently re-read Some Tame Gazelle, by Barbara Pym, after I read a new biography of Pym, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, by Paula Byrne. It was fun to re-encounter the sisters Belinda and Harriet (middle-aged "spinsters") knowing that Pym as a young woman had imagined a life similar to the one she later lived, roommates with her own middle-aged sister!

And imagine my delight, after having read the Marie Kondo book on tidying up (as both a physical and spiritual activity), on finding this passage in Some Tame Gazelle:

"'It's no use being sentimental about things,' said Harriet. 'You shouldn't keep a clutter of clothes you never wear just because you once liked them.'

"Belinda made no comment on this, for she was thinking that Harriet's words might be applied to more serious things than clothes. If only one could clear out one's mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one's wardrobe..."

I'm glad I got rid of clothes and books this summer, but not my goofy little Pym paperbacks! With weirder covers than anything shown here. And I'm working hard, but I hope generously not ruthlessly, on clearing out my mind and heart!

It's been an exhausting couple of weeks. Partly because of the annual cemetery walk last week, a lovely community event, for which we had excellent weather, and partly because this week my mom had a fall. She is fine now, amazingly healthy overall, but it was stressful and scary for everyone, especially her. She is so glad to be home. 

Me, too, and so glad it's Friday. Chilly. It will be the coldest year ever for the Sugar Creek Arts Festival, moved from July to October to avoid the heat...but now folks had better be bundled up in layers! Art in the streets!! And maybe funnel cakes and elephant ears! And kettle corn! Hoping my mom stays home this year. But we have found her cane! And maybe I could find a few more at the arts festival! To leave here and there around the house...

Hey, there are actually gazelles on this last sample book cover! Wait! Is it possible that Marie Kondo used Barbara Pym as an epigraph to her own book, and I had already encountered this random coincidence?! I don't know! I gave the book away! Twice!!

Cemetery Season

It's cemetery season for me, coming up on the annual Evergreen Cemetery Walk. I've been a longtime writer of scripts and scenes for this walk through Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, where community members and schoolkids can meet the people who are buried there, and, in the past, I played many characters and this year will do so again. It's an exhausting but rewarding experience! As actors, we do two rounds of six performances each on the weekends, and three rounds on schooldays for field trips during the week, in all kinds of weather. It used to fall in October, and now it's bumped up to September and the first weekend of October, because the schoolkids were not wearing jackets and appropriate attire in the cold or rainy weather! My character is Helen Clark McCurdy (1866-1962), who ran for office. 

It's also spider season, and all the webs are up!

Other things on my mind:

Second blooming of a lilac bush that touches the sidewalk on my walk to work.

The mulberry bush wrapping a purple smokebush in the same yard.

The glorious breezy, sunny weather this Sunday afternoon.

Barbara Pym, as I am reading a vignette-style biography of her, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, by Paula Byrne. I discovered her when I was working at DePaul University as an assistant to the secretrary of the English Department, before I got my graduate degree there, and had submitted a story to the student creative writing magazine, that was accepted and published, and one of the woman professors compared me to Barbara Pym. So I had to find out about her. I hope it was my quirky, comic style in that particular story!

The coincidence of Pym at Oxford + visiting Germany around the time of the Hitler and Chamberlain, etc. agreement to give Sudetenland back to Germany from Czechoslovakia, who was not consulted nor at the talks or signing, and the film we watched last night, Munich: The Edge of War, based on the novel Munich, by Robert Harris, which I guess I will now not have to read...

Rejections, which are now rolling in, from a batch of submissions. Pym got a lot of rejections, too!

Parade/Shy

I did double duty in the Labor Day Parade again this year, walking first with the McLean County Democrats (blue shirt) and then with Moms Demand Action (red shirt, underneath my blue shirt, on a day cool enough to wear two and take one off!)! What a great turnout of both participants and parade viewers! So many laborers! All the unions were out, as we have a workers' rights referendum on the ballot on November 8. (Vote Yes!) So many candidates! So much candy.

August exhausted me, and not just with all the Sealey Challenge poetry reading, which also enlightened and energized me. Lots of brain energy of other sorts these days. Plus...termites. Yup. Sigh. So they are gone, we hope for good, as we got the whole treatment, burned any wood or cardboard from shed or garage that might have tiny critters, and dumped even more in Marie Kondo fashion! It's like the house fire a few years back. Anything left in the attic, that might have been damaged by smoke or water, I dumped, without much perusal. This time, anything left stacked in the basement near the termite wall...went.

But the joy and comic relief came with the book Shy, by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green, subtitled The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers. It was hilarious and very informative. Mary Rodgers wrote Once Upon a Mattress (sometimes I burst into song with "The Swamps of Home") and Freaky Friday. Plus, my parents' lives crossed with hers, sort of. Mom and Dad met her sister, Linda, then married to Dan Melnick, in the army. Apparently, they hung out together at Fort Sill army base in Lawton, Oklahoma. Dorothy Rodgers, mother of Mary and Linda, invented the Johnny Mop, a toilet-cleaning tool, a version of which I use today! Well, not today! It's the Labor Day holiday, so I cleaned my toilets and did my laundry earlier in the weekend!

And here's a Labor Day poetry feature for you at Escape Into Life. For today! [Pink gloves from The Clean House, by Sarah Ruhl, at Heartland Theatre.]