420 Old Millbury Street

Every morning on my way to drop the girls off at day care, I always ask if they want the highway or the back roads. The answer is always the same, so we have become very familiar with the streets of Millbury. At 420 Old Millbury street there was an unusual sight that didn't quite fit in to the sometimes manicured, sometimes bucolic landscape.
An old rotted out tree stump cradled a baby pine tree. Maybe a bird dropped a seed at just the right moment and it found itself in the perfect dewy niche in which to germinate. This would be a perfect spot to start off life. Raised above all the shrubs, there was no competition for space or light, no lawn mowers to thwart it's sprouting, no snow plows to bury it until summer. So it thrived, this brilliant green life growing out of the hollowed out carcass of another tree. But I always wondered how long this untenable situation would be sustained. Sometimes a life with a perfect beginning is destined to be felled early. Just the other day, I saw that the owners had cut down that old stump and with it, that new tree. I wonder if they ever noticed it. I wonder if it's replanted somewhere in the background of our drives.

magic night

On my drive home with the girls tonight, we found magic. I told them to look up into the eastern sky because the glowing pink clouds had caught my attention. Little did we know that as we grinned at that sight, a giant smile would overtake our faces when we rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of the sun setting behind a cotton cloud that was outlined in all directions with a fluorescent pink glow. There are sunsets, and then there was the sky tonight. We pulled over to make sure that our memories wouldn't be clocked at 60mph and watched as the color began to fade from the edges of the clouds. Down the road we rolled, into a patch of twilight fog. As we emerged on the other side, we saw a baby deer standing right before us. Charly and Maddy both gasped with excitement. "Are we dreaming mommy?" was asked first by Charly and then by her little sister. "I think we just may be" was the only valid response I could give. We watched the sky the whole way home, and as the night crept up on us, it drained the last rays of color from that cloud. We talked about how lucky we were to have left when we did, to have stopped when we did, to have our eyes open when we did. Too bad the only music I could find to accompany this was lucky star by Madonna. Guess every cloud has a grey lining.

Road trip Faux Pas I

Having just come back from a 3 week road trip with one hubby, 2 little girls, a teenage boy and a 1 year old puppy, there are certain things I want to jot down before they fade into general feelings rather than distinct memories. The trip was amazing, we are all better for it, closer to each other and full of laughter, but I always enjoy the bloopers first, so here are the most most memorable.
We rented a 29 foot coachman RV with a bathroom, sink, hot water heater, shower, refrigerator, propane tank, oven/stove, microwave, generator, TV/DVD player, awning, and a partridge in a pear tree. Before we drove this behemoth off the lot, we were given a whirlwind 30 minute tour of the do's and dont's. Needless to say, not all of it stuck in our vacation ready minds. The extent to which we were clueless became readily available to everyone in the parking lot of the Loves truck stop off route 40 in Baxter TN. After circling the facility a couple times, we stopped to ask a trucker where exactly the dump station was. He looked at Ted as though he were a dump station. The woman inside the stop was more helpful and told us where we needed to be. It just so happened that the sprinkler system also needed to on in the same spot. It didn't occur to us until after the first couple passes that perhaps we should roll up the windows..all of which were being assaulted by the high velocity water being shot seemingly only in our direction.
After what felt like 12 years or so, the attendant came out to unlock the lovely hole in the ground, otherwise referred to as the dump station (so apropos). As we were "dumping", we decided to fill up our water tank, all the while, trying to dodge the heat seeking water missile that Ted ended up physically twisting into an unsuspecting trucker who was either fast asleep or too afraid of the angry stomping dumper to say anything about it. Maybe he wanted a clean truck? At this point, the dump was flowing, the water hose was hooked up to the RV and Ted and I were soaked. We sat there for another 12 years filling the water tank, which never really filled. Screw it, we can get more water down the road we thought. Back into the RV we climbed, wet, wet and more wet. It wasn't until we stopped for more water the next day that we realized we hooked the hose up to the wrong part of the RV. The fact that water was spraying out both ends of the hose with enough pressure to create a half assed diamond apparently was not a big enough clue for us that night. So we rolled on, waterless and one step into "the road trip faux pas".

Jen Goodman Linn

No matter how sick my friends are, it always comes as a complete and heartbreaking shock to me when I find out that one has passed. I am in disbelief that she's gone. Her voice still resounds in my thoughts. I truly hear her. The last correspondence I had with Jen was an email I sent quoting George Carlin on the subject of just where in the priorities of the day people place us when they say, "you're in my thoughts". Needless to say, the quote itself is not blog appropriate, but was appreciated in my own private email. Never the less, Jen is in my thoughts, and for the sake of clarifying this from the platitudes that she worked so hard to distance herself from, I want to state exactly where she is. She chants a fearless mantra every time I let my mind creep in to the labyrinth of morbid possibilities, she urges me to remain steadfast in my pursuit to aid in the human fight against this disease, she reminds me that nothing, not even death, can stand in the way of a fulfilled life. I hear her voice crystal clear as though she's sitting right next to me. She's in my thoughts, right at the forefront, right at apex of the battlefield.