Returning the Gift

It’s been a pretty lazy day!  No school, kids chilling and I have been writing all day.  Spent most of the day working on my memior.  Actually printed out what I have written so far and went through it page by page.  My son and hubby asked if they could read it.  “Not yet”, I told them.  Let me get a little more done and then I will let you read some.

Most of my ideas come to me in my dreams or through late night thought and prayer.  Recently an idea of a novel came to me.  It really all started with a silly conversation I had with John.  Funny how those conversations stay on your mind and then fuel your dreams or thoughts before bedtime.

Time to get off this computer and relax the brain.

Luv, luv,

Julie

David Bowies song ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes is on my mind.  For many reasons I guess.  I have felt changes all around me and I am still ok.  Yes, I am still ok!

It seems to have started on January 5th, at 9:30am when I got the call “not to come back,  its just not going to work”.  Just a little over two months and its over.  These kinds of Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes wipe the confidence right out of your vocabulary and makes a person just want to craw under a blanket for days.

When you learn you lost your job 3 days before your 44th birthday, it kinda puts you into “shut down” mode.  That is exactly what I did.  I shut down my website, facebook, and twitter.  I hide settings on my linkedIn account and decided not to answer my phones.  Socializing was not something that even interested me.  I just crawled into bed and slept.

Family and friends have a way of pulling your butt out of bed and making you socialize.  My hubby said I had to do something, so I had a football party.  Saturday the 7th I invited friends down, had great food, and watched the game.  It was nice, no one asked me about my job.  People also didn’t realize it was my birthday on Sunday, so I didn’t have to talk about that either.  Its was all football, all night!

By Thursday the 12th, my girlfriends took me out for my birthday.  It was nice and something I really needed.

Although I am not feeling great about myself right now, I still believe with all my heart; God has bigger plans for me.  I feel so much more at ease this time then last, John does too.  Our family has already experienced hell (our own hell, not others.  We know many families worse off than us).  When you have been were we have been and you have to go back again, you have experience, you have built up resilience, and it doesn’t seem as bad as last time.

Hope is alive!  I completely moved my website from Joomla to wordpress so that I could set it up more like a blogging site.  Started reading more about prayer.  Working on finding a job and getting ready to start back to school this week.   Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes!

Luv, luv,

Julie

My 2012 intentions for the year are finding ways to soften my heart. I will start by placing the jealousy and judgment behind me and move forward in finding my way back to faith, prayer, and God. I will do my best to see hope in all that surrounds me. I will dig deep within myself to use the courage and strength that I know is within me. I will write as much as I can in hopes that it will somehow inspire others. And I will find LOVE. The love that existed before my heart became hardened, the love that inspires me to write, and the love God provides me!

I remember as a child running around by myself in my grandmother’s back yard lost in my thoughts and in my surroundings.  The backyard was deep on a slope with a crabapple tree and many other trees.  In the far back corner she planted her garden and on the edge of her driveway she would grow her Sunday flowers.  The side yard, sloping down into a pool of willows, is where all the wild cats would appear.  My grandmother would feed every last one of them the leftovers from dinner.  In the back along the edge was a very dark wooded area.

There were many things about my grandmother’s that scared me as a child.   The “dark” wooded area was a place that seemed very evil to me.  The tallest tree in the yard was mysterious, but I always found myself under the tree and at night when I was put to bed in the old rope bed in the spare bedroom (that conveniently had three beds, one for each one of us), I was always frightened by that tree I spent many hours underneath.  Bushes along the back of the house would scratch up against the window as I would stare at shadows on the wall.  The basement was cold with many rooms and hiding spaces, to this day I have never seen a house like it.  But those rooms often scared the daylights out of me.  There were only two things in that basement I thought were beautiful and that was the colorful lights in the class block bar and watching my grandmother put together her Sunday bouquet of flowers.

During the day I would run along the edges of the woods, but never brave enough to enter.  Even going back to the garden at times was scary and I usually made sure my grandmother was with me.  My grandfather was a scary old man who I always remember sitting in his chair or at his desk with his wooden bowl of snacks and his class of liquor.  I don’t remember any words my grandfather spoke, just grumblings that he made.  I often wonder how a loving beautifully giving man such as my father came from such a person.

Then I see my grandmother, this average looking woman who would bake things that were out of this world, who would talk to you with these curled up fingers, big knuckles, and long finger nails perfectly rounded, but filled with dirt from a day of gardening.  She was not afraid to get dirty and yet Sunday morning she would go to her closet, pick out her Sunday’s best (which she had a lot of), open up her jewelry boxes and put on something fabulous.  Her purse and shoes always matching her outfit she would make sure she had Kleenex and minty gum to make it through the day.  Flowers, me and her off to church we went.  She was the daylight in my darkness, something I would only come to realize after her passing. 

Last year about this time I had mentioned to my husband John that I love the sound that the owl makes during the day (woo-oo-oo-oo). I told him that it always reminds me of my grandmother and sitting under that tree in her back yard.  At times I thought the sound was scary and eerie and at other times I found it to be comforting and familiar.  He laughed at me and said, “Julie that is not an owl, it is a mourning dove”.  I argued with him and told him there was no way.  I still didn’t believe him until this past fall when I took a biology class and we had to study birds in the area and the sounds they make.  Sure enough my husband was right.  The sound that had been so familiar in my life was that of a mourning dove.

What makes this just a little more interesting is that since the day we moved into our home every spring two mourning doves have sat perched upon our house.  In the first years we would joke about having two doves on our house must signify the love we have between us.  I will tell you now with each passing year we look forward to the spring and hearing the sound (woo-oo-oo-oo) of the mourning dove and we look forward to seeing two every year.

Even though as a child I felt alone, so different and unwanted, even though I would find out while my grandmother was still living that she too in the beginning didn’t want me (adoption not easily excepted back then), I know that in her remaining days on this earth she loved me!  We were very close in her final years and it saddens me to admit, but I have not thought of her in many recent years, until today amongst the sound of the mourning dove.

That eerie but beautiful sound reminded me of a child lost in my thoughts, frightened of the unknown, and wondering who was watching over me.  Wondering who would protect me, who would help me, who would love me?  Today the sound of the mourning dove not only reminds me of my grandmother, but reminds me that God loves me so much that he gave is only begotten son, that whoever, whoever; you, me, my grandmother, my husband, my children, whoever, believes in him should not parish but have everlasting life.  My grandmother is in that everlasting life sending me mourning doves to remind me I am not alone!

Luv luv,

Julie