Mom, Thanks

Mother’s Day, 2011

Mom,

Thanks for having a resolve tougher than a two dollar steak at a clearance sale when I wanted to test you and for not backing down when I tried you because you knew what was right for me.

Thanks for having shoulders softer than summer slumber by the seaside when life sometimes beat me into a pulp of worthless goo.

Thanks for making me tuck my shirt into my pants, for making me say “Sir” and “Ma’m”, for making me get my hair out of my eyes and for making me go get my own hickory switch when I needed it.

Thanks for worrying about me through the bumps and bruises, breaks and pains, stings and dings, bike wrecks and car wrecks, ups and downs, mountains and valleys.

Thanks for having a ready box of band-aids and a tiny bottle of merthiolate that burned like fire but seemed to heal like a miracle direct from the King James Bible when applied to those cuts and scratches.

Thanks for seasoning your words of constructive honesty with sensible sobriety the times you had to tell me what I needed to hear and not what I wanted to hear.

Thanks for having eyes in the back of your head because I imagine they kept me out of trouble on more than one occasion.

Thanks for understanding how a well-timed and well-placed moment of silence sometimes said more to me than an ‘I told you so’ ever would.

Thanks for praying for me when I was face-down in the pits of despair and then for praying for me when I sat perched on top of the world.

Thanks for your forgiveness then your forgetfulness when I spoke to you without thinking, when I judged you without reason or when I caused you to ever be hurt, ashamed or disappointed in me.

Thanks for taking me to the county fair and the Smoky Mountains and the school carnivals but also thanks for taking me to the funeral home so that I would know how brief and full of value life really is and how the people you meet along the way and who go to their reward before you deserve a bit more than just a passing thought.

Thanks for leaving that lamp on at the end of the couch when I came home late and for going on to bed but staying awake until you heard my key unlock the front door and then heard my footsteps in the living room.

Thanks for naming me what you did and not naming me after a constellation, a car part, an exotic food, a foreign country, a shoe insole, a pain reliever, a soap opera star or some off the wall combination of names from two relatives no one else in the family remembers.

Thanks for giving life to me but also thanks for giving life to my brother and sister because, well, they’ve become pretty special to me, too.

Thanks for trusting your faith and your common sense to instill your values in us kids and for not being lazy or unconcerned enough to leave that task to a TV show or a TV star.

Thanks for loving Dad and for the moment when you knew with all certainty you would ride out life’s storms with him together and not ever settle for just putting up with him or walking away from him when you felt you had had enough.

Thanks for making me take my cap off in the house, for making me brush my teeth in the morning, for making me wash my hands before supper, for making me say my prayers before going to sleep and, from time to time, for telling me to act like somebody with some sense.

Thanks for caring more about us than you ever cared about yourself.

Thanks for teaching me to share and play fair and take turns.

Thanks for making me visit your parents and Dad’s parents and all those aunts and uncles and cousins when I was younger especially after there came a time when I thought my Sunday afternoons could be better spent doing almost anything else because I now miss those times, those places and those precious people.

Thanks for recognizing my wife for the good woman she is and for always making her feel welcomed and loved.

Thanks for your kindness, your courage, your patience, your good humor, your sacrifices, your talents, your dreams and the countless other things that make up who you are.

Thanks for being my mom and not my friend because I needed you to be my mom more than I needed you to be my friend.

Happy Mother's Day.

Love,

Tim

Riding the Brakes Again

Hiatus.

It sure is a funny looking word. It sounds funny, too.

Mashing together various sources on that deep and wide and seemingly know-it-all search-and-reveal engine Google finds that “hiatus” means “a break or gap in time or continuity”.

That funny looking and sounding word, hiatus, pretty much covers the status of this blog for the past ten months or so. Without really planning any kind of break, it, hiatus, just happened one day. I suppose there could be all sorts of things which could cause a hiatus. In the case of this blog, it unknowingly started with a simple blog entry. One day in 2010, I wrote a blog entry. It came together rather easily. It weighed in at just under five hundred words sliding comfortably into around a half dozen paragraphs. And so, like a few dozen times before there I was at the checkout counter just a few clicks away from adding that entry to this space.

I then reread the piece. To me, there didn’t seem to be anything glaringly bad about it. Then again, I am not the best critic of what I write. And because of that blind spot I sometimes linger a bit at something I have put into words, remaining behind trying and hoping to find that extra string of words, that clever phrase turn that will make things a bit clearer, a bit more descriptive and a bit more memorable. With this particular entry, something just didn’t jibe. Something about the entry tugged at me enough to take another glance at it. After looking at the piece another time I came to the realization that I had written a blog entry with the almost exact same theme a few months earlier.

To me, this is a pitfall of any kind of effort to write. Let me attempt to explain. When I first really began to love to write I wanted to learn more about this mysterious art of writing. I read that in order to find success as a writer then a body needs to write about what he knows. So, in the case of that blog entry months ago, I was following that simple yet challenging, that tried but true, that ragged but right doctrine proved from the pens of those who had bled ink on paper before and who had come to grasp at least some understanding of the secret. However, after another reread of that blog entry my own gnawing mystery emerged in my head. How do I, in written words, say the same thing again without saying it the same way I said it the last time I wrote about it?

That answer never did come quickly or easily to me and hasn’t yet. Maybe the answer lies shrouded in the fog and the haze somewhere outside the outskirts of my imagination. So, that blog entry, the old hiatus-starter, stayed saved on a flash drive waiting to emerge from that murky and shadowy place.

Apparently I was on a roll though. I then inadvertently ignored another well-worn axiom those who write are advised to follow: write, write and rewrite…then rewrite again. It’s ‘practice makes perfect’ put into practice. Keep writing because something good will eventually come out the other side. Sharpen and focus. Spit and shine. Or in the case of this particular blog entry, rewrite and rewrite and find a way to say something unique about something which has been said before.

But I didn’t go back and work on that blog entry. I did write a few other things. I dabbled some with some other things I had written including some fiction I had started and stopped a few years back. Now and then I would look at the blog and think how I needed to try again. But then, life and work and all sorts of other things came along and then without warning months had passed by with no new blog entries.

And there you have another consequence to this whole blog experience. It takes time and dedication to keep it all going. In some strange way, a blog is like that pet you begged your parents for when you were a kid. You just had to have it, so your parents fell to your persuasive powers but told you in no uncertain terms that you would have to take care of that pet. Not long after getting that pet, reality weighed in like the cold, wet nose of that same pet making you understand that the pet had to be fed constantly and that could be quite the constant chore. Back then your parents might bail you out and take care of the pet. Now though it’s hard to ignore the fact that this beast has to be fed, cold, wet nose and all.

And so, ten months now after that last blog entry, here I am again, hands on a keyboard, fingers lightly tracing the pattern of the keys, eyes gazing onto a blank white screen, thoughts racing through my head that need some capturing then pulling apart and pushing together and placed in an order that might make sense. This is where the puzzle pieces of so many things get poured onto the table to be put together. This is the fun part.

So, where did we leave off? Oh, yeah, hiatus. Avoiding another one, well, that will be the challenging part. Hiatus? That sure is a funny word, isn't it?

Why The Fern Hanging On the End of The Porch Looks Like It Is About To Die

I come from a long line of people who have spent a lot of time growing things. Not one summer of my life has slipped by without some discussion, detailed or just in passing, with some family member about the garden they are growing or the flower bed cared for with lots of time and love. Sad to say, and a bit ashamed to say, this piece of family know-how didn’t seem to make it down to me. Even a middle school stint in the Future Farmers of America didn’t help me that much in this regard. I just don’t seem to have the ability or patience to grow much of anything.

My wife is no help in all this either. She claims no green thumb. She tries and has succeeded with a few plants and some herbs but nothing very elaborate. We do try though at least on some small scale. Usually every spring, we bring home some baskets to hang on our porch. Usually somehow we end up allowing this plant life to slowly wilt away in summer’s heat. And yes, we do that even with ferns. Ferns seem to be pretty resilient. They stand a lot of heat, a lot of water and can stand some neglect. We speak from experience as we have made some nice ferns endure all three. This year four plants, two hanging baskets of petunias and two fern hanging baskets, came into our care.

While we can do enough damage on our own to hanging baskets we have found one other thing limits the growth of hanging baskets at our house. Birds, and in our neighborhood, we have lots of birds. The last few years we have been bombarded with birds from seemingly every direction and they seem to really like nesting in baskets hanging on our porch. No doubt the faulty workmanship on our chimney which allowed water to damage some siding probably also helped attract birds to our house. These winged foul would interrupt Sunday afternoon naps with their beaks bouncing off the outer shell of the chimney as they searched for bugs or as they tried to make enough of an indent into the crumbling exterior to create a hole where they might infiltrate and nest for awhile. It all was maddening and caused me to declare war on the birds in my yard although all I really could do was glare at them then snarl and plead with them to not do that anymore making me feel like a parent whose child has pitched a fit at the most inappropriate time and place while the rest of the world happens to be watching. Over this past winter, we remedied our bird problem with some extensive house repair. Since then, the neighborhood birds and I get along.

No doubt ferns everywhere were pleased with the great bird truce of 2010 as this likely increased their odds of surviving the long summer days on our porch. Surely, the thought must be that these two folks, minus the bird issue, can provide enough water and care to carry a fern’s life from scorching heat into fall’s first frost. And, honestly, we do try.

This year though, one fern is not going to make it much longer.

A few weeks back, I came home one evening and as I pulled into the driveway, rain began to fall. I rushed into the house past my wife and out to the porch. There, I lifted each hanging basket off it’s hook and sat each at the bottom of the steps so each basket could soak up some of the rain that was falling. As I placed the last basket, a fern, on the ground, I noticed a bird’s nest with three small blue eggs embedded underneath a secret veil of fern leaves. The rain began to beat down then so my instincts drove me back onto the porch and then into the house. There I began explaining to my wife the reason I rushed through the house to the porch was so that the hanging baskets might get some water this week. As an aside to her, I noted the one fern basket which a week or so earlier we realized housed a bird’s nest now had three small blue eggs in it. Jennifer then looked at me and asked me if I had left that basket in the rain. Sure, I replied, slow to grasp my own stupidity. I then walked into our living room. Through a window I saw a bird perched on the porch railing underneath where a fern hung moments earlier. The bird turned her head from side to side as if she were lost. Stupidity grasped. Without further thought I took myself out the door and into the rain where I retrieved the fern holding the bird’s nest and the three small blue eggs and returned it to it’s hook, safe on it’s perch from heavy rain or other enemies, such as human stupidity.

I have kept a closer eye on that fern and the nest since that evening. One day I noted two more eggs in the nest. Another day five tiny but ugly wads of birds were crammed into the intricate tangle of twigs and sticks constructed with a mother’s love. Now I watch that mother bird flit around the fern feeding five mouths while another fern slowly turns brown.

So, just in case you come by our house and upon inspection you see that the hanging baskets on our porch don’t look so healthy and you wonder why, well, now you know. We’re not that great with plant life, but we do try. And while our porch this year may not be quite as adorned as it could have been, I don’t mind. I understand that the sweet song of the birds speaking to one another in their native language has a beauty and richness beyond what any eye could ever see.