I’ve been neglectful on posting the review to this book, which I finished sometime in early August. I honestly thought I had already posted the review. That’s how “with it” I am these days. Ha! Plus, I’m not really a “book reviewer” but have reviewed a couple of books here lately. *Special note: This book review is unsolicited. I was not given anything for it. I discovered Robin by accident on Instagram and sort of fell in love with her, but not in a weird way. In a “she gets me” kind of way. When I downloaded her book that feeling grew even more. I couldn’t put it down. Well, I did “put it down” because I had to sleep that night, but it was hard to stop reading it once I started.
Anyhow, on to A Long Time Comin‘ by Robin W. Pearson. First, the book description:
To hear Beatrice Agnew tell it, she entered the world with her mouth tightly shut. Just because she finds out she’s dying doesn’t mean she can’t keep it that way. If any of her children have questions about their daddy and the choices she made after he abandoned them, they’d best take it up with Jesus. There’s no room in Granny B’s house for regrets or hand-holding. Or so she thinks.
Her granddaughter, Evelyn Lester, shows up on Beatrice’s doorstep anyway, burdened with her own secret baggage. Determined to help her Granny B mend fences with her far-flung brood, Evelyn turns her grandmother’s heart and home inside out. Evelyn’s meddling uncovers a tucked-away box of old letters, forcing the two women to wrestle with their past and present pain as they confront the truth Beatrice has worked a lifetime to hide.
Now for my review (don’t you like how I’m telling you what’s next, like you can’t figure it out.):
This book ripped my heart out and shoved it back in, battered, bruised but better off than when it first left me. I could relate to Evelyn so much it was scary. I could even, in small ways, relate to Granny B.
The way Robin wove this story, pulling me in as I read, so I felt like I truly knew this family, walked their roads with them, was genius and other worldly.
Ruthena reminded me of people I know and when I read her chapter I had to stop and put the book down and leave it for a day. My heart needed time to recover.
At the end of the book I had to do the same. Good grief – what an emotional roller coaster ride that forced me to look at situations in my own life that I’ve been looking away from and have wanted to run away from.
It forced me to consider grace for those who I don’t believe deserve it, to wish for healing for a family shattered much like Granny B’s family was. In our case that healing can’t come earthside because many of them are gone, but I pray there was some healing I’m unaware of before they passed away.
I’m sure the fact the book took place in my own Mom’s home state of North Carolina helped make it more appealing to me, but where the story takes place doesn’t matter in the long run.
It was who it took place with and who it changes when they read it – because it changed me. Thank you, Robin. I can’t wait for your future books, but this time I’ll know to have the tissues ready. no If you would like more information on Robin and her books, you can check our her site and her blog. Her next book ‘Til I Want No More is due February 21, 2021 and is already available for preorder.
I’ve been dealing with depression recently. I go through these spurts from time to time. When I go through them I feel completely unqualified to be sharing about the need to draw closer to God, since I know I’m doing such a poor job of it myself. Maybe, though, I need to be honest when I’m failing at this trusting God stuff, or feel like I’m failing. After all, I know I’m not alone.
One reason for my social media break is that I often run to forums about my health or depression issues to attempt to find solutions instead of running to God. As I have struggled this week with wrong thoughts, I have really been feeling like God has been telling me to press into him. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I’d guess he means I need to trust him and not my circumstances.
I feel him asking me to trust him and not people on the internet or my own means.
I heard a clip of a sermon yesterday by Pastor Steven Furtick who suggested that when we are telling God “Hey, I’m trying,” he is telling us “I don’t need you to try. I need you to trust.”
But there have also been other outcomes, that weren’t my choice, that has strengthened me and taught me and taken me down life-giving paths I never would have chosen on my own. I need to remember those when my days are dark, my heart is heavy, and my mind is jumbled with worries and stress.
This week when I have awoken in the night with a weird symptom and that pounding, suffocating, and overwhelming fear that hits me, I am trying to press into God’s goodness, his desire to prosper me, not harm me, to draw me through the bad moments when I want to be lifted out of them. So I often I base how well my day is going to go on if I think I had a good nights sleep. God is bigger than a bad night of sleep. I need to trust that I can have a good day whether I’ve had a good night of sleep or not because ultimate rest comes in ultimate trust that God’s got this, no matter what “this” is for each day.
More encouraging or thoughtful words under the theme “Faithfully Thinking”:
Welcome to Random Thoughts for the Week, where I share . . . well, random thoughts or events from throughout the week. Feel free to share your own random thoughts in the comments!
I was so proud of the header I shared on my first Random Thoughts last week because I put the clip art together in my own design. My bubble was burst when I showed my son yesterday and he said “That brain is backwards. The brain stem is coming out of the mouth. How did you not notice that?”
AAAAARRRRRGH!
Public school is looking like a better option more and more lately (that being said, homeschool sessions start Wednesday here). Also, I redesigned my header, obviously, and now the brain stem isn’t coming out of the head’s mouth.
From my son: “We’re all born dumb, stupid and frail. In other words, we’re born a politician.”
Here are a couple phrases or words I will be glad to never hear or read again my entire life: social distancing, quarantine, face masks, or Fauci.
I was watching a movie on Netflix with Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott. No spoilers, but they kissed and my children walked in at that moment and screamed “Old people are kissing!!!!” while pointing at the screen. Next weekend at Sunday dinner I’m asking my parents to kiss so they will be traumatized even more.
I’ve always had a crush on Lou Diamond Phillips. I don’t know if this is a random thought or a confession.
Our kitten only likes to lay on my chest when I’m wearing a bra because the bra makes my chest more like a shelf. That’s all I’m going to say about being a woman and getting old.
My son, while playing Amish Paradise by Weird Al Yankovic asked “Whatever happened to all the Amish around here?” He had a good point. I haven’t seen any Amish in our area in years and we used to. We at least saw some Menonnites. Readers, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to research what happened to all the Amish in northern Pennsylvania. Let me know and I’ll include it in my random thoughts next week. (This is just a joke. I really can look that up myself.)
I won’t be surprised if all this COVID craziness reveals a few things for people, including the fact that colleges are over priced and many students can get the same education online for much less. Also that we need to focus more on skilled labor training.
I spent part of my Sunday Googling the phrase: “How did my cat get so fat?” How did I get to this point in my life?
I’ve been jokingly calling our cat Fatty and Fatso but stopped this week when she gave me one of those “I Will Kill You In Your Sleep” expressions. I had a feeling she was thinking: “I don’t call you fatty, lady, and I could, so back off.”
My mom recently told me that my dad told my grandfather, her dad: “I want to ask permission to marry her but if you say ‘no’ we are going to get married anyhow.” If you knew my dad and my grandfather you would know why this is a pretty surprising statement by my dad. To explain a little: picture one of those stereotypical stern Southern fathers in any movie or book and that was my grandfather. Picture the fairly polite, quiet, shy Pennsylvania farm boy and you have my dad. I guess he really wanted to marry my mom.
— Looking through and old journal app again I found another winner from my daughter.
Me to Little Miss : “I don’t want to cook dinner … I’m tired.”
Little Miss: “Well, then what are we supposed to eat? Air? Um… no… there is just oxygen in the air.”
That’s about the time I decided I needed to stop letting her watch any educational shows. She was almost five when she said this. Jesus, please help me prepare now for her teenage years.
So, how about you? What are your random thoughts for this week? Let me know in the comments.
Sunday Bookends is my week in review, so to speak. It’s where I share what I’ve been up to, what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been watching, what I’ve been listening to and what I’ve been writing. Feel free to share a link or comment about your week in the comments.
What’s Been Occuring (yes, this is a referrence to Gavin & Stacy if you’ve ever seen it. If not it is on BBC America, or Britbox on Amazon.)
What a shock to my system when I looked across our backyard at the beginning of last week and watched yellow leaves fall to the ground in a gentle breeze. It’s not even September and our leaves are already changing color. By the end of the week, the maple tree by the garden shed was transforming from green to a deadish looking orange, raising concern within me that we will have yet another dull autumn to make the world seem even more dark and morose this year. Who knows, though, nature has surprised me before.
This year has given us a lot of hits and one of those has been the closing of the libraries. This has sent me down a path of depression because I was so excited to be able to visit our local library once we moved here but instead we are told we can only call in and order books. If I want to order books, I can do that online. I like to visit the library so I can actually touch the books, read the descriptions, decide if I want them and simply enjoy the feeling of being surrounded by so many portals to other worlds on the shelves.
I paid our water bill the other day and as I pulled out of the street the borough hall is on I looked down at the library and thought about going in. Then I realized we aren’t allowed to just walk in and look at the shelves and I felt a catch in my throat about it all.
If you’ve noticed a lot of typos in my replies to your comments lately, it’s because I’m often holding a sleeping kitten on one arm while I’m trying to respond. I seem to be little Scout’s personal bed and she rarely takes in to account that I need to move for such things as cooking dinner, cleaning up messes, letting the dog out or using the toilet facilities. She looks quite shocked each time her bed moves for one of these, or any other reason. She’s definitely growing fast and I know that one day she might not want to cuddle with me so I need to enjoy it while I can. My other fear is that one day in the future she will want to still cuddle with me and she’ll be so large I’ll be suffocated under all her fur.
This past week didn’t leave a lot of time for reading mainly because my head and body hurt too much to read or I was taking care of children whose heads and bodies also hurt. We caught some sort of short-lived (thankfully) summer cold. Of course my mind immediately jumped to “the virus” when my daughter started coughing in the middle of the night after spending the day at her grandparents swimming and looking for frogs in their pond. My mind didn’t go there when her nose was running earlier in the day because I assumed she had walked into something she was allergic to in the filed. ‘Tis the season for ragweed after all. But when she started coughing and couldn’t sleep that night, keeping both her and me awake, and when she developed a fever in the morning, I started making plans for how to get her tested.
We called the pediatrician’s office at the end of the next day and the pediatrician on call answered our question about summer cold’s going around with an affirmative and said our daughter’s illness seemed to be following the pattern of the common cold and not “The Virus.” The particular virus everyone is talking about seems to develop first as the dry cough (which my daughter had in the middle of the night), a sore throat (which she also had), a headache and then a fever. For her, and then later my son and me, the illness developed first with feeling “off” and achy for a little while, but also with runny noses, nasal congestion and a low grade fever.
Her fever reached 102, inching toward 103, but came down easily with some children’s Motrin. The bottom line was that the pediatrician suggested to continue our at home treatments, keep an eye on her, see how she was in a few days and then call again if it seemed worse or to be more like the pattern of COVID. We never had to worry about that because the next day she was better and she’s only been left with the sniffles which are acting more like allergies than anything else.
My son and I are still sneezing and blowing our noses and I’ve been battling a sinus headache (which I’ve actually been battling off and on all summer because of the high humidity.) but we are on the mend and bracing ourselves more sinus issues when the temperatures begin to drop in preparation for Fall.
What I’m Reading
On the first night of Little Misses’ illness I didn’t fall asleep until 4:30 a.m. I had felt so good earlier that day and even felt pretty good while she was crying because she couldn’t breathe through her nose and waking me up every hour. After giving up on the sleep idea, I read some of The Cold Dish (the first in the Longmire series) by Craig Johnson. When I finally fell asleep in the wee-hours of the morning I dreamed of killers out in the snow somewhere in rural Wyoming.
This book is definitely not my normal read and maybe that’s why I like it. It’s not your run of the mill mystery. The characters are well developed, especially Sheriff Walt Longmire, the main character, and his friend Henry Standing Bear. There is even a bit of romance thrown in as Walt, still struggling to face the grief of his wife who passed away four years before, begins dating Vonnie, a woman he’s known for a few years. The book draws you into the various relationships and mysteries gradually, dropping hints here and there about relationships before fully revealing them. One of those relationships is with Longmire’s daughter, Cady, who so far is only mentioned once or twice in passing but you begin to realize something isn’t right with their relationship in the way he keeps trying to reach her by the phone but she isn’t picking up.
I have watched some of the show based on these books and there are definite differences. For one, in the show Henry is played by Lou Diamond Phillips (yummy) the Philapinno-American actor who seems to often be typecast as Native Americans because he looks like one. In the books, however, Henry is not really a dreamy 50-year old; he’s a larger, bigger and more complicated man who served in Vietnam with Walt.
I enjoy Johnson’s writing style, but of course, being a self-proclaimed prude, I could do without some of the more colorful language. Of course, if I was a real “prude” I probably wouldn’t be reading the book at all.
I haven’t tried starting or continuing any other books this week. Hopefully some of the sinus pressure will lift this next week and I can read a little more.
What I’m Watching
To avoid politics and try to deal with our summer cold, we’ve been watching a lot of comedy, including comedians from Drybar Comedy. I especially liked Zoltan Kaszas (would love to know the story behind that name) and Matt Falk. I’m sharing one of my favorite Matt Falk bits with you and will let you look Zoltan up because this blog post is getting a bit jumbled with links.
What I’m Listening To
My brother was nice enough to let me know that Needtobreathe had a new album out. I knew part of the album was out, but not that all of it had been released, so I’m going to be listening to more of that this week. So far, it’s pretty good, but I do miss Bo Reinhardt, one of the founding members who left earlier this year.
What I’m Writing
I’m deep in revisions of the novella Quarantined and am trying to write all the scenes that are in my head for The Farmer’s Daughter as fast as they pop up, which has been fast this week. I may go back during editing and delete half of those scenes I write anyhow. I’ve already eliminated one I really liked because I felt like it won’t work with the final draft of the story, but we’ll see. It might serve as my segway into book number two, The Librarian. I hope to have Quarantined ready for publication sometime at the end of September and The Farmer’s Daughter ready for the first part of January 2021.
Not that any of you probably care but in my head the books of the series will be The Farmer’s Daughter, a novella The Farmer’s Son,The Librarian, The Farmer, The Pastor’s Wife, and possibly The Editor.
Somewhere in there I have planned a novella or novel called Related by Blood, which will continue the story of Hank from A New Beginning and deal with his relationship with his son Jackson once Jackson is an adult. A friend told me I have to drop all my other books and write this one first because she wants to know what happened to Hank, but we will see what happens.I would love to also finish Fully Aliveat some point but I’ve flipped that story on it’s head with a new idea so that may take a bit.
As always, this is a work of fiction in progress. What I share on the blog is not the final draft of the novel or novella I’m working on. I reread, rewrite, and rework the stories a few times before I finally publish them on Kindle or Barnes and Noble. I also try to fix typos, plot holes, and punctuation issues in the final draft and have it proofed and edited. If you see errors in the chapters I post on the blog, feel free to send me a note on my contact form (link at the top of the page) so I can make the corrections, if I haven’t caught them aready.
Following along with the story and missed a week or want to follow along? Find the other chapters HERE.
Have some thoughts on the story itself? Let me know in the comments.
Chapter 5
Cassie climbed under the covers and flopped on her back to stare at the ceiling, moonlight cutting a square across it from the window.
What was with all of Matt’s weird questions tonight? The situation with Liam and Maddie must be rattling him even more than she realized. She rolled to her side, fluffed up her pillow, hugged it and tried to get more comfortable.
It wasn’t working.
Her mind was racing too much.
Maybe Liam and Maddie’s situation was rattling her too.
She was thinking about them and their marriage, and viruses and if her family was safe and how to get groceries if they had to shelter in place for even longer and the media and what they’d be saying for the rest of the week with Matt and his staff having still worked for a week after they knew they’d been exposed to a contagious virus and . . . .
She squeezed her eyes shut, sucked in a deep breath, and held it for several seconds before letting it out again. She had to calm down. What was that one relaxation technique she’d heard about again? Breathe in six seconds, hold five? Or was it, breathe in seven and hold six and then let it out for the count of four or was it letting it out for the count of seven? Oh, forget it. Trying to remember the technique was making her even more anxious.
She closed her eyes and tried to focus on one worry at a time instead.
She couldn’t deny that there were days she regretted agreeing with Matt that he should run for the senate in the first place. They both had such high hopes six years ago; hopes that they could make changes for the voters who had put their faith in Matt, while not being changed themselves. But it was impossible not to be changed by the influences of Washington, D.C. Nothing in this city was like the small upstate New York town Cassie had grown up in and it was also nothing like Stevensville, Ohio where she and Matt had lived before he had been elected.
Stevensville, Ohio was small. Very small. Like everyone knows your name and your business small. It was also still her and Matt’s home in the summers when they left the city behind for much needed breaks. Only that break wouldn’t be coming this year. Not with all the craziness about viruses and quarantines and freezes on travel. Cassie wanted to cry but she was afraid to because once she started, she might not stop. She was homesick for New York and Ohio, for her own family, for Matt’s family, for the familiar she’d left behind when Matt was elected six years ago.
She sighed and opened her eyes, looking at the other side of the bed where Matt slept most nights of the week, unless he was working late and then he stayed at John’s apartment, closer to his office. She touched cool sheets, thinking of how many nights they’d laid here next to each other, back to back, rarely speaking because she knew he needed his sleep, because she knew he needed to get up early in the morning, because she didn’t want to burden him anymore than he was already burdened.
But she missed him. She missed him holding her and them talking about their future, instead of him telling her about the stress he’d been under that day and then falling into a fitful sleep. She missed his hand on her cheek as he moved closer late at night, a small, mischievous smile that signaled he wasn’t ready for sleep yet.
She missed long, slow kisses, roaming hands, but as much as the physical, she missed the emotional connection they’d once had. The connection when Matt wanted to talk with her before anyone else, when he didn’t want to make a decision unless he’d asked her, and when she’d known so much about his day, his job and his life that it was as if they were thinking like one person.
“Cassie, are you sure you’re okay with this?” he’d asked eight and a half years ago when he’d considered running for Senate.
“Yeah. I am.”
That’s what she’d said, but she really hadn’t been sure she was okay with it. She was okay with Matt wanting to help the people of his small hometown and the surrounding counties by becoming a senator from Ohio, but she wasn’t really sure she was okay with the lives of their entire family being upended. She’d given up her social worker career four years before, deciding to spend more time at home with the children. Matt’s career as a lawyer had exploded and from there he’d become involved in county politics and then state politics. When the state’s Republican party came to him and asked him to run for the senate, he’d turned them down at first. But after several meetings, a few months of consideration, and talking to Cassie, his parents, his sister and brother, and his pastor, he’d decided to step into an already contentious race for the seat.
From the moment he’d announced to the day he won the seat the lives of the Grant family had been a whirlwind. After the election, the moving began. Tyler had been 7 at the time, Gracie 3 and Lauren was born in Washington. Every effort was made to ensure that the children and Cassie would see Matt as much as possible, despite his job, but there were weeks they still barely saw him at all.
The idea of having the family living close had been a good one, but the execution of it had started to fail within six months. Meetings, conferences, sessions that ran late into the night, and media-made emergencies were constant, taking over every aspect of Matt and Cassie’s life. Matt still made every effort to attend baseball games, dance recitals, and Saturday mornings at the park, in addition to balancing his responsibilities as a senator, but that left little to almost no time for him and Cassie.
For the most part, Cassie was okay with being the last in line for his attention. She preferred he spend as much time as he could with the children during their formative years. This was a season of life, not a new normal. Time for them, as a couple, would come later, when things slowed down.
If things slow down, Cassie thought, panic suddenly gripping her, like a heavy weight in the center of her chest. If Matt gets reelected we could have another six years of this and maybe even another six after that. . .It’s already been six, I don’t know if I can take another six.
She shuddered, pulling the covers up around her, even though it wasn’t that cold in their bedroom. She tried to imagine six more years, or even more, of accusations against her husband, and sometimes even her, in the press. She tried to imagine six more years of barely seeing her husband; of feeling like her husband’s nanny, even though she loved her children desperately; and of constituents confronting her husband when they were out in public, complaining about this or that change he’d promised he’d make if elected but still hadn’t been able to.
Tyler would be graduating high school at the end of six years. So much of his life had already been consumed by Matt’s position. Would he have to endure it during his high school years as well?
Cassie knew it wasn’t only the quiet life she and Matt had led before he’d entered politics that she was homesick for. She was homesick for time alone with Matt. She was tired of sharing him with his staff, his fellow congressmen, his constituents, and the press. She was tired of feeling like she was second in line for his attention, even though she knew he didn’t mean to make her feel that way.
Who knows, she thought, feeling sleep finally settling on her. Maybe this quarantine will be good for not only Liam and Maddie but for Matt and me. Maybe I’ll actually get him to myself for once.
***
The election had been brutal. There was no denying it. Worse than the campaigning, the traveling, the long days, had been the media coverage. Non-stop negative stories aimed at destroying Matthew Eben Grant before he could even open his mouth. The media machine was out of control. There was no denying it, especially after that first month of campaigning when one of the state’s biggest newspapers had questioned his staff’s lack of diversity. Those questions had led to him refusing to answer questions of his campaign staff’s ethnic backgrounds and horrified when a newspaper had called the head of his campaign his “one token person of color,” as if she hadn’t been qualified for her job simply on the merits of her professional experience.
From that story it was a quick jump to combing through Matt and Liam’s social media accounts, searching for anything that would sink them in the political arena. One rogue satirical Tweet from his college days, labeled as sexist by feminists, dominated headlines for a few days, but as it always was with the current 24-hour/7-day a week news cycle, the press had turned it’s hungry eyes to another candidate, another subject to devour. the following week.
The polls showed Matt losing and big, right up until election day, but the night of the election the numbers had come in fast and furious late in the evening. Matt had won by a landslide. Apparently the silent voters, the one who didn’t want to be yelled at or condemned for their opinions, had come out in droves and sent a hard message home to the incumbent and his political party: “We’ve had enough of the status quo and of corrupt politicians with empty promises and even emptier apologies.”
Matt knew, though ,that in less than a year he could be in the same boat and it could be his rear end with the boot of the voter against it as they shoved him out the door. Voters preferences were fickle and ever changing and some days nothing a senator did could make anyone happy. Matt had only been a senator for six years, but it felt like it had been 100. Now he had a small idea why so many presidents went gray while in office, though thankfully he didn’t have the same pressure as a president.
He yawned, stretching his arms out as if he intended to stand up and head up to bed, but he didn’t stand up. Instead he fell back on the couch, remote in hand. He surfed streaming services, suggested shows and movies scrolling by, but he wasn’t really seeing any of it. His mind had slipped back to five and a half years ago, to near the end of the election when the news stories were at their worst. He was being called a racist, anti-woman, anti-this, anti-that. He had lost count of all the names they had called him.
“Is this even worth it?” he asked Cassie one night in bed, snuggled close against her.
“If you can get in there and really help facilitate some change, then, yes, it’s worth it,” she assured him.
But then the win came and with it came more news stories, personal attacks against him and his family. The worst came when one of his staff members brought him an article about Cassie, accusing her of being fired from her previous job.
He was furious. “Where did they even get that story? Cassie was never fired from her job. She left to support me and be with the children.”
Scanning the story, he saw a former co-worker of Cassie’s was quoted and offered only summations, not facts. Still, the headline suggested the accusations were true. It wouldn’t have upset Matt as much if it had been about him instead of Cassie. He’d grown accustomed to being accused of inappropriate acts or offensive words, or anything else the press could come up with, but Cassie?
Cassie was off limits.
Only she wasn’t off limits.
She wasn’t off limits because he had made her fair game when he’d decided to accept the party’s urging to run.
He’d dragged her out into the open and essentially thrown her to the wolves.
The story had been pushed to the side quickly in a few days with another news story, about another politician, overshadowing it. One of the only good aspects of the 24/7 news cycle was how fast paced it was. It meant a story that was in the forefront one day was gone by the next and even though the story on Cassie had faded fast, he still felt incredible guilt about how much he’d exposed his family during this process.
He’d always wanted to protect Cassie. Now he didn’t know how to. In a hyper-political atmosphere that was beginning to suffocate him, the negativity was coming from every side.
His phone rang and he glanced at the ID before answering it. He let out a sigh of relief when he saw it wasn’t John, a member of the Senate or the press trying to reach him.
“Hey, bro,” he said to Liam. “You hanging in there?”
“Yeah. Locked myself in my office. You?”
“Yeah. Feels weird just to be sitting at home.”
“A good weird or a bad weird?”
“Both.”
“Things okay with Cassie? The kids?”
“Kids are doing great. They don’t know much about what’s going on. Cassie’s . . . okay, I guess. She seems tired.”
“Is she mad at you for all this?”
Matt laughed. “She doesn’t seem mad, really. She just seems like Cassie. She’s cooking for the kids and me, cleaning, checking on her parents.”
“Did you ask her if she was okay?”
“Yeah, she said she’s fine.”
Matt heard a small laugh on the other end of the phone.
“What?” he asked. “No. Don’t even say it. You think ‘I’m fine’ is code for something else.”
“You know I’m no expert on women,” Liam started.
“Uh, obviously.”
“But I am learning during this that apparently when a woman says she’s okay, she’s really not,” Liam continued. “I didn’t know that Maddie was struggling, Matt. I just thought she hated me, that I was doing everything wrong, but I think she feels — I don’t know. Abandoned? She pretty much told me she feels like I abandoned her.”
Matt sighed, laying on his back, staring at the ceiling. He slid his arm behind his head. “In what way did you abandon her?”
“Staying at work too much, for one. She says I worked more so I didn’t have to face us losing the babies.”
“Did you?”
“No, I . . .”
Liam’s voice trailed off and then there was a brief silence. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I did. When you asked me to be your press secretary I jumped at it because I knew I would be so busy I wouldn’t have to think about losing the babies, about that empty hole in the center of my chest.”
Matt grimaced as he sat up, propping his elbow against his knee. “Liam, I’m sorry I was so focused on the election, on me really, that I didn’t notice all you were going through.”
“Dude, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I didn’t even admit to myself how much it was bothering me.”
“I know, it’s just — I’m really starting to realize how out of touch I’ve been with what really matters in the last few years; you and Maddie, the kids. Cassie. When I decided to run, I pulled all of you —”
“Matt. No. You were doing what you felt was right. And it wasn’t just you who decided to run. We all decided. As a family. We knew this could be rough. Yeah, it’s a little worse than we expected with all the extra political drama going on these days, but we are still in this together. It’s okay. We’re all okay. Well, we will be okay, one way or another anyhow. None of this is your fault.”
Matt flopped back on the couch again. “I know it isn’t. But I still feel . . . guilty. I don’t know. What I do know is that all of this, this forced slow down, has opened my eyes up to what I’ve been missing lately. I don’t like that our family, or our country, is going through this, but it’s putting some things in perspective for me.”
Liam sighed on the other end of the phone. “Yeah. It’s doing the same for me.”
I’m going to try a new feature this week, which I’ll probably share a couple of times a month: random thoughts. I stole this idea from my husband who sometimes does this for his weekly column in the newspaper. His random thoughts are shorter than mine because, well, I just ramble too much (hence the blog title: Boondock Ramblings.).
— I found this gem from the journal app on my phone. It was from last year so Little Miss swould have been almost 5. To set the scene, I was making my grocery list for that week.
Me: “Oh. I forgot to add veggies to my list.”
Little Miss: “Oh no, I know I get those when I wear too tight pants.”
Me: “What? Oh. No, honey. I said I forgot the veggies.”
Her: “Oh… well, now I gave away one of my secrets.”
— Most of the people who wait on me at our local dollar store are less than friendly. They were less than friendly before masks but now I can’t tell if they are smiling (doubt it) or scowling at me (pretty sure).
I try to joke with them, be friendly, but they just keep sliding my purchases into bags and acting like I’m not even talking. Most of the people at the stores in our town are pretty friendly so their behavior is unusual for me. it was the norm where we used to live.
I have often heard of people in more urban areas always being miserable (not the lovely folks who read my blog of course) and I can now see why.
I mean, who would be cheerful if everywhere you go people are grumpy? Except, we can choose to be cheerful even if people are grumpy to us and I did. I told the woman ‘thank you! Have a good day!” and I sang a familiar worship song on the way to my van. No use letting her dampen my spirits.
—- The other day I was watching a movie and Little Miss was in the room. A character uttered a bad word. I hadn’t been expecting it and told Little Miss: “Never repeat that word.”
“That word?” she asked. “Oh. That’s the word you said the other day.”
Ouch.
Must have been a stressful moment because I don’t remember saying it, incidentally. It’s not in my usual repertoire.
— I love having kids who are so unspoiled that they are excited when I bring socks home from the store. “Socks!” Little Miss declared Friday reaching into a Dollar General bag. “Oh, thank you!”
She then proceeded to try each one on, deciding if the peach colored ones were softer than the blue or purple ones.
“Oh my. These feel so soft on the hard floor. Not so much on the carpet, but on the hard floor they make my feet feel soooo soft.”
Eventually she put all five on at once and said they were even more amazing when worn all together. Who knew buying socks would be so exciting for her?
— Our town is so small that just about everyone I bump into has lived in our house at one time or another. Okay, so only two people I have run into so far. One is the secretary at the borough (town for people outside of PA) office and the other is our neighbor.
I have a feeling I will bump into quite a few more, though, because eight children grew up in this house at one time. Looking at the three bedrooms upstairs I couldn’t figure out how so I asked the lady at the borough office. Apparently there were four bunk beds for four boys in my daughter’s room and her room is the smallest in the house. I really can’t picture four bunk beds in there.
The girls were in my son’s room and the parents were my husband and my room. And back then they only had one bathroom. I contemplated this whole idea of a family of 10 in this house when we first moved in and mentioned it to an older neighbor who bluntly informed me “Well they didn’t have all the s*** we have now.” So, there you go then. That was blunt.
— Kittens are super warm.
— Dogs are also warm.
— Warm pets aren’t the best thing in hot weather, especially curled up on your chest.
— Josh Turner has a new album of covers. That’s exciting for country music fans
— Going off social media does wonders for your brain and your energy. Eliminating news adds even more happiness to one’s life
So there are some random thoughts for this week. What are your random thoughts? Let me know in the comments section.
I found this piece in a journal app on my phone that I haven’t really been using lately. It was written a year ago today. I’m not sure why I never shared it anywhere before.
I’m seeing ghosts today
Today I looked around the corner of my parents house and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw her sitting there. She was in the glider, rocking it by pushing one foot against the concrete floor, hand against her chin like it always was when she was thinking. She was looking out at a blur of green and brown – the barn and the freshly mowed field. Everything was a blur since her eyesight had started failing years before.
“Whatchya doing, Grandma?” I might would say.
“Oh, just enjoying the cooler weather,” she’d say.
“Not contemplating world domination then?”
She’d laugh fully, head back, and squint at me from the shaded place she was sitting.
“No, no. I wouldn’t want that,” she might say.
And she would rock and then Leonardo, the fat cat someone dropped off at my parents’ no-longer used barn, would climb up and sit next to her. She was the only person he’d let pet him, pressing his little form against her thigh as she stroked him and rocked and enjoyed the cool weather.
Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw another ghost, brushing a cat, then turning to water a plant.
“Whew. Sure glad for this cooler weather,” she’d say. “Lordy Lordy. It’s been hot, girl.”
She’d take a swig from her bottle of Diet Pepsi, the one she shouldn’t be drinking, and sit back on that same glider Grandma and used to sit on and look out over the green hills, the dirt road weaving between them.
“Sho is purty today, ain’t it?” She would ask, exaggerating her southern accent for fun.
“Sho is,” I’d say.
Together we’d look out over the fields, my dad’s garden, the children chasing each other, the dog chasing them, the cat lounging on the deck railing and we would sigh a contented sigh.
I’m seeing ghosts today because they’re all gone – Grandma, Dianne, even the cats. But somehow it’s like they’re still there – the shape of them – the feel of them – the sight of them out of the corner of my eye.
Sometimes it’s like they’re still there – on the fringe of it all, the chaos of life, the struggles, the joys, just sitting on the glider, rocking it back and forth, enjoying the cooler weather, never fully gone; wisps of a reality I’ll touch again one day.
Sunday Bookends is my week in review, so to speak. It’s where I share what I’ve been up to, what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been watching, what I’ve been listening to and what I’ve been writing. Feel free to share a link or comment about your week in the comments.
Our adult cat Pixel has a nightly routine where she jumps up on the edge of the bathroom counter and waits for one of us (me) to turn the faucet on for her so she can drink water out of it. She has been doing this for a couple of years now. Her routine has been thrown off, however, since we adopted the new kitten (Scout) about a month ago.
We close Scout in the bathroom at night to keep her from hurting herself and to protect her from Pixel, who likes to slap Scout around if she gets too close. I still tried to keep Pixel’s routine by letting her into the bathroom for a drink before we put Scout to bed, but instead of drinking Pixel would sit on the counter watching Scout play on the floor below and growl. I’d finally toss Pixel out and she’d swish her tail at me and then proceed to glare at me from the hallway while I slept.
This past week Pixel started walking in the bathroom before we closed the door for Scout, yowling at Scout but then jumping up on the counter to actually drink from the faucet, reclaiming some of the routine she had before Scout. Incidentally, the water has to be turned on to just the right flow for her to drink from it. If it is too fast or too slow she sits back and looks at me through narrowed green slits until I tap the handle and get the flow right.
Unfortunately Pixel doesn’t want to leave her spot when she’s done drinking now. She’d rather sit and watch Scout and growl warnings at her. But I need her to leave because otherwise she might eat Scout when we are asleep. So, I try to carry her out of the bathroom, which is hard lately because she’s gotten so fat that we are wondering if some of the other neighbors are feeding her when she’s outside pouting about the new addition to the family. Or maybe she ate one of the neighborhood cats. We don’t know but she’s gotten large.
For the first week we had Scout, Pixel wouldn’t even let me pet her and spent the majority of her days outside, scowling at us from the backporch like a teenager.
Now she at least comes into the house for part of the day and allows me to pet her again. She has even returned to sleeping at the bottom of the bed (an aside: she snores). Hopefully she will eventually accept Scout or at least stop slapping her in the head when Scout tries to sniff her.
What I’m Reading
I guess the theme for this week is cats because in addition to our “cat drama” I also noticed a paperback on my shelf that I had never read: The Cat Who Had 14 Tales by Lillian Jackson Braun. It is a collection of short stories about, well, cats, obviously.
Braun is the author of The Cat Who . . . mystery series so of course she would write a collection of short stories about cats. They are really entertaining and cute stories. I’m sure it is available at local libraries or on Kindle as well.
On the other side of the spectrum I am still reading the first book in the Longmire series by Craig Johnson and enjoying it so far. It’s a series about a slightly unconventional sheriff in a rural area of Wyoming. It’s also been made into a show on Netflix.
We are also still reading The Bottle Cap Lady by John Spier from My Life With Gracie each night before bed. Little Miss has been playing hard this week with the temperatures being so nice and mild so we haven’t gotten too far in the book. She’s been passing out in exhaustion about five minutes into the reading. We’re going to try to start earlier the rest of this week.
Up on the reading list next is some lighter fare with The Secret Life of Sarah Hollenbeck by Bethany Turner. I started this one a couple of months ago but got distracted with a couple of other books, not because I didn’t like the book, but because I have the attention span of a gnat sometimes when it comes to books.
What I’m Watching
I asked my husband if we were going to go to a fish fry near our house Friday night and he said “Nah. I’d rather stay home and watch TV with you.” That’s when it hit me. I’d made him watch a couple episodes of Virigin River with me on Netflix and now, even though he’d made fun of it for using evey trope known to girly/CW shows, I had gotten him hooked on it.
Me: “I got you hooked on my girly show didn’t I?”
Him: “Sadly, yes.”
Ha! Love it. In all all honesty, though, we’ve spent most of the episodes making fun of some serious plot holes and the over use of romance novel-like tropes. I also had to confess to him that I fast forwarded a lot of the later episodes because they were a bit cringe-inducing and the main character was driving me crazy by telling another main character he needed counseling for his PTSD when it was clear she also needed counseling.
It was also hard for us to watch scenes with a character named Connie because she reminded us so much of a family member who has caused us all a lot of trauma over the years. We would both visibly shudder when she came on screen and my husband said he was certain he “smelled sulfur and ozone” at the sight of her. I took that to mean she had come from the depths of hell like the family member of ours clearly has.
I unfortunately watched Nights in Rodanthe one day this week. Yikes. When will I ever learn? I very rarely like Richard Gere movies but here I was, trying it again. Honestly, I don’t think playing an arrogant surgeon was a stretch for Mr. Gere. If anyone is reading this and is a fan of this movie, I’m sorry. It actually wasn’t a horrible movie but [SPOILER ALERT] I prefer happier endings for movies. That’s all I’ll say about that. I will say, however, that the acting, of course, was very good. Richard Gere is a very good actor, as is Diane Lane. And I do have to admit that the story was a good one as well. (I should probably insert here that I’m not a fan of Nicholas Sparks so that may be why I didn’t enjoy this movie .. even though I didn’t realize until later it was based on one of his books.
I’ve been listening to a few worship songs this week, but I really need to listen to more. Here is one my favorites:
For the past year or so I’ve fallen asleep listening to a podcast on Apple that features episodes of an old late 40s early 50s American radio/TV show called Our Miss Brooks. The show started on CBS radio in 1948. It was about a high school English teacher, Miss Connie Brooks, who somehow always seems to end up in a misadventure She’s in love with the biology teacher, Mr. Phillip Boyton, who is completely clueless. She rents a room from Mrs. Davis who is also clueless and absent-minded.
Her boss is Principal Osgood Conklin, who is obnoxious and gruff. Other characters are Walter Denton, a high school student who gives her a lift to school because her car is always broke down; Harriet Conklin, Mr. Conklin’s daughter and Walter’s girlfriend; Stretch Snodgrass, a space-cadet jock; and Daisy Enright, the other English teacher in the school who is Connie’s rival for Mr. Boyton.
I did see a clip of the show on YouTube one time and from what I could tell it was super, super low budget. The writing, however, is pretty good and while some of it doesn’t hold up all these years later, the majority of the humor remains on point. Listening to it takes my mind off the stresses of the day and keeps my brain from wandering to various topics about various issues that are usually completely out of my control.
What’s been happening besides cat drama
Our weather finally broke last week, or at least briefly. The cooler temperatures were such a welcome blessing. Not feeling sweaty and light headed from the humidity was certainly welcome. It’s odd but I’m actually looking forward to Fall and being able to curl up under the covers with a good book. I say it’s odd because I once dreaded Fall since I knew it meant winter was coming and I’m not a huge fan of the cold and clouds of winter.
As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve started to hate the heat. I can barely tolerate it, so I eagerly welcome Fall to get a little break from the hot weather.
We had two days in the mid-80s and during one of them I pulled the sprinkler out for my daughter while my son went on a camping trip at my parents’ with my dad and a friend. My daughter and I also pulled some carrots and tomatoes out of my slowly dying garden. This summer has been hot and dry for the most part and our gardens and backyards are showing the damage.
