Tag Archives: friends

Taking Time for Gratitude

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When I wake each day, I spend a few moments thanking God for another day and counting my blessings. Well, not every day. There are those days when I sling shot into the morning with six things to do before breakfast. But then I try to slow down, take a breath, and remember to be thankful. Thankful that I have six things to do and can do them. Also, I’m thankful that as a retiree I have the luxury of slower mornings.

On Saturday I walk five to seven miles on the trails through Vistoso Nature Preserve, a two-hundred-acre open space that borders our backyard. In every direction, I see the glorious mountain ranges that surround us. Their solid majesty guardian of our valley. I’m grateful for the beautiful Preserve where wildlife is abundant and free to roam. I am grateful they share their space with us, invaders in their world. Today a young coyote crossed the trail about twenty feet in front of me. She stopped on the other side, paused to look at me, and then ambled into the underbrush and trees. Within seconds she disappeared, as animals do, melding into her environment. A couple of miles later, two cavorting coyotes came to the edge of the trail from an open area, noted my presence, then played on chasing each other, leaping and disappearing into the tall grass. They looked like a couple of dolphins breaching from beneath the sea.

Bird song accompanied my walk. I felt I was being passed along from song to song, bird by bird. I’m not a birder so I couldn’t identify the avian varieties, but their songs were a lovely accompaniment to the walk. Rabbits, large and small, scampered alongside trails busy in their bunny ways. They would halt to give me a look, then go about their business.

I am grateful to be able to walk. A few years ago, I broke my ankle and had to have the shattered bones screwed and plated back together. I spent weeks on the sofa unable to take even a single step on my own. Thank God for Dr. Ty who did a wonderful job of putting Humpty Dumpty back together. I so looked forward to walking across the family room into the kitchen. But… Immediately upon healing, I broke the other ankle. Don’t ask. It’s a dumb story and one for another day. I believe God saw I had not learned the lesson He intended and decided I needed more time immobilized. So again, I had to have surgery and spend more time on the sofa unable to walk.

During that long recovery period, Ken would pack me into the car for little excursions to get me out of the house and lift my spirits. What it mostly did was make me jealous of people I saw walking. Such a simple thing. We learn as babies to stand on two legs and claim our freedom to get from one place to another on our own. I did not appreciate that freedom until suddenly I was anchored down for three months. I swore that once mobile I would walk every day and appreciate each step. I have and I do. My daily walks are one to four miles and each step is blessed.

Ken still accompanies me on daily walks for up to a mile. He cannot walk further right now but hopes to increase his mobility in the near future. I’m cheering him on as he works to improve. I’m grateful that he is making every effort.

Most Saturdays I walk with my friend Roxanne, but she has been away visiting her son in Oregon, so I go alone. When we walk together, we talk, talk, talk for two hours. We solve the problems of the world and a few of our own. When I walk alone, of course, I’m really not alone with all the critters in the Preserve or friends from the neighborhood I meet along the way. My time walking alone during the week is for quiet contemplation, writing poems in my head, thinking about situations a character in one of my stories faces, or sometimes listening to music or a book on my phone. I am grateful for all those opportunities – alone or with friends.

Haiku from today

Silly woodpecker
Rapping on the metal pipe
What is he thinking?

Change * My Last Post on A Way with Words blog

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As my dear husband reminds me whenever I am flummoxed by events that modify my circumstances, “The only constant is change”. The world is always in flux. Change is life. We are not the same, day in and day out, because our lives are not static. We live in an ever-modifying world, shifting conditions and changing views. As we get older our bodies transform as do our wants and needs. Change brings growth even when we don’t immediately realize it. Change is a catalyst for learning about ourselves, others, and our world.

What I’m getting at is there is a change on the horizon with me and the A Way with Words blog. This is my last post as a regular blogger. With the permission of Sally and Jackie, I will occasionally be a contributor. Our friendship remains intact. I will always be grateful for their generous friendship and their mentorship. We spent many years learning to write together and now we are going separate ways as writers.

I established my own blog site Wonkagranny, a grandmother’s perceptions of the universe through stories, poems, and life observations. I will write posts on that site beginning September 1st.  I do not feel that I can maintain an effective presence on two blogging sites at the same time. I am writing short stories and essays that may or may not ever be published. Publication has never been a goal for me, but some of those stories and poems will be linked on my Wonkagranny site. My past posts from A Way with Words are archived on Wonkagranny.

I deeply appreciate all those who read and comment on our mutual website and I hope you will join me on my personal journey with words.

What I’m getting at is there is a change on the horizon with me and the A Way with Words blog. This is my last post as a regular blogger. With the permission of Sally and Jackie, I will occasionally be a contributor. Our friendship remains intact. I will always be grateful for their generous friendship and their mentorship. We spent many years learning to write together and now we are going separate ways as writers.

I established my own blog site Wonkagranny, a grandmother’s perceptions of the universe through stories, poems, and life observations. I will write posts on that site beginning September 1st.  I do not feel that I can maintain an effective presence on two blogging sites at the same time. I am writing short stories and essays that may or may not ever be published. Publication has never been a goal for me, but some of those stories and poems will be linked on my Wonkagranny site. My past posts from A Way with Words are archived on Wonkagranny.

I deeply appreciate all those who read and comment on our mutual website and I hope you will join me on my personal journey with words.

A Writer’s Best Friend(s)

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

Sally, Diana, Jackie

Last October I wrote a blog post called “Writers Need Wingmen” about the importance of writers’ groups. Writing is a solitary task but a writer’s mission is to connect with other people through their creative calling. Our book, Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets is a collaborative memoir of our group as we learned from a variety of writers how to craft prose and poetry to make it an enjoyable experience for readers. After all, readers are the consumers of all our efforts to communicate. In the last year since our book was published, I made the acquaintance of more writers, some have created their own critique groups. Our Oro Valley Library hosts a forum twice a month with up to twenty-five or thirty authors and would-be authors. We talk about our experiences with the writing, editing, and publication processes. It is a valuable asset for writers.

Before you get an agent, before you get an editor, before you find a publisher, you need to produce a novel, short story, memoir, or poem that showcases your talent at its best. A strong support for a writer, especially one that is starting out, is a small critique group with four to six people; other writers who take your endeavors seriously and comment on what works and doesn’t work when you send your creative emissaries out into the world. Writers’ groups develop over time as you learn to trust someone else’s opinion. Others in the group are not there to change your story, poem or essay or rewrite it, but to help you give it the best polish, to make a great impression.

One of the publishers we interviewed before we published our book gave us very valuable insight. He said we were writing to each other, not the world at large. Our group has been together for over twenty-four years so we know each other very well and understand how we each work. He said some of our memoir left out details that WE knew but to which readers were not privy, the important backstory. In other words, we weren’t telling the whole tale. A wake-up call. We got busy filling in the details to make our story more accessible.

A writers’ group is designed to do that for each member. Our book has suggestions for creating a group and general rules that make it work. We wrote together, learning how to create story and build characters, even in memoir writing. We held each other accountable to do their best work, to communicate fully.

One of the writers I came to know this last year is Debra VanDeventer. She wrote an engaging book with humor about the transition from thirty-seven years as a devoted teacher to joining the real world, Out of the Crayon Box – Thoughts on Teaching, Retirement and Life. She has a blog site, Seams Like a Story. As the title of her blog hints, she is a seamstress and weaves bits and pieces of her other creative endeavors into her writing posts. Yesterday, she wrote in her blog about her critique group and what it means to her and her writing. I recommend you read it and then, if you are interested in furthering your writing, get a copy of our book to start your own group.