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Spending five years on the east coast was a gift from the relocation gods.  Mark worked for the NIH for those years, and since we knew we wouldn’t end up living there permanently we crammed everything we could into our stay.  My favorite place was Arlington Cemetery.  I never failed to be in awe.  I LOVED Rehobeth Beach in Delaware and even though driving over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge scared the bejeezits out of me we went often.  We saw the White House, Monticello, Mt. Vernon, Annapolis, Harper’s Ferry, Assateague and Chincoteague.  We saw the monuments more times than I could count and you really must see them at night as the quiet of the dark gives them special meaning.

Mark loved the the civil war battlefields.  We saw several but we’re especially close to Antietam.  I didn’t get into it as much as he did until we went there.  When you saw how close the North and the South were shooting cannons at each other………..well, dear God it’s a wonder anybody lived.  It is hallowed sacred ground.

In the last few days, I’ve seen the trailer of the Lincoln movie that Steven Spielberg made that is coming out in November.  When my sister and her husband came to town we went to the Ford Museum and the boarding house across the street where he died.  It’s surreal to be standing in the place where Lincoln was shot.  Besides seeing the clothes that John Wilkes Booth was wearing when he was captured there were artifacts like a letter from a fourteen year old boy to his mom and dad.  A soldier at fourteen.

This video is almost like the movie in my head when I went to all those places.

This is a video I came across via another blog.  This woman was a Russian ballet dancer and at 95, exercises every day with a routine she and her mother came up with long before there were exercise classes, gym memberships or yoga studios. 

I think she is lovely, the video was well-done and I need to stretch.  Every day.

Simplicity, work and enjoyment.

I’ve been on the new job for nearly a month and it’s about what I expected.  Long stretches of dullness, aching legs and feet, flurries of activity, credit card machines not working, thirty boxes of inventory coming in one day.

A day in the life of a shopgirl.

When I went on an interview this summer for an office job I knew that I could not do that.  I knew I’m the kind of girl that needs to keep moving during the day and putting me in a chair behind a desk would be like eight hours of time-out. 

When you never know who will walk through the door, the potential to meet somebody interesting is present on every shift.  Today we had a lovely woman in from Joplin, Missouri.

That Joplin.

We asked her how the town is doing.  How rebuilding was coming along.  She told us of a friend who got picked up three different times by that tornado and landed upside down inside a car.  Not only did she live……she remembers the entire thing.  That you can see clear down blocks where businesses used to be and there is absolutely nothing.  That the hospital will not be rebuilt in the same place because it was too close to the other one in town and they cannot risk another tornado taking out both.   That while one hospital was destroyed the other one had dozens of severely injured patients coming in with no electricity and a week before they had running water again.  That in her lifetime she will never see her town resemble anything close to what it was.

That on any day she is a combination of sad, lucky and grateful.

On this day, I was happy to be a shopgirl once again.  To hear customers stories, to be reminded that it’s all fleeting, to know that despite what one wears attitude always makes the girl.

………and my favorite city.

Labor Day weekend may be about celebrating the American worker, but in my part of the world it’s about the Sparks Flea Market.

Sparks Kansas.

Yep, it’s in the middle of nowhere.

Last year we took Will and he thought it was all kinds of fun.  This year we took Maggie and Nate.  Prior to leaving, Nate told the siblings, “Kids, this is your mother’s Super Bowl, now don’t do anything to spoil it.”

Yeah kids, don’t make me get out a can of whoop-ass.

The siblings got along.  They bought stuff, they survived ridiculously hot temps, they ate corn dogs and sat in a tub that a farm boy cut in half and made into a loveseat.

The Farm Boy is not married.  He’s never even dated which led to some awkward silence on our part.  If I knew a guy who was that talented I’d snap him up in a heartbeat, but I didn’t say that out loud as you never know the sketchiness of the kind of guy who would tell complete strangers that he’s never dated.

We came home with an old trellis, a rusty blue tool box, a green oar, a bowling pin, birdhouse, some locker baskets and a shelf made from an old piece of luggage.

And just before we left, we ran back to buy one more thing from the farm boy.  That’s when we discovered that he may have some issues with gas. 

The first time I ever saw a protest was in the sixties when we were piled in the family station wagon headed to see our grandparents.  It was a civil rights protest that we passed and it made The Queen Mum really nervous.  Dad said they were standing out there to make a point and weren’t interested in bothering anybody.

A few years ago, our church organized a walk to join a protest in Kansas City against the Iraq War.  I told The Big Daddy that we needed to put our money where our mouth was when it came to this and so the whole family went.  He and I might have been more effective protestors had we not both been suffering from A Massive Hangover.  As I was walking with a friend, she told me she was suffering from the same affliction, and that church of ours wasted their best intentions on some of their slacker parishioners who thought the prep was to get shit-faced the the night before.

When the Westboro Baptist Church showed up at the kids high school with their “God Hates Fags” posters, every man, woman and child within twenty miles came to that protest to drown them out and send crazy packing.

Last week in New York City, two dozen women protested their right to go topless.  One woman said that her dog has six nipples that anybody can see, but if she were to show her two she’d be arrested.

But your dog isn’t picking the kids up from school, making a deposit at the bank or digging in the freezer case at the Winn-Dixie for the Green Giant Sweet Kernel Corn that’s two for one.

My years of living make me believe that if we all gave peace a chance we’d be better off.  And while I appreciate the right to protest and wouldn’t hesitate to do it if I believed in the cause, I’d rather passer-bys just be looking at my sign.

Twenty years ago when we moved to Kansas we rented a townhouse.  Coming from the D.C./Maryland area, the idea of actually buying a home was absurd.  It didn’t take long for us to figure out that here in the heartland, home ownership was a real possibility.

The Big Daddy was all about scouting out a new homestead, and so we’d map out the Sunday open houses, pack up the kids and snoop in other people’s lives.

We argued a lot in these open houses.  The Big Daddy, enamored with the bells and whistles, and me not so much.  I’m not hauling groceries up a flight of stairs to a kitchen that some idiot put on the second floor.  Another time we were in a house with gold-flocked wallpaper on the entire first floor and when I said I’d seen enough he told me I was being too negative.  When we got to the backyard with the above-ground swimming pool coated in algae, we both barfed a little in our mouth.

On the way home from one of our shopping trips we passed an Open House sign in a neighborhood we weren’t familiar with.  We stopped anyhow and oh, how we could see ourselves living in those digs with the wide open downstairs “great room” that the kids were already running around in.

We likeyed that place.

When we inquired about the price it was $450,000.00.  Hmmmm…….that’s several hundred thousand dollars more than we intended to spend.

The realtor nodded knowingly and wished us well as she pointed us and our sweaty kids to the proper exit.

She stood in the doorway and watched us pull away in our Oldsmobile Firenza, and I bet it was the faux wood paneling on the side of our station wagon that was a dead giveaway that we had stumbled into the wrong neighborhood.

“How long til my soul gets it right?”   

Maybe not so long.

Or an eternity.

My new favorite video and I found it without kid intervention.   

I got that right 😉

When Maggie was little, she liked to play school.  As is often the case with the bossy first-born, she was always the teacher.  She’d gather her brother and kids from down the street into the basement to educate them, and why they put up with it every day when they’d already spent all day in school is beyond me.

When she went to college, she decided to go into journalism with hopes of being the next Katie Couric.  When the greeter at Costco told her that her smile was so pretty she should be on t.v., that sealed the deal.  After one semester, she decided to change to media relations.  Her father said, “Oh, so when a company recalls a drug that makes people sicker instead of better, you’ll be writing the bullshit to make it look like they weren’t really in it for the money?”  They may have sealed the deal on that major being short-lived.

Her second year of college, she listened to the universe and became an education major.  

She is now a 3rd year teacher and at 25 years old, she’s worked harder than I have my entire life.  She chose to work in the inner-city and this is her second year as an ELL (English language learner) teacher.  Throughout the week she works with every kid in the school whose home language is not English, the goal being to fast-track these kids ability to learn.  It is daunting.

This year her student population has gone from 60 to 100.

One teacher.  One part-time aide.  Lunch on the fly.

While her father and I have instilled social justice and awareness in all of our kids, this bossy first-born has walked the walk, and all those years of playing school in the basement was a precursor for the seismic shift she would make in the lives of hopeful families.