WordSisters

Author: cmkraack

  • Home and Away

    College recruiting, corporate management and consulting carried me across much of the United States. Although some of that travel prompted future visits, a suitcase in one hand, briefcase in the other wasn’t the most satisfying way to explore cities and countryside. There are cities I enjoy, mountains worth the travel, lovely ocean sides. Driving across the plains or open lands remind me how different our life experiences are from fellow citizens.

    The Midwest continues to be where I am comfortable living my life. Green spaces, cities, the Great Lakes, agriculture, forests blend well. We considered moving during our careers, imagining our lives in desert lands or other river cities, even one Canadian possibility. Except for Canada, I don’t regret passing up those changes.

    Something moved me in the childhood lands of Pat Conroy and Flannery O’Connor. The charm of old Savannah and the Lowcountry areas of Georgia and South Carolina felt homey. I wanted to stay for a year, maybe two, and learn about the rhythm of that region’s residents. To walk where azaleas and trees blossomed in March, to witness the loggerhead turtle’s journey, to try Sunday church once more, to celebrate holidays differently.  Biscuits tasted better, seafood fresher, crayfish better than a slab of whitefish. 

    Weeks in Maine challenged my Midwest assumptions that farms were farms, days on the shore universal, that New England was an area of wealth and education. Spending weeks in a London flat introduced reality to daydreams of living in a congested metropolitan area. Nearly two weeks in a small Irish community felt nice, but I wanted to go home. This stretch of the south felt like it could be home as if the slower movement of my mature life would be acceptable in a place that has nurtured so many artistic folks.

    When the roof needs repair, spring returns to stormy winter, property taxes increase, daydreams happen about a mythical life in a charming setting where all seems lovely. But roofs deteriorate there, summer temps and humidity can be high, history and today’s politics lean away from my values. Best to keep Savannah on my writing retreat list and my home in the Midwest. I’ll be back with a notebook, laptop, and good walking shoes during azalea season.

  • Fate of the Crumbled Cookie

    Tip of the hat to the Girl Scouts gathered outside stores with boxes of their annual cookies. This blog is not written for them.

    Peanut butter cookies float my boat. For those with peanut sensitives, please substitute your favorite cookie variety. At the local Piggly Wiggly the store-baked cookies are delightful and at their peak for at least five or six days. Soft and buttery, one cookie has to be enough for anyone over the age of daily recess playtime. 

    I carried the last four cookies home near the end of their prime to surprise my husband. Unfortunately, they rested under bananas in the carrying tote. That’s the way the cookies crumbled. Four round sweets became pieces of many sizes in a sealed bag. The 1950s phrase, jokingly exchanged with my husband, stuck in my mind. 

    On Reality Wednesday, the day after Super Tuesday, I responded “this is the way the cookie crumbles” to a friend’s deep unhappiness about voters’ behavior. He asked if I had learned that phrase from my grandmother then suggested I use the appropriate contemporary phrase: shit happens. Which describes what many people hope to avoid during the 2024 election cycle.

    Our discussion made me wonder about how U.S. English slang language transitioned from cookies crumbling to shit happens when describing something bad has happened and a person must accept the way things are.  The 1950s were considered a happy time in the U.S. with the boys (and girls) returning home from war, building houses, starting families and enjoying the life that World War II sought to protect. Cookie references seem to reflect that seventy years ago kind of contented outlook.

    And today’s phrase also seems to reflect the current emotion of our nation.  Fearful, divided, violent, embracing the crudeness of life, watching events too large to be absorbed that must be accepted because people did die or had their lives negatively impacted. We’re not looking forward to a golden era, just trying to adjust to what now exists, and hoping for at least a plateau in our world’s disruption. For some the best times are past. For others the best times were never experienced. 

    These are broad painted observations. Media no longer allows people to remain ignorant of what is broken or underdeveloped in our country or how the physical environment of our world demands attention.  

    I ate some of the cookie pieces and one of the offending bananas. Mustn’t waste. Time to return to the heavy lifting of doing something to keep more shit from happening.  

  • Love of a Woman

    Did you notice many people wearing red February 2 to call attention to the American Heart Association®️ Go Red for Women®️ campaign?  Has anyone mentioned to their doctors the Yale’s Women’s Health Research study on women’s lower outcomes compared to men after coronary artery bypass surgery? Keep in mind that heart disease is the #1 killer of American women and 44% live with some form of it.

    February is National Heart Health month. While political theater would keep female eyes focusing on reproductive health as women’s major issue, most of the true state of women’s health is unknown. Not only is there inequality in how the medical community treats women, but less than 11% of the National Institute of Health’s 2020 budget went towards female illnesses or conditions. Staying with heart health challenge, only 29% of cardiac artery bypass surgery is done on women, with a statistically lower success. Heart disease presents different in women and is often ignored. Select surgeons recommend that more female cardiac surgeons need to be trained to care for female patients with additional research and training on female heart disease treatment. 

    Not need to worry unless you are a woman or love a woman. That includes daughters, sisters, mothers, partners, special friends. 

    The World Health Organization found that although women in the European Union live longer than men, they spend more of their lives in poor health. Prevention is not as high a consideration in women’s health as intervention–waiting until illness has hit, a pregnancy is in trouble, a young mother cannot take care of her family. Research money in pain management is directed toward men—80% of budget while about 70% of women manage long-term pain. 

    Women are responsible for 85% of the decisions about their families’ healthcare. Marketers know a lot about women as buyers and users of healthcare. Sophisticated research can be done today by manipulating data. So why doesn’t the healthcare world know more about the differences between men and women’s bodies?

    For love of all women, healthcare research and care delivery need to immediately update thinking that treats a five-foot four-inch female standing next to a six-foot male as merely a smaller body. Someone you love might depend on more specific knowledge and care.