WordSisters

Category: Uncategorized

  • What I Know For Sure

    Older Like many women, I subscribed to O, The Oprah Magazine from its inaugural issue in 2000 to its last two decades later. Along the way, I tore out and saved a four-inch-high stack of articles and ads that has been sitting on an upstairs bookshelf ever since.

    That stack included the ad pictured here. It was part of Chico’s 2018 “Growing Bolder Not Older” campaign designed to celebrate women and their desire for style at every age.”

    I saved the ad because its headline proclaimed exactly what I expected to be doing as I aged…growing bolder, not older. 

    One reason for my optimism was my grandmother, Valeria Szczech. Born in 1902, she lived most of her life on a Benton County farm and died in her sleep at age 92.

    In between, she had no choice but to grow bolder. Life circumstances required it. Valeria’s mother had died of a heart attack on Valeria’s wedding day, leaving her partially responsible for several members of her extended family, including a brother who was unable to work due to a heart condition.

    Then, in 1952, her husband, my grandfather, died a few weeks after the tractor he was working on exploded, leaving him severely burned on 90% of his body.

    Despite his death, Valeria continued to live on the farm, milking cows, feeding chickens, canning vegetables and doing whatever else was needed, thankfully with the help of their son who lived only a farm-field away.

    After her son’s too-early death, she sold the farm and moved to the small town of Foley, where she attended mass, made new friends, grew a large garden and provided full-time care for a brother made infirm by a stroke. 

    I was in awe of her and her independence and assumed my grandmother’s get-up-and-go—and the get-up-and-go that I thrived on in my 40s and 50s—would continue through my 70s, 80s and even my 90s.

    Unfortunately, at 66, I’m already finding that much of that get-up-and-go has gotten up and gone. At least temporarily. And although I do not think of myself as old, and some days not even as older, I am definitely not bolder. Nor do I strive to be.

    Yes, I still enjoy meeting friends for coffee or a walk, but I’m no longer willing to drive in rush hour traffic to make it happen. Yes, I still travel, but not as often or as vigorously as I once did. And yes, I still walk, but more often solo in my own neighborhood rather than around the lakes with a friend.

    At first, I blamed Covid. After all, where was there to go when nowhere was safe? But while fears of the virus have eased, my desire to go, go, go has not returned. Instead, I’m content being at home, purging files, clearing clutter, organizing cupboards and completing projects.

    Does that make me less bold? Perhaps, but in keeping with one of Oprah’s signature phrases, “what I know for sure” is that I am growing older…and for that I am truly grateful.

  • 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.  

  • Saying Goodbye to My Books

    In preparation for a someday move, I’ve been parting with my books. Hundreds of them over the past three years. Most have been collecting dust for decades (I bought my house in 1989), while others are recent additions. Some are quick reads I started and finished while drinking a cup of coffee, while others took me more than a year to make my way through.

    Many are still on my “to read” list while others have been read and reread, by me and by the family and friends I’ve shared them with. Some were gifts, though most were bought by me at local bookstores or while traveling.

    One reason I have so many books is because the upstairs of my house, which once belonged to the owners of a local used bookstore, is a 45- by 15-foot half-story lined with—no surprise—bookshelves, 150 linear feet of them, plus three standalone bookcases.

    Although I’ve loved owning my books, some of which date back to my years as a college English major, now that I’m on Medicare and beginning to think of moving, it’s time to let them go.

    But parting isn’t easy, in large part because I still treasure the stories they told, the memories they hold and the lessons they taught. There are books about saints that I read while in Catholic grade school, and books about the sea I read while in Florida on family vacations. There are books I used to motivate myself, and others I turned to for solace after the deaths of my parents.

    There’s a shelf of books that include autographs from people I admire and heartfelt messages from people who love me. There’s even one shelf dedicated to books written by people I know, and whom you may know as well: Marly Cornell, Kate DiCamillo and Cathy Madison to name a few. Plus, books by Natalie Goldberg, Mary Carroll Moore and others from whom I’ve taken a Loft class or gotten to know because of a writing workshop.        

    Just seeing the books brings back a flood of memories of the books themselves—the characters, the settings, the twists and turns of their plots—as well as where I was when I read them: while packed in the car with my parents and four younger sisters on our way to Florida for a family vacation, while taking college English classes, while flying to China, while spending a month on a Panama beach, while sitting bedside during my father’s final hours.

    Others such as How to Forgive When You Don’t Know How and Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Difference home in on my desire to be a better person and to advocate for causes I care about.

    And, no surprise to anyone who knows me, there are also dozens of self-help books, many of which inspired me to write my own book, What Do You Really Want? How to Set a Goal and Go for It, A Guide for Teens.

    While I’ve treasured all my books, I’ve recently begun sending them back out into the world. I’ve donated hundreds to Rain Taxi, a local non-profit that sponsors the annual Twin Cities Book Festival, which includes a book sale. I’ve also put dozens in the Little Free Library down the street.

    Still others I’ve passed on to family and friends whom I hope will enjoy them—or learn as much from them—as I have. They range from true crime to travel guides, from books by (and about) artists to how-to books on everything from fishing and stargazing to tying knots and learning Spanish.

    And because I now do most of my reading on my phone thanks to the Kindle and audiobooks I borrow from the Hennepin County Library, my shelves are becoming empty.

    Thankfully I have one thing that will keep my book memories alive: the annual “books I’ve read” lists. I truly treasure these lists and the many fond memories they prompt of the nearly 2,000 books I’ve read since I started keeping track back in 1982.

    As author Italo Calvino has written, “Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life.” And although there are now far fewer books in my house than there were in the past, I hope you will always be able to see the important place they hold in my life.