(Today we are finishing up my memories of Ireland from the summer of 2014…..memories to last me a lifetime…re-written and saved now on the Chapel of Hope Stories Pt 2…..taken from January 10, 2015-Enjoy again!)

Dear Reader:

What is it about traveling to a new environment that keeps us in a state of anticipation and excitement? The whole time I was in Ireland I felt like a child on Christmas morning.

I couldn’t sleep late because every morning when I woke up I thought about our itinerary for the day and could hardly get out the door fast enough!

Later…I started thinking that I wish I could retain that same excitement in my everyday life at home….after all ….just waking up to a new day anywhere with all the possibilities it holds…defines it as a “day of wonder“….a day of gratitude.

And speaking of…The title photo (with the famous “Stones of Gratitude“)- were located in a Catholic church cemetery right in the same village where we were renting a cottage in western Ireland (after leaving Dingle)….Ballyvaughan!

We stopped by there on our way back from a breath-taking adventure at the Cliffs of Moher.

The sun was just starting to set….it had been a visually stimulating “tourist” day and to end it with the discovery of  “stones of gratitude” had Anne and I just plain “giddy” in gratitude, ourselves, for simply… the joy of life!

I thought it is only fitting that I use some words from John O’Donohue (Anne’s and my favorite Irish poet, author, philosopher, Catholic priest, and Celtic spiritualist) for this blog entry. Sadly, John died a few days after his 52nd birthday in 2008…so young. He was on vacation in France with friends… he went to sleep one night and never woke up.

I love this excerpt from a writing O’Donohue did for Amit Awakin‘ several years ago about the wonder and possibility of each new day. He might have died young…but he certainly lived each day to the fullest.

… No day is ever the same, and no day stands still; each one moves through a different territory, awakening new beginnings. A day moves forward in moments, and once a moment has flickered into life, it vanishes and is replaced by the next. It is fascinating that this is where we live, within an emerging lacework that continually unravels.

Often a fleeting moment can hold a whole sequence of the future in distilled form: that unprepared second when you looked in a parent’s eye and saw death already beginning to loom. Or the second you noticed a softening in someone’s voice and you knew that a friendship was beginning. Or catching your partner’s gaze upon you and knowing the love that surrounded you. Each day is seeded with recognitions.

It was his last paragraph that spoke volumes for me when he created a mental metaphor for new days with endless possibilities, alongside, daily creative writings.

Lately, it has been my blog writings each morning, that have really defined my days for me.

With the extreme cold weather settled into our lowcountry … keeping me inside- nice and warm…the anticipation each morning of creating another blog fills me with such happiness.

I don’t have to leave home in order for my mind to travel anywhere it wants to go….there are no boundaries in creativity…just new lands to explore. And to be able to do it with all of you readers and your encouragement sends me flying…no airplane needed.

… The writing life is a wonderful metaphor for this (each new day.) The writer goes to his desk to meet the empty white page. As he settles himself, he is preparing himself, for visitation and voyage. Each memory, longing, and craft set the frame for what might emerge.

He has no idea what will come. Yet despite its limitations, his creative work will find its own direction to form. Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.

–John O’Donohue, from “To Bless the Space Between Us”

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Now that the framework is set for our thoughts on this glorious Saturday…let’s pick up on the pictures of the remainder of our Irish vacation. (I believe we left off with me strumming on an old guitar with new Irish friends….and beautiful Irish voices.

The trip from Dingle to Ballyvaughan certainly contained its share of excitement….

1) The Mountainous Terrain: We had come in on the peninsula (right) side of Dingle which was fairly level, drive-able, and unbelievably beautiful…On the way out we climbed mountains….I half expected to see Julie Andrews emerge at any moment singing “The Hills Are Alive” because I felt that to be true, not only were the mountain alive, but we were about to get eaten by them.”

The sharp curves upward and downward were a driver’s (and rider’s ) worst roller coaster nightmare….I had to literally peel my fingers off the upholstery when we finally stopped…in order to climb out of the car on shaking legs….

2) Cows.… Awhile later…around a bend we were met by a herd of ‘escaped cattle’ with Holstein Hilda leading the pack…All we could do was pull over and sit back in the car, hang on as it shook from the trample of the passing herd, and laugh hysterically.

 3) Trucks of Bales of Hay – 

I think you can readily deduct from this picture that when we got stuck behind a truck carrying bales of hay…there was no room to pass. (Unfortunately it was hay-baling season…patience is a virtue.)

4) In order to save several hours of travel…we needed to make the ferry so we (and our rental car) could save many miles…the cows and trucks of hay had definitely thrown us off our time schedule…but God was good. We slid onto the ferry ….the side bars immediately went up behind us and before we could even get out of the car the ferry was crossing the river. We just made it!

It would all be worth the hardships when we finally reached Ballyvaughan….this was our home for the next few weeks…located right on the Bay of Galway.

Here are some random photos taken from the Ballyvaughan area….the marina was just a block down from us and there were lovely gift shops, a small grocery, and the yummiest tea room…all within walking distance. 

Each day we would mark off a new itinerary….but, as is always the case, it was the surprises along the way that added such excitement to the trip.

 For example…we discovered that we had gone by John O’Donohue’s final resting place at least twice before we knew to stop and turn in. We had even commented on this pub having his family name…located in close proximity to the cemetery-Creggagh.

It was there that Anne discovered some of her ancestral family (the Driscolls) were buried there also…and met a part-time caretaker and inn owner who became an immediate friend. They ended up sharing several emails back and forth.

We never know who we will meet on any given day who will change our lives…do we? (A photo of Anne standing by O’Donohue’s grave)

To finish off our time in Ireland…I just selected a few photos from the sites we visited including the Cliffs of Moher, a creepy cave, the Burren, the Perfumery, the mountains of Connemara and Kylemore Abbey.

It was on way to Galway from this beautiful castle (Kylemore Abbey and Gardens) that a “miracle” occurred. My brother Ben had filed for Veterans benefits after suffering from PTSD (Vietnam) for years and his requests had gone unnoticed and forgotten for years.

But with all the recent shake-up of the Veterans Administration he was finally getting his “day in the sun.” He had an appointment to tell his story at 10 a.m. the day we went to this abbey…which in Irish time would be 3:00.

Anne and I had already planned to pull over and say a prayer for Ben and his long struggle with PTSD and the Veterans Administration. Suddenly Anne called out “It’s 3:00!” and just as she did we were coming up to a small church and a large sign that read: 

And that I did….I literally jumped out of the car and took off for the sanctuary….falling down on my knees in front of the altar…Anne continued praying in the car.

 Guess what? Ben’s story was recorded and there was hardly a dry eye when he left the room…he received his pension a week later. God’s miracle!

And as for Miss Eva Cate and her castles…little did I realize that there are more castles in Ireland per square mile than any other country. But my favorite was Dunguaire…not far from Ballyvaughan.

It was bittersweet leaving Anne and Ballyvaughan to return home (she had her sister and brother-in-law coming in next.) But I was also excited about re-living the adventures through lots of stories.

As I landed in Philly…one of the airport administrators took this picture of me, the cut-outs, and the Liberty Bell …asking if he had my permission to use it as an advertisement in the future. I gladly said “Of course” not knowing that another photo of the Liberty Bell would later come back to haunt me. Isn’t life interesting…never a dull moment?

So until tomorrow….Remind us Father to wake up each morning with “wonder” for the day….Your day filled with surprises for all.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

* I remember when I got home…I immediately ran to the garden to see if it had survived the hot drought conditions prevailing in Summerville while I was gone. Tim and my amazing neighbor (Vicki) had really come through with the watering….my magic moon gate welcomed me back… with open moon flower blooms! And I still had my holding cross!

* Another “miracle” of sorts yesterday….I waited for the temperature to reach its highest point and about mid-afternoon I headed over to the Knightsville Piggly Wiggly.

On the way back I almost ran into the car in front of me from gawking at the gasoline sign. How many years has it been since I saw it this low? God is good!

  I hate to have to report that just when we thought we had Betsy in a better place following her cardiac tests results…another set of symptoms… sending her diagnosis in a  different direction has popped up.. unfortunately also.sending her back to the ER.

She is physically and emotionally exhausted at this point. …and just wants it to stop. Besides prayer I think we need to all sit on the top of the lid of Pandora’s Box to keep any more heart problems from popping out. The Clarkson and Crick families appreciate your prayers during this trying time…and believe me…it is trying!

******Isn’t it nice to know that this statement on Betsy’s health took place in January of 2015……happy to report that Betsy’s diagnosis was finally discovered and she has resumed a fairly normal life and is so appreciative of it.

Dear Reader:

* By accident I came across a two-day reflection blog I did January 9 and 10 of 2015. The day I returned home from the beach, Friday June 10, my blog was going crazy….up, up, up with viewers. I couldn’t imagine what was so interesting about my little blog talking about coming back home and I was right.

Instead of June 10…..the January 10 blog on remembering Ireland was shooting up into the skies. I don’t know what caused the strange conglomeration of dates to switch but I thought since there seems to be so much interest….I would take it back a day and get both posts on Ireland included for Wednesday and Thursday’s blog. 

My original blogs had been removed from the problematic incident two years ago on November 19 and I remember thinking that I didn’t want my thought and memories of Ireland gone forever. 

When I look at the cardboard cut-outs of Eva Cate and Rutledge…they don’t even look like the same children. “Time waits for no man.: So without further adieu…Ireland revisited. 

………………………………..

Dear Reader:

The first week in October last year…I took three really big baskets of mums around to all my girls…Mandy, Mollie, and Kaitlyn. The baskets of flowers were gargantuan ….and filled with too many blooms to count…just waiting to burst open with life and joy!

 (Of course…I had to get me one of those huge mum baskets too to put in my garden!)

Yesterday when I quickly patrolled the garden to see if anything had survived the frigid night…there lay the seemingly black dead mums from the October mums… now brittle and lifeless.

  However, upon closer inspection, hiding under the dead stems was new life…beautiful, green stems fighting to stay alive amidst the formidable (below freezing) temperatures. (I gathered up all the mums and put them in my garage.)

What a great lesson for us all…even in dying..there is new life waiting for its opportunity to show us a new home.

In Archibald Rutledge’s (Poet Laureate of South Carolina and one-time owner of Hampton Plantation) book God’s Children he has this (following) quote which has remained with me since first reading it…simply because… it is just so “doggone” peaceful and lilting to the human ear.

“It was late October and the dying year was so beautiful, as only lovely things departing can be beautiful.”

Even as I was giving three gorgeous baskets of bright yellow mums away… back in October…in reality…they, too, were already in the “dying year and invisibly departing in their own beautiful way.”

I think what Rutledge is saying in this quote…as I consider myself in the “autumn” of my life…that from the moment we all take our first breath…we are (knowingly or unknowingly) dying… until we take our last.

Normally we give thoughts like this little of our time or contemplation…until one day we hear the diagnosis of a challenging form of breast cancer. It was only then, for me, that I understood the intimate relationship between life and death.

It was only when I was faced with the possibility of death…that I really began to live. It was like Someone took a bottle of Windex and cleaned the vision around my being. Suddenly colors were magnified…like seeing everyday life in 3-D.

I was drawn to laughter, children’s voices, music, art, and nature in a way I had never fully appreciated. Instantly, I was more alive and feeling happier than I ever remember… …as if I had popped out of Mother Earth’s womb with a second chance to “see” what I had missed…what I had taken for granted the first time around.

Regrets over missed opportunities, from my first life, would descend from time to time. Instead of crying over “spilt milk” I decided to start rectifying my lost opportunities.

Thus…last June found me in Ireland with Anne Peterson. I had always wanted to go there, especially to Dingle, Ireland, and now opportunity came knocking at the door. Anne was renting a cottage for almost a month and asking friends and family to come stay for different parts of that time.

Without a moment’s hesitation I said “Yes! When do we go?”

Peggy Franklin, observed from an earlier blog that the single most viewed day for 2014- was the day John got our first batch of pictures from Ireland on the blog…almost a thousand views that day. Peggy wanted to see them and of course, they were privatized along with all the rest of four years of stories.

So I have decided to begin taking a day or two a week and pulling pictures and stories, from earlier posts no longer available to viewers. I, also, see the need to update new viewers on some history pertaining to the blog.

…(In order to help viewers who have just joined us since November 25  understand better the original reason for starting the blog, the role of St. Jude’s Chapel of Hope in my life, an explanation for Scheherazade’s story competition which ended successfully for me in 2013 with 1002 stories told to beat Scheherazade’s 1001 Arabian Nights tales…and other needed bits of “lost” information.)

Today I will end the blog with pictures from our first stop in Ireland…Dingle!

I hope you enjoy.

* One quick bit of information for my new readers….My four year-old granddaughter,Eva Cate, was sad that she couldn’t go with her Boo Boo to Ireland…especially since she is into princesses and castles.

So I had enlarged a cardboard picture made of her and Rutledge to take with me and share in my adventures…culminating in a scrapbook… dedicated to both of them.

Never did I dream that this personal “project” would introduce me to so many new people (“my people”…retirees) who enjoyed the idea of taking the “grandchildren” with them on a trip abroad…without any of the “problems” of taking the grandchildren with them abroad.

It all began innocently enough…Tim dropped Anne and I off at the Charleston airport…Do you see the Detour sign above our heads…it should have had a blinking warning icon next to it.

The “Luck of the Irish” would have to be drowned in beer at the “detour” airport bar… as we would end up losing an entire day in Ireland due to a “detour” because of bad thunderstorms in Philly….where we were scheduled to depart for Ireland that evening. (We would actually leave the following evening.)

So we had to detour to Charlotte, stay in a “sketchy” hotel (at best) fly to Philly early the next morning… and spend the whole day there at the airport waiting to fly out that evening.

On the flip side, however, the Rutledge and Eva Cate cut-outs lured a good-looking man into conversation with me all the way to Charlotte (way too short a flight)…things were turning around quickly.

And then a white knight came to our rescue …Anne’s beautiful niece  met us in Philly and showed us the town while Ben Franklin shared some wisdom with the “grandchildren.”

By the second night when we finally left the good ole’ USA for Ireland…we were exhausted! The flight was jammed pack…because lots of other people had gotten bumped from the night flight before too…with the summer thunderstorms. But we were just happy to be in any seat as long as would wake up in Ireland! (I just partied on with a location wedding party fired up and ready to celebrate!)

We did it….we finally got a car rented (will not even go into the havoc surrounding that encounter of the third kind) and then drove (on the right side) towards Dingle…the closer we got the  more beautiful the land and sea became.

We stayed at a wonderful B&B and immediately headed into the delightful seaside village of Dingle….first thing…to ride Fungi…at least the sculptured one…the adopted dolphin of Dingle at the marina. (Later we took a boat tour and got to see the real one)

We took several tours during our stay at Dingle and then also squeezed in some adventures on our own….saw where the movie Ryan’s Daughter was filmed and where Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman honeymooned in happier times.  Some beach walks, great restaurants, and wonderful entertainment!

Everything, it seemed, was named Dingle in Dingle…”A dingle dingle here and a dingle dingle there!”

One morning while looking through a history book on Dingle…a picture appeared that gave me a start….does anybody else see a resemblance between this little resident of Dingle (back in the Great Depression) and our little Rutledge Dingle today-on the right?) I believe the “Black Irish” genes are in full force.

It was our last night in Dingle which turned out to be the most fun….we heard some wonderful Irish music coming from a pub that lured us in…. We ended up having dinner there and stayed until the musicians closed down the place.

I don’t remember ever clapping or tapping so much in my life. The two young men were so gracious afterwards….to let me hang with them (and the cut-outs )  and let Anne take a picture of the “whole” group to remember this fun night by….

Before we left the next morning…I had one last mission to accomplish…there was a restaurant/tavern at the end of one street in Dingle, originally called Walsh’s Townhouse….but sometime right before we arrived…it changed names.

  I was able to talk to the proprietor (last name Walsh) and explained that my son’s name was Walsh Dingle and he had a little boy named Rutledge Dingle…she immediately grabbed a little teddy bear with the inscripted Dingle on its woolen sweater for me to take back to Rutledge, as a gift, with her regards. A great way to leave one of the most beautiful locations in the world with beautiful, friendly people!

Tomorrow I will finish off the pictures of our later adventures in the Burren (rocky, craggy) area of Ireland and then the mountains! A miracle even appears in the later episodes.

So until tomorrow…Let us see life anew and take advantage of all opportunities to “engulf” our amazing Father’s World and meet the most wonderful people along our journey!

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

   I heard from Mike and Honey yesterday…isn’t Cocoa growing…precious? She has adjusted quite well to living in the mountains… (Mike says she is “gifted”)… until maybe yesterday morning.

Honey and Mike woke up to 06. to 08. degrees up there on “dem dare mountains” near Hendersonville, NC …it couldn’t even muster up one degree! Unfortunately the water is no longer running. Mike sent me a comment that the Effie “funnies” on the blog motivated him to clean out closets yesterday. You go Mike!

 Mike and Honey said that a few prayers thrown their way for running water would be quite appreciated! Y’all have got it Burrells….we will all pray for running water your way! BURR!

* One hour after I typed this I called Honey to check on her and Mike and they had just gotten their running water back…I told her what I had just typed…and we laughed….the blog readers must have a ‘hot-line” upstairs!

 * I had a sweet email, last evening, from Chrissy, my physical therapist for the last three months. We exchanged emails and I gave her my blog website last week at our last appointment.

She mentions that she believes there is a reason that our paths crossed and I felt it too….God definitely played a role in both of us being able to support the other along our individual journey.

Dear Reader:

As you know, from yesterday’s blog, I am spending an inordinate amount of time these days, set aside, for reading the biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. The pages are large and the print…quite tiny….one can almost read a chapter from another novel in the time it takes to read a couple of pages from this biography.

It can be somewhat daunting at times but it is so well-written as to drag the reader back into the secret recesses of the book like the lure of the sirens of old. One can’t put it down long before starting the pursuit again.

After only three chapters I have already begun to recognize a pattern in Hamilton’s life, which in retrospect, is similar to my life and your life….the connection between initially daunting detours, verbal treasures and significant benchmarks in our lives.

In this following excerpt from the Constitution Daily….you get the picture (pretty quickly) of how a letter from Alexander Hamilton to his father, filled with verve and gusto (following the worst hurricane to ever hit St. Croix) changes the direction of Hamilton’s life. This self-educated young clerk displays his secret compartment of “verbal riches” within his writing, for the first time publicly, when the letter is published.

How a hurricane brought Alexander Hamilton to America

How different would America have been without the hurricane that disfigured the Caribbean island of St. Croix in late August 1772. Without it, Alexander Hamilton may never have emigrated from there to New York City and indelibly shaped this country’s history.

Hamilton, 17, was a self-taught clerk for a business that traded goods between the French West Indies and America. Despite his lack of formal education, he wrote with precocious verve. In a letter to his father, James Hamilton, young Alexander called the hurricane that arrived on August 31 “a total dissolution of nature”  and described it as “sufficient to strike astonishment into angels.” 

The letter was then published in the Royal Danish American Gazette.  “O ye who revel in affluence see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them,” the letter pleaded and moved a group of island businessmen to bestow their blessing on Hamilton. They sent him to North America for a proper education—and a reversal of fortune worthy of a classic fable.

……………………….

Hurricane Hugo, September of 1989. For many of us who lived through this natural disaster and  detour in life, we can readily understand how life-altering benchmarks can occur following such a disruption of nature and life as we know it.

The eighth grade social studies department at Alston Middle School decided to create a written “scrapbook” or memento for our students to have as a keepsake of this famous historical occurrence in their own lifetime.

We had the students write a personal commentary about their feelings and also hopes for the future. We, also, had them create maps showing the route of Hurricane Hugo through South Carolina and the eerily  similar pattern to Sherman’s “March to the Sea” through our state at the end of the Civil War.

Several years ago, a former student of mine, who was in my class the year of Hugo, approached me in a restaurant and re-introduced himself. He told me that he was helping his parents clean out their attic before they moved to Florida to retire and came across that old memento scrapbook from Hugo, as well as his old “I Survived Hurricane Hugo” t-shirt.). He told me how much it meant to him and his parents to re-live those moments again through his personal recollections of this terrible storm as a 13 year-old boy.

He assured me that it was better than finding a “treasure chest.” Since reading Hamilton….all I canthink of now…is the importance of the “verbal treasures” within the scrapbook.

It was that same scrapbook that won some public recognition for Alston Middle School and the eighth grade social studies department… which later lead a college professor to ask me to come in and share the “verbal treasure” with student teachers. It was that same professor, along with her colleagues, who talked me into applying for their master’s program two years later and thus opened up opportunities, in my life, that I had never even imagined.

In 2008 it was the diagnosis of breast cancer (“little c”) that took me on another daunting detour in life morphing into an unforeseen opportunity (St. Jude’s Chapel of Hope) to write a blog (“verbal treasures“) about my experiences. And here I am today…amazing.

Take a minute and think back to an unexpected detour in your life that, though daunting and scary at first, proved to be the catalyst of change for a better opportunity than previously dreamed. I think this life pattern is pretty universal, don’t you?

(Jackson, your and Matthew’s experience from the “1000 Year Storm” last year…is a classic case-in- point.)

You are both in such a good place now…a niche you can call home again!

A toast for unexpected detours!

So until tomorrow…Establishing goals is all right if you don’t let them deprive you of interesting detours. Doug Larson

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

Delights of the Day:

Another “delight of the day” was finding this saying on Mev Schieder’s Facebook photos. After recently losing her husband and best friend James (Jimmy) to cancer, Mev has remained so positive with mantras like this: (Thank goodness for family!)

Dear Reader:

One of the funniest “Got Milk” commercials has to be the peanut butter sandwich stuffed in a contestants’ mouth with no milk left when he is asked the $10,000 question: “Who shot Alexander Hamilton?” on a random phone contest selection.  Do watch and chuckle.

Original “got milk?” commercial – Who shot Alexander Hamilton …

Lin, Manuel Miranda (playwright/music, lyrics/actor) was on vacation a few years ago and bought the book Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow, in an airport gift shop.

He told Sixty Minutes (last Sunday) that he had only read two chapters when his imagination took hold and the musical began unfolding in his mind. A week ago Sunday Hamilton was up for 16 Tony Awards and won 11….including Best Musical of 2016.

(Besides writing the script, creating the lyrics and song numbers (raps) for the musical, Miranda also stars in the leading role, Alexander Hamilton.

Miranda’s new vision of the Founding Fathers reflects the new, modern America over the original “white men” Founding Fathers by casting the leading roles of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Burr, etc. with African-American and Hispanic actors. Women hold their own, too, in this production through important decisions in forming the new country…no sewing allowed!

Maranda, like most Americans, admits he only knew two facts about Alexander Hamilton at the start…..he was on the ten dollar bill and he was killed in a duel by Vice-President Aaron Burr. (He must have forgotten about the “Got Milk” commercial.)

But over the course of the biography (I am wondering what will come first this summer….me finishing the book or summer ending…it is one l-o-n-g book!) Miranda realized that this amazing individual, who was born on the island of Nevis, illegitimate, no formal education, a dirt-poor immigrant who arrives in America during the American Revolution, was a figure in American History like no other.

A fictional writer couldn’t begin to create such a complex, complicated, extraordinary genius as this Founding Father if he tried.

In my mind, as a history teacher for over three decades, the highest praise that can be given an author/writer of non-fiction is that the story reads as if it is fiction. Ron Chernow and David McCulloch both have this amazingly talented gift. To take a subject, that could be quite boring, and turn it into a page-turner for the average American reader is nothing short of miraculous!

Let me give you one example of this writing talent of Chernow in the biography of Alexander Hamilton. In the first paragraph of the book he lets the very aged widow of Hamilton take center stage. She was known as “The Oldest Revolutionary War Widow.“( Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton)

“In the early 1850’s, few pedestrians strolling past the house on H street in Washington, near the White House, realized that the ancient widow seated by the window, knitting and arranging flowers, was the last surviving link to the glory days of the early republic. Fifty years earlier, on a rocky, secluded  ledge overlooking the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, Aaron Burr, the vice-president of the United States, had fired a mortal shot at her husband, Alexander Hamilton, in a misbegotten effort to remove the man Burr regarded as the main impediment to the advancement of his career. Hamilton was then forty-nine years old. Was it a benign or a cruel destiny that had compelled the widow to outlive her husband by half a century, struggling to raise seven children and surviving almost until eve of the Civil War? “

Pretty interesting start, right? Elizabeth would die at the age of 97 still fighting to “rescue  her husband’s historical reputation from the gross slanders that had tarnished it.”

The other day we talked about the difference between Columbus and Vespucci….the first a dreamer and the latter a reality-maker and documenter. The same can be said for the visionary rift between Jefferson’s future view of America and Hamilton’s….after reading these excerpts I think we can all agree, with the luxury of hindsight, that Hamilton was definitely the truer visionary.

“Hamilton was the “prophet of the capitalist  revolution in America.” While Jefferson promoted the “more ample view of political democracy,” Hamilton “possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit.”

Jefferson’s “rosy agrarian rhetoric and slave-holding reality of democracy” is long gone. Not so Hamilton’s “ bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks.”

“Today we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.”

I hope I have given you enough tidbits to capture your interest in examining Alexander Hamilton’s life in more detail…after all that is what we history teachers do. As for me, when I finish the book, I am setting my goals on a ticket to the musical….when it goes on tour (2017) Atlanta appears to be one of the closest locations to us.

If my ship hasn’t come in by then….I will simply start paddling because somehow, some way (mark my words) I will see Hamilton, the musical! Rap on Founding Fathers!

So until tomorrow…Every time we read about a famous person in history…we must remember that “famous” doesn’t necessarily mean the brightest or smartest, or nicest, or most moralistic…it is simply the person who follows his/her dream and then turns it into reality… in “written memoirs.”

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

Doodle graciously had Father’s Day dinner at her home. Then some of the family stopped by the house….Rutledge had gotten some children’s books for his birthday and was thrilled, Eva Cate was given a necklace of her great grandmother Dee-Dee by Aunt Pap and she, too, was thrilled. Hope everyone had a great Father’s Day!

Jackson, Eva Cate and Rutledge both tried out the tractor…Rutledge’s legs need to get a little bit longer….Eva Cate’s are long enough but she doesn’t have the strength to push the pedals hard enough to move it without some help from behind.

Tommy said to tell you, Jackson, that children back in the fifties must have been a lot stronger! (I told him of course we were.) Actually a little WD-40 should do the trick! A good work-out machine!

Rutledge might just have turned three, but he has already figured it out….you get more girls sitting outside the pool than in it…especially when you are a little cutie!

Dear Reader:

Happy Father’s Day! My only wish on this day is that I had more memories of my own father. The few sketchy “memories” I have of daddy are based more on second-hand accounts…. heard from adults in my family talking about this or that story of him.

So the image and deep knowledge of my father is shrouded in more hearsay than actual recall. And even memories can be quite deceptive. What we think we remember and what actually happened years ago are usually not quite the same when laid out side by side.

It was hard to get mother to talk much about daddy so, even as a child, there were many gaps in my time-line with him in this life. But, on this special day, let me share with you some impressions that still linger within me of my time with daddy.

He will always be daddy in my mind because he died so young (31 years old) when I was so young- five. He is “Forever Young.”

It is hard for me to grasp the concept that my youngest child, Tommy, has already lived longer than my daddy did. (And he died leaving a wife and three children at that tender age.) Eva Cate (6) is now older than I was when I lost my father at five.

This photo was the last picture taken of me and my siblings with daddy. By the next Easter he was gone. (kidney disease)

Daddy died at Duke hospital on April 15, 1954 leaving his heritage behind in the form of three children. Me, David, and Ben.

I only have a few pictures of daddy but I chose the one of him and mother taken soon after their marriage (as the title photo for the blog) because I always loved looking at them loving each other. As a child and now an adult it was and is still quite romantic.

They would only have nine years together but it was quite a love story….one that would have to last an eternity for both in different ways.

I remember mother telling me (when I specifically asked how they met) she met daddy on a blind date. He was home on leave before shipping out to England….(he would end up with the rank of sergeant in the Air Force during WWII and play a pivotal role in the famous D-Day invasion.)

So much of their “dating” was through postcards and letters passed between them throughout the war.

*I am so grateful mother saved this 1944 Christmas card because it is the only piece of writing I have of my father who had a limited education because all the boys in the family had to quit school at 16 to help on the tobacco farm in Smithfield, North Carolina.

Mom and dad married in 1945….the year the war ended and two years later my older brother Ben arrived. I arrived two and half years after that and my younger brother two and a half years following me.

* I was always jealous of this picture….first-born children always get the most pictures made, especially with the parents….the rest of us are the “forgotten” children. Neither David nor I got a picture made with our parents together. Not fair! By the time the second and third come along…one parent is taking the picture of you and a sibling. (I want a picture of daddy holding me!)

My father’s family was of Scottish descent and obviously they were very proud of it. Daddy and his brother, J.D. managed to get leave at the same time (during the war) and meet in Edinburgh for pictures in their Scottish heritage kilts.

*For this reason this is the one  country I still wish to see and try to trace down my daddy’s family ancestry.

I can’t help but think how life in my own family would have changed if I had died at 31. I would have only left behind two children, Mandy and Walsh, since I didn’t have Tommy until I was 32.

I have to believe that God has a plan for people taken in the prime of life, but for the life of me, I have yet to figure it out. I will have to wait until the next world to discover the answer I believe….Sure hope it is a good one because I needed a daddy in my life to carry me and a little brother to tag along behind me.

(Every little girl needs to be a princess in the eyes of the first male figure in her life. It sets the tone for the rest of her life. I was….but my tiara came off way too soon.)

*A friend of mine, Kathy Worthington, sent a beautiful comment on an earlier blog this week when I was feeling sorry for modern generations who will no longer have letters from the past to remember loved ones by….she recalls:

I am lucky to have kept letters my daddy wrote me from Korea when I was just a little thing. He was such a comedian, always wanting to make me laugh and telling me to take care of mama until he came home. My favorite is one where he started in the middle of the page and wrote in circles like a pinwheel! What treasures they are – and how our grandchildren will never have such things – sad for them.

My only vivid memory of daddy was him coming home from a business trip with treats for me and my brothers. The “surcie” was a ‘two-headed’ lollipop. There was just one stick but two lollipops….one on each end of an extra long lollipop stick.

You had to eat it like you were twirling a baton. It is still so clear in my mind…that moment when I twirled the lollipop stick between my sticky fingers… licking first the cherry side and then the grape. (All the neighborhood kids were envious….nobody had ever seen a lollipop like this before.)

I remember feeling so proud to be daddy’s daughter with a special treat for me. I must be the luckiest little girl in the world to have a daddy who brings home such treasures. I was.

So until tomorrow….To all the fathers who have gone before us, but not before molding us into who we are or were to become…thank you!  That is the greatest treasure, the longest-lasting gift of all. I once was loved and that is all that is important in life.

I love you daddy! Happy Father’s Day!

“Today is my favorite day” Winnie the Pooh

They were married in 1945, the year the war ended.

Dear Reader:

This is a wonderful “mantra” for those of us lucky enough to live in the lowcountry of South Carolina. I noticed Thursday night that the moon is getting fuller and brighter… ethereal in its beauty. And, as far as the sun goes, we have already seen so much of it and we aren’t even “officially” into the summer season. Hot! Hot! Hot!

I love “sunshine” as an accessory too…but lately there has been a lot of sunshine… with no rain. I have been watering and watering and watering!

*I think I need “rain” as my new favorite accessory.

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*Sorry for the interruption but I had just typed that last sentence when it grew dark as pitch, the wind picked up, and oh boy are we getting rain….lots and lots of rain!

(“Ask and you shall receive“-It must have been that crazy rain dance- I even embarrassed myself dancing yesterday in the garden-that did the trick though!)

I started this blog around 3:30 yesterday afternoon and soon I was typing in rhythm to the raindrops falling on the roof.

My Ginger Shell plant was so happy and so was I…finally after weeks of no rain in my neighborhood….it started raining right here on Rainbow Road. Bless you God! I and my water bill thank You!

When I came across this message. “I am a day dreamer and night thinker” I thought now that is the true me. I do my best thinking at night and dreaming during the day. I get the big picture of the creative project going during the day, but it is at night, in bed, when I am able to solve the problem of the infinite details involved to turn the dream into reality.

I remember a lesson my class once did on Columbus Day. The students had to read a short biography on both Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. By the end of the discussion they had to answer the question: “Why is our country named “America” for Amerigo Vespucci instead of “Columbus” for Christopher Columbus?” 

It all came down to one fact. Columbus was a dreamer and Vespucci was a doer…a maker of dreams come true and most importantly a “documenter.”  He didn’t just stop with the dreaming component of finding a new world but he continued with all the written infinite details necessary to make it a reality.

In the end….his role played larger than Columbus’s with the name of our great country.

“Christopher Columbus might well have had the new world named after him, had it not been for two shortcomings. The first was that Columbus was under the mistaken impression that he had found a new route to Asia and was not aware that America was an entirely new continent.

The second was that he never wrote publicly about it so the masses were not aware of his discovery. Had he done this, Mr. Waldseemüller and his colleagues might have named it Columba! As it happened, Vespucci did write about it and was the first to call this land the “Novus Mundus” (Latin for “New World”).

To sum it up: Dream first, document second….dreaming gets one nowhere unless discoveries are documented in written form. a lesson for all of us dreamers.

Columbus, the explorer, and Vespucci, the navigator, used the sun and moon to guide them on their explorations….so in a sense, they, too, both: “Lived by the sun and loved by the moon.”

So until tomorrow…Every morning when we rise to the sun and every month when we see a full moon (or moon flower bloom)….we should be filled with gratitude for life…beautiful, crazy, unpredictable life.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

*Happy Birthday to Rutledge! Isn’t it wonderful that Rutledge let Sir Paul McCartney share his birthday? He is such a generous, kind-hearted little soul! Has it really been three years? ( For Paul….74 and counting…but who’s counting right? It’s Paul!)

A special day deserves a special event….Anne’s moon flowers bloomed last night ( I am sure) in honor of Master Rutledge’s special day….Three of them bloomed in fact. Happy Birthday my precious three year old Rutledge!

Dear Reader:

Life always finds a way to keep climbing. When I went out to water the plants yesterday the morning glory vines were going berserk. One had jumped on the fairy picture and was starting to climb around it….in fact I couldn’t tell where the morning glories stopped and the painted flowers began.

Another morning glory vine decided to climb a decorative sunflower and leap to the fence from the top of it.

Still another morning glory decided to climb a dead plant stalk…searching for higher ground.

I went and got another roll of twine to help the morning glories get to the fence.

Have you ever watched the movie American Beauty? There’s a scene in the movie where a character is watching a plastic bag floating in the wind. The bag drifts back and forth and up into the air as the wind shifts direction.

As the character watches, he says, “sometimes there is so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it.”

We get saturated with so much violence, hatred, and evil-doings in the news/world that it is easy to find ourselves complacently walking by so many objects of beauty without giving them a second glance.

Two new blooms made their appearance yesterday in the garden. Though I don’t remember the name of the plant the delicate, periwinkle  blooms made me stop in awe and appreciation of their beauty.

While watching the morning glories climbing over and around the fairy painting….I had forgotten that there were beautiful purple flowers in the painting to match the morning glory blooms and bumblebees….lots and lots of bumblebees.

Memories of mother, of Eva Cate playing with the fairies in the garden, and now purple morning glories adding to the decor of the painting. Beauty surrounds me.

I, also, got a good report from my oncologist yesterday on my blood work and overall health. I was reassured that I would stay in this “new” drug I have been on… as long as it continued working for me. That was such a relief! It is unbelievably mind-blowingly expensive….thank goodness for being a teacher and having my state insurance plan along with Medicare. The best insurance around….it really makes up for the pay scale for teachers in this stage of my life. It has saved me literally thousands upon thousands of dollars and potential financial medical ruin..

I have learned the hard way that good health is one of the most beautiful gifts in life…..actually price-less in its beauty.

I came across this poem fortuitously and thought, it too, is beauty in its own creation.

“Tomorrow does not stand apart,
A shining, all new day;
Tomorrow is a thing slow-built
Of hours passed away.

It’s made of dreams your heart has stored,
And dreams discarded, too;
It’s made of all the joys and tears
The years brought you.

It’s made of lessons you have learned,
The friends you’ve known–the foes;
As each of our Todays is bent,
So our tomorrow grows.

It’s made of sweat and toil and pain
And song and love and laughter;
Each minute of Today helps build
The day that follows after.

Tomorrow does not spring full-built
With some new dawn’s bright rays–
Tomorrow is a slow built thing
Made up of yesterdays.”

-Helen Lowrie Marshall from her book, A Gift So Rare

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So until tomorrow….Let’s get in the habit of pausing during our day and take five minutes to remove ourselves from our daily routines, meetings, and  deadlines…to walk outside. Find one object of beauty, examine it, appreciate it, and return to your life more fully aware of a Creator Who loves us in everything He creates.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

Delight of the Day: How cute is this…Stephanie Ballard Trzeciakiewicz shared this idea/photo (“potting’ wreath”) as seen at Joanne’s Craft Shop. “I think I can I think I can.” Even adding some miniature tools would be cute too. My potting shed is smiling at the thought.

Tonight Anne’s first moon flower bloom should take place….so exciting….mine are a little behind but growing and climbing.

Dear Reader:

You know you are getting old… when you begin to fear that future generations will never be able to read first-hand historical documents because they can’t write or read cursive.

You know you are getting old…when you fear that your grandchildren will never have the opportunity to experience finding a love  letter from an old boyfriend/girlfriend or spouse because young people rarely write letters today.

You know you are getting old…when you cringe at all the misspelled words in an email. Children and young people are learning weird abbreviations instead of spelling, so their communication (email/text, etc.) looks more like some kind of foreign Morse Code than it does a note.

You know you are getting old….when you miss being able to read someone’s face to identify their real emotions about a problem rather than try to decipher their true feelings from an email or text. The absence of touch to heal hurt feelings or disappointments worries me. We all need someone to hold or hug us and say “SHHH now…it will all be alright.”

Last night on HGTV’s Fixer Upper Chip and Jo were fixing up an old home to look like a rustic farm house with all modern amenities added. The last thing she did before showing the house was put a wooden plaque over the mantle that read simply: GATHER.

Don’t some words convey such power of emotion.…especially when standing alone. Gather to me means being close, being together. It is being able to sit down and have a meaningful, perhaps even memorable, conversation with a friend, adult child, or grandchildren.

I fear for the young generations coming along because they really believe it is easier for them to have cyberspace relationships than real ones. It is like settling for a synthetic blouse over a 100% cotton one.

A young writer by the name of Krysti Wilkinson  in her article “We Are the Generation that Doesn’t Want Relationships” (Huffington Post) concludes her thoughts with this sad statement:

…When things get too close to being real, we run. We hide. We leave. There’s always more fish in the sea. There’s always another chance at finding love. There’s just such a little chance of keeping it these days.

…We want a placeholder, not a person. We want a warm body, not a partner. We want someone to sit on the couch next to us, as we aimlessly scroll through another newsfeed, open another app to distract us from our lives. We want to walk this middle line: pretending we don’t have emotions while wearing our heart on our sleeve, wanting to be needed by someone yet not wanting to need someone.

We play hard to get just to test if someone will play hard enough – we don’t even fully understand it ourselves. We sit around with friends discussing the rules, but no one even knows the game we’re trying to play. Because the problem with our generation not wanting relationships is that, at the end of the day, we actually do.

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So until tomorrow….Take the opportunity to “gather” whenever you can with friends and family. The only way to build strong relationships is in person….be there.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

*I discovered this cute picture on Mollie’s (Facebook) Beauty Counter Momma website….love it!

A family that masks together detoxes together! Y’all this mask is amazing! I could feel it working within seconds of applying it. It feels tingly, cool, and refreshing! Work baby work, release those toxins! My husband found it refreshing too! 
PS. This mask is not for children. Hence only a spot on Rut’s nose real quick.

Dear Reader:

The other day in a Huffington Post article on finding your true self and then staying true to it…. an example (was given) of a woman who found a pillow in a small antique shop on sale for $9.99 and literally built her new home around the beautiful turquoise color/design. The article went on to explain that this was probably the best example of us finding our true selves and then living our lives accordingly. The pillow” spoke” to her and symbolized her vision of her life style.

Immediately I thought of how the trip to Provence, France (for an International Creativity Workshop with Anne in 2005) changed my life by helping me find my true self. I fell in love with the colors found in Aix-en-Provence where we stayed for most of the two weeks.

Sunrise and Sunset in Aix-en-Provence is breathtakingly beautiful because of all the oranges and yellows along the streets of the amazing town. But it was actually the evenings when we went to restaurants where the orange and yellow walls drew tourists into the cozy, comfortable restaurants that started me thinking that I wanted my house to “glow” at night with love and hospitality!.

At night in Aix-en-Provence the fountain-studded Cours Mirabeau was so beautiful….besides fountains there are more cafes and open markets that you can count and we tried to hit as many as possible while there. Besides falling in love with Provence and its colors…I also fell in love with wine and cheeses. It would be quite easy to change old eating habits if one lived there.

But “actually” it was the movie Love Actually that reminded me why I fell in love with oranges and yellows in one of the last scenes when the character Jamie proposes to Aurelia in the Bar de la Marine in Marseilles, France. (a skip and a hop from Aix-en-Provence.)

It is so romantic and the restaurant is filled with white lights and yellow walls and I knew immediately that my decision was made….to keep the house and re-do my whole side by painting the colors of Provence throughout my home. I am still in love with it today. Here is a movie clip from that romantic scene that helped me find my “true self.”

Love Actually Jamie and Aurelia – YouTube

My color palette for every room on my side is me….for better or worse, it is what you see. The true me.

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(Excerpt from Huffington Post- Pillow Talk and Listening to Who We Are Matters Most Definitely) Kay Morse

We express who we are with our choices. Our cars, homes, pillows, clothes, words, people, paints reflect who we are. When something or someone speaks to us, the real us, we must listen, even when it does not fit who “they” or “we” think we are.

The “voice” can take many different shapes:  The nudge that we are on our way to our great big glorious life. The pillow. The swipe. The article. The new hairdo. The move. The cashmere sweater purchase. The trade In. The Exit. The Stay. The billboard wisdom. The unexpected chat. The inspiration to step outside of our sleepy story and write the one that is bursting at the binding to come forth.

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So until tomorrow….If you hear someone calling your name from behind but see no one….could it be your true self begging you to slow down and become who you are destined to be… by reflecting yourself through your life style?

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

Delight of the Day: Look at this beautiful Chinese indigo plant of the day….gorgeous! It belongs to Vickie, my neighbor in her beautiful tropical “rain forest” garden.

I spent Monday night with John and Mandy since I wasn’t scheduled to have my AC unit fixed until this  morning….but as you already know God winked and all was taken care of Monday morning.

We had already planned a day with the children Tuesday so I went on with the plans. It was Tigger’s birthday yesterday…he turned eight. Tommy and Kaitlyn joined us at Wild Wings Monday night and we went birthday shopping for Rutledge yesterday morning…he is turning three Saturday. My baby is turning three…tempus fugit.

Birthday Day boy Rutledge…..coming up in three days! Saturday! BOO BOO LOVES YOU THIS MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*It looks like little brother Lachlan has already gotten into the birthday cake.

Dear Reader:

I must confess that I am a closet worrier who can go “willy nilly” on you in a skinny minute. I am all over the place in my visualization about a problem.

Sadly….one drawback to imaginative people is that we can use this wonderful attribute in quite a detrimental way… when we let our imagination embellish problems beyond common sense and reasoning. Being creative means we have the ability to create more  (What if?) scenarios that border on the ridiculous.

Personal case-in-point: While on our Ya retreat (last week) I told the girls since I didn’t have any big plans for this summer I had made a personal financial promise to myself to pay off the balance on one credit card that had gotten too high, start paying off my equity line and have a good start (by the end of the summer) of being back on the “black tar” road and no longer on the “red” clay one.

I knew I had a plumber scheduled to come yesterday and I had already worked myself into a “What If” frenzy. There was a plumbing problem on both sides ….one in each bathroom. Sunday night I tossed and turned wondering if either or both of these problems could spell disaster. Plumbing problems, from personal experience, seem to invariably plummet into more costly fixes than originally thought. (like renovations)

But that wasn’t what was keeping me up….I arrived home to a “dead” air conditioning unit on my side. Ouch! I was worried about the B&B side air conditioning unit since it was a lot older getting through the summer, but instead my newer one proved to be the culprit. It was so hot…. and all I could imagine was the heat/air repairman telling me I needed a new unit.

So when the sun peeked into my bedroom Monday morning I was awake and exhausted. I called a heating/air company I used before but it would be Wednesday before they could come. Half an hour earlier than expected….the plumber, who my yard man Ernie, had recommended showed up.

I apologized to him for having to work in the heat on my side….and he asked me what was wrong. I told him the fan wasn’t turning on the unit and it wasn’t cooling. “Well then, he said, “we need to fix that first don’t we?”

Puzzled, I stared at him….”Aren’t you the plumber?”

“Yes“ he replied, ” As well as a certified contractor in HVAC….electrical and plumbing.”

“All I could do was nod as he went to his truck to get the right tools. None of the plumbing problems were “serious” and the air conditioning unit just needed a new starter for the fan and a couple of other small replacements.

What a God Wink! I needed a plumber and a HVAC contractor/repairman and I got both in one. I am very cool as I am typing my blog and have no drips or pressure problems any more with my water and faucets.

All that worrying for naught! When will I ever learn….I must be the slowest spiritual student around….maybe that is why God is holding me back for some more renewal lessons. I get so far and then slide backwards!

Harriet Lerner once quoted:   “Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.”

What I have learned through my garden and back yard is that stillness and calm go hand in hand. In order to calm down we must get rid of all the mental clutter and find a clearing.

The title photo is now one of my favorite places to go….mainly because it is on the edge of the woods behind my house and thus shady. I can go there, listen to the birds, the fountain, feel the breeze and know God is there.

“Stillness is not about focusing on nothingness; it is about creating a clearing. It’s opening up an emotionally clutter-free space and allowing ourselves to feel and think and dream and question.” (Brene Brown, PHD)

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So until tomorrow…Don’t give up on me, God, I may be slow in turning over my cares of the world to You but deep down inside I do believe, at the end of the road, You will be waiting for me.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

* Delight of the Day: Lisa (Hollow Tree Nursery) calls this maple a Swamp Maple....I just call it beautiful. I can watch it grow from my clearing in the woods.