At Considerable Cost

All three of my children started school this year.   All three.   Thomas is now a proud kindergartner.   Clare is in second grade.   Emmeline began intermediate school which means a locker and schedule to remember.   My house is nearly silent during the day and it feels very empty and lonely.   I have to stop here and step off any pity train, though.   Every school day, I climb into my car and get to pick up my babies from school.   Then, I get to spend the rest of the evening with them, along with the weekends and holidays.   My house is not always empty.   It's not the same as the seven years we waited for the sounds of children to fill our home.   The idea of returning to homeschooling has been very appealing to me recently.   It's been appealing because I want my children with me all the time.   I honestly miss them.   My head soon takes...

Today I threw open windows in my home as the first crisp morning of autumn arrived.   It took me back. Rough, harvest gold and forest green verigated shag carpet beneath my tightly-crossed legs, clad in shorts for the first time since winter truly settled in.   Chalky, textured dry-wall against my back.   An attic fan, mounted in the hallway ceiling outside my bedroom, spun its massive blades and whined, drowning out the everyday evening sounds within our home and the new noises outside my opened window.    The first whirs after the flip of the switch were what I imagined a helicopter would sound like and the sudden intake of air from the opened windows around the house were so strong the house seemed to inhale and gain some momentary altitude.  That intense pull created my favorite spot of refuge, my temporary hiding place that I could only enjoy for a only a few weeks of the year.   As long as the...

I'm a Southerner, but not a Southern Belle.   I was never presented to society at a white-gloves-and-ball-gowns-cotillion.   I was never the princess or queen of a small-town festival.   I only drink unsweetened tea, whether hot or iced.   My parents wanted to see if they could raise me on only unsweetened tea, so I wouldn't like the taste of the sugared variety and it worked.   Mama always made two pitchers of iced tea.   And, though I can appreciate the cast and technical achievements of Gone With the Wind , I'm telling you, if I had any state secrets, I might give them up if forced to watch that film on an auto-loop.   Ashley sure wasn't worth all those ripples of misery and by the end, the only three people I could respect were Big Sam, Mammy and Belle Watling. But whenever I am once again close to the waters of the Mississippi River, my pulse seems to adjust itself to the undulations of the ...

This was one of my first writing assignments as a college freshman.   We were instructed to write a descriptive essay.   It's one of my favorite things I've ever written.   It's not some great literary work and it took tremendous restraint not to correct the many things I'd like to change now.   I cringed at some of the cliches and my tendency--overuse-- of repetition is evident.   Then, there are the tense issues.   It is a favorite, though, because, as I wrote in the previous post , it was one of the first essays I ever "saw."   It is also a favorite because it is a description of the storms I regularly witnessed growing up on our farm.   I loved watching the approaching storms and taking shelter during their short reign over the land.   I post it as part of my mission to record a part of myself on this blog, for myself and my children. I am standing in the middle of a yard.   A large br...

 This post has absolutely nothing to do with football stadiums or sports spectator seating. Our new home has one flaw.   It can get hot.   Really hot.   Last winter, we rarely had to run the central heat, except for maybe a cycle or two first thing in the morning to take away the chill.   Yea for the winter utility bills!  Oh, wait a minute.   This is Texas, so that really only affects two--maybe three--utility bills? We have no mature trees anywhere near our home, so our large roof just soaks in the heat.   Thermal curtains are on the front windows for the morning heat (when our door handle gets too hot to touch) and solar screens are on the kitchen windows, on the back of the house, where the evening sun comes bearing down.   I complained about our lack of trees to a friend from Louisiana.   She told me the new neighborhoods cleared all the trees and people had cut down trees because of all t...

During our last effort to finish cleaning out my parents' home nearly two years ago, I finally came across some of my childhood toys.   Memories came to mind and heart with each new discovery.   Some toys I remembered well and had thought of many times throughout the years.   Others had slipped deeper into my memories and I only remembered them as I found them.   Some of my favorite finds were items from my kitchen set.   I loved my kitchen set.   I probably played with it every day until about 6th grade when it was moved out of my room.   It was a Sears one, made of Masonite.   It had red accents, including a plastic red sink.   Behind the sink was a little painted window scene, complete with red and white check curtains.   All of the cookware was red and my dishes were tin with red accents. Our house on the farm was built in 1956 and it had characteristics tra...