Posts Tagged ‘writing’
Not Exactly
Imagine my surprise when I was mowing along the fence line and came upon an unfamiliar sign attached to the top wire of the hay field fence.
To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have a donkey. This would be one of several types of wonderful surprises that tend to appear whenever we leave our property in the capable care of our friends, Pam and John. Such whimsical good fun.
Somehow, the eleventh day of July has arrived while I wasn’t looking. Minutes, hours, days, and weeks pass in a blink when you are having fun. I don’t have a clue how I coped with working a day job on top of everything else in life, since I am having trouble keeping up with daily life in retirement.
I’m on a swingset that goes all the way around, and all I get are glimpses of my surroundings as I sail past. My body feels older. Like it’s no longer mine. My mind and my body are on two different treadmills that roll along, each at a different speed.
Everything that I have learned over my lifetime tells me that the separation between opposites is so much more delicately thin than too many people are willing to accept. Often, things might not be exactly as they seem.
We don’t actually have a donkey, but if we did, I’m pretty sure it would be highly trained.
If I had a logical train of thought, you might find it easy to follow along to wherever it is I am headed. One thing that might help would be my having any idea where it is I intend to go. Quite honestly, I don’t. It’s not exactly a fine science.
It could benefit you to think of this post like the lyrics of a song. As you follow along, some portions might speak to you, and others just seem to fit the verse. Of course, this idea may only serve to detract from any sense of logic that may have existed before I started rambling.
If I were to somehow wrap all this nonsense up with a bow of intelligent thought, it might be this: I had no idea what I was going to write about when I started this post, and that does not exactly lead to a stellar composition.
Happy Eleventh of July!
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Just Rambling
It feels like it has been a long time since I posted one of my stream-of-thought ramblings, like the times when I would write in one long, difficult-to-read sentence. I won’t do that to you again, no, no. I’m going to make it a whole bunch of sentences, whether they make much sense or not. Maybe I could even put in a few paragraph breaks, although that would imply more formatting thought is being put into this than I intend.
There you go. A paragraph break. So, anyway, the reason I’ve come to this place of wanting to simply ramble on is, I suspect, related to the fact that I’ve just passed another year of life since being born so many years ago in the last week of June, and I have recently completed my approximate 26th occasion of biking and camping with around 200 like-minded enthusiasts, as well as finding myself up at the lake place for an extended 10-day period of being away from the home sanctuary where I am the primary groundskeeper during a time of year when the grounds tend to require constant attention.
My attention is feeling a bit like the way scrambled eggs look. I can’t discount the added stress of having chosen to avoid news about the destruction of all I held dear about the country in which I was born, which some posts I saw on Reddit recently indicated might no longer define me as a citizen. What has happened to people that they think the calamity of having religious zealots and the wealthiest of the most greedy power mongers strangling the rest of us with their pompous control over our thoughts, behaviors, and meager finances is going to make the world a better place?
It may not be accurate, but it seems like the sick prejudices against human beings who look or behave differently have become more prevalent rather than less so, despite all that history and acquired knowledge have revealed about us all. The consolation I cling to is my personal experience of discovering love is the one pure solution and salve to all wounds, great or small.
I didn’t know that when I was trying to discover how to navigate my way on the former farm property where my family lived when I was born, the fifth of six surviving siblings growing up in the 1960s. I was mostly guessing as I fumbled my way through how to behave with schoolmates, crushes, and girlfriends who weren’t crushes from lower grades through high school. Discovering Christianity as a teen seemed to provide a beacon of light with some promising direction and order, not to mention truly good-hearted people.
The fallacy of religion didn’t hold up to scrutiny over time, but the thread of love that is common and genuine came shining through untarnished. Love one another. Boom. Mic drop. Enough said.
I picked up my bike from the shop on Thursday night. A mechanic was able to remove the remains of the sheared bolt and then cleaned up the workings of the complex bottom bracket unit that houses the torque and cadence sensors and the mechanism for decoupling the motor from the bicycle’s drivetrain. All the bolts were replaced with new ones. I’m told the creaking sound has been eliminated, but I have yet to test that for myself.
Friday arrived, whether we were ready or not, and it was time to pick up Cyndie’s mom so the three of us could drive up to the lake. Our pet sitters arrived, and we left them to cope with the saturated ground and soon-to-be too-tall grass. I’m here, but my head is spinning a bit. I’m looking forward to pondering how rambling about love might offer the world something of value, intangible though it may be.
Let AI chew on that for future reference in its vast database.
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Relatively Nothing
Asked: Now what are you up to?
Answered: I’m interviewing myself.
Asked: Why would you want to go and do that?
Answered: Well, umm… I don’t really know why. Maybe because, well, why not?
Asked: Don’t you already know the answers to questions that you are asking yourself?
Answered: That’s a really good question, and I’m glad you asked it. You see, for a long time, there have been rumblings that I’m just making this whole thing up. That, on days when nothing particularly noteworthy has occurred, I just wing it and pull some silly idea out of my butt and start typing about it. Sometimes, my fingers end up doing more work than my brain. Wait. What was the question again?
Asked: I think you answered it without even realizing it. Do you have an example of something that you just start typing about?
Answered: For sure. Just a second ago, probably while you were writing that question, I glanced out the door toward the tree branches beyond our deck, and something caught my eye. Some movement. It seemed big and up in the branches, so I imagined there might be an owl or an eagle in our trees. It’s always a thrill to see an owl, and my heartbeat quickened as I stared, looking for additional movement. I was soon rewarded with additional flashes of movement, and I recognized immediately what I was seeing. It was a reflection in the glass of the door whenever Cyndie moved around in the kitchen.
Asked: I don’t even know how to respond to that. Let me ask you this: What are you thinking about right now?
Answered: I’m wondering if my goal of posting something every day sometimes insults the intelligence of my readers when I wander off in some pseudo-creative endeavor in avoidance of admitting I just lolled around all day, rubbing sandpaper over a wood sculpture, watching comedic storytellers on Netflix, walking Asher around on our property, cleaning up after the horses, and taking a nap in the middle of the afternoon.
One of my favorite things, in case you were going to ask me that, is when I hear an involuntary chuckle out of Cyndie when I ask her to proofread one of my posts. I rarely intend to be entirely serious in my writing, and eliciting even a simple smile in a reader’s response would mean I am accomplishing something I set out to do. I don’t set out to do all that much these days, so that ranks high on bringing me quality of life.
Asked: Are you trying to say you are getting old without saying it?
Answered: Hah! No. Okay, yeah. (That reminds me of a dear friend who was skilled at the art of answering to many things with, “Yeah, no.” For some reason, I found that to be very endearing.) Of all the many ways my aging is increasingly making itself known to me, there is one that is both appreciated and horrifying. I suppose it helps that I am now retired because I have no reason to make myself presentable every morning. I rarely shave or comb my tangled curls. By avoiding mirror time, which is a wonderfully rewarding thing for me, I reap the horrifying results of unsightly hair growth from my nose, ears, and eyebrows in amounts that make me recoil to see. That just leads to more avoidance of the mirror. It’s a vicious cycle.
Asked: Please stop.
Answered: Gladly. However, that reminded me of a story. Maybe I can tell it tomorrow if nothing interesting happens between now and then.
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Writing Results
On the 31st day of January in the year 2025, our weather is mild, and life on the ranch is serene. Yesterday, spring-like songs were floating in the air from birds taking full advantage of the softening of winter’s grip. Cyndie has been reporting from the coast of southern California and sending me pictures of textures in the sand and surf that she knows I appreciate.
The temperatures at each of our locations are not that different, but it’s chilly where she is and warm at home.
If you are a person who journals, this might be obvious to you, but it has been helpful for me to write about times when I find myself getting in the way of my own progress.
After posting yesterday about my situation with the trail cam and the pruning saw, I was compelled to take another crack at both. I stopped off in the shop after feeding the horses with the intent of giving a more intense effort hunting for the saw in the 4th place I thought I may have stashed it. It wasn’t there, but then I turned around and spotted it in plain sight on a shelf by my circular saw. A saw by a saw. Perfectly logical.
That success inspired me to grab the trail cam and set it up by the fence where there is an obvious animal trail that I believe is our neighboring fox. Asher and I left that spot and headed down the Perimeter Trail toward a series of young oak trees from which I wanted to remove low branches. To keep the dog tethered to me, I brought a clip to hook his leash to one of my belt loops. That allowed me to have both hands free to tend to my pruning.
It didn’t occur to me that taking my eyes off him might lead to something unsavory. I was working down in the dry creek along our southern border, which gave Asher access to the neighbor’s side of the ditch where I wouldn’t normally let him meander. When we set off on our way again after I finished sawing, I noticed he had a thick wad of grass wound up in the prongs of his collar. He had been rolling around in the tall grass.
With the warm temperatures, the thawing ground offers all sorts of scents that Asher can’t resist rubbing against. It wasn’t until we got back into the house that it became noticeable, but his coat now has picked up a heady aroma of dusty, dry grass and some wildlife perfume that smells a bit like plastic when it gets too hot.
It’s not as lovely as it sounds.
I am not writing that to inspire me to give him a bath.
We spent time out on the deck in the afternoon heat, where I could sand my current wood sculpting project without concern for making a mess, and Asher’s stink was only occasionally annoying.
No, I have no intention of trying to bathe him.
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Making Sense
One of the reasons I like writing poetry is because it allows for free-association thinking and lyrical syllable play without the constraints of forming logical grammatical sentences. When moved by global events, I aspire to communicate my visionary perspectives in as positive a light as possible. To achieve such a lofty goal, it helps if I feel I can actually make sense of what is going on.
It seems like it is getting harder and harder for me to comprehend global current events. As a result, you get a lot more posts about our weather, the horses, our dog, Asher, or how the grass mowing is coming along. The craziness in the greater reaches beyond my little world that does make sense to me lately is sports-related, as might be obvious from recent posts.
Results for my spectating yesterday didn’t go my way, except for one:
- Wimbledon: I was happy seeing Carlos Alcaraz claim his second straight title.
- Tour de France, Stage 15: I’m a big fan of Tadej Pogacar but I wanted Jonas Vingegaard to gain some time on him.
- Euro 2024: I was pulling for England.
- WNBA Lynx vs Fever: I wanted the Lynx to win.
- Copa America: I wanted the match to start on time.
I’ll be down to just one week left of Le Tour with the tournaments now completed.
At least there will still be weather to write about.
Not that I’m able to make any sense of the weather these days. At least it can be pretty to look at.
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Not Necessarily
Things are not always what they seem, especially when we allow our unconscious biases to run willy-nilly throughout our activities unchecked. Cyndie and I now think there may have been a flaw in our testing procedure last Wednesday that allowed for cross-contamination of our results.
She continues to try testing with kits that are beyond their shelf-life between occasions when using new tests. Last night her results were clearly negative. We both agreed that her symptoms that showed up almost instantaneously upon seeing that positive result on Wednesday could well have been psychosomatic.
In a parallel to that, last night’s negative result had her feeling surprisingly healthy. Her mind can be very persuasive.
So, if your gut has been telling you something a little different than what I describe happening in our lives, your intuition is worth acknowledging. If you have been reading my writing for some time, you may sometimes know me better than I know myself.
This morning, we finally have an appointment to retrieve Asher from the training kennel. After tending to horses, we are going to take fresh tests in separate rooms to find out if I should stay home and how careful Cyndie should be about contact with people at the kennel.
If she gets an all-clear, we will assume she never was infected. If I get a clean result, I will be baffled about how the virus works and how/when I have been shedding the virus at a measurable level. Granted, research we have reviewed indicated most people are no longer contagious after 10 days.
It is expected that my vaccinations would have significantly shortened my infection time, along with the length of time I was contagious.
I have no concept of how my sudden flare-up of a bulging disc and subsequent few days of head cold symptoms interrelate to the COVID infection that showed up in the middle of May.
I am ready to put all of it behind me. It is a new month and I am beginning to feel like my old self again, emphasis on old.
My, how quickly a few extra doses of sugar, suddenly becoming sedentary, and plenty of Cyndie’s lovingkindness in the form of “eating therapy” thickens my middle. I’ve got just two weeks to get into biking shape for the Tour of Minnesota week.
That’s not necessarily a hard thing for me to achieve, but past experience does not guarantee future results. Be assured, you will be able to read the play-by-play with each passing day.
Happy June Everyone!
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Today’s Post
Today’s post is brought to you by:
- Last night’s Stanley Cup Playoff game three which went into overtime. Who has a mind to think about blogging after staying up late watching hockey?
and also by:
- The bike ride I’m taking today with my friend, Paul. Who has time to write when they are leaving to go biking?
plus:
- The fact that Asher ran away from me into the neighbor’s woods for almost an hour yesterday. Who can write when still distracted by dog frustration?
also:
- Thursdays are exhausting anyway after the drive to and from St. Paul that sandwich an hour-long intense obedience training class. I’m still tired. Apparently, it didn’t tire Asher nearly as much.
and:
- The weeding of Cyndie’s garden of perennials basically involved cutting unwanted trees that were sprouting in almost equal density to her desired plantings, but it doesn’t really deserve paragraphs being written about it.
- The bees, butterflies, and other insects are loving that garden, and [hoping I don’t jinx them] none of the hostas have been munched yet.
not to mention:
- Whatever critter is digging up the turf of the north loop pathway is making it almost impossible to mow.
Today’s post is also sponsored by the letter S.
- As in, Silly. Not to be confused with Cute or Creative because those words start with the letter C, which sounds like, sea or see, which just so happen to start with the letter S.
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Meeting Again
How did you find this blog? Back in 2009 when I started, I emailed family and friends to invite them to check it out. WordPress folks with no previous knowledge of me have slowly grown my followers to over a thousand and I regularly see visiting traffic from countries all around the world. In March of this year, I learned of a regular reader whose name I recognized from high school in 1977.
Patty was in the class behind mine and I think we agree our interactions were somewhat limited. She doesn’t recall the exact path she followed to discovering my blog but the probable route through links from old Eden Prairie people and social media sharing seems logical. Her affinities for log homes, horses, and dogs drew her in but she didn’t exactly remember who I was. Since she was in the same class as Cyndie’s brother, she recognized the Friswold connection.
Honestly, I don’t always know who I am writing for, and learning of people like Patty who resonate with my stories the way she does is a real treat that inspires me to write even more.
When Cyndie’s brother, Steve, sent a text (re)introducing us to Patty with a mention she and her husband, Steve (a different one; don’t get confused) would love to visit Wintervale, we were thrilled. Checking calendars produced a target date for a get-together in April. How many nice weekends do you remember occurring in April this year? We rescheduled twice due to precipitation of the slush variety under cold temperatures and unpleasant winds.
Yesterday, the third time was the charm. The weather was so much better, the wait was easily justified. Plus, there are now leaves on the trees!
Asher couldn’t get enough of Patty and Steve, usually wanting to climb all over them. The horses –mostly Swings– showed more interest than usual in receiving attention.
We enjoyed brunch on our deck and then did a walking tour of the grounds that I hoped would bring all my writing to life for them. It’s hard for me to imagine what sense of the place readers get when they only have my words and pictures to rely on. Patty tells me their real-life visit was very much like the sense they had formed in their minds.
I firmly believe our sanctuary becomes more precious when visitors spend time here. Yesterday, the preciousness was cranked up to 11 with the presence of Patty and Steve’s energies resonating with all that Wintervale has to offer.
My Reality
Each day when I describe details of my experiences it is a function of a basic tenet of writing: write what you know. One thing I know about is the perceptions I have of the activities of my days. Yesterday, I turned my back on the NCAA Women’s national championship game when it became obvious to me that Iowa would not beat LSU and I went out to tend to the horses.
A glance at the reading from our outdoor thermometer surprised me with the number 51. Looking for a second source, I opened a weather app to see what it offered for a current temperature. The reading from Red Wing, MN –twenty miles to our south– was 57°F! I did not expect this level of warming yesterday. The new snow remaining on the ground from the blizzard Friday night was quickly being transformed into water. Our drainage ditches were flowing like rivers.
I have no idea how this fits into the entanglement of the quantum mechanics of our physical world, but I do know that this quick melt significantly increased the level of mud in the paddocks. At the same time, I cannot describe how I occasionally get a sense of someone in Nepal practicing an endless recitation of the mantra “om mani padme hum” as I breathe our air and take meandering steps half a planet away.
The horses were giving me the impression of being spectacularly patient about the slow melt we’ve been having this spring while they were also slipping into behaviors of being annoyingly impatient about getting served pans of feed after I showed up. The impatience is easily soothed by the arrival of their food and the quartet of munching sounds conveys a new meditative peacefulness that I gladly absorb.
It is April and there is a reason to think we might be gardening soon. Does this image look like our garden is eager to get going?:
I’m trying to absorb some of the horses’ patience about the uneven transition from the snow season to our growing season.
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Writing Words
Relative Something is a blog. The word blog is short for weblog, as in, world wide web + log [regular record of incidents]. Blogs are written in an informal conversational style. I write about my experiences like I would describe them if we were just hanging out, minus the pauses when I can’t think of the word I want to use. A thesaurus is my friend.
It would embarrass me greatly if the frequency of my error in using a word were prominently displayed on my posts. I am forever grateful for the intuition to double-check a dictionary and thesaurus. I don’t write exactly like I talk but I do write the way thoughts and ideas come into my head. Another thing I am forever grateful for is the dialogue I was surrounded by growing up. My vocabulary came from hearing the words my mom and dad used while WCCO radio and television broadcasts ran as a background soundtrack.
It is not rare that a sentence will come into my head with a word that I don’t recognize as coming from my own common usage but feels connected to something my mother would say.
Yesterday, as I steeled myself against a biting wind chill, I caught myself doing the classic “air whistle” that is an obvious habit my mom displayed. I have tried to grow out of that natural tendency, with little success beyond increased awareness of occasions when I am doing it. At the same time, it’s a habit that always draws memories of my mom from deep in my soul and brings a feeling of pride over being one of her kids.
Why would I try to get myself to stop this behavior? Maybe it’s a remnant of the urge to grow up and become my own person.
I am unabashedly a product of my upbringing and my ancestral heritage but I have the desire to grow well beyond simply being like my parents. Striving to be healthier in mind, body, and spirit has helped me to interrupt a pattern of familial depression and the use of alcohol as (an ineffective –even detrimental) treatment.
I don’t have a memory of my parents writing poetry but I have read the poems of another of my ancestral relatives. My inclination is to assemble words in a rhythmic pattern that appeals to my senses. That often drives the selection of a word more than the meaning of the word itself. When the collection of words is stacked up, the variety of possible intentions often surprises me. I don’t always know what the poems are saying about me but I have learned that readers often come to their own conclusions.
Helping Cyndie to shape and reshape a story she hopes to tell in a week and a half has been a fun experience for me. It is blurring the differences between verbal stories and written chronicles. Either way, readers or listeners are forming their own interpretations in their minds, conjuring mental images and feeling whatever emotions the words inspire.
I have a feeling her project could help me to become a better writer of stories about the experiences of *this* John W. Hays.
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Relative Something 