Telling Stories....

When I started blogging five years ago, I frequently wrote about my experiences at work.  Or family life. Or something I saw and wanted to comment about.  I used a photo to illustrate the blog and that was it. Ever since I started, I have always hoped that my words would make my readers think and relate what I have said to things in their own lives…

A little more than a year ago, I started scrapbooking again.  Things have changed in the scrapbooking world: it’s not just about photos cut into cute shapes and lots of stickers to decorate the page.  Somewhere along the line, people figured out that pasting photos on a page wasn’t enough.  And cutesy stickers didn’t add much to the story of when, why, and where the photo was taken.

And so, scrapbooking (in whatever form you choose) has become a method of telling our stories about our lives, our families, and our adventures.  Photos are accompanied by “journaling cards” that recount what happened, or was going on, in each photo.  Sure, there are still stickers and other ephemera but they are an adjunct to the story, and a small one at that.

Currently, I am doing Project Life for the second year in a row.  It’s a system of telling our stories in an easy-to-do format, with pockets for photos and other souvenirs of everyday life. Becky Higgins

What I like about Project Life is that it makes me focus on today.  Sure, yesterday and tomorrow were, or will be; important in their own time, but today is what I have right now.  In other words, I live in the moment, recording life’s ups and downs as they happen.  The only thing better than living in the moment is being able to go back and look at those moments later…

My just-completed first page from last week.

And my second page from last week.

I bought in to the project, literally, and purchased a “core kit” from Becky Higgins.  This year, I have been making some of my own journaling cards to add to the core kit.  I want to personalize my story, after all, as I am the only me around…

A few of the journaling cards I have made...

Whether the photos show snow-capped mountains or mountains of laundry in front of the washer, there is a story there.   Not a what-I-did-last-summer story but the story of everyday….. And that is what matters: telling our stories.

 

So, though the format and content of my blog may seem different, it really isn’t.  I am still focused on telling my own story but I am using several modalities and not just writing.  The important thing is that, someday, someone who knew me and loved me will have a better glimpse of who I was and what I did.

That’s telling my story…

Cali

Going Home Again...and Again

Then

In an unexpected turn of events, we traveled 25 miles southeast of Podunk to another, even smaller, Podunk…  Having been sick with a cold for more than a week, I was glad to get out of the house and “see the world” as it were…

We traveled to a quaint little town east of Podunk to visit my favorite antiques shop.  Afterwards, we stopped in at the hardware store.  Truly, a hardware store, with creaky wood floors, items displayed in divided shelves, and an old-fashioned heater grate in the floor.

Ever solicitous about my health, he asked me if I wanted to go home…. I said “no” because I was enjoying being out in the sunshine.  And so, he had an adventure in mind: “let’s go to Lindsay (an even smaller Podunk) and find the house you lived in….”

I don’t know why, all these years later, that I remember the name of the street we lived on….But I do.  And I found it on my iPhone’s Google Maps app.  As we drove through town, the little blue dot on the screen was moving with us, ever nearer to Linda Vista Drive.

I remember what the house looked like because I have several photos of family in front of it.  My mother told me once that the house was featured in Sunset Magazine in 1947.  I don’t know if that is true or was invented by a realtor who wanted my parents to buy the house.  I think I may have to look into that at some point…

I felt a lump in my throat as we drove down the street…..and there, at the turn in the road, was the house.  I remember it as being gray—the color of the kitschy cinder-blocks used to build it—and now it is a beigy-gold paint color.  The window frames are still hunter green, and the windows are original, too.  A cooler is precariously perched in one of the bedroom windows, and the lawn is winter dead.

Now

Although we only lived in that house for a couple of years, and I was VERY young, I do remember lots of things about it.  For instance, the bathroom floor was black marble.  Why do I remember that?  Perhaps because I spilled my mother’s face powder on it and she thought she would never get it all cleaned up…

My favorite spaces in that house were all outdoors.  There was a screened-in sleeping porch along the entire back of the house and I would sleep there at night during the long, hot summers.  Just beyond that porch was the back patio, which was huge.  It was angled and free-form to make it blend into the back lawn in a pleasing fashion. 

One of my favorite things to do (remember: I was VERY young) was to push Daddy’s push mower across the patio, delighting in the clackety-clack sounds it made on the cement.  I do remember the last time I did that, too, as Daddy was home for lunch and came outside to ask me to “stop doing that!”

I remember the houses on each side of ours, too.  On the one side was the “elderly” neighbor with the apricot tree.  I amazed my neighborhood friends by being brazen enough to sneak into her back yard and steal an apricot from her tree.  Not only that, I stopped at the faucet under her kitchen window and washed it off before running out front to eat it in front of my cohorts…

On the other side of our house was the home of my best playmate and friend.  She and I had some great adventures, such as painting her porch red with the blooms on my mother’s rose bush.  Also not a popular pastime with adults…

That relationship had its ups and downs, too.  When I was allowed to paint the picket fence on her side of the back yard (remember, I was too young to have read “Tom Sawyer”), she was upset that I wouldn’t let her help me.  I tried to explain that my mother told me just to paint our side of the fence, and that she had to ask her mother before she could paint her side of the fence…..  She was frustrated and slapped me—hard—on my cheek.  Without thinking, I ‘slapped’ her with my paintbrush across her cheek.  After hearing both of us shriek, our mothers both came out of the house and, needless to say, neither one of us got to do any more painting….

We had moved to that little town because that’s where Daddy found a job after the war.  I also remember why we left that house and that town….

It was Christmastime, 1950, and my mother was busy getting ready for Christmas.  One of the things she did to “get ready” was to take down the living room curtains and wash and iron them.  It was a whole day’s chore, I’m sure.  And then, on Christmas Eve, the weather dropped to below freezing.  Since that little town is situated in the middle of miles and miles of orange groves, the night air smelled of the smudge pots burning all around us, keeping the oranges from freezing.

Perhaps it worked, and the crop was saved.  I really don’t know.  What I DO know is that, on Christmas morning, my mother shrieked when she saw her newly-washed and ironed curtains: they were now charcoal gray, thanks to the freezing temperatures and smudge pots…

By the next Christmas, we had moved here, to Podunk, to the very house where I am writing this…

We had prolonged freezing temperatures here in Podunk last night….maybe that’s why I was thinking about that house in that even smaller Podunk, 25 miles away…

Cali