Tag: Life changes

Fall thoughts

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leflore marching band

leflore marching band (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fall, despite being the herald of winter, is easily my favorite season.  And why not?  There’s so much to love: hot apple cider, marching band season, beautiful scenery, not to mention all things pumpkin.  I could go on and on.

There’s always a day in September when it begins.  The air is a little cooler, the walk to school a little more brisk.  Mornings like this hold a special kind of beauty.  The sky seems just a little more blue when the leaves are changing, and the brightness of the sky intensifies the crimson and gold of the leaves.

As a girl, I loved walking home from school in the gutters.

Melancholy

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Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.  –Graham Greene

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Related articles

Mawwage is what bwings us togevah today…

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I said in my post yesterday that twenty-four was a banner year, but twenty-five ranked right up there with it.  We spent the better part of the year planning the wedding and the honeymoon, getting details worked out and being generally happy and excited and everything else that is good.  At Easter, I was confirmed in Seymour’s church after completing the RCIA program.  That was one of the biggest decisions we had made thus far in our life together; his family is devoutly Catholic and mine is Presbyterian.  My family didn’t seem very happy about my decision to convert, but it’s not like I was changing religions or something.  I simply changed my denomination.  After all, Catholics and Protestants do worship the same God, do believe in the same afterlife, do read more or less the same Bible.  It’s not like I joined a cult or something.

However, the difference did pose an interesting question…

Onward and upward!

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That’s right, things started looking much better for me in my twenty-fourth year.  Much better, as a matter of fact.  The whole year was pretty stellar, really.  See, my birthday is at the end of January.  Shortly before my birthday, I signed up for Yahoo! Personals.  I had gone to a wedding a few months prior for a couple who had met on eHarmony.com.  The groom and I had gone to high school together and I thought, “Hey – if Seth can meet such a nice girl online, maybe I can find a nice guy myself!”

I had a few first dates, but nothing that really went anywhere.  Then one day, I was scrolling through matches in my area and came across a guy who was a few years (okay, six) older than me and hailed from my hometown.  I had no idea who this guy was.  My hometown has a population of 1800 people, so everyone pretty much knows everyone else.  The first thought that ran through my head was, “Who is this guy and why don’t I know him?”

I clicked on his profile and read through it.  That was when I had my second thought: “I need to know this guy!”  He was a former military officer and a single father who was “not looking for a mom” for his daughter.  He was also a self-professed Star Trek freak.  Could this guy be any better?

So I sent him a message.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

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When I was twenty-three, my marriage sank to the bottom of Lake Despair.  Okay, it hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing for the four years that it lasted, but I had tried to make it work for the sake of the son my husband (now ex-husband) and I shared.  Tomcat was three and a half the day our divorce was finalized.

I spent the weekend I turned twenty-three moving out of the home we had created, leaving the life we had made for ourselves behind.  He refused to sign the papers accepting service at first – he didn’t want a divorce, he said.  But here’s the thing: He’d been looking for a place to move, away from me and our son and closer to the mistress he’d been seeing for four years, closer to the son he shared with her.

The day we were scheduled to appear in court for the hearing on the stipulation, he didn’t even bother to show up.

Twenty-two

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Photo by Kay Kauffman

When I was twenty-two, my marriage was falling apart.  My life was a shambles.  But even as my marriage was ending, my brother-in-law’s was just beginning.  As my twenty-second Christmas approached, he and his fiancée asked that I take their engagement pictures, which I was happy to do.  I love photography and at that point in my life, I hoped to be able to earn a little extra money from doing something that I loved.  It didn’t work out, but maybe that’s all for the best.

Twenty-one…

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Oh, twenty-one, that eagerly-anticipated age of majority.  I’m actually not sure which age young people look forward to more, eighteen or twenty-one.  Both ages are ages of majority – at eighteen you can vote and smoke and get your driver’s license if, for some reason, you don’t have it already (because, believe it or not, I know a few other people who finished high school without one).  But at twenty-one, you can legally drink, and I know many people who anticipate this event with as much, if not more, excitement than the ability to drive.

Twenty

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When I was twenty, I returned to college.  I took a semester off when Tomcat was born and transferred my credits from Wartburg to a community college a little closer to home.  I was no longer working toward a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, but at least I was still working toward a degree.  As one of my floormates from Wartburg put it, a degree is a degree is a degree.  While it may not be the one I wanted, it’s better than no degree at all.

During my time at MCC, I was selected for their honors program, which left me speechless and flattered (okay, not truly speechless – that’s only happened once, but definitely shocked).  In order to obtain my degree with honors, I had to take several honors classes and attend a certain number of honors seminars, one of which was mentioned here.  I took honors art appreciation, honors music appreciation, and honors American Indian history.  It was either that or honors computer applications.  I thought history would be easier than computer, but I was wrong.

The professor I had for American Indian history was brilliant.

Be orange!

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My first year of college was an eventful year in more ways than I had ever anticipated.  I was the only kid in my class who dreaded high school graduation; though I was excited about the new opportunities I would have in college, I was terrified of leaving my friends behind and starting over.  A few people from my school went to the same college I chose to attend and, as a private college, it was much smaller than the state universities so the class sizes were comparable to what I’d experienced in high school.

But I was on my own, for the first time.

Entering Teen Town

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Ah, thirteen, that magical age that most parents dread.  And with good reason – the teen years are notorious for being way worse than the terrible two or troublesome threes ever dreamed of being.  My teen years were every bit as dramatic as any soap opera, and I’m sure everyone can relate.

An avid diarist, I read back through some of them once some years ago and realized that a.) as a teen, I was truly awful and b.) if my kids are anything like me, my uppance will come.  All my teenage entries were generally some sort of variation on the theme, “Blah blah blah my life is awful blah blah blah everything sucks blah blah blah no one likes me blah blah blah I am undateable blah blah blah my life is over.”

Naturally, being a teenager, there was a whole lot more swearing in there.  There were even some pictures cut out of magazines and taped in for posterity and late-night drooling.  There were also the requisite doodles of hearts and boys’ names.

Not all of this drama was of my own making, however.