Fired Up – Ready to Write!

Buckle your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride…because today, for the first time in many moons, I am fired up, and ready to write. Here’s some background music.

First, thank you to the countless readers who asked me to continue writing when I formally declared my retirement from cyberspace in July, a mere three months ago. Wait – I think I can count them after all – like maybe twenty or so originally, but then they overcame their emotions, and moved on. No judgment.

I felt released, a sense of freedom from my self-imposed burden to manufacture interesting, eye-catching, occasionally witty, words of wisdom on a semi-regular routine. I believed that, after fifteen years of blogging, what did I really have to say? Surely my brain must be tired because my eyes weren’t doing their best work anymore.

Grandparents Day caught me off guard, however, when I felt a compulsion to share that fun time with my friends in cyberspace in September. And then there were the losses of three women I have admired for their courage for as long as I’ve known about them: Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, and Harriet Hancock. I could not ignore their passing without writing a personal tribute.

I was beginning to think the retirement ship had sailed. Still no real joy in my work – but more of a compulsion to react to life around me with the only creative tools in my toolbox: my words.

The vicissitudes of life, as my daddy called those events which came to everyone and were beyond our control, were busily at work during the past three months involving the death of Pretty’s father’s wife which left her 93-year-old father alone in his home two hours away from us. Decisions, decisions, and extra care combined with extra travel required. A genuine vicissitude.

Little girls loving sleepovers on the weekends at our home during the past three months are always a tonic for what ails us during the week. High energy, high focus a must. Pretty’s Antique Empire has a workaholic taskmaster. Guess who?

There you have it. I woke up this morning with writing on my mind. I changed the name of my blog to I’ll Call It Like I Feel It because my eyes don’t see as well as they did fifteen years ago, but my feelings run deeper than ever. Frankly, I try not to watch the hullabaloo on the news as much as I once did.

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Today, October 20th., is my maternal grandmother’s birthday. She was born in 1898 and would be 128 years old if she had lived. She died on April 20, 1972. My parents and I lived with her until I was thirteen years old. She loved me to the moon and back, and I felt the same about her. She was a married mother with four children when she became a widowed single mom during the Great Depression. I can’t imagine her struggles all her life to survive, but I do feel the joy I gave her when I became her first grandchild in 1946. I know that because that’s what I feel for our granddaughters. Joy.

And that’s why, as our four-year-old Molly is happy to say when she often offers answers to questions no one is asking.

Bernice Louise Schlinke Boring (1898-1972)

with her sons James Marion, Jr., Charles John, and Thomas Bruno

at their home in Richards, Texas

(my mother, Selma Louise Boring Morris, wasn’t born)