Category Archives: 6 Looking Back // Memories!

I’m at that age where you have lots and lots of memories. When I am waxing melancholy…

Happy Birthday, Stephanie

1 Christ is All, 2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

It is your birthday, dazzling daughter~

Really?  Is it possible that exactly 28 years ago today you were born?  That 28 years ago this morning I awoke to the certainty of my baby arriving on. this. day. even though you weren’t due for at least 5 weeks and the whole sha-bang had been started on a ridiculous carnival ride where I taunted the operator for it being too tame and he, in turn, decided to show me how rough it could be and our course was set?  Oh…I was young and stupid.  Can you imagine, Stephanie?  Can you forgive me from jolting you from the safe place too early?  I was only 22, naive, untested, and very ill-equipped in my mind – and yet, God was about to place the most fragile, tiny amazing head-full-of-hair, cutie-patootie ever in my arms.  He trusted me. With you!  I am still awed.

I want you to be remembered as the girls who sang their songs for Jesus Christ

Who were willing to lay down their lives, And do His will no matter what the price

 

We celebrated both Tara and Stephanie’s birthdays just a few days ago…a picture of Steph by Stormie

You’ll be singing for the deaf man who will hear about salvation through your song

You’ll be singing for the blind man who will see the light in you and come along.

So, here you came: this itty-bitty thing with underdeveloped lungs and not an nth of fat under your skin.  You arrived to a smashingly handsome and proud daddy and a big sister who’d just turned three and you were her utter delight and joy.  She took to that role like bees to my flowers and referred to you as “my baby,” when she told people about anything you’d done or happy she was.  During your extra-long 12-day stay in the hospital, we sewed and prepared and cushioned and made-ready.  I wanted everything to be perfect when you came home.  And even though they’d told me in the middle of the night, after you were born, to expect a 3-month stay in the hospital, 12 days later, we wrapped your 4 1/2 pound sweet self up and brought you to the charcoal-colored house on Armstrong Street in Kokomo.  We brought you home praising God, grateful that He heard our prayers.

“For this child I prayed and the LORD has granted me what I asked of Him.”  1 Samuel 1, an amazing chapter!

His.

And back when baby dedications were more personal, before the designated days of them, our home church allowed me the honor of singing to both you and Tara as we dedicated you to the Lord, His to use and live in and work through all the days of your lives.  And we stood there, young and naive and full of hope for our two little girls and this tiny, tiny little thing we called Stephanie May (May for the beautiful month in which you came), and I sang Evie’s song, Live for Jesus over you.

Live for Jesus, that’s what matters

And when other houses crumble, ours is strong.

Live for Jesus, that’s what matters

That they’ll see the light in you and come along.

And whether God honored my prophetic words over your tiny self that day, or whether I had just unknowingly tapped into His heart for you already, you became, along with your sister, such a songstress.  You started singing so early, I can hardly remember when or how.  You started singing as a baby and you sang your way right into the funny, delightful little girl you became.  You sang first thing in the morning and you sang while the rest of the household was going to sleep.  You sang silly and you sang well.

Well, I know you’re not the only girls who can sing His melody

But He’s chosen you to bless you

And to bring you into all that you can be

And you never self-promoted.  So when your song would go public, people were wowed (Remember high school?  His eye is on the Sparrow!?).  I can remember hearing you sing in your room and hitting those Mariah-highs and have heard you level those Kim Walker lows now and I have still never heard enough of your song. 

I laugh now because I can actually remember, when you were supposed to be taking a nap as a youngster telling you, “Stephanie, quit singing-go to sleep,” because you’d sing ’til the cows came home if we’d let you.  Well, I take that back.  Don’t quit.  Never stop singing, Stephanie.  You are dazzling and deep.  You are gifted and you are Miriam – singing the song of triumph.  Your voice was meant to proclaim: in your face, devil!  Your lungs were healed to give power to proclaim enemy defeat.  So sing, Miriam, sing!

And sweet Stephanie?

Live for Jesus, that’s what matters

And when other houses crumble yours is strong

Live for Jesus, that’s what matters

That they’ll see the light in you and come along!

 

The family legend is true. 

When you were 3 you’d fall asleep in the middle of singing a song and when you’d start to wake up, you’d pick that song up exactly in the place you’d left off.  You are full of song.  You are song.  And I love you.  Happy Birthday, Steph.

Love, Mom

SONG:  Live for Jesus was an Evie Tornquist song waaaaaay back in the day.  I adapted the actual lyrics for my purposes in singing it for the dedication in 1982.

Lava

2 Mi Familia, 4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

Grandma Baker + Gardening = Lava Handsoap

Grandma and Grandpa Baker way back when…

+

But my question is, which is it?  Lava from a volcano, as I was led to believe as a child, or is it pumice-powered – which I thought was some kind of thing from the ocean – hnaging out around the coral reef?  Are these one and the same?  Have I spent my life in the dark?

 

The old packaging I remember…except I don’t remember it being creamy white (only in the loosest sense of the word perhaps), and what I assume is current packaging telling me it is pumice-powered.  What?!!?  Is ground molten lava not powerful enough?  What gives, I ask you?

GARDENING TIP #1:  Must buy very bright, very cute gardening gloves at WalMart for $1.99.  A really beautiful pair of garden gloves, meant to protect your hands, are an absolute necessity when facing garden chores.  Why?  Well, not to wear, because it is so much more fun to touch the hot, black soil with your bare hands and get a little dirty while gardening.  But won’t they look cute and just make you so happy when you toss them on your gardening clogs in favor of going barefoot and you look at them and think, “Wow.  I have gardening shoes AND gloves.  I am such an amazing gardener!”?  Oh, they will make you happy.

GARDENING TIP #2: For real.  Scrape your nails over a cake of soap (but probably NOT lava or pumice-powered soap) before you place your bare hands in the black soil and when you are done and wash your hands – VOILA!  No dirt under your nails.  You can be seen in public! 

GARDENING TIP #3:  But if you forget step #2, please DO use the scrubby-soap pictured above.  My Grandma Baker always had this in her bathroom (where she also apparently snuck cigarettes and I had no idea until I was grown) and using this soap is kind of like getting a hand massage.  I washed my hands a lot at her house.  A lot.

I actually just found out Lava has a gardening page on their website! http://www.lavasoap.com/lawn-garden/

“If I had a day I could give to you, I’d give to you a day just like today.  And if I had a song that I could sing for you, I’d sing a song to make you feel this way.”  John Denver, Sunshine on My Shoulders

It IS that kind of day!… Jeanie

UPDATE 5/14:  So-pumice, apparently, is more of a textural term for volcanic lava mixed with water.  I must have been absent from school that day.

 

See what I mean?  Happy!

NOTE TO SELF:  Go see “Oceans” tonight with Stormie and catch up on my sea world/pumice education.

Happy Birthday, Tara

2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think
The best gift that I ever got
Didn’t really cost a lot
Didn’t have a ribbon ’round
And sometimes made a terrible sound

When you had surgery in January and I sat with you in the low lights of the hospital room as you recovered, I was struck with a deja vu so strong it nearly knocked the wind from me.  There you were, my baby – grown, but fragile, capable and strong, yet set back and breakable.  But I also saw myself….

  Tara at 4

I was taken back in my memory to Broadway Methodist in Merrillville, Indiana 31 years ago, to me in a hospital bed, a brand new mommy/so young – having just delivered this mysterious bundle of blond joy.  It was after dark, the room lights were low then too, and I was getting acquainted with you for the first time.  I looked at that perfectly round, tiny head and the gentle slow movement of your eyes daring to open and look up at me.  With great reservation I examined your hands and the contour of you, absolutely terrified to unwrap you and soak in the whole of you.   I had been afraid to intrude.

But the connection I felt was beyond anything I had ever experienced. The  intensity of emotion, as I’d approached labor with gritted teeth, determined to control my “situation” and handle it without “bothering anyone,” suddenly became stronger than my organized plans.  When the labor room nurses scolded me for not letting them know how close I was to birth, for not arriving sooner (for I’d only at the hospital for 30 minutes and had nonchalantly received the hospital gown and instructions as if I had all day), I wondered why they couldn’t understand that I was alone, that I’d been pregnant alone, that I would birth alone and somehow in silence, I would make my own wrongs right…all alone.  Understand, of course, that my skewed understanding was that of a teenage girl who did not understand that I’d never been left, never forsaken.

But then one, two, and barely 3 pushes and there you were – the girl I secretly hoped for, but had never allowed myself to believe I’d get.  You were perfect and pink and easy.  And they plopped you on me like a basket of laundry and you barely made a sound, though transcendance thundered through my body and I trembled with awe.

The best gift that I’ve ever known
I’ve always wanted most to own
Yet in my dreams of sugar and spice
I never thought it could be so nice

But later, in that room,  just us two, I knew that you were mine, a gift straight from God.  “I don’t know you yet, but I know I love you,” I whispered, wondering who you’d be and if you could ever love me back.  Yet, even then, in the dim light, when you looked at me, I sensed that already, this baby, this gift from God for me in spite of myself, already understood and was joined to my heart.  The deep communion of that perfect night between you, me and God, {deep breath} ~ I was certain I could read your heart and you mine, as if we were communicating on some empathetic plane.  I truly believe He was there, our Father, in that room, sealing our relationship, blessing our future.  And I knew I was no longer alone, however self-exiled I’d been.

The best gift I could ever get
Was sometimes dry and sometimes wet
Was usually pink, but oftentimes red
As she lay so innocently in her bed

Mercy was rewriting my life that night in a way I had no words to express.  The gift of God, eternal and true was being visited upon me in the most humbling way possible.  For the merciful gift of this baby girl who would become to me my joy, my very own proof of the amazing grace and endless love of the Father for me, to me and through me ~ left me speechless.  I needed mercy.  And through you, my sweet Tara, I have found it again and again.

 

And here is what I knew in January after your surgery and what I know every day and everytime I am around you: You are one of the most incredible human beings on the planet, a woman I admire and love beyond belief.  You are grace and mercy and joy.  And I am so pleased to call you mine.

The best gift of the year to me
The one I hold most dear to me
The gift that simply drove me wild
Was my tiny, newborn child.*

Happy Birthday, Tara.  Mercy and joy, grace and peace back to you, my gracious gift of God.

*LYRICS: The Best Gift by Barbra Streisand.  Bill Tull and Mary Tiller sang this at your dedication service June 1979, as suggested by Bill.  I’d never actually heard it before then (from one of her early Christmas albums), but it was true of you.  Still is.

To the mom who made me Me!

1 Christ is All, 2 Mi Familia, 5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

Happy Mother’s Day, mamala!

Wow, I am blessed.  What a godly, gentle and guileless person you are.  What a good mommy you were to me when I was so little and you were so young.  I love that you always just wanted to be a mama.  I LOVE that I got to be first in making you a mom!  I love that there were 22 hand-sewn dresses waiting for my arrival, that you were so anxious to be a mommy you couldn’t stop that crazy exuberance of yours from preparing for me.

You taught me about heaven and end times (when I was four!) and the first two words I could ever spell were B-i-b-l-e and Oh, you can’t get to heaven without s-a-l-v-a-t-i-o-n because you sang me those songs over and over.   You made me cry telling me the story of Bambi and Roy Rogers’ stuffed horse, Trigger (housed, you informed me, in a Roy Rogers museum in Hollywood where you someday dreamed of going) and you made me listen to country music and though I eschewed it for years, I have come full circle and truly appreciate its place in my life now.  You told me where puppies came from and bought me the Christian book about sex called Almost Twelve when I was only ten.  But you only let me read 2 or 3 pages at a time, every few months, and it did end up taking me until I was actually almost 14 to finish it, but that doesn’t really matter since if that book  had been my only sex education, I still wouldn’t know what the heck was happening!

You taught me to cuss like a Christian.

“Oh, crap-a-dap!”

You were never too busy to stop and explore something fun.

I love how you are creative and so totally unpretentious. And I love how your life has been filled with you discovering new passions and finding new hobbies and you have just never gone dull.  There has always been something delightful and new to picque your interest.  I mean, you became an award-winning horse photographer after the age of 55 and had your work on magazine covers!  What a resourceful, inspiring, virtuous woman you are!  You are SO Proverbs 31!

You are long-suffering and always believe the best in everyone.  You let people walk on you ~  determined to win them over and though I advise you to tell them where to get off, you do, in fact, always win them over and there isn’t anyone I know who doesn’t love you.  And if there is anyone in the whole wide world who doesn’t love you?  I don’t even want to know them. Someday I hope I can be more like you, mamakins, because you are wonderful.

Mares eat oats and does eat oats
And little lambs eat ivy
A kid’ll eat ivy, too, wouldn’t you? 

We’d lie across the bed and sing this and laugh our heads off.  It was years before I even knew what I was singing.  And wasn’t that the point?

As if being a good mommy to me when I was young wasn’t enough,  you are my most cherished friend and confidante now.  You are my biggest cheerleader and when you nag me about overwork and taking care of myself and hold me accountable for making every effort to enter in to that Sabbath rest that remains (Heb. 4), I naturally rebel or pretend all is well.  But inside I am happy that there is a human being on earth who takes the time to actually care anything at all about me.  I love you, mom.  Thank-you.  Thank-you.  Thank-you.

Then

You dreamed of me.  You planned for me.  You wanted me.  And you have never given up on me.  And though I even know as you read this you would say to me, “Oh, Jeanie, I am not perfect.  I have a lot of faults,” and perhaps this is true, the only thing that really matters to me on Mother’s Day and every day is that you are PERFECT for me!  You were the only woman in the world God could trust to be my mom and I am grateful He knew…

Now

One of my favorite remembrances ever shall be that when we found out the Roy Rogers Museum had moved from California to Branson – just 45 minutes from your house, I got to take you to see Trigger (whom you’d actually seen ALIVE when you were a young girl…doing his tricks and carrying your beloved Roy Rogers).  And just before the museum closed down for good, together, we got to see all the things you’d told me about in my earliest memories (3 or 4 years old) and we stood there singing “Happy Trails to You” in the fan room, me at 50, you at 70-ish – our girlhood fancies intertwined…We are from so long ago, it is as if we have always been.  You are my mama and I am your baby girl, forever and always.

On my last birthday you wrote this in an email:

“You just can’t know how very, very happy I was when you arrived in October 1959. Wow! My Dream had come true!!”

I am among the most blessed women of the world.  I have such great treasure.  I am rich in a way that most people can only wish – to have my mom say words like these to me.

I love you, Norma J. Moslander, my mom.

J e a n i e

You have more than fulfilled the “prediction” in your high school senior yearbook, mom-ma!  You have pleased God.  It is certain.

“Give her the reward she has earned and let her works bring her praise at the city gates.”  Proverbs 31.31 NIV

May Day! May Day!

2 Mi Familia, 4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, 5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

Pieces of April….

M A Y   D A Y is today!….

I’ve got pieces of April, I keep ’em in a memory bouquet
I’ve got pieces of April, but it’s a morning in May**

May Day memory:

As kids in Des Moines in the 1960s, we’d create “baskets” from paper: usually a cone-shaped affair with a “handle” attached.  We’d fill the containers with candy or lilacs, which happily bordered the yard, and hang them on neighbor’s doors, ring the bell and then run.  May Day was the most sunny, delightful holiday of them all.  No pressure, no rules – just try to be sweet to people annonymously.  Shouldn’t we be doing more of that?

 

Pictured: google images.  The ones we did as kids had spring flowers like these on the left, but were paper cones like on the right.  I like the idea of the paper flowers with the Rolo glued to the center shown here.  Hmmmm…..hope some one does this for me today!  Chocolate + caramel = Rolos YUM

A great website to visit on May Day~www.MayDae.com

CLICK HERE: www.maydae.com  Two of my super-cool daughters’ website using their middle names.  What have they got up their sleeves today, I wonder?  Read all the posts you have missed and I promise you’ll be smarter and way more hip by the time you have finished!

“April gave us springtime, and the promise of the flowers…”**

Pictured:  My ‘pieces of April’ ~

 

Averi and Amelie by www.lilacphotography.com  “…together in perfect harmony…”

 

 

The Kelley Kids:  Gavin-the-Great, Guini-my flower girl, and GemGem the delightful!

 

Hunter-Magoo at a video shoot doing the Heaven Fest dance!

 

Planning for May fun.  Bright and cheery.  Weddings and graduations, showers and celebrations galore!

  

April hair: mine is brown-black (on purpose this time) and Dave’s is growing back.  Left: what he looked like at the end of March having just finished 2 months of keeping it shaved for the ANNIE performances.  Right: this is now. 

**LYRICS: From [possibly] my favorite Three Dog Night song, Pieces of April, written by Dave Loggins.  He explains: “I wrote [Pieces of April] at a very special time of my life. Special, because I met the ‘love of my life’ and had recently lost her. By chance, we were together for three consecutive Aprils and then she left me for good. Today, I don’t know where she is or how her life turned out. May is symbolic of the present, April was, and still remains a sweet yesterday. I have never really gotten over ‘April’ and the ‘pieces’ still remain. Those sweet Aprils… It’s my favorite song, too.”  -Dave Loggins

Isn’t today a positively perfect May Day?  O yes!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOE!

2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, 9 TV & Movies/Books & Entertainment, Stuff I Actually Think

J o e- theBROTHER…49 years in 10 minutes flat!

 

 QUICK CLICK for full, crazy, sentimental effect: The mood music



  

My little brother, Joe, turns 49 today.  When we were little, when we were “Jeanie and Joey” way back when, he was my best friend and confidante.  I was bossy and he needed to be bossed.  I was forthright and opinionated and he was the gentle listener who appreciated my opinions.  I talked.  He listened and drew pictures.  He became an accomplished artist and I, a talker.

One time he quietly saved me from drowning and another time he saved me from something much worse.  He risked a lot to be in my corner during a really hard time…or two.  He has spent his life teasing me, tormenting me, aggravating me and protecting me.  I have spent mine acting like I am always right and challenging him to boxing matches (which I win, of course, because gentle Joe would never hurt a girl). 

For a lot of years, marriage and raising kids and careers and life made what we once shared so closely (he was my first nap and room-mate) a sweet, but distant memory.  But then the melancholy of years and a deep, abiding love reminded us to reset our priorities and to be not only a brother and his big sister (he now calls me his “little sister” which is all the more reason to love him), but to be friends – the kind who are God-sent and will never let you go.  For that is what I have in Joe.

During those interim, busy-life years, I once almost lost Joe permanently and I didn’t even know.  I was living my  own life and he was dying, coding repeatedly one night after he collapsed doing police work at the airport.  Thinking now about what I’d have missed if he hadn’t made it makes me nag him and check his pacemaker for malfunction when I see him.  His strong, steady heartbeat is very important to me.

He was my first best-friend.   At times, moving around like we did as kids, he was my only friend.  Now?   Friends to the end!

Forgive my sentimentality, but I have put together 10 minutes (!!!) of pictures of me and ‘the Joey.’  And I added “mood music” because this is how I want to tell him how happy I am that he was born on April 14, 1961.  Plus I am all melancholy and sentimental. 

I know you are probably thoroughly embarrassed now, Joe-Joe, but I don’t care.  It is what I do.  You KNOW I’ve got the “Joey-Joey-Joey-Joey

down in my heart!”  And I love ya!  HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  So glad, so so glad you were born to be MY brother!

 

Now and Forever by Carole King

Now and forever
you are a part of me
And the memory cuts like a knife…

Now and forever
I'll remember all the promises still unbroken
And think about all the words between us
That never needed to be spoken
We had a moment
Just one moment
That will last beyond a dream,
Beyond a lifetime
We are the lucky ones
Some people never get to do
All we got to do
Now and forever
I will always think of you
Didn't we come together
Didn't we live together
Didn't we cry together
Didn't we play together
Didn't we love together
And together we lit up the world
I miss the tears
I miss the laughter
I miss the day we met
and all that followed after
Sometimes I wish I
could always be with you
The way we used to do
Now and forever
I will always think of you

Now and forever
I will always be with you

Happy Birthday, Joseph Allen Moslander

 

 

What’s Up, Buttercup?

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

THE DELPHINIUM

 

My love affair with the mixed blues, purples and lavenders of the glorious Delphinium (a royal member of the Buttercup family) began years ago when I’d pass by a fallow field on a ragged, old 2-lane highway.  There along the edge and in the ditch were thousands of Delphinium growing free-form, waving quietly in the breeze.  Each year for several years, the patch would grow and increase in volume, the edges expanding in glory.  There was no obvious rhyme, no pre-planned reason to the patch.  They were just there: seeding and re-seeding themselves and allowed to exist in all their mesmerizing beauty and the sight?  Took my breath away…

Then they put a strip mall there.

  

The Blues, Lavenders, and Purples

In measured backyard neighborhoods we grow some along the fence to support their grand height, but the eager Delphinium is never quite allowed to be everything it was created to be, to reach for its full potential.  It is placed among other flowers and plants where it is told to behave nicely, share the space and get along with others.  Neat borders and purposeful edging keep it from infringing freely into the wild open.  It is still beautiful, just oh-so-contained.

But I wouldn’t mind, someday, when I am too old to be expected to follow suburban-garden-protocol, to let the Delphinium be, to scatter the seed around my house and let it fall at season’s end only to sprout up in new places the next time.  I would not be opposed to waking early in late spring, curtains waving in the sunlit breeze, to take my coffee out to walk amidst a full field of Delphineum dancing to a morning melody.  It would not be neat, nor orderly, but it would be soft and sweet.  It would be as it should be and I?  I would take my place among the long stems of star-shaped blooms and disappear into the soft sway for most of the day.

I have the fever one gets come spring…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  2010~let the Delphiniums have more space!  Teach Sandy-the-Dog that crashing through them in a bird chase  is hereby unacceptable.

Google images…wish I could find what I used to see the strip mall now stands…

Hello, Dolly!

2 Mi Familia, 5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, 9 TV & Movies/Books & Entertainment, Stuff I Actually Think

In the early morning dark, when you shouldn’t really be awake,  I reach over and feel Dave’s temporarily-bald head.

“You feel like GI Joe,” I tell him, referring to those really great GI Joe dolls of the 1960s that looked like Rock Hudson and had this short, fuzzy hair.  Dave has 2 days’ growth.

“You can be my Barbie,” he replies, referencing the fact that when I played Barbies with my friends as a young girl, I let the others have Ken and opted to use my bothers’ GI Joe as my particular love interest.

In totally unrelated news: And, by the way, I got to see the colorful, bright and delightful Carol Channing star in “Hello, Dolly” in the 90’s.  It was soooooo cool!

 

Dave with hair, in the kitchen; Dave without hair for his performance in Annie, onstage.

NOTE:  He is rumored to have been advised to start growing his hair long, really long – which he is able to do easily,  for a possible starring-pirate kind of role next year.  People, I implore you!  Did Carol Channing ever have to change her hair this much?

15 FIRSTS

2 Mi Familia, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, 9 TV & Movies/Books & Entertainment, Stuff I Actually Think

First BK Whopper

1982 when I was pregnant with Stephanie.  I’d never had more than a cheeseburger and small fry at a fast food, but Dave insisted I try it and I LOVED it!  I actually got addicted to them.  Now I just get Whopper Juniors, but, mmmm…charbroiled!

First Big Mac

NEVER!  Two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun?  It’s the onions.  I cannot take them, plus McDonalds?  Ick.  And-I consider this the one thing that makes me unique in any way.  I have never had a Big Mac.  And I never shall.

First full sentence

“I’m gonna go to church!” 

I don’t say that nearly as much now – to the great concern of my grandchildren who have asked their parents, “Why doesn’t Nonna go to church?”  And to the amusement of Rocky and Tristan who said to me a few weeks ago when I arrived on a Sunday morning, “Good to see you here.  This is the result of a lot of people praying.”  Yuk-it-up, boys.

Once a church girl, always a church girl.  No worries, people.

First plane trip.

I was a senior in high school.  I went back to Louisiana after our family had moved to Gary, Indiana because my HS credits didn’t transfer correctly and they were going to make me go all year long.  So I finished up back in Hammond.  I hung out with Cheryl Bardwell.  And Ginger.  I met a guy I almost ended up marrying (breaking it off 3 weeks before the wedding is “almost” right?) and I had my first taste of living far away from Ross-the-Boss, Mrs-Moss and the-rest-of-the-Little-Landers.  I worked at The Sonic Drive-In for 1 day and finished high school.

First poem I ever wrote

I love my daddy
I want my daddy
I go to see my daddy
He picks me up to love. 

~by me at barely 4.  It was my first and probably my best.  Ever.

First shoes with heels

3rd grade.  I started young.  They were 1 1/4″ high, navy blue with a cute bow.  The first of many.  I do not love all shoes like some women, but when I love them, when I have formed the strong emotional connection, they will forever remain in my heart.  I will know where I was was when I got them, what the occasion was for looking and the special places they carried me.  Oh, yes, I will.

First…(you may not want to know)

Ok, disclaimer.  If you are easily embarrassed, don’t read this girly fact.  My first period (as in menstrual, not high school schedule) started on David Cassidy’s 21st birthday.

First speeding ticket

2 1/2 years ago.  I said to him, “Seriously?  I am 47 years old and I have never had a ticket!” very decidedly implying he was not going to get away with giving me one because of my very clean record.  

The officer very coolly replied, “Only Jesus was perfect.”  How did he know that was the one thing I wouldn’t argue with?  I still totally disagree that I was going 32 mph over the speed limit.  Totally.  Disagree.

First job

Working at the church day care center watching pre-schoolers.  Unless you count babysitting church people’s kids as a young teen.  Which really wasn’t much more money than I’d made gathering sparkly rocks from a shared alley and selling them to my neighbors for candy money when I was 7.  So that was it, I guess.  Selling rocks.

First movie in a theater

“Gone With the Wind.”  I got in so much trouble.  It was a school trip tied in with our Civil War series in Social Studies.  And I wasn’t allowed to attend movies (church rules, you know), but I did and doggone it if a man from church didn’t see me and tell my dad.  Big trouble.  But I don’t regret going now.  I so appreciate the accuracy with which the Civil War was depicted, the raw and realistic portrayals of Rhett and Scarlet and how I still look at nice drapes for the amazing outfit I might be able to get out of them.   Yes, I attribute my above-average resourcefulness to “Gone with the Wind.”

First kiss

Jimmy Green behind the North Pine Church of God in Davenport, Iowa.  1972.  And for you inquiring minds?  I kissed him.  He didn’t know what hit him.

First time in the mountains

I was 11.  My parents, my 4 siblings, my aunt and uncle and my 6 cousins  and I drove from eastern Iowa to Colorado and camped in the cold Rocky Mountains.  There were flower children and hippies everywhere and I loved it.  The flower children and hippies are still here getting their Rocky Mountain high, but they are very old now.

First time in the ocean

Spring 1977.  My dad let us skip school and we drove to Gulfport, Mississippi (Let your love flow…was playing on the radio) where I remember beautiful white sandy beaches and an ape that spat on my sister in some gas station animal viewing place.  Good times.  And yes, the Gulf counts – it is still part of the Atlantic.

The First Time Ever I Saw His Face

August 1978 when I first went to Northwest Bible College.  I met him by the fountain and he was very shy and I liked to tease him about the girls he liked so I could see his dimples.  Though we wrote friendly letters for a couple of years, he didn’t officially ask me out until May 26, 1981.  It took him awhile.  But we got married less than 2 months after the first date, following the Biblical admonition that it is better to marry than to burn.

First blog post

November 29, 2006.  It was so scary.  I was afraid to hit the post button.    I was afraid to say anything because some one might actually see it.  But after about 4 or 5 months, the graphomaniacal tiger in me had been released, never to be recaptured.  And on it goes.  Everything and waaaaaaay more than you can possibly believe is Mod-Podged onto the collage that is my thought collection.

Love is in the Air

5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, 9 TV & Movies/Books & Entertainment, Stuff I Actually Think

Valentine’s Day is Sunday!  As you prepare to EXPRESS your love, I submit these tidbits for inspiration:

 

Tweet Me!

Conversation hearts, they are a-changing.  For all my growing up years they just said things like, “Be mine,” “Kiss me,” and “Sweet talk.”  But as of this year, 1 in 80 hearts will say, “Tweet me.”

You’ll still find the traditional, “Be true,” but also the ones added in the late 90s like “Call me,” or “Email me.”  Last spring they even produced special Twilght-themed hearts, which my little grandbebes seem to adore, that said things like “I {heart} EC,” “Lion and Lamb,” and “Dazzle.”  “Bite me,” is also an interesting addition, now interpreted romantically (Thank-you, Edward) rather than as a vulgar insult.  Times have changed.

Your Kiss is on my List!

I posted a whole list of KISSING-QUOTES previously.  You may read them here.  But please BE SURE to read the comments from others because they added some wonderful KISSING sentiment, too!  That Tredessa knows her kissable literature and movies!  AND SHARE YOURS!

“How did it happen that their lips came together?

How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts,

that the rose unfolds,

that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill?

A kiss, and all was said.”

~Victor Hugo

 

Music and passion were always the fashion…

Remember “mixed tapes?”  People would create their own, personalized playlist of love songs for their true amour on something called a “cassette.”  Back in the day…{sigh}  Now you can can just do it online, no-muss, no-fuss: FREE playlists.  www.playlist.com  They are playing our song…

I saw this t-shirt at Kohl’s the other day.

“I’m a vampire…don’t make me bite you.”

 

And they lived happily ever after~

I wrote about MOVIE KISSES that I love.  This is still a great list for love and kissing inspiration.  I wholeheartedly recommend watching a couple of these this weekend! 

LOVE AND KISSES!…Jeanie