Category Archives: cloud nine girl
Day 8: A vivid childhood memory—chickens are not sweet. They kind of scare me.
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I have been chased by a headless chicken.
All of sudden, the memory floats to the front of my mind: I see those little sticky legs, its flapping wings, its giant feathery chest—and yes, no head on that creature—and I laugh.
My dad’s side of the family is from the middle of Kansas. My grandparents, Ike and Helen, lived in a tiny little town called Lehigh. A town so small the high school closed two years after my dad’s graduating class in 1966. There was a post office, a car wash, and a Coop. That’s all folks.
I spent a great deal of time with my grandparents in the summers. Lehigh sat 40 minutes north of Newton, the town I grew up in until I was ten-years-old. I stayed a whole week in Lehigh every summer, going to their Mennonite Church’s Bible school, hanging out at my Aunt Joyce’s farm when I wasn’t in church or with grandma, and that’s where I encountered Ms. Headless Chicken, herself, ready to pounce on me.
One summer my cousins Leslie and Laura drove up from Oklahoma and spent the entire week with me and my grandparents. We learned about the farm. I remember the bull escaping from the pasture, holding my breath as Uncle Gerald worked him back behind the safety of the fence. My cousins and I tamed the farm kitties. We picked beans from the garden and prepped them for dinner. The cutest red calf cinnamon was born. His momma didn’t want him, so we helped out bottle feeding and bonded with him.
Back to those pesky scheming chickens. Well, they were being prepared for dinner(to put it nicely). I tried to hang back, far out of the way, but curiosity got me and I walked down the path from the house to the chicken coop, beyond the pigs and I saw it—a wild headless chicken flapping and flying straight my way! I think I screamed. I turned and I ran and that darn chicken chased me down the path, me thinking, it was part ghost part chicken not wanting to let go of life, wanting to get me somehow. It ran half way up the trail—Finally! Finally it fell limp. My cousins laughed. Leslie was always the super brave one.
“You can stop running Erika. The chicken is gone.”
Anyway (taking a big giant breath) I’ll never forget that summer. I love my family. I miss my family. We’re now scattered all over the place and it’s so hard to see each other.
Miss you cousins! Miss you aunts and uncles! I’ll never forget our memories together.
Day Seven of My Blog Challenge: Three Books I Adore
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“All this time I’ve hated myself for it. I thought I’d given it up for nothing. But if I hadn’t fallen, I wouldn’t have met you.”
― Becca Fitzpatrick, Hush, Hush
My first love has always been urban fantasy type stories. I like the mix of real life and the subtle scattering of magical possibility. I wonder. I dream. And I hope for the what-if.
So when I heard Meg Cabot had just published Abandon, the first book in her retelling of Persephone’s famous story of being kidnapped and taken to the Underworld by Hades himself, I had to get a copy. I fell in love with the book.
“And eternity is a long time. So if you have to spend it with someone I could see wanting to spend it with someone impossible…but interesting….”
― Meg Cabot, Abandon
All the characters in Abandon, felt different and interesting. Not to mention, the first page jumped right out with a strong voice and pulled me into the story of Pierce’s near death experience. I understood her fear in living with the reality of dying, coming back to life and not being able to tell the details to anyone because they made her sound crazy. I think we can all relate to feeling crazy at times and wondering if the world will ever believe what we think. In my mind, Meg opens up some great questions about human character in a unique structure I hadn’t seen before—how she jumped between the worries, the internal sorting of her character’s thoughts, and the present moment, blew my mind. It felt messy and random, exactly how I remember feeling at that age, and for that, I loved it. I love unconventional. Gertrude Stein’s story of Three Lives taught me a great deal about breaking conventions. I felt like Meg Cabot did the same for Pierce, the Heroine in the book.
I’m definitely a sucker for a girl in a strange new life, after coming back to life, and finding out a dark and dreamy immortal angel has been in love with her, has been secretly protecting her, and she doesn’t know why. Needless to say, I can’t wait for the third installment in the series.
― Mark Twain, What Is Man?
Twain’s style bites in this book with humor, satire, and can even burn you if you’re not careful. I like a challenge. And while reading his works, his biographies, and learning a little about his life, I saw him much like a painter. Never take art at face value. Interpretation is always left to the observer. Who will ever understand the painting except the artist?
Day 5: My Pet Peeves, Then and Now
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Imagine this…
…you have been standing in a really long line for at least thirty minutes. It’s your lunch break. You have to buy what is in your arms. It is the perfect thing and you drove forever to get to that store. Everyone’s cart is full. You are fidgety, shifting back and forth, staring at your watch, smiling at the people around you, when someone in a really nice suit is talking on their cell, looks at you, looks at the line—a cashier is suddenly free! It is your turn! You step forward and… they do that horrible thing they do. They cut in front of you…
…What do you do?
You decide to visit the gym. You have your perfect music play list to motivate you and help you work harder. You jump on your favorite cardio machine and you start to sweat. It is a fast interval moment, where you are pushing yourself and maybe you have closed your eyes so proud to be in that moment wanting to make it all the way…
And then…
….a stinky bomb sneaks up your nose and you gag and wince—and you just want to die it stinks so bad! Yes. A stinky fart so potent has silently bombed the whole gym and permanently stained your nostrils for the rest of your life…three times!
…What do you do?
You are at a party…
…Your favorite music is playing. The lights are amazing. You’re in your favorite outfit feeling pretty darn good about yourself. You meet a friend. Not someone close, but someone you respect, and they smile. You smile. They start to talk and you say something, but they interrupt. And then they’re talking some more and they just won’t stop talking about themselves. Minutes pass. It feels like hours and they’re still talking…
…What do you do?
You have had a really bad day at work. Traffic was a mess. You waited on the highway for a good hour. You get home. The kids are having fun. Dinner smells good. You take your shoes off, head upstairs and crunch a toy right under your foot! It burns! It stings! And then there’s the kitchen counter! You cleaned the whole thing just five minutes before and when you turn around, there’s a trail of bread crumbs like a mouse had just destroyed an entire loaf of bread….ack!
….What do you do?
Pet peeves make me laugh. Especially as I’m capturing some of them now. They seemed so important in the moment, but in looking back, they are kind of funny. Some pet peeves become big things. Some peeves are so big it distorts the way we can look at a person at times, but you know what? After I’ve had a chance to look mine over, I’ve come to a really great cloud nine moment. They are not so big. Well, maybe the line-cutting lady, but I did end up saying something to her, which resulted in an immediate apology and a hustle to the back of the line.
We all have our idiosyncrasies. We all have our moments where we just don’t make sense to someone else. And as I get older, it is becoming more about believing in doing the right thing by someone else. And sometimes I have to believe the best in someone else, because it is also the right thing to do. Maybe the lady on the cell who cut in line had a terrible moment in her life right then. Maybe the guy passing wind on the treadmill was so embarrassed he didn’t know what to do. That toy? That counter? I can live with that.
Because then I think, there are so many other wonderful things about people, so many things the people I love in my life share with me.
Erika
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Day Four: Skipping Ahead to Laughter and What it Means to Me
I had to get a drink of water.
It was Saturday night. I sat on the couch, sniffling with my Kleenex held to my nose, my brown furry blanket sprawled across my lap while my kiddos ran in circles in the living room, dancing to their dad, strumming his guitar.
I got up. He got up. I moved up the steps, and he turned to our two kids, smiling so big, his blue eyes sparkled. He strummed a made up song on the guitar, letting his voice carry away a hilarious tune starting something like, “Baby Bear, baby bear, likes to wear her stinky socks…”
…Laughter!
…Rolling laughter!
…Squeals of joy!
The three of them, my two-year-old princess, my four-year-old creative boy, and my fun loving computer husband sang and danced and made up lyrics on the spot! My heart was practically beaming inside with joy.
My husband let each character in our family star in their own verse: Daddy Bear, Simon Bear, Cyrus Bear (our dog) and then Mommy Bear, and we all became the brunt of a really funny song about something stinky; from socks, to underwear to anything we could think of!
…just like Smelly Cat from the sitcom Friends, when Phoebe captivated the coffee shop with her song and it went a little something like this…
“Smelly Cat…
Smelly Cat…
What are they feeding you…
Smelly Cat…
Smelly Cat…It’s not your fault…”
…And then she invites her friends to chime in with words helping create a community of fun in the coffee shop, much like the moment in my very own living room.
So the question about seriousness of life and humor begins and I think Audrey Hepburn sums it up best for me:
“I don’t take my life seriously, but I do take what I do – in my life – seriously -”
― Audrey Hepburn
I have been through a struggle in what it means to live and laugh, and then how to accept my serious side, because that’s part of me too. There’s this war inside of me between a carefree, wanting to skip through a field of daisies girl, and a side that says listen to me! Take me serious, please!
The point of today is how I’m learning to let go of seriousness and what laughter means to me. I think laughter is about letting go and living life and most of all, learning to laugh at myself again. Watching my husband and my two beautiful kids who have absolutely stolen my heart, they have no qualms with making fun of themselves in good times. That’s what I aim to go back to.
So laughter is what I strive for everyday. I want to make fun of myself in a good way, to laugh at the ridiculous things that sometimes fall out of my mouth without thinking. Like when the ice and snow storm hit, I said something about the power lines going down, a total blind and blonde moment. I forgot, power lines, are in the ground, Erika, not above it anymore, duh…
So don’t forget what it feels like to laugh at your own silliness. When you feel tense, when you feel like the world is sort of spiraling out of control, do something fast so your moment doesn’t drag you down. Have someone distract you. Remember something silly you did when you were little, something hilarious about yourself. Maybe call an old friend, your best friend. Let laughter change your mood. It works for me anyway—and of course post-its too. I am the post-it queen. LOL
Cloud Nine Girl 