Dandelions: The Flower of Life

Today’s Facebook question involves choosing a favorite flower. 
 “White roses,” it states, “represent purity and innocence, and are traditionally associated with weddings and new beginnings.”  

Carnations for divine love, Daffodils - unrequited love, larkspurs - fickleness.

Not a fan. 

Why are dandelions not an option?

I mean, here they are already, marching across yards and ditches, alleys and junkyards, shoulder to shoulder, yellow heads tucked against the blustery early May wind. Nature’s fiercest warriors, they know no boundaries, respect no lines, do not discriminate. They are plentiful and free to everyone. 

Has ever a mother accepted a handful of these lovelies from her little one with anything but the utmost exuberance? “Oh my!” we say. “Aren’t they gorgeous?” And then we inhale that sharp fragrance until our noses are yellow with it. 

They are beautiful! I don’t own a single warm weather memory that isn’t dotted with bright yellow, as essential as the blue of the sky itself. Childhood summers were spent weaving their stems into chains, staining our fingertips green. We studied the rudiments of  dandelion wine making, made a wish while scattering the feather seed balls, and chanted “mama had a baby and its head popped off” until the ground was littered with the beheaded beauties. 

Dandelions are forgiving – they come back.

My own children gathered them up by the fistful and set them on the counter in water glasses; and even though the bloom’s demise was immediate, we would keep the wilted stem for days. I have to admit (and I think most women would) that I have received roses with less enthusiasm.

At my aunt’s funeral, my cousin’s final act was to offer a dandelion – she stood for a time with her head bent, sunlight brightening her hair, and then she lay the little flower on the coffin, creating a memory so sharp, so poignant it will be forever linked in my mind with the first green of spring.

Weed, you say? Dandelions are the flowers of life, brave and resilient and absolutely glorious. They represent all that is good - round of face, bright complected. Shouldn’t we all be more like them, planting our feet firmly, squaring our shoulders against the opposition and raising our heads to the sun?

Perhaps a bit overboard, you say? Yes, maybe, but I will make my husband read this before he reaches for the Round Up.

~*~*~ 

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The Thing About Easter

Here is the thing about Easter. It’s never been my favorite. Part of me wants to blame the color scheme. It’s so hard to get behind a holiday that is all about pastel fluff – marshmallows and jellies and pink pink pink.

What if we were to color the day in crimson hues? I mean, bright and glorious – that shiny warrior color, blood-red like the sun coming up in a stormy sky?

 Well, that’s better.

The thing about Easter is, I think, that nobody shouts enough. It’s hard to get excited about bunnies and peeps and little rosy colored eggs. Shiny shoes and broad brimmed hats and long, long church services.

Yes, what if we shouted? What if we claimed the victory that is our birthright and sang about a never-ending life?

Maybe we should throw aside the eggs and the bunnies and (maybe) even the chocolate and just be . . . well, shouldn’t we be really happy?

 If the egg scheme is gone, and we are left with only the victory of life over death, then . . .  we should definitely be singing. Lol! Maybe we just need to pay more attention. To examine more closely the words of the dry little fellow on the alter, and then repeat them to one another. Joyfully.

He lives.

Because if Jesus died and then came back - and this we know to be true - that is huge. That is rock star awesome, and that victory should absolutely be vibrating throughout the whole universe.

So maybe this Easter we should pluck happiness out of the sky and hug it to ourselves just as fiercely as we hold our sorrows, our angers, our prejudices. And we could let those things go, because they cost too much anyway. We could dance instead of cowering, we could lift our faces to the sky and inhale sunshine.

And sing, beautiful people, sing hallelujah.

~*~*~ 

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Facebook Empath

*Artwork by Edward Dyas

“My mother died yesterday,” she writes. “She was eighty-seven years old, and I never told her I loved her. But I did.”

The post rears up from six-hundred twenty others and slaps me full in the face, such a sharp surprise I have to blink back tears. Who wrote this? I don’t know her. Her name is Sadie and she’s from Scotland .

My fingers float over the keys, and finally I type, “She knew it.” I hesitate, and then punch delete.

 

 

Facebook is such an odd microorganism of life! I almost feel anger at this woman for hurting me this way, and a large part of me wants to tell her that she should have laid the computer aside, just for a minute or so, long enough to say those three words.

 

What sort of society bares their souls to total strangers on little-bitty screens all day long every day? Are there studies being done somewhere on the long term effects?  Hang on, I need a cup of coffee while I think about this.

 

Okay, my Facebook may be unique in that, in addition to actual friends, I have crammed it full with authors, bloggers and firefighters from every corner of the globe. In short, people I don’t know.

Which is to say, they don’t know me either.

 

“Mmm-mmm, fried chicken and okra tonight. Jimmy should be home by six and this girl just wants to put her arms around him.”  They’re from the south. He drives a truck and she’s got three kids at home, one of whom broke his leg last week.  For a minute I can almost smell supper, hear Bandit scratching at the back door and see the first spring flowers.

 

“Lil girl didn’t make it but Tierra doing better, and God got his loving arms wrapped around that baby.” Chicago . The daughter lost her preemie, but they’ll be okay because they are so, so religious.

 

“Lost my freakin gloves in the field fire south of town. FML.” Okay, that was a huge fire, saw that on the news. Gloves should be the least of his worries.

 

“Day twelve without a cigarette!”      “Christian brought home a science project that is going to cost us forty dollars to build a friggin robot. Hate this school system!”      “Watching Chicago Fire with my hunny.”       “No fat shaming!”      “We’ve been pooping wrong! Asians squat on the toilet with their feet on the seat.”     Aaaaargh! The messages fly off the screen, take on accents and nuances, and, sometimes, lose all meaning. Facebook is no place for empathy or patience. Is it?

 

“I never told her I loved her.” Ah, Sadie, there you are again. I am so sorry.

Maybe Facebook isn’t so different from anywhere else? Maybe everyone is just clamoring to be heard like bus-trapped kids on a field trip – excited, happy, sick or disconsolate? Hear me! Listen to my story!

 

“I don’t know you, Sadie,” I type. “But I really hate this for you. I think it will get better in time.”

The knot in my chest loosens just a little. 

 

And I remember, then, that I’ve got a direct line to the Pope on Twitter. I’ll drop a note to him about Sadie.

 

~*~*~ 

 

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Little Girl Writes

“I’m so thrilled you wrote a book!” she says to me. “Do you remember how you used to read me your stories every day on the bus?”

Actually, I had forgotten. But suddenly it seems important.

“You always had a notebook in your hand, and you left spaces in between the lines in case you wanted to add more.”

She’s known me since childhood, and the rush of her enthusiasm has brought the little girl back to me whole, tousle-haired and slumped with her knees against the seat in front of her, a pencil eraser propped between her teeth.

I actually love that version of me; thank God she’s still here.

She is, you see, a writer – and I had almost lost her in the throes of trying to become an author.

Writers write. Much the same as “humans breathe.” It is an instinctual response, vital to existence. They write at kitchen tables, in bedrooms, on buses. During blizzards and heat waves, after house fires, before baptisms, during first dates. They can’t help it – they have to get story onto paper. Capture the emotion, freeze frame life. All of it.

Authors. Well, authors publish. They network, promote, sign books. They hire professional photographers to snap their photo and publishers to place it just so on the back of their novel cover. Authors edit mercilessly the writer’s dream words and then they join critique groups who help them to slice away even more. In a nutshell, authors boil the craft of writing into business, which is all well and good, and absolutely essential.

As long as the author doesn’t bury the writer.

Because the writer is susceptible to crushing injuries, and tends to crack beneath the weight of the author’s demands. Remember, she doesn’t write for money or recognition. She writes because she loves her craft - actually not so far removed from the little girl who cried when an incautious sibling left her notebook in the tree house during a thunderstorm.

To my bus buddy, I write on the inside cover of my very first real published novel. Thanks for helping me to remember. <3 Lucy Crowe

Wait For It

        Rob Thomas’s cover of “Blood and Fire” is nothing short of breathtaking - best listened to on the way to work, when dawn is just the tiniest strip of pink on the horizon. Funny thing about this tune, though – it is not immediately fantastic. It’s live, and the sound quality is poor, the opening measures filled with squawk and back feed. But then, at last, Rob Thomas open his mouth and the notes fall out; I swear to you, the first time I heard this it stopped me in my tracks. That voice flows; it soars. It reaches right into you and snags a piece of your soul, and you know, right then, that you have heard something absolutely lovely.

            You just have to wait for it.

            A birthday, and I’m in the kitchen getting the cake ready. Three candles, or ten, or twenty – doesn’t matter. I light them and carry the cake into the dining room, and watch. There it is, the smile. More spectacular with each passing year, because I can see the little child, first peeking out through the adolescent’s eyes, and then the adult’s - and I realize that essentially nothing changes. This wonderful person is still my child and always will be, and the smile – well, the smile has the power to set my world right.

            I just have to wait for it.   

            There are evenings when I feel as though my soul is bruised. As though nothing I do could ever be good or right; and even though the last patient called us angels I know that her hip is broken and essentially her life is beginning a sharp decline here, today. The best way, of course, to deal with that knowledge is to shove it aside, and by and large, I am successful at that, but sometimes – well, sometimes I feel that it makes me a lesser person to bleed for other people; it costs too much.

So I’m on my way home in this wretched, bad funk, and I just want to choke somebody. But then – wait for it, wait for it – the angle of the setting sun changes and all of this filthy, tiresome March snow is bathed in a perfect lavender light. Norah Jones is singing “The Long Day is Over” on my radio, and a peace – a tranquility so clear and sharp it is nine tenths painful – comes over me and I know that I am going to be okay.

There are moments in our lives of sheer beauty. Quiet moments so quick we can miss them if we’re not looking for them – sweet, evocative notes and birthday candles and twilight shadows on snow.

Wait for it, wait for it.

~*~*~ 

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"Ah God, You're Killing Me!"

Today’s blog takes us to the fictional location of Mount Bloom Fire Station, where I’m interviewing a handful of my central characters. It occurs to me, belatedly, that these folks often take a backseat to my narcs, Rush and Bobby, so I’m hoping today to rectify that, and to provide my readers with a fuller glimpse of this crew – essentially, who they are and what they do.

            “Most memorable call?” Chief Cotton lounges in the doorway with a coffee mug cradled in his big hand, brown curls on end and a sardonic smile quirking his lips. “Hey guys, c’mere! The nice writer lady wants to know about our most memorable call.”

            “The five kids in the rollover.” Jess Cantwell offers in his unabashed fashion. He is the baby of this bunch, at twenty-two, and the only guy with an earring – big gaudy diamond in his left earlobe. His sandy hair is buzzed short, but he lets a stripe down the middle grow to an inch and a half Mohawk.

            Cotton is frowning at him. “Ugly call,” he says briefly. “Entrapment, sleet, Life Flight couldn’t get to us. We did what we could do.”

            It takes a moment for me to understand there will be no further embellishment, and in that time, Cantwell has moved off to the doorway, where he lights a Marlboro and lets the smoke drift up around his face.

“Downtown fire,” Allen Burwell speaks into the quiet. “Coupla’ kids lit up the old Laundromat. Connected roofs downtown, shared basements, hard wind out of the north.”

“Ten freakin’ degrees below zero,” Cotton elaborates. “Pump froze up, street was a skating rink. Quill broke his ankle.”

“We were frozen in our gear,” Cantwell says. “Like icemen. We couldn’t unbuckle. The newspaper man took pictures of us.”  He holds his arms out stiffly and laughs. “I frostbit two fingers.”

“We lost three buildings.” Burwell runs a hand over the bald dome of his head. “Finally brought a bulldozer in and took out the fourth. Stopped it right there.”

“My ex lived in the upstairs of the building we took out,” Cotton chuckles. “Which pretty much put a cap on the whole mess.”

Nic Thomas wanders in from living quarters with a coffee and a bag of Oreos clutched to her chest. Mount Bloom ’s only female, she is short, and blonde and sturdy in the way of a small athlete. “What about the time me and Jess dropped Albert Logan?”

“Criminy, Thomas, confidentiality.” Cotton pokes her with an index finger, snatches the cookies and scowls at me. “You didn’t hear that name.”

Nic is undaunted. “Grouchiest patient ever,” she says around a mouthful of cream filling. “Frequent flier. He could never talk to us, not one word. Hated the hell out of us. The wife always called, and we’d load him up, not knowing if it was chest pain, stomach, whatever. All the way to Sorrows, we get nothing, not a word.”

“So one day,” Cantwell picks up the thread. “We get a call just like all the others, but when we pull the cot out of the rig at the hospital, it gives. Just freakin’ collapses, and Albert’s on the ground. Thumped the piss out of him.”

“He spoke!” Nic is laughing now. “He said, ‘Ah God, you’re killing me!’ That was it. Never heard him speak again.”

“Dead now anyhow,” Burwell says, and his bright eyes settle on Nic for a moment.

       “I cried when I heard,” she sighs. “I don’t know why. I didn’t like him.” 

      “Her and Quill had a good call last week,” Cotton rallies. “Big guy, full arrest. I’ll never know how they got him into the rig, must’ve weighed four-fifty. He’s still alive. Got him in ICU, but he’s not gone yet.”       

      “It was a nice save,” Burwell acknowledges, and Nic grins.

     “The little boy who fell through the ice,” Cantwell pitches his cigarette outside, and the group grimaces as one.

“Jesus, enough gloom and doom,” Cotton says. “That’s it. We gotta’ do rig checks.”

They are gone – trailing laughter and Folgers scent behind them into the bay - while Cotton’s order is still resonating. 
 I love these guys. 

~Get to know Cotton, Cantwell, Thomas, Burwell and Quill in Lucy's first full length novel, Sugar Man's Daughter.  Available at Amazon.com. ~

The Speed of the World

 The circumference of the Earth at the equator is 25,000 miles. The Earth rotates in about 24 hours. Therefore, if you were to hang above the surface of the Earth at the equator without moving, you would see 25,000 miles pass by in 24 hours, at a speed of 25000/24 or just over 1000 miles per hour.

  

"A Helping Hand" by Juli Cady Ryan

Lol, yes! This is exactly how we feel most days, barely hanging on while the world whizzes around. As though we are on a speed track, moving in ever-increasing fast-forward with each new morning. Never enough time for anything!

Okay, but specifically, where are we going and why so fast?

I think it’s a national problem, but we are so close to it, we fail to see it. Fast food, quick reads, instant messaging. We need it all now - or not at all - and the result is . . .  well, something less than pretty. We are exhausted and obese. We are depressed. And the list of what we don’t have time for is endless. Religion. Family. Aimless chatter. A good book.

And conversely – adding insult to injury - this very deprivation has resulted in the wretched propagation of “me time.”  People, it is everywhere. Our souls are seeped in it. How to make “me time”, what to do with it, how to utilize it, hug it close and keep it keep it keep it to ourselves. We are told continuously that we need to exercise, soul search, beautify ourselves.

Okay, we do, there’s no denying this. But the answer is probably not found in the mirror. The advocacy of “me time” has resulted in an indifferent nation. Coupled with a hurried attitude, it’s disastrous.

Small thought, but, I hope, important. Could we not feed our souls, and indeed, better ourselves, by, first, slowing down, and then, perhaps . . . looking outside ourselves?

What if, somewhere in our sixty to seventy-two hour work week, we made time to shovel the neighbor’s drive? Do homework with our kids instead of telling ourselves that they are better served by learning to do it themselves? What if, at the end of the day, we talked to our spouses? Could we gain more satisfaction than what we find at the bottom of the “me” barrel?  We need more empathy, more humor, more philanthropy.

We need more time, but we also need to recognize the gift in each day.

Ah God, is this preachy? I try to avoid that. But I’m in the same boat as everyone I know. I’m TIRED. I’m dieting. Sometimes at the end of the day I am just angry that I didn’t have time to sit down and read even for half an hour.

So, no wizard here, and I’m afraid, no real answers. But I think when I get off work tonight – whether on time or even into overtime – I’m going to actually look at and  talk to the people I love.

            It’s a start!