Notebook in Hand, Head in the Clouds

© Irene Owens

“I’m a writer, what’s your superpower?” The tee shirt advertisement screams at me from my Facebook page and I can’t click away from it quickly enough.

Well, it is silly, isn’t it? So much easier to get behind an occupation like firefighting. EMS. Or even motherhood. Writers are the nerds of the universe, let’s face it.

But lately it occurs to me that, at least in the beginning, the purpose of this blog was to promote my novel. (Sugar Man’s Daughter, for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Oh please,  tell me you are here because you have read it and love it!) Anyway - somewhere along the line, the Crowe’s Nest took off and gained a life of its own, and it’s all about things like ambulances and chocolate chip cookies. Matchbox lyrics and Easter.

It’s all good! But today I think I’ll talk about writing.

I don’t remember not doing it.  My mother helped me put words to paper before I could even spell. I was always the kid with the notebook in hand, head in the clouds. I studied landscapes, emotions, and the small, nebulous bits of life that a lot of people don’t give much thought to – what, precisely, does a March wind feel like? How best to describe the scent of August corn? Or burnt brownies? People squirmed beneath my avid stare, never realizing that the silly bespectacled girl was trying to find the right words to describe the mole on their chin.

John Steinbeck was my hero. Still is. Such a beautiful magic, to take mere worlds and create . . .  a whole world. Complete. Every sense engaged, so that the reader sees what the author sees, feels what he feels.

I had to do that. And I say “had to” because there was no choice. The author in my head clamored to be heard day and night, restless, always restless, until the pen was put to paper.

I was never a poet, didn’t like short stories. For me, it was always The Novel. I finished my first one in high school – well over three hundred pages that my mother painstakingly typed on an old-style typewriter. Corrections in white-out. Imagine that for a moment, and you will understand how blessed I am that this woman loves me.

I wrote throughout my time at junior college. I wrote in the early/late hours when I came home from my factory job. I wrote when my kids were small and after they had grown. Through a marriage, a divorce, another marriage. I wrote letters to editors and essays for teachers. Journals for me and books for the world. I created characters out of thin air, and I made them whole, and now I can’t imagine a life without them.

God, I think, loves me as much as my mother does because today I am a published author. This is huge and exciting, and on the days when I am impatient with my publisher or upset over a late royalty check, I only have to remind myself that the miracle has already happened, and I hold my book in my hands.

To the world, this isn’t as exciting as screaming down the road in an ambulance. Or rolling up on a fire with the lights and sirens full bore. It’s not like a first kiss or the laughter of your child.

But it’s close, people, it’s close.

Yep. Remember the nerd factor?

~*~*~ 

Love Lucy Crowe's Nest?  Sign up for the new blog subscription and get posts sent to your inbox every week.  Submit the form in the right sidebar or enroll HERE.

~*~*~

The Secret Recipe for a Happy 2015

©Mary Engelbreit Studios

Why does the New Year begin in January?

Google blames Julius Caesar, which makes perfect sense to me, because, well, Julius didn’t live in Illinois, did he?  Here in the Heartland we all know that the year actually begins in March – lovely gray tempestuous month, cold and warm and gusty and gentle all at once. Rainy winds and tiny slivers of sunshine, the days at last stretching out until we have an evening again.

But January? Oh dear. Cold and dark, so bleak and . . . well, January.

It’s hard, isn’t it, to get excited for a year beginning with frozen pipes and frostbitten toes? How to set goals when even daylight is confined to just a few precious hours?

Ah, but we persevere, don’t we? Thankfully, perseverance is a huge part of the human make-up.

What does your 2015 look like? Are you a goal-setter, a trend setter, a roll-with-the-tide type?  No matter your inclinations, I’ve got ideas for you, and they are mostly along the lines of feeling better even in January. They look something like this:

1.) Sleep more. Seriously, people, aren’t you tired of being tired? Everyone I know is exhausted – work and run, run and work, and no end in sight. So pull the shades, snuggle your teddy bear, and just lay down. Pure heaven, try it for a few hours once in a while.

Or maybe until March.

2.) Rum. And brownies. All right, maybe not every day, but once in awhile won’t kill you. Think of it as a social thing – a drink with the hubby, a snack with the kids. Lay aside the soul-draining low carb restrictions and taste life now and then. Great stuff, chocolate. Rum, even better.

3.) Exercise, yes. Throw snowballs and build igloos. Wade in the creek, ride your bike, hike up the hill. Drag that old treadmill out of the basement and to local scrapyard – and then do the spider dance when you realize you have cobwebs in your hair. Exercise is good.

4.) Love more. Love everything more – your people, your pets, your bugman, your supper. The thing about love is you have to apply it liberally. Big, sloppy paintbrush, spread that stuff around everywhere. There is no shortage, okay? You can’t run out of it.

Sleep, food, exercise, love. There you have it, the recipe for a simple and lovely 2015. And no more being mean to ourselves, people!

We are, after all, supposed to be happy.

I'm Dreaming of a ....Multicolored Christmas?

I’ve been allergic to white Christmas trees for years. They make me itchy, make my nose sting and my eyes tear up.
Maybe it’s the lack of smell. Or the sparkly paint on the stiff dead branches, more glare than glisten.

My fourth grade teacher had a miniature in a pot on her desk, all trimmed out in tinsel and red glass ornaments. I elbowed it to the floor on my way to the pencil sharpener and sometimes, forty years later, I still wake up in a cold sweat, having dreamed of her face in that critical moment.
Fourth grade was brutal.

In 1986 I worked fourteen hour days as slave labor in a greenhouse that specialized in Christmas décor. We sprayed white snow and shiny lacquer on pine branches until we were dizzy with the fumes. I had hives all over my body and fluid in my lungs, and I swore I would never, ever go white at Christmas.

A dear friend had a “life” sized white Christmas tree. Her fiancé had purchased it for her on a post- holiday sale, and he died, very suddenly of a heart attack, before Christmas came around again. I helped her decorate the wretched thing the following December, and amid tears and scattered branches and way too much rum, we finally reached an accord of sorts with the white tree.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “It won’t bring him back.”
“He would’ve wanted it,” she sobbed. “He loved white at Christmas.”
“One of these days.” – fanning a branch and sighing - “This sort of thing is going to get easier. For now, we'll just decorate the side facing the living room”

White lights, white pines, white snow, bleh. What about a real tree - big gaudy retro lights, red and green and blue? Candy cane stripes and glitter, homemade ornaments? Or . . .

Ah hell, it’s not about color, is it? It’s not about trees, or cookies or candy canes, and we know this because Linus tells us every year.  “ . . . the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, 'Fear not! For, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger . . .' "

Probably the baby wasn’t dressed all in white. The swaddling clothes would have been whatever blankets his mother had managed to tuck away for the journey. Maybe the baby himself wasn’t even white.  But we know, don’t we, that He shone with a brilliance, a beauty, a love that He would carry with him throughout his entire life and even after.

There it is. He is our “white” Christmas, people –  brighter than the Macy’s Christmas tree, shinier than the Chicago Bean. Gorgeous and perfect and wrapped all in love.

And love, after all, is a multi-colored beast, no?

~*~*~ 

Love Lucy Crowe's Nest?  Sign up for the new blog subscription and get posts sent to your inbox every week.  Submit the form in the right sidebar or enroll HERE.

~*~*~

So you want to be an EMT?

So you want a career in EMS? Both of the rural stations where I work have been hiring. You’ll be called for an interview a week or two after you turn in an app, and then set down in our meeting room amidst four very serious faces and asked a host of enlightening questions. Something like this:

Why do you want to do this job?

Tell us about a moment where your training failed you

Do you consider yourself to have good leadership skills?

Etc etc etc.

Good grief, I say to the hubby (also the fire chief) can you not ask a single question that matters?
Such as . . .

1.) Well, can you lift? And I don’t mean a little. The cot alone weighs a hundred and twenty pounds and the majority of your patients will be something more than petite. They’ll be upstairs, all of them.  Or at least those who aren’t in the basement, under the front deck, on the roof, down a well. What they will never be is standing in the front yard waiting for you.

2.) How do you respond to vomit? Projectile. Large quantities. In your hair, on your shoes, down your shirtfront. You’re no help to anyone if the patient causes you to be the second patient.

3.) Can you back up? I know that sounds simple and I’m sure you’ve backed out of your driveway  a gazillion times. But here – can you back an ambulance? Down a narrow twisty farm lane in a blizzard? Up a hill, down a tow path and – most important of all – into the bay at your station?

The chief cries real tears if you ding the rig.

4.) You’re not afraid to go back to school, are you? A lot of us go for the paramedic, but even those of us who don’t are training on a very consistent basis. So – meetings, meetings, meetings. Classrooms, skills tests, recertifications. Even when you’re beat, even when you’re just off shift or it’s supposed to be your free weekend (ha). Even when, God help us, there is no coffee to be had at the station.

5.) Which brings us to – are you a coffee drinker? Please just nod yes. Dunkins, Starbucks, Peets, plain old Folgers. It is the all-important elixir of life. You must brew a pot immediately upon reaching the station and then you must keep it going all day and most of the night. If, Heaven forbid, you should break the pot, you’ll need to get somebody to cover your shift while you run to Walmart. Pick up some Dunkins on the way home so we don’t have to wait for the next pot to brew.

6.) Oddly enough – but you’ll get used to this, trust me – the next question has to do with sleep. Can you sleep any time of the day or night? More or less at the drop of a hat? Oh, and can you rebound from said sleep and be at the rig in seconds flat?

Lift, wipe up the vomit, back the rig, go to meetings, coffee-coffee-coffee, sleep-sleep-sleep. That’s about it! If you’re still with us, welcome aboard.

*Art by MauserGirl

~*~*~ 

Love Lucy Crowe's Nest?  Sign up for the new blog subscription and get posts sent to your inbox every week.  Submit the form in the right sidebar or enroll HERE.

~*~*~

 

Halloween Magic: Behind Our Silly Adult Masks

Art by Julie Jamison-Lewis

I’m pretty sure time stands still on October 31^st.

Every Halloween, all of our lives, frozen still in amber. Here we are as little children, grinning behind the old plastic masks – cowboys and Indians, back in the day. Casper and Sylvester the cat.  We lit jack-o-lanterns with tapered candles that our mom had cut into halves, sticky caramel on our fingers, cold wind in our hair. Running, always running, through the crimson blitz of autumn, gold leaves spinning in a smoky twilight sky.

November as far away as tomorrow.

My daughter was a week old on her first Halloween. She wore a teensy black cat costume, and I took her trick-or-treating in her stroller, winding full-speed through our trailer court with maple spinners crunching beneath my tennis shoes. Already smiling, already caught up in the enchantment. The child she was – the child I was – they are still here, suspended in perfect bursts of autumn color.

Three gorgeous kids, years and years of costumes and cookies and scavenger hunts. Bonfires, buckeyes and bob-for-apples. Every year, a year older. Every year, still magic. We did Build-A-Monster, cemetery walks, the town parade - and always, always, the air was crisp as a new apple, the moon a sharp crescent in a broad and purple sky.  Dizzy with laughter, drunk on excitement, we zoomed from house to house and never seemed to touch the ground.

Another year – pumpkins already on the porch, lights strung through the bushes, Jack Skellington climbing the hill again, bony silhouette against the fat yellow moon. Children grown and new steps going up to the cemetery. Endless busy days – work and college and meetings; and nothing has changed at all. Not on Halloween.

On Halloween, the world stops spinning while the moon comes up and the ghouls come out and the jack-o-lanterns leer from the shadows. We hold our breaths while the magic, the never-ever-failing Halloween magic, fills the air and fills us all. For an instant, we are grinning kids again behind our silly adult masks.

And so, my friends, the biggest, the bestest holiday of all is soon upon us. Wishing you all a wonderful, fantastical, beautiful night.

Look Up

“Oh wow, that is magic.”

Just the moon. Set unmoving in a broad and blameless early morning sky; it is perhaps a little red. So we huddle in the parking lot outside our fire station with our chins tipped up like the Peanuts gang on Christmas Eve, and we almost forget to breathe. Such beauty, so undeserved.

I’m not a Doomsday Prepper, but I have to admit to a certain fearfulness lately. Ebola, Isis, D68. Not just the evil that we foist upon each other, but the randomness of catastrophe. It’s a scary world out there, isn’t it? 

We’re hunkered down, frightened, so much of the time.

We have to remind ourselves to look up.

But more than that, we have to look for that same prettiness down here on earth, both boots on the ground.

Well here, it looks a little like this -

“I finally got my student loan money.” Oh yay, she has been waiting for this. Counting pennies, literally. But her voice is hesitant now, so I wait for the other shoe to drop. “I gave five hundred dollars to Operation Smile. It’s a charity that helps kids with cleft palates.”

Ah God, for a moment I am breathless. This girl, my child, isn’t wealthy by any standards; five hundred dollars, to a charity, is a drop in the bucket – to her it is, well, the moon.

I’m made small by this, I really am. I’m humbled by a kid who would give away the moon so another person could have a pretty smile.

And this –

The tones go off at the station, both fire and ambulance needed for a motor vehicle accident. My partner and I jump in the rig, and as we round the corner, here come our new recruits. Three wonderful young men, not a decent vehicle amongst them. They are on foot, running full-out to our station to answer the call. 

They don’t get a paycheck for this.

Wow, right? Are we not better than we give ourselves credit for?

So, here is the awesome news to hang onto today. In the midst of sickness, war, poverty and ignorance, we still exist. And by “we” I mean the cashier who recommended her favorite herbal remedy for your child’s cough. The elderly lady who brought cookies to the kindergarten book fair. The kid who found a twenty dollar bill and tacked it up on the bulletin board at your local convenience store.

Why don’t we look harder at the goodness in each other? And in looking, why don’t we take heart? We’re not small, ignorant, dysfunctional or petty.  We are – or at least we have the capability to be – good, shining and bright.

We just have to look up.

5 Reasons Firefighter Training is Actually Life Training

Firefighting is rife with hard and fast rules. And even though, at any given episode unpredictability can fast become the norm, these rules remain in place – guiding stars, if you will. Wisdom of our fathers and all that.

 But the really cool thing I’ve discovered about the rules is that they cross over. Into motherhood, into friendships, into other careers. In fact, with very little manipulation, the golden rules of firefighting can become the golden rules of life.  

I think it looks something like this:

         1.)  Prevention. Smoke alarms, CO2 detectors, an escape plan.

Mothers, can we apply this to our children?  Feed the dog before you do your homework, so he isn’t tempted to eat your math paper. Tidy your bedroom daily so that it never arrives at Tornado Alley status. As for teenagers and prevention . . . well, you know the drill.

           2.) “Two In and Two Out” is a perfect life lesson. In the fire service, it applies to the way we enter a burning building – which is to say, never alone and never without back-up on the outside. It’s hot in there, you can get hurt.

 Don’t enter life alone, either. Be social able, make friends. Because it’s lonely out there, and you can get hurt. Hug and hold hands and love each other – we all need somebody, and that is as it should be.

           3.) Bring all you’ve got. If the worst happens and the fire is up and running and bigger than anything you’ve ever seen, throw everything at it. All the water, all the manpower and all the equipment. Be strong and be smart and keep working. And don’t be afraid to ask for help. Every department near and far. They want to come, they’re dying to lend a hand.

           So it is in life. In the midst of complete catastrophe, you can’t curl up and die. Stand up and throw everything you’ve got at the problem. All of your brains, your skills, your time and talent.  And it’s okay - it’s good in fact - to ask for help. Call friends and cousins, coworkers, Mom and Father Barron. We’re all here to help each other.

          4.) Remember accountability. When you go into that fire, you’re not only responsible for you, but also for your brother. Be safe, be responsible. Remember that you are valued and very much needed, and always loved.

          5.) Oh, and don’t forget your bunker gear. No sense scraping your knees if you happen to stumble. That Superman costume, real or imagined, can be a total life saver.

~*~*~ 

Love Lucy Crowe's Nest?  Sign up for the new blog subscription and get posts sent to your inbox every week.  Submit the form in the right sidebar or enroll HERE.

~*~*~