Crawfish, Covid and Wine Margaritas

 I haven’t written any thing in a few weeks so I decided to touch base and roll it out so to speak.  My sister and brother-in-law came for a visit last weekend.  Their granddaughter and son also came.  It was very nice to have family stay with us.  It is boiled crawfish season so we went and ate boiled crawfish together with our stepdad and their daughter drove in from the Houston area to join us.  It was the first time for all of us together since Covid.  We laughed and shared the food.  It was like nothing had changed but every person coming in and out of our experience was wearing a mask.  It was a constant reminder of how life had changed.  After finishing our meal we went back to my stepdad’s house and visited more.  The conversations were interesting to say the least.  Let’s just say I can’t repeat what was said without permission from a couple of relatives.  Anyway, that is how it rolls out.  Wine based Margaritas will get you.  

More Than Words

 What can I say when I feel I so deeply that the words don’t express what I am feeling?  

I want to try but I also don’t want to say something that I can’t take back.

We have known each other for so long that we don’t have to say anything to know what the other is thinking.

Pain Sucks

 My left hand, more specifically, my left index and ring fingers  hurt when I wake up every morning.  Sometimes I think it is arthritis but I fear it is carpel tunnel syndrome.  

I should have it checked out.  I think it may be aging at this point or something to just live with but eventually I will have to address the weakness I feel.  

Some days it is more pronounced.  I wonder if it is diet related as well.  Inflammation?  All I know is pain sucks.

Easter Sunday

 As I sit outside enjoying the sunshine; I want to wish everyone a happy and beautiful Easter.  I hope all are well and with loved ones.

Journey

 I have been thinking about finding my voice.  Again.  Inside my head I think I have found it.  In my heart I have doubt.  

I have a dream of being shown riches of rubies and emeralds inside a room in a mansion that feels familiar but just out of reach.

I awake thinking that the precious gemstones are mine if I can find my way back to the hidden room.  I focus on the gems mostly because of the riches they represent but I don’t see the search as the important part of the mystery.  

I think the room represents my innermost thoughts and the precious gemstones represents stories or writings which are waiting for me to find my way back to them.

My journey is on going.  I am searching for what is just out of reach.  What I seek is invisible and eternal.  It isn’t shining and easily found.  

I must find my way.  

My way.

Work

 Work.  It can drain all the joy from your day when you have to do something you don’t like or want to do.  I feel joyless today.   Work.

Truth

I was taught early in life to tell the truth.  “Always tell the truth even if it hurts.” 

 It does.  

 Our earliest social interaction with others pressured us to conform to the group.   To be part of the social group is where we learned that the truth isn’t wanted by many of  our peers.

We tell ourselves that we always tell the truth but over the years the world’s lack of concern for what is true wears us down.

I think what hurts is knowing we didn’t tell the truth all of the times we had the chance to.

Temporary Crown

 I had a crown replaced with a temporary one today.  The old one was over twenty years old and my gum had receded causing food to become stuck between my teeth.  

Now hours later, as the shots and the Novocain wear off I find myself worn out.  I feel like I fought a ten round fight and lost.  

It is only Monday.

2020 And Beyond

 Life never stays static.  Last year, 2020, was quite different and in my opinion unlike any that had come before it.  The pandemic has changed human interaction.  Two weeks to slow the spread turned into government overreach that seems never ending.

Now a year later, people are uneasy. Some are fatigued by social distancing, mask wearing and the whole thing.  Some are afraid of everyone and are basically hermits trapped in their homes. Somewhere in the middle resides most people.

It is here in the middle that most of us think we exist but the truth is we travel from pole to pole in our thinking sometimes in a matter of minutes.

Conversations about who has it or who “may have it” devolve into political beliefs.  One side decries follow the science while the other points out how the “science” has been flopping around like a fish out of water.

The change in thinking from innocent until proven guilty is where  the rubber meets the road.  Now, everyone is viewed with suspicion.  Stay away from people.  This goes against how we interact with each other.

Some will take the vaccine.  Some may and some will never take it.  Herd immunity is just over the horizon.  Is it?  Is this virus here with us like the flu?  A yearly booster shot?

I think what disturbs me the most is the realization that the government and the experts who we rely on are only looking out for their power over us citizens.  Their lust for control over our daily life is never ending.  

What say you?

Anyone Out There

 That is the question isn’t it.  I started this blog over ten years ago and a lot has changed since then.  For one, I am not on Facebook or Twitter.  I decided a while back that “social media”  was not very social anymore so I culled it from my daily life. 

One would like to think their writing will have broad appeal but the truth is I may never reach a large audience.  I mean, I stopped blogging for over ten years.  I am my worst critic and I self talk myself out of all kinds of things.  So I stopped.   

I am starting up again.  It really is that easy.  To borrow a slogan “just do it” 

If I write it will they come?  Will it matter to anyone out there?

Let me know what you think?

Sixty-One and Counting

 I am half way through my sixty-first year.  I never thought I would live this long because my dad and his dad, my paternal grandfather, both died young.  

My sister Terri gave Gail and I AncestryDNA kits for this past Christmas.  It was a unique gift.  I can’t believe I willingly spit into a tube and sent my spittle off to who knows where to be “tested” to find out as much as I could about who and where I came from but I did.

Growing up neither side of our family’s relatives were well known to us.  I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t curious enough (I was or at least I thought I was) or it wasn’t talked about with “the children”.  I don’t know which case it was still to this day.  I think it wasn’t by design.  Who knows at this point. 

Shortly after my Dad’s death my Aunt Kay made a photo album our my Dad’s family with a short family tree.  My dad had five brothers and four sisters.  She also said that she researched where the “Melancon’s “ had come into the United States from Nova Scotia.  What I was told was that all the Melancon’s in the United States were from two brothers who entered the U. S. with one settling near Chicago and one settling in Louisiana.  My dad’s side comes from the “brother” who ended up in Louisiana.  So if you are a Melancon and your ancestors are from Louisiana we are probably blood related.

Maybe the AncestryDNA will confirm that story.  Maybe it won’t.  Life is like that.  Full of hope and unanswered questions.  I certainly don’t expect a few million birthday wishes from all my kin in September.

Well well well.

 Hmmm.  I haven’t.  A long silence, forgotten really.  Not much to say about it.  I tend to overthink it.  Discarding ideas because I am waiting for some seminal moment.  An event that changes everything.  Like winning the lottery.  Walk into a store put down your greenback and walk out with another piece of paper that can be worthless or worth it.  It can happen but most likely it never will.  What does happen is what life is made up of.  Being.  Owning it.  Focus.  Writing the next great story.  Funny how I wanted to be a writer when I was a teenager.  I started writing poetry shortly after my father’s death.  Literature was my favorite.  Reading it in High School English class was something I was engaged with.  I loved it.  Wanted to write like the authors we studied. Now, all these decades removed from that I am still frozen in my tracks.  The desire can grow cold like coffee sitting in a half forgotten cup on the side table by a favorite chair.  Why is that?  I think it is because I went about in the wrong way.  Instead of expecting “the greatest idea to appear out of nothing”  I should have started  writing and never stop.  You see.  I am a writer.  It is what a person does and by extension what they are.  If I don’t write then I am not a writer.  Well,well,well!