Underneath the following picture is a list of the amazing bloggers who have nominated me for awards. I am so grateful for this kind of acknowledgement (of my blog), however, as an award-shy person, my way of accepting these nominations, with grace, has been to create the ‘Hot Potato Award’ which I give freely to (no strings attached, no rules – you just take it and copy/paste to your blog page, or you don’t).
So please check out these hot potatoes – they are very worthwhile, incredible blogs!
This is Son with Little Second Cousin, about a year ago. I have an almost identical picture of Son at this age on the lap of Little Second Cousin’s father’s knee but I can’t find it! I will ask Little Second Cousin’s father’s wife to see if she has it because I remember us being amazed by the similarity in the pictures.
Oh, and Little Second Cousin’s father is the Beautiful Little Brat in the love story on my other blog at http://jmromance.com/. Now if that isn’t a blatant plug, I don’t know what is – ha!
Yes, it is a bit confusing!
Anthony has always had such a wonderful sense of humour and a way of being firmly planted, accepting of all contingencies, and light-hearted. I used to think these attributes were rather superficial and that he didn’t have depth (whatever the hell ‘depth’ means!) but I have, over our nearly 20 years of marriage, learned to do what he does, which is to laugh his way into and around various situations and then dismiss them as unimportant.
Well, no, I haven’t actually learned to do that exactly, but I am trying and I have Anthony’s verbal handbook by my side just in case I forget. He could run around paddocks and round cattle up without a murmer of exhaustion; he could climb onto the roof of this house during a cyclone and stop it; he could nurture a rejected calf and bring it up (and, until a few years ago, before ‘Reject’ died, this calf-come-steer would actually leap into Anthony’s arms and give him a hug.)
“Am I like you, or Dad?” Son asks me and I hide my anxiety behind a chuckle that reminds me of Anthony’s attitude.
“You are you, kid!” I say.
“Yes, but I think I might be more like you, Mum – serious and sad….”
I take a deep breath and say, “No, you are much more like Dad because of your sense of humour!”
“You know the way you laugh, Mum, in that loud way – could you try to do that a bit more often?”
“Okay.”
Anthony hasn’t laughed for a couple of years now. He used to have this raucous guffaw and his whole face would crinkle up in mirth and it was absolutely contagious and Son and I would be swept into this wonderful hilarity – always.
Anthony can’t even smile anymore and, the other day, when I said to him, “I wish you would just smile at me,” he said, “Jules, I have Parkinson’s – remember?”
“Yes,” I said, “but can’t you just try to smile?”
Anthony tried and failed and then looked at me (I was smiling hyena-ishly, trying to get him to do the same), and said, “Jules, you really are quite thick, aren’t you!”
And we both smiled….
Last week, Son and I bought a box of chocolates for a girl in his music class whose mother was very sick. I dropped him off at music school and he had the box of chocolates, a little note he’d written, and roses he’d picked. He put it all in a plastic bag because he didn’t want to embarrass her, or himself. He was going to wait for a private moment (not easy at a music school).
But she wasn’t there that day because her mother had died. When I found out, I wept for this daughter and mother who I don’t know, and my sorrow seemed somehow presumptuous.
The roses went into the rubbish and the chocolates into the refrigerator.
I just dropped Son off at music school so he can accompany the rest of the class to the funeral this morning.
Perspective.
If it were my stomach roll, this would all be fine.
If it were my ham and salad roll that Son stole from me after I stole it from him, this would all be fine.
It’s my blogroll! I spent hours copy/pasting urls to this and somehow, yesterday, when I tried to link the love story blog to this blog, everyone just rolled away.
Very sorry – I will begin again – grrrr!
Ola is the little gosling turning the ‘wrong’ way in the picture below – ha! If you have seen previous posts, you will know that Godfrey, our godfather gander has been trying, for nearly a year now, to whip these babies into shape. Ola not only defies him, she ignores him!
See! This Ola and her sister Seli (both pseudonymed afer Mandy’s first borns).
How interesting! I just sussed out the recent statistics for this blog (something I don’t usually do – really!) and found that pain is much more popular than pleasure. I don’t have these two pps as categories in this blog, but it is obvious that more people want to read about sad stuff than happy stuff.
Why?
I do understand this because, when I was teaching Creative Writing at the local university, I used to talk to the students about this writing conundrum (this was before my husband got so sick), and this is what they came up with at the time:
I miss those students and their wisdoms.
And I would like to know why pain is so pleasurable – over to you…..
Why?
Photo courtesy of Shaam Burley
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