Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 15

Our Mother's Daughters

Conversation with friends this weekend. One of them says she is having trouble finding herself again. Ever since she helped her mother from incapacitation through illness and finally death, she feels she has become someone she didn't know existed.

I know how she feels.

Neither of us were close to our particular mothers. Both were women who found meaning for themselves in the church. Both were women we were certain judged us harshly. Neither were women we tried to emulate. Read more

Squirrel!

At any given time, there might be 6-8 squirrels - grey squirrels, I'm afraid, but I don't really like apologizing for the existence of any given creature - running around in my yard. I toss a little mixture I call Critter Food - peanuts, corn, sunflower seeds - you get the drill - out the door for the ground feeders. The big birds who can't access my squirrel-proof birdfeeders and, of course, the squirrels. Read more

How Do You Know?

I knew this guy once who used to say, when he was angry with the world in general, that if he had a gun he would just "walk into a bank and blow them all away." He had great admiration, at the time, for most any and all of the current rabid responses of the American left-wing "revolutionary" armies. Read more

Wayne Bennett

There's a story I've been telling for years. A true story. A story about a guy who used to hit on me. A guy I brushed off, but gently, I hoped. Still hope.  Read more

April Green

The garden is green. In Seattle, the garden is almost always green, but the green changes. Wintergreen is dull green, tired green, green that's just barely keeping up appearances. Summergreen is deep green, fat with green, so replete with chlorophyll that on rainy days the city is drenched in it. Autumngreen is olive green, camo green, blending into the background, knowing our attention is on the splashes of red, yellow, and orange, holding what green it can for when it is the only color left. Read more

Why We Leave

My sister-in-law stopped by yesterday, and when I say "sister-in-law," I mean my ex-husband's wife. She had some things my daughter had left at their house. We are friends. These last couple of years, we have all celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas together. We were laughing about something else my ex had said or done - something that proves to us that he is, generally, averse to trying new things or going somewhere he hasn't been. Read more

Pick a Pundit

Does anybody actually watch the news anymore? Do we have to? Does anyone actually have to turn on the TV at 6:00 in the evening to find out what's going on in the world? Don't you already know? Hasn't your New York Times update sent you the morning's headlines? Hasn't it sent you any crucial updates and breaking news items of which one should be aware? Don't you have a radio? E-mail? Twitter? Facebook? That shooting in wherever - aren't you already talking about it at the office, assuming you have an office. Read more

Ah...Andy.

More from the old blog - I haven't told you about the Victorian house yet.

April of 1982. I get a letter from Andy. Ah......Andy.

Remember way back a couple of weeks when I said my ex and I moved into this big gingerbread Victorian house, he in one bedroom, I in another, he dating one of my best friends, I dating the guy who lived in the back apartment? Andy lived in the back apartment. Read more

Once Upon a Decade

January 18, 1978

Thinking and writing about 1968 - it's a troublesome ghost. It's eerie, watching the pages of U.S. News and World Report flip 1968 past me on the microfilm. War and rumors of war. Riots and tools of riots. Hopes now dead. The slender beginnings of the Nixon years. A short item concerning the gov. of Maryland's views on black activists. J.E. Hoover calling MLKing a rabble rouser. A garbage-workers strike in Memphis. How odd. As if Nazareth was once just another town.

Winter in Wisconsin

Jan. 3, 1978

Caroline and I are sick with colds and coughs. We feel pursed by demons. We ward them off with puzzles and colored dinosaurs.

Jan. 4 -

We are still sick and miserable , oppressed by bacteria.

Jan. 9 - We live in a shell of glowing ice. The sun lights the windows like mother of pearl in candlelight. But it isn't the ice on the windows that keeps us here - it's the ice in the wind.

Jan. 15 - Post-nasal drip has all the misery of polio and poison ivy. You aren't sick so you can't go to bed and you are sick and can't function. It's purgatory on earth. Read more