And On This Day Six Years Ago, Another Part Of My Heart Opened Up

Damn. I almost missed realizing that today is my blogoversary. Six years.
Six years, 4109 (now 4110) posts.
Four gazillion words.

As I have said before, I may not be a great writer but I sure am fucking prolific.

And I do not feel like waxing poetic about what this place means to me. Just please know that it means the world. You people who come here, whether you've been coming here for the entire six years or  just somehow found your way here recently- you are, well, I'd say something really stupid like the wind beneath my wings but you know that's not me.
But you are.
Thank-you.

I had no idea when I started using that picture on my blog anniversary that I would eventually begin to resemble that old lady. Or maybe I look more like the old man. Whatever.
We've been through some stuff here, haven't we?
And at your places too.

As always, thanks most especially to Hank for pushing me. In doing so, he gave me about the best gift I've ever received. And to Mr. Moon for making sure that I have a device to compose and send all these words out on. I, Ms. Prolific, have no actual words to express how much I love you.

This year, in lieu of my usual requests for gifts of fine leather goods, genuine gold and platinum jewelry with precious stones, chocolates and flowers, I am asking you all to just say a little prayer for my immortal soul.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

All joking aside, I'm the one who owes you.

All right. Let's get on with it and lead our lives and let's keep talking about it. Let's keep holding out our hands to each other. Let's keep telling our stories. Let's continue to keep each other tenderly in our hearts.

Our incredibly blessed hearts.

Love...Ms. Moon

Number Three Thousand, Three Hundred And Thirteen

Three thousand, three hundred and twelve.

That is the number of posts I've written for this blog.

In five years.

That's ridiculous.

I went back this morning and looked at all of my anniversary posts and a few of the ones surrounding them. Man, I just never run out of shit to talk about, do I? That was my main realization. My secondary one is that the hydrangea are usually blooming by this time. I just went out and checked. Not one bud. I did cut them back pretty severely this spring.

I wish I could say that I've learned a lot in the past five years. Perhaps I have but I've also forgotten 99% of whatever that was. I told Lily yesterday that I'd had a realization. That a president who is fifty-seven years old is not considered to be an old president. So why do I feel so old?
She said, "What are you going to do when you turn sixty?"
"It is not going to be good," I said.
I then told her I was going to find an ice floe and set myself adrift on it.

I was only partially kidding.

I was a mere child five years ago. I wasn't even a grandmother yet. Not by a long shot. Now I'm a grandmother twice over.

I took yoga five years ago. I don't now. My yoga block is something for Owen to stick tacks in. I'm afraid to unroll my yoga mat for fear of what might fall out of it.

I hadn't gone truly crazy yet five years ago. Now, going truly crazy is something I know I can do and boy-oh-boy, that's something I'm not ever going to forget as much as I wish I could.

Five years ago I did not have chickens. I sure as shit have chickens now.

Five years ago I was having hot flashes. I still am.

Five years ago I had a garden. I still have a garden and haven't learned one damn thing about gardening, obviously. Hell, I had a garden almost thirty-five years ago. Again- I haven't learned much.

Frankly, I'm not sure how much I've learned about anything at all in the past five years or the past fifty-seven, almost fifty-eight. If you want to know the truth.

Some days I think I've learned a lot. Some days I think that the main thing I've learned is that I don't know shit and that there are times when I need to shut-up and realize that and not display my ignorance.

I tell you what I do know- life can be hard, even under the best of circumstances. It is filled with vast pits of sorrow and you lose friends and your friends are going to lose you, too. Eventually. That you can love someone with all of your heart and soul and you can't keep them safe. That making the same mistakes over and over and over again is not just the definition of insanity, it is the definition of being human. That babies are hope in a way that nothing else is. That dignity isn't worth shit and the sooner you let go of any desire to preserve it, the better off you'll be. That death isn't the worst thing. That love is really all that matters in the end, especially if you have enough money. That clean sheets are one of the cheapest, best things in the world. That things can happen to you in childhood that you'll never, ever get over, I don't care what anyone says. That people are supposed to keep chickens. That when your children grow up they can become your best friends but you'll still always be their mother. That love abides. It can. Even as it changes, it can abide.

Those are a few of the things I'm pretty sure of. The rest? Well, I'll leave it all to someone who is younger and has a better-functioning brain than I do to figure out.

Here's one more thing I know for sure- writing this blog is my joy. That I never imagined, five years ago, it would come to mean as much to me as it does. That people would have any desire to come here and read what I have to say about the weather and Jesus and aging and grandchildren and side-boob and politics and gardens and chickens and death and birth. About having the god gene or not having the god gene. About Keith Richards. About sexual abuse and pain and sorrow and joy and cooking and dancing and not-dancing and bras. About Cozumel and Just Being and fighting to get there and trying to get back. Both to the place and the mind-set. About dogs and shit. About acting and not-acting. About sanity and insanity. About gratefulness.

No idea. Hank said, "Do it," and I finally did it.

Okay. I shouldn't have said that thing about a give-away. Who in hell do I think I am? Pioneer Fucking Woman? But I tell you what- give me some suggestions on what a good blessourhearts giveaway should be and I'll consider it.

As to cake- that picture up there is my traditional blogoversary picture. There's TWO cakes in it.

I love you.

I mean it. You will never know how many mornings the only reason I could find to get out of bed was to see if anyone had commented on what I'd written the day before.
There have been days when the only thing I could accomplish was to sit here and spin words.

And that's something. That's life-saving. That's why I love you.

You. And you. And you, too.

And especially you.

Every day I give away my heart and every day you take it so gently and you give me yours in return. The greatest honor. Five years. 3, 312. And now 3,313.

Thanks, You.

Love...Ms. Moon

Another Blogoversary

According to my Dashboard thingee this is my 1,493rd post.
It is also the third anniversary of this blog.
My first anniversary post was here.

My second was here.

And this is my third and if you click back on those links you'll see that the picture above is now my TRADITIONAL ANNIVERSARY PICTURE!
Tradition is important, don't you think?

Three years later and that picture still tickles my funny bone and I love having a reason to reuse it.

And I suppose I could get all nostalgic here and review my year and tell you what all this blog has meant and does mean to me but I'm not in the mood. Nope. I am not.
I think I write that daily anyway.

But here's what I think I will do. I'll give a little autobiography of myself for any of you who haven't been reading very long. Why not? Here goes.

I am a fifty-five (soon to be fifty-six) year old woman who lives in a village named Lloyd in North Florida. I have four children who are grown, one son, three daughters. I have a husband named Mr. Moon who is almost seven feet tall whom I have been married to for twenty-five and a half years and with any luck, I will be married to for another twenty-five and a half years. I have one grandchild, a boy named Owen. I am incredibly lucky in that I get to keep him a few days a week.

I live in a house which is one hundred and fifty one years old. That is old for North Florida. I love my house. It is my dream house. It has four porches. There are oak trees in my yard which are probably hundreds of years old. They are huge. If I had my way, when I die my body would be wrapped up in an old sheet and buried under one of them. Nothing would make me happier.

I love my life. It is my dream life.
I love my children and my grandchild so much that it is almost a sacrilege to discuss it. Same with my husband.

I do not love my four dogs but they are mine and some day they will die.

I have chickens. I love my chickens.
I have friends. I love my friends.
I am slightly agoraphobic. I have a hard time leaving Lloyd. I feel safe and protected and needed here on my tiny piece of land with my garden and my plants and my chickens and my husband. Sometimes, though, I leave to drive to Monticello which is the only real town in the county I live in and I go there to do things at the Opera House which brings me great joy. Sometimes I act in plays. Other times I serve dinners. Whatever. It's all lovely to me. The people at the Opera House whom I play with are some of the best people I have ever met in my life.

I have been having hot flashes for over ten years. I don't think they'll ever go away.
I was sexually abused as a child.
I am a registered nurse who doesn't work who has a neurosis against all things medical.
I wear overalls a lot.
I love to cook and I love to eat.
I love to use vulgar language. The word "fuck" in all of its forms enchants me.

I love Mexico and when Mr. Moon takes me there, I am not agoraphobic and I am not a fifty-five year old grandmother. I am a girl who sits on the back of a moped and weeps with happiness to be back as we travel the roads by the sea and I smell the salt and the masa and the garlic and I see the tiny Mayan children in their parents' arms.

I am anti-religious. I know who Jesus is so don't try to tell me about him and his plan for me. I wonder what he did all those years between when he was a boy telling the rabbis shit and when he became JESUS. I think he may have had Asperger's Syndrome. I suspect Asperger's Syndrome in many people I have known or who are historical figures. I do not know if he was married to Mary Magdalene or if they had children. I do not know if he was gay. I don't care. I don't think that god was trying very hard if he only had one begotten son.

I worship dirt and growing things and rain and love. I worship babies and light. I worship the oceans and the trees and yes, I have been known to hug a tree. So what?

My favorite form of prayer is dance.

I try to do my best which is so far from perfect I'd have to travel light years just to get a glimpse of it.

I believe in the rights of all people to love and marry whom they choose if those people are consenting adults. I hate self-righteous people who get elected to office and try to tell other people they must live their lives according to small-minded bullshit religious superstitions.

I was a hippie. I think I still am but I do shave my legs. I hate bras. With a mighty passion although I wore my favorite bra last night and it is tiger striped with bright turquoise lace trim and it makes me look like I have bosoms which occasionally is fun.

I love our president. I still love Bill Clinton, too. I'd flirt with him.

I believe that books are holy relics. So are the bones of animals and the shells on the beach and the things made by the hands of people I love.

I love bowls and bags and baskets. I recognize that this is a womb-thing and I feel comfortable admitting that.

I have been to births and I have been to deaths and in doing that, I have learned that there is some sense to this world and I have been humbled and taught not to be so afraid although that's just on a cosmic level. On a small, personal level there is much I am afraid of.

I believe in home birth and home death whenever possible because I believe that mostly these events are spiritual and not medical and I think that having handed these events over to doctors and hospitals has taken away our understanding of what it means to be human.

I love that I live on planet where the faces of the people are of many colors and I love that there are so many cultures and maybe in another lifetime I will be an anthropologist and study those cultures.
I would also like to be a stand-up comedian in another lifetime.

I don't really believe in reincarnation but who am I to say for sure?

I don't know shit.

I do know I love to write and that in the three years I have been writing this blog I have been stunned at the pleasure it has given me. I am stunned that people come here to read it. I have met new people from all over the world and I visit them where they write and I learn from them and I cry with them and I laugh with them and I hope to meet some of them (at least) in real life some day. Or maybe another lifetime. Who knows? Not me.

And now I am going to give my traditional blogoversary wish which is that if you come here to read but never comment I wish you would just, for this one time a year, make your presence known out loud to me in a comment. I cherish comments with all my heart. I think we all do.

All right. Here's to the mysteries and miracles of life which we are all exploring. Together. As we float down and swim down and chug down and sail down and plow down this river of words and pictures we call the blog world on the internet.

Thanks for dropping by. The Church of the Batshit Crazy is always open for business. There is no collection plate, there is no tithing. All are welcome. Come as you are. Come as you were. Come as you want to be.

Let's bless each other's hearts because what else can we do?

Love...Ms. Moon

Pictures and Words

The first blog post I ever wrote was two years ago today and I talked about how dry it was, how unseasonably cool. The weather. Good place to start, right? I didn't post a picture with my words. I didn't know how yet.
A week later I wrote about being a hippie and about how my children were born.
And it went from there.

A year ago today I wrote a blog birthday piece here.
I love the picture I used there. In fact, I love it so much I'm going to post it again.


It's funny how quickly after I started posting that I learned to love the process of finding a picture to use with my words. I started off searching for appropriate ones in google images. And then slowly, I began using pictures I'd taken or ones my daughter had taken. She's got a natural eye and I do not. But still- it seemed more downhome and genuine to use images of my real world, a true reflection of what I was writing about. They may not be good pictures in the technical sense, but they are mine.
Just like my words. They are mine.
Here's a picture taken from a strip of four that lives on my refrigerator:



Mr. Moon and I had been dating for all of one month when we posed for it. We'd wrangled a way to get to go off together to New Orleans. He had a ticket to see Auburn play at the Sugar Bowl. And we, being in the newly-falling-in-love portion of life hopped in my car and drove to Louisiana where they were having the worst freeze in their history and there was no running water in the city and we had no place to stay and Mr. Moon never made it to the game and we ended up having the very best time of our lives.

Well, you know.

The picture was taken in a photo booth at Tipitina's. Honest to god, I think the Neville Brothers were playing but that's not what I remember. I remember being so tired and not really sure about why I was there or more specifically why I was there with this man who was six feet, ten inches tall, who I could already tell was going to ask me to marry him.
I remember walking into the bathroom and a woman was laying out lines on a mirror. She looked up at me and said, "You're not a cop, are you?"
"Oh hell no," I said, and went on into a stall.

Oh, my Voodoo Chillens- The stories I could tell about that trip. In fact, I've been trying for twenty-six years to figure out how to write the story of just one of the experiences we had and I simply cannot do it justice with my words. Suffice it to say that it involved marijuana, a deranged drug dealer, a giant dog, a true vision of future events, sheer terror, and professional wrestling. Also guns and a rug.
It was, as they say, a bonding experience for Mr. Moon and me. And could only have happened in New Orleans and I'm sure led to me sitting here today where I am.

So many stories.
Stories of how we got where we are today. Stories that put in a line make up a book that tells the story of a life or of lives together, like the pictures taken in a photo-booth strip tell the story of a moment in time.

When that picture was taken back on the last day of 1983, I was still the single mother of two children. I had no idea where the adventure I was on in New Orleans that night was going to lead me. To a life here in Lloyd where I live with that same man who gave me two more babies.
Four children in total, all grown up and one of them about to make me a grandmother.

The other night Mr. Moon and I were on the porch and we were talking about what it's going to be like to see our daughter Lily holding her own child in her arms that first time and we both wept. It seems like a few minutes since that picture above was taken. A few minutes and a thousand years ago. A few seconds since Lily was born and an eon ago.

It seems like yesterday that I started up telling my stories on this blog. I was so timid to begin with. I didn't put my picture on the blog. I didn't say I lived in Lloyd. I didn't know where I was going to go. I wrote about the weather, testing the waters, as it were, and then I plunged on in. That's what life is all about. I looked at that gorgeous man with that huge grin and he opened his arms and I snuggled on in. I had no idea what would happen. We never do, whether it's to get in the car and drive to the grocery store or accept a date with some guy who is way too tall. Whether it's to step out the front door for a walk or to read the homes-for-sale classifieds and then take a late-night drive down the interstate with the Beatles blasting on the stereo to drive slowly past one of the houses you've seen listed.

Whether it's to kiss a boy or to end up giving him your heart, your soul and your DNA to mix with his.

One thing will lead to another.
One word will do the same.
Since that day two years ago I have written five hundred and eighty seven posts, including this one.
How many words is that?
Too many, I'm sure.
But not enough, because I'm not done.
There is always another story.

We may start out timidly, discussing the drought but we might end up jumping in stark naked and swimming around in the starlit warm waters.

I feel as if I have done that.

In the past year I have definitely written about the weather. I've also written about the children, the coming-grandchild, the new president, the old president, going insane and trying to come back, the story of being sexually abused, flowers and chickens and tomatoes. I've written about stove repairmen, turtle feet and dogs and death. Again, always with death. And birth!

Music and friends and friends who play music.
Food and how to grow it, cook it, love it and hate it.
Aging and acting and birds and begonias and Christ and Crist and Cher and dates and daring to do new things and on through the alphabet to zinnias and then back again to aging.
I've abandoned all attempts at anonymity and ended up posting names, dates, locations and every damn thing except pictures of my own bare body.

Don't hold your breath for that one.

I've said all the bad words, I've lambasted religion, I've talked about sexual abuse, discussed politics until I was blue in the face. I've had the gall to post poems. I've not broken any rules because what rules are there to break? I have no paycheck and no editor. No one to answer to but myself.

And here's the amazing thing- people read this drivel, this dramatized doodlings of my brain. They've hung in here through it all and commented and by now, the blog is me and I am the blog and I've made friends from here to Ireland to the Netherlands to England.
I've got friends in Denver and Kentucky, California and oh hell. I have no idea where.
And you know what I wish? I wish I could meet every one of you. I wish I could see your real faces, hear your real voices, see how your legs work as you walk, feel how your body feels as I hug it to me, see how your heart reflects in your eyes, see your babies, your spouses, your dogs and your tomato plants.

But I can't. Not now. Maybe one day I'll have met some of you. I hope so.

And in the meantime, here we are, sharing all these things one word at a time. One blog post at a time.
They add up, don't they?
I know what you think or least what you tell me you think and I believe you know what I think.

Here's a picture from that same strip taken at Tipitina's.


In it, Mr. Moon is grinning that grin. What is he thinking? Is he thinking he has the world by the tail with this pretty woman he has in his arms? Is he seeing a future with her and does that future look like it's going to be all jumping for joy and adventures in magical places? I think he was.
And what was I thinking? Probably something like yes, there will be jumping for joy and adventures in magical places but there will no doubt be sorrow and death and hard, hard work and disappointment and redemption. But that maybe, just maybe, if we stuck together, it would be worth the jumping-in together.

And it has been.
Sometimes you just know.
Not everything but something.
And I am just so grateful (and rather amazed) there I have a physical snapshot of that evening, that night at the beginning of Mr. Moon's and my journey together.

I'm not happy with this post, this five hundred and eighty-seventh post. It's surely not my best one and I don't even know what that one would be but this one ain't it.
But it's the one I've got today.
The rain is still coming down for the fourth or fifth day in a row. Everything is SO green and the frogs are everywhere, so many that when we went out last night to look at the garden and check the chickens, we probably inadvertently mashed some babies who couldn't hop out of the way of our big, clumsy human feet fast enough.

I'm still in love with that man in the pictures. I don't know if he still thinks he has the world by the tail but he has me in his arms. I may not be the beauty I was then but I'm the beauty I am now.
I may not always get the words down I mean to say, but I get down the words.

Here I am. Today. Right now. No make-up, no jewelry. My hair hasn't even been brushed.

I still don't know what the future holds but I know I'll be writing about it, whatever it is.

And maybe I'll meet up with a few of you this afternoon at the Black Dog.

And look- I hate the word lurker. It sounds as if there was evil intent involved and I don't think that's the case here. But if you read and do not comment usually, I'd really love it if you left a word today. Think of it as a blogbirthday gift. The prodigal readers, as it were.
I'd slay the fatted calf for you. I promise. If I had one.
But since I don't, I'll just say thank-you to everyone who comes on this journey with me and who shares their journeys too.

Bless our hearts, babies. Bless our precious hearts as we string together words, as we pose for pictures, as we deliver them to the world to be weighed and measured.

Bless our hearts, our words, our dreams, our hopes, our sorrows, our fears, our comings and goings and our beings.

I'll raise a cup or a glass or a bottle to you tonight.
And then tomorrow I'll tell you about it.
And maybe there will be pictures.

Housekeeping (I Might Even Bake A Cake or Maybe Not)

When I was in nursing school, our anatomy teacher was a woman named Dr. Sparkman. She was also, at the time, the head of the entire nursing program at FSU. She ALSO had a PhD in music. And she was, to put it kindly, old and she looked it.

She had sparse gray hair she twisted up in a sort of bun, a false eye, and she was, well, lumpy.
But we adored that woman. She was sharp-tongued and funny. She demanded the best from us. If we complained about a test answer we'd gotten wrong with the words, "But I MEANT this..." she'd answer, "In nursing, you can kill someone by MEANING to do the right thing."

She taught us the liver, the heart, the electrical system of the body. She told us we should properly tell the people we love that we love them with all our kidneys because the kidney is the most amazing organ in the body while the heart is merely a pump.

She's the one who would stand in front of the class and say, with her fist in the air, "If you're going to sin, sin BOLDLY!"

And we would wonder what sins this old spinster had ever managed to eke out, while in our hearts we knew those sins might have indeed been quite interesting and probably bolder than we could imagine, back in the day when cars were called Horseless Carriages and she was a young thing with two good eyes and young, lithe body.

Anyway, she would often start class with the words, "Let's take care of some housekeeping," which meant she had something to say about upcoming deadlines or program-related necessary information.

Then she would ask us if we ever figured out why the shower curtain blows IN when you have the water running and none of us ever figured that out but that's another story.

So in the memory of Dr. Sparkman let me say that I have some housekeeping to deal with and here we go:
Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of this blog, this land of blessourhearts, this little piece of cyber real estate that I own, this window into my world, my soul, my heart. And blah, blah, blah, I could go back and point out what it has come to mean to me but since I feel I'm teetering on the need to go to rehab for bloggers anyway (NO!NO!NO!) I'm not going to do that. Today, anyway. Who knows about tomorrow? I may get all weep-whipped up and tell the world how much I love my blog and the fact that it's given me a way to communicate which still, after two years, gets me out of bed in the morning and has gotten me through periods of insanity and fear and loneliness and horror and given me so much joy and well...
STOP!

Stop the madness!

Okay. Breathe in. Breathe out.

So I mentioned last week that I was thinking about having a blogiversary gathering for me, myself, and blessourhearts on the day and tomorrow is the day and I've got to be in town to sign a contract (for the bar! the bar! the bar we'll be the landlords of, not the owners of! which means someone else will be cleaning the bathrooms!) and so I thought after that I might wander over to the Black Dog for some coffee and if anyone who lives in the area wants to meet me over there we can, as I said, become over-caffeinated (sort of like I am right now) and go crazy and scream in high-pitched voices and oh hell, I have no idea.

Therefore I'm asking- anyone out there think they'd like to meet up at the Black Dog around five tomorrow afternoon so we can put faces to names and names to blogs and so forth? Because I do NOT want to sit there all by myself with my little latte, pretending to read a book while my heart falls with each passing moment because no one is showing up, not even my children.

So let me know if you'd be interested in this little gathering. Okay?

Thanks.

And remember: if you're going to sin, sin BOLDLY and please, if you happen to know why the shower curtain blows IN when the water is running, tell me because I've been pondering this question for over twenty years now and still do not know.