Let the Sunshine In Day 28 Y2

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Yesterday, I was walking across the wood floor in my living room and I pulled up short.  I raced to get my camera to record the light that spilled across the deck rail and in through the tall windows that face the southeasterly exposure.  It was brilliant and warm.

Today, I found an entirely different kind of light at T.J. Maxx.  

I was reminded that each of us has a story. Each of us has a message.

The woman who cashed out my purchases was someone whom I have seen occasionally over the past five or more years.  In the three minutes we spent together in order to complete the transaction, she told me this:

You can’t make anyone happy but yourself.  Don’t waste your time trying.

You deserve to be happy.  You deserve to be joyful. 

And so, across a counter-top laden with Christmas merchandise placed to encourage impulse-buying, we hugged. She reminded me that each of us carries a bit of our own light.

Being There Day 28 Y2

My son at work (picture taken with permission)

Hurricane Sandy has had a wide-reaching impact on many aspects of life.  The major losses of life and property outweigh all of the other annoying, frustrating and sometimes comical aspects of life after the storm.  There was one unexpected development....some colleges and universities made the decision to delay the due date for Early Action College Applications from November 1st to November 6th.  For my son who is a senior in high school, that was the break he needed; the pressure of keeping up with schoolwork, delivering 100% at his internship, getting a new film project off of the ground and completing his Early Action application has grown increasingly intense.  The changed deadline, like a break in traffic, granted him a reprieve; he used it to put his foot to the pedal, shoot ahead in the small gap between moving cars, cross two lanes of traffic and make it safely to an exit.  For me, it has been a hair-raising, hair-pulling ride.  My son was a “hair’s-width” away from completing his application when I came home to lend my support during the final days before submission.  I had no idea the amount of pleading, cajoling, threatening, rationalizing and finally, writing that could fit into a hair’s width.

We have mountains and hills from which to yell. Not so many rooftops.  However, wherever you are as you read this, I hope you can hear me yell through cyber-space.

HE DID IT!!!  Done, done, done. 

Let the waiting begin. 

Mushrooms Galore

Driving down Haydenville Road today, I saw a car pulled over on the berm of the road. The driver crossed the road where a gully seemed to swallow her. She bent over and began to closely examine the ground. My curiosity once piqued was satisfied. She was a mushroom hunter. I have a healthy respect for people who are sufficiently confident in their ability to identify mushrooms that they will put their lives on line with their harvest. There are a plethora of web-sites dedicated to educating people who are curious about the practice. Mushroomhunter.net touts the wonders of the mushroom and all of its fungal cousins. However, before going too far with the raves the authors caution, "There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.”(This is attributed to Klingensmith.)
The hill that rolls down from our house, beneath our deck, has produced a prodigious number of mushrooms this year. According to a report I heard from the U.S. Department of Fish and Game, the wet weather this fall produced the ideal conditions for mushrooms to prosper and multiply. I have risked life and limb to balance on the steep hill and photographed them repeatedly. This preoccupation with the wonder of mushrooms reportedly runs in the family. My grandmother’s brother started a business as a teenager when he made a fortuitous discovery of a crop of edible mushrooms growing in one of their grain silos. My great-uncle Donald found hundreds of desirable mushrooms growing happily in the dark, dank damp environment of abandoned corn. Before long, local housewives and restauranteurs turned to him for their mushroom supplies. Happily for all, everyone survived.
I am less sanguine about the prospects of safe selection of mushrooms. I claim a particularly healthy respect for the supermarket, shrink-wrapped varieties after an incident in college. A family who had immigrated to the U.S. from Italy lived in my apartment complex. After several rainy days in a row, we would see the wife (a scarf covering her head and tightly knotted under her chin)out in the apartment common with basket and knife at the ready to hunt mushrooms. Everything was fine....until it wasn’t. I commented to the complex manager that I had not seen the couple lately. His face grew ponderous and sad. “She killed him,” he said. I screeched, horrified- I was envisioning guns, knives and bloody carnage. “She poisoned him when she fed him the wrong kind of mushroom.” It’s been thirty years, and that incident lives as vivid in my memory as if it happened last week. Despite the abundance of mushrooms on our hill, I am not the least tempted to bring them home for dinner. I will stick to the photographic preservation of the mushrooms I find.

Technical glitch: In a perfect example of how life and art merge, my new computer is resisting all my attempts to upload one of the many fabulous mushroom photographs I captured. Apparently, I am lacking the expertise to figure it out tonight. One day, when least expected, pictures of mushrooms will blossom suddenly on my blog. Look for them!