I need your eyeballs for a moment, please. No, I won't get them dirty, and I'll give them right back. Promise.
I need to know how this new layout works in various browsers. I realize there are problems with it in the Safari browser, and possibly Mozilla. Let me know if it looks funky to you, and if you're really smart, tell me how to fix it!!
All done. Now see, your eyeballs are just fine.
Well, except for that one. I swear it was like that when I got it, though.
In my early years, someone put an empty journal in my hands and said, "Write."
So I did. I composed poems, girlish and emotional. I wrote letters to God. I hid my secrets in the pages, the loves and hates that lived in my heart. I found and lost myself a thousand times, in a thousand words. There is no better definition to my life than what can be found in those compositions, even to this day.
Reading them is a humbling revelation. It exposes the weaknesses that I couldn’t see at the time. It reveals inner strengths that have come and gone over and over like birds to warm weather. There are more lessons to be found in the past, in those crinkled and ink spotted pages, than I had intended.
Yet, for some of the bitter, there is plenty of sweet. Watching the people I love grow through those pages, becoming the people they are today, what a delight! To remember the silliness of childhood, the awkwardness of youth, the fumblings of adolescence, and the bloom of adulthood- I chronicled not just my own path. I carried everyone around me into those books, and their stories became part of mine.
What a gift that empty journal was. It directed me down a path that changed me, and taught me. I see in those written strokes that I am Flawed and Imperfect. And yet, the beauty, the joy of writing… there is always a blank page to be filled. A new chance, a time for evolution into something better. What gift is greater than the promise of new beginnings and unwritten destinies?
So now, this is your invitation. The empty journal placed in your hands. Endless blank pages, waiting for your words, regardless of age or ability.
I say, Write.
We love to stop in at the little antique places that pepper our route to our parent's houses. Our stops used to be much more frequent, before the arrival of the Short Ones. Now, they are rare little luxuries we occasionally indulge in.
Anyway, we stopped this past weekend at a very promising spot, an old storefront on the mainstreet of a tiny town. Amidst the collection of old rocking horses, cast iron cauldrons, and traveling trunks was a piece that left me a little puzzled. An old outhouse bench- for two.
I really don't want to know what prompted that invention. And I won't question the "sold" sign either. I'm not sure which is more disturbing!
Ah, the joys of junking!
Fortunately, the stars were shining brightly in the field that night, and the girls had no trouble picking their way carefully through the tall grass.
“Shh… I think I hear them,” whispered the smaller girl. They ducked down behind the weeds and peered into the darkness until they spotted the figures framed in the moonlight. Two men bent over a large tub, and a third was filling mason jars with a ladle from a second tub.
“They’re m-moonshiners,” the girls said in unified horror. “I can’t believe Pappy would do something like that!” Tears gathered in disbelieving eyes, and the girls sunk dejectedly back into the grass.
“I knew we shouldn’t have come here. Mama told us not to go poking our noses into this! Why do you always have to go and ruin everything?” asked the older girl hotly.
“Cara, don’t get mad at me! I'm not the one moonshining or lying to his family!” said the younger girl defiantly. “Besides, I couldn’t make you stay in bed. You wanted to come.”
“I’m not mad, Jillie. Well, I am, but at Pappy, not you.” She sighed. “Come on, let's go home. We know the truth now. I don't want to watch this anymore.” The older girl grabbed her sister by the hand, and they edged away from the troubling scene.
Cara took one more look at her father, her brows creased in frustration, and she fought the urge to confront him right away. She knew daughters weren't supposed to question their fathers, especially a man like Pappy. His word was law in the Folsom house, but she'd come up against him several times in youthful rebellion. He had quickly set his oldest daughter straight, and the rule of the house endured. This time was different though. Moonshining was wrong, Pappy himself had expressed disapproval of it in the past. Tomorrow will be soon enough, she thought to herself, dreading the moment she'd have to admit she'd left the house in the wee hours of the morning. Even more though, she feared the look in his eye when she confessed what she'd seen him doing.
Cara watched him stir the tub with a large wooden spoon. She nearly turned away, when a sudden movement behind him caught her eye. Squinting her eyes to focus in on the motion, her heart lurched as she realized that one of the other men was pointing a shotgun at her father’s back. She opened her mouth to yell a warning, but it was drowned out by the sudden reverberating shot that rang out in the night. She watched in dismay as he fell forward, tumbling over the vat and onto the ground. Jillie’s hand slid out of hers and the younger girl cried out as she ran forward to her fallen father.
Cara propelled herself after Jillie, fearful that her sister would meet the same violence, and terrified that her father was already dead.
“What have we here? The old man’s brats?” asked one of the scruffy men angrily. He yanked Jillie up by her hair, and held her as she kicked and screamed at him. “Get that other one,” he ordered, as Cara flew to her sister’s rescue. She was quickly caught up in big arms, and she nearly gagged at that odor that assailed her.
“You shot my pappy!” yelled Jillie. “I hate you! You’re a bad man, and –“
Her words were cut off when he clamped a dirty hand over her mouth and growled in a menacing voice, “If you want to end up like your precious pappy, you keep talking, missy.” He jerked her cruelly and her small whimper tore at Cara’s heart.
She yelled at Jillie to be quiet. She knew these men. They were hired hands that skulked into town at the beginning of the summer, and had found work on the Anderson’s farm. After a few run ins with the local boys and inevitably the sheriff, the men had earned a reputation for being bad tempered and mean. Everybody in town had avoided the pair, recognizing that trouble followed them like their bad smell. Even the Andersons kept their distance, and had onl