mmmm....

my husband made me dinner tonight and it was tasty! we had spinach salads, caribbean jerk shrimp kabobs and black beans & rice -- and it was SPICY! had a glass of water handy though so i thoroughly enjoyed it ;)

Red Door

by Donald Platt

Don Platt was one of my professors at Purdue. He was a great professor and writes beautiful poetry. This was recently featured on Poetry Daily. The formatting might get a bit screwed up but you can see it here as well.


How handsome my father
still is in that wallet-sized photo my 88-year-old mother
keeps by

the telephone! His thick black hair is parted on the left
and combed diagonally
to the right, so that it catches the light from the studio's

umbrella lamps
and glistens. He smiles wide. His cheeks rise. His large black eyes
gaze out

with a look meant only for my mother. He is dressed to kill
in his khaki
army shirt with a neatly knotted black tie and a small

gold cross
pinned to his collar, which means he's a chaplain in the Seabees
about to be sent

to Saipan and Okinawa, 1944. This is the man my mother first
met on the morning bus
to Santa Monica. She was answering an ad for a "room to let"

in a boarding house.
He had a day of leave and wanted to take a swim in the Pacific, stretch out
on his towel and watch

the pale-legged girls stroll by the mumbling surf. The two glanced shyly
at each other.
When they both boarded the evening bus back to L.A., they started talking.

Three weeks later they got married,
had a champagne breakfast with friends at her boarding house. Next morning
he shipped out. Sixty years

hurl by like bumper-to-bumper cars at 70 mph on the L.A. freeway.
My mother visits
my father on North Three, the nursing home's locked unit, every day.

Though he's forgotten
everyone else, he still remembers her. She kisses him full on his purple-blue lips,
which look as if

he's been drinking grape Kool-Aid on the sly.
It's his poor
circulation. When they kiss, his watery, hooded

lizard eyes
wake and glint for a moment like those of the young man in the photograph.
"Do you remember,"

she asks, "how we went all over England, France, and Italy on our
motorcycle?
Coventry, Carcassonne, Vézalay, Rome?" Those names brim

in her mouth, turn
to honeycomb. He shakes his head no. "We would go where the cars
couldn't. When the steep

cobblestone streets became stairs, we rode up the smooth gutters
on the sides.
Don't you remember?" He grins lopsidedly as if to apologize

for his stroke.
"It took you four years to finish your doctoral thesis on the first one hundred
years of the Church of England,

two volumes, one thousand sixty-four pages, with nineteen appendices!
You wrote about Jewel, Hooker,
Andrews, and Laud. Your tutor was Norman Sykes. He must be

dead now. But aren't
they all? That's history for you!" The three of us laugh
uncomfortably.

Suddenly my mother points to the watercolor on the wall.
She painted it
fifty-four years ago. It shows a woman with a child

walking by
a bright red door on a narrow English street. "That's where we used
to live. Remember

Number Two, Little St. Mary's Lane? The red door? The park? Our church?"
My father hesitates,
but only for a second, then says, "Of course I do. Who can forget

our red door?"
My mother smiles. I want to say that the past and the future are
a door like fire

we must walk through forward and backwards. Time is a room
we rent
by an ocean that fills our ears with the surf's susurrus and lamentation

morning, noon,
and night. We live and die in it. The lease is day-to-day. The small photograph
my mother keeps

by the telephone, on which my father will never call her again, is no illusion.
He always smiles
back at her. He is about to say something only she

hears. Their years together
are the morning bus, the evening bus. "Though you forget it all," she replies,
"that's what happened!"

the view from the highway

the view on our drive to work :) (nate was driving, i didn't take a pic while behind the wheel although i wouldn't put it past me!...)

isn't it pretty? nate says "it's flat." but i think all the swamps and trees and green are pretty cool. maybe it's because i grew up in a desert ;)

it really is a small world afterall!

i think one of the best things about living in orlando is the sheer variety of visitors :) lastnight we had dinner with dave's parents and on the way home i commented to nate that living in orlando kind of makes me feel as if the world is on our front porch ;) people happen by that we may never get to visit with at length in our home city and it's wonderful!

i've been trying out photographs on all kinds of subjects around the house-- the one below has been obviously photoshopped, but i like it ;) it's a gift cassie gave me the last time she was here to visit -- and it's something i've was looking for -- it holds all my necklaces ;)

and check out the GORGEOUS sunset we had tonight! (no photoshopping on this one, i promise!)

i've gotten kind of addicted to including pics with my posts :) i'll bring some poetry back soon, i promise!

new lens!

so i sped home today (shhh.. nate if you're reading this, i'm just kidding- i drove 10 under the ENTIRE time) because my new lens was waiting on the porch! so far, i love it! expect crappier pictures from me until i get used to it though - it's a fixed lens meaning i can't just zoom in and out to change my outlook, i actually have to step forward or back ;) that'll take a bit to get used to.


also, it's capable of a really shallow depth of field meaning that i can get all fun and artistic with what's in focus and how blurry i want the background to be ;) here's one of the first pics i took.. and guess who? cleo!!

but i also got nately to cooperate when he got home from work ;)



also, nate's been a fantastic 'dog dad' lately and not only been brushing cleo's teeth but is also the only person that can get away with trimming her nails, as he did tonight. and here are the results ;)

oh! i also posted pics of our flower bed handiwork from this weekend, i'm sure nate will post in length about it soon ;)

my black but sometimes green thumb

so i've been successful keeping all of our patio plants alive. and we've had so-so luck with the flower beds we've been trying to keep up with. but for the life of me, i couldn't keep ANYTHING alive in our window boxes. then i saw some fake flowers on clearance at michaels... and i couldn't resist. so for $10, i now have festive looking flowers that are always in bloom ;) in fact the other day one our friends even complimented how nice my flowers looked outside. so maybe they don't look as cheesy as i thought :)

besides, most people see them from this vantage point:

not this one, which definitely makes them look fake ;)

and another one..

nathan wants to know how i can 'be taking any more pictures of the dog that [i] haven't already taken.' but i still think she's adorable and a great learning subject :) that... and a very willing photo model when i have treats handy!

rules of the red rubber ball

so nate and i saw the author of the book named above last week. he was incredible! very cool what he has overcome and done with his life. it's a message i've heard before, identify what your passion is in life and do it. but the way he thinks about and delivers it is awesome :)

the book is very creatively done as well. he talks about blending the lines between work and play so that it's difficult for someone else to tell which it is you're doing :) he also had us tender our resignation as adults:



Adult’s Resignation
I am hereby officially tendering my resignation as an adult. I have decided I would like to accept the responsibilities of an 8 year-old again. I want to go to McDonald’s and think that it’s a four star restaurant. I want to sail sticks across a fresh mud puddle and make a sidewalk with rocks.
I want to think M&M’s are better than money because you can eat them. I want to lie under a big oak tree and run a lemonade stand with my friends on a hot summer’s day. I want to return to a time when life was simple. When all you knew were colors,
multiplication tables, and nursery rhymes, but that didn’t bother you, because you didn’t know what you didn’t know and you didn’t care. All you knew was to be happy because you were blissfully unaware of all the things that should make you worried or upset. I want to think the world is fair. That everyone is honest and good.
I want to believe that anything is possible. I want to be oblivious to the complexities of life and be overly excited by the little things again. I want to live simple again. I don’t want my day to consist of computer crashes, mountains of paperwork, depressing news, how to survive more days in the month than there is money in the bank, doctor, bills, gossip, illness, and loss of loved ones. I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth, justice, peace, dreams, the imagination, mankind, and making angels in the snow.
So . . here’s my checkbook and my car-keys, my credit card bills and my 401K
statements. I am officially resigning from adulthood. And if you want to discuss this
further, you’ll have to catch me first, cause . .
“Tag! You’re it.”

"Somehow I can't believe there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C's. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy and the greatest of these is Confidence. When you believe a thing, believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably."
-Walt Disney

photos posted!

so i posted all the az pics from my camera :) still need to post the ones from my mom's camera. instead of using the shotgun approach this time, i sifted through the many i took, post-processed them, and then posted them :) nate's not so sure about this plan, i think he thinks i'm over processing.. which i may well be! i can't decide. for example:

straight out of the camera

and after i played with it a bit

i'm not sure i guess... although the first is the picture i originally took, the second looks more like something i'd want on the wall and in my memory, seems like the colors were that vivid, so i'm conflicted!!

philisophical arguments about photoshop aside, these are a few of my favorites:

my dad :) my brother austin actually took this picture and i made it black and white and burned (darkened) the edges.

my mother's delicious looking snacks!

my mom spotted this hollow tree trunk while we were waiting for marty and nate to try and free a deer (long story..)

and nate finally let me take a proper portrait - lots to learn about taking good portraits but i think he looks cute :)

oh and joey is one of my dad's two dogs ;)

how cute is joey??

i forgot my camera charger!

so we're in az this weekend and at the cabin surrounded by gorgeousness! but i forgot my extra battery and charger so i only have pictures from a few hours on the first day, the rest are taken on my mom's camera-- oh well :) we're having a great time just the same, it's topping out around 75 degrees during the day here which is fantastic compared to phoenix (112 degrees) or orlando (in the 90s for both temperature and humidity!)

happy labor day eve!