What Will Tomorrow's Weather Bring?

April showers bring May flowers, but will this daily rainfall ever stop?   Joints are aching, and all I want to do is snuggle under the down comforter in my warm bed.  I had to pull out my corduorys and wool sweaters, wool socks and rubberized shoes to go grocery shopping for the week.  The heat is back on; forget tanning weather.  We’re back to late winter snowfalls and driving sleet and icy rain.

Weather is a contest beween man and Mother Nature, who’s proving to be rather fickle for us MInnesotans this past year.  I figure I should be getting Noah’s plans for building an ark!   Andy and his crew put in the dock on Saturday, but we may have to raise it as already we’ve had over 4” of rain in 2 days.  Our bricked sidewalk is flooded so my soaking wet husband Dave, buffeted, pelted and drenched by the rain, has put old dock sections on top of the sidewalk so people don’t have to wade in pools of water to get to our house.  

Inside, I have seven buckets set up to catch dripping water.  This east wind pounds our windows, especially the sliding glass door to the deck, habitually a drippy area of the house.  Today the drips are compounded by raging winds that have the tall maples and pines swinging and swaying.  All I need is a toronado pulling up trees, crashing into my house.

According to WCCO weatherman Paul Douglas, driving rain, raging winds and dark, ominous clouds dominate the next week in Minnesota.  Weather can mean life or death for folks, especially those in the toronado belt and the Gulf Coast, sometimes swept by damaging hurricanes.  So far, no toronados have been sighted in Minnesota, though a few have raced through Iowa and caused havoc in nearby states of Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska. 

 It appears that weather has become an indispensable part of our lives .  Americans are preoccupied with the weather.  Of course farmers, sailors, and fishermen have always been weather geeks.  Benjamin Franklin was the first to observe that storms can move in an opposite direction from the wind.  He accurately theorized about the existence of high and low pressure.  Franklin uncovered the secrets of the Gulf Stream.  Everyone is aware of his experiments with lightning.  Thjomas Jefferson and George Washington both kept methodical meteorologial diaries, recording weather data daily over their lifetimes.  

The National Weather Service was established in 1870 to deliver weather data and forecasts from across the nation to newspapers and radio stations.  By late 1930’s, local radio news programs included regular weather forecasts.  The “weatherman” came into being.  By 1940, experimental television stations began broadcasting weather reports. 

Technology has brought the weather into our living rooms.  We can comfortably watch high-definition TV in our home to see what the weather is today and the forthcoming week.  

Hopefully, sunshine will re-enter my world later this week.

Sensing Changes

FROM WHERE I SIT    SENSING CHANGES APRIL18, 2014    Pat DeKok Spilseth

April showers bring May flowers and glorious sunshine, breaking up ice, opening the lake for boats to speed across the water.  Neighbors are putting docks into the lake.  Yesterday, shirtless guys in yellow, red, and green kayaks paddled across our shoreline dodging ducks in their path.  

Rhubarb tips and tulips are peeking through the dusty grass and dried leaves.  Creeping Charlie has begun its yearly takeover in the lawn and gardens.  Time to get out the rakes, fertilizer and week killer.  

My most treasured reminders of spring are the blue wild hyacinth and sprouting spring beauties in the wooded park across from our house, the mottled leaves of trout lilies and dutchman’s breeches as well as the teensy purple, white and pink violets.  

The maples in our yard are budding and the willow’s branches are sprouting yellow tendrils, which will soon be waving in the breeze.  Fat raccoons are prowling the woods: a few are probably sleeping in holes in our aged maple trees and under the deck.  Buddy is in a barking frenzy with spring’s eruption of hopping bunnies and teasing squirrels.  He’d love a playmate to chase around the yard, but the bunnies and squirrels are not interested.  The ticks are out, and soon pesky mosquitoes will buzz and strike at our white winter skin.  

Our wooden Adirondack chairs are scaling, drastically in need of sanding and repainting.  The wood deck and house need a power wash and oiling.  Weekend rains cleaned our folding lawn chairs so we could sit outside on the deck at Easter, enjoying the company of relatives and friends.  Soon the loons will join the ducks and geese on the lake, and we will, once again, hear their haunting cries.  

Spring brings so many changes.  Soon I’ll not have the time to enjoy reading books as often as I had this winter.  Our long MInnesota winter days let me enjoy entering other worlds in books, which I love to explore.  “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested,” wrote Francis Bacon.  That’s exactly how I felt last week as I read and thought about many ideas in Julian Barnes’ THE SENSE OF AN ENDING. a page-turning meditation on aging, memory and regret.  I was enraptured with Barnes’ insights about youthful insecurities, aged regrets and false recollections.  “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you,” wrote M.J. Adler.   I identified with Barnes’ teenage characters suffering the insecurities of dating, body changes, and shifting friendships as well as his aging character stewing about a boring past and humdrum present life.   As I read, I agreed with John Kieran’s words, “I am a part of all I have read.” 

Sometimes I wonder about the authenticity of my memories.  Barnes wrote, “History is that certainity produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”    As we age, there are fewer people to document the certainity of our memories.  Perhaps things were not as good nor as bad as we remember.  Was my life at the jail with Blackie, Verdie and Paul, the Dancing Decorator, as terrific as I remember?  Maybe it’s all about how we interpret those events, which may change as we age.  

As we change, easing into middle age, Barnes wrote that “Middle aged man contends with a past he never thought much about.”  Mindlessly, most of us plod through our daily lives not identifying causes and effects.   Barnes writes “Every day is Sunday”.   Boredom goes on from generation to generation.  We tend to live years of stagnancy, waiting for our lives to begin.  How many of us are still waiting for moments of inspiration, hoping to find a new passion, wanting more excitement in our lives?  

More changes come as we enter dreaded old age.  Our fears compound.  We might not be as independent; we may need the services provided by a nursing home.  We don’t like being old where there is often too much overfamiliarity.  We still want to be viewed as a dignified person, a person of value...who wants to be invisible?

When we’re young we invent different futures for ourselves; but when we’re old, we invent different pasts.   As a teen, many feel we can be anyone we want to be.  We might have dreamed of being a movie star, some wildly successful, important person.  But life became real: job hunting, marriage, kids and paying bills became our day to day existence.  Maybe that’s the time when the worlds in books entered our lives, giving us a means of escaping from our “Sunday” lives to a life filled with excitement.  

Barnes has me thinking: time first grounds us, then confounds us.   Am I being realistic to settle for safety, avoiding change, not facing certain things I want to avoid?

Most of us are average.  We have to reconcile that life may not be all it’s cracked up to be.  Our youthful idealism, those pie-in-the-sky dreams of who we could be, are rarely achieved.   We may never be the person we wished to be, but we’re always changing, and the way we live does affect others.  We make impressions on those around us.  If not now, when will you and I begin to fully live?

Springtime brings changes: new life in nature; renewed energy and ideas in us.   Like Minnesota’s changing seasons, books bring interesting people, other worlds, new ideas, wonder and joy into my life.  “Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”  Kathleen Norris

“A HOUSE WITHOUT BOOKS IS A ROOM WITHOUT A SOUL.”  MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO”   981 words

Easter on Parade

FROM WHERE I SIT  EASTER ON PARADE     MARCH 29, 2014 PAT SPILSETH

The Easter Bunny will soon be hopping his way to our house with baskets of candy eggs decorated for the holiday.  It’s taken many years, but it’s finally dawned on me that it’s crazy to believe a hopping bunny on two legs will carry a basket of chocolate eggs  to my house on Easter.  It’s almost as bizarre as a flying white stork bringing babies to houses with pregnant women!  What salesperson imagined this strange idea to market Easter candy?  Why didn’t we question these ideas when we first heard them?  On Easter, christians celebrate the risen Christ, who died for our sins and rose again.   Many of us also enjoy other Easter festivities...egg hunts, spring flowers, candy, fuzzy bunnies, straw bonnets and an Easter parade.

As a kid, I thought that decorating Easter eggs would be fun.  I bet Moms think differently after they’re stuck with cleaning up the mess of cracked eggs, colored dyes, and messes on the table and floor.   One year I persuaded Mom to dye hard boiled eggs into pink, aqua, blue and violet colors for Easter.  That happened only once at my house.   We tried dipping the eggs in bowls of various dyes at the kitchen table, but our results were not pretty.  Since nobody in our family liked to eat hard boiled eggs, after a few days sitting on the kitchen table in the sun, the eggs begin to smell rotten.  They ended up in the garbage.  Not even the dog would eat those eggs.

When my own kids were little, we tried having Easter egg hunts a few years. Usually either Andy or Kate would end up crying because they didn’t get the most eggs in their basket.  These kids are so competitive!  We gave the hunt a final try when Kate must have been about eight and Andy five.  We invited our St Louis, MO. friends, the McAdams, with their little kids Patrick and Sarah to join us for the holiday.  To get into the spirit, Dave put on a gray and white Easter Bunny costume, with cottontail and long ears.  We parents rose early on the frosty Easter morning to hide the eggs among the trees and bushes in our lawn before the kids awakened.   After getting the kids into their Easter outfits so they’d be ready for church, we distributed pink, purple and yellow  straw baskets to all four kids and said GO!  Find the hidden eggs.  Dave got the movie camera ready to roll...

It was a race to disaster.

Dressed in pretty Easter dresses, their winter boots and jackets, Kate and Sarah raced to the tall maple trees and bushes in our yard, where the girls had spied a pink and yellow egg.  Andy saw it at the same time!  Dashing to the treasure, they collided and began hitting each other with their straw baskets, fighting to claim the egg for their baskets.  Eggs flew out of the baskets and scattered on the lawn still wet with dew.  Kate wildly scratched Andy’s face and his chubby cheeks turned beet red with tears of frustration; sweet Sarah stared open-mouthed..she’d never seen such chaos; Patrick, the youngest kid, checked out another tree for a different egg.   Kate dove on Andy’s back, wallopped him, and snatched the prized egg!   As their bellowing cries echoes through the neighborhood, their heads smacked and both started bawling.

Meanwhile, up on the deck Dave in his warm Bunny outfit was filming the egg hunt as kids scattered on the yard.  Everybody, but the kids, was laughing.  I had to separate the fight before someone ended up with a concussion.  Already several faces were streaked with tears and bloody noses.  Their Easter outfits were ruined, torn with grass stains and blood.  That was the end of Easter hunts at our house. 

When you think about it, isn’t it strange bunnies have anything to do with chocolate eggs?  In the 18th century, the Easter Bunny idea came to the U.S. when German Lutheran immigrants in the Pennsylvania Dutch area told their children about the “Osterhase”, meaning hare, not rabbit.  Legend tells us that only good children received gifts of colored eggs in nests that they made in their caps and bonnets before Easter. Sometimes the bunny is depicted with clothes, carrying colored eggs in a basket with toys to the homes of children, much like Santa Claus.  

Personally, I haven’t given up on Easter egg hunts.  It’s so much fun to hide the eggs and watch little kids race to fill their baskets with eggs.  If I ever have grandchildren, I’ll want to host an Easter egg hunt, happily dye Easter eggs with the tiny tots, even clean up the mess.  I’m hope Easter will be warm this year so we can celebrate with lilies, tulips and hyacinths not only in our churches but also outdoors.  We Minnesotans desperately need warm spring weather.  Wouldn’t it be great to enjoy Easter without wool coats and ear muffs?     846words

COFFEE CREATIVITY

FROM WHERE I SIT  COFFEE CREATIVITY  March 25, 2014 Pat DeKok Spilseth

As Dr. Seuss wrote in his book that I used to read to my children,

 “How did it get so late so soon? 

It’s night before it’s afternoon.  

December is here before it’s June.  

My goodness how the time has flown.  

How did it get so late so soon?”  

Where did the time go?  Some days I feel that I’m mindlessly drifting on an endless treadmill, going nowhere.  I find myself shuffling worn cards, playing solitare to pass the time.  Though the sun is shining today, I have little energy to try something new or tackle a task that needs to be done.  My energy seems to be dissipating with each new year, especially during the winter months when the sun doesn’t shine so brightly.   Darkened hours take over my days, sending me to bed with a good book in the early evening.

It’s winter.  That’s the problem.  I’ve got to shake myself out of this lethargy.  Maybe another cup of strong, black coffee will help.   Coffee helps energize me, but I often wonder how could a cup of tasty coffee be good for me?  Doctors are now saying that dark chocolate and red wine are good for our health.  Who knows what they’ll discover about coffee!   I just read an article by Sanjiv Chopra, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who wrote that ”Coffee is truly a lifesaving miracle drug.”

According to Dr. Chopra, it’s still a scientific mystery how a simple cup of  coffee works wonders in the body.  In The Readers’ Digest, epidemiological studies repeatedly verify coffee’s astonishing benefits: 

*More than three cups a day lowers women’s risk of developing the most common skin cancer by 20%.

*More than six cups a day cuts men’s risk of dying from prostate cancer by 60 percent.

*Drinking at least one cup of coffee a day lowers women’s risk of stroke by up to 25%.

*Consuming at least two cups daily reduces women’s chances of becoming depressed by up to 20%.

I feel new energy from a strong cup of java!   Coffee recharges my energy and creativity: I’m back writing columns at the computer, baking cookies, and I just popped a casserole in the oven.  WOW!   

Read Mark Walton’s Boundless Potential: Transform Your Brain Unleash Your Talents, Reinvent Your Work in Midlife and Beyond.  National Institute on Aging’s director Sunil Iyengar said.   “Enhanced creativity is associated with greater satisfaction,” Though dementia or brain damage can affect creative output, in a healthy brain, decline is not a given.”  

There’s no reason to assume that people lose their energy and stop being creative just because  we get gray hair.  Check out those energetic, aging rockers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both 69.  They’re still strutting across stages around the world and draw huge crowds for their concerts.  

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning writer on racism, colonialism, feminism and communism wrote about her own creativity: “Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever.  Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.”

To stay creative and original in later years, we have to be willing to try new things.    Self-help columns tell us to take up a new hobby, learn another language, travel...  Salvador Dali switched from painting in the classical art style he was trained in to surreal painting and sculptured objects.  Remember seeing those crazy clocks of his with sagging faces?  Matisse, my favorite artist, went from painting lovely, serene family and landscape scenes to assembling colorful cutout shapes on paper.  When Norman Mailer lost his teeth and was walking with two canes, he was still writing.   Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was in her seventies, but when she died at 101, she had created 1600 works of art.

Rex Jung, assistant professor  of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, thinks that older people have lots of data  and fewer brakes inhibiting their thoughts. They’re able to put things together in more novel and useful ways.  He said, “When you see an increase in people’s creative undertakings in retirement, it may not be just because they’re retired and have more time on their hands; it may be because the brain organization is different.”  

Age can bring diminished energy, but also there’s a greater urgency to the creative process.   We don’t want to run out of time before completing a project that consumes our interest.  Writer Valerie Trueblood wrote, “...you just see the brevity of life more acutely when you’re older, and I think it makes you work harder and be interested in making something exact and completing it.”

It could be that society’s stereotypes about aging may be the biggest creativity killers.

When we begin to sense the lengthening shadows of age, we need to shake off that midlife shiver and try something new and different.  Give your brain a jolt.  We may be getting gray, but coffee can help spur our brains to keep working.  Have another cup of java.  847 words