life of a georgia Artist

 Sweet Lil one celebrated her b-day yesterday My sweet grandbaby is turning one on Tuesday. Yesterday were all came together to celebrate her. She was not the most uncomplicated birth, but she has been happy since she the day she was born. She was holding her head up on day one. She was crawling and walking early. She loves and loves books, both to pull them off the shelf and to read. I look forward to her being older and her going to a library with me.  So many people from " Her village" came out to gather, to eat, to tell Ava stories, and to pour out presents on her, but more importantly their love on this lil one who is not so little anymore. She is all over the place. She snuggles me, hugs me, and genuinely loves me. She has a plethora of toys representing the plethora of love for her. We had meatballs, cupcakes, pigs in a blanket, and more. I had both of my kids and my granddaughter with me, what could be any better? I ordered her something from Etsy, which I believe is ...

                                                              Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash Into the woods I go, For there is peace in the hooting of the owls, the howl of the coyote, and the rhythm of the streams over rocks, which are forging new paths through the natural woodland wonders.  The woods calm my heart, heal my soul, and engage all my senses at once. I smell the damn dirt beneath my feet. I hear streams and animals foraging. I see mist high above the trees. I listen to where my heart tells me to go, and I watch all my steps for critters on the forest floor. I smell the trees and their dark peeling bark. I yearn to howl like wild animals, but they are perhaps relaying to each other that a human is among them. Breath misted around my face, cold filling my lungs, legs aching from the...

                                                    Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash Yesterday was my 54th time around the sun. I was spoiled with love. I ate cookie cake, I ate chocolate cupcakes and I even got a free birthday muffin. I was taken out to dinner the day before, and lunch the day of, and it was the best birthday in such a long time.  For my birthday, I ordered new face creams, lotions, and other fun things. I will do some skin testing to find new products I like. I still use my Noxema, but a day and/or night lotion would be good too.  I do not know if you know I am a Joisey Gal. Born and raised in NJ, but have lived in Ga for over 20 years now. My entire family took turns calling or texting me to wish me a happy birthday. My sister's oldest was the first one to wish me a happy birthday. It was a day filled w...

  Pumpkin season is here. Bright orange pumpkins, white ones too. Bumpy wart-looking pumpkins, tiny pumpkins, large carving pumpkins oh my. Pumpkin pies, pumpkin rolls, and pumpkin cookies are all being made.  This is the season of change. Changing leaves, changing what kind of food we cook, and changing how much we are outside. It is the perfect weather to go hiking. Also to pick up tiny acorns all over my backyard.  This is the season of open windows, of children's laughter as they leap into piles of leaves, as they skip through the pumpkin patch and pick the perfect pumpkins. This is the season of pumpkin spice cake, or pumpkin spice coffee, of all things pumpkin. This season is the season of outdoor festivals and traveling. Or perhaps taking your kite out to fly on the first fall blustery day. It is filled with cool breezes and candlelight. It is filled with jack-o-lanterns and all things to send us into a fright. There are haunted houses all over town.  This is ...

Autumn Season  The leaves are changing into vibrant rays of sunshine in reds, oranges, and yellows. The ground is carpeted with fallen leaves and the temperature is dropping. This is my favorite season. I love to sit under any tree as the wind blows and leaves fall all over me. It brings me joy. This is the season of coziness. As the temperature drops, the blankets are rewashed and brought out, and laid about the house for all to grab and use as needed. Candles are light again, lights are left off, and the earlier night darkness seeps into all the corners of our lives. Fall with its crisp air, its apple picking season, its hayrides, and corn mazes. Its birds flying south, its mornings spent listening to the owls hoot as they say a quick early good morning and then go off to sleep. It is a wind blowing by carrying leaves that had fallen. It is the crunch under your feet.  This is the season to travel. To chase colors across the state. To find the perfect fall spot to take photo...

  Fall is attempting to push summer to its demise. And yet here we are in Georgia in the 90s daily.  And with a nasty viral something, a nasty cold, or whatever the baby felt like sharing, snotting on me. Fighting it off for four days now. Broke dishes, I'm not banned from using breakable containers. Also, I am banned from soup, which went well. Another thing, making a pitcher of cherry-flavored water, which went all over the entire fridge. It filled in every nook and cranny.  When I am sick I am a clutz. I have banned myself from driving today as well so all other humans remain alive. This cold has me down. It is not covid, just another viral thing floating around. My daughter, granddaughter, and I all have it.  With this said, I want to double back to another post. The one about hearing. I have been writing in my journal each morning, and I pay attention to the world now and how it wakes up. My listening path would make Julia Cameron proud. The phone sits idle. A c...

                                                         Photo by Tomas Anton Escobar on Unsplash There was a book I read  awhile ago that said to listen. I believe it was by Julia Cameron. I have read the Artist Way and liked it but, her book  Seeking Wisdom  was the book that stuck with me. She is a brilliant writer and her words opened my ears. I started writing down what I heard first thing in the morning, I left my phone untouched.  The cat helps because he  loves the window open first thing in the morning, It has cooled a tiny bit at 6AM in Georgia  First, I make sure he has food and water, then I make my coffee and sit down to listen. He just sits quietly in the open window waiting to tell any bird, squirrel, or lord forbid a cat walks into his backyard, he will tell it off quickly ...

 This past weekend was DragonCon in Atl. This building with these trees outside always reminds me of the book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It's a sad book about poverty, despair, and life and how living in poverty is sometimes all you can see. Atlanta does not have a lot of trees in the city part, but these two remind me of the tree that grows in Brooklyn in the book. A sign of hope in a concrete jungle.  Read it if you haven't. It is truly humbling. When I came around the corner I always gasped in glee. My tree that grows in Atl is still there. I cannot explain it but when we go to DragonCon seeing these trees is my highlight. Trees and nature have a way of surviving even when we build over them, even when it struggles and breaks through the sidewalk, trees grow, flowers bloom, and nature perseveres. I see this as a metaphor for life. We work, we bend, we grow, and we are survivors. We push through so much in this world. Hunger, poverty, jobs, divorces, miscarriages, babies, ha...

 Fall is my favorite season. I love to hike in all our state parks. I try to capture their beauty, butttttttt I am allergic to the outside.   Recently I have been fighting allergies, ear pain from them, eye pain, and cannot breathe out my nose. So This is a sense of smell edition. I have always had allergies in Georgia. Never had this issue growing up in NJ. Now my ears, throat and so on are always mad. There are tree allergens, leaves, grass, air, you name it. My doc gave me medicine and told me to sit my but in the AC and not to hike.  I miss the outside world. I miss seeing nature, I miss hearing the birds while in the woods, I miss seeing the local alligator at our local park. * he is friendly from afar*  Who else is suffering? I have to take a steroid nose spray and try to do steam nightly and in the AM. I struggle with holistic and medical healing. I fight and fight and fight.  I feel that winter, which is mild here in Georgia, will be when I can emer...

  Sounds have a way of performing time travel. We hear a song,  we hear a phrase, we have a voice, and we are transported back in time. Sounds take us back to when we were a kid, a teenager, a new mother, a father, or took a road trip cross country. Sounds are magic and instantly transport us.  I know when I hear REO Speedwagon, I am a teenager again. When I hear the bangles, Walk like an Egyptian I can see my HS gym and it is decorated for a school dance. I see us all walking like Egyptians on the dance floor.  Sounds like a familiar voice takes us back to something our grandparents said to us as kids, or perhaps they always said something like Look on the sunny side and it stuck with you. My grandparents raised me till I was nine and I can always hear them clearly when I think back to my childhood. The swing chains make a little rattle, the crackling of the burning leaves in the outside stove, the sound of water repeatedly as I jump into our pool over and over. I a...

  Last week's post was about smells. I was telling you about essential oils. This week I want to talk to you about sight. When we rush from one thing to another we miss so much. Our eyes glance over different things, but we never really see them. I love to hike. The woods are my happy place. But if I just wander and do not actually see the forest then I miss so much and obviously, Autumn has so much to see with all its colors, but if we hike conscientiously, we will notice so much more. First off leave no trace Pack it in, pack it out. Do not leave the woods anyway other than how you have found it. Second, as you walk, look at what has walked where you now are. There are always animal tracks in the woods. You will notice animals leaving feathers, fur, droppings, paw prints, and more. Take time to notice what is below your feet.  With that said look up. Get right next to a tree trunk and gaze up its side and notice how it seems to touch the sky. Notice where the bark has been e...

  Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash Finding joy lately seems to be harder for us all. We are struggling with this pandemic. We are trying to move from day one to day two and avoid getting ill. We are consumed with shots, boosters, masks, no masks, people, no people, what is ok, and what is not. It is chaotic at best and dreadful at worst. I work with essential oils and have been working on mixes for mood, for uplifting smells. I find that smells play a big part in my moods. Peppermint helps with my migraines and also in mopping with it, my house smells amazing. I inhale tea tree from a diffuser to ward off sinus infections. I love lavender for a calming effect. Eucalyptus hanging in my shower mixing with the steam also helps me breathe better.  I feel smells can make a mood better. Walking into an open house with a house that smells like cupcakes or banana bread will make you see the house as welcoming and homey. If it smells of disinfectant then you are turned off and perh...

  Photo by me, taking in NJ I wrote this to submit to an online platform and it was just not a good fit, but I feel it's honest, it is raw, and I pray it will touch you and that you read it and say, me too! The Uninvited Invite him in they said. He is the rock that you need. Your life will change they said, but I was happy as I was. Why do I need the lord in my life? It is going simply fine. I wrestled with inviting him into my heart and soul for a long time. I go back and forth from I do not need him, to please lord take this burden and be with me. The lord and I have had an on-again, off-again relationship. I am not proud of that. It is just a fact. I come to him with everything in my life, but then I take it back ten minutes later because I think he did nothing in those ten minutes to help me. I invite him in, but I am keeping him out. I want him to rule my heart, but my mind races with anxiety about what he will truly do with my broken soul. I was raised in the Catholic church ...

  Photo by SOCMIA Fotografía on Unsplash Sunday Road tripping to my son's house this weekend.  Got furbaby snuggles. Got to spend some great time with my son and his wife, and got some great food, though my tummy seems to be on strike. With covid, we all stayed home, but now we have had enough time together as needed. Sunday was the interstate backed up, it was stop-and-go traffic, it was chocolate melting in my trunk. Yes, I put it there so I didn't eat it as I drove home. It was belly laughs for the first time in a long time as we tried to assemble furniture, ending in fits of laughter that were sorely needed.  Life had us all scampering to our own corners, but I am thankful for a weekend with my son. Reminder to self, go up more. Going to try one weekend a month to go visit him. He is only 2+ hours away. We played games on TV, we laughed, we tried to move other furniture and only ended up cracking up. We think we are a superman and then realized what we were trying to...

  Photo by Nick Page on Unsplash Weekends are for relaxing. They are for slower pace days. They are filled with walks and friends and good food until you need to mow, do laundry, cook, clean and flip mattresses. When the day takes a turn and now it is about cramming everything you need to do before work into one day, well that is a non-relaxation day. It is a day about hurrying up, running here, there, everywhere, cooking all the foods, prepping for the week, getting it done hurry, hurry, hurry, and then exhaustion sets in, and when we hit Monday we are already tired and ready for another day off.  I truly believe we need three-day weekends each and every weekend. We need two days to take care of our own stuff and a day to truly relax. We are horrible at self-care. We rush and struggle. We are truly never present when we are rushing through life like this. We are thinking of the next three things we need to do. I know for me I am already thinking that we have a meeting tomorr...

  A Cup of Tea, a biscuit dunked, a hot steamy mug to clear my head, and the color red that I love all make up my morning. And then... the day begins. It is off the race to start, to get it all done, to clean everything I have made a mess out of for seven days, and to clean it up in one day. How does this even make sense? But yet here I am, mop, broom, a bucket of pine sol, sprays for the kitchen counters, the microwave plate out to clean and to clean the inside of the microwave. The rat race was brought on by society, but I am home alone. I feel their eyes of judgment on me. Look at that dust, they say. How is she even alive they say, as they see my yard needing to be mowed? The rat race though is in my head. It is racing my blood pressure and it is causing me health issues, but out loud, no one has said anything to me. I perceive it from the looks I get from strangers. Strangers who do not matter to me and who may or may not be judging me. My daily life Monday to Friday is work. ...

                                                              Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash This week has cost us $1000. Car repairs are expensive. Lack of sleep due to having to tow the car and only use one car has been taking its toll on her and tempers have been short. I reminded us both that this was temporary. The car is fixed, the money was spent, and both vehicles are up and running. We didn't snip much at each other and when we started, I stopped it by saying, we are ok and we would both breathe.  Sometimes life is easy, sometimes it is hard and sometimes it is just right. (If I may borrow that from Goldilocks.) Life is not all sunshine and roses, but writing about it helps me work through it. Writing about any emotion or what is currently happening helps me gain perspective on what is...

                                                         Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash When our writing is dry as the desert it is lacking in imagery, details, and specificity of, well everything, and  I for one have been bad about getting the storyline down and then going back and filling in the descriptions, which is fine except when I say something like, he smelled like bourbon and oak, and I move on and don't write what that description means. He smells like those things naturally? He is a drunk? And then when I go back to the places where I THINK are the holes I realize I missed so many holes through my story because I was in a race to get down the bones.  I have been writing for years. You can find my writing on numerous platforms on and off the internet. I love to write. I love to connect with ...

   coffee time A few years back I spent the summer traveling in Georgia to different coffee shops. Coffee is my jam. I love sitting in these lovely places and just people-watching. I listen to snippets of conversations and imagine everyone's life.  Who are these folks? Why did they come in today? Did they meet someone they were supposed to? Or perhaps someone new?  If you have been following me for a while you know I am obsessed with the theory of the third place. If you have not let me briefly explain the concept. The theory states that you have a home, work, and a third place. The third place is a safe space in the community where you can relax, talk with others, and just enjoy yourself safely. No judgment, just relaxation.  There are books on it, it is a real thing. Look it up. I did my 24-page graduation thesis on it. I used two books and juxtaposed two different third places. One an urban space, one a park. I used it on papers all through my college years a...

                                                            Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash I have been published a few times in different online places and also in actual magazines. When some might think that I have been lucky, I want to say no I have not. I work on my writing. I work on engaging in whatever the prompt is and I struggle.  This week ( ok honestly the last three weeks) I have been struggling with a poem and have sheets and sheets of paper to prove it. I love to still work out pieces on paper before typing them. It is way easier to erase on the computer than on a piece of paper. With magazine writing, you write for summer winter and winter the summer. It takes some mindset to do this when it is 95 outside your window. I struggled, while sweating, to write about the romance of winter. I...

  Sundays are slower. Sundays are lazier. Sundays are made for rest. Sunday is never what it is supposed to be. When I think of Sunday I think of slowness, relaxation, and lots of coffee. Sunday is never that! Sundays are my writing day. I submit my pieces to online and regular magazines and blogs. I write the pieces to get published and paid. I take a block of time for me. Sunday though is laundry and mopping and sweeping. It is cleaning up from the week and struggling to stay afloat. Sunday is for relaxation and slowing down, but none really do. We are cleaning up from our Monday to Saturday messes. We put jackets back where they go. It is for picking up things from the wrong room and getting them into the correct room. It is for mowing, cooking, shopping, and getting the to-do lists done.  Sunday is for resting, but we do not. This Sunday I am taking it slow. I enjoyed a second cup of coffee. I wrote for some magazines. I wrote in my journal. I sip my tea slowly. I move abo...