"I was there to hear your borning cry, I'll be there when you are old...I'll be there to make your verses rhyme from dusk 'till rising sun." Lyrics from "I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry" by John Ylvisaker
A letter to my grandson...
Dear Oliver,
Early Saturday morning, Feb. 19, 2011, you were getting restless to make a grand entrance.
Although you really didn't know me, you probably had heard my voice many times as your mommy, daddy and I marveled over the thought of you.
Driving to Sioux Falls, the formations of birds, floating effortlessly north, decorated the overcast sky with the sign of new life. Watching them, I pondered how this day has changed.
It started as any old Saturday - sleeping in, rousing to let the dogs out,
brewing tea and eating breakfast at the kitchen table.
After receiving the phone call from your daddy, the day quickly transformed to a magical holiday, a crimson Christmas, an illuminating Easter, a spectacular birthday.
Entering the hospital and ascending to the third floor, I quickly became Visitor 3545.
Here is what I wrote in my journal before your arrival.
Today is the day you will be born and every step I take, I inch closer to you.
Every action leading to your birth seems like slow motion: packing my bags, calling the dog sitter, leaving the house, loading the car, driving 75 miles north across wintry rolling fields.
Everything carries me in a glad cadence to your new life.
As a drum beat, the pace of your heart on the monitor is a rhythmic melody
leading to the sweet sound of your borning cry.
Yes, the day quickly transformed to a magical holiday, a crimson Christmas, an illuminating Easter, a spectacular birthday - your birthday, Oliver.
A heart full of joy and love,
Grandma
2011 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Bosco Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her writing has won first-place in competitions of the National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women. In the 2009 and 2010 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took five first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on FaceBook.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Cooking canon cans convenience
Have you ever noticed how many food commercials there are on prime time TV? One right after another, they just don't let up: images of sumptuously steaming hot meals for insatiable ever-ready appetites.
I suppose advertisers count on the assumption that all of us are hungry. If not, they are bound and determined to make our mouths water while we sit perched in our Lazy Boys, cravenly glued to our giant flat-screened TVs.
My problem is that when I actually do order a meal at a fast food restaurant, which is seldom, the food never looks as plump and deliciously juicy as the larger-than-life images portrayed on the tube.
Most fast food I’ve consumed is either slimy, dried out, wilted, served at room temperature or all of the above.
Besides, I'm really not much of a hurry up and eat person. The bottom line is that preconfigured food, ready to cook in minutes is plainly not natural to me. Whatever innate goodness it may have possessed originally has been processed right out of it.
As you may have guessed, there's really nothing speedy in my canon of cooking. I don’t serve Minute Rice or dinners from cans or boxes. I believe meals need to be slowly loved on and nurtured into a heavenly soup, a heartwarming stew or a sleep-on-it pie.
In my cookbook of life, any recipe short of spending several hours poring over a hot stove, mixing, measuring and fussing with fixings is not the kind of meal I really want.
Besides, home-cooking makes the house smell so – how would you say – homey. What could be better than cohabiting with aromas of pot roast or pasta sauce pleasantly invading olfactory glands and seeping throughout every room in the house?
You see, I believe that nothing is ever lost on down-home cooking. Inconvenient at times, it has the potential to transform a bad day into, perhaps, the one and only good thing that happens. It’s a powerful saving grace worth defending.
When was the last time you had French fries or a Whopper at a funeral lunch? Probably never. Even after funerals, when we wish we could run back to our on-the-go lifestyle, we meticulously prepare and gracefully serve a nice sit-down meal. Slowly and thoughtfully made, it’s not just any meal; it’s a calculating device to soothe forlorn hearts, mingling with hushed and sometimes uncomfortable conversations over ham salad sandwiches, pickled cucumbers and lemon meringue pie.
My father used to say, "If you want it all, you have to give up something."
I say, if you want a quick meal, you have to give up all kinds of good stuff through which kindness and love are indissoluble.
2011 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Bosco Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her writing has won first-place in competitions of the National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women. In the 2009 and 2010 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took five first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on FaceBook.
I suppose advertisers count on the assumption that all of us are hungry. If not, they are bound and determined to make our mouths water while we sit perched in our Lazy Boys, cravenly glued to our giant flat-screened TVs.
My problem is that when I actually do order a meal at a fast food restaurant, which is seldom, the food never looks as plump and deliciously juicy as the larger-than-life images portrayed on the tube.
Most fast food I’ve consumed is either slimy, dried out, wilted, served at room temperature or all of the above.
Besides, I'm really not much of a hurry up and eat person. The bottom line is that preconfigured food, ready to cook in minutes is plainly not natural to me. Whatever innate goodness it may have possessed originally has been processed right out of it.
As you may have guessed, there's really nothing speedy in my canon of cooking. I don’t serve Minute Rice or dinners from cans or boxes. I believe meals need to be slowly loved on and nurtured into a heavenly soup, a heartwarming stew or a sleep-on-it pie.
In my cookbook of life, any recipe short of spending several hours poring over a hot stove, mixing, measuring and fussing with fixings is not the kind of meal I really want.
Besides, home-cooking makes the house smell so – how would you say – homey. What could be better than cohabiting with aromas of pot roast or pasta sauce pleasantly invading olfactory glands and seeping throughout every room in the house?
You see, I believe that nothing is ever lost on down-home cooking. Inconvenient at times, it has the potential to transform a bad day into, perhaps, the one and only good thing that happens. It’s a powerful saving grace worth defending.
When was the last time you had French fries or a Whopper at a funeral lunch? Probably never. Even after funerals, when we wish we could run back to our on-the-go lifestyle, we meticulously prepare and gracefully serve a nice sit-down meal. Slowly and thoughtfully made, it’s not just any meal; it’s a calculating device to soothe forlorn hearts, mingling with hushed and sometimes uncomfortable conversations over ham salad sandwiches, pickled cucumbers and lemon meringue pie.
My father used to say, "If you want it all, you have to give up something."
I say, if you want a quick meal, you have to give up all kinds of good stuff through which kindness and love are indissoluble.
2011 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Bosco Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her writing has won first-place in competitions of the National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women. In the 2009 and 2010 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took five first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on FaceBook.
Monday, February 7, 2011
It looked like a thing-a-ma-jig
On Friday, January 21, we arrived home from work to find a basement full of water, and it wasn't from melting snow.
The washing machine's water sensor valve had malfunctioned, turning our washer into a ever-flowing Maytag fountain, spilling over its sides from morning til evening.
As you can imagine, TGIF quickly turned into OMG. We spent Friday night and the entire weekend wet-vacuuming the basement and clearing furniture. My aching back!
When moving the washer and dryer for the first time in 10 years, I discovered it had a life of its own underneath.
I will admit I do shove couches and chairs around now and then to clean under them, but never the washer and dryer, and it shows.
Down below the many years of swishing and tumbling, under spin and rinse, resided a dusty field of lint and stuff from pockets.
Among the lost was a plastic what-cha-ma-call-it that neither my husband or I could identify. It looked like a thing-a-ma-jig from a...whatever.
A balled up foil wrapper from a Hershey's kiss, bobby pins and buttons, twist-ties and toy parts. Hand-written notes whited out from a good washing. Shiny silver coins. Junk jewelry. Even jelly beans.
As I swept the collection into a sizable pile, I surveyed what had become a shriveled ecosystem of the forgotten, lost in the throes of laundering. Items that once thrived somewhere, spent years in absentia, now found.
It's been said that home is where our stories begin, and as I swept the pile into the dustpan, I felt as though I was sending any number of stories to their sure and certain deaths, closing their files forever.
This is one of the many challenges writers face. While navigating from day-to-day, making our way from here to there, we never stop writing. We do it on I-pads and scratch pad, on envelopes and napkins, on our palms and on our hearts.
Like a lovingly nagging mother, whose pursuant reminders to wash our hands, brush our teeth, eat our vegetables never end, the stories never cease.
Even as we lie down, we are pestered by thoughts and ideas for stories and then more stories.
We face the daunting responsibility of determining if they have teeth, are substantial, capable of being told? Some are, some not.
It's a circular process always leading us to the place where our memories and dreams dwell. The sight of a stranger on the corner, the smell of her perfume, his silly laugh, muffled voices in the hallway. All begging to be told, leading us to the blank page.
It's a peculiar predicament we face. Pestered by what to write, we arm-wrestle topics paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, until a neatly constructed narrative rises sweaty and triumphant.
Albeit short-lived until a new story taps us on the shoulder and the next deadline looms.
2011 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Bosco Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her writing has won first-place in competitions of the National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women. In the 2009 and 2010 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took five first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on FaceBook.
The washing machine's water sensor valve had malfunctioned, turning our washer into a ever-flowing Maytag fountain, spilling over its sides from morning til evening.
As you can imagine, TGIF quickly turned into OMG. We spent Friday night and the entire weekend wet-vacuuming the basement and clearing furniture. My aching back!
When moving the washer and dryer for the first time in 10 years, I discovered it had a life of its own underneath.
I will admit I do shove couches and chairs around now and then to clean under them, but never the washer and dryer, and it shows.
Down below the many years of swishing and tumbling, under spin and rinse, resided a dusty field of lint and stuff from pockets.
Among the lost was a plastic what-cha-ma-call-it that neither my husband or I could identify. It looked like a thing-a-ma-jig from a...whatever.
A balled up foil wrapper from a Hershey's kiss, bobby pins and buttons, twist-ties and toy parts. Hand-written notes whited out from a good washing. Shiny silver coins. Junk jewelry. Even jelly beans.
As I swept the collection into a sizable pile, I surveyed what had become a shriveled ecosystem of the forgotten, lost in the throes of laundering. Items that once thrived somewhere, spent years in absentia, now found.
It's been said that home is where our stories begin, and as I swept the pile into the dustpan, I felt as though I was sending any number of stories to their sure and certain deaths, closing their files forever.
This is one of the many challenges writers face. While navigating from day-to-day, making our way from here to there, we never stop writing. We do it on I-pads and scratch pad, on envelopes and napkins, on our palms and on our hearts.
Like a lovingly nagging mother, whose pursuant reminders to wash our hands, brush our teeth, eat our vegetables never end, the stories never cease.
Even as we lie down, we are pestered by thoughts and ideas for stories and then more stories.
We face the daunting responsibility of determining if they have teeth, are substantial, capable of being told? Some are, some not.
It's a circular process always leading us to the place where our memories and dreams dwell. The sight of a stranger on the corner, the smell of her perfume, his silly laugh, muffled voices in the hallway. All begging to be told, leading us to the blank page.
It's a peculiar predicament we face. Pestered by what to write, we arm-wrestle topics paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, until a neatly constructed narrative rises sweaty and triumphant.
Albeit short-lived until a new story taps us on the shoulder and the next deadline looms.
2011 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Bosco Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her writing has won first-place in competitions of the National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women. In the 2009 and 2010 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took five first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on FaceBook.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
It looked like a thing-a-ma-jig
On Friday, January 21, we arrived home from work to find a basement full of water, and it wasn't from melting snow.
The washing machine's water sensor valve had malfunctioned, turning our washer into a ever-flowing Maytag fountain, spilling over its sides from morning til evening.
As you can imagine, TGIF quickly turned into OMG. We spent Friday night and the entire weekend wet-vacuuming the basement and clearing furniture. My aching back!
When moving the washer and dryer for the first time in 10 years, I discovered it had a life of its own underneath.
I will admit I do shove couches and chairs around now and then to clean under them, but never the washer and dryer, and it shows.
Down below the many years of swishing and tumbling, under spin and rinse, resided a dusty field of lint and stuff from pockets.
Among the lost was a plastic what-cha-ma-call-it that neither my husband or I could identify. It looked like a thing-a-ma-jig from a...whatever.
A balled up foil wrapper from a Hershey's kiss, bobby pins and buttons, twist-ties and toy parts. Hand-written notes whited out from a good washing. Shiny silver coins. Junk jewelry. Even jelly beans.
As I swept the collection into a sizable pile, I surveyed what had become a shriveled ecosystem of the forgotten, lost in the throes of laundering. Items that once thrived somewhere, spent years in absentia, now found.
It's been said that home is where our stories begin, and as I swept the pile into the dustpan, I felt as though I was sending any number of stories to their sure and certain deaths, closing their files forever.
This is one of the many challenges writers face. While navigating from day-to-day, making our way from here to there, we never stop writing. We do it on I-pads and scratch pad, on envelopes and napkins, on our palms and on our hearts.
Like a lovingly nagging mother, whose pursuant reminders to wash our hands, brush our teeth, eat our vegetables never end, the stories never cease.
Even as we lie down, we are pestered by thoughts and ideas for stories and then more stories.
We face the daunting responsibility of determining if they have teeth, are substantial, capable of being told? Some are, some not.
It's a circular process always leading us to the place where our memories and dreams dwell. The sight of a stranger on the corner, the smell of her perfume, his silly laugh, muffled voices in the hallway. All begging to be told, leading us to the blank page.
It's a peculiar predicament we face. Pestered by what to write, we arm-wrestle topics paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, until a neatly constructed narrative rises sweaty and triumphant.
Albeit short-lived until a new story taps us on the shoulder and the next deadline looms.
2011 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Bosco Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her writing has won first-place in competitions of the National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women. In the 2009 and 2010 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took five first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on FaceBook.
The washing machine's water sensor valve had malfunctioned, turning our washer into a ever-flowing Maytag fountain, spilling over its sides from morning til evening.
As you can imagine, TGIF quickly turned into OMG. We spent Friday night and the entire weekend wet-vacuuming the basement and clearing furniture. My aching back!
When moving the washer and dryer for the first time in 10 years, I discovered it had a life of its own underneath.
I will admit I do shove couches and chairs around now and then to clean under them, but never the washer and dryer, and it shows.
Down below the many years of swishing and tumbling, under spin and rinse, resided a dusty field of lint and stuff from pockets.
Among the lost was a plastic what-cha-ma-call-it that neither my husband or I could identify. It looked like a thing-a-ma-jig from a...whatever.
A balled up foil wrapper from a Hershey's kiss, bobby pins and buttons, twist-ties and toy parts. Hand-written notes whited out from a good washing. Shiny silver coins. Junk jewelry. Even jelly beans.
As I swept the collection into a sizable pile, I surveyed what had become a shriveled ecosystem of the forgotten, lost in the throes of laundering. Items that once thrived somewhere, spent years in absentia, now found.
It's been said that home is where our stories begin, and as I swept the pile into the dustpan, I felt as though I was sending any number of stories to their sure and certain deaths, closing their files forever.
This is one of the many challenges writers face. While navigating from day-to-day, making our way from here to there, we never stop writing. We do it on I-pads and scratch pad, on envelopes and napkins, on our palms and on our hearts.
Like a lovingly nagging mother, whose pursuant reminders to wash our hands, brush our teeth, eat our vegetables never end, the stories never cease.
Even as we lie down, we are pestered by thoughts and ideas for stories and then more stories.
We face the daunting responsibility of determining if they have teeth, are substantial, capable of being told? Some are, some not.
It's a circular process always leading us to the place where our memories and dreams dwell. The sight of a stranger on the corner, the smell of her perfume, his silly laugh, muffled voices in the hallway. All begging to be told, leading us to the blank page.
It's a peculiar predicament we face. Pestered by what to write, we arm-wrestle topics paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, until a neatly constructed narrative rises sweaty and triumphant.
Albeit short-lived until a new story taps us on the shoulder and the next deadline looms.
2011 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Bosco Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her writing has won first-place in competitions of the National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women. In the 2009 and 2010 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took five first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on FaceBook.
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