First string players I love in the fight against Breast Cancer

I met Annie back in Richmond Virginia, Bob’s  2nd local TV market (WTVR- CBS) and we were all wet behind the ears to the journalism business.  She was the weather girl and even when an ice storm was coming, Anne could make you feel like it would all be OK.  I remember feeling so old back then-- Bob was 31 and I was pregnant with our second- most of the people kicking around the station were young and single and so our house become the "salon" for young, starving journalists who needed a hot meal.  (piece of Trivia-- Mike Allen’s Politico founder was a print reporter in Richmond then in print and he’d stop by the house too  for food and conversation)

Annie is a good bit younger than me (don’t ask , don’t tell) but I remember thinking that if the McConaughy girls added a sister- it would be someone just like Annie- giant smile, great sense of humor, always a positive attitude.
 

She wouldn’t meet her husband and have her stunningly beautiful kids until years later- and she always told me we were her "married" role models-- whatever that meant  But Annie Murray Paige is now MY role model. She has brought all of her best stuff--  courage and humor and honesty to battle this insidious disease and in doing so-- she has taught us all to keep our chins up and laugh in the face of danger.  


Annie Murray Paige is more than a survivor-- she embodies a thriver.  And if I were reborn on this earth- I’d want her to be my next mother.  (That way she can be older than Me too!)

Ann’s Diary: Feminism In A Bottle

Recently I was yet again picking up after my family–this time it was lunch plates and milk glasses, when I got to thinking about the feminist movement.

Ever since they let the genie out of the feminist bottle in the 60’s, women have been officially allowed to follow their dreams.  Those dreams didn’t necessarily have to be domestic–as in “I can’t wait to be a wife and run a household”.  But yet they could be–if that was your desire.  What the feminism movement tried to do was release women from the expectation that allthey could do was be a wife and run a house.  And 5 decades later, I think it worked.

We have women doctors, lawyers, astronauts, mechanics, dentists, doctors, principals, CEOs and financial advisors.  We also have women teachers, nurses, waitresses and others holding stereotypical “for women only” jobs–doing so (hopefully) because they chose them, not because they were the only ones offered to them.

So I thank Gloria Steinem and all her gal pals for releasing me and my daughter and my daughter’s daughter from the drudgery of post-suffragette but stay-in-the-kitchen syndrome.  But with all due respect, I have a bone to pick with whomever it is that is now running the modern feminist show. Because somehow, when the message was getting passed on that women can work outside the home for money, it didn’t get transferred to all spouses out there that women, working or not, don’t necessarily have to still be the ones who cook, clean and pick up after the slobs who live there.

Okay, maybe slobs is a little harsh.

But really–as part of the Steinem mantra, I sure wish someone had thrown in “and BTW, just because someone is born with ovaries and breasts (even it she loses them to breast cancer later on like I did) doesn’t mean she should–or even want to–pick up your old coffee, spilled juice, dishes from last night, dog hairs and opened but just-didn’t-happen-to-make-it-into-the-waste-basket discarded mail.”

I am a woman of the 21st century, which means I watch my kids AND I work from home. And my work–writing this blog–means I make minimal money for my talent–but I DO have talent. And that talent, while poorly represented on the W2 form each April, is not in the venue of cooking, cleaning or scrubbing toilets.  Yes I can do them, but no I do not like to do them.

I’m just guessing, but I’m going to assume that nobody puts “vacuum the carpet” in the Things I Want To Do When I Grow Up essay in 2nd grade.

But it must be done–if not, a house becomes a pigsty.  That I understand.

What I don’t understand is why, when that genie got smoked out of her feminism bottle all those years ago, she didn’t make sure she read the fine print on the contract.  If she had, she might have realized all that was to be expected of her–get a job (either at home or at an office,) have the children, AND still be the one who ends up cleaning up after the entire house.  Had that been the case, I’m sure she’d have rubbed the lamp next to her and wake up the “Get Off Your Butt And Clean Your Own Dishes” genie. Then women today would all go to work and come home to a clean house and folded laundry.

I’m not saying every home suffers from this syndrome, but if yours does, you are not alone.  Gloria Steinem’s work is over but if anyone else wants to jump in and pick up the cause where she left off, I’d be grateful.

Til then, I will continue to fight the good fight at home.  Since I no longer own any bras to burn, I’ll just have to hope that via love, communication and good old friendly discipline I am able to create a new movement in my homestead that frees me from the clutches of pre-suffragette housekeeper.

But if you see me polishing the lamps in my house with unusual vigor in the days head, you’ll understand why.

Ann Murray Paige

Dahlia Days

I have a theory that people are either cooks or gardeners first.  OK… relax.  I’m not saying you can’t DO both. I think everyone has a favorite and my clear winner (because cooking involves cleaning up and gardening, not so much) is to be out in my garden.

I’ve got one word for summer:  DAHLIAS

 

Yup.  Dahlias are my favorite flower ever.  They come in so many varieties of color, size, shape and petal. Each one is a mini work of art.  The names themselves are pure fun;  Bodacious, Envy, Freedom Fighter, Maniac, Mango Madness and Cabana Banana, to name just a few. And merely tending to them I find complete zen planting, cutting and arranging.  Nature puts me in the right frame of mind: green, sunshine, air, quiet.

 

My kids and husband call it “Dahlia Mania” and they all roll their eyes when the box of tubers comes each year from Oregon’s Swan Island Dahlia Farm in April.  

 

“You love your flowers more than us, Mom” my kids accused me of once.  And there are times it’s true. Flowers don’t talk back or require boundaries and limits.  They don’t need balanced meals.  They just keep producing beauty.

 

The first thing I do is plant them in pots to get them started, as they are ultimately bound for my garden up north.  Dahlias are not really ideal for pots, so if you can put them straight in the ground, that’s best. Here they are at phase one—just out of my garage.  You don’t water at all until the first green shoots sprout through the dirt.

I get them in the ground on Memorial Day and place the stakes near, as I know they will do a lot of growing in a month, but still not produce flowers until mid-July in my hearty North Eastern growing zone. Loving dahlias is about being patient, not about immediate gratification.  Their really prolific season is August and September, even into October they produce magnificent blooms until the first frost. 

Here they are in the ground. Freed from their pots:

But I was in for a shock when I returned to the cottage at the end of June for the summer… What the ding dang bejesus?  Deer had munched my dahlias on the side garden.  They’d never done that before. And this created a blood boil. 

But the great thing about flowers and plants is that they grow back, kinda like nails and hair.  So check this out.  A few homemade cages with my wire cutters and voila, flowers on the mend.

And now?  The first flowers of the season…..

So wherever you find YOUR zen, at the shore, in the mountains, the lake, or  the city,  I hope you find it somehow in nature.  Here are a few more for you to enjoy and I’ll post some of the photos in my gallery as late summer and fall progresses. 

Earthquakes, Hurricanes and Sending Her to College

I knew exactly what it was the minute the couch swayed.  An earthquake in upstate New York.  I’d been through “the big one” in San Francisco in 1989.  So when I felt the gentle rocking, and then the stillness, my thoughts flicked to the fragility of our place on this fairly fragile planet.

 

Sometimes nature mirrors our own interior landscape.  And so the late summer and early fall before I sent my girl off to college continued to be a crazy quilt of disasters; fires in Texas, hurricane Irene, followed by the aptly named “Lee” and then Katia, whipping those of us on the east coast into more paroxysms of frenzy.   My own rising anxiety was trebled by watching pre-Irene cable news coverage for eight hours straight.   Not recommended to keep calm and carry on. 

At home we hunkered down.   We changed the batteries in the flashlights, bought the bottled water and rolled up the rugs.  Our house was spared.  But when the flood waters from Irene receded in our town, we were all reminded that none of us stand in the control room of life.

And then the main event.  The real reason for my interior upheaval.  A very clean room.  The morning after we dropped my second child—our first daughter—off at college, my husband and I each separately passed her room and quietly wept.  The bed was made, the floor immaculate, the closet almost empty, containing only objects too unimportant to be packed. 

A hole was punched in our family when our son left three years ago.  But this hole was different.   Our daughter had been present in ways too complicated to articulate.   She was my sometime confidant, the baker of chocolate chips, the pinch hitting babysitter/driver for her twin sisters, the little girl that had grown up, but still toggled between those two different-aged worlds under our roof.  Her close knit group of friends had flitted in and out of our house for years, enthusiastically calling out hellos, hanging out in her room or outside, tanning on towels.  She brought into our home the wonderful background thrum of teenagers in all of their in-the-moment-up-to-the-minute ebb and flow of enviously self-absorbed lives.

And then in the wake of her departure…the anniversary of September 11th.    A somber reminder of the day, one decade ago, when our lives, outlooks, world views and complacency changed forever.

I haven’t watched many of the specials or news stories on TV about the anniversary.  I saw enough ten years ago and in the intervening wars and memorials and remembrances since.  Watching just makes me sad. I don’t need to watch to remember.   How can any of us forget?

And yet when I look at all of the things that have transpired on that day and after “the big horrible thing” on September 11th , I am constantly reminded that people survive.  They endure incredible things.  They pull themselves from the brink of rubble and disaster, terror and grief and they begin the slow climb back to the top.  

And here is what I know.  This is what I have personally seen and experienced.  Human beings are built to survive.  The flower grows miraculously from between the crack in the cement.   

September 11th will forever be etched like Pearl Harbor day as a fulcrum event in our country’s history.  It also happens to be my wedding day.   A wonderful cobalt blue sky in 1988; an Indian summer September year when I said “I do” to my best friend, my love.  And I never once looked back, despite my understanding of what commitment and “forever” means 23 years later.

On a phone call recently with my daughter, she tells me it’s a day she is missing home a bit.  I know what she is missing; that easy feeling of friends in lock step since elementary school, the security of being a senior at the top of the pile, the king of the world.  She’s missing the warm walls of home, a dinner made, a kiss good night and her snuggles with Dad.  She’s missing a structure where there is a higher power and a set of rules that are not open to dispute.  As a freshman she is at the bottom of the heap in a new place, with few connectors to her old life.  She has to set her own new boundaries.  

After the cataclysmic winds of a hurricane comes the calm, the clean up,  the damage assessment.  And after the hurt comes the chance to heal.  It’s all in choosing to move forward, even though there might be another hurricane brewing offshore, another hijacker on a plane, another unimaginable diagnosis.  

Change, transitions, the possibility of failure, cutting the umbilical cord; these are all big things.  It’s scary out there.  And she’s just left the nest.   And yet I know my girl will hit her stride not only in college, but out in the great wide world beyond those four years. She will find her place in the universe, even as I walk past her room and grieve the loss of her place right here.