Gathering Graces 2/1/2018

*Welcome February!!  I have great things planned for you this month.

*I had a wonderful lunch with my friend Kellee getting caught up since we saw one another last month.  We enjoyed our Chinese food at Wah Hing, and, when I arrived, Kellee was making a friend.

*Brother Bill had a colonoscopy this afternoon and needed a ride home from the hospital when he was done.  When I received the call, I left work, and picked him up, and got him safely home, so he could finally eat some solid food after his two day fast.

*I have been reading a book for my book club called Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate.  It is a novel based on the true story of children who were kidnapped and sold by a woman named Georgia Tann.   She was an American child trafficker who operated the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, an adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. Tann used the unlicensed home as a front for her  baby black market adoption scheme from the 1920s until a state investigation into numerous instances of adoption fraud being perpetrated by her closed the institution in 1950. It was a good read.  It really makes you realize that sometimes the people in your family tree may be different than you thought.  But should that really matter?

*One of the most wonderful things is getting into bed after you have just put on clean sheets.  It is such a small thing, but oh so wonderful.  I took time in the evening to put clean clothes away and change our bed and put on clean sheets.  While I was doing this, I listened to another episode from the Revisionist History podcast titled Hallelujah.  I encourage you to take a listen and see how Malcolm Gladwell combines the stories of Picasso, Cezanne, Elvis Costello and Leonard Cohen to talk about the role that time and iteration play in the production of genius.  It made me ask myself, do I create like Picasso or Cezanne?  Or does it depend on the project?

*Over the past week, schools in the Kellogg School District, to help increase the safety of our students and staff, have had a special device installed on their main entry doors to people now need to push a button, identify themselves, and then have someone push a button to have them gain entry into the school. It reminded me of article I read online about a school shooting at a Middle School in Los Angeles and a 12 year old girl was the one arrested for the crime.  This was disturbing.  But what was also disturbing was the final line of the article, that reported there have already been around a dozen school shooting already in 2018.  I maybe read about one other.  They aren’t big news any more.  That is sad and disturbing. And having a security device on the front of the school I work at so that people need to be screened before they enter is also sad and disturbing.  I realize the reasoning behind the  decision, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

* I came across this sentence describing the month of February. 

February is a month of transitions, as the cold weather and short days begin to give way to the nascent signs of spring, that season that is yet powerless to be born.

I also found this poem written by Michael Field. ‘Michael Field’ was actually not one poet, but two – neither of whom was male (or called Michael): the name was the pseudonym used by Katharine Harris Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece Edith Emma Cooper (1862–1913). (They intended to keep their identities secret, but it came out not long after they had told Robert Browning about it.)

I love the line of the poem “tingling secrets hidden everywhere”.  What tingling secrets that are hidden everywhere in my life be revealed this February?  I can’t wait to find out.

February

By Michael Field

Gay lucidity,
Not yet sunshine, in the air;
Tingling secrets hidden everywhere,
Each at watch for each;
Sap within the hillside beech,
Not a leaf to see.