Slides

Slides 

Boxes of hundreds of color slides, the projector and a screen have been stored in our basement for over a decade, glanced at mostly by accident while rummaging and searching for something else. I have been haunted by the awful truth that they age poorly and fade with time. It was as though I could hear the voices of my friends and relatives crying out to me. "Help, we're fading! What about the slides of all the pretty wild flowers that may have lost their vibrant colors? The time had come to begin the rescue mission and turn it into a fun project, after all, I thought, it can't be all that hard.

It was sort of fun at first, looking at the faces of old friends, family members and places we have visited, it was a trip down memory lane.  I then had to develop a system. I based it on the following categories: family, vacations, neighbors, flowers and toss. The problem was, I found so many more categories and I was running out of room; weddings, old cars, work friends, home remodeling, divorced friends, people we never see, and on and on. This is not as much fun as I'd imagined but I'm going to stick with it and keep adding categories until I have rescued every last one. Help!!!!

I 

First Post

This is new to me, it's fun, exciting and my "toe in the water" to begin my adventures into the world of writing. Now to begin........

I was born in Los Angeles on a hot spring day right after WW II. My parents were poor, (now we politically correctly say "low income.") My mother, at twenty-two, married daddy who was twenty years her senior. He was not the perfect husband in the earning-a-living-wage department, but a kind and gentle soul none the less. I was crazy about him and had no idea that we were poor.

 Mom hated L.A. and secured train tickets from her family in Wisconsin, took a stand and made it known that we would be moving to the mid west and that was just the way it was going to be. I was only a few weeks old and haven't been back since. I often thought it would be fun to move to California some day and announce to a group of people, (who undoubtedly consisted of transplants from other cities,)  "I am a native Californian," while watching their faces turn green with envy.

I spent the early part of my life in Illinois, moved to Minneapolis Minnesota at age fifteen and then to rural Brainerd in 2003, where I live now with my husband "The Ganz" and an adult grandson, "L". I have one sibling, my sister Jo whom has not trusted me since we were children mainly because I accidently knocked her out cold with a swinging iron gate. (Please don't judge, she was chasing me.)

There's so much more, and like everyone, a story filled with life's ups and downs. We have had many more blessings than down times and that's what we focus on theses days. As my friend Ram Dass has taught me, "Be here now." (Ram and I have never met, but I consider him a friend, that's just the way it is.)