Wandering Through the Dead

Tom and I like to visit cemeteries. Usually when we visit a town on vacation we try to find the oldest cemetery there is and wander through.

Last fall we went to Cincinnati with some friends and that city has the most wonderful cemetery I have ever seen in my lifetime. It was huge, easy to get lost in if we had been alone. These two photos are an example of all the truly amazing statuary that decorate the grounds.

We wander about, looking for the oldest graves and the ones with the most interesting information on them. We've discovered that different parts of the country have different ways with their cemeteries and headstones.

In Kentucky, home to Tom's family, we found that people there are very fond of decorating with multiple fake flower arrangements. But they also put a lot of interesting information on the grave markers, often listing names of children and grandchildren on the back of the stones. That's got to be a genealogist's dream.

It's nearly time in Michigan to tend to my parent's grave, now that the danger of frost is about done. This is a task my mother always took care of, but with her passing it is left to me. I always gave her simple flowers on my birthday, a handful of daffodils - a bunch of tulips, now I'll have to take them to the place she rests, next to my father and side-by-side with my grandparents. No fake flowers there!

It strikes us that there aren't nearly enough cemeteries for the number of people who have lived in the United States to date, but it's too mind-boggling to think about that much. It's just enough to think of graveyards as quiet, peaceful places of eternal rest.

With a few live ones wandering through once in a while.

Early Morning- Grand Teton National Park

This is the first of several quilts I have in mind to go with my essays and Tom's photography about the National Parks we have visited.

This one commemorates the time in the Grand Tetons that Tom ran across a grizzly bear and two cubs on his way back to the lodge after an early morning photo shoot.
I'm writing an essay called "Beaver and Bear" (he was startled by a beaver while walking along the river, and this bear and her cubs were really only a short distance away).

I'm entering this one in a juried art show and hope it makes it in. It's all hand quilted - which I have been working on like a maniac for the last five weeks! The next western quilt I will tackle is one for Monument Valley, which I've already started, and after that one for Mesa Verde, which I've got sketched out.

Spring and Flowers and Inspiration

I've always loved spring. It's not just the normal coming-out-of-winter kind of feeling - I was born in the spring and I always felt that the season was specially made for me.

Where we live they celebrate the blossoming of all the fruit trees with a festival called, logically enough, Blossomtime. They hold a parade on the first Saturday in May and since my birthday is on May 4th, inevitably the parade would occasionally fall on my birthday.

Once when I was very young, probably only 4 or 5, my family went to the parade, meeting up with families from my Dad's workplace in a gas station closed for the event as we did every year. It was my birthday that year and I remember I was wearing a brand new peddle pusher outfit. They gave me a surprise birthday cake while we waited for the parade to reach the area we were at and my Dad told me that the parade was really for me to celebrate my birthday.

I believed him. And, though it didn't take too many more years for me to realize I wasn't the center of that particular universe, I've always felt a kind of excitement about spring ever since (and secretly believed that parade WAS for me).

The past two years have been a little rough. My mother died two years ago on May 1, right in the middle of what would have traditionally been a happy time. She was a spring baby too - it's something we shared in common. It was an early spring that year, as it is this year and I brought her simple flowers in the last few weeks of her life - daffodils, tulips, lilacs and iris - trying to bring a little touch of her much loved garden into her sick room.

This spring is much better. It took a while, but I am finally feeling happy again. This spring is extremely early for our area of the country and all the fruit trees are already blooming - five weeks too soon. When that Blossomtime parade comes (not quite on my birthday this year) there will be no blossoms to celebrate.

But I don't care. I'll take that jump start on spring and marvel at the beauty all around me. It's inspiring, it makes these old bones start to feel the stirrings of youth again. And isn't that what spring is all about?

Happy Chicken

Diligently working on my National Park Project - here's a goofy little piece I wrote after a trip in May, 2009

Sometimes things are just funny. Sometime just one word can send a perfectly normal person into hysterics. That was the case with Chester the Fried Chicken episode.

We were travelling from Moab, Utah to Monument Valley in Arizona. We stopped at the Hole in the Wall gift shop, which is plenty weird in its own right, and stopped again at a gas station to use the rest room. I sat in the car waiting. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was idly staring out the window, lost in thought, when I began to notice two things. There were a lot of people going in and out the side door near where we were parked. And, there was a smell of fried chicken infusing the air.

That’s when I saw the sign, which should have caught my eye right away since it was large and mounted on the side of the building about six feet from where I sat. “Chicken to Go” was in white letters on a red background – hence the large white boxes all the people coming through the door were hauling out of there. Above that were the words “Chester Fried” and a cartoon character of a rooster dressed in a red cowboy hat, gun holster and a sheriff’s badge. He had one wing raised up in a friendly wave. It was the small words below the title that really sent me off – “the crispy moisturized chicken.” To be specific, the word “moisturized.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how “moisturized” could apply to chicken!

All I could picture was someone rubbing a chicken with Oil of Olay. Dozens and dozens of naked chickens being lovingly massaged with moisturizer before being thrown into the cooker. I just started laughing and simply could not stop. Why did that rooster sheriff looks so cheerful? Didn’t he know he was on the verge of becoming “moisturized?” By the time Sloan and Tom returned to the car, I had tears running down my cheeks and tried, between gasps, to explain the whole moisturizing thing. They smiled vaguely – but I could tell they didn’t think it was all that funny.

We pulled back out onto the road and left Chester behind, but I knew for a fact what a lot of people in that town were having for supper that night – crispy, moisturized chicken!

Sloan goes to Mexico

Our daughter, Sloan, is spending her spring break from college in Mexico. Instead of lounging on the beach and becoming a candidate for a "Girls Gone Wild" video - she is spending it on a mission trip through her church to an orphanage for special needs kids.

This is so like her. She is a senior this year and the whole time she has been in college she has never gone on a spring break trip. It figures that the first time she does, it's to do charity work!

She has grown up to be a kind, thoughtful, caring soul - and if I must say so myself - absolutely beautiful. She has her whole wonderful life ahead of her.
But I must confess, it's still hard for me to think of her going out into the real world. I didn't even like to think of her going to Mexico, especially after the State Department issued a travel warning.

While she's been in college, I have deluded myself into thinking she's safely tucked away into an institute of higher learning not too far from home and we bought ourselves some time. Unfortunately, that's quickly coming to an end and I have to come to terms with her growing up and going out.

Thankfully, I still have a little time before I have to do that!

Ruminating on the Parks

Tom and Denise having a jolly time at Zion, October 2011


I am finally able to return to my writing and I'm finishing up a project I've been working on for three years - my National Park project.

This is a collection of short essays and poetry about the nine Western National Parks we've visited over the last 20 years: Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Glacier, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons; and two reservations: Monument Valley (Navajo) and Browning, Montana (Blackfeet).

I only have six more pieces to finish and a little bit of revision to do, which I hope to have done by the first of June. Then I'm going to turn it over to an editor and forget about it for the summer.

In the fall I'll do another revision based on anything the editor finds, then try to find the project a home. This will be the first time I've seriously tried to send a finished manuscript out to find a publisher.

The whole project may be entirely too personal to have a wider audience, and if I can't place it with a publisher, I'll self-publish a limited edition. Either way, it will be exciting to finish up a project I've been working on for a long time and send it on its way!

Travel Plans

Tom and I have made our vacation plans for the year. Because I'm spending much of the year getting my knees fixed and getting my strength back, we decided to stick closer to home this time.

We are going to visit the Smokey Mountains and rent a cabin in Tennessee. (This photo is from the Smokeys, but it's not ours.) The cabin is not at all rustic (it has WiFi and Cable with flat screen TV's) but it's log and has a wood-burning fireplace and a covered porch with rocking chairs.

And it has a full kitchen, so I can do all the cooking and baking I want to do. And, since we're going in the fall, the fireplace will feel nice, I'm sure.

It's only about 9 hours from where we live, so we are driving, which means I can take as much stuff as I want - lots of quilting, lots of writing and reading. And no luggage or weight or space limits!

I haven't spent much time in this part of the country, so I'm looking forward to seeing it and - for the first time in a long time - moving around freely with knees that work!