A year ago today Rob arrived in Des Moines to help me finish packing for the move to Alberta and the beginning of our life together. Aside from two nights last December when he and the older girls traveled up to Grande Prairie when his late mother-in-law took ill, we haven’t been apart since and with our first wedding anniversary at the end of the month I thought it appropriate to commemorate today’s mini-anniversary with a song.
Rob first sent me the Mark Knopfler song, A Prairie Wedding, during our long distance days when we were sending each other a half-dozen emails apiece daily and spending our evenings and nights either IMing or on the phone with each other. It’s an appropriate tune for us because like the couple in the song we only knew each other by our words for a while in the beginning and we came to know and love each other through their strength.
The assignment for today, should you choose to participate, is to share a song that has meaning for you for whatever reason.
I am looking forward to seeing, reading about, or hearing your choices. Don’t forget to link back.
My husband is continually amazed by the contrast of me on the page/screen and me in reality. He met me via my words and so thought me this bold, outspoken woman, and though I can be her when I need to be, I am closer to the image that Rodgers and Hammerstein paint of Cinderella, but my little corner is an office that was once a bedroom and my chair sits in front of a Macbook.
I am most comfortable when I can write. I don’t stumble for words (or mispronounce them). No one can hear my slight lisp or the accent that veers back and forth between Southern Iowa and Northern Alberta. Like Cinderella, I can be whatever I want to be. Whether or not that is really me, I haven’t yet discovered.
Almost exactly a year ago, I left the high school where I taught for the last time and headed home to continue purging and packing my belongings and begin my wait for Rob to arrive from Canada. Within a week, the house was near empty and ready for its new owners and we were on our way to a new life in another country.
I am the least adventurous person I know. I am the last person that anyone who knows me would imagine could meet a man on a message board in December and marry him on foreign soil six months later, willing and ready to begin anew.
However, I could write it. The story of love across international boundaries conquering all with a mousy, yet determined, heroine and a sexy, sturdy hero leaping over and pushing aside all manner of obstacles to be together.
But I am living it instead. Minus the mousy. I am shy. Not timid.
Nothing is more terrifying to me than new people and yet I have put myself deliberately in the position of being the new girl over and over most of my life. As blood-curdling as the prospect of a room full of strangers is, I changed schools 5 times in a 20 year teaching career and this was after taking a job in a city where I knew absolutely no one to begin with.
When I came here last June, everyone save Rob and my younger step-daughter, Jordan, was a stranger. Everywhere I went was some place I had never been. And I did a lot of it on my own with only my four and a half year old as back up.
I joined two writing groups, have made myself a regular at the gym and the Starbucks (the only familiar landmark in a Twilight Zone of same yet not same places).
They know me at the grocery, the bank, the child-minding and the school. Maybe not so much a testament to me but to the smallness of our town. Still, I have found a home.
And I write. Send my writing to the world via this blog and MSU and the comments on the blogs of people I have come to know through my initiative and theirs.
My comfortable place is behind the words I write and the stories I dream, but I have and continue to move past and move them out into the world along with myself.
*So what better topic for Hump Day Hmmm this week, eh? Tell us about your comfort zone, outside your comfort zone, and share a journey you took outside your comfort zone…what happened? I think reading each of these stories will pull each of us beyond our own existing horizon, so I really hope for a lot of participation. Let’s even beat last week, which had over a dozen submissions! (I was ecstatic!)
To motivate you even more, I’ll put a prize on the table again: a Morgan Spurlock book or DVD. Choose among his Super Size Me, Don’t Eat This Book, or Season 1 of 30 Days.”
A piece on Pammy’s Wyldreams blog a week or so ago gave me the idea for this week’s meme. She wrote about kissing. So today, Iet’s talk about the art, the act, the romance, the good, the bad and ugly of that seminal relationship moment – the first kiss. Who? When? Where? and Why? And any other pertinent information you feel like ‘fessing up to.
I’ll go first.
My first kiss was with a boy in my first grade class at Resurrection Grade School. His name was John Shaw. We went out behind the cars in the teachers’ parking lot. I think we were standing behind a station wagon that belonged to Paul Donahue’s mom who taught 4th grade.
It wasn’t a particularly romantic moment as John had told his friends and several of them followed us. I can’t remember now if they stayed to watch or I chased them off (I was a bossy girl and it helped that I was taller than nearly all of them).
We kissed twice. The second time was due to the fact that John did not open his mouth and I told him that this was the wrong way to kiss. Whenever I had observed grown-ups kiss, they opened their mouths (I was not aware of the whole tongue aspect until junior high and found it repugnant for a quite some time after). So the second kiss was open-mouthed.
No teacher observed us. The nuns and lay teachers ate lunch while we had recess. Free-range teaching in those days.
Your turn. Don’t forget to link back or just share it here in the comment space.
anniegirl1138 