Page 439 of 524

Iowa, B.C., Texas and the Kingdom of Saud


When we were back in Iowa visiting with my family a few weeks back, we spent an afternoon out in the rural area that my dad’s family helped settle well over a hundred years ago. The old homestead is the house I remember from my childhood and visiting my Grandma and Uncle Jimmy, who was farming it at the time. It was a house that my great-grandfather built and all but his oldest son was born there. In fact the trees that run along the driveway were planted the day my grandmother was born back in March of 1894. The house is still livable but no one has lived there for several years and it shows. One of the McCarthy boys, Phil, owns it now. He is my third cousin on my grandmother’s side. At least I think that is the degree of our relationship. I have trouble with the whole cousin rating system once I am past second cousins. Phil’s great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were siblings is all I know. And even that might not be entirely accurate. Phil wants to sell the acreage the homestead is on, preferably to family. My sister and her husband looked at the place over the summer but decided against it as the house needs too much work. After we visited the place with my dad and Katy and my nephew, Luke, Rob surprised me by commenting that he could see himself living on a place like that in future and that he found my hometown a fairly nice area to live. Interestingly, I had thought about buying the homestead on different occasions in my live but it was never for sale until recently.

I bring this up only because Rob and I have been talking about where we want to retire. A bit premature you say? Well, not really. We are both of the mindset that “retirement” in its current form is a fantasy for the majority of people our age (40’s). The social structure will be bent to the breaking point by the older boomers and won’t exist in its present form for us. Unless we win the lottery (and apparently you have to play in order to win) or I really do write that Oprah Book Club masterpiece some day soon, we are going to be working in some form or another all of our lives. What we need to do is settle upon careers that we enjoy and that can be done anywhere. And we need an anywhere to do it.

So, now we have one possible anywhere. My family’s homestead. Next week we are heading to B.C. (British Columbia) to visit Rob’s mom in her new digs. It’s in the mountain valley area and it’s apparently very beautiful there. That might end up being another “where” possibility.

Rob mentioned the Iowa retirement option to both his daughters in an email he sent to them recently updating them on things going on around here, not the least of which is a possible job offer that could take us back to the states very soon. Jordan, the younger, thought that Iowa was about me and my wanting to be close to my family. Rob asked me about that too when we were discussing it. Probably because when we first met, I was under some pressure from my mother and sister to move back to my hometown and I was resisting it. My reasons then where that though it would be good for Katy in some ways to be nearer my family; it would not have been good for me. Not then with my life being what it was. I told Rob that now was different simply because I am different. My circumstances are different. Things do change. Iowa would still be good for Katy because she would grow up around extended family and as an only child with older parents, it would be good for her to have connections beyond us. It would be okay for me too now because I wouldn’t be in danger of being sucked into some of my family’s dysfunctional ways the way I would have been had it been just Katy and I.

However, for the immediate future there is what a move to Houston and then quite probably Saudi Arabia would mean for all us. Iowa or B.C. is food for thought and a later date to ponder and act upon.

Time Flies


Not literally and yet literally, time flies. And it’s not about fun either. I am not always having fun. The dishes, the laundry, the child, the cat, the groceries, the miscellaneous errands. The care and maintenance that goes into the all of the aforementioned can run a considerable range up and down and around the old fun meter. There are my various physical activities (running and swimming) and mental activities (my novel, the blog, attempting to keep up with the world of literature and the news of the day – although sometimes I don’t get to today’s news until tomorrow). I have written about this before but I just run out of time, nearly every day it seems.

As I sit and type this, I can hear and feel the roof shuddering because Rob is out back in the pitch dark building a new gable over the kitchen window box because the roof is leaking and it’s pretty much winter here now. And he hasn’t time either and I don’t need to wonder why or how this happened. We merged our lives and doubled everything essentially but the time we are alloted.

So, the novel is over 31,ooo words and 108 pages and I am certain I will hit the 50,000 within a week but I will likely not be done. More like 3/4ths done. I have discovered however my novel writing style, which as I suspected it would be, is not a start at the beginning and write to the end; but more of a have a good idea where things go and write as the ideas germinate whether that is starting in the middle or rearranging chapter order as you discover that you wrote chapter 11 when it should be chapter 2. My writing is more and more consuming time. I am becoming of those people who sit in waiting rooms with their laptops open and pounding away.

Tomorrow I promise to blog more topically but tonight I am tired and there is a novel calling and a hay fever attack subsiding and my husband is back inside to be snuggled up to. Time just continues to fly by.

First Snow of Winter


The snow was falling even before we went to bed last night. Not flurries either but the wet, heavy flakes that fall straight down like missiles, sticking to the cold surfaces and piling up like cord wood. From a distance they look like tiny snowballs and up close they clump on face, getting stuck in your eyelashes and bangs before melting into tiny slush pools that dribble slowly down you face and off your chin like drool.

Although it was much colder this morning, the snow clung to most surfaces save the roads. They are still a bit too warm and with the help of the sun, shook off the white stuff this time. Next time will likely be a different matter. Snow in early November is something I can’t recall in the last several years. The last really snowy winter I remember was 1998 when Will and I were first living together. It seemed as though it did nothing but snow that winter. I think we had nearly a week’s worth of school to make up that following June because of the snow days. Here, according to Rob, the snow fell and stayed, foot after foot of it, just before Halloween. I don’t recall snow on Halloween ever but I remember plenty of snowy Novembers growing up and even through my young adulthood. Weather patterns have changed a lot though because of the global warming in the last decade and a bit more. In Iowa winter snows fall around and more often after Christmas and in the southern part of the state significant and lasting snowfall is over by late February or very early March. By late April the warm weather returns and it can be very warm and humid by mid-May and stay that way through to mid-October. Here the snow falls and stays until May.

Everyone is concerned about how I will handle a Canadian winter, but I only just put my long johns on today whereas Rob has been wearing his for weeks already. It’s just snow and cold. The sun being perpetually on the horizon, not that we have fallen back to standard time, is more bothersome. On the way into town today, Rob has me try to picture what it will be like with feets high snow banks on either side of the road and weather so cold that the car exhaust builds up into a fog at the intersections from the waiting vehicles. Not hard to picture the latter at all as I have been paying attention to the smokestacks at the plants around here and the smoky pollution that comes out. It’s thicker and moves languidly up and across the sky. Manufactured clouds of steely gray snaking away for what seems like miles. Rob isn’t far off when he asserts that the cold is visible up here. I used to try and picture the Fort and the road to Josephburg before we moved up from his descriptions. I tried to visualize the layout of the yard and the house. He had shown me how to get to the aerial shot on Goggle Earth once and that helped a bit, but it wasn’t until I got here that it all made sense. Of course, even in the beginning, nothing seemed concrete in the same way life in Des Moines did. Now the Fort is my mailing address and Josephburg is where I live, and this house, is our home in a way that the old place on 53rd Place never was.

Winter has arrived. And so have I.