Big Bright Fireworks

Posted on November 2, 2012 by The Retiring Sort

This time last year, my beloved and I were in Hawaii.  We missed the Hallowe’en Nor’easter of 2011 that dumped snow on our New England home and left many here without power or with lost trees and other damage.

Our hotel near Waikiki in Honolulu had a show each Friday night with hula dancers, stories, songs, and a wonderful fireworks display. As we stood on the beach and looked up, we enjoyed these wonderful bright lights in the perfect evening sky.

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This year we weren’t so lucky – we were home for Hurricane Sandy, and spent a couple of days without power. Now as Daylight Savings time is about to end and evening temperatures in New England are growing frigid, the memories of our time in Hawaii last year are warming!

Where were you this time last year?

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This post was written in response to a Travel Theme challenge from Ailsa at wheresmybackpack. This week’s theme is Bright.  To learn more about the challenge and to see the brilliant posts from other bloggers, click here.

Posted in Retirement itself | 34 Comments

I’m Wishing…..

Posted on October 31, 2012 by The Retiring Sort

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride,
If turnips were swords I’d have one by my side.
If ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ were pots and pans
There’d be no need for tinkers hands!¹

I wish I were…

If you had only one wish for your life (or even three), what would you wish for? Something for yourself, or for a loved one? For the world at large? If you could change yourself or your life, what would you want?

Snow White wished for the one she loved to find her… Tevye wished to be a wealthy man. On a more whimsical note, Paul Simon wished to be a Kellogg’s Corn Flake or an English muffin. The incredible Mr. Limpet wished to be a fish.  All of these were meant as fixes for the current stresses in their lives.

And what would I wish for?  Focus.

I’m generally a very happy and easygoing person the outside, but I’m sure many people who know me would describe me as a little manic.  That’s because I’m a “high functioning” ADHD adult.  I keep lists and calendars.  Microsoft Outlook saved me at work, redirecting me regularly.  Because I catalog things so I can find them again, people think I’m organized…  but these are all devices. It’s all smoke and mirrors, folks.

In real life, I’m always a little afraid of losing track of something. My home office and other private spaces always look a little like a cyclone just hit them, and that’s pretty much a reflection of what’s going on in my head. I ramble, I babble, I digress.  I’m fascinated by a thousand things (can you say bright shiny object?) and it’s been ever thus.  I can’t remember a time when I stayed focused without some powerful incentive.

This is why I plan our vacations down to the hour (I do leave free times), still keep Outlook on my phone and computers (even though I’m retired), and need a list when I go shopping. It’s also why I can lose hours to web-browsing.  Everything is interesting; everyone is interesting.

It is sometimes frustrating not to have the built-in restraints and disciplines some people’s minds enjoy.  Often, especially when I was in school or working, I wished I were more focused. Now I fear I’m not always making the best use of the wonderful gift of retirement.

But would I give up my hunger to know more about everything? Would I like it if I couldn’t see many sides of an issue at once? Would I survive staying on one track for a prolonged time?  Absolutely not.

OK, maybe I wish I were a little more focused.  I wish I hadn’t babbled and interrupted people sometimes. I wish I’d studied more when I was lucky enough to be in school with wonderful teachers. I wish I didn’t misplace things so easily because I get distracted. But overall, I’ve learned to love my crazy kaleidoscope world. I am, after all, what they call high functioning, which my kids and friends probably think is pretty darn funny.

So… I wish I were more focused because life would be somewhat easier for me and those I love, but I was made the way I am for a reason, and truth be told, I’m very grateful for the life I have.

I’d never really wish it away.

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This post was written in response to a WordPress Weekly Writing Challenge. This week’s theme was I wish I were…   To see other bloggers’ wishes, click here.

Image credit:  © Igor Nazarenko – Fotolia.com

¹ Old Scottish Nursery Rhyme

Posted in Ruminations, Writing Challenges | Tagged , , , , , , , | 34 Comments

Blue Willow – Foreign Stories of Faraway Worlds

Posted on October 28, 2012 by The Retiring Sort

Two birds flying high,
A Chinese vessel, sailing by.
A bridge with three men, sometimes four,
A willow tree, hanging o’er.
A Chinese temple, there it stands,
Built upon the river sands.
An apple tree, with apples on,
A crooked fence to end my song.¹

This is a story within a story, within a story.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, we had a book sale at school, and I bought a few books, including Doris Gates’ Blue Willow, first published in 1940.  I took it home and read it completely in a day or two.  It captivated me.

First, it touched me, because it validated and amplified my parents’ stories of the Depression (a time that seemed quite far away and foreign to me) through the eyes of Janey, a girl my age.  I tried to imagine myself as the child of a migrant worker, having lost my mother, longing for a home of my own….  it was all so far from my own life.

But the book fascinated me on another level as well. At the heart of the story is a blue willow patterned plate Janey inherited from her great-grandmother, through her own mother.  To Janey, the design portrayed the beautiful home she longed for. For me, the story behind the plate’s design  was both romantic and sad, and the foreign artwork was exotic and beautiful.

The pattern tells the tale of star-crossed lovers, the daughter of a wealthy Mandarin and a man beneath her station. They escape together across a bridge, but are eventually captured and killed, then turned into birds. Legend has it the broken-hearted father created the pattern as a lesson to other parents, that they should listen to their children.

Many years later when I traveled to China, I found that everything was foreign – the language, the written characters representing concepts rather than letters, the lifestyle, the history.

We visited a number of beautiful sites around Beijing, and one of our favorites was the Summer Palace. There, I could imagine the ivory tower life of the Mandarin’s daughter, the escape across a footbridge, the willow tree setting.

The photos I took there in my own story reminded me of the story of the blue willow china pattern, and of the place a single blue willow plate held in the story of the little girl who found her happy ending.

Suddenly, it didn’t all feel so foreign.

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Click on photos to enlarge them.

This post was written in response to the Weekly Photo Challenge on WordPress.com’s Daily Post. This week’s challenge topic is Foreign. To learn more about the challenge and to see the alien images posted by other bloggers, click here.

¹Blue willow verse and plate photo plate from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_pattern

Posted in Photo Challenges, Ruminations | Tagged , , , , , , | 37 Comments

The Spooky Spectres of Samhain

Posted on October 27, 2012 by The Retiring Sort

Well, it’s that time of year – The celebration of the spooky festival my Celtic ancestors called Samhuinn or Samhain (literally “Summer’s End”, and pronounced Sow-een, Sow-in, or Soun). It’s also known as the Day of the Dead.  The Catholic church, trying to assimilate the pagans in the first millenium AD, turned the first night of the festival into All Hallows Eve, now known as Hallowe’en.

November first (what the Catholic church calls All Saints Day) falls midway between the Winter Solstice and the Autumn Equinox, and over time became the Celtic New Year.  On the eve of that date in ancient Ireland and Scotland, the Celts, led by their priests (the Druids), brought in the harvest, retrieved their cattle from the fields (slaughtering some), performed cleansing rituals, and celebrated one of their four great seasonal festivals –  Samhain.

This is also one of the Celtic seasonal celebrations when recently departed souls supposedly traveled on to the “otherlife” (so ghosts were about), and faeries and other mythical beings made appearances. Animal and vegetable sacrifices were made to help the dead on their way, and bonfires were lit, partly for purification and partly to keep their souls away from the living. This also tracked with Roman pagan festivals of the dead and celebrations of the harvest in late October.

Early in the 7th century, Pope Gregory I ordered priests and  missionaries to find ways to merge pagan holiday festivals into Christian celebrations, rather than trying to abolish them. Eventually, the mid-winter festival was chosen for the celebration of Christmas (which probably really occurred in the Spring), and November 1st was selected as All Saints Day – making All Hallows Eve coincide with the Day of the Dead.

So now we celebrate Hallowe’en by carving or decorating fall harvest vegetables, sometimes burning fires inside them.  Our children dress as various lively spirits to keep less desirable spirits at bay. We reward them with treats (no longer in return for tricks), and decorate our homes with symbols of the Fall or end of Summer. All this happens in the season when the moon is visible on clear cool nights beyond spooky nearly leafless branches.

But the scariest image this year, for those of us on the eastern seaboard of the US, is the storm tracking of the path of Hurricane Sandy – headed straight for us in the days before Hallowe’en. We are all knee deep in preparation for 50 mile per hour winds, pouring rains, and likely power outages.  If that’s not a horrible spectre, I don’t know what is!

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This post was written in response to a Travel Theme challenge from Ailsa at wheresmybackpack. This week’s theme is Spooky.  To learn more about the challenge and to see the scary posts from other bloggers, click here.

Hurricane Tracking Image from https://www.facebook.com/WFSB3

Posted in Photo Challenges, Recreation, Ruminations | Tagged , , , , , | 30 Comments

Drawing with Light

Posted on October 22, 2012 by The Retiring Sort

Photography:  derived from the Greek photos (“light”) and graphein (“to draw”). ¹

If you think about it, light is both the subject and the paintbrush for most photographic work. It can help bathe a subject in color or brilliance, bringing out every detail – or, when a light source is behind a subject, it can actually obscure the features of the image. Silhouettes are wonderful images of a different sort.

When I take pictures, I’m now learning to pay attention to the sources and values of light in my viewfinder.  It used to be that I was just trying to capture a face, a place, or a moment.

On a recent paddle down the Lieutenant River when tides were high, we came to these branches dragging in the water, and commented on the shapes outlined by their silhouette. Do you see a duck? A fish? An arrow? Anything else?

One fun aspect of photography is learning to use settings to capture the same subject in different light. With new digital options, we can even do this after the fact.  Walking on the Air Line Trail one overcast afternoon, I captured the near silhouette of two trees, with just a small splash of color from the leaves.  Using software later, I was able to enhance the image…  which do you prefer?

I can remember, when we were children, shining a light against our profiles, and tracing the outline of one another’s features onto a paper taped to the wall behind us. We cut out the outlines to create silhouettes.  Now, using our cameras, we can use light to create shadow images of a different sort.

The results can be wonderful!

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This post was written in response to the Weekly Photo Challenge on WordPress.com’s Daily Post. This week’s challenge topic is Silhouette. To learn more about the challenge and to see the large images posted by other bloggers, click here.

Here’s an earlier post on this topic, with  other backlit images:   https://theretiringsort.com/2012/08/24/travel-theme-silhouette/

¹Brittanica.com

Posted in Photo Challenges, Ruminations | Tagged , , , , , | 23 Comments

A Circle of Friends – The Līgo Circle of Appreciation

Posted on October 17, 2012 by The Retiring Sort

“The yearly Līgo celebration happens every summer solstice in Latvia.
At this time we adorn our heads with Līgos of flowers, oak leaves,
grasses and plants. We join circles around bonfires and celebrate life,
and our appreciation of each other.”*

This is an interesting group – I have been  invited by Amy at The World is a Book to participate in the Līgo Circle of Appreciation among fellow bloggers. Here are the rules for joining the circle:

PLEASE NOTE: This is an Appreciation, NOT an Award.

To fully participate in the Līgo Circle of Appreciation:

  • Complete this sentence about blogging: ”A great blog is…”    I think a great blog is one which regularly posts interesting entries, has a central theme, and where there is interaction with other bloggers: replying to comments and pingbacks, and visiting and making meaningful comments on other sites.
  • Refer back to the blogger who invited you (Done above.)
  • Invite 2 bloggers to join the Līgo Circle of Appreciation on a post – this can be done daily between October 1 and October 22, 2012. My invitations today are to:
  1. http://teedeevee.wordpress.com/about/ – Teedeevee’s lovely blog centers around Johannesburg, South Africa. She makes meaningful comments on other sites, and interacts with visitors to her posts as well.
  2. http://eof737.wordpress.com/about/ – Elizabeth at Mirth and Motivation has an inspiring blog, and is always generous with her time visiting and commenting on other blogs, as well as interacting with those who visit hers.

 Thanks, Amy, for inviting me to this circle!

* Quote from http://esengasvoice.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/ligo-circle-of-appreciation/ .

Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , | 14 Comments