Armistice Day: 100 Years Ago…Today

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind” – Kurt Vonnegut

**

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.  – For The Fallen,  Laurence Binyon

The Books That Made Me Part Two: Little Women

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Can I tell you a secret? Out of all the books that I have read and loved, one of the dearest to me will always be Little Women.

Because I was ever a Jo and my sister was ever an Amy. This book was the first book to show me that you could actually be different and succeed. You could be a girl/woman and a writer. You could have short hair and madcap adventures and fall in love and still be a writer. Jo was everything to me. She worked and she wrote and failed and triumphed and suffered and won. But she was above everything else, a SHE and SHE WROTE.

Narnia gave me the endless possibilities of different worlds and times and a special kind of magic. Little Women taught me that it was okay to be eccentric and strange in my actual life. That it was appropriate to want to have writing as a passion and a career. That I could want more than being a wife and mother married to an officer and leading that kind of life. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not denigrating those choices and those who make them. The Megs and the Marmees of the world are incredibly important. I know quite a few people who would be utterly lost without them.

I only mean that, for me, who was born a kind of Beth with multiple illnesses and a certain kind of medical fragility, who was raised by a Marmee who was so wonderful and so patient as I grew into Jo. As the eldest in the family, I was trained and expected to handle the duties of a Meg and in our family, the joke was that you either became military or you married it. So I was, in a way, brought up to be Meg. It never really fit correctly, like a dress that doesn’t quite fit. I could perform all the functions of a Meg but it didn’t bring me the inner happiness that I saw in several of my relatives. Jo and her everything showed me that there was another way. That I wasn’t broken because Meg just didn’t fit me.

I could be Jo. Wild and wonderful and creative and passionate and messy. I could have my happily ever after, if I wanted one, without sacrificing the words that bubbled up from within.

Jo was a lifeline when I desperately needed one and for that, Little Women will always be one of the books that made me.  The latest adaptation was quite good and it’s definitely worth  watching if you haven’t already seen it.

Election Day 2018

Election Day 2018.   Despite the PTSD from past elections, my housemate and I are settled into the couch with the returns on the tv as we work on our laptops. We both look kind of bad at the moment because Tuesday started very early for us. We live in TN and Monday had some very severe weather which lead to some pretty massive flooding in our hobbit house.

We estimate that we took about 96 gallons of water out of the study and downstairs bedroom before we quit for the night er morning.

Luckily my day job has weather emergencies built into the PTO plans so I could call out and spend most of the day today assessing the damage, cleaning up the mess, and also plotting out what to do about it in both the short term and the long term.

So tonight we are hoping and praying and watching. Turnout has been good, but the stories of voter suppression have also been way more blatant and prevalent than normal.

Here’s to hope and to all those who voted and called and canvassed and texted and acted.

No matter what,  tomorrow is another day, and we still have to pick ourselves up and carry on.