this journey is my own

It's been a wild couple weeks.  On December 5th I officially started walking again.  It was a lot of lurching at first!  Monday, December 7th we took the last wedge out of my boot.  And then, after a week of walking and lurching, Robert and I took off for Minnesota for the third time this year.

This time had nothing to do with the Mayo Clinic though!  After twenty years of trying, Robert managed to score us tickets to see Sara Groves, who is one of my favorite artists and someone whose music has literally changed my life.  When I started college in the spring of 2004 I was alone in a new town.  I started playing tennis with another student, Scott through a tennis club, and we became tennis buddies.  We didn't talk much but at one point mentioned the schools we were going to and discovered we both attended church alone.  We started taking turns going to each other's churches each Sunday and sometimes going to both.  We played tennis and we went to church together but were very much painfully alone.  Loneliness nearly ate me up as a kid and going to college was not a magical cure.  I recognized he had his own issues with loneliness, but we did not talk about how alone we were or really anything of any substance.  We were tennis buddies and provided each other company when going to church.

One day he lent a CD to me.  It was Conversations by Sara Groves.  Naturally the CD got stuck in the CD player in my car, and I was so mortified!  Even though the CD was stuck in my car, it still played, and I listened to it nonstop.  There were a handful of songs that were very reassuring at that time in my life and helped me feel less alone.  Eventually I was able to get the CD back to Scott.  Shortly after that he said he was going to Russia after his graduation to bring a bride home.  Seriously!  It was his decision, and I didn't feel it was my place to say anything.  I didn't even really consider us friends.  Outside of church and tennis we led different lives and didn't talk much about those lives.  So I didn't say anything.  And he disappeared.  We sent emails initially, but his emails stopped suddenly, and I never heard from him again.  I didn't think we were friends at the time, but he let me borrow a CD that very much gave me the strength I needed to survive a tough but soul-shaping couple years of my life.  

One Sara Groves CD led to another and another, and with every new album there are a handful of songs that help me feel less like a stranger to myself.  

Robert knows all this, understands how much her music means to me, and has tried to get tickets the past twenty years.  Sara Groves sings at churches, women's conferences, and other semi-private events.  The closest Robert got to getting tickets one year was by pretending to know someone in the church's congregation, which was the requirement for that particular concert.

The concert we finally scored tickets to was at Art House North, which is owned by Sara and her husband and located in their St. Paul neighborhood.  It's a place that supports artists of all kinds and is appropriately in an old church.  Robert bought the VIP tickets which included a Q&A with Sara Groves while enjoying pie and cider all while sitting together in pews.  The Q&A was incredibly personal and also sad due to Sara Groves losing her father a week prior to the concert.  One person in the audience asked Sara Groves if she was writing a song about her father, and she played us what she had composed thus far.  Because this concert was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Conversations, Sara Groves had forgotten some of the music.  She even ran home to get some of the music!  She played piano, had her fabulous band backing her up, and shared her vocals with her daughter and two friends.  She played the entire album, made a few mistakes, told stories behind the songs, and even invited the audience to sing one of the songs with her, which is a moment so precious I will take it with me for as long as I live and even past the grave.  

It was brutally cold with piles of snow everywhere in St. Paul.  Plus the church had stairs.  I went from barely walking to tackling icy sidewalks, snow drifts, and stairs all in the matter of 24 hours.  I walked into PT Monday and was not at all surprised to learn I was officially transitioning to a tennis shoe and wearing the boot only at night.  My physical therapist said I may need a crutch the first few days of transitioning to a shoe, and I was like, "Dude I got this!"  I had no issues the first day but the next day I was in the worst pain I've been in thus far on the achilles tear journey.  I didn't use a crutch though and made it through a ten hour day at work.  It's been tough but doable since then.  I broke down and bought yet another pair of shoes though.  I am wearing heel cups for the moment, so the tennis shoes I wore prior to the injury are way too tight with the heel cups in them.  I bought a wide in my size, and the pain is better now.  I hope nobody I know ever goes through an achilles tear, but I've been taking notes for ways to make it better if anyone asks.  

I feel buoyed from the concert and ready to finish out the rest of the holiday rush at work while amping up my physical therapy.  I've been told this next part is going to be difficult, but I think I'm in a good place to do the hard work.  I also finally received confirmation that I graduated on Friday, which is a relief.  I think I can finally heal from the library trauma now that I'm not constantly peeling back the bandaid so to speak.  I chose not to go to the graduation ceremony.  I really only have Robert to celebrate this small achievement with, and we haven't done the cap and gown thing at our other graduations.  Also, the night of the commencement ceremony Robert I were on our way to Minnesota!  I can't think of a better way to celebrate than seeing Sara Groves and hearing the songs that convinced me to keep trying.

I also made it back up to my office this weekend.  I still need a chauffeur AKA Robert to climb the stairs, but I was thrilled to finally be in my special place where I can continue to sort, reflect, celebrate, accept, and unwind.  Whatever art happens moving forward is going to have a lot of extra joy, hard work, intention, and striving going into it.  

nonfiction winners

I just finished two more books worth checking out.

The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller (Teen or Adult nonfiction)

I enjoyed Miss Spitfire, Caroline, and most recently Hick by Sarah Miller. All three of these books were about women who interested me. After reading Hick I looked through Sarah Miller's remaining books to pick out the next book and nothing really stood out to me. I said the heck with it and went ahead and put one on my to-read list any way. And I'm glad I did. Sarah Miller has this way of completely capturing your attention and writing about characters in such a way that you end up caring immensely about them whether you want to or not.

Prior to reading this I hadn't heard anything about the Dionne Quintuplets. This book is heartbreaking. The entire family ends up being messed up in one way or another (though there are a few characters I think were messed up before the quintuplets were born). The whole thing is appalling. The parents were put in an impossible situation. Nobody knew how to handle five babies being born at the same time (totally fair) and everyone's dark side came out. It was a complete train wreck. I couldn't stop reading and was once again ensnared in Sarah Miller's wealth of research and narrative nonfiction prowess.

There's nothing new to read here - families are messed up, humans are flawed, and emotions rule us despite our best efforts. But Sarah Miller will have you on the edge of your seat wanting desperately for not just the Dionne quintuplets to thrive, but for all the Dionne children to get the hell away from their childhoods and parents and have a fighting chance.

This is Orange by Rachel Poliquin & illustrated by Julie Morstad (nonfiction picture book)

A celebration of the color Orange. The cover is immediately arresting, both delicious and powerful. With marbled, creamsicle end papers, an otherworldly, scribbly cantaloupe, monarchs flying from the pages carrying the souls of loved ones, and a colored pencil spread that deserves to be framed, the illustrations alone carry the celebration, history, and importance of the color orange. There's nothing special about the text, but this tiny book delivers a punch. From the linguistic journey of the word Orange to the roles Orange has played in defining itself, art, culture, history, literature, architecture, religion etc. There's nothing untouched by Orange. I'm ready for Poliquin and Morstad to write about the rest of the colors!

2025 Music

Music is fuel for me, so when Spotify and Apple share my end-of-the-year stats, I get pretty jazzed about it.  I listen to both.  I have my monthly playlists in Spotify.  Each month has whatever floats my boat.  The first song I like each month begins the new playlist, and I delete that month from last year.  Apple has all of my longer playlists, and also all the music I've ever owned from records I've converted to discs I imported to spoken word albums I also imported.  None of the hard-to-find stuff ever shows up in my stats.  I will forever be gobsmacked by how much music is out there that Apple and Spotify do not have.  It's one of the reasons I still look at cds when I see them in the wild.  

Here are just a few of my favorite moments from this year:

Needtobreathe is always in my top five.  This year they were my top artist in both this year.  They have some incredibly profound moments in their lyrics.  I'm excited they're at the top, but I'm ready for a new album from them!    

  

I love most kinds of trap.  It's the genre I listen to the most.  I never heard of it until about fifteen years ago, so I feel like I'm making up for all the time it didn't exist in my life.  At first I had to buy these trap cds that weren't sold in our country.  Thankfully, it's a lot more common right now, and there are gobs of sub genres.  The past couple years I've been listening to quite a bit of Hanzo, who is a music producer from Germany.  It's about as intense and imaginative as trap gets.  The best example of this is their song, Invasion, which is about aliens taking over.  Other than the PSA announcement at the beginning, there are only a few words sprinkled throughout, but Hanzo uses the music to tell us exactly how the invasion is going down.  

I listened to a lot of Latin music last year.  I wondered how that was going to show up in my genres.  Spotify has some crazy genres!  Last year our neighbors tore down their house and have been building a new house.  This is a common thing in my city.  On my street right now we currently have four tear downs/rebuilds in various stages of destruction/completion.  As the walls were going up at the neighbor's house in October of last year the framing crew listened to El Alfa nonstop.  The sound of it blaring from the cavernous shell of the home is something I'll never forget.  Every spare minute I had was spent on the porch listening to El Alfa blast from that shell.  Even though nothing could come close to that same quality of sound, I started listening to El Alfa even when I wasn't on the porch, and this opened the doors to all kinds of Latino and Brazilian music thanks to both Spotify and Apple doing such a great job recommending similar music.

  

I always get a huge kick out of seeing my stats at the end of the year, and I really enjoy seeing others.  My Arizona brother's top song was a Bluey song!  There have been some interesting posts and articles about parents and how their kids have taken over their Spotify Wrapped.  There are ways to fix this of course, but it's always a delight to see my Arizona brother's top songs of the year peppered with the music his kids listen to.  I hope he doesn't fix it! 

enjoying the calm

I feel like I'm in the eye of of the end-of-year tornado.  Mostly caught up at work.  We're managing to stay just barely on top of things, but that will do for the moment.  Yesterday was the first day I didn't work past the point of what I had to give, and we got home at a decent hour.  I've been managing to still take Sundays off, which have been devoted to school work.  Robert hasn't been so lucky.  He's working today.

Next week we meet the other side of the storm.  Teetering piles of things to do at work.  I also have PT twice, a dentist appointment, a doctor's appointment, a get together with my poetry friends, a holiday party, and a special concert Robert and I are traveling to St. Paul to see.  Mostly good things.   But today it's like my brain and body know about what's to come.  Though I didn't finish as strongly as I hoped, school is done.  It's my first Sunday with nothing on the schedule.  I have decided to hunker down and start a new embroidery project.

I just wrapped up this piece, which feels like a meadow reprieve from the gray and cold of December.

I like to include progress pics, but there aren't that many for this piece.  It came together quickly and was easy to get lost in.