Rachel, Lucy and Desmond in the park.

 

 

 

It’s been a week of family fun around our house, with my daughter, Rachel, and her nine-month-old Baby Lucy home from their mountainous home in Montana, along with Desmond, my oldest Daughter (Renee’s) son, who comes every Monday and Tuesday, here from nearby Oconomowoc. Desmond turned 4-years-old today, in fact I’ve just come home from his energetic birthday party, only an hour ago. In order to relax, at least enough to write, I had to first take a walk with John and the dogs and kittens, so that I could suck up the fresh air and refresh my spirit. To prepare for our grand children, Desmond and Lucy to come, I spent the last couple of weeks pulling up the old carpet off my office floor, (because I now share an office with John.) and then scraping glue strips from it (not an easy job) so the floor could be refurbished with fresh coats of blue paint and become a playroom. John went out and bought a beautiful carpet, (maybe because he felt guilty that I had done all the work) when the truth is, he was busy with his own work of rewriting and rehearsing his play “The Writer’s Cave” that will be performed tomorrow in the Frederick March Union Theatre as part of Wisconsin’s Book Festival, which I’ll write about on Monday before this gets posted. All of a sudden, as it always happens with me around projects, including these writing installments, it was down to the wire, which got me thinking about what to write about this week, knowing that on Monday, John will want to post something. It’s Saturday night and all I can think about is the love and memories and joyfulness I feel around my family.

 

Now that it’s cooler, even with this glorious fall weather of sunny days and hues of colored leaves swirling, it’s also clearly the time to prepare for winter. Therefore, knowing it was crunch time with Rachel and the kids coming, I put it all into forward motion until the playroom and the rest of the house were done, (and we all know it’s never done) leaving me no time to spare before going to gather my beloveds. As it turned out, Rachel and Desmond and Lucy spent three hours (on a beautiful fall day) in a near by park, close to Renee’s house, waiting for me. A photographer happened by while they were playing and snapped their picture, because he said it looked like they were having so much fun, which they were! Rachel raises Lucy in the same environment that she and Renee were raised, in libraries and parks. Their photo appeared the next day on the front page of the Local section of the Milwaukee Journal.  

 

Slave that I can be to myself, I worked and worked on the playroom, as well as digging up plants so the highway department can put in a new road in front of our house (what a messy and noisy project that is!) I put the final touch on with the washing of all the windows, (filthy from the road construction) which made the house light up with dancing streams of crystal light shining in on the colored glass bottles that I have on the window ledges instead of blinds and drapes. Now, with absolutely no more time to spare, I wrapped it up the best I could and drove to Oconomowoc to fetch my beloveds. 

 

It seems with me, especially knowing that so many families are in the throes of emotional and financial unrest, not to mention all the other hardships people go through, so difficult for me to focus on that I don’t often talk about my own nuclear family that I was born into, who are all about kindness and good will and love for everyone!  Janet and Carl Schorr, our parents, are the most generous and loving people I know, (which is why my siblings and I chose them as our parents.) We are all light-bringers who need a loving environment to do our planetary work. My father, Germanic and very proud of his life and work, has taught us all how to be hard-working, while my mother, more the quiet and serene type, loves to hold Molly, their little Yorkshire dog in her lap, while she reads library books and figures suduko puzzles. Their home is a hub to family, friends and neighbors, and you can never stop in when they aren’t taking care of one or more dogs, (except mine because John and I never leave them anywhere). Mom handles the finances and is always, it seems, writing out checks to those in need, including me, again and again. I’m not proud of this, but to my mother I don’t have to explain, I just have to ask.  

 

I never talk about the goodness of my family, because it’s not what a person hurting wants to hear, and there are so many of us hurting! However, tonight, because I’m feeling so full of love, I’m going to say it up front just how proud I am to come from such a fine heritage that I’ve passed on to my girls. Renee has a gift for connecting with younger children in crisis through her social working skills in Milwaukee with inner-city kids, while Rachel is more like me. We cannot bear to hear or see the pain of others, because it breaks our hearts and kills our joy. Rachel and I naturally attend to the plants and animals, lovingly, while administering to the people who come to us in need. As we do this we give gratitude to God.  We know that a higher source sustains us, that everything, even when it seems to go wildly astray in the world, as it does, is working out of the greater good for all humanity that will be evident when the New World arrives. 

 

Now it’s Monday, and I must say, as John feels, that his play “The Writer’s Cave,” was a huge success! And even though only thirty people showed up, it still felt like a Broadway production, with professional actors powerfully projecting the essence of the play much better than our reading it on paper could. There was a lot on the line because the heart and soul of the play was much of John’s life, true and imagined.  I was enthralled though out the performance, laughing and smiling with pleasure, even at myself, who John portrayed as a spiritual fanatic–all about God, which I am–what can I say.  Unlike me, John isn’t the physical type who finds satisfaction through labor. Rather, he’s at his computer, engaged as he always is, in the writing life. Tomorrow, however, he’s promised to help me plant the large shrubbery that came from the front of the house, via a bobcat, to the back of the house, up on the hill that we look out on from our office. I need to have him hold the enormous shrubs in place while I fill in around the roots with dirt. After that, outside projects finished, with the exception of gathering more firewood, we can settle into our cozy little family with plenty of warmth and love. Let the snow fly.