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RIP Lex
I’ve always wondered how the sun can continue to shine, birds and crickets sing, and people go on about their business when we feel the sting of the death of a loved one. Our chocolate lab, Lexington, isn’t lazing on the cool porch beside us as we have coffee this morning. Our oldest son, Calen, asked in the summer of 2008 if he could rescue a young puppy whose family had a new baby and couldn’t keep the pup anymore. He asked our permission because there was talk of him shipping off to Iraq with the Army Reserves, and we all knew who would really have puppy duty. He was…
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Tornado Alarm
The blasting siren traveled to my six year-old ears, reverberating in every direction inside my skull. Maggie looked to the sky, pulling a Pall Mall out of the tanned, ancient folds protecting her toothless gums and declared, “There’s a tornado com’n!” Terror filled me. I ran in high gear, next door to my two-story red sandpaper-sided house and straight to my personal fallout shelter. Sitting on bathroom scales stuffed between the pipes of our small sink and stained bathtub, I clasped my ears and sobbed, knowing I would be blown to bits. I was a dramatic child. Like “the chicken or the egg” question, I’m not sure which came first:…
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Mrs. Sharon
As I begin my last year of teaching, I am looking back on the last 25 years I have spent in the same district from which I graduated high school. There is one person I wish I could have shared the entire time with, but she is not far from my thoughts. My junior high reading teacher was one of the best teachers I ever had. I was scared to death of her those two years, though, because Mrs. Sharon demanded respect and didn’t take any bull off anyone, as she taught in what I thought was a most unconventional manner. It was really exciting to have a teacher work hard…
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Fake Friends
Yesterday I woke to an interesting Facebook friend request. Over the years, I have received some odd requests, as I guess many people have. The ones that annoy me are from men with profile pictures that look like they are models and have names I have never heard of. I scoff at them, then sometimes curiosity gets the best of me and I examine them closely, because I am immediately suspicious. These jokers are always single. They are friends with a few of my Facebook friends; undoubtedly two or three young females. The bulk of their few friends are always female and many times they have no male friends at all. Their…
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Stonefort Reunion
This is the time of year I remember back to The Stonefort Reunion and the many years friends, classmates and I gathered to walk at least 100 laps each night around the fair midway. It was a time for us to reconnect if we hadn’t seen each other over the summer. We would run to check in with our families, who were sitting in lawn chairs clustered around the stage watching a variety of local music and dance talent, and ask for more money or beg to stay longer. In junior high and high school, it was a time for young love. Countless relationships surely began or ended between the…
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FREE 1,000 VIEWS GIVEAWAY @carlakirklandwriter.com
Wow! I want to thank all of my website subscribers and writer Facebook friends for reading my stories. Today I reached 1,000 views in less than a month! I am having a blast writing pieces of my heart down, and am amazed you want to read them. Truthfully, it makes me feel alive, at a challenging time of life. I am celebrating with a giveaway! I am going to put my website, carlakirklandwriter.com, subscriber email addresses into a drawing TWICE for a published memoir by one of my favorite authors or one of your choice. Friends names on my Facebook account at https://www.facebook.com/carla.kirkland.39 (not my personal Carla Nolen Kirland FB account),…
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Move Over, Mary Kay
It was a day I dreaded to see end because we would see my mother for the last time. Her visitation had been the night before, and we had her moved to the church she loved so much, for her funeral service the next morning. I cringed at visitations because someone would always say how “good” the person looked. It seemed like such a weak attempt to comfort a loved one, or maybe the only words positive enough to express when you are at a total loss of something else to say. In my mother’s case, it was the very first thing I noticed, and I was amazed. She looked absolutely…
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The Sun Singer
The most common question I am asked these days (besides if I have a pencil a student “can” use) is, “How did you know your husband has Alzheimer’s?” Sometimes before I respond, the well-meaning person may say, “Did he forget where he left his keys or what he was going into a room to do, because I do that all the time?” Well sure, he has done those things, but haven’t most of us? No, it was much more dramatic than that. Jim’s mother had Alzheimer’s and her mother probably had it, since she was placed into a care facility at a young age. Like anyone in a family with…
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One Red-Headed Cuckoo in the Bush Worth More than Two in the Hand
While in college, my friends and I would take our Christmas break and spend a month in Big Bend, Texas, backpacking and camping. I’m not talking day trips up a little trail and back again. I am talking about carrying everything we needed to survive, on our backs–the guys would have packs ranging from 60 to 65 lbs. and my pack was upwards of 50 lbs. (not too lame for a 5’2”, 100 lb. girly girl). Because we were spoiled and accustomed to luxuries we just could not leave behind, we included things like toilet paper, toothbrush, novel, and flashlight alongside our necessities such as tent, warm clothes, food, water,…
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Tiny House Sanctuary
It is a cool July morning in southern Illinois and strangely, the air we wear is low. Yeah. Humidity. Summer between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers is unbearably sticky and my white railed veranda is my sanctuary. I love coffee in the mornings there while the sun thinks about burning the mist off the water on a nearby pond. Three years ago, Jim and I thought it would be a great idea to leave the comfortable home where we raised two kids, four exchange students, my elderly father, multiple dogs and two cats, and downsize. One thirty foot dumpster, a moving sale, three trips to Salvation Army, and donating…
