Whoo! Hoo! Super Duper Sweet Blogging Award

You can imagine my surprise!  How great is this?  Recognition from peers is a beautiful thing that inspires, encourages, and affirms we are heading in the right direction!  Now it’s my turn to shine a light on others.  Please take time to explore the blogs below; if you do, I guarantee you’ll walk away knowing a little bit more about the world, others and yourself.

Rules to this award are:

1. Thank the Super Sweet Blogger who nominated you

Mind On the Loose is an amazing woman who inspires us with stories reflecting the history and traditions of her family, her hopes and passions, and a litany of on-going and revolving projects. Her curiosity about the ever-changing science of electronics is quite impressive to a technologically-challenged admirer such as myself. Mind On the Loose provides a welcoming community setting for anyone looking for a place to share.  I hope you visit her soon.

This is the first time I have been nominated for a blogging award, and it’s name fits so well, not because I’m sweet, but because Sweet is my maiden name!   So, many,many thanks to Sabrina, whose mind is on the loose, for including me in this award.  I’m so happy we’re friends, but we most likely would never have even met if it were not for WordPress!

2. Answer five super sweet questions: The 5 sweet Questions are: 

• Cookies or Cake?     Cookies! (mostly)
• Chocolate or Vanilla?     Chocolate!
• Favorite Sweet Treat?     Italian Cream Cake! (Neither chocolate nor cookie, whoops!)
• When do you crave Sweet Things the most?     3:00 (PM and AM!)
• Sweet Nick Name?     ittyMac, a combo of maternal and paternal grannie’s nick names: IttyBitty and MissMac.

3. Include the Super Sweet Blogging award image in  your blog post  (See above)

4. Nominate a baker’s dozen (12) other bloggers

Here, we go!  I’m following Sabrina’s example of giving you an idea of what sort of content you’ll find in the blogs I’ve nominated to share this amazing sweet prize!

The Empathy Queen – is a sincere, sometimes heart wretching journey through life and all that means. Pure, straight up honesty and amazing candor expressed humorously, punctuated, when least expected, by a precise and smooth sense of irony.

Humoring the Goddess – Back from a blogging hiatus, this funny, relevant blogger takes a swing at aging in a fast forward world continually changing.  This blog is a wild, fun ride you won’t regret taking!

Meganhasocd, The War in my Brain – A tug-a-war some days, a sail boat ride across a placid lake on others, The War in my Brain delivers a hard message softly, and with humor that always leaves me thinking; which, I believe, is exactly Megan’s intention.

Foreignly – Enlivening Dreams – is written by a student sharing his “ideas about various subjects ranging from humanities to science, but mainly on personal development…”  I think this is a very interesting blog, and being able to communicate with a young person on the other side of the planet is just too cool.

South of Where – is a blog I have only recently explored.  I found it while reading a response comment on an unrelated blog.  It was stumbling into treasure, for me.  At first, I thought I could see my own life in her words, but later I realized it is the author’s perspective that makes hers special to me.

Kmosullivan – is an advocate for women and setting socio-economic, cultural and community bars higher.  I’m drawn to the author’s use of humor and current events, and always enjoy the personal stories Kelly shares.

Writings of a Mrs – is the journey we follow as a woman works through the process of achieving her dream to make writing a profession.  Family photographs, poetry and personal musings bring us along for the ride!

Forgiving Dreams – thoughts on life and living the dream – covers a myriad of subject matter ranging from current events to spiritual musings.  This blog is where living  a Sustainable Green Lifestyle intersects, nicely, I might add, with the fast paced challenges and changes of Corporate World.

World’s Worst Moms – Well, if the blog name was actually intended to represent the truth, I’d have to be the first one to say, “I want one of those!”  Humorous, serious, relevant.

Cranky Caregiver – Grandma says – cracks me up!  If I could take life on like Grandma does, I’d have a lot more pep in my step!  Funny, fun and accurate.

–Jenny Kissed Me – JeGlatter  This blog takes me into the space in my head that poets share with both the splendor and the abysses that are part of celebrating and surviving a deeply introspective life.  Her words are so fluid, it feels like I’m swimming.  She is great, not good.

Second Half Woman – follows the journey of a single woman exploring the second half of her life and sharing with gorgeous photography, poetry and personal musings along the way.

5. Notify your nominees on their blog

There; all done!  Thanks again, Mind on the Loose!

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When someone comes to mind, let them in!

When someone comes to mind, let them in; sit with them.  Try to understand why they have appeared.  Pay attention to the way you feel.  Get out a pencil.  Make a series of dots from the message in  your brain, to the face in  your mirror.  Connect them, and let them live.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a girl from high school.  It happens from time to time, I think about her; she’s like a left over shadow from the past, tugging at my sleeve, not letting go.  Joyce and I were never friends, and I can’t recall if she had any, but surely, she did.  I must have been too busy trying to be cute to notice; I must have been too bored by lunch when she would enter the cafeteria seemingly without moving her feet, but gliding on a cushion of air, her water-blue-liquid eyes searching for an empty chair.

She made me uncomfortable because she made me aware.  It was as if she moved in slow motion, her hands so deliberate I ached to reach across the desk that separated us in English, and slap them silly, make them hustle, respond, claim a larger, stronger place in the space she filled; but of course, I did nothing.

Joyce moved too slowly to finish class assignments.  She didn’t look like the average dumb kid; there was a certain air about her, an innocence, really.  I don’t know why, but each time I see her in my mind’s eye, she is wearing a blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar, with pearl seed buttons splitting her chest in two equal planes with budding breasts, breasts the size of a girl in the seventh grade, not a senior ready to burst apart the world with her bare hands.  No, Joyce’s hands weren’t strong enough, and too white, to burst anything apart.  And she was too slow, like molasses pushing up the trunk of a tree, trying to reach the tiny, green leaves on the top branches, but pooling instead, close to the place where the roots disappear, deep in dark earth.

I remember watching Joyce write on a clean piece of notebook paper; it was like watching someone complete a ritual or say a prayer.  With her left hand, she smoothed the length of the paper as if checking its surface for dust or palpable imperfections.  After she’d satisfied herself that nothing was there, no inhibitors to the strength of imagination, no deterrents to concise, clear thought or written language, she ceremoniously placed her left hand on the outermost portion of the upper left side of the page, and deliberately, as if getting ready to draw one perfect note, placed the tip of her Lindy Pen on the first blank line on the blank page.  Each letter she formed was a labor of art or love, or perhaps the act of a blind woman climbing Mt. Everest, unsure of each step, but pushing ever so cautiously ahead.

There was part of me that could relate to this strange girl, like a seed pushing out of its pod, sprouting new growth but on top of the ground, roots, never forming.  And tiny leaves unfurling, stretching skyward in search of solid ground, not realizing it was reaching in the wrong direction, not understanding that one is born with his roots in the ground, or one is not; not recognizing that one can walk, at the end of his life, through a cemetery recalling aloud the history of his clan, or one can be cremated, set loose in the wind because he never found his place in the soil of the earth.

Joyce and I shared the same mirror, one moving slowly, the other rushing; both trying to fit in.  The day the principal interrupted fifth period to announce Joyce’s death in the same voice he used to announce pep rallies and bake sales, the pit of my stomach rose to the back of my throat.  He said Joyce died in a car wreck, and he told us he knew we would miss her, and that we should all be very careful driving home that afternoon.  His words were secret code; every girl in the room caught the gaze of every other, and soon we were nodding in unison.  The boys never caught on, except perhaps the one whose sweet words  had left Joyce so few options.

Several times a year, we’d lose a friend to the nightmare of a Home for Unmarried Pregnant Girls where keeping your child was unheard of.  The shame and humiliation, the double standard razor wire, was simply too much for some girls.  Losing our chance for an education made an already impossible situation even worse.  So while boys got a nod for sowing wild oats, girls were sent packing in shame, our lives interrupted forever…because who ever really recovers from such a thing?

Joyce, the deliberate, pale girl who was not my friend has come to my mind again today, reminding me why it is important to remember her name, and her story.  Joyce is the cross burning in all of our yards, screaming for justice that never came, not in her life, and perhaps, not even in mine. Time is turning in on itself; already women in several states have lost control over decisions concerning the healthcare of their own bodies, in spite of battles previously won to ensure such choices are kept personal.  Zealots are pointing angry fingers in our faces.  State Congresses are punishing us with unnecessary invasive procedures for making choices that do not align properly with religious ideology.  And politicians are opening the car doors for Joyces’ all over the United States, handing them the keys.

Part of me hates that Joyce is visiting again; but I suppose she feels quite strong about what’s happening these days.  So I’ll sit with her for a little while, and share her story with you.