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  1. Seven Things I Love About Small Towns

    June 4, 2013 by admin

    When we rolled into the little town of Louisburg, KS, for the first time – Bryan and I and our six-month-old Eli, all in the whipped Toyota Highlander that had crossed half the country in our biggest move yet – I told myself not to be nervous. The questions and uncertainties about this new place slapped at my mind like angry rain: What if this town was ugly? What if there was no coffee shop? What if the town was run down and forlorn and what if the people who live here had no pride?Memorial Day Camp Trip 2013 047

    I had to laugh at myself, almost. After all, I was raised in a small town – once the least-populated county in the least-populated state. And here I was, uncertain and fearful of the emerging picture of small-town life in a new place.

    It’s true the differences were dynamic, coming from Orange County, Calif., where we had spent the last two years. So removed from the incessant whirr of traffic, Louisburg boasted as its trickiest intersection the four-way stop sign on its one main street. There were no hotels in this town – none. The nearest lodging was a small manicured hotel ten minutes away, bearing the same name as the town in which it had staked claim. There was potential for a coffee shop – a quaint A-framed stucco building on the main drag with faded green letters that read “The Coffee House” on the outside and a “For Rent” sign in the dirt.

    As we began to peel back the corners of our life in this new place, I had to smile. Who was I kidding? I grew up a small-town girl. I knew how to blossom in a place like this.

    Below, seven things I love about small towns, and this one (Louisburg) especially:

     

    1)      Conversations in the grocery store parking lot. In the grocery store parking lot, I chase down a man who is returning an empty shopping cart to the front of the store. “Sir, sir!” I say, not sure how else to get his attention.

    Finally, he turns around, looks at me and grins.

    “I didn’t respond at first because no one ever calls me sir,” he says.

    I’m sure I blush a little. He introduces himself as the retired math teacher of the local high school, and beams a wide grin at my two boys who are still strapped in their carseats.

    “Can I give them a quarter?” he asks, fishing in his pockets for loose change before I can even nod.

     

    2)      We talk to people, not machines. When I call the pharmacy to order a prescription, a person actually answers the phone. A person named Kevin or Kathy asks, “How are you?” and “How can we help you?” There are no lines, no long string of numbers to punch into a temperamental cell phone to lock in the correct prescription number. Inside the pharmacy, black-and-white photos of the owner and his family adorn the walls.KC dog park Nov2010 001

     

    3)      Freebies and surprises for little ones. At the doctor’s office following his visit, my three-year-old, Will, receives a coupon for a free ice cream cone at the local Sonic Drive-Thru. We stop there on the way home and I hand him the vanilla cone, tall and sweet and sticky.

     

    4)      A cup of Starbucks coffee is a novelty. Because the nearest coffee shop is in a suburb of the city, each trip there is exciting, rather than routine. Bonus: my husband loves this fact because it saves us money.

     

    5)      We know our neighbors. We do crazy things like borrow their lawnmowers, accept biscuits made from scratch next door, invite the neighborhood boys to come over and play.

     

    6)      A phone book is still relevant. People still say things like, “Do you have my land line number? It’s in the phone book.”

    Source: Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/kansasexplorer3128/137054235/

    Source: Creative Commons
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/kansasexplorer3128/137054235/

     

    7)      Promoting local business doesn’t feel like a maze. Around here, there is one library, one veterinarian, one dentist. Sure, you still expect good service and can easily take your business 20 minutes north into the Kansas City suburbs if you’re not satisfied. But, at least in this small town, the starting points are easy.

     

    My husband and I have spent the first seven years of our marriage mapping our lives in big places: Kansas City; Omaha; Orange County, Calif. Louisburg, Kansas, is by far the smallest town we have ever called home. But in a way, I acknowledge, I am simply coming back to my roots. And I have to admit, it feels pretty darn good.

     

    *What do you love about the place you live or the place in which you grew up? What new perspectives have you gained as an adult about the place you call home?

     

    PS – The “Events” page has been updated! Join me at the Louisburg Library in July for a reading, or consider hosting me to read, speak or teach a writing workshop for your book club or writer’s group!

    Category Family, Feel-Good Stories, Home, Inspiration, Life, Parenting, Place | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,,, | No Comments

  2. “Home” Making

    March 12, 2013 by admin

    It has been two months since we rattled back into the Midwest with two vehicles packed to the gills, exactly no place to live and a standing reservation at the Best Western on the southern edge of the Kansas City suburbs. In some respects, it seems like we’ve been back in the Midwest for forever – as if we never left in the first place. In other respects, it seems like we just arrived yesterday.

    Life hasn’t quite slowed down for us yet. And of course with two little boys, a husband whose work schedule is forever fluid and changing and my own gnawing need to put words together and write, I wonder if that time of slow-down will ever come. I consider the word “routine” with longing, craving it like a piece of sweet decadent chocolate. Still, we aren’t quite settled here. Still, the kids wake up in the middle of the night. I drag myself out of my warm bed and go to them, then laugh to myself as I return to my own bed, flicking off the alarm that was (so many hours ago) strategically set for 6 a.m.

    I always feel so blessed when on my blog (or elsewhere) I run into a mother or mother-to-be who “gets it.” You know, that crazy anxiety of trying to do it all and be a champ at it all. I think at its richest, this flux time is fodder for material. I am living the book that’s yet to be written. It can’t be written right now because the story is still unfolding. We can’t very well write the book while it’s happening – because then we’re too focused on the writing to actually be living out those messy and wonderful moments.

    When Eli was still brand new, squinting his fresh eyes at the buzzing world around him, I found that my best writing came on my bed at 2 in the afternoon. There, in a weak attempt at rest while the baby slept, I lay with a legal pad and a pen, my mind too noisy to invite any form of sleep. I scribbled furiously, messily, caring little about handwriting or the neatness of ideas. My desperate goal: to get the words that flew around in my head out, somehow solidified and preserved. The writing may have lasted for just 20 minutes or a sentence. How many one-line prayers did I scribble in the margins? But words came, and they came from the deepest of places. Even after one or two hard sentences, I could look at that long piece of paper and feel good. Somehow cleansed. My world, after those brief moments, made a little more sense.

    The writing is becoming more regular these days, but still the routine emerges slowly, like cold molasses. Still I am mother first. Then wife. Then writer. But (and I know this will be true as long as I live) the need to write won’t let go. Even when I am covered in toddler pee and am holding a fussy baby in one arm while I clean up the mess. Even when I am pushing mashed sweet potatoes into a tiny bird-like mouth. Even when the piles of dirty laundry are stacked so high and there is dinner to get on the table and from upstairs a little voice hollers “Mom!” and my husband walks through the front door and wants a little love. Even then, that urge, that innate need to write, will stubbornly persist. And my self will not re-encounter its equilibrium until that need has been acknowledged, satisfied.

    How do you do it? Whether you’re a mother, a student, male or female, you, too, wear a lot of hats. How do you make time for your art? How do you prioritize the need and make it somehow align with your myriad other roles?

    Around here, we live one day (and yes, sometimes one moment) at a time. And, slowly, the story is being written, the masterpiece in its own time taking shape.

     

    PS: The next post, on Thursday 3/14, will pay some small reverence to the December shootings in Newtown, CT, exactly three months after the young gunman opened fire at an elementary school. It’s one writer’s way of processing tragedy the best way she knows how, via silent words. Come with a somber heart, or not at all.

    PPS – A much-delayed announcement: Thanks to your support, my readers, via new Facebook page “Likes” and new followers on my blog, $30 was donated to cleanup efforts following Super Storm Sandy. Thank you, for supporting my work and the power of communicating our life stories. You rock.

     

    Category Creativity, Family, Home, Inspiration, Life, Motherhood, Parenting, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,,,,, | No Comments

  3. To Write Again: A Return to the Sweet Life of Art Making

    February 21, 2013 by admin

    So. Days melt into days, and weeks into weeks. Across five states and two time zones, from a place that perpetually feels like summer back to a place where winter is in full force and (amen) the weather comes and goes in seasons. It has been a long road from southern California back to Kansas City, the challenges of moving with two young kids fierce and at times unrelenting. Yet we have pulled through it, and in all the chaos, things are beginning to make sense again.

    Finally, we are emerging into a new normal. We are putting down roots here fast and hard. Desperately, we want them to stick because if we’re honest, this life of mobility, of pulling up our lives every one to two years to begin again in a new place, is just plain tough. It was the life of adventure five years ago, when we were still relatively newly married and without kids. Now, with two little boys in tow, we simply crave to be settled. For the wellbeing of our kids. For the wellbeing of our family.

    As I write, the wind outside is fierce, hurling hard snow against the upstairs windows. My little Eli, who was born in sunny California just seven months ago, can’t take his eyes off of the mean white stuff. I finished nursing him this morning, and he lay his head on my shoulder and snuggled into me, quiet. That’s odd, I thought. And I said out loud, ”Why are you so quiet?”

    Then I saw why. His eyes were wide open, staring intently out the window at the onslaught of blizzard.

    Snow. Something completely new to him.

    As I ease myself back into these waters of a writing life, I feel more and more at home. To be honest, I don’t know where my work will take me next. We have started over yet again, in a new community, a new place. Ideas throw themselves at me ruthlessly, and I snatch at them as if trying to catch beautiful butterflies in a net, wanting to keep them, study them, turn them over in my hands and then release them into the world again.

    I revisit old essays, wonder why some of them have remained untouched deep in a folder for so long. But the answer comes quickly. Mothering. Family. Life.

    Most important right now is that we have weathered a stretch of tremendous transition and upheaval. In this new normal, this new place we so much long to call “home” for the long haul, I am writing again. And dang, it feels good.

    Category Creativity, Family, Home, Ideas, Inspiration, Life, Motherhood, Parenting, Place, Travel, Writing, Writing Life, Writing Process | Tags: ,,,,, | 5 Comments

  4. Putting Down and Pulling Up Roots

    January 8, 2013 by admin

    Pulling up roots hurts.

    It’s a reality we face every time we move, and we find ourselves facing that pain once again, as we prepare to move back across country from Los Angeles to Kansas City.

    The news came quickly, as it usually does. Christmas was three days away, and we were plunged into packing for a holiday road trip to Seattle. The road trip was adventure enough: a long drive up Interstate 5 through some spectacular country, stopping in cities we’d never visited and showing our two young boys a new slice of the world. The adventure only exponentially grew when the phone call came that my husband had been assigned to a new construction project back in the Midwest. They wanted him there mid-January.

    We took deep breaths, opted to continue our Christmas plans and deal with the details of the move when we returned. Our foundational attitude through the whole thing: Life is short.

    Now back in California, we relish the conversations with loved ones, lingering in the church parking lot for drawn-out goodbyes, gathering around our dinner table (the legendary piece of Purdue University furniture, a former lab table we bought for 50 bucks) for a final meal with friends, pounding down slices of lemon cake in the living room. We talk about home, where and what it looks like. I say if moving so much has taught me anything, it’s that “home” is not a question of where you find yourself but who you find yourself with. We talk about what it means to bloom, digging hard and fast into a community as soon as we settle into it, because lingering over tough goodbyes when it’s time to yank up those roots is so much more worth the pain than having no good-byes to say at all. One friend comments that it takes a lot of risk and courage to so wholeheartedly immerse yourself somewhere when you know that “somewhere” is not permanent. We say we have no choice; it’s simply what we must do.

    So now comes the tough week. The good-byes have started. The list-making is well underway. Among the book of lists are titles like, “Stuff to clean,” “People to call,” “Things to take with us.” Under the list, “Things to take with us” (identifying those items not to be handled by the moving company) is the ivy plant, which my mom gave to me 10 years ago following the death of my Uncle Ron. She clipped a budding green sprig from his casket at his funeral, rooted it in water and planted it in good soil. The thing has survived six moves and six states. The vines are strong and happy now, twisting and growing and sprouting new leaves all the time.

    All it takes is rich soil and some tender loving care.

    Those old roots are my inspiration now. As I anticipate the new soil we will soon be sinking ourselves into, I can only look forward with a bright anticipation. Back in the Midwest, we will reconnect with old friends, rekindle treasured relationships, and find new ways to immerse ourselves in the community we call home.

    Home. With my Bryan and my boys. There is no place like it, no matter where that place is.

    Category Family, Home, Inspiration, Life, Place, Travel, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,,, | 1 Comment

  5. 6 Reasons Why I Don’t Do Christmas in California Well

    December 12, 2012 by admin

    It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and yes, we are certainly loving it here. The happy chaos, the fresh evergreen smell of the Christmas tree that has, for the month, replaced one of the two recliners in the living room, the candy cane antlers that always find their way to the garden frog out front (thanks, honey).

    But a true-bred mountain girl will just never get used to a winter holiday season in southern California. Here’s why:

    Copyright Melissa Brawner, from www.creativecommons.org

    1)      No matter how many people ogle over the non-stop sunshine and year-round warm weather, a 72-degree day in December to me just feels wrong.

    2)      I completely over-analyze the outdoor Christmas decorations at Target, knowing I can’t buy a light-up snowman for the yard or a blue snowflake for the front door because it never snows here, and so clearly a snowman or anything having to do with snow in my yard would be ridiculous. (Then again, would a light-up festive pink flamingo be any better? Don’t worry. I didn’t buy that, either.)

    3)      When my mother texts me to let me know a light snow is falling at home, I burn with a twinge of jealousy.

    4)      It can take an hour to get to a Wednesday night Advent service 4 miles from our house, if traffic is bad.

    5)      I wonder how in the world people get lights up so beautifully on the roofs of their houses, and I feel  a pang of guilt every time my 3-year-old son remarks that we need to have outside lights at our house like everyone else. But that has nothing to do with California. It just has everything to do with my ineptness when it comes to outside lighting.

    6)      A palm tree adorned with Christmas lights makes this mountain girl slightly nauseous, even if my husband points out that the nativity set we recently unpacked came with palm trees because a person would be much more likely to see palms over pines any day in Bethlehem.

    Still, there is plenty to love about this time of year in California. I don’t have to bundle up my boys every time we leave the house. I can (gulp!) wear a skirt to a Christmas service without tights or wool knee-highs. And ever heard of a Christmas light tour through an ocean canal via hydrobike (that’s a bike that moves on water!)? Oh, yes. Date night December, here we come.

    *PS – Three more days to support Super Storm Sandy cleanup efforts by following my blog and/or “Liking” my Facebook page. Until Dec. 15, I will donate $1 toward cleanup efforts for each new “Like” or follow. Thank you!

    Category Creativity, Family, Home, Life, Motherhood, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,,, | 3 Comments

  6. Seeking Story in Tradition

    November 21, 2012 by admin

    Tradition.

    It’s an idea we all find ourselves coming back to this time of year. Be it falling into the comfort and warmth of old traditions or seeking joy in starting new ones, we all crave the same thing: something to celebrate.

    I find it intriguing the way years come and go, how some holidays are busy and exuberant and bouncing with life while, in other years, they are quiet and mellow, low-key. One only has to map the ups and downs of life through a single holiday to see how time works: how people come and go, how places transform, how we, ourselves, grow up.

    My strongest Thanksgiving memories will always center around my Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Wyoming, the place where, for so long, Thanksgiving took place with no questions asked. I write about it in Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood, this way:

    “Thanksgiving has happened at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s every year for as long as I can remember. The tradition runs so long and deep that no one questions it, even with the family tensions that ripple quietly just beneath the surface: Grandpa’s reckless ways and Grandma’s bitterness – driven, I think, by loneliness – the way he and she seem to like each other less every year, the fact that neither one of them has ever shown up for a school play or a band concert.

    Grandma and Grandpa sit at opposite ends of the table, paying no attention to one another, while my parents and I and my great uncle John fill the spaces between them. I scoop up big helpings of my mom’s turkey and her Swedish corn pudding. I pass on Grandma’s mashed potatoes and gravy because the gravy is an awful brown, and like every other year, I fear she has salted it with a rabbit carcass. She served fried rabbit on the first Thanksgiving my mom spent with them – no turkey. Mom, a wholesome girl from the Midwest, cried.”

    The memories are rich, but so, too, is the story.

    This is a story of tradition. What is yours?

    Later on in this piece, I share what still hangs on as one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories:

    “A cozy quiet hangs in the Thanksgiving afternoon: the ancient dishwasher hums through its cycle, the coffee percolator brews weak Folgers coffee for my mom. Soon, my grandmother will call for a game of hearts and we will gather around the Formica table, pie in hand, for a long game of steering clear of the Old Biddy.”

    I want people to see themselves here. I want them to resonate: with the tension, with the details of tradition, with the desire to bring the familiar to life.

    This Thanksgiving, we will celebrate in a new way, with a family that is not ours in a state where our roots are only temporary. It will be my oldest son’s fourth Thanksgiving, my youngest son’s first. Still, I will make Mom’s Swedish corn pudding in the CorningWare dish. I will bring it to the house we have visited only a few times, an act of both sharing an old tradition with new friends and hanging on to something familiar for the holiday. Will we eat cranberries out of the can? Will there be sweet potatoes? A card game after the meal?

    I don’t know. But I do know there is plenty to celebrate, from the warm memories of the past and the people who are no longer with us to the new friends we’ve made, the new life we’ve created and the new traditions that will blossom from it.

    This holiday season, I encourage you to seek the story in tradition, whatever that means for you.

     

    Category Family, Family History, Feel-Good Stories, Home, Inspiration, Life, Life Stories, Place, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,, | 1 Comment

  7. Cans and Can’ts

    November 8, 2012 by admin

    I probably shouldn’t admit it here, but promotional efforts for my new book, Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood have more or less come to a standstill since I returned to California from my home state of Wyoming last month.

    For two solid weeks in Wyoming, I was out, reading and putting on writing workshops, engaging people in glorious conversation about the significance of telling our life stories. I met people of all ages with raw, captivating life experiences to share. I shared bits of my own life experience, exposing the wonderful, the challenging and the pivotal moments of growing up as an only child in rural Wyoming. Strangers and acquaintances came to know the strong and unforgettable characters who shaped my childhood: Great Uncle John, Grandpa Bucky, Mountain Man Chuck and that lady up in the Hoback who once danced naked. For two weeks, I was in author heaven.

    Then I returned with my family to California, and the realities of being a full time mom quickly settled back in. This is certainly not a bad thing – it is simply fact. My husband, an engineer who diligently worked while his wife and two sons were away in Wyoming, transitioned from a day shift to a night shift while we were gone. And that meant that upon our return to California, we had some major adjusting to do.

    For a while, all rhythm in our household was lost. Family dinner time was out the door, replaced with family time mid-morning and, if we were lucky, lunch together around the kitchen table.

    Settling back in to life as mom and wife proved harder than I’d expected, coming off of an exhilarating two weeks in my home state where Grandma and Grandpa were always around to help with the boys and where I had plenty of time to wear my writer’s hat. I felt like life as a writer had no choice but to take a backseat for a while. I fought it. I cried. I wondered what the fate of my first published book would ultimately be, if I was not out in the world pushing it for all I was worth.

    I am both a mother and a writer. This means that very often, something’s gotta give.

    The writer Hope Edelman acknowledged her realities as a writer and mother in a blog post on Brevity, sharing a list of what she can and cannot do as a wearer of multiple hats. The advantages? She is really good at budgeting time, and says she has experienced a whole range of emotions that have enhanced her writing. The disadvantages? In her own words, she can’t “spend three months at a writer’s colony … stay at literary events past 9:15 on a weeknight … shower every day … be a foreign correspondent.”

    Because I am a mother and a writer, I can snatch quiet moments as they come. I can multi-task – say, make an important phone call while I’m nursing my three-month-old, jot down an idea for a new essay on the back of a receipt in my three-year-old son’s preschool parking lot, confirm a book sale via email while kids catch five more minutes of TV. I can make two solid, blessed hours of work time pass in the blink of an eye. And, like Edelman, I can garnish loads of heartfelt material from the range of emotions that come with being a mom. Believe me, I have stories to tell.

    And because I am a mother and a writer, I can’t give readings or host writing workshops every day of the week. I can’t tackle my list of marketing ideas fast enough. I can’t blog as much as I want to nor be in conversation with fellow writers and readers as much as I’d like.

    For now, I just have to trust that, as mom and as writer, I am right where I need to be. My book is out. People are reading it, and the feedback is just heartwarming. I am so grateful and so humbled to all of those who have picked up a copy and have taken the time to read it. I hope there will be many more readers to come.

    Seasons come and go in our lives, and I think to some degree a level of chaos is always present. Finally, I feel like I am working my way back into a rhythm where I can wear the hats of both mother and writer, as family woman and book promoter. There’s a lot of work to do. But then again, there always is.

     

     

    Category Books, Creativity, Family, Home, Life, Life Stories, Motherhood, Parenting, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,,,,, | 3 Comments

  8. Why Conversation is the Bread and Butter

    October 3, 2012 by admin

    Tough. It’s a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as I find myself in conversation after conversation with wonderful, inspiring people over what it means to be tough.

    Wyoming leaves, Copyright 2012 Kate Meadows.

    The past two weeks in Wyoming have been an awesome hurricane of readings, book selling, interviews and writing workshops. Coming up against those Sublette County mountains – my mountains, I am proud to claim – is nothing short of spectacular. Experiencing a Wyoming fall in all its glory was a blessing unmatched – it’s only fair to say I get homesick when the quivering leaves of a yellowing quaking aspen put tears in my eyes.

    Selling a book, this piece of art that has been so close to me for the past four years, is a tremendous and rewarding feeling, it is. But the best part? The best part has been being in conversation with people, real people with dynamic lives and hearts tuned into what really matters. Real people with lives much different than mine. Real people with unique perspectives of what it means to be tough.

    I think of Ashta, the 69-year-old woman from West Virginia who I met in a Jackson Hole bookstore. One day away from her 70th birthday, she told me how she planned to celebrate her special day in the Tetons, her sister and son by her side. She likened “tough” to “strong,” thinking on the term from the perspective of a woman, a mother. That we draw strength from the most unexpected places sometimes.

    And there’s Paul, who walks with a cane now and recalled his days driving cattle with my grandfather before sunrise on an old local ranch. He’s lived in Sublette County his whole life, save for one month, the month he was born so many decades ago.

    And there are the two women I met at the Rock Springs library who own property up near Sublette County’s Warren Bridge. One of them was taking her grandson bowling the afternoon I gave a reading. Still, she made time to stop in and buy a book. The slight woman who has lived in Rock Springs since 1946 and loves to collect as much information, hear as many stories as she can about the region where Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood takes place.

    These people, these conversations, are the bread and butter of what I do. I write, yes, but writing would be meaningless without people to share it with.

    At its base, writing is about communication. My reward for writing is the communication that gets returned, those individuals who stick around long enough to go a bit deeper, who take the time to share with me their own perspectives.

    Part of life’s beauty is the way we meet each other at our various points along life’s path, the opportunities to share our unique views with one another.

    The book sales have been outstanding. Exciting, rewarding, completely worth smiling about. But those conversations? They are the real icing on the cake.

    So? What’s your perspective? How has the concept of “tough” played out in your life?

    Category Books, Creativity, Feel-Good Stories, Home, Life, Life Stories, Place, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,,,,, | No Comments

  9. 10 Things to Love About Fall

    September 18, 2012 by admin

    Across the country, fall begins to creep, soon to burst with its telltale phenomenal color. Starbucks is out with its signature fall drinks. Stores are displaying Halloween merchandise. Leaves are beginning to fall.

    As I come home to Wyoming to launch my book, Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood, I am overcome with nostalgia and awe, both at nature’s blazing show and at the little ways my parents have ushered this remarkable season into their own home, my childhood home.

    I walk into a house where a wood stove has already kindled its first fire. The kitchen smells of warm pumpkin and spice in the wakes of burning candles. Fall decorations color every room: scarecrows and wagons and brown and orange figurines with straw hats, placemats shaped like maple leaves, Mom’s favorite. I am so overcome with gratitude – both for the opportunity to be back in my hometown and for the chance to experience this fall season that, now living in California, I so desperately miss – that I feel it in my chest. My throat nearly tightens at the sight of a Swedish aspen with leaves the color of fire. Because I am in love here. I miss the change of seasons so much.

    As I prepare to share snippets of my own childhood here via book readings and writing workshops, I reflect on fall, the season I love so dearly. Here are 10 things to love about fall:

    Pinedale, WY, 2012, Kate Meadows.

    1)      The brilliant color of the changing leaves

    2)      Crisp air, which, compared to summer’s heat and humidity, is somehow energizing and fresh.

    3)      The way a noticeable transition in season can spawn motivation to revisit goals or launch an inspirational transition in your own life.

    4)      The cozy comfort found in warmth: pulling out a sweatshirt that has sat on a shelf for months, rediscovering a trendy scarf, sitting by a wood-burning stove

    5)      Scented candles: pumpkin, apple crisp, cashmere woods. Warm aromas.

    6)      Favorite fall foods. At our house it’s homemade apple cider, sweet potatoes, pumpkin chocolate chip muffins.

    7)      Pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks.

    8)      Football. Sunday nights. Monday nights. Thursday nights. (Although I have to admit, “Thursday night football” just doesn’t have the same ring as “Monday Night Football.”)

    9)      Rakes and piles of leaves to jump in. At my parent’s house in Wyoming, the back yard is THE grounds for this. And I happen to have a soon-to-be three-year-old who, assuming we can find a rake, might soon just find himself in leaf heaven.

    10)   Tradition and family. You know. Halloween. Thanksgiving. And all of the stories surrounding these days that over time will knit special memories.

    What do you love about fall? What traditions surround your family this time of year?

     

    Category Books, Creativity, Family, Feel-Good Stories, Home, Inspiration, Life, Nature, Outdoors, Place, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,,,,, | 1 Comment

  10. What is Your Life’s Theme?

    September 13, 2012 by katemeadows

    If you could pull one theme out of your life, what would it be?

    For me, that theme is “tough.” As in, “What does it mean to be tough?”

    I didn’t know this when I first set out to write a series of essays profiling the colorful characters of rural western Wyoming around whom I grew up. That series of essays now comprises my first book, Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood, published this month by Pronghorn Press.

    The essays were, at first, quaint and almost fluffy, mere sketches of people and experiences in my life that I found interesting. One piece did not necessarily relate to another; they just sort of fell out of me, one by one, like stones. I knew I had to write them – but I didn’t exactly know why.

    It was a long time before a pattern started to emerge, some sort of thread or echo that started resonating within each piece. I realized I wanted to know how these people – people like big-bellied bachelor Uncle John, the rancher-turned-writer woman named Chris, and my wild and impulsive Grandpa Bucky– helped to shape my upbringing and, consequently, shape the woman I am today.

    The resounding thread? Each of the characters I wrote about exhibited some form of tough. And moreover, they displayed senses of toughness I never felt I had. Having to homestead on a desolate landscape so barren that nothing grew? Not me. Driving cattle home at four in the morning? Not me. Spending lonely winters alone in a boxy cabin miles off a main road? Not me.

    Through writing, I started to look hard at this theme of “tough” and ask myself, “What does it mean to be tough?”

    All of these things, yes. But wasn’t there more to the meaning of that word? If not, I realized, I wasn’t tough at all.

    Except I know I am tough. Just not necessarily in the ways a rural Wyoming life demands. Through writing, I realized that my notion of “tough” was narrow. By holding myself up so sharply against these people who had truly lived hard and noble lives, I had for far too long denied that “tough” badge for myself.

    Looking back on the essays prompted me to examine my life via other questions as well.

    If you could re-do any moment of your life, what would it be?

    If you could live one sweet and precious moment of your past, what would it be?

    Thinking about our lives from a variety of angles can help give us a better grasp on ourselves, who we really are. Peeking through multiple lenses can help us to better understand ourselves – who we have been, who we are, who we hope to become.

    The former New York Times and Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen writes: “It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented. And finally I was what I was again. It turned out I wasn’t alone in that particular progression.”

    I am not yet 30 years old. As someone once told me, “You’re not old enough to write a memoir.”

    But in writing about my younger self, I discovered a powerful theme at work. It’s a theme that, piggybacked with a theme of confidence, I take with me into the wilds now of motherhood. It’s a theme that is molding me now, and a theme I believe will continue to shape me in the future.

    And all because once, I wanted to write about and therefore recall some colorful and strangely admirable characters of my past.

    Look at how these “tough” people defined me. Because of them – and because of the writing process – I am now tougher and more beautiful, a more complete person.

    You can receive a signed copy of Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood here.

    So? What about you? What is your theme?

     

     

    Category Books, Creativity, Family, Family History, Home, Ideas, Inspiration, Life, Life Stories, Motherhood, Parenting, Place, Quotes, Writing, Writing Life, Writing Process | Tags: ,,,,,,, | No Comments

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