There’s a full moon rising … let’s go dancing in the light

 By Mary Kay Roth

After a week of hallowed sunshine and days laden with that heavenly smell of deep, wet earth – there’s a full moon rising tonight, and I intend to go out and dance underneath the stars.

The calendar turns to March on Monday and there’s a different restlessness about the promise of spring this year, an edge, an ache deep in your bones.  We all crave that first crocus, thunderstorm, Zesto ice cream cone, farmer’s market.

We’re always happy about the advent of warmth, but I suspect that this year we're ready to bust wide open with t-shirts, tennis shoes and gin-and-tonics. 

After a year of sanitizer and solitariness, a year of helping sew nurse’s gowns and wearing my mask religiously, I long for birdsong, bare feet on new green grass, rolling down the car windows to scream rock ‘n roll at the top of my lungs. Blessedly it’s finally time for celebrating the gurgle of thaw, strolling through damp prairie grasses and listening to the primal call of sandhill cranes.  Time to dance under the full moon, perhaps even howl.

I believe that if you haven’t learned anything during this pandemic, you just weren’t paying attention. And one of those lessons for me has been about not wasting precious time.

Then, last week, this happened:  Arriving home one afternoon, I headed to the bathroom to change into sweats – but as I attempted to remove my turtleneck it got stuck over my head, my arms dangling up in the air.  And when I wiggled around trying to get free, I tumbled backward into the bathtub, ripping down the shower curtain, bonking my head on the shower stall and somehow landing sprawled on my back in the tub. Stunned, I assessed possible damage, figured out I was OK – more or less – then started chuckling.  Good grief, after a year of vigilant focus on escaping COVID-19 – I almost perished by turtleneck. 

That night, after sharing this saga during a Zoom call with my kids, we all weighed in on takeaways:

• My son : “Mom, you need to buy bigger turtlenecks.”
• My daughter:  “ASAP, go fill out a POA/Power of Attorney.  What if you were in a coma, stuck in the tub?” 

Valuable lessons, indeed. But sorry, kids, not the lesson I’m taking to heart. 

If COVID doesn’t get you, your bathtub will.  Life is dear. Time is to be cherished.  As the urgency of spring seeps into my soul, and my bumps and bruises heal, there is no time for procrastination.

I signed up to serve on the Salvation Army’s Emergency Disaster team. I reserved a summer cabin in Rocky Mountain National Park and reserved a time slot for giving blood.  I bought my first kayak and am currently on the hunt for a pickup truck to haul it. 

Now is the time, my friends. Time to paddle your kayak down the waters of a Nebraska river on a brisk spring morning – remember how it feels to ride a bicycle without holding onto the handlebars – skip stones and fly kites – find yourself completely lost off-trail in Wilderness Park. 

One of my very first blogs in 5 Women Mayhem was about planting pansies last March, just as the threat of a pandemic loomed large. Tomorrow I plan to buy pansies again, dip my hands into good, clean earth, keep the faith their blossoms will flourish and survive the remaining cold – keep the faith we are on the cusp of something better. 

Rest assured, I’m not tossing away my mask or throwing a huge party. But somewhere out there, a vaccination is waiting for me – waiting for all of us. 

And since we never know what’s waiting around the next turn – a global pandemic, a perilous bathtub – perhaps it’s ok to daydream again. Dream about sunsets along the Platte River, swimming with the whales, camping in the Sandhills under vivid night skies, watching the prairie chickens dance, gathering seashells on the shore, gazing up at the Northern Lights. 

Perhaps it’s time to toss out old lists of dusting and cleaning – in exchange for new lists about living.  

• Climb my first 14er.
• Wish upon the first evening star.
• Yes, have that cup of coffee – that Hershey’s kiss.  
• Plant pansies. 
• Buy bigger turtlenecks.
• Find a pickup truck.

If not now, when?  

I want to learn to dance the two-step – check out every book from the library I’ve always wanted to read – and, on a gorgeous spring evening, find a motorcycle to jump onto. I want to master the art of drinking shots (they always do it so smoothly in the movies). I want to remember to never again turn down a live concert I really want to see – never again forget to tell the people I love that I love them.   

And I want to follow Neil Young’s advice, “There’s a full moon risin’ – let’s go dancin’ in the light. We know where the music’s playin’ – let’s go out and feel the night.” 

So, this evening, I’m heading outside. Come dance with me.

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INSPIRED

by Mary Reiman

 2021, the year I choose to write about powerful words that rise up and lift my spirits. 

 Inspire is one of those words. Synonyms are to encourage, motivate,  energize. To celebrate the goodness and positivity of others. Close your eyes and think about that for a moment...the people who inspire you and how they enrich your life. Doesn't that calm your soul?

On this weekend of candy, flowers, and love poetry, I think about all who have inspired me...and my heart swells with joy and gratitude.

My magnanimous family inspires me every day in so many ways. I'm sure yours does also and sometimes we simply take that for granted. Going through mom's scrapbooks last year, we found some of the valentine cards family members sent her over the years. That was a gentle reminder to me why handwritten notes still matter. And it also brought back the memory of sitting at the kitchen table making valentines with construction paper, markers and ribbon. Oh how I yearned for stickers, but those were not to be found in my hometown, and purchasing online was not an option long ago! And even though I was never a great artist, my homemade cards were at least worthy of being placed in mom's scrapbook each year!

I moved to Lincoln in 1977 and as my career extended from Lincoln City Library to Randolph Elementary, Lincoln High, Zeman Elementary, Southeast High, and the LPS District Office, I had the good fortune of working with many dedicated, passionate, caring individuals who inspired me and luckily for me, became my friends. Many of you are now my Facebook friends. You are the ones who rescued me when I hit the low points, celebrated when I hit the high points, and inspired me every step of the way. 

As you celebrate this weekend, I hope you know how important you are, no matter how long it's been since I have seen you, talked to you, sent a text or written a note (remember...that's one of my new year's resolutions!). You sustained me, you taught me, you encouraged me and most importantly you inspired me...and you still do. I am a better person because of you. And you know when we see each other again, our conversation and our laughter will return immediately!

I received a card from my cousin this week. The verse was, "Today you're wished all the love this day can hold!" That is my wish for you.💖

Happy Valentine's Day!

 

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Mysteries and secrets

By JoAnne Young

The dinner plate was made in China, dishwasher safe, but not safe from the harm that came from the smashing it got when it hit the parking lot pavement. 

It broke into more than a dozen shards, scattered over multiple spaces in that lot at Holmes Lake. 

A white dinner plate, maybe more than one, that had taken on greater significance than holding food to nourish a body. It had become a receptacle to feed someone’s soul -- with words -- written in blue marker and red ink. 

 

By the time I came upon it, it had been used to channel relief of someone’s anger or frustration or sadness. 

 

Those words had been broken apart, some smudged. I could read only a few: victim, because, fake, happy, never, good, stop, harming. And one phrase: “But it’s so hard.” 

 

I spent many steps on that walk after viewing the refuse letting my imagination form a story of the journey of that plate to that parking lot, and the emotions that accompanied it. 

 

It’s why I love Lincoln’s urban lake, where people of all ages and stages, all backgrounds and purposes, go to walk, fish, bird, photograph, talk, play, share space with wildlife and water and earth. 

 

To scatter shiny stars or confetti in some kind of celebration. To tailgate on a cool evening. 

 

To leave messages. 

 

On one early December day I found one of those, wrapped in clear plastic and fastened to a bridge. It said:

 

“Think good thoughts

Words become actions

Actions become habits

Habits become character

Character becomes destiny”

 

It was signed with a heart and the names of two boys and their “proud daddy.” 

 

I’ve also found notes of despair written on rocks on the water’s edge. 

 

The stories of the lake can be profound. And sad. In early January I came across the leg of a large waterbird surrounded by icy gray and white feathers lying on the side of a hill. 

 

The mysteries and secrets of grief and healing are frequent visitors to the lake. 

 

There is a favorite spot of mine, on the southeast side across from Hyde Observatory where I watch and photograph the sunset. A perfect place for a bench, I had thought for years. 

 

Then one fall day in 2020 I walked to the spot and there it was … a bench. I had manifested a bench. But no, of course not. The story of that bench became clearer within a short time when a plaque was placed on it. 

 

It reads:

Gene’s Point 

A place for all. 

Eugene J. LeDuc 

1985 – 2020

There are so many reasons that this has become Gene’s Point. It’s a place to rest under the pines, where the sun puts on a show every evening as it bids farewell and ushers in the twilight, the time between dog and wolf, when the light is such that it becomes difficult to distinguish between a dog and a wolf, between friend and foe, the known and the unknown. 

Gene's parents, Joe and Margaret LeDuc, were walking at the lake when they got the call that changed their lives, that created in their souls a perfect place for raw emotion. 

Their 34-year-old, kind-hearted son Gene had died suddenly and unexpectedly on that Sunday in mid-April. 

 

Gene had a calling in his work in Lincoln, to help adults with disabilities, to offer them support, to serve them. Many of those he worked with didn’t get out much, and he became that surrogate to bring them to the lake and other parks, to let them breathe in the outside air and get a different view. 

Joe and Margaret’s son loved the outdoors and nature, and would take walks at the lake, to work out his stress, as many of us do. So with the memorial money that friends and family had generously donated, the LeDucs proposed an idea to Lincoln Parks Foundation Executive Director Maggie Stuckey to place the bench in his memory on that tall grass hill with a view of a connecting bridge across a narrow passage of the lake. 

 

And there will be more. With additional donations they hope to get, it will become a place where even those with mobility challenges can park close by and have a pathway to the bench, and space for those who use wheelchairs to share the beautiful view. 

 

“As the inscription says on there, we want it to be a place for all. We want it to be a place for people to reflect and pray and just be,” Joe said. 

 

Life and death and everything in between are mysteries, as we have been reminded so often in 2020. They are filled with secrets. 

 

Like smashed plates and notes on rocks and a seat at sunset at Gene LeDuc’s Point. 

 

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