Marianne's Mini Musings

With the election season finally over, we can begin celebrating the holiday seasons in earnest.  I've been secretly listening to Christmas music since August and I've begun posting my daily gratitudes.  My gratitude for freedom of religion is so much larger than a tweat or a tiny post on Facebook.  This country was founded upon religious freedom and many have lost their very lives in defending it.  In the seventeenth century, pilgrams immigrated from Europe, seeking a land where they could practice their religion freely and as they believed, not as dictated by their government.  Many were running from the belief and practice that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens. Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics.  As with most pioneers, the pilgrams suffered illness -- scurvy, pneumonia, malnutr...

When we first moved into our urban St. Louis home, we cut down an old, dying tree and replaced it with an apple tree.  How wonderful it will be, I thought, to go into my backyard and pick a delicious crunchy and crisp apple straight from the tree.  It would remind me of my childhood in California where the memory of those apples taste far better than any real apple I've tasted since.   That old apple tree bares many memories -- the day it reached out and caught my sister's kite and entangled the string throughout its limbs, its limbs cut and used for "much needed" spankings, the pink blossoms that would spring forth each April as if the tree were cotton candy. I suppose I neglected the tree, hoping I would plant it, water it occasionally and let the sun nourish the fruit until it was ready for picking.  I knew it needed a good pruning but I was afraid I might prune it wrong and kill it so I left it to grow gnarly, each limb fighting for access to the li...

Motherhood The day is coming, the one that many women detest, the second Sunday in May.   I look forward to it -- not because I expect to put my feet up and be served breakfast in bed, or to be pampered, or spared toddler-tantrums or diapers or to be worshiped -- but because I feel like the luckiest woman in the world that I get to be a mom. I'm an old mom by many people's standards, a 42-year-old with a toddler.  Many of my friends have children who are heading to college while I'm just starting.  I hide the tiny strands of silver gray that threaten to call me Grandma and pretend that age is only a number, that I'm really only three and a half dozen. For years I dreaded the day.  I pitied myself on Sunday morning when all of the mothers of the congregation were asked to stand and receive a flower or a candy bar or some token as to say, "Here is your reward..."  Reward for what?  I wasn't sure; I was too busy (depending on the year) feeling t...