Let Them Eat Cake

On the way home from the gym this morning, sweaty and feeling euphoric from my 30 minute workout on the treadmill, it occurred to me that today I should have cake. I should have cake because today is the day 3 years ago my whole life changed and I should celebrate it. 

Today is the day that I couldn’t say my name,
Today is the day that I couldn’t read, write, and 
Today is the day that my right side inexplicably went completely numb.
And today is the same kind of day -- crisp, cool, sunny, unexceptional -- the same kind of November day that I had a stroke. 

Over the last 3 years I’ve spent somedays finding myself ready to “move on”, accepting the imperfect future a brain injury provides, but I’ve also spent plenty of time wallowing in my self-pity, pissed off that I’ll never be the same Kate again and that I lost months, even years, re-learning things that I already learned in elementary school. Going through this whole experience it seems that it would be the right time to weave some sappy, histrionic phrase from quote.com to illustrate that I’ve attained some kind of nirvana after all the anguish, but that’s not really life. Rarely are things so buttoned-up. And was it all that bad? 

In my experience I’ve met so many extraordinary people that have triumphed over tragedy after the wake of their strokes. I’ve met people that are not able to walk, people that aren’t able to talk, people that aren’t able to write, read or even remember what they did yesterday. I’m amazed by peoples’ will to live, their ability to defy the odds are heroic. And so today they get cake, too.

This has been an extremely emotional journey in the last 3 years, but I’m so grateful that I’ve met so many wonderful healthcare providers, stroke survivors, and caregivers, and I wouldn’t have been able to go through it all without them. I’m still working through all of this, I still have some physical limitations to work on, but again, it is better and it’s not so bad.

But whether or not it is, I don’t care, I will think about it tomorrow. Because today we all get cake. 

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I guess since it’s the first day of school, it would be a good time to reminisce about our summer vacation. And it would be a perfect day for me to be really sappy and depressed as they walk away to their respective schools, wiping tears from my cheeks bemoaning how quickly time goes. And when they leave, I could be, in an instant, lying on the carpet of the living room in a fetal position hating the eery silence. But really, let’s take a minute here - have I turned into THAT kind of mother??

Sadly... yes. (maybe)

A (not so) long time ago in a galaxy (not too) far far away, I’ve reacted to the August school bell ring like Pavlov’s dog, immediately relishing my “me” time by either going to the pool, making some art, taking a nap, dancing in every room, you know, whatever the mood takes me. It’s only been 3 years now that I’ve been staying home with the kids, because honestly, when I was a working mother summer vacation didn’t really change my life other than changing my daycare needs. On the first day of school, and the day before that, I was still going to work within my own routine. So now as a stay at home mother, the end of summer vacation materializes with more intense emotion. And I already miss it.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the routine and stability that school gives. School allows me to count on getting some of those enjoyable hours that I need (pool time, art making, napping, dancing, etc). Usually the equation in my life was always like this: 

But what changed in my equation this year was that I actually was able to do some of those enjoyable things with the kids AT HOME. Hmmm. Who would ever think? So that time of my life, (that time that my mother told me that one day those kids aren’t going to be kids anymore so enjoy them) yes, that time is slowly coming into fruition now. Everyone is getting older and more independent, not needing me every minute of the day. So, like I mentioned, I could be really sappy and depressed that everybody’s getting older as I age one more year toward my eventual grave, it didn’t take me long to realize (by about noon, but nobody’s taking score) that I really DO enjoy by selfish time and it was probably time for the house to get quiet again. (Case in point: Do you think this essay would ever happened with kids around? Writing is one of those things that absolutely can’t happen with kids at home)

But, I did reminisce a lot today that summer vacation was over because it was definitely one of the best summer vacations I’ve ever had in recent years. I explored at lot with the boys this summer and all of our experiences were in Ohio. (I wish I could say that I have an acute affinity for the 17th state of the union, but it’s because I’m cheap).

I'm proud to say that here is the list of the places we experienced in the last 2 months:

(not in any particular order)

Old Man’s Cave

Bicentennial Park

Inniswood Park

Slate Run Historical Farm

Scioto Audubon Park

Ohio Caverns

Marblehead Lighthouse

Cedar Point

South Bass Island

Peace Memorial

Ohio State Reformatory

Alum Creek Dam

Ohio Theatre

Franklin Park Conservatory

Dawes Aboretum

COSI

Worthington Pools

Magic Mountain

also we ....

kayaked

canoed

rode on a ferry and

oh, I saw a deer come through my backyard

and I read the book, "The Year of Magical Thinking"

The really good news is that while they have to go to school now, the last time I checked the calendar summer is not over because more adventures await. 

After I take a nap.

Going automatic to manual

Recently I was asked to write something about what photography means to me on the Columbus instagram (@igerscolumbus) page. It was kind of a tough assignment, but here is the full essay provided. If you are on Instagram, you will find at @house_of_revelry.

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Lately, I’ve had my own personal renaissance with my vintage cameras and have been shooting film again. I’m getting back to basics with aperture and shutter speed, listening to the beautiful sound of the shutter clicking (and I don’t mean the synthetic shutter sound from the iPhone, I mean like a real camera), and the anticipation and trepidation of going to the lab telling yourself that you’ve probably underexposed the whole roll and see that contrary to what you expected you haven’t underexposed all the whole roll, but Yes! Yes! you’ve produced an amazing roll of art. GO ME!

Now if that preceding paragraph didn’t get you to dust your old cameras and run over to your local lab to buy some film, I don’t know what will. Put your phone down now. Go. Really, I’m serious, go!

But not until you read the rest. :-)

As a hobbyist photographer over the last 20 years, the creative process with a photograph is at best a wonderful work of art that speaks for me when I cannot. A couple of years ago, I took a self portrait and it was ugly and it truly, literally, spoke for me when I couldn’t. Two and a half years ago I suffered a stroke that left me with acute deficiencies with reading, writing and speaking, along with some other less acute deficiencies. While I obviously read, write and speak now, it left me with mild aphasia - an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. Re-learning the fundamental skills that were taught in first grade left me extremely humbled. My self portrait said everything that I was trying to say - anger, depression, lack of hope, and wondering when I was ever going to get out of bed again - without saying anything at all. And that is when photography is simply wonderful. It was then that I slowly re-learned how to use a camera, bring them all out of storage, because I really needed that tool back. And I’m still working on it.

Over the years I’ve gone through the process of loving photography and hating photography - it can be my haven and it has been my foe, but lately it’s been my savior. At the onset of the stroke I had brief paralysis on my right side and I can’t imagine if I didn’t have the function of my right hand. I’m very lucky that I am able to do anything at all.

So, whatever the camera you have - challenge it. Go back to the basics. Change your setting from automatic to manual. Photography will thank you by making you a better photographer. 

Now go buy some film! 

The Advocate

There is something very important to know if you find yourself as a patient in a hospital - the most important person in the hospital for you is your “advocate.” 

When I was admitted in the hospital, which was only two other times in my adult life to have my sons delivered, an advocate was a concept that was as familiar to me as Mandarin. And I’m not talking about the kind of advocate that works for causes such as social or racial equality, I’m talking about an advocate in the hospital working for you when you can’t. 

My husband and I collected a long list of errors around the time of my stroke - from the inability to recognize stroke symptoms to going to the emergency room late - and there are lots of essays to write about each one, but the topic of advocacy came up in my last young adult stroke support group.

After the meeting, I immediately thought about the terrible incident I had with a late-shift nurse in the hospital. First, I’d like to say that most people in the medical industry are capable and knowledgeable people who work diligently for their patients. There are also exceptional people in the medical industry and those should, if they have not already, be applauded. And just like any another industry, there are the creeps. 

Possibly I am being too hard on this nurse as I relay her character as a “battleaxe”, but at the time she was the living, breathing problem with my aphasia and I didn’t like it. It was my second night in the hospital and picture the scene, if you will: I’d had a constant, throbbing headache for over 2 weeks, living in a hospital room for the interminable time being, tethered to an IV so every time I needed to urinate I had to bring the whole contraption with me, my taste buds were messed up so I was hardly eating, I couldn’t really read, couldn’t really write, couldn’t really talk, and couldn’t really sleep much so any fortuitous sleep was relished. ALL sleep in a hospital is relished. I was on my own after Eric and my mother left to take care of the kids, and honestly, we all thought that it would be fine leaving me on my own, since the night before I was on my own, too, since Eric needed to take the kids home since kids were really not allowed in ICU. After the ICU, they had transferred me to the stroke wing, but again, we all felt that I would be in good hands with the nurses in the stroke wing. Remember, readers, I am in the “stroke wing.” Remember that. 

It was somewhere between 10 pm and midnight when the nurse woke me up by opening the fluorescent lights above me. It was customary that a nurse would ask me to state my name and birthdate when they check my vitals. I had understood this routine by the second night, but the ICU nurses where pretty lenient on me to say anything at all considering I had limited speaking skills. I would expect that a nurse from a stroke wing would have even more leniency, which left me perplexed when the nurse was shocked that I couldn’t speak my last name or my birthdate, elevating the air of the room into a fever pitch. Since I wasn’t communicating well, she was certain I had undergone another stroke, and it was frustrating the hell out of me that I couldn’t tell her that I was fine. I had even accepted her apology in my head that she had so rudely woken me up if she would’ve just shut the lights and close the room and let me sleep. But she never did understand what I needed. 

If you’ve ever been in a situation that you were being physically constrained without your will, I can only understand the terror. The inability to communicate with that nurse, and everyone else in the world for that matter, left me with a cold and strange vulnerability as the world mocked my feeble attempts of communication; the new peculiar idioms spewing out of my mouth incensed my already growing irritation. That night was the unwelcoming introduction of what would be the rest of my life. It was real terror.

After my senseless words that were left on deaf ears, they readied me to have another CT scan to prove or disprove that I had had another stroke. I watched the flurry around me as they moved the IV, transferred me to a different bed, then rolled me into the hallway on the way to the CT scan room. All the while, jailed in my damaged mind, I just wanted to say my name, Kate Sorenson, and my birthdate is January xx, 19xx. It would’ve just been so much easier, if I was able to say, my name is Kate Sorenson, and my birthdate is January xx, 19xx.

After the CT scan was done, the nurses wheeled me back to my fluorescent room, where I sat awake, looking at a generic painting that would be found in a mall, passing time by pissing all over the world in my head. When battleaxe and the doctor came to my room, they gave me the good news that I had not suffered another stroke, proving that I was right all along that the CT scan would be a fruitless exercise. I sat down on the bed, looked up the ceiling and muttered, “I told you.”

There was no energy for validation though, all I wanted was for everyone to close the lights and let me go to sleep. The next morning I was certain about two things: one, I insisted that I get a new nurse for the upcoming night and two, because I do not suffer humiliation easily I needed to get my speech back fast. I didn’t think I needed an impetus to get my speech back, but the confrontation with the nurse was everything that I needed. Speech was truly devalued before the stroke. 

Going back to the long list of errors that Eric and I had collected, patient advocacy is crucial. We’ve already moved on from the regretful ignorance; but we were in our early 40s and we were patient newbies. Like any other uninformed experiences in life, the only thing that I can take from them are the lessons. 

Patient advocacy is much more important than I realized. With the risk of sounding like a public service announcement, I urge anyone and everyone to make sure that if you are not able to communicate for yourself, that your designated patient advocate have clear communication with hospital staff. 

Awkwardness

I know that I’ve already used this blog for several years and for several reasons, but when I started writing again on here this year, I knew that there were lots of things I wanted to write about, but mostly about the experience of stroke - not just MY stroke, but the experience of stroke itself in hopes to help other stroke survivors. 

There are many topics that I want to write about in a free-flowing way specifically for this site, but some of the topics about the stroke I have already written for my book that I am working on and wanted to share. Rather than re-write a new essay about a particular topic, just as I similarly had posted finished work in a previous post, here is another excerpt from some finished work for the book.

To give you the context, I’ve just started to write chapter 4, which includes the days coming home from the hospital right after the stroke and how strangely the world felt to me. 

Enjoy.

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CHAPTER FOUR

“God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Coming home to my once familiar place, my skin was singed by the newness, and my gait was hesitant as I walked over the threshold. It wasn’t just the late afternoon sun warming the walls of the living room, a toasty aura was giving life to the rooms in a way I hadn’t remembered. Even the sounds that reverberated seemed unaccustomed to my ears. In previous years and days, I hung the pictures on the walls, I placed the furniture, I bought the house, but was it my house? Like coming home after a vacation, for a few minutes a house feels new again, but that day coming home from the hospital my familiar feelings were completely astray. The only word I could snatch in my mind to describe the circumstance was: awkward. The world had turned completely awkward.

By the time I had come back home from our road trip to the ER there were 5 long days for me to grip the shock of what the damage of my brain had entailed. As I entered into the house, it was the first time I had experienced a physical separation of my surroundings, observing all the comings and goings in the domestic happenings like a spectator. To say that it was an out-of-body experience would lose the point in the rabbit hole of religious fervor, but it certainly was an experience, an experience not particularly in control of my senses. I knew that my welcome home was what I needed to live again but the awkward world looked fresh and new as if I had been transported into another dimension and so I wondered inwardly what parts of my brain were killed from the stroke and those that were newly ignited. 

Walking

Like millions of other folks looking to get fit for the new year, I signed myself up for a new membership at a gym. It had been a few years since I regularly worked out, so it was time to tune up my aging, flaccid bod. 

In the last couple of years I was distinctly damning my stroke for either gaining weight, being out of shape, getting gray hairs and getting more wrinkles. I’ve never been so vain in my whole life. While it is true that a fair percentage of things progressed quickly right after the stroke, stroke or not, they were going to happen anyway because I am now at a point in my life that is called “middle-aged”.

Gulp.

Middle age? Yes, middle age. 

Yuck!

The last time I was at my ob-gyn, I was talking to her about my “interesting” menstrual cycles and asked, “Is that because of the stroke?” She chuckled and said, “No, that has nothing to do with the stroke. It’s pretty normal for your age.”

Excuse me? MY AGE? It has to be from the stroke, right?

Aside from the changes in my brain, it turns out I’m not so unique at all. As I think about my age - 44 - I consider my maternal grandmother: she died a couple weeks shy of her 89th birthday. So, when she was 44 years old in 1957, she was...middle-aged. Assuming I’m banking on my DNA it makes sense that I would consider myself middle-aged.

But how does my body feel? Over the last couple of years I feel like I’ve aged a decade. The fatigue hasn’t helped by making me feel like an old lady and since the stroke, I wasn’t feeling in control of my own body. I felt myself hesitant to swiftly move around, fear of another fall or fear of another dissection. Truly that is a valid fear, but I know that I can’t continue to move so stiff for the rest of my life. Late last year I started walking in a regular basis to move my body again, but of course when it started to get cold, I wasn’t walking anymore. 

So, I’m happy to be back in a gym again but wow, I forgot how sore muscles really feel like. After the first few nights of agony with jimmy-legs that almost propelled myself off the bed, the jimmy-legs have subsided and moving my body on a (somewhat) regular basis is really the ticket I needed to keep moving forward.
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To read more about my exercise after stroke, see the following article, "Walker Recovers One Step at a Time" published on the OhioHealth website as part of the Faces of Heart and Stroke Stories page. Beside my part, there are several inspirational stories. 

Photograph of the Week

THE AMERICAN SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE

Underneath every roof a story is told. 

Taken by: iPhone 5s

Location: Worthington, Ohio

Apps used: Mextures, Stackables, Snapseed

The Power of Stories

Yesterday, Eric and I were fortunate enough to take part of a panel on stroke education led by a neurologist with OhioHealth at the Go Red for Women Luncheon in Columbus and I was left with some amazing inspirational stories from some amazing women. I met one particular woman named, Christina, and we both agreed that our stories were so similar that it was like looking at each other in the mirror: we are both about the same age, we were newly married at the time of our strokes, we both have multiple kids, we both got our strokes from a dissection from our carotid artery, and we both have similar physical after effects. (She's an extremely strong woman, though because she had not just one stroke, but FOUR strokes). We spoke after the luncheon when I learned how similar our lives were, and when we were parting and I lent my hand to shake, she hugged me. That is what sharing stories is about, and it is exactly why we need to share our stories. 

We all have a story and we all need validation with our stories. Every time I talk to others about their stroke stories in the two separate support groups, I’m invariably left with comments like, “I know, me too!” or “I know, isn’t it weird?” or “Wow, that sounds just like me!” These are the kind of things that doctors will never be able to tell you and what you really should expect. It’s the community that will really help you to recover, whatever life events you have. When I was a new mother, and the blogging craze started, there were thousands of “mommy bloggers” cropping up all over the internet. I found myself at the time loving the authentic exchanges from other mothers who were writing about all of the same things. Obviously, the topic of motherhood is not a new thing, but talking and writing about it in such a global sense gave a level of sanity that we needed. So whether it’s an illness, or whatever life event you are experience, it’s these stories that help us to recover and clearly there are thousands of them out there. 

We relayed the story of my stroke to the audience at the panel (Eric spoke unbelievably well!) with candor and knowledge, the only way we knew. Eric and I have always thought that we have a “helluva story” about our lives in the last 2 years, and maybe we do. But you know what? There’s another “helluva story” out there in just the next town over. Find them, and you have struck gold for your recovery.

Somedays it's a lonely place

Two weeks ago, I had the kind of day that reminded me of very real and certain things: one, my body is not 20 years old anymore, and two, my stroke really bit me in the ass. It can be easy to forgot how much energy our brains need to do all the daily tasks that we are asking ourselves. One day not too long ago, I was telling a friend that I was feeling really tired. I was feeling the kind of tired that I could just get into bed and be there for days and I had been feeling fatigued like that for several days. And then she replied in her sarcastic tone that I love and said, “Well, hello, you had a stroke, of course you’re tired!” (We should all have a good friend like that who brings us back to reality). We continued to talk about the concept of fatigue about how even small traumatic events can, as I said, bite us in the ass.

So, two years later I’m still battling fatigue and still trying to figure out how to manage it. Two weeks ago, that week my energy level was pretty good so I went to the gym 4 days, got a lot of things around the house, and was happy with some personal work. The following week, my brain was toast. On the Tuesday morning after President’s Day, after the kids were all on their way to school at 8, I went back to bed and slept until 10:30. Subsequently, I laid in bed for another 30 minutes, made some breakfast, rested for another 30 minutes, took a shower, got dressed and it was almost 1 in the afternoon until my day really started. Before you start to feel jealous, don’t. 

I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this, or perhaps I was still in denial with several things, but I’m pretty sure I know exactly what keeps me tired: it’s my aphasia. 

I feel like it would be totally appropriate to interrupt right now with something inspired by an old political slogan by saying, “It’s the aphasia, stupid.” Proceed....

And what actually is aphasia? Aphasia is a result of a stroke or brain injury, and affects a person's ability to communicate. If you have aphasia, you may find it hard to talk, listen/understand others when they speak, read, write, use numbers and do calculations. And for me, in addition to all that, decisions are hard and multi-tasking are almost physically impossible for me. For instance, it is almost impossible for me to write and listen to something like music, television or voices at the same time. Before you start to say, “well, I can’t multi-task either,” either you have aphasia yourself, or you have no idea what I’m talking about. Noise literally hurts. Or, “well, I have terrible grammar, too,” it’s completely different from saying that you are prone to typos. Words literally change from what is in my head to what I end up writing. For one example, in my head I will want to use the word “specifically”, but then writing it, I will write the word “necessity.” Another example is that I will speak a word aloud and I have no idea for the life of me how to spell it. And it can be a little, normal word like “such” and it would take me a few minutes to say the word over and over again until I remember how to spell that. It’s strange how your brain works - long, complicated words are so much more easier to work with than all the little words.

Just like the fatigue, I’m trying to manage and work around all those communication limitations. Obviously I am reading and writing and speaking on a daily basis, but what has changed about it all is that communication was previously so commonplace, so freely granted like water and air, a very important core of what makes us human. Everyone needs to communicate. So, something that used to be so commonplace isn’t anymore. What it is now is truly an investment or a decision. Believe it or not, that’s been hard for me to realize and to exercise it. Because I still want to communicate like I used to - speak when I want, speak and listen like everyone else, and compete at everyone else’s pace. I don’t want to take the time to read an article for 30 minutes when it used to take 15. I don’t want to have to constantly fish for the right word while writing or speaking, I just want it to be there. I just don’t it to be there. 

I invested my time and energy to write this essay so that people would not take pity on me about the stroke, but because I have to physically write things down to help resolve problems and I’m hoping that I can help other readers that are struggling with the same issues. For a long time when I would tell people that I had “issues” from the stroke, I never used the term that I had “Aphasia”. And one day it finally dawned on me that I should use the right term because using the right term is closer to the acceptance. 

And denial is a river in Egypt, right? Rrrriiiiight.

So it brings me back to my lovely friend who so wickedly and wonderfully brought me back down to reality. The aphasia can be a really lonely place somedays and I have been terribly pissed off about it. Just like my friend reminded me that I had a stroke, here’s my own personal acceptance of reality - I have aphasia and it may or may not go away. I may be like this for the rest of my life. 

Woof. What a big bite. 

Photograph of the Week

NEW YORK CITY TAXICAB

Taken by: iPhone 5s

Apps used: Mextures, Snapseed

Like everyone else, I know I've made some bad decisions in my life, but I know I've made some really good decisions, too. One of the best decisions of my life? Living in New York City in my twenties. 

Coconut Dreams

A chronicle of your life can be a daunting task. More than I ever thought it would be. Putting on top of the fact that it is literally and physically hard for me to write the exhaustion can be crippling. The good news, though is that it has really helped my language skills. But, it can turn out to be just too emotional to handle, and so I shelved the memoirs that I started to write last year for the last 7 months. It must be time for me to handle the emotion again because today I went through them again by editing and writing new pages. 

The memoirs are mostly the story about my stroke and the surrounding time in the efforts to help others, but it seemed fitting to write about life before the stroke to breathe more context into the story. Right now, I've written a couple chapters about the day of the stroke and the subsequently days at the hospital, but I've been working on a couple chapters about early life because, as I'm writing, it has been extremely cathartic and healing to write about difficult parts of your life. Hence, why I needed to stop it for a while. While it can be painful, I recommend every else to take the time to do the same. 

Here is an excerpt of the rough draft of my memories of days at the beach with my mom ---- 

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Before I needed to know anything about resilience, before I knew anything about what it’s like to be a mother myself, there are some endearing memories with my mom in my childhood which would be amiss if I didn’t document them. I remember the charmed days spending my summer afternoons on the beach, and you could have found me there at any year between 1976 and 1982 dodging the jellyfish, surfing the waves with my belly board, playing hours of Marco Polo and countless jumps on the diving board.    
My mother had a part-time job at the Parks and Recreation Department in the morning and she would dutifully come home by 12:15 pm. For me, if I wasn’t at art lessons in the morning, than I would likely be in front of the T.V. watching the countless episodes of I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, Brady Bunch or Three’s Company, followed by The Price Is Right, watching the hysterics of midwest housewives bidding on $6,000 cars and $150 refrigerators. When Bob Barker teased that the showcase showdown would be on next after the commercial, I knew that mom would be on her way home soon. At home, she would likely make herself a turkey sandwich with some Ruffles and a small pickle spear with a little RC soda before we would pile into the white, ’66 Ford Mustang on the days that we would take our 6 mile trek to the beach. 
For our days at the beach, we spent them at Sea Bright, New Jersey - a sliver of land full of beach clubs, vacation bungalows, condos, restaurants and bars. My parents paid a membership in one of the beach clubs called Sea Bright Bathing Pavilion (SBBP - now Chapel Beach Club). It was one of the smaller clubs of the avenue, but charming and had everything we needed. 
Coming through the front doors of the club, there was always a welcomed wind gust from the other side of the lobby, and ocean waves echoed on the walls in the room. After picking up our locker room key from an old, cranky lady who sat in the front office, I always had to walk gingerly on the slippery spanish tile floor. There were people with wet feet coming in and out between the ocean and the pool and so I always wondered why they had built the floor with such slippery tiles because I had found myself quickly, and many others, on my butt on several occasions after running through the lobby.  
We were able to store our beach accessories and bathing suits in what we called “lockers”. The lockers were actual individual changing rooms, with floors made out of wooden planks and the doors and walls made with plywood and shingles on the roof. There was no electricity, so when you needed privacy to close the door, the sun light coming through the bottom of the door was the only light to lead you to your clothes. There were rows and rows of these cozy lockers. 
After we scampered on the hot sand, we would stake our claim on the beach by stabbing the sandy earth with our umbrella. My mom always wanted to sit as close as we could to the ocean, tickling our toes by the alternating tides. Smells of the beach remind me of coconut oil, salty air, and chlorine and whenever I get a whiff of any of those I’m immediately transported onto the beach, my childhood beach, and my mind’s eye sees the childhood beach, full of virtue and purity, looming on the horizon of the Atlantic wherever I am. Sense of smell is the curator of all things abstract as we engage with our memories. So as to describe the beach, there is nothing more logical for me but to use the sense of smell to convey the scene to others. Coconut oil. Salty air. Chlorine. Smell them and you’ll know what I mean.
At the stake we claimed in the sand we situated our chairs, towels, bags, belly boards or anything else for our day of the beach. My mother usually spent most of her day reading on the beach while I vacillated between the large, Olympic-size pool and surfing the waves, timed by the lifeguards who whistled at the 40th minute of each hour to annunciate that it was adult swim, until we heard the next whistle at the top of the hour, knowing we could play again. I would play with friends from school and friends in other schools, and sometimes I played by myself and sometimes I would talk with a lifeguard. I do recall feeling lonely sometimes or from being slighted for some ridiculous pre-pubescent spat with another friend. There really isn’t much more to expound on the statement that, girls can be mean, every other female out there knows that. But I don’t know why I gave mean back sometimes, thus churning the fiendishly vicious cycle. I was extremely competitive and I’m sure the petty behavior could have had something to do with my own personality.
Although I was good at making up my own imagination on those days while I was lonely or being dismissed, days must have been very enjoyable in my mind somehow, so whether it was my creative imagination or from the fun with friends, the gauzy dreams in my mind of our days in the beach are very easy to recall.
Nice dreams. 
It was always a nice end of the day when, my bronze skin became bronzer, the sand between my toes were showered off, the salty/chlorine mixture in my dirty blonde locks were combed, and when mom was in a good mood, the day would become even sweeter when she would finally give in to my pleas to take me to Dairy Queen on the way home. I always wanted either a simple chocolate cone or a hot fudge sundae. Always. My mom always wanted a Dilly Bar. Always. And I would watch the wind through the window of the Mustang, on the road near the banks of the Navesink, quickly licking the spiraling ice cream that looked like a helix before it melted onto the cone.
Nice dreams.
Lucky dreams.

______________________________

Photograph of the Week

I thought I'd start to post my own favorite photograph from the previous week. I've been taking pictures almost daily those days - they are all on my Instagram account. There is a button on the right margin that will bring you to all the pictures on my account. And if you aren't on Instagram, you'll see the best of the best since I'll be posting one every Monday here. 

This first photograph was captured at an antique mall that I went to over the weekend. It's a picture of a large format camera and selling at $190. It was beautiful! If I had the mad money in my pocket at the time, I would've bought it in a heartbeat! 

I thought there was some irony here that I was taking a picture of a real old camera with a really new "phone". If you look closely you can see the Apple logo in the lens. I'm still amazed by what you can do with a phone these days. And truth is, I hardly call anyone anymore! 

Throwback Thursday #tbt

In late summer 2009, when my son, CJ, was just a few weeks shy of his 8th birthday, we set out together on a warm, humid day to explore the rural areas of Delaware County, Ohio to see the sights and to take pictures. At the time, he was getting curious about Mom’s camera collection and wanted to play with them. I was looking to get some inspiration to take some more photographs, and I thought, sure, why not, take him along. I had just purchased my first Digital SLR so I wasn’t using film at all, so I lent him my Pentax 35mm, a few rolls of Kodak 200 speed and off we went together. 

I think back to that day and I think I must have been a little crazy to have brought my son to my photo exploration because we really (literally) got into the weeds by parking the car along a busy highway to take pictures of a creepy abandoned motel and vacant barns, walking through high grasses and all. We had even trespassed some private property at one point! We had drove off the property in a flurry when we saw the private property signs and laughed about it all. I could say that maybe it wasn’t my best moment of motherhood, not the best shining example of safety for my son, but really, it was one of the most memorable days that I will ever remember with him. 

And believe it or not he survived without a scratch. 

Here are some of the photographs from the day. 

How the Brain Works

Try as I may to close out this blog for good and move on to something else, I can’t seemed to shake it off. It’s like Michael Corleone in Godfather III - “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” 

So here I am. Back.

I’m not going to bore you and me with a long tedious paragraph about the inception of this blog (if you feel so inclined, I encourage you to click on the right margin and peruse the several posts over the years) and I’m not even sure what I’m going to write about for future posts! The last few posts I was sporadically posting about my stroke, and then after that I kept most of my writing offline. Over the last year I have been working on a memoir about my stroke and other things, and also working on a fictional short story and a book of my photography. As of right now, all projects are incomplete, which is fine, because while the writing skills were coming back during my recovery, I was also re-acquainting myself with my love of photography. Photography has always been a huge passion for over 20 years, but the truth is I lost a lot of creativity after the stroke, physically and emotionally, so it’s really just been recently that I have regularly picked up the camera again. 

Which brings me to how the brain works.  

There is something very terrible about brain trauma - nobody would contradict it - but there is something glorious about it, too. During the times when you are contemplating the parts of your brain that you have lost and then trying to regain them, your thoughts can be turned upside down, exposing the beautiful coiling brain matter that are now oozing with musicals, operas, sonnets, books and paintings - things that otherwise never would have been created if not for the trauma. But whatever the kind of trauma you experienced, your brain tapped into your unconscious and brought it up so eerily present that it is hard to ignore and you will see things that only you will see. 

I’m still deciding whether I should use my powers for good or evil.

Truth is, it’s been terrifying and frustrating to have to deal with this new brain that sometimes works swimmingly and then sometimes works achingly slow. The bad days are really bad, and the good days are sonnets and operas and paintings. I’d love to even it all out, but I think the brain is still working on the kinks. The good news is that good days are winning over bad days. Trauma or not trauma, aren’t we all a work in progress?