March 30, 1997 - Happy Easter dot com

~~Happy Easter dot com~~

Sunday, March 30, 1997, 10:00 a.m.

I was beginning to think that March would be the first month completely devoid of dreams since I started writing this journal. I did remember one near the beginning of the month, but it was one I couldn't record here. [There is something wonderful going on, but I can't talk about it here . . . Not really, I'm just being perverse.] Anyway, I had a dream right after I went to sleep last night and I woke up enough to record it, so March didn't turn out to be a dreamless month, after all. Another Cajun Dream.

7:00 p.m.

Big Eggs We went out and had lunch with my parents and the rest of my family who live here (my brother, his wife and their two children, and my sister and her two daughters), then Bob came home to work on the books shortly after lunch and I stayed until around 5:00. As my brother was getting ready to leave with his kids in the middle of the afternoon, his son, Kristopher, got started singing "Yankee Doodle." In the beginning, he couldn't remember the words, but then when we laughed, he started making up silly words. "Yankee Doodle went to London, riding on a chicken . . ." soon progressed to "riding on Grandpa's back," and "riding on Grandma . . ." The funniest one ended with him putting "duck feathers" in his cap, ". . . and called it quackaroni."

My dad was also in a fine mood, appending "dot com" to every other sentence, and referring to me as "willa dot com." He said he's getting tired of hearing that at the end of every commercial and television program, and that it's being ingrained into his thought processes. It was pretty funny. My sister quizzed me about the meaning of web acronyms: "What does HTTP mean?" "URL?" "What about HTML?" She said, "It's all very confusing," and my dad said, "How do you think I feel? . . . dot com."

As I was driving down the street this morning on my way to my parents' house, I passed the house at the end of the street, the one that Bob refers to as "Tobacco Road," the one with the painted wooden cut-outs in the yard. I guess they really love that little boy peeing, and his faithful bulldog companion, because now they're painted their likenesses on the side of their pick-up truck. Complete with stream and puddle. I'd sneak up and take a picture to post here, but I think it's probably a given that this family is armed . . .

Yesterday afternoon I went out to fill the birdfeeders and bird bath and noticed that I have a gorgeous carpet of violets in what will be my flower bed a little later in the spring. I guess the daffodils froze, because I've never had more than the two blooms I had early in the season, but lots of other things are coming up now. The lilies are up, and lots of herbs are beginning to send up green shoots. I spent about an hour picking up fallen leaves and cutting off some of the dead plants from last winter, and started feeling excited about digging in the soil again. As I gathered up the winter's debris, the scent of spearmint wafted up to me, making me really anxious to get the herb garden started again. Next weekend may be a nursery weekend, probably along with everyone else in the city.

My mother sent me home with a pot of several poppy plants. I've tried to grow poppies for several years, and I can get them to come up from seed, but they always die before they produce flowers. My mom is determined that I have them, though, and maybe this year we'll succeed.

From "The Lessons of Love:"

That evening we watched Joseph Campbell on television. He talks about God, about loving God. He says when we open to loving a person, whether that person is a spouse, friend, or child, we open our hearts to loving God. He says when we let someone love us, we're opening our hearts to God's love. He says the acts are the same.
I decide that loving isn't for the faint. It's for the courageous.
~ Melody Beattie, "The Lessons of Love"

I liked the part about "letting someone love us." Too many times we harden ourselves against love, against vulnerability, not only not allowing ourselves to love, but also not allowing ourselves to be loved. It reminds me of the way that so many of us respond to compliments--"Oh, thank you, but . . ." "Your hair looks nice today." "Oh, thank you, but I really need to get it cut." "I like that dress." "Oh, thank you, but it's really old." "You did a good job on that report." "Oh, thank you, but I could have done better." When we open our hearts we need to not only open them so that love can go out, we need to open them so that love can come in. It takes courage to be accepting of love, and not to push it away. It takes courage to just say, "Thank you."

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