Life in the Petri Dish

          I wouldn't know "normal" if it bit me in the butt!!!  However, I do know love, compassion, empathy, regret, rage, disappointment and its opposing force contentment.

         I know that being "unforgiving" will bind you to the person you cannot bring yourself to forgive. I know that its opponent "forgiveness" is the flip side of the same coin.  Forgiveness, is the freeing side, the deal breaker, and the restorer of lost time.

         I know that laughter and humor can make the worst situations bearable.

         I know I have a promise to keep.  While my mother was dying of Alzheimer's, I promised her that I would write her story.  Generations from now, I want our descendants to know "Monya", "Miss Betty", "Betty Lou" and "Mama".  I want them to know her as we did. Also to know her story as I have just found out over the past two years.  There were so many secrets. It may not matter to anyone else, but it matters to me.  A promise made is a promise kept.

        I will continue to write my blog "It Doesn't Take Much to Make me Happy".  In addition I will begin writing another blog entitled,  "In the Petri Dish"  I named it that because, this blog is a growing organism.  I really don't know the outcome.  I just know it wants to be written.  And I would really like to sleep again.  The 2.a.m. rendezvous are nice but just a little bit tiring on a morning person.  So I will write and tell her story---really our story.

       As I write more and more, I find that being from the South has affected my life more than I ever imagined.  When I go "home" to Kentucky I feel differently.  I am a part of something that is gone.  I have no home there anymore.  I have my father, friends and family but something is missing. 

       As soon as I cross the Kentucky State Line, always accompanied by the blaring of my horn,  I feel unhinged.  All the old familiar feelings rise to the surface, almost as fast as the Mississippi River is rising back there now.  Some feelings are good and others stink like rotten flesh. However, they are always waiting for me, ready to step back in time--whether I want to or not.

      I was raised on fried chicken, biscuits and  gravy and lies---lots and lots of lies.  Over the course of the past two years, most of the lies have been settled, the truth told, I guess.  There are a few "holes" left in my life that will have to be addressed one day---but not today and not now.  I remain on a journey of learning, accepting, forgiving and most of all loving.

      Although my mother was a private person, I am telling her story. She had an amazing life and was much stronger than I ever knew or gave her credit for being. The last 4 or 5 years of her life were spent in a long, slow madness.  She permanently forgot a part of her life every day.  There was nothing we could do to stop it. So we had to accommodate the situation as best we could. We were all along for the ride, with no control of the reigns.  The new blog will be that story.  Some stories, I will never forget--hopefully.  Others find me in the middle of the night, in an old letter, I didn't know I had  or in a photograph. There are stories that family members have filled me in on----explained the "holes" in my life.

     You are invited to join me in this new adventure. The blog site hasn't been officially set up but will be soon. The name will be "Life in a Petri Dish".  I look forward to my new adventure and I invite my friends to come with me.