Sally Gerard

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Another short excerpt:

They’d known each other once, some time ago. Finding themselves seated together at a dinner some mutual friends had hosted, they’d enjoyed the evening and that first “getting to know you” over shared conversation and dipping chunks of crusty sourdough bread in the hot cheese fondue.

Over the next months they met for coffee, gone on some walks around the parks, and learned more about each other. She brought him along to a family picnic where he seemed to have a good time with her brothers. And she went with him to the big city for a “fancy” dinner out with his parents and siblings.

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Things got serious. And then everything ended. Months passed, and then years. One spring day, she was visiting friends out-of-state and, on a planned outing to a lake, she saw him. What was he doing here?She thought she’d let it all go. He felt a familiar stab in his belly when he met her eyes. They never spoke.

Nine months later, she was fifty miles from home, helping one of her clients organize goals for a next step. In a back corner of the local café, they sat in a booth going over action plans, when the little bell on the door jingled. Their eyes met when she looked up at the sound. Really? Again?

Did she believe in serendipity? She felt a force, gentle, but persistent and continued to ignore it…

It was a deliciously foggy wet Sunday. I borrowed a dragon from the neighbors, so I could fly off to a favorite sandy spot for a picnic lunch. Felago is a bright iridescent blue in the sunshine but turns to a steel gray color in its absence. Wanting to blend in, I dressed in thick flannel-lined grey canvas pants, treated to repel water and topped it with a cable knit woolen sweater and a lined black oil skin.

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I’ve borrowed Felago before, the neighbors were not really into him and I think they wished I would just make an offer and take him off their hands, and I might. I packed the leftover ham and beans, still hot in a thermos and some almond butter cookies I’d made and that I knew were a treat for the dragon.

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Felago was not large, as dragons go, but he still had to kind of bend down, so I could use his front leg to climb up on his back. Smooth just at the base of his neck behind the joint where his leg joined, I balanced easily as he took off, dancing a few steps and lofting himself into the gray mist.

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Life coach. Can’t we all use one? The internet says that life coach is supposed to help you reach your full potential. Sweet! A life coach can look at a broad picture objectively. They can work with you to help you figure out what you want and how to get there. Nice!

And then there is accountability. A life coach won’t let you off the hook. You can’t nod and say, “yes, that’s what I want,” and then not follow through. You can’t continue to say you’ll do something and never get around to it because of this, that, or the other thing that’s holding you back. Fear is a powerful brick wall. But knowing that life coach is there and is going to show up and look at progress with you should be motivating.

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Do we need a life coach because we’ve lost touch with our own wisdom? Because too many things stop us in our tracks? Are we so afraid of making the wrong decision, choice, or move that we don’t do anything? Because we have no friends close enough to confide our deepest selves too? Have we forgotten how to listen, relate, have communion and walk side-by-side to reach our next milestone?

I don’t know the answers, but I’m all for pairing up as life coaches.

Sometimes our dreams are stranger than some story we might write, but at the same time, they can be utterly realistic. I went out to do the chores, which meant in this particular dream, feeding the heifers, checking the stock tank, and feeding the horses. Making sure I hooked the wires back, I walked around the barn to where the horses were in the north pasture. Sliding open my pocket knife, I cut the strings and flung the flakes of hay over the fence. I don’t normally feed this way, but it seemed the right thing to do in the dream.

Then I saw them. Thirty-five heifers (don’t ask me why 35) were running pell-mell for the gate that was open across our road. Now, our yard is not fenced in, nor do we have a gate that opens and closes where you would turn into our yard. But, it turns out that for this dream it was a good thing we did.

All but five of the heifers turned at the gate and ran back through the yard. The other five headed up and into the twist of hills just west of our house. Um, yah, there are no hills there, but they disappeared into them anyway. I stood there by the horses and thought hard about whether or not I’d actually hooked those wires and how much trouble I was going to be in because those five heifers were running wild in the hills. I remember seeing the last one kind of kick up her heels in freedom as she vanished beyond my reach.

In the dream, I went through various scenarios for how I could manage to get them all back in the pasture before my husband got home. I opened a gate into a corral and decided those in the yard would find their way as somehow, I’d already managed to spread some hay in that corral, all while I stood by those horses. Then I decided that a pick-up full of hay and cattle treats would bring those five renegades back to the yard gate begging to get in. Then I woke up, content that I’d done a fine job gathering them all back home.

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After so many hot days, we finally experienced a little cool down complete with a stout north wind. It felt like heaven. The leaves have pretty much left the trees, the vine on the old tower is a bright red, burnishing in the evening sun. Fall made an appearance and I hope it stays for a while. I love winter and snow, but the easy cool today was a welcome breath.

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Our hay is in the loft to feed over the winter, my garden is still producing zucchini, and the spaghetti squash is ready to come in-maybe this weekend. We have our candy supply in for Halloween. Who comes out this far, you ask? Well, it never hurts to be prepared, right?!

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The company I teach for online has a health-oriented department to, well, help online employees stay active and healthy in all aspects including physically, mentally, and spiritually. This department sends out a monthly newsletter with tips and stories and resources that I usually find pretty helpful, if even only to get a break from grading or course set-up by reading something completely different.

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They also sponsor “challenges” a couple of times a year, complete with prizes and some healthy competition to keep everyone who signs up in the game. For a month during August and half of September, it was a step challenge. As you accumulated steps, a little graphic took you around the world and gave you information based in each location on earth. And, there were prizes.

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I’ve never once won a prize in their random drawing until now.

I got an email from the challenge organizers that I had won a prize and I would receive it in the mail sometime in the next couple of weeks. That’s all it said. Any guesses as to what the prize might be?

Why do grey skies make everything seem greener, or at least make the green deeper somehow? They’re like the rumble bars they put on the road to remind you, firmly, to slow down and pay attention. Traveling along the highways, it’s easy to let everything just slide by out the windows, but then those grey skies darken and cause you to look up and out at what made you notice the little shift in light. That is when all the green hits you upside the head and you say, or well I do, “Wow. That is so beautiful.”

There are other subtle shifts that have the same effect:  the sunlight making the brown-red feathers of the bird visitor who landed on my feeder catches my eye through the window when I’m caught up in my work, a jack-rabbit I thought was just a rock on the side of the road hops out in front of me pulling me out of the podcast I was listening to as I ran, or the sweet memory of kolace at Sokol Hall as I strolled by the guy selling them at the antique farm show. The middle was always the best part.

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Diving into my second to last course for my master’s in creative writing, I shall be forced to consider my “professional persona.” This is, more than likely, a good thing and I wonder where I will end up with it. I’m a pretty simple person. I prefer long runs with a sky full of stars and little light from the moon. I like nothing better than brushing my horse, saddling, and setting off with a friend, or just my horse, for several hours of riding, a few Pull ‘n’ Peels stuffed into my pocket. On pack trips, I always have a small journal stuffed in my bag, so I can write by flashlight in my tent. Long hikes in summer feed my soul and spirit, followed by ice-cream to refuel (it’s on the list of top ways to refuel in some highly respectable medical journal, trust me). I wrote my first novel, and much of the second one in the top of a barn. So, professional persona?

Like every course I’ve taken in this program so far, I know that at the end of ten weeks I will have figured it out. But here, on the threshold of the beginning, there is a wide chasm, the trail covered in slick snow where one misstep would send you careening down into a steep canyon never to be seen again, at least in one piece. In the meantime, I’ll just keep dancing in the barn loft.

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Life can get so crazy sometimes. I keep a printed calendar on my desk by my computer and strike through each item each day with a highlighter when I’ve completed it. I update the calendar every Friday afternoon and print it for the next week. I like having that hard copy next to me, rather than having to get into something on my computer to see if I’ve done everything. It’s physical, right in front of me, and when it turns to highlighted, it helps me stay on track.

Or, it can be a total train wreck. Sometimes life gets in the way, like this week with not one “writing-500 words” highlighted as complete, not one “yoga” highlighted as complete, and several other tasks undone. It is our fall launch time though and I’ve had my hands full setting up courses, welcoming new students, helping new students understand how to work our platform, calming anxious parents (times a million), oh, and grading, grading, grading. All this while I try to maintain a personal presence in each and every course, connect with and get to know my students, and try to begin to form community in each course so students feel like I’m a real person and I see them and hear them and care about them, which I do.

So, while I’ve posted links to free PDFs of required novels my students need, made videos about how to do class discussions for them, read their funny and touching first memoir assignments, tackled the strengths and weaknesses in my AP students first essays, redirected some lost students back to unit one from their attempt to start with the last unit, and worked hard to find new Laffy Taffy jokes (I really dislike the banana flavor), my daily writing has gone by the wayside. Fortunately, there is always tomorrow.