Dear Reader,
Welcome to my site. I’m glad you came! If I were writing an autobiography, then these would be some of the slices of life I included. (See below). What I would not include would be the time I ate a cockroach, or so my mother says. Or the time I pinched my baby brother really, super hard to “see if he was real.” (He is still real. Real old!) Or the time Jimmy Masterson threw up his yellow-colored lunch on the floor in my first grade classroom. (That was more than a half-century ago, and the image still ranks high in my Memory of Horrors!)
Here, though, are some things you might like to know about me that you won’t find on a search engine.
Since toddler-hood, libraries have been my sanctuaries. My crib was the first, my mama tells me. Whatever on the stuffed animals… just leave the books on the mattress, back away quietly, and close the door behind you. I loved “nap” time.
Now as then, if I feel confined or restless or bored or alone or crazy – or if I’m on the verge of a next adventure but still parked in a temporary town – I go to my happy place, the library, where the stories are, where the perfume of old books is, where I can step out of reality for a little while – or for a daylong staycation.
Libraries are also the places where magic happens, whether in books or bathrooms.
A few years ago, I was living in an unforgiving cornfield in Ohio, feeling utterly lost, alone, wounded, frightened, confused, and hopeless. On the day those rotten emotions collided, I waded through tears to the library restroom. And then, mid-hiccup, I saw it. On the toilet paper holder in the handicapped stall was a blue rock with a command written on it, one that in hindsight saved my sanity – but that’s another story.
The tools I needed to be an unwitting mapmaker were in Houston libraries. The tools? Books – books in which I felt like I was the main character. Laura, Andrew Henry, Gypsy Girl, and Space Witch Tilly Ipswitch. (I’ll talk about Tilly next time).
Diarist Laura Ingalls’ Pa lugs the family by wagon at whim, from here to there and there to here. (My dad did that too). The Ingalls set up a cozy home for a while. Pick prairie flowers, dance to Pa’s fiddle, chase fireflies, play catch with a pig’s bladder… and then pack up the wagon and move on…to the shores of Silver Lake.
Hey, me too! I’ve moved by car from Texas to Mexico, island to heartland, prairie to prairie…about every two years, stuffing everything I had into my wagon. Not surprisingly in my weird life, I have literally lived by the shore of Silver Lake on the Cherokee Nation reservation, not 30 miles down the yellow brick road from where the Ingalls family built a one-room cabin measuring about 8-feet by 10-feet. When I was charting the places I’ve lived – from Michigan to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico – I saw that my journey was the same as Monarch butterflies! Wherever I lived, these travelers flew overhead. Just wow.
While I had an address in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, I discovered the Tall Grass Prairie Nature Conservancy down the road on Osage Nation land. It is a land without fences. What one can see there now is what Laura would have seen – big bowl of grassland and sky. What happened on its graveled road from Pawhuska, OK (where the Pioneer Woman lives) to Sedan, Kansas (where the Yellow Brick Road is) was one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments …
because you just might end up losing all your fear, moving to Mexico, and starting a found called The Oz Project. Its mission was based on Einstein’s words: “Your imagination is a preview of coming attractions.” So we took children in orphanages and poor rural areas up in hot air balloons, where the realm of the rainbow is, where dreams begin and anything is possible.
GYPSY GIRLS BEST SHOES by Anne Rockwell — No one has time to watch the little girl dance in her best shoes. Red shoes. Ultimately, she shrugs her shoulders and dances for herself. Turns out, there were a few others quietly watching: some schoolchildren, a teacher, a squirrel or two. They thought she was wonderful, and before long, she believed it too.
Then she grew up, gave her hand-glittered red shoes to her daughter, Elizabeth Rose, and decided to go barefoot in Port Aransas, Texas, where she read to pirates’ parrots, lived on a yacht named The Maiden America (a big sailboat named by the previous owner), and where she organized a human peace symbol for Earth Day, 2016 (and jumped out of a plane in a mermaid costume to draw media attention to the environment. It worked!)
ANDREW HENRY’S MEADOW, by Doris Burns.
This is my favorite children’s book. Ever since I first opened it in 1970, I’ve wanted Andrew Henry to build a house for me, my very own house, a fairytale house where garish colors and mismatched chairs are a mainstay.
Andrew is a boy consumed with vision, talent, and energy. He is an inventor of a kitchen helicopter, a living room eagle’s cage, a merry-go-round propelled by his sisters’ sewing machine, and robo-maids. His contraptions were not met by his family with the awe they deserved!
His solution is to strike out on his own. In the meadow, he builds a little house according to his own specifications – no limitations! Soon, Alice Burdock, toting her birds in cages, arrives.
“Andrew Henry, will you build me a house too?”
“Sure thing,” Andrew Henry said. And he does – a treehouse with feeding stations and a bird’s eye view of the meadow.
Eventually, with Andrew Henry as contractor, all the kids in the ‘hood have unintentionally created a community, harmonic and organic. It’s a fun place, a pretty place, a friendly place, a happy place, a safe place with an unspoken foundation of “love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Leviticus 19:18)
My dream is to create an intentional community or live in one. In Texas. Andrew Henry told me this more than a half century ago (at the same time Jimmy Masterson lost his lunch in my first classroom). Hmm… what should I call it?
My son, James, will be the contractor. Dyslexia was a factor in his choice to study architecture on the job instead of formally.
Like Andrew Henry’s, my community will include others with their small houses designed just the way they like them.
Many geniuses with the gift of dyslexia – like Einstein and DREAM SOMETHING BIG’s Simon Rodia – envision possibilities far outside of the box. Sometimes they are so far out, people call the inventor ‘crazy.’ If you’re like Einstein, Rodia, Andrew and others, take ‘crazy’ as a compliment and say thank you. I know without doubt Andrew Henry opened his gift as if every day was Christmas.
If I could have imagined as a little girl that one day I could check out my own books from libraries worldwide, I would have smiled the kind of smile that makes people wonder, What’s up with her?
And where’d she get those shoes?
