Today is the first anniversary of the death of Jim Lindsay, my good friend Nancy’s soulmate. I hadn’t realized it had been this long until I saw her post on Facebook. A post that brought me once again to tears.

To me, it seems like yesterday that news of Jim’s terrible illness and subsequent death reached me through a series of texts from a mutual friend. But the sorrow I see in Nancy’s eyes, and the pain in her voice every time she speaks his name lets me know that to her, Jim has been gone for what seems like an eternity.

Truthfully, I didn’t know Jim very well. The first time I met him, he was living in a genuine teepee while working with my husband at a refuel outage at a nuclear plant. I found him to be an extremely fascinating man.

Jim smoked a pipe, knew how to tie all sorts of knots, live on a shoestring, and loved his wilderness cabin in Montana where he enjoyed beautiful vistas of forested mountains from his back porch. And of course, he loved Nancy.

We weep with those who weep because love binds our hearts in inexplicable ways and causes a measure of their pain to become our own. This is part of friendship, of family. Of love.

Jim Lindsay

November 24, 1951-

September 29, 2015

We celebrate your life, Jim. Thanks for sharing it with us.

My double purple trumpet flowers are by far the most beautiful feature of my little garden. This morning I thought I’d spied a rare triple bloom about to open and pushed aside two stalks of leaves and flowers to take a closer look.

Without warning, a stink bug from hell dive-bombed past my ear with a sound like that of a chinook helicopter, and another one took off, crossing my field of vision just inches from my face. Auuuggghhh, I screamed, lunatic style, then flailed my arms around my head while high-stepping it, double-time, back into the house.

It wasn’t the first time a bug had chased me from my garden. Probably won’t be the last. The shame of it is, stink bugs don’t bite or sting, and I know I shouldn’t be afraid of them.

It makes me wonder how many stink bugs I’ve allowed to come between me and things I want to enjoy?

I recently took a trip to Montana to visit a friend who lives near the Bitterroot Mountains. Nancy’s a good driver, but the fear of heights kept me from enjoying the breathtaking views as we drove the rural mountain roads through clean, fresh air and Ponderosa Pines. I’m calling STINK BUG on that fear.

Some fears I have are many years old. Like the fear of (go ahead and laugh) the dark, especially the fear of dangling my feet off the bed in the blackness of the night.

But other fears are relatively new – or at least more pronounced than they used to be. Like the fear of criticism or rejection. As a writer, I’m elated when my novels get good reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, and brought to a low place by bad or mediocre ones. This fear has no basis. My self worth isn’t determined by what other people think of me or my work. I’m throwing the STINK BUG flag on that fear.

I’m sick and tired of the myriad of unmerited fears that make me run off screaming with arms flailing and feet stomping. So from now on, when I go to the garden, I’m going to stand my ground. And if one of those darn six-legged monsters even thinks of looking at me crooked, I’m going to yell STINK BUG and keep looking for that triple bloom if it kills me.

Or, gulp… Run.

The flood of 2016 in S.E. Louisiana started with rain and one of the worst electrical storms I’ve ever experienced in the Baton Rouge area. The zaps of lightening sounded like an artillery attack. The Comite and Amite rivers overflowed their banks, and bayous that normally drained into them had nowhere to go, backed up, and also overflowed. Land that was NOT in a FEMA-designated flood zone flooded. People narrowly escaped with their lives and the clothes on their backs.

My husband and I were in a state of shock as we watched the devastation unfolding on TV. The flooding came as a surprise, just as it did with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Only, this flooding wasn’t caused by a hurricane. A deluge of rain caused this catastrophic event. Rain. Lots, and lots of rain.

So—and here’s the whole point to this blog post—what can YOU do to help others when a disaster like this happens? Plenty.

• You say you have faith? Put it to practice and ask God to show you what you should do to help.
• Realize that you can’t help everyone, but you can help ONE. Or two, or three…
• Keep your eyes on the local news. They will tell you where the shelters are and what’s needed at each one. You don’t have to buy a mountain of supplies – just what you can afford. Every bit helps.
• Love animals? Find a shelter where lost and found dogs and cats are housed, and volunteer to walk the dogs or sit and sooth a frightened cat.
• Volunteer to be a Red Cross worker. If this is your calling, sign up online and be ready when the call for help comes.
• Help a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend, whose house is damaged. Maybe you have zero skills in carpentry, electrical, construction, etc. But you can swing a hammer and help bust out wet drywall, use a flat shovel to scrape up flooring, or help roll up wet carpeting and help kick it to the curb.
• Fix sandwiches, pack a cooler with water, and bring them to that friend’s house when you go to help.
• Do you have a washer and dryer? You could help by doing your friend’s laundry. Clothes that have been through a flood need to be washed and dried quickly before they become moldy.
• My mother-in-law always used to say she felt like everything was in control if she had everything she needed to make spaghetti. Good idea. What do you have in your cabinets that you could use to make a meal for someone? It’ll mean a lot to the recipient.
• Here’s my favorite. Perfect the art of the hug. Yes, the hug. Hold that person a couple of seconds longer than you normally would. Let your heart beat next to theirs for a while. Whisper something in their ear – “I’m sorry you’re going through this…” Let them know you care. Let them FEEL it.

I grew up in an apartment on the top floor of a South Bronx tenement building. The “front” window overlooked 148th street, and the “back” window overlooked an alleyway that was teeming with stray cats. Our much-loved house cat – a black and white beauty that eventually lived to the ripe old age of seventeen – was born in the alley, but enjoyed a safe, healthy, and well-fed life in our house.

As kids, my older brother Tommy and I would often sit out on the fire escape looking down and feeling sorry for the hungry cats that wandered the brick and mortar canyons between buildings. We didn’t want to sit idly and let them starve but weren’t exactly sure how to help them.

After tossing around a few ideas, we decided to form The Pussycat Club of America, an organization dedicated to filling the bellies of hungry alley cats. Tommy claimed the position of President and appointed me his VP. I asked if my best friend could join. But typical of a natural-born politician, Tommy said no because he didn’t want anybody to join the club who could later vote him out of office.

We dumped canned cat food onto a square of Saran Wrap, tied a string to each corner like an inverted parachute, and lowered the food four stories until it came to rest on the ground. We called “here, kitty, kitty, kitty” from our window, and a couple of cats came and gobbled the food we’d provided. A few more cats came for the next batch, and by the time we’d delivered a few loads, we had attracted quite a crowd.

All was going well until we overloaded the Saran Wrap. It tore somewhere around the second floor, and rained mushy food over the faces of twenty or more meowing cats who were looking up, waiting for more. A massive cat-brawl broke out. Windows flew open and tenants stuck their heads out to see what was going on in the alley. The melee of screeches and yowls lasted a good five minutes before tangles of fur disbursed and cats ran or limped away to lick their cat-food flavored wounds.

Discouraged, we tore up the club identification cards we had made and disbanded The Pussycat Club of America.

I often look back on the memory of those two scrawny kids with a bit of pride in my heart. We were visionaries who, armed with nothing but a couple of cans of cat food, Saran Wrap, string, and compassion, tried to make a difference in this world.

I was just thinking… Maybe, in light of our experience as executives in a national organization, Tommy and I should run for President and Vice President of the United States.

Anybody care to nominate us?

Hello? Anybody out there?

Synopsis:

“For her fifteenth birthday, Anoira White’s step-mother bought her a boyfriend.”

So begins the coming-of-age tale of Ann, a young girl with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome growing up under the thumb of her high maintenance step-mother, Hilde. When Hilde forces Ann to enter a beauty pageant in order to continue to be with her friends, Ann will put everything on the line in order to stand up for them- and for herself. But will her hard work be enough to overcome the monumental hurdle of an undiagnosed mental disorder? Or will Ann discover a new way in which to accept the way she was made?

The third installment of the ‘Once Upon a Reality’ series, The Thing About Apples is a modern re-telling of Snow White that re-defines what it means to be ‘fairest in the land’.

Author Bio:

Elizabeth Rose is the fiction alias of a twenty-something Colorado native with a double major in Religious Studies and English. Till the Last Petal Falls, her first full-length novel, was published in 2013. It is the beginning of the Once Upon a Reality series. She has also had several short works published through eLectio publishing, Hirschworth magazine and Crack the Spine.

Mini-Interview:
1. Why a teenage heroine for this one, when the first two books have older women in them?
The goal of the series as a whole has always been to use fairy-tales as a framework within which to talk about the experience of being a woman in the here and now. I don’t think you can really have a well-rounded discussion about that without throwing in the coming-of-age experience- puberty is a tough time for everyone, and Ann has some specific challenges that both make her experience unique, and also make her relatable to readers of any age.
2. If you could spend time with a character from The Thing About Apples, who would it be?
Hunter. He’s a really good guy, and I think he’d be an amazing friend. Though I’d probably want him to have gotten a little bit older.
3. Pen, Typewriter, or Computer?
I write my first drafts all my hand, and then I type them up on my laptop. Then I print them off, hand-edit them, and type them up again. From then on it’s all via computer.
4. Who is your favorite author?
Even though I write nothing like him, my favorite will always be Sir. Terry Pratchett.
5. What’s the next fairy-tale planned for the series?
The next one will be a modern-day Cinderella featuring a girl who was a teen mother trying to get herself through college. I will most likely start drafting on that sometime early in 2017, after all the hoopla of getting married in December passes.

Website: www.thesingingroses.com