I am astounded to be reminded that the tragedy of Tiananmen Square was twenty years ago. That long?

Ok, Ok, I am finally coming to terms with the fact that the Mt. St. Helens eruption is ancient history, though I can still remember the daily drama of facemasks and shoveling ash off bridges and roofs before they collapsed.

I have even begun to relax a little bit since the reuni-fication of Germany. As I blogged about not too long ago, I am still trying to resolve my thoughts about walls.

Tiananmen was the same year as when the wall came down? Crazy. The pain and dread of young, beautiful, unarmed people standing up to an army is still so present in my consciousness. I can’t believe it is yet another one of those stories that is history.

Astonishing that the Chinese government won’t address it. They refuse to even allow dialogue. Really? Just like people believe there was no Holocaust, some people believe there was no Tiananmen? But, but, but… I still carry the pain of it! It was real! And I’m among The Ugly Americans, which normally causes us to forget. But this we remember…

And that image.

Thank you Jeff Widener for what you were able to give us. I recalled so clearly that there was a lone man standing with his hand up. But when I looked for the image, it is even more compelling: a man holding grocery bags. A symbol worthy of any activist’s respect. You can’t get more grass roots than: “I was on my way home from the market and saw the tanks and, well, something had to be done.” Mr. Widener said about his composition that he thinks it’s best not to know the identity of the man. Without knowing his name, he’s one of us, and that makes him so symbolically powerful.

I asked my partner if he remembers “that image” from the Tiananmen Square massacre? In answer, he raised his arm to stop the tanks in the exact way I remember it. He, too, has remembered the message the way I did. Isn’t that interesting?

 

 

My girlie will only be in the 6th grade for one more day. She's such a sweetie, and growing so fast. Gosh, I love that kid.


Friday morning we are driving her down to Humboldt County to be with her dad for the summer. Mark and I are going to make a mini-vacation out of it and camp in the Trinity Alps while we're up there. I don't know a parcel of land on the planet that I am more in love with than the Trinity Alps Wilderness.

My beloved friend Margaret is off in France getting her Qi aligned again after a great loss in her life. So I won't be able to visit her, but I am hoping to drop in on April and share hugs and kisses and news. My Ophelia also suffered a great loss last year and I need to check in on her spiritual health.

I'm looking forward to a couple summer months without my girl to see if it helps me get my book written. I have 45 thousand words, but I am pretty sure I need 45 thousand more so that I can edit it all down to something meaty. (Don't know if anyone's noticed, but I can write forever about only mildly interesting things....)

My garden is growing and my daughter is growing and I think I'm growing too.

I wrote to my friend Vlad this morning: I need to choose one of many topics and blog this morning!

As I assume many artists do, I keep a running list in my mind of all the projects I want to get to. Since I fancy myself a writer, my prominent list is of all the blog topics I will write. Then, before I get to them, new topics come up. And now look, it's been 10 days and I haven't written about anything!

Just off the top of my head, there's:
1) What's going on with politics, demonstrations, vandalism, violence, state TV, foreign media and all the rest in Iran! Wow! So exciting.
2) Our trip to Cali and camping and the ocean, seeing old friends over last weekend.
3) My "garden" is more like jungle, I can't believe it. So awesome. I need, need, need to put up new photos.
4) Excitement at being contacted by a new beautiful Gaia soul who reached out to me. I can't wait to get to know her better.
5) Writing about the foreclosure and loan modification process on our home, for those interested, those worried, those hopeful. Inspired by Love in the Time of Foreclosure.

...but in the interest of time, I'm simply going to copy an email I wrote to a family member this morning. It's not really a hot topic on my mind, but it's interesting, and says a little more about me.

***********
Yep Mark and I are happy together, but I need to set the record straight. You give me too much credit. It's Mark's second really significant relationship, and his total relationships he could count on his fingers. He's a pretty loyal pup.

I, on the other hand, am currently in one of the longest relationships I've ever had. Crazy, huh? I've dated over 40 people, was married and divorced THREE times. I'm always seeking, unsatisfied, restless. I always manage to hook up with selfish partners who aren't necessarily evil, but get that way when combined with my faults of enabling and playing victim and having extremely low self esteem.

My relationship life has been a total disaster. When I met Mark I was close to having completely given up, and he was feeling the same. In the beginning, we were together NOT because we thought we were dating!! ha ha. I had given up on men and he had given up on women and we both swore off marriage forever, and thought the only good thing about relationships was sex and who needs to be in a committed relationship for that? We are also both needy, clingy people, so we spent all that time together because we didn't want to be alone. And it was easy to be together because we didn't expect a damn thing from each other. We felt the same about love and the opposite sex. When Mark moved in with me in Fitchburg, we agonized about the terms of it for a long time, until we agreed that it was not a commitment, except his rent payment was a commitment and helped me continue to own the house.

However, we really liked our time together. We enjoyed each other physically. We enjoyed our talks. I loved meeting his family and learning about his life. We had these serious talks pretty often that were like "Ok, the day one of us doesn't want to be here is the day this arrangement is over." But...we continued to want to be together.

Maybe that was my secret to learning how to be happy. I needed to stop having so many irrelevant expectations.

Also, my Mark is an extremely spiritual guy. He has his days when he's a total selfish, whiny brat, but if I can wait it out, he corrects himself. And I forgive him for it, because I know I can also be a horrible bitchy moody person and he keeps forgiving me for it. He never asks me to change. He makes fun of my habits sometimes, but not in a mean, you-are-wrong, kind of way, but just because he thinks I'm amusing. Mark is loving and loyal and it takes very very little to make him feel good.

Anyhow, somewhere along the line we realized that we were in love with each other. It wasn't until after he moved to Portland. In fact, when we agreed to both move to Portland together, we still insisted to each other that the move did not commit us to each other, and that we were still free to go our separate ways in Portland if either one of us wanted to.

There did come a time when we hashed it out and made a new agreement, that we were in a committed relationship. It was a slow and painful transition. It took about a year probably. And the hurt and resentfulness that built up during the transition took another year to get worked out.

He is so wise. He told me soon after we met that he didn't think he could get to know a person until they had been close for at least 5 years. Considering that none of my marriages had lasted that long, I thought he was crazy. But it's been almost 5 years, and I am just now starting to think we've got things going on the right track between us. I am also aware that we both have a lot of work to do if we're going to keep it healthy. Urg. What a lot of work.

But it is fun feeling love for a guy after all this time. I mean, getting all giggly and happy just to see him. That's a new thing for me - to feel that way after years.

OK! Enough on that topic. I hope it wasn't tremen-dously boring. I just didn't want you to think that I'm a sweet innocent girl, floating along to guy number two and having it all work out. We have come through a lot of crap to be happy together. And that pain includes the things we have done to each other and somehow recovered from together.

Financial stress and deaths of loved ones has hit us hard in the last few years, and that makes everything worse. But I'm sure you guys know about that right now. Two of Mark's closer friends in AA have killed themselves, now his grandmother dies of cancer. Urg. I think you are an optimist like me, so here's to keeping your spirits up!

Ok, so everyone owes the IRS at one point or another. But $46,182? That's obscene. Forty-six thousand, one hundred eighty-two dollars. Right. You know, I can't even get worked up about it because that amount of money is simply... ridiculous.

And plus I'm mad at Mark. It's his bill, but since we're family it's our bill. Apparently in 2007, in an attempt to improve the outlook of his investments, he pulled all of his investments out of their diversification, and dumped them into.... well... banks.

Banks didn't do so well in 2008, if any of you didn't notice. Or 2009 either.

In the meantime, because of his method of investment - pull the money OUT, then buy new and completely different stocks - each sale registered as income. It doesn't count that he just bought more stocks. Which failed. The IRS thinks we had a great 2007 based on his stock sales.

His defense is that he used the 1040EZ and it didn't ask him any questions about his stocks, so he didn't put it down. "The EZ form? Seriously?!" ( I suddenly remembered that until his divorce was final a couple years ago, his ex's family accountant did his taxes for him every year.) And then he said he sort of forgot about the risk he took, because he was so worked up about losing his retirement savings when all the banks failed. "What?!! How can you have lost track of that extremely important detail?"

So ok, there's probably some denial going on here, probably some embarrassment, probably some legitimate bone-headedness. Needless to say, he is not allowed to do his own taxes anymore - so long as T and I are impacted.

The bottom line is: that was a really yucky thing to get in the mail.

Last week, Mark "celebrated" his one-year anniversary of being unemployed. The good news just keeps raining on in.

Here are some other things that also bite the big one:

















They are all addressed to someone different. In order to cover all the bases, I suppose. To: Mark, Crystal, Mark & Crystal, The Trulove Residence, Homeowners, etc. Unfortunately, a duplicate set of all those envelopes was also served to me. In my living room. When no one else was home to comfort me. :(

As if getting served wasn't humiliating enough. Take a look at what was inside.


But the worst part of all of it was the notice at the bottom of the letters. The precise details of how, where, and when our mortgage holder plans to unload our home. This is hard stuff to read. Very hard.



Ok, but don't worry about us. Mark's already negotiating with the IRS to figure out how to chop that number down. And Wells Fargo was encouraged by the Obama Administration to cut us a deal. We qualified for a loan modification program and they have cut our mortgage down to something we can afford just on my income.

I just wanted to update with a couple of photos.







I blogged these when they were little sprouts. I was so excited. Now look at these things. We have to keep picking and eating the beet greens, and you can't even tell. Very fun.




This is the other side of the front steps, or the other side of the hill in front of our house. We cleared the ivy from the right side, put up the retaining wall, put in the garden. Then cleared the ivy from the left side, put up a wall, put in the garden. This side hasn't has as much time in the ground and is thus less like a jungle than the other side.



My daughter insisted on watermelon, so here it is. I've never been able to make this plant survive before, but it seems happy here, so maybe we'll get some fruit after all. The peas look sad, but I did put them in late, and they should have been an early crop.

We had visitors yesterday. First a woman and her husband who said she lived in this house as a child. She said she moved away in the 1950s, when she was 10 years old. She had fun wandering around the property and looking at all the rooms and telling us what it looked like when she lived here. They currently live in Indianapolis, and warned us that because of a family reunion, we may be visited by others, since there were six children. "Well, that's why we had to leave, of course," she said. "Not enough room."

We were also visited in the evening by this couple. They wandered through the yard and then out into the alley. We must have had good bugs, because they hung around for about an hour, clucking and purring and cheeping.