Norma's Wanderings around a small section of Montana |
PROMPT May 27th Write about your first _______. (You fill in the blank. Ex: first car, first job, first crush, first week at college, etc) I thought for a bit about this prompt. Then I decided I would do a different take. I decided to write about the 'lasts' in my life. My last husband and my last house and home. I know I saved the best for last. I had two husbands before my current love. Let's just say I'm a slow learner. But he's a keeper and he is definitely the love of my life and the last love I'll ever have. I’ve lived in quite a few different homes. I counted them at one time. I decided to start keeping track; you know, for fits and giggles. I thought I still had that list, but it's nowhere to be found. Darn. It is in the double digits, that I know. We decided to buy this small house in Roundup, Montana. The first time we drove through this small burg we were less than impressed. It struck us as sad and depressed. But maybe that was our state at the time. We wanted to be out in the country, not in a town. But here we are, smack in the middle of a small Montana town, where God has seen fit to put us. So we are making the best of it. We purchased this two-bedroom, century-old home on a small lot with our savings. Since we bought it, we’ve been remodeling to make it reflect more the spirit of the time in which it was built. Our home shows up in the old photos from the 1920s. It has gone through some changes, but the main bones are still here and still sturdy. When we remodeled the dining room we found some items in the wall, a child’s school book and a ball from the ’20s. I put them in my memory box. With a bit of help, but mainly our own hard work, we’ve redone the woodwork, installed better windows, remodeled the bathroom, and insulated the crap out of this place to help keep out the winter winds. The kitchen was remodeled before we moved in, we just replaced the dated countertops. So we live our quiet little lives in this humble little town. A place where people still wave to you as you walk by, as you drive down the street, no matter if they know you or not. This town is a tight-knit community of kind-hearted people with generous hearts. But that’s the attitude of most of the small towns in Montana. We love living in Big Sky country. |
PROMPT May 26th Make a list of your top five short term goals and a separate list of your top five long term goals. What steps will you take to achieve them? This reminds me of the 'What did you do on your summer vacation?" assignment at school. What do you write about this? A short version came to me last night at midnight, Short Term: Wake up in the morning Make the bed each day Read the Bible each day Walk each day Write something each day Long Term: Do each of the Short Term goals for the rest of my life. I mean, like Robert Waltz said, at my age, what else is there? I don’t drink, so alcohol is out. I don’t do drugs, so that is out. I don't work at a real job anymore, so no climbing that ladder. Social goals? Try to be a nice person. So I’ll just live my life with my husband the best I can. I’ll go to church as often as I can. I’ll try to write as much as I can. I’ll try to be the best person I can be. I’ll just try to live as long as I can. There. That’s five. Done. |
PROMPT May 25th Write about the most exciting, odd, or valuable thing you’ve found on the ground or abandoned on the side of the road. Invent a story about where the object came from and who owned it before you found it. Like Robert Waltz wrote, money. I live near the 'superhighway' to the high school. Kids drive and walk by me all the time. They are careless, it seems, with their riches. I am frequently the recipient of a $20, $10, $5, $1 and more often loose change. Half goes to church, half to me as the lucky finder. I walked behind one person on my noon walk. I actually saw the money fall from their backpack. Before I could yell to the person, he/she turned around and picked it up. I was glad. Don’t want to lose your lunch money. But as I walked further, there were still a few coins. I pocketed them since the person was now around the corner. Hubby and I, when on our RV adventure, tried to sell Christmas trees in Phoenix. We recruited some young people to help. This one young man would come to work every day with some money to buy snacks, sodas, the usual stuff. When he got back from the store, he would look at his change and throw the pennies on the ground. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Getting rid of the pennies.” He replied, “You know if you have enough, you have a dollar.” “They’re stupid. Not worth anything.” Again we said, “But if you save them, they add up.” He kept throwing them on the ground. We kept picking them up. Evidently no one ever told him ‘A penny save is a penny earned.” Queen NormaJean II GreenEyes |
PROMPT May 24th Write about a movie or television show you watched recently that blew you away. What lessons can you learn from the show and incorporate into your own writing? I used to watch ‘The Walking Dead’ every week. I enjoyed the early years of that drama. They had a great ensemble cast. It was truly the good guys versus the bad guys. All the dystopian world we fear will come to pass. Zombies and world collapse. How are we to survive without a government and medical care and food supply and most of all, petroleum products. But then somewhere along the line, they started veering off the path. It became more of a soap opera than it was before. The well-defined characters and drama became all muddled. I know you cannot keep a TV show going for years and years before you have to change it up a bit. But I feel cheated. I feel it has ‘jumped the shark’, as they say. The characters have morphed and changed too much, probably to reach out to their perceived audience. The plot lines are going down strange and wandering paths. I’m not sure what the writers think each week with these episodes. I know the original idea came from the graphic novel of the same name. It cannot be easy to transfer the thoughts of comics to the screen. Something has to be lost in translation. So I no longer watch that show, ’The Walking Dead’ or its evil spawn ‘Fear the Walking Dead’, ‘Fear the Walking Dead The World Beyond’, and then there is the talk show that dissects each episode, ‘The Talking Dead’. That used to rule my Sunday night. But I can change, just as television is changing. More and more people want to watch movies, series, bits and bobs on their internet devices. I’m just glad I’m not in charge. I guess you ‘make hay while the sun shines’. Oh the cliches I can think of here. So this show will eventually fall away, as all things do. There is a cult following, just like there was for ‘Star Trek’, for 'Happy Days’, for 'The Waltons’, for ‘Little House on the Prairie’. I know I am showing my bias and age with those old shows. But how I long to go back to those innocent times. Beam me back, Scotty! |
PROMPT May 23rd Write about nicknames. What nicknames do you have for people in your life? What nicknames do others use to refer to you? Do any of these names have an interesting story for how they came to be? I don’t like nicknames. I feel that you should call people by the name they were given. I was called ‘Normie” by my Aunt. I hate that term. I still have one friend that calls me that. I don’t like it. I tried not to call my children by nicknames. I feel that parents take great care in naming babies and you should honor those names. But then again, some parents chose some very interesting names for their offspring. And perhaps nicknames would be better options than the legal names. Hubby calls me Norma Jean. That I like. My proper name. |
PROMPT May 22nd Write about the biggest challenge you have faced and how you overcame it. Perhaps I shared this before. I was in a bad car accident in my 20’s. I remember driving out of the parking lot of our apartment. For some reason I left our daughter, age 2 at the time, at home. Good decision. The next thing I remember is hearing a lot of noise. It woke me up and bothered me. Why so much noise? It was all those machines that were monitoring me, keeping me alive. I was in the intensive care of the local hospital. I had been in a car accident, a bad one. My car, a Ford Pinto, red, 2 door, was totaled. I had multiple injuries, but the worst was a fractured pelvis. It seems that I went through an intersection on my way to the grocery store. A truck hit me broadside, pinning me in the bucket seat of the car. They say it took some time to get me out. I have no memory of this. I do remember later going to look at the mangled car. It was amazing that I survived. But then the Pinto was poorly designed. Six weeks in the hospital, not being able to move. Seems you can’t do much for a fractured pelvis other than let nature take its course. The only bright moment of the whole ordeal was when a woman came in to turn me and rub my back. Heaven! I did, of course, finally get out. A big bruise on my thigh still gives me trouble to this day. Fifty years later. The only thing I thought of while in the hospital all those weeks was getting out. Seeing my daughter again. Walking again. Now that I look back on it, seeing my husband again was not a priority. Interesting. But then, he never came to visit me in the hospital. My parents came once. Again, interesting. So when I remarried and husband #2 was in the hospital for an extended time, I made sure I was there daily. And when current husband was in the hospital, I made sure I went to visit him as well. It is important to me that loved ones are shown support and love. No matter where they are. But especially if they are sick or injured. I wish someone had visited me back when I was alone and injured. |
PROMPT May 21st Write an open letter to a person or group of people you strongly disagree with and explain why. Use reason not emotion. Dear They, I have a hard time thinking of this mindset. I am a charitable person. I feel that I get along with most everyone. I understand everyone has a right to believe what they feel is important for their life. However, this whole gender identity ‘thing’ really has me baffled. The latest ‘star’ to announce this is Demi Lovato. I don’t know much about her. But this was written about the issue: “In the most charitable reading, some of this criticism is born out of profound ignorance. "Nonbinary" is a term increasingly used by people who exist somewhere along the spectrum of gender, either between male and female or outside the binary altogether. Essentially, it's shorthand for a complex, liminal, both/and relationship to gender that varies widely from person to person. Nonbinary is both a gender identity and a big middle finger aimed at the concept of gender itself.” (nbcnews.com) Binary, non-binary. Holy crap, pardon my French. What the heck? Sorry, this is to be unemotional. God made two sexes. We are born male or female. XX and XY. Our chromosomal makeup is determined at the nanosecond of creation. Your parents could not choose before your birth. You cannot change that combination after birth. As far as I know, no evil scientist has found a way to tweak our DNA to change the sex we were given at birth. So the people who ‘identify’ as non-binary now want to use different pronouns as well. As if being LGBTQ isn’t enough, we have to remember to use the plural pronouns, they/them when referring to a non-binary person. When I went to school, the pronouns they and them were for more than one person. So I am confused as to when this became acceptable to be used for a singular person searching for their identity. I am aware there are probably some folks on writing.com that fall into this category. I will respect the wishes of those folks. But that still doesn’t make this whole issue any less confusing for me. Sincerely, NormaJean still using she and hers |
PROMPT May 20th What does happiness mean to you? Reflect back on a specific moment when you felt unconditionally happy. What circumstances made you feel that way? I feel happy when I am with my hubby and we are on the same wave length. No controversies, no complaints. I felt this way when we got married. Very happy. I finally met a nice man who I was confident could care for me for the rest of my life. I no longer had to worry about taking care of it all, as before. I now had a partner. I was no longer alone. |
PROMPT May 19th Write about the most historic world events of your lifetime. How are they (or will they be) remembered? What will the history books focus on? I’m of the age that remembers when JFK got shot. I think I was in elementary school. Not too much beyond the fact of the incident. People are still discussing whodunit and so forth. I do remember the moon landing with John Glenn. I was just out of high school. I seem to remember being in my grandmother’s kitchen. Perhaps I watched it on her B&W TV. Some time later there was talk it was all a fake, it was filmed in Utah. I just remember that big hullabaloo that we, the USA, had to win the space race against them, the USSR. When the Twin Towers were hit, I was in Ohio, sleeping. I didn’t go to work until about noon. My current husband had flown to Chicago earlier that morning. He called me, waking me up. He said, “I’m alright!” I said, “Great! Glad to hear it.” “No really, I’m fine.” Still unaware, I said, “Wonderful. Thanks for letting me know.” Then he told me what had happened and I turned on the TV. And of course, it was all over the TV for weeks, months even. You couldn’t stop watching those planes hitting the towers, listening to the man on the plane talking to his wife. Hubby had to get a rental car to drive back to Ohio since the planes were all grounded for a time. So glad he was safe, so sad that happened. |