A walk – the day is gorgeous, the best that south Florida has to offer; beautiful blue skies and a lovely breeze blowing.
A lucky break is that someone has already thrown out two clay pots onto their bulk trash pile – mine! Fun and it’s not 1 p.m. yet!!
Day 6
Finally – I’ve got a job interview – now THAT’S fun!!
Day 7
Mmmm? What fun will I have today?
It’s actually already started – my oldest son has been published – again! What fun.
The book is a group memoir written by people known and unknown. Each person wrote a six-word memoir!!
In writing back my congratulations I included some interesting words from my recent reading material – primarily a history of the first college I attended. Why did I not know much about its history when I was there? Perhaps they forgot to impress it upon us or perhaps, since I wasn’t naturally an academic, it took all my effort to do the course work.
Anyway I had a list of three words to pass along to oldest son – he has a great way with words.
Then quite suddenly I had my own six word memoir:
“Reading anything I damn well please!”
An epiphany for me. Quite suddenly I realised that all through my education I was compelled to read specific books. I am an excellent reader – few words puzzle me when it comes to pronunciation, I can read aloud easily, although not in public!
However, I am extraordinarily slow when it comes to comprehending what I read. I put it down to having been taught to read too early (by age 6 I was proficient) and also that my teachers were more concerned with the mechanics of reading rather than the comprehension of what I read.
Some of the major things I learned when teaching my own sons and other people’s children were: the importance of individual differences. We all learn at a difference pace and frequently in a different order from that conventionally taught. For one son his comprehension was terrific but reading came later – that puzzled his teacher at his annual testing session, until she realised that her own daughter learned in exactly the same way!
Our gifts and talents are different and frequently don’t all surface until our teens and 20’s. I love to assume everyone has at least one gift and/or talent.
I know so many people who have a multitude of talents – how lucky can they be?! Those I know who have great musical talent are frequently highly computer savvy – I believe there’s a mathematical connection there. My husband’s fine cardio-vascular surgeon also plays classical piano! Such hands.
So now for me, reading is fun. “We read for pleasure” was the answer I gave a college lecturer in my first year. Her pronouncement was “No we don’t, we read to learn”.
I always read for pleasure even when I am learning, but mainly when I am learning about things that interest me – fun things!
Reading is fun for me now.
Day 8
Today was pretty mundane; running errands and going to the Post Office. But a phone call to my mother in England cheered me.
She is one of the few still living Land Girls who worked British farms during WWII when the men went off to war. Her husband and her two brothers signed up for the Royal Air Force as their contribution, so she had to see what she could do for the war effort.
She speaks often of how well she was treated by the farm family and the cottage she shared with another Land Girl, also still living. Her cousin was a Land Girl and was in her early 90’s when she died in October. Such hard manual labour doesn’t seem to have served them badly!
Not that there weren’t very scarey times: doodle bugs (unmanned V1 bombs) flying over “as long as they were whistling we were OKâ€, planes crashing in the fields and bursting into flames, cycling around the country lanes at night only to be spooked by hordes of soldiers hiding in the hedges waiting to be shipped across to France!
The fun times were attending agricultural college (for a 6 week crash course!), learning to ride a horse, getting the cows in the barn and running the milking machine and then having a little petrol to learn to drive Dad’s old Morris Minor – no licence needed(?) and no finding reverse either!! Mum’s driving remained steady until her early 80’s.
At Christmas a friend wrote to say how glad he was Mum would be receiving a medal for her services during the war. We had yet to hear of the news. Today my brother helped her fill out the form. He even found photos from that era! She is over the moon!
I also found out from my brother that the article I wrote about my father for our local historical society newsletter has been published! The same day as I submitted an article for our local literacy newsletter to be published next month.
Couple all that with a lengthy conversation with my UK sister-in-law which we both enjoyed – not often we have time for that. Much laughter.
Tonight is my garden club meeting and my friend Kelly is picking me up – how much more fun could one person have in a day?