Tramp time, and the livin' is easy...

“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall”
- Ray Bradbury

Chicago South Shore Triathlon

There's something incredibly moving about watching your child take another first. This time, it was his first triathlon.

Not wanting him to feel any performance pressure, all we talked about was having fun. Crossing the finish line, he definitely looked like he enjoyed it. As the awards started, we picked up our things and headed home. Ironically, when I checked the results on the drive home, he took 2nd Place!


Pre-race talk from Dad--explaining the course and calming the nerves.



Last check-in prior to the start. Although the words of wisdom might be given the other way around next time...Dad took 3rd place and his mini-me took 2nd. Way to go guys!







We found a "transition" that he enjoys...

Let Freedom Ring

Sharing some of my favorite 4th of July photos from today and from years' past.
Happy Birthday, America!

memorial day @home

Twenty-One gun salute,
Taps.
High school band plays,
Vets in wheelchairs salute.
A prayer, a wreath, a microphone too muffled to hear.
Men in old uniforms with distant memories stand near me,
Never guessing that I share more with them than this town we call home.
Kids beg to leave for for ice cream...Americana lives on.
-ljh

On Valentine's Day

An Epic Love...

One Mother of a Blizzard

Blizzard, 2011.

Already, we know this is one for the history books. Whether you counted inches of 24 or 28, it was a LOT of snow that rained down--frozen, fluffy, and blindingly white--on the first 2 days of February. And that doesn't even include the drifts. Before Blizzard 2011, I thought "snowed-in" was an expression reserved for the minor inconvenience of a driveway that needed a good shoveling. But when we woke up on Thursday morning to a back door impossible to open due to the 4 foot drift that held it shut, I learned the true definition of "snowed-in." Yes folks, that's a literal thing in these here parts of the hearty Midwest.

Preparing for Blizzard 2011 was a lot like preparing for a hurricane as a kid growing up in sunny south Florida: stock the pantry, line up the candles, find the flashlights, count the batteries, and hope for a day or two off from school. A blizzard, however, throws a few more curves to facing Mother Nature when she's got something to say, or roar, about.

First, there are no evacuation routes. You are where you are. The population of Chicago would no sooner be ordered to evacuate then they would hold an election without a controversy. All roads lead to home, sweet snow.




Second, as a kid, instead of less, you need more. More layers of clothes to venture out in the thick of it, more hot cocoa to warm your insides and lift your spirits, and definitely more physical strength to shovel, trudge, and move your wool-swaddled-self through the blowing blizzard white-out conditions.


Third, you don't run out into the streets and dance in your bathing suits during the "eye of the blizzard." Here's what the eye of the blizzard looked like on the morning of Wednesday, February 2nd:



In a word: white. And not just any white. This was the horizontal-blowing, down your jacket, in and around your long johns, chill-me-to-the-icy-bone, I think I'll go back in now, blowing-white.

Blizzard 2011 was the kind of experience that made you stop in your sleep--as the house swayed with the howl of the night winds, it begged the question...."OK, Mother (Nature), you have my attention, What???"



This is a question more pressing for our children's generation than any other before. What forces of Mother Nature and environmental woes--man-made and otherwise-- will they face, be challenged by, understand, and ultimately survive? What skills are they cultivating in today's lego play? Will they create the next oil spill prevention plan? Finally combat global warming with success? Will counting the glass Montessori beads in the palm of their small hands lead them to discover the next energy-independent culture? Will building their igloo forts translate into galaxy adobes someday?

Ultimately, I have one hope. That by venturing out into the zero-visibility, below-freezing conditions, and pressing their little bodies against the weight of the wind and snow to put one snowy boot in front of another snowy boot......that this experience deepens into their hearts in a way that 10, 20, or 30 years from now when they need that same strength to fight for and with Mother (nature)...they will call upon the strength of this blizzard that they each now hold a part of.

These are the questions that the raging night winds of Blizzard 2011 brought. Experiencing the sheer power and utter force of Mother in all her unbound volume was simply put: inspiring and generation-sized attention-getting.

Irish Blessing for the New Year

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

~ John Donahue