Tag: life

Posted in Life, Writing

Forgiving Light

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor lifts her camera just as the woman raises her head. Her face is streaked with tears, the light catching them, so it seems they shimmer rather than fall.

She quickly takes in a half-finished coffee, scarf draped over the back of the chair, and a book open on the table. Something in the woman’s stillness suggests she hasn’t turned the page in a while.

Her finger hovers over the shutter button. The woman meets her eyes; a fragile thread of connection stretches between them.

Eleanor’s mind, unhelpfully, begins to invent possible stories about the woman. Grieving, she thinks. Recently divorced. Terminally ill. Bereaved daughter. Job loss. A pigeon-related incident. Endless possibilities spinning through her mind like a carousel.

She could walk away, let the woman have her sadness in peace, but something in the woman’s faint smile sees Eleanor push the door open and step inside.

The bell gives its half-hearted ting. ‘Just the usual, thanks Matt,’ she calls. ‘Oh, and one of your Portuguese tarts.’ She turns toward the woman. ‘Would you like one as well? They’re dangerously good.’

The woman shakes her head, then mid-shake says, ‘Yes, why not.’

Eleanor smiles. ‘Excellent decision.’

‘Is it all right if I sit here?’ she asks, pointing to the table next to where the woman is sitting. ‘I promise not to talk unless it seems vital.’

‘That sounds perfect,’ the woman says, wiping her face. Eleanor, pretending not to notice, stirs her coffee as though it requires medical precision.

They sit in silence. Eleanor wrestles with the tart’s flaky pastry and warm, wobbly custard, while across from her the woman breaks hers cleanly, long fingers steady and assured. Eleanor’s own fingers feel clumsy – her sister once called them ‘sausage rolls,’ and she has to admit the description isn’t entirely unfair.

She guesses the woman is in her late thirties, graceful in that effortless way some younger women are. “Well put-together,” Eleanor’s mother would say, “considered”.

‘When I first saw you,’ Eleanor breaks the silence, ‘my imagination went into overdrive. I kept inventing reasons for the tears. Little scenarios, death, divorce, job.’

The woman glances at her, curious. ‘None of the above,’ she smiles, licking crumbs from her fingers.

‘You’re a photographer?’ she asks, nodding at the camera on the table.

‘Sometimes. Depends who you ask. My grandson says I’m a breakfast-face photographer.’

The woman laughs. ‘Breakfast-face?’

‘Yes. He thinks he’s my muse. I take photos of him eating breakfast.’ Eleanor chuckles, shaking her head. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘Can I see?’

Eleanor flicks through the images on the camera until she finds yesterday’s – Garry mid-spoon, mouth wide, eyes half closed. The light falling on him like a benediction.

‘He’s wonderful,’ the woman says. ‘And clearly plotting something.’

‘Always,’ Eleanor says. ‘It keeps the mornings interesting.’

The woman traces a fingertip along her cup. ‘You took my photo earlier,’ she says, not accusingly, just a fact laid gently on the table.

Eleanor blushes. ‘I did. I’m sorry – it was the light. It does that to me sometimes.’

‘Can I see?’

Eleanor turns the screen toward her. The woman’s face is luminous against the dark interior, the tears faintly catching the light.

The woman studies it for a long moment. ‘You’ve made me look… beautiful. Not sad at all, even with those tears.’

‘You are beautiful,’ Eleanor says simply, then wonders if that’s too much. ‘It’s mostly the light,’ she adds, flustered. ‘It’s very forgiving this time of day. Like a kindly aunt.’

That earns another laugh.

‘I wasn’t sad, you know,’ the woman says finally. She closes the book, letting Eleanor see the cover. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. ‘It just caught me off-guard. That ending.’

‘So,’ Eleanor says lightly, ‘you were crying over fiction, not a break-up?’ She leans back slightly, watching the shift in the woman’s expression.

‘Mortifying, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all,’ Eleanor says. ‘I once wept in a tram over a poem about a cabbage. People gave me space, though, which was nice.’

The woman laughs, a bright, sudden sound that makes Eleanor laugh too. Matt glances over, shakes his head with a faint smile, and goes back to his orders.

When the laughter subsides, they sit smiling at each other, the moment oddly companionable.

‘Thank you,’ the woman says at last.

‘For what?’

‘For seeing me. Even if you got the story wrong.’

‘Oh, I usually do,’ Eleanor says. ‘But I enjoy the practice.’

The woman slips the book inside her bag and stands. ‘You should call that photo Forgiving Light.’

‘I just might,’ Eleanor says.

When the door closes behind her, Eleanor’s eyes settle on the table where the woman was sitting.

She lifts her camera and frames the scene – the empty cup, the wrapper, a few stray bits of pastry scattered across the plate. Caught in a narrow shaft of fading golden light, the woman’s scarf draped over the chair.

She presses the shutter, then scoops up the scarf and rushes out after the woman.

Posted in Life, Writing

While the kettle boils

Posted on by Sharon

Eleanor is plagued by a dream of herself that she has not yet managed to actualise.

It visits her most mornings, while the kettle boils, the version of herself she keeps coming back to, the one who writes before dawn, sitting at a wooden desk while a mug of tea cools beside her and words spread across the page. That woman lives in a house smelling faintly of cedar and old books, where quiet work happens. Her own novels fill a shelf – novels the reviewers call assured and luminous.

Eleanor, on the other hand, lives in a house that smells of toast and tea, where crumbs, spilled juice, and scattered blocks demand her attention. Her desk is the kitchen table, her laptop fighting for space amongst the mail, the Aldi catalogues, and her grandson’s Elsa costume. Drafts are stacked in manila folders, marked up by people who, she has to believe, mean well in their critique. Lovely imagery. This doesn’t work. Show, don’t tell. You don’t need this section. Two pats, then the slaps. Or more often, multiple slaps with few pats. 

The stings linger.

Her agent says the publishers see “promise”, but not enough to take a risk on her. The competitions reply with polite variations on no: “You have a distinct voice … there are moments of real beauty here … we received many excellent entries, unfortunately your submission did not stand out in the current field … we wish you success placing it elsewhere … we hope you’ll consider submitting again next year.” Eleanor is familiar with the rhythm of rejection, the preamble as softener, then the stinging dismissal. She imagines the editors, judges, unseen decision-makers standing behind an iron gate, steadfastly refusing to hand over their giant key. Instead, she pushes her work through the bars and listens intently for the sound of approval.

Silence.

Yesterday, she found a story she wrote when she was twenty-three, tucked deep into one of the folders. She read it and winced, then told herself to be kind – it was from forty years ago, after all. She’d lived a life since then, worked, raised children, lost people she loved. She’d written through work and play dates and trips to the beach, through illness and recovery, through poor decisions, through countless rejections.

She thinks of that thing Sylvia Plath said: I love my rejection slips. They show me I try and recognises the rawness of that statement. Feels the strength of it. Sits up a little straighter.

She looks outside, to her grandson building a house near the garden beds she’s been developing. He’s starting simple, laying one block carefully next to the other. She sees the clear line from front to back, a foundation solid enough to hold the next storey. She watches him for a long moment. 

When the kettle clicks off, Eleanor makes tea, and thinks about foundations, clear lines from start to finish, starting simple.

She settles back at the table, picks up her pen – and hears a yell from the garden.

A catastrophe, by the sound of it. Possibly involving Lego.

Eleanor takes a sip of tea, then pushes herself up.

The quiet work will have to wait.

While the first line of this story came from a text message I received from a friend recently, this is a work of fiction. I felt it was such a strong line that I wanted to see if I could write a story around it.

Posted in Learning, Photography, Writing

Play

Posted on by Sharon

For four years, some members of my family have been involved in a weekly photo challenge. This challenge morphed from previous photo challenges we’ve done over the years, but in its current form, this one has been going for four years. Each week we have a word as our focus and we take photos of a representation of that word, share it in a private Facebook group and each Sunday night we Zoom, have a chat about our week, and talk about the photos.

This week just gone, the word was ‘play’.

It got me thinking.

This blog ‘Musings from the cold’ has a subtitle: playing with ideas and images. It’s something I enjoy – to look at a subject from different angles and see what stories emerge. I’m not always successful of course, but that’s what playing is all about – experimenting, seeing differently, trying out other voices and seeing what feels weird and whether I can sit with the weirdness.

I play photographically, but I realised I don’t often play with my writing. Not here anyway, on the pages of this blog. Over the years I have written many different sorts of things – journal articles, conference papers, book chapters for academic books, textbooks, newletters for parents and staff when I was teaching, interview questions and intros when I worked in radio and scripts for an Arts program I used to produce and present, poems on the fridge. Different audiences, different purposes, different styles.

But I realised through the week, that I only write in first person on this blog and so I decided to play, to experiment, to try a different voice. It felt weird, but I chose to sit with it, to keep writing in that style to see what I could learn from it, determined to push through the distance it gave my writing from myself until I found something new – well, new for me at least.

I wanted to play, and through that play to develop as a writer. It was never meant to be an endpoint, a final stop in my learning about writing – it was to help me go on a journey from one voice to another, one style to others (many, multiple) – to begin opening up the possibilities for my own writing.

When my youngest daughter was in Grade 3, the teacher asked them to write a story about their weekend every Monday. At a parent-teacher interview, the teacher commented that we lived the most interesting life. I knew this not to be true and asked her how she came to that conclusion. Apparently Emma’s Monday journal writing embellished our weekends to a point where they didn’t reflect our reality at all.

The teacher told her to only write what was true.

Emma stopped writing. Boring weekends didn’t interest her, and if the rule was to report only the facts rather than invent stories and worlds and interesting characters we met along the way, then there was no play left in it. And without play, the writing lost its spark.

It’s a reminder for my own practice. Play matters. It keeps my writing alive. So I’ll keep playing – with words, with voices, with styles that don’t quite fit until maybe they do. I don’t know yet where that will lead, but I suspect the detours matter as much as the destinations. If you find me writing strangely now and then, think of it as an experiment. You’re welcome to play along.

Posted in Life, Writing

On seeking an identity

Posted on by Sharon

When she started teaching, she dressed more like an English teacher, although preferred to call herself a Drama teacher. She taught both, but she wanted the stereotype of a Drama teacher to suit her more – creative, exploratory, suggesting invention and movement.

Later, as a PhD student, she carried her lunch into the staff lounge and walked past the big table where the academics sat. She sat instead in the corner, with her sandwich and a journal article or two. She enjoyed the thinking and the stretch of ideas, but she couldn’t yet picture herself wearing the identity that the big table represented.

In time she did, and the academic identity settled more deeply than she expected. In fact, it was the hardest one to let go of. Not because it had ever been easy – it was never that – but because it felt true. It matched her need to make sense of things, to learn, to question, to seek alternatives. And it gave her a title that needed no explanation.

When that identity fell away, she felt a bit lost. Eventually, she became a Senior Consultant Associate. When she was asked what she did, people would invariably say, “What does that entail?” and in the 18 months she was in the role, she never got to the point of being able to easily explain it. So instead, she often told people she was a ‘researcher’ – an identity more closely aligned with ‘academic’.

She had tried retirement before but hadn’t found an identity within it. This time though, with more certainty that it would stick, she knew she needed to work out what her new identity might be.

The question that pushed her in this direction was: “How did you fill your day today?”. She disliked the language of that question, the sense that life without paid work was only marking time, of ‘filling’ time. It’s not a question people asked of those who head off to jobs every morning. And so she bristled at it.

She wasn’t retired from living, or from creating, or from learning. Her life, even her retired life, was made up of more than ‘filling’ time.

And so each morning, she took photos. An anthurium. A sunflower on a black tile. Flannel flowers in a brown vase. Each afternoon she sat at her desk and wrote blog posts, exploring a different style in a different voice to see how it felt.

When she saw the images and words on the screen, she felt a flicker of something that she wasn’t quite ready to face.

But the question lingered: “How did you fill your day today?”. She had no tidy answer yet, but she could feel that she was reaching for something. She’s crafting her ideas into words and images, taking notice, taking her time.

She’s trying on a new identity, one that’s not dependent on a role, or a job, or an income. It’s an identity dependent on what she creates.

She’s not sure she can even say it out loud yet … so she whispers it to herself, to see if it fits.

…

Not yet … but it’s early days and she knows there’s no rush.

Posted in Life

The streak

Posted on by Sharon

I’m not talking about the Ray Stevens song here – I thought I’d better preface that in case you think I’ve taken up running through the grocery store with no clothes on.

This is a different kind of streak, a streak that requires memory, persistence and consistency. You have to remember to do the thing that develops into a streak every day. You have to build it into your – in my case morning – routine, so that you don’t lose your streak through forgetting.

At first it’s easy – the stakes are low; it doesn’t matter if you don’t do it when you have a streak of just one or two, or even ten or twelve. But when it starts getting over 50, there’s a tingle of motivation to keep going. You play around with it, testing yourself out to see how much you really do care, to see how serious you are about it.

You start to brag to other people you know who have their own streaks – or who at least challenge themselves on a daily basis. I’m on 150 now. I’m now on 200. I’m closing in on 280! You feel a weird sense of pride, tinged with a fear that it might end. You ask your husband for hints, you read the blog to pick up what others have said about it, you try a different starting point each day.

You also need to get it right – your streak is over if you make too many errors – and so you proceed cautiously, being more careful, taking more time. My morning routine was such that I was having to get up half an hour earlier, just to get it done. Or getting to work later!

I make it to 300! I don’t post about it on social media of course, that would be weird, but I do feel pretty good. Close to a year’s worth of luck and determination, and new approaches, and risk, and remembering.

But then, Thursday, August 15 dawns. I’m not well, I rush, I get to the last attempt, feeling oddly confident. I couldn’t possibly be wrong.

I sit there open mouthed when it turns out I am.

My streak ends at 303.

303 days of getting Wordle right – and then, in an instant, my streak is gone!

I had wanted to get to a year … and I came so close!

And the thing that hurt just as much as losing my streak?

There was no acknowledgement of my 303 days of success. Just a ‘thanks for playing! You’re out of guesses.’

Brutal.

Posted in Family, Life

After the big thing, the little things

Posted on by Sharon

The bananas have been sitting on the kitchen bench for over a week. She sees them when she rinses her coffee cup, and when she’s making the kids’ lunches on the days she’s working, and she sees them on the days she’s not working. They shrink just a little each day and she wonders if she should do something with them, but she’s not much into banana bread and her mind won’t stretch to more than that.

She gets furious with the toaster. It burnt her toast twice last week, partly because she was distracted and partly because it has a mind of its own that switches back to level 6 when she’s not looking.

And socks. How many feet are in this house? And the way they just expect to be paired up like nothing happened. Seriously!

Because, she’s discovered that after the big thing – the really big thing – come the little things, the mundane things. The MyGov password reset loop. Dealing with the bank. Not knowing how to deal with the bank. The text from a well-meaning friend saying “let me know if you need anything” when she’s already forgotten how to need things. The email reminder that the phone bill is overdue.

The mountain of tiny normal things that didn’t get the memo that her world had changed.

Maybe the little things are a kind of mercy. Something for her brain to busy itself with while the rest of her recalibrates. You can’t solve death, but you can wonder why the kids have suddenly stopped eating bananas. You can’t rewrite the awful bits, but you can yell at the toaster for making anything more than warm bread.

There’s no real point to this. I’m not even sure why I started writing, except that a few weeks ago she said ‘you haven’t written a blog post in ages’. It’s taken me a while to get my thinking straight and my head in the right place.

My thinking is this: if I ever was, I’m no longer convinced by people who respond to loss with wisdom or insight. I’m not convinced that grief makes you wise. It certainly makes you sad and angry and empty and …. The world, in its relentless striving for normalcy, doesn’t stop to accommodate the strange new reality, or the sadness or anger or emptiness or ….

It just keeps serving up the little things: the unmatched socks and toast that’s too brown and overdue phone bills and washing that won’t do itself. As if that’s all there is to be done.

And maybe for now it is.

Posted in Family, Life, Mid-life blogger

Friday, December 6 2024

Posted on by Sharon

Adding the date to the title might suggest that there’s significance to this date.

There isn’t. Not to me, anyway. There is to all the people who are having a birthday today – for them I imagine it’s quite a significant day. But there’s no significance for me.

And now I’m beginning to sound like I’m protesting too much, but I’m really just trying to work out why I added the date to the title. When I did it, mere moments ago, I had a reason, then I got distracted because I realised, when I typed the word ‘birthday’, that I’d missed my friend Airdre’s birthday two weeks ago and so had to write to her a very belated birthday wish, and now I’ve come back here and the reason for adding the date has slipped through the (increasingly) porous parts of my mind that holds reasons for doing things.

Very convoluted way of saying “I wrote the date and now can’t remember why”.

I could, of course, just delete the date and all of this nonsense and start again, but I’m not inclined to.

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s Friday and that means it’s time for a Friday Feels post.

You know the drill. Three questions and an F-word.

  1. What made me happy this week? Not only normal happy, but the kind of happy that makes you do the weird little happy gesture with your hands that you try to keep to yourself because when other people see it they stick a label on you. That kind of happy. Let me tell you the story.

    We were one minute and 17 seconds into our journey to Tumut last Thursday when I asked Tim to turn around. I’d seen a man building something out the front of someone’s place, and I needed to speak to him. Tim duly turned around and I went and spoke to the man. I didn’t know the man, but soon discovered his name and number, and arranged for him to visit me on Wednesday, my working from home day.

    Kyle, for that is the man’s name, arrived on Wednesday and is the cause of my happy gesture. He came to give me a quote on some work I want done on the house, and he brought his six-month old daughter with him. He handed the baby to me while he was measuring up and talking tradie talk, so I got to hold said baby and talk to her and bring up some wind I saw she had trapped, and let her play with my hair (well, she was going to play with it whether I said she could or not – it’s just one of those baby things).

    It was lovely. It’s been way too long since I’ve held a baby and she was an absolute delight. I hope I get to do it again.

  2. What else made me happy? I’m glad you asked. Yesterday was a hot day. Clear blue sky, broken air con at work, very noisy fan pushing hot air around. Hot. I got home, put our working air con on, found my bathers and headed to the pool. We’d had the cover on the pool for a few days (maybe a week) and of course, the heater’s been on (apparently, in this part of the world you only put your pool heater on in the summer – never in the winter), so I was expecting it to be warm. Or warm-ish at the very least.

    It was only 35C warm-ish!

    It was blissful. Maybe a tad too warm, if I’m being really honest, but I did not mind at all. I swam laps (five strokes up and five and a half strokes back), floated, swam lengths under water, and floated some more. It was a fabulous day for my first swim of the season. The sun was very low in the sky when I dragged myself out, and there was a distinct chill in the air (I think the outside temperature had gone down to 25C by that stage), but I didn’t mind at all. I was, in fact, very happy.

  3. Anything else? Now that you mention it is, there is. Funerals are not generally things that make people happy – unless you see them as a celebration of someone’s life and can distance yourself from the fact that that person will no longer be in your life (except as memories). And even then, they don’t really bring a sense of happiness. But they do provide opportunities for families to come together. I have four cousins on my mother’s side, and while I see each of them individually from time to time, it isn’t often that we get together. Usually only at funerals as it turns out. Friday last week I got to spend some time with three of my cousins on my Mum’s side and it was lovely to share memories of our shared grandparents and trips we’d done and look back on photos when we were all a lot younger and decide not to re-create the ones where I, as a 12 year old, was holding my cousin Michael, who was then a baby and is now, quite obviously not.

    So, not “happy” happy, but it’s always great to connect.

    My F-word for the week is the same as my sister’s as it turns out: festive. I, however, did not dress as an elf and embody the notion of festive as she did. But we did put up the Christmas tree and that gives the house quite a festive feel.
Note the West Country-inspired bauble from Dottie Wombat

Only two more Fridays between now and Christmas, meaning only three between now and 2025.

Golly.

See you next week.

Posted in Family, Life, Mid-life blogger

Friday Feels

Posted on by Sharon

For me, Fridays arrive like a reward at the end of a busy week. I work for a company that values its employees in more than just words. It instituted a 4-day work week some time ago and I’m here for it. My Fridays bring a sense of relief at the end of a week full of writing and editing and doing all the other things one does in a busy consulting firm. They act as a little pause between work and the official start of the weekend. I appreciate the slower pace of my Fridays, the opportunity to write a Friday Feels post, and the chance to then switch my brain off for a while.

Yet, each one brings with it a subtle reminder: time is moving quickly. Since I’ve been writing Friday Feels posts Fridays seem to arrive faster and faster, not because they actually do of course, but because I’m marking the time, taking notice of it.

This Friday, November 29, 2024, is a particularly poignant day to be marking time.

My parents were married on this day in 1958 – 66 years ago. Debbie and I were eating breakfast at Mum’s dining table this morning when Mum pointed to the crystal bowl in the centre of the table, “that’s been in the family 66 years today”. It was a wedding gift that she’s carried with her all these years, through all the different houses and states she’s lived in.

The crystal bowl hasn’t aged in the way the rest of us have, but it serves as a reminder of the passing of time. Dad’s passing in 2018 meant that they didn’t quite make their 60th wedding anniversary, but the date is firmly fixed in our minds anyway.

The date will also have other significance for us now. Today, November 29, 2024 we celebrate the life of my uncle, Mum’s younger (only) brother who passed away last week. We’ll gather today, family and friends, to share stories and memories of Uncle Roy. We’ll laugh and cry and comfort each other as we say farewell.

So that’s my Friday Feels for another week. Not the usual format, but it’s not a usual Friday.

Mum and Dad’s wedding day – November 29, 1958
My baptism in June 1962. Uncle Roy, my godfather, is at the back
Roy Frederick Humphries, 1941-2024
Posted in Life, Mid-life blogger, Writing

Friday Feels Returns

Posted on by Sharon

I missed last week’s Friday Feels post. The reason is one of the things that made me happy – read on to find out more.

Friday Feels is a (seemingly) regular blog post I started writing about three months ago. Debbie, my sister, writes the occasional Fridays Feels post and I thought I’d copy her lead.

There are three questions each week, mostly the same, and then an F-word. I think I’m supposed to write only brief responses to each question, but struggle to do that. Someone famous once apologised for writing a long letter “because they didn’t have time to write a short one”. Even though I could take the whole day to write a blog post, I try not to. Especially on days like today where it’s warm – 27C – and the pool is calling!

The three questions I answer each week are:


1. What made me happy this week?

2. What’s been challenging about the week?

3. What’s caught my attention on social media this week?

Rather than a F-word this week, I’ve decided to write about a C-word instead.

First, the questions.

  1. Cancer – that’s a C-word. And it’s related to what made me happy this week. On Friday last week, rather than writing a blog post, I met with my medical oncologist for my FINAL oncology appointment. I’ve had annual check ups with my breast surgeon, my radio oncologist and my medical oncologist since 2019 and last Friday was the last appointment. Five years of low-down terror in the back of my mind … and now it’s all done. I have to admit to being much more emotional than I imagined, and spent some time in a quiet corner of a hospital corridor pulling myself together. But I’m happy that my appointments are done and that the five years is now officially over and closed off in my mind.
  2. COVID – that’s a C-word and it’s related to what’s been challenging about this week. Tim didn’t feel too well last Friday and did a COVID test. Negative. Big relief. Saturday he felt even worse. Mid-afternoon I found him in bed shivering even though it was a really hot day. I took his temperature – 41.5C. That’s a bit warm. I had thought he didn’t want to do gardening with Chase and I, but apparently he was ill. Sunday he did a test. Positive. He tested positive as recently as yesterday. He’s slowly getting better. I’ve been working from home all week and because of the design of our house we’ve been able to keep away from each other and so he hasn’t passed it to me. But it’s been a big week.

    Another reason it’s been a challenging week is because my uncle – Mum’s brother – passed away on Wednesday evening. He was a great storyteller and had a wealth of them to share – from years in the Navy to his more recent travels. He was also a great reader and that made discussions always interesting. He’d share books and recommend others and wasn’t shy about telling you why a book was unreadable! Wifedom, for instance, was not one of his favourites! Mum has lived around the corner from him for the last four years and minutes after she’d ring him to invite him round for morning tea, he’d be at the front door, zooming up the steep hill fearlessly on his mobility scooter. One thing we always chuckled about, was that even though they were both in their 80s, she’s still such a big sister! He was a well-read, well-travelled man, but oh golly … when his big sister said to do something, he’d do it! It seems that’s one thing that never changes in family relationships. You’ll be missed, Uncle Roy.
  3. Characters – that’s a C-word. Have you heard of Paloma Diamond? I hadn’t either till just last week – possibly because I don’t have TikTok. But she popped up on my Instagram feed last week and she’s become a bit of regular for me now. The actor behind the character, Julian Sewell, has amassed a huge following – and I’m just jumping on board. Also, if you’re into period drama, check out his ‘Aunt Ingrid and Evelyn’ characters.
Screenshot from Julian Sewell’s Instagram account

Link to Julian Sewell’s Instagram, just in case you’re interested.

Well, that’s it from me for another week. I’m pretty pleased with myself for not mentioning the other C-word.

Christmas!

Apparently it’s only 30-something days away. Who’s getting excited?

Posted in Life, Mid-life blogger, Writing

Friday Feels

Posted on by Sharon

As it’s Friday, it’s time for another Friday Feels post. When I started writing these posts I wasn’t planning on doing more than one, and now I find I’ve written a post every Friday for the past nine weeks.

I answer roughly the same questions each week and it’s always interesting to read back over my responses (mostly so that I don’t repeat myself) but also to refresh myself on what’s been happening in the/my world.

The three questions each week are:

  1. What’s made me happy this week?
  2. What’s caused me some discomfort?
  3. What have I re-started doing that I haven’t done in ages?

My F-word for this week is fazed, which I’ve sneakily used somewhere in this post.

  1. What made me happy this week was my friend Airdre coming to visit. The last time we tried to organise a catch-up her grandson thoughtfully gave her his cold and so she wasn’t able to make it, but today, despite a lingering cough, she arrived for a chat and a laugh and a delicious lunch at a local cafe (3 Little Pigs – we can both highly recommend the zucchini fritters). Airdre and I co-edited the recently published Enacting a Pedagogy of Kindness: A guide for practitioners in higher education (available now online). If you’ve read it, we’d love a review. A kind one, of course!

    We talked about writing and editing and reviewing and about how being direct is much maligned and how we both don’t do small talk and the importance of acknowledging the good bits in a piece of work and tense and tone and voice. Airdre and I have another connection – not just our writing one. I discovered earlier this year that the house Airdre used to live in, in northern NSW, was the very same house that my great-grandparents had lived in 90 years before. I wrote about it here. So a lovely morning with Airdre has made me happy this week.

  2. What caused me some discomfort this week was the result in the US election. I won’t say any more about it, but it discomforted me. You could say, it fazed me.

  3. What I’ve re-started doing that I haven’t done in ages, is digital drawing. In mid-2022 I started drawing using Procreate, an iPad app. It’s a very powerful tool and I found some great tutorials to follow along with as I learnt how to use the program and started to develop my skills. Back then I was in the retirement phase of my life and had loads of time to learn. Since moving on from retirement – back to full-time work – I have had way less time to do any drawing and I realised recently that I miss it. I came across more tutorials through the week and have decided to give them a go and see what I can learn and create. I need to emphasise that I have never been someone who draws and I have zero skills. But I enjoy learning and trying new things and so I gave it a go.
One of my ‘drawings’ from mid-2022 – drawn using Procreate


That’s it from me for another week. Next Friday I have my final oncology appointment. It’s the final thing in my cancer ‘journey’ (hate that term but can’t think of another one) and I am very much looking forward to that particular journey being well and truly over! I will probably pass on the Friday Feels post next week – just know my Friday will feel pretty darn good!!