The Fairy Harp

You all know I've been working on this novel for forever. And I found out there is actually fairy harp music out there. A woman named Elizabeth Jane Baldry has a webpage on it. She performs all over Europe and has a cd or two. It's evidently hauntingly beautiful. Now, isn't it about time I finish the dern thing? We could put a cd in with it...

Motivate me, people!

Megan

I won a poetry contest!!! Well, Donna won. But I got second place!!!

I love Jody Mace. Her website is fun. Her kids are funny. She's just overall great. And I am not being paid for this advertisement!

________________________________________

Poetry contest results are in!!

Read all the entries here: http://www.jodymace.com/news/?p=165 Since the topic was “the internet” I chose as a judge my 13-year-old daughter who loves the internet more than me, her dad, and her little brother all combined.

She chose four favorites.

4th place: Donna Koppelman for her haiku:

Blogging has become
The Wailing Wall of our time
Problems on display.

3rd place: Angela for the haiku:

Far across the world
Someone else feels this way, too.
I am not alone.

2nd place: Megan Hoyt
Angela is not alone.

People staring,
stalking, swearing,
everywhere she goes.
Through the long night,
into the morning,
stalking,
talking,
silently creeping,
toward sweet, serene Angela.

Eyes droop,
head falls,
keyboard pillow leaves jkl
on Angela’s forehead.

Pistols cocked,
ready for action.

Angela sleeps,
spammer leaps!

She wakes,
disorder!
mailbox is full,
no one is there.
Robotic spammers
leave a trail
of techo-babble
in their wake.

Sudden silence!

Poised for action,
Angela strikes.
Delete all.
Peace.
Random.
Fragile.
Delicate.

Angela is finally alone.

And the winner of the grand prize…..
Donna Earnhardt for the free verse poem entitled “Virus”

I slink from site to site
sipping in and out
of blogs, journals and email
leaving a trail that is
seen only by SuperGeeks
with their x-ray vision and quarantine tactics
they catch me
and try to contain me
but I won’t be restrained
my clones continue to travel
the infomation highway
looking for unsecure rest-stops
and insecure travelers
who open emails from strangers
download “postcards” from long lost friends
and
visit sites they think no-one knows they visit
but I know
and I
wait,
hungry and crouched
ready to pounce
and devour
the weakest link

Donna Earnhardt and Megan Hoyt: I know where to find you! Donna Koppelman and Angela, can you please email me your mailing address? (to jody at jodymace.com)

Looking for a breakthrough here, ladies and gentlemen!

It's always darkest before the dawn, right? Well, things have been looking pretty dim in the home remodeling department lately. We seem to have made an enemy or two along the way without meaning to. And bills are piling up sky high!

You know, when it gets right down to it, the only thing that bothers me about that is that I now can't send money to our friends who are serving in Lebanon and Uzbekistan. Or to our old church in Virginia Beach. I wanted to prosper financially so we could support them more. What can we do?

I don't know the answer, but I'd sure be open to suggestions. Any new markets I can tap into? Thanks, Donna, for the tip on greeting cards. Anyone else? Jody? Jean? Have I been lookin' for love in all the wrong places? What are the right places?

And even more than that, I'm increasingly worrying about how I can spend more time with my daughters who after next year will be in college and on their own. All these and other questions, I'm sure, will be answered in due time. (When is due time, anyway?)

Meanwhile...

Still clinging to the hope that saves men's souls...

Megan Elizabeth

Bloggin'

I haven't had a whole lot of time lately to devote to blogging. As a writer, this is a problem for me. I want to blog a little here and there, when I have a spare moment, but I'm a perfectionist. I desperately dislike it when I don't write well, choose the wrong word, or something worse -- use it's instead of its or their instead of there. (Sacrilege for a former proofreader!)

The truth is, I am swamped at the moment. I'll try to put something together soon, but in the meantime, don't read my idiotic sentiment below about candy unless you sincerely want to waste three minutes of your life for no good reason at all...

Now to tackle all the things that are making me crazy!

Yours -- amid the dust and rubble, hay and stubble,

Megan Elizabeth

The Hard Bits...

There are three main types of candy. Crunchy hard candy, chewy caramel candy, and soft, melt-in-your-mouth smooth candy. They're all sweet, but they hit you in different ways.

Life is sort of like that. A good, decent life filled with ups and downs, highs and lows, and lots of doldrum days in between. The hard bits you have to suck on for a while whether you want to or not. If you don't -- if you just haul off and bite into one -- you could break a tooth. It won't release all its goodness in a few seconds either. Sure, the sweetness swirls around in your mouth for a nice, long time, but you run the risk of getting tired of the flavor. And that big, hard chunk keeps you from talking or doing much of anything else.

Chewy caramels are a tough sell for me. Some like them, but I honestly can't tell you why. They gum up the insides of your teeth, you can't talk, and you make these awful faces while you're trying to get the stickiest bits out of the crevices. Yeah, it's sweet. But you get tired of all the hard work. Where's the payoff?

Now, my favorite kind of candy is chocolate truffles. They're strong, rich, smooth, creamy, and oh, so sweet. They're small and expensive, but well worth it. You don't have to work hard to crack them open or get the stickiness out of your teeth. Just sail through that sweeter than sweet, strong, rich flavor. Oh, baby. No worries. No hardships.

But it's over way too soon.

Yours, through early morning cravings and late night binges,

Megan Elizabeth

Dumping Depression

Here is an excerpt from what I hope will soon be a book about living a fulfilled life under the shadow of depresson -- or maybe despite it. Or maybe TO spite it. Or spit at it. Something like that anyway...


I am usually silly. Quite silly, I mean. I guffaw and twitter and joke. I'm sarcastic and cynical and over the top.

But I discovered something serious today. Three simple words that finally explain why my perception of God was permanently altered at a very young age.

Absent when needed.

I was reading a book this morning called Finding Hope Again. I struggle with depression (I refuse to give it a capital letter even though it's a disease.) I am definitely not at ease. I have been dis -eased for a very long time -- by people, circumstances, situations beyond my control. And by people who were previously an integral part of my life being absent when I really needed them to be present, reliable, and loving.

In this book, Neil Anderson explains why some people don't believe God is there for them. It's because the people they counted on weren't there when they were really needed. We all probably already know this. You think God is like your earthly father, right? Everyone does. Especially every little girl. In my case, my father adored me, showered me with affection, encouragement, love, and laughter. Then, when I was 13, he had an affair with my mother's best friend and subsequently left. At first, I thought things could remain relatively the same for me. He was still my dad. A bit flawed in the morality department, but still the same guy who loved me, right? Then as time went on and visits became sporadic at best, I realized he was deserting me as well as Mom. It stung. I cried. But the pain didn't go away. Deep rejection like that sometimes doesn't. At least not without a lot of counseling.

I carried that rejection along with me wherever I went from that moment on. It was heavy. I lugged it into relationship after relationship, none lasting more than two months. Then I fell in love. I thought I had found someone I could trust. Someone who would never leave. The thrill of love had melted away my fear and I could breathe again, feel the breeze blow gently across my face, open my heart wide and live, love, laugh. Nine months later, the cheater left me. And on it went.

Absent when needed.

If only I was able to feel God was there to comfort me. If only I had realized that depression was keeping me from feeling He was there. If only I had been able to believe He loved me and was holding me in His arms even if I didn't feel it...

Instead, I believed He was absent.

I stuffed the emotions, the pain, the despair deep down. I never let on. I married, had four children, lived a life many only dream of. But the feeling that God was not going to be there for me when I really needed Him never went away.

I don't know where one goes from here. How do you get back the years you've lost to depression while trying to live in the present? I don't suppose you can. I was duped and damaged like many a young girl. But I developed a disease that kept me from recovering from it. God was absent -- or it felt like He was anyway. But what now?

Here is what I've decided to believe for, hope for, and wait for.

Summer.

I believe God -- who is there even though most of the time my brain won't allow me to feel it's true -- can take my winter and turn it into summer.

Listen to what John Donne said about it:

He brought light out of darkness, not out of lesser light;
He can bring your summer out of winter, though you
have no spring; though in the ways of fortune, or
understanding, or conscience, you have been benighted
until now, wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed,
damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till
now, now God comes to you, not as in the dawning of the
day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon.

I will wait for my sunshine. Even if it takes forever.

This just in... Can you guess who it is?

Yep! If you read the fine print or guessed Dan Fogelberg, you were right!

April Fools!

At our house, pretty much every day is April Fools day. But occasionally we outdo outselves. I remember one year my daughter took it upon herself to turn the entire house into one big April Fool. She put salt in the sugar bowl, filled the teakettle with juice, put confetti in the cereal box, and had a serious talk with us about running away from home. All in one day. And we still didn't catch on.

Then there was the time -- and this didn't even happen in April -- where she was tidying up the house for us and when it came time to go somewhere we couldn't find the car keys. After searching and searching, she conveniently found them... in the sugar bowl. "I swear I don't remember doing it!"

And another time, we were trying to go out for dinner and couldn't find my husband's wallet. After searching the entire house, I gave up on the idea and popped a few frozen dinners onto the counter to microwave. I opened the microwave and voila! The wallet.

They all wanted to lay claim to the wallet fiasco, but no one wanted to take credit for the time Drew got lost at the outlet mall in Williamsburg. He must have been less than two years old at the time. We were in a bookstore, and the girls were supposed to be watching him. They did. "He went that way, Mama," they told me as I frantically swept the store.

Now, it's a surreal feeling to lose a child in a crowded place. First you panic. Then you panic some more. Then time stands still. I'm not kidding! As I began to run through the center of the mall, it felt like I was jogging in slow motion. But it soon turned into a race, complete with people on either side urging me on. "He went past me just a few minutes ago!" some stranger would say. Then, "He's down around the corner!" from someone else. I could feel the pressure building inside my head, the tension mounting in every sinew, every muscle fighting and flighting at the same time.

I turned the corner to go down to the end of the mall where we had first come in. And there he was. The tricky little dude had noticed a merry-go-round by the front entrance and walked out of the bookstore and back around two corners through massive crowds of people to get to it. A woman was watching him and glancing nervously behind her, scanning the crowd for any sign of adult supervision, probably also looking for a policeman to lock the crazy mom up.

Have you ever gone from serious to hysterical crying in a single second? That was how it was when I saw Drew sitting there, happily patting the merry-go-round elephant.

"I ride, Mama?" he said, those innocent, long-lashed eyes batting syrupy sweetness at me.

"Sure, baby. You ride!" I said, hugging him to my pounding heart.

So now it's April Fools Day again. I don't know what to expect from my four critters, but I know something's coming. I already found legos in the dog biscuit box, and a large picture of one of the Super Mario brothers in my cereal.

If that's as far as it goes, we're good.

: )

Yours, when everyone's insane but me and when no one's insane but me,

Megan Elizabeth