Growing Up Hilt

Excerpt from “To the Hilt,” Chapter One

To the Hilt: That’s how I live. I didn’t know that everyone didn’t live like that. We did. We do. Maybe it’s not the best way to live, but it is our way. We live fast and full. We take every day and strangle every single minute out of it that we can. We look at obstacles and see the path around them. We struggle and we learn and embrace the strength that is born from that struggle.  

Our stories are not extraordinary, each standing alone, but together they seem unbelievable. Now that I reflect on the stories that chapter my life, I have had a strange realization that we are different from most—all perhaps. Having said that, I realize that I have lived in a world of mania and given the crisp, fast way my family lived, I believe perhaps we have all suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disease. I am diagnosed now and receive treatment, but the others don’t.  

This is a book of my memories, as I remember them. All of my recollections have marinated in the brain of mania and depression over the years. Here’s my life explained as I have worked through it in the last sixty years or so years. In the time I have spent writing this much has moved and changed. Please keep up.    

Precious Pooches

So, we love our dogs. As far back as I can remember I have had great dogs in my life. I don’t know if they are great dogs because we are so good to them or if we are so good to them because they are such great dogs. 

Da’Artagnan is the most recent addition. We don’t know how we could’ve lived without him. Dart is our baby of a baby. He’s the world’s tallest chihuahua, and we love him more than we thought possible. He started so small we always thought he’d be tiny, but he has recently passed up the miniature schnauzer in height and weight. He surprises people and we couldn’t be prouder of him. He is well behaved and a polite puppy with a pure heart. 

Titan, the miniature schnauzer is our own ‘Rocket Ranger” and a real daredevil at heart. He never saw a puddle that didn’t have his name on it.  He can find dirt at Joe’s spick and span house. 

They are brothers. They do not look like brothers with one scruffy and the other the Felix to his Oscar. They snuggle together to sleep—if they aren’t in our beds. They play ball together. They take walks together. They are even kind to one another. We should take the example they set and yes, they are only dogs, but we are very fortunate. 

Dart sleeps with me. I apparently can raise the cover to let him in under the covers to sleep and snuggle with me in my sleep. Titan comes in occasionally when he needs a little more love and attention from me or D’Artagnan. Dart always makes room for him as long as he stays on his side of the covers. 

I have two sons that I love very much. They are, by comparison (while I do know better than this!) dwarfed in the amount of love and affection that my dogs show toward me. If only… 

I have two sons that I worked hard every day—harder because they existed and dd my best to provide everything that they needed (which is more than I had) but also most anything that they wanted. I did all this alone, without help of any kind from their father. 

I don’t understand my kids—neither of them. I did everything that I possibly could to make sure that they were afforded the most prestigious home situation. The wanted for nothing growing up. That’s not how I was raised! But that’s exactly why I wanted to raise my kids like that. 

Fast forward to recent years… 

I don’t know how to say it except to actually say it: My boys are both keeping their distance from me. I don’t know why. I’ve asked what I did wrong and gotten nothing but blank stares.  

I’ve been patient. 

I’ve taken on responsibility. 

I’ve accepted that it might have been me that fucked things up. 

I’ve tried to remember. 

No, nothing. 

What do I try next? 

I’ve written a book. 

I’ve told how much I love them… 

And why. 

And Dane loves his dad. 

Not sure Tucker loves anyone. 

But that’s Tuck. 

He apparently like to spend his dad what a piece of shit he was and what a shitty father he was. 

No punches pulled. 

Just the facts ma’am. 

I don’t badmouth their dad in any case. 

I hear that I’m the only one playing by those rules. 

Anyways… 

Yes anyways… 

I have a lot to offer. I don’t know why they don’t care, but they don’t.

I do love those dogs. Really. I can’t imagine loving anything more. But I know that I did—or is that do love Larry very much and Dane and tucker…more than the dogs…right. 

Pink Flowers

Walking has become a part of my healing process. I live out in rural Makanda, Illinois, near Cedar Lake. I have two dogs that love to walk. The roads around here remind me of my rural country life growing up. The dogs don’t see the familiarity of all this, but they are good companions on my daily walk. 

I walk quietly listening to the tunes of the woods. They speak to me, and I watch as greenery crosses my field of view. As I walk past the dogs pull on the leash and I am transported back to the road when a small pink flower crosses my path. She is singularly blooming all alone on the shoulder of the road. Her pink hue lights up my world amidst all the green. She sits there growing alone but proud. She is a standout who cries for attention. I look at her while I walk past and can see that she is a vision in my world that represents more than her pink delicate bloom.

Why is she alone on my walk? What made her decide that she should sit there in my path? Did nature tell her to do this? Is she sad to be singularly growing to beat the band? Blooming on the side of the road must take some doing. What all has she faced? Plenty of things could prevent her from thriving, yet here she is in all her beauty. Standing tall among the plants and trees tangled on the side of the road. 

The dogs continue on the familiar road that we walk daily around our neighborhood of comparative souls living in the woods surrounding the lake itself. Today we walked the nearly two miles to the boat dock. It’s a long, beautiful walk that tests me on the hills and makes me continue forward past my friend, the little pink flower. 

Soon the ground is covered in tiny yellow flowers swimming in the field of weeds. Perhaps they are weeds, but they twinkle in the sunlight and light my world that makes me smile. I see a tall white delicate flower attached to a field of stems reaching for the heavens. Where are the “Queen Ann’s lace” flowers blanketing the woods with a crystal presence that signifies royalty in nature? 

I huff and puff going up the hill toward the lake. The dogs exuberantly climb the hill stronger than me. They are young and agile and ready at a moment’s notice to run and sniff the ground as if it was the latest Rom-Com and couldn’t be more interesting. We are nearly there to the dock and the signs tell us that we are close. We will rest then at a bench placed at the lake’s edge. We will reach the water up around the next hilly curve. 

A field of Shasta daisies opens, in my vision, and their graceful wave reflects the breeze that we share. The blessings of nature are clearly seen here. The boat dock is just around the corner and the dogs know it and are getting excited. They tug on the leash as they pick up the pace, and I must slow them down. 

After a brief respite we are set to walk back and tackle the 1.8 miles to home. It’s been a good walk from here to there. The boat owners, mostly fishermen, nod to us and smile at my pooches galivanting in the field surrounding the lake. 

It doesn’t take long to remember our pace and return to the familiar wooded road cut through the Shawnee Natural Forest. The walk is beautiful, and I must remind my tired body that it will be worth it as we tackle the next hill. I know that this walk is good for my health as well as my mental health. I am recharged by the slightest thing. 

Black-eyed Susans dot the landscape, and I wonder how I never noticed them before. Their yellow brightens the day with their sunshine. How do they choose to spread and bloom here? One. Two. Three. The flowers decide to spread out and become sparse as we go further down the road on our quest for quiet reflection and exercise. 

We walk at the pace of a turtle. Even the dogs have slowed down to enjoy the scenery, walking a bit more slowly and investigating the plants along the road. Soon, we approach a low-growing field with a creek flowing beneath the gravel road. In the field, I see them. It’s the simple pink flowers that I loved at the beginning of this walk, and there are hundreds of them blanketing the field and stretching clear into the woods ahead of us. We walk through, and the boys ignore the pretty flowers as they discover a squirrel crossing the road. They find the strength to chase it as far as the leash will allow. 

I drink in the delicate pink flowers and feel like they are mine. I know that they are not mine to pick and disturb from their place of grandeur. I see that they are sprinkled throughout the field ahead, and each flower is full of loosely gathered petals hooked together with a single stem, creating a circular spiral of flowers. They are friends of mine spread across the media in various places, yet they all see me as someone special. I guess I am. The pink flowers just remind me. 

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Hay Starts Green

He had done it his whole life. He was a farmer as was his dad and his father before him. It was over thirteen hundred acres of pure pasture for 300 head of cattle each bought at the local auction barn, Grandpa was aware that the farms needed to take care of the cattle orphans. Raising cattle from birth to adult hood would teach the caregiver many valuable and surprising life lessons. Bottle feeding those young calves with those oversized orange nipples and a gallon of the secret milk potions. It was hard work with temperamental animals. Come winter it will be even worse as one of the boys would use a pickaxe to break the ice on top of their fresh water. They would each care for their bull and use the five-gallon buckets recycled from the old lumber yards to carry water. It was good hard work that was completely expected of them, and they delivered. 

“And it’s good to connect with all that dirt. Preparing the soil for the seeds of spring is vitally important, ” Sarah Marie could go on for days once she got started… 

Corn, yes corn was the agenda of the day. Grandpa had to jump the combine to get it started. Lazily the tractor slowly took the gas and finally turned over with a spark. 

Grandpa was tickled that the old combine would put in their spring crop without any big maintenance repairs. Dustin Meadows was Grandpa’s crop buddy in business for a 30/70 split for the spring and fall major crops.  They used a three-crop system with the spring crop used for repair and maintenance at the farm. The late summer belonged to the four boys to pay the bills for the upcoming months. This made them very independent at a young age. Isme and Grandpa believed in making them earn their keep as soon as they were old enough. 

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Modeling… not for the faint of heart!

I wish that I had good stories to report, but I don’t.

I’d say that I am easily a narcissist and I thought it would be right up my alley, but it was nothing like I thought it would be.

It was worse than the guys who hit on me in the bars on the strip in Carbondale back in college. Photographers take up photography if they want to get close to women. (Maybe all of us are narcissistic…) More people tied to separate me from my panties, but I didn’t bite (so to speak.)

I think that I was decent at it. My eyes were always very striking, but it was more about me naked than my looks or my eyes.