I don’t have a magic wand

Okay, this was my idea, so what is my problem? I know that writing is a stress reliever, not a stress enhancer for me. So do it, set the timer, sit down and just go. Write anything if you need to, anything at all, but of course I have unfinished stories to write, and always will. Everyone’s life is an unfinished story until the end, and then you can’t write about it, too late! So if I am going to get the things out there that I want to, I must do it, just do it. As you must. 

So, prompts. Today I am rolling the story dice, a nice little product to get kids in school telling stories, and hopefully it will stir something in me and in you today. 

Before I give you the prompts, let me comment on this half-baked blog that I have put together. I am trying to do it myself, and I paid plenty for the privilege of doing that… so I mess with the Word Press every day trying to improve it. But I want to write, that is the main idea. If you are seeing this site in January, it will be so much better in the weeks to come. 

PROMPT words: moon, pages, honeybee, magic wand, bridge, calculate, fountain.  That’s it. Use all or none as you write.  Here goes: 

My mother. She had so much as a child, but worked hard, too. A family of four…. parents and a sister and herself. They managed a chicken farm and grew produce for nearby training base Fort Devens during World War II. Hard work, favorable weather and farmer’s luck along with the ability to save money by my grandparents meant that Mom had “luxuries” as a teenager. One of the first televisions to be watched in a living room in Pepperell, Massachusetts. A beautiful glider bicycle that would last her whole life. A collie dog. She was an achiever. Her 4H book is full of completed projects. Black and white photographs taken with a Brownie camera are pasted into the pages showing off her full garden with long rows of beets and carrots, chard and squash. What a green thumb!

Cynthia was brilliant, she finished high school in three years and wanted to go to engineering school to design highways. After all, Eisenhower was rebuilding the highway system in the United States. He had learned as a general in World War II that a good highway system is key for moving troops around quickly. 

But her parents thought, and probably rightly so, that she would be harassed as the beautiful girl she was if she went to college with classes of men. They sent her to nursing school. At seventeen she began her nursing courses, and after two years of book work, she was ready to do some floor time and see what it was all about in real life. She was assigned to the Burbank Hospital in Fitchburg. There she was in the children’s ward, taking care of very seriously sick children.  Later in life, when she had many children of her own, she told us why she never finished her nursing degree. She would go back to her all-girls dorm every night and cry. She could not stand to see children suffer. 

Besides that, she had fallen mad in love with my father, who was training to be a teacher at Fitchburg State College. In those days, the dances were spectacular for college students, the swing bands were in, the Lindy was the dance to know, and it was just the bee’s knees to get out there and dance your cares away while trumpet and clarinet solos indicated that life could be a dream, a lark. They bought it. 

What am I getting to? I am getting to the fact that it is much easier to support two children in a reasonable style than it is to support seven. I was the first baby of seven more to come, and only one did not live to see the light of day. My father struggled to support us as a teacher. The pay was abysmal. But his father had been a teacher before him at Rindge Technical School, and it was a way of life my father was familiar with. But Dad had only one brother, so there again, the two of them had more amenities than my parents could afford to give us when I was a kid. 

Of course, we asked for things. Barbie dolls, GI Joe dolls, trolls, troll houses, Chatty Cathy dolls, and then the big items. Bicycles. Puppies. And then, a horse, please. “I don’t have a magic wand.” I heard Mom say that a lot. Somehow, they managed to provide us with a good Christmas, but I know they started very early with the shopping and accomplished it little by little until we did have quite a few presents under the tree. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know,” was another way she put us off. She never complained about Dad’s lack of a big paycheck. 

But she did work outside the house (along with all the work inside the house that we made for her). She sold Avon, Tupperware, and eventually a cosmetic line called Aloette. She carried on this visiting sales job just to get out of the house, I know it. And in the summer, we all lived on a big piece of land in the woods of Cape Cod. My grandparents thought they were out of their minds when my parents founded a ‘’’tenters’ village” in the fifties that grew eventually into a successful campground in the 1970’s, just as I was feeling my hippie-ness. In fact, the hippies who came to camp at our campground marveled at my parents who had basically raised us barefoot every summer since we could walk. We taught those hippies a thing or two about camping. My dad could fix just about anything since he was an industrial arts teacher, and Mom let folks just pour their hearts out to her. People came back year after year, even when they lost their braids and beads, got their white collar jobs and raised a family.

  And so we had it good. We didn’t know it, we didn’t get the things we wanted most of the time and we worked hard to keep the campground and the restrooms clean. But that time in the woods of Wellfleet was more precious than any family situation that money could buy today. No electricity, one telephone. No television, and not even missing it. Swimming in the ocean every day. Writing letters to friends by Coleman lanterns and candles at night. Sleeping in sleeping bags. Cooking on gas camp stoves and charcoal grills. No electronic distractions except for the transistor radio we listened to every night for the next day’s weather. What a magical life.