Just Successions...

It has been many months since I visited this blog to add my thoughts and Pearl's adventures. Successions of Somethings is being printed and will be available soon. I must admit, the wait is excruciating, but I am sure that "this too shall pass," and I will be stronger for the waiting. Like being patient with the printing and release of Successions, the latest new adventures have been overshadowed by life's many twists. Jason and Elli are still planning their nuptials, but my mind needed clearing of anything "nuptialistic" for a bit, so we will catch up with the marital adventure later this summer.  For now, I will focus on simple blogging in it's truest form. No book, no chapter, no adventure of Pearl and her excursions into the past hurt while healing int he present will be posted for a few weeks. Instead, you will get the meandering thoughts of Mary's mind... hmmm scared yet?

It's difficult sometimes to figure out what needs to be blogged as fact or fiction, but in the end the past is the past, and somebody's fact is another body's fiction - isn't it? The truth is, we fight every day to make the "what if's" a reality - the fiction turns to fact, because the current present is not what we planned for our future. Sadly, yesterday only has a fifty-fifty chance of surviving as fact as well. Life- is it stranger than fiction? Or is it a step into fiction-and an avoidance of reality?

I chose this week to live in my fiction- or to play "what if" . Imagine a whole week of "what-if". I played in a creek with my youngest daughter, watched my youngest son hit a home run, hugged my oldest daughter before she walked down the aisle, and toasted my eldest son saying he was a super lucky man to have a bride as wonderful as his. I sat under a huge ancient oak with a friend while sipping tea and talking, and reminisced about my childhood with a fellow California native.  I planned family vacations, and birthday presents for the kids. I planned get-a-ways and escapades in Italy. I rehearsed for an imaginary vocal exhibition, and I fell asleep on a boat on the river. I spent a fall in Michigan at the Great Pumpkin Festival with my mother, and I ate date nut bread with my dad. I wore wooden shoes and shared oliebolens with my brothers, and I slathered on my big sister's lipstick. What a week- a wonderfully interesting week of laughter and love. Does it have to end? Was it all fiction?

Funny how those moments from the memory become somewhat distorted and make their way into our minds as perfect factual bliss.  If my smile has a chance to remain, I say let this fiction live. True successes are found when one accepts the reality of fiction and smiles through it while thanking God we have the escape.