I'm not sure where the rest of January went!

I think it ended up swallowed into the mouth of several viral illnesses shared around my home, some busy weekends of adventures, the end of a long-standing freelance contract of mine, and the revival of some inspiring music in my life. Some of these were fun, and, as you can imagine, some were the exact opposite of fun. For better or worse, however, I'm feeling very creatively juiced right now, and ready for a jump into something!

Now, just to figure out what...

But first things first, I want to share -- with whomever might not have given up on me -- some great music I heard at this year's Trad Fest at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Each year, the school has a weekend of beautiful community-uniting old-time music that starts with a potluck and square dances on Friday night, continues with master class workshops on Saturday afternoon, and ends with their "barn-busting finale," a concert on Saturday night. I've been a faithful attendee for the last three years, and each year, a new musician blows my mind. One year it was Ira Bernstein and Riley Baugus, and another year, it was the Clack Mountain String Band. I've also been introduced, via these concerts, to the beauty of really talented flatfooting, the impressiveness of musicians who play two or three or four instruments at performance-worthy levels, and the realilty that, if the music is good, I can indeed sit and listen for four hours without once feeling like I need to leave.

This year, the bands were, as always, great, but the real stars of the evening were The Carolina Chocolate Drops. I am more and more drawn to groups that add simple percussion to this beautiful old-time music, and these people have incredible, delicious percussion in just-the-right-amounts. They used snares, something like claves, a washboard, and even a marching bass drum, but they never sounded anything more than organic, acoustic stringband-ers. It was perfect. My favorite was this one:



Some of the lyrics are:

Cornbread and butter beans
And you across the table
Eating beans and making love
As long as I am able
Hoe some corn and cotton too
And when the day is over
Ride a mule and cut the fool
And love again all over

What a tribute to simplicity! This is how I would love to distill life: good food, someone you love with whom to eat it, working and enjoying the day, and then doing it all over again. They announced the title of the tune before playing it, and I leaned over to True and said, "If this song is half as good as its title, I'm going to need to know how to play it soon!" Needless to say, I'm working on it.

The other thing they did was take a good R&B/rap song and turn it into a stringband tune. It's remarkable, and definitely worth a watch too.


So, enjoy the music for a while, and I'll be back in the coming days to update you on my latest hare-brained schemes, all titled "What Comes Next for Debi?"

It is 9:15 am. I am sitting on a high stool at a coffeeshop where the baristas know my name and that I like an extra squirt of chocolate in my mocha, the other customers are often the parents of Doodlebug's classmates, and I can look out the large window at the nearby shops and passersby. I got here on foot, trudging through bright white snow under fairy-trees covered with white ice, listening to music through my earphones, just after dropping my children at school on foot, too.

Now, I'm waiting for a call from someone who wants to talk about the upsides and downsides to working as an independent contractor. After that call I'll get to working -- right here, in my coffeeshop, with my mocha at hand. I have to admit that this is a very, very nice routine.

The downsides are that it can be lonely -- no colleagues, just clients, and they're not here at the coffeeshop -- and that the work is unpredictable. I can be ferociously busy, or have nothing at all. Either way, the childcare hours I schedule are set, and while I can sometimes add hours if necessary, I can't cancel them without paying anyway.

So, what do I do next? I am not really passionate about my work, though I am good at it. I like completing jobs and making clients happy, but I don't find web development very soul-stirring. It seems no one wants to pay me to learn fiddle tunes or experiment with vegan cooking or read novels. Silly world! For now, I have work to keep me busy through February or early March, and then, eh. What next? I really don't know.

Anyone have any ideas?

It is cold here. It's not as cold as it is for my country mouse friend in Booger Freeze, AK, but it's cold enough to make outdoor time a means to an end instead of the enjoyable experience it usually is for me, Doodlebug, and Shmoo each morning and afternoon. We're bundled in lots of layers, and because of the volume of snow that fell upon a similar volume of slush that was all followed by a deep freeze, we're avoiding some very slick patches of snow-and-ice-packed sidewalk. This means that often, we trek, head down against the cold, over the snow on people's lawns. And to think I considered not bothering with buying Shmoo snow pants this winter!

Last Thursday, the three of us were heading home from school when we saw, up ahead, someone trying to manoevre along the sidewalk on crutches. That patch of sidewalk, the next up from our house, has not been shoveled, salted, or otherwise attended by the owners of the house against which it sits. He was wearing a backpack and clearly having trouble. As we crossed a main intersection to reach our corner, I was watching my girls and lost site of the crutched pedestrian ahead, so when I looked up and didn't see him, I assumed he had gone into one of the houses. As we approached our porch, though, I saw that he had fallen. He was on his knees in the snow and using a fire hydrant to pull himself up.

With Shmoo in the sling and Doodlebug close behind me, I ran to him and found that he was young -- maybe 20 -- and clearly in terrible pain. He could barely hold himself up on his crutches, and the damaged leg/foot was wrapped in ace bandages and ended with a dangling sock, soaking wet and freezing from being dragged in the snow. He is a student and has no family here. I asked him if I could call a taxi for him, and he said that he had been waiting at the hospital for a taxi for more than an hour and a half before he was told he had to leave. The hospital staff who had told him to leave had told him that his destination was only three blocks away.

It was at least eight. And did I mention that this person was on crutches in the snow? After some phone calls and attempts to get this poor kid a ride from someone without two children, I finally saw a taxi in the street (not a common site in residential Evanston). I flagged it down and bribed the driver to take this kid home.

Two days later, I was in the car with Doodlebug and her best friend, on our way home from a birthday party, when we saw an old woman on a street corner, waving a silver cane at all passing cars. I rolled down my window and asked if she was ok. She said, "Look at this! I can't get across this! I'm trapped!" Sure enough, the path from the sidewalk down into the street was flooded with an ankle-deep puddle on one side, and on the other side, a path roughly the width of my foot was the only route through. This woman simply could not navigate it. I locked the car, put on the blinkers, and got out to help this woman over the mound of snow and into the street. Then I discovered that she was on her way from a pharmacy in our neighborhood back to her neighborhood, roughly half a mile away. She had come this way, I gathered as I drove her home, because the pharmacy in our neighborhood was slightly cheaper. Then she got stuck.

So, two lessons I learned:

1. Urban dwellers, please shovel your sidewalks.

2. Read more about national health care, health care advocacy, and what can be done in my own neighborhood about the hospital and its policies about patient release.

I mean, really, what the heck?!!?!

How many people in the foreground of this picture have valuable opinions that count?

Most of you out there would likely answer "two," counting the toddler and the adult to whom she's speaking. I think, even on a few moments' reflection, there would be very few who would say "just the adult." The thing that frustrates and saddens me most in the world of parenting are the numbers of people who don't ACT that way.

I live in a house with three other people. I don't live with one other person and two walking baby dolls; I live with three people. Doodlebug and Shmoo won't suddenly become people with opinions that matter when they get jobs or have children or pay taxes or vote; they are people with opinions that matter right now. I like them. I think they're interesting little people, and I want to know what they're thinking and how they feel about our world, the one that we share, all four of us, here in this house where our adventures are based.

Of course I have more knowledge and experience than them, but the jury is still out on whether or not I have more wisdom. I know how to do more things, but I might not know all of the important things. I have a responsibility to keep them safe and offer them as much guidance as I can, but in the end, these are little humans who will grow up to feel that  they are as wise and important as I give them reason to feel.

That picture up there? That's me, around age two and a half. I was in there, in that little head of curls, in that cute little face, figuring out the world around me and how I felt about it. The worth of my opinions did not suddenly grow exponentially when I was able to express myself clearly. For my children, I try to remember that, and to treasure their feelings as I treasure my own. Try as I might, I cannot understand those parents who don't feel that way.

Shmoo and I were walking from her school to Doodlebug's the other day, singing "The Wheels on the Bus." We were making up verses, and I was asking her to fill in the blanks. This became a challenge for her when I sang:

"The hippo on the bus goes..."

She thought for a second, and finally said:

"Hip, Hip, Hippo!"

Who knew that was the sound they made?

The hippos on the bus go hip, hip, hippo
Hip, hip, hippo
Hip, hip, hippo
The hippos on the bus go hip, hip, hippo
All through the town

So, today's lesson is that the most obvious answer might be the best one, too!

I have been brewing over this post for a long, long time.

In my journey with Little Shmoo, our fight to find out what was wrong with her, my arguments with doctors and others about my gut feeling, and in our final validation of my deep fears, I often asked myself what I was supposed to be learning. I spent a lot of time sitting in hospital rooms with my baby on my lap, wrapped in IV chords and monitors, staring into the green glow of the room and trying to figure out exactly what I was doing there. What was the lesson to be learned?

I had read about the concept of drawing experiences to you, spiritually, for the lessons they would bring you, and had a friend who told me, over and over, that the universe would send me answers if I would phrase the questions clearly and listen quietly. I even had a therapist who I sought in desperation, and her advice was similar: this is your path. Why are you on it?

In the end, I know that I have years of thought to process regarding these experiences, but a word keeps coming to me when I ask the universe for an answer. The word is "instinct." I had instincts regarding Little Shmoo, despite my feeling somehow disconnected from her for longer than I'd care to admit. Couched in all sorts of other terms: "a gut feeling," "a strong suspicion," "I have trouble believing that...," "I just have a sense," "something tells me..."

Something was telling me. It got louder and louder and louder. It kept me up at night. I listened to Shmoo cry and felt scraped raw inside. I said to my parents once, "What if there's something really big that we've missed? What if she has some kind of problem that we don't know about, and she's hurting?" I felt so physically ill when she cried that I began, unknown to everyone, digging my fingernails into my forearms, leaving pink crescents in them, keeping myself from screaming along with her. The universe was trying so hard to send me my answer. I just didn't know what to do with it.

For those of you who have not read the whole "Woah Baby" set of blog posts in 2006, it turns out that I was unquestionably, frighteningly correct about my instincts. Shmoo had an undiagnosed congenital heart condition, easily resolved with surgery, that likely had caused much of her sleeping trouble and almost all of her respiratory trouble. We discovered it in September of 2006, when she was just over 13 months old. I was right. I was RIGHT. I WAS RIGHT.

I WAS RIGHT.

This brings me some solace, but not a lot. What can I do with this information? What can I do to heal from the trauma of being right and ignored? It seems this is a recurring theme in my life: "you're right. so what?" I want to answer that last question. So, here's what I've been thinking...

Does anyone else out there have a story of instinct to tell? Have you ever been right when no one else could imagine it so? Would you be willing to talk to me about it? I have an idea, but I'm not ready to share details publicly yet. Let me know. Pass this on to people. You can write to me privately here via Gaia mail, or at my email address: debi at jebraweb dot com.

This has been a hard winter, physically. Life in the warmth of our house is brighter, and in the cocoons of home and school and the homes of friends, but almost every excursion outside is grey.



The snow has frozen into the alleys and unsalted sidewalks, making treks perilous and startling. Walking in the tire tracks is a recipe for disaster -- only dirty, uneven snow allows enough traction for anyone without spiked shoes.




Even deep into bushes and the branches of trees, winter has a strong grip. It's exhausting, all this grey and white. I find myself wearing the brightest things I can find, more jewelry than normal, drawn closer to the television and the computer, where colors flash provocatively if artificially.

Said simply: I've got to get out of here. We're making a break for the desert of Nevada this weekend, where recent surprising rainfall followed by bright sun has created -- oh, to see them in person! -- flowers!

I'll report back from the world of color late next week.