Posts by Maddie Lock
Make Friends With Your Monkey
All of us have one. Some are more active than others. When you think of a monkey what comes to mind is a chattering and noisy little creature that can’t stay still or be quiet (unless it’s sleeping. Maybe). Think about the last time you fretted about something.
Read MoreResistance
Resistance is the way we react when we don’t want to embrace the present moment. We want things to be different. Period. So we feel that anger, or jealousy, or impatience. We don’t accept that things are what they are.
Read MoreA New Purpose for a New Year
I fell madly in love on Christmas Eve. Here’s what happened.
My husband and son walked into the house carrying a huge grass basket, singing we wish you a Merry Christmas at the top of their lungs. Inside the basket? Two eight-week-old Jack Russell Terrier puppies.
A Daughter’s Journey
Often in the afternoons my father will open a cabinet, and with his gnarled index finger trail the spines of binders filled with catalogued DVDs until he finds one he wants to share with me that day.
Read MoreApple Strudel
The January before her death in 2013, my mother Susi came to Florida to visit me. She was living in my half-sister Jackie’s Colorado home and wanted to get out of the cold and snow for a few weeks. During her visit, we both worked hard to be kind to one another. COPD and emphysema limited her activity; a trip to the grocery store sent her to bed for the afternoon. So we dallied over lunches, settled under the oak trees in the backyard and looked out over the lake.
Read MoreDownton Abbey Redux
I believed the beauty, orderliness, and stateliness of the great house would offer a balm for my current sense of things falling apart, of immense changes not only in my life but in the world. However, I was mistaken.
Read MoreAfter the Storm
Ironically, the morning after Ian left Florida to move on to South Carolina was astounding. After two days of angry wind gusts and a steady downpour, we were rewarded with a cerulean sky and a few wisps of white clouds along with temperatures that herald in the wonderful Florida autumn.
Read MoreThe Stranger
Here is a photo of us. I am sitting in her lap; our heads are close together. We are both smiling. No, I am not smiling; I am grinning from ear to ear, holding a black Fury horse with wheels on its feet and a Joey doll on its back. A gift from this woman who says she is my mother. It is Christmas Eve, my fifth one.
Read MoreNostalgia
I tend to get nostalgic and think of my early childhood in Germany, when the landscape turned orange, red, and yellow, a precursor to the bare and wintry landscape soon to come. Time to collect chestnuts and stock up on firewood. Memories of Oma climbing wearily out of our cozy featherbed in the mornings and crank up the wood-burning stove to warm the kitchen before she came to get me up and dressed.
Read MoreThe Swinging Pendulum
For sanity’s sake, I choose to believe in Emerson. His compelling essay “Compensation” offers hope that wrongs will be righted, and that good deeds—and diligence— will be rewarded. In other words, do the right things and the universe will restore balance: gifts and burdens are the extremes on the spectrum, the balance is the middle and the universe always returns to this.
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