By: Gloria MacKay
This is the first in a series of articles by our newest contributing writer, Gloria MacKay of Trilogy at Redmond Ridge. Gloria is a writer of poetry and essays, and she will be sharing her thoughts and reflections with her fellow Trilogy members through this series entitled Sense of Place.
When I come upon a lemon lingering in the crisper, I don’t want some knee-jerk optimist telling me I should turn it into lemonade. When I want to cook from scratch, I do desserts.
How much lemonade can you get from one lemon, anyway? Even metaphorically speaking, it’s scarcely worth the squeeze. What I tend to do is shove it down the garbage disposal and wait for the splat. (This makes a great air freshener.)
I’ve never strived to be an optimist—like Pollyanna, the little orphan girl who plays the ‘glad game’ in a series of children’s books written by a succession of authors, presumably all equally glad. I read one or two and switched to Nancy Drew.
Even now, when I wake up in the middle of the night to darker darkness than usual—no digital time, no street lights and no moon at all—I am not inclined to scrounge for candles, thinking “isn’t this going be fun?” I dig for the flashlight, scurry to the bathroom, and crawl back to bed. The best way for a non-optimist to deal with power failures is to sleep them off.
There was an exception.
Beyond the wooded lot across the street, sheets of turquoise flashed across the sky, and ‘pow pow’s’ peppered the air as though giants were playing war. I stepped outside, crunching a path in the grass with my bare feet. My intention was to see the line of demarcation between us, stranded up here in the dark, and them, asleep in the distance with freezers humming and nightlights aglow. But the only lights were sky lights.
Read the rest of the story on MyTrilogyLife.com.
