Category: Non-fiction

Posted in Non-fiction

The Day in the Porch Swing

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

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It was about 1980. I was a grownup. Married. Living life on my own. But with regard to some things, I think you always stay a child. This was one of those things. I was at my grandparent’s house with my mother and my aunt and uncle. They were helping get my grandmother ready to leave her home and live with one of her daughters. It was a hard day.

My grandfather had passed away several years before. The family had tried to leave my grandmother in her home by providing help for her, but that just hadn’t worked out. It was time to do something else. She was quite elderly, almost 90 years of age. Young for her age, however. I remember how beautiful she still was. Still smart, savvy. She was a tough Eastern Kentucky lady. It hadn’t been many years since she was squirrel hunting. I was always a little scared of her, but I admired her.

I remember that I tried to help but, typically, my mother wouldn’t let me. I spent most of that day sitting on the old porch swing. Many homes in my part of the world, back in those days, had wide front porches that went the full length of the house, where family and neighbors gathered in the evenings for fun and fellowship. There was always a porch swing. It was my favorite place to sit at my grandparent’s house and, I suppose, in the back of my mind, I knew this would be the last time.

As I looked around, it occurred to me what a beautiful place it was there in the eastern part of Kentucky. My grandparents farm was in a bowl-shaped valley, surrounded by hills rich with valuable hardwood timber. Not only did the residents of the valley farm, but fossil fuels lay beneath the surface and there was drilling for oil and natural gas. A beautiful, rich place. I’d taken it for granted growing up. I didn’t anymore.

My uncle had passed away a year before my grandfather. As I sat there in the porch swing, I had thoughts of those who had gone before me on that patch of ground, especially my beloved grandfather and uncle. I could see my uncle pull in the driveway in his postal service car. At that point, I heard the sound of tires on gravel and I looked around. The car in the driveway looked like my Uncle’s car. I thought to myself that it wasn’t possible. He had been gone for a while now. I felt like I just blinked my eyes and I saw my Uncle leaning against his car as he so typically did, grinning at me. I wanted to call for my mother, but there wasn’t time. The next thing I knew, he was walking up the road with his back to me, but he seemed just to be a shadow. I watched him walk. As he walked away, he slowly disappeared.

I just sat there, in that old swing, for a few moments. There was, indeed, a car in the drive but it wasn’t my Uncle’s. I knew that I had seen him. I had never had such an experience before. It somehow gave me peace, not only about my Uncle but about my grandmother leaving home. I don’t know how to explain that further. It was a bit of a spiritual journey for me. The day in the porch swing.

Posted in Non-fiction

Protecting the Environment

Posted on by R.M. Carlson


I’ve always been an environmentalist. I will soon be living, at least part of each year, in an area where protecting wetlands, and the plants and animals that live within them, is of vital importance. This may be difficult since there is a movement in the nation’s capitol to abandon environmental regulations and concerns. 

The current budget, presented to the U.S. Congress by President Donald Trump, abandons most, if not all, environmental regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency has essentially been defunded. The Keystone XL Pipeline has been approved. The waste water of coal mine operations is going to be allowed to pollute the water around the coal mines of West Virginia and Kentucky. This is not an exhaustive list of the effect of the proposed federal budget on our environment. 

My area wetlands in Southwest Florida support a large variety of tropical plants, birds, and animals. Part of the area has recently been rehabilitated and the wetlands restored. Wetlands only exist if there is symbiosis between the species of plants and animals within them. The Florida Everglades are an example of wetlands where the symbiosis of the area is not only being disturbed, but destroyed.  Snakes that people have kept as pets and that have gotten too large have been dumped into the Everglades. Pythons, boa constrictors, and others. They are not native to the area and are upsetting the symbiotic balance in this very important wetland area in the United States.

Another environmental issue that is particularly important to me is in the state of Kentucky and its coal mining operations. I, of course, want the people of the state that I have called home for many years to have jobs. Many people in the eastern part of the state work in mining. They blame federal regulations for the loss of their jobs. To increase his popularity, President Trump has dropped the regulatory requirement that coal waste water not be dumped into local waterways. In reality, federal regulations are a small part of the coal miners’ problems. They will simply end up with polluted water and jobs that won’t last very long, if they are rehired at all. 

The Keystone XL Pipeline will run the width of the United States. The chances of a disaster of epic proportions regarding oil spills is high. That is one reason that environmental groups have protested against the construction of this pipeline.

Perhaps the most troubling action against the environment is the dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in this President’s budget. When we think about the advances in cleaning up our air and water since the federal government established the EPA, it is shocking to think of what dismantling it might mean. The symbiosis between species of plants and animals within the environment will disappear as environmental regulations are dropped. Entire species will vanish as well. We don’t know what effect that will have on our environment and, ultimately, on the human population.

Posted in Non-fiction

Journaling #1

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

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This is not my usual story, but just my thoughts this morning. It’s a nice morning in Kentucky. It’s 55F degrees at 8 a.m. It’s supposed to warm up to 70F degrees today which is going to be a wonderful change from two weeks of bitter cold. The cardinal, in the picture above, is a bird of spring in Kentucky. We love our cardinals!

I woke up thinking about writing as I do most mornings. I’m wondering about you – my blogging friends. Do you sell your writing? Do you want to? I did for years. If you write non-fiction, polish up some of your pieces, research the markets where you would like to place them, and query those markets. If you’re rejected, just keep on trying. You’ll break through. Some publications don’t even require a query letter. Don’t just automatically think you can’t do it. You can. It is hard work. Some of the Writer’s Digest publications can help you. No, I don’t work for them. Aim high! Don’t be ordinary.

Fiction is tougher to sell, but there are markets out there. Find them, query them, same process. Try short stories or flash fiction. Flash fiction, in my opinion, is an amazing tool to help you learn to write only what is necessary.

Can you make a living writing? Absolutely. I did for years at one time. I’m not trying to right now as I am semi-retired, but I may try it again. I don’t much like retirement. 🙂 I’m focusing on a book.

Writing a book? So am I. First research how to write a book! The elements that make a book good. It’s not as simple as telling a story.

Another topic. It’s busy around here this weekend. We’re getting ready to go to my favorite place in the sun in Florida where we have a little home. Two months this time.

I’m going to the city today for lunch. Looking forward to that. Writing is a solitary profession. You live inside your own head. Take breaks, get out, see your friends, have new experiences. You can’t write without new experiences. Our home in Florida is in an artist’s colony. I get inspired in many ways there.

Have a great day!

Rosemary

Posted in Non-fiction

Label

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

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When I saw the prompt from the daily post today, I just had to write a short post about it because it is the word label. That word, in certain contexts, has always bothered me. Allow me to explain.

When children are growing up, they are often labeled. There are the cool kids. The poor kids. The rich kids. The label that other children attach to each other determines the way children are treated by other children. We all experience that in our first twelve years of school. Sometimes, those labels are painful and make for a hurtful experience for children in school. Labels may cause children to be bullied. In reality, these children may simply be introverts or extroverts. They may have problems at home. We, as parents, should teach our children not to label other children.

Attaching labels to people doesn’t stop when we grow up. For example, I’m told that I am eccentric, reserved, cool, conceited, a snob, and a few other labels. In reality, I’m just shy. An introvert who is probably a bit eccentric. The other labels that people have attached to me are hurtful and untrue. An introverted, shy person like myself is mistaken for an arrogant, conceited snob when only a few people really know me. Is that fair? I don’t think so.

Instead of attaching labels to people we don’t really know, we, in my opinion, should make an effort to get to know them. Then, there would be no need for labeling. We should teach our children to do the same. The world would be a kinder place.

Posted in Non-fiction

Health Insurance, Local Business, and Big Corporations

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

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Health insurance changes every year. I know that my plan is with one insurer for a few years, then switches over to another insurer for a few years. Different insurers have varying requirements. The same is true if you have a separate prescription plan like I do. My prescription plan works with my insurer but is through another company. It can often be frustrating to figure out the requirements of your insurance plan. A separate prescription plan just adds another layer of confusion.

Until this year, I have been able to use my local pharmacy to fill my prescriptions. My local pharmacy is not one of the big ones. It is not a Walgreen’s or a CVS. It is a small, local pharmacy. The kind that you don’t find much anymore. It’s independently owned by people in the community. It even still has a soda fountain. It is the business you can think of when you hear the slogan, “Support local business.”

I have a special attachment to this pharmacy as most people do to local pharmacies. My parents used this pharmacy. I use this pharmacy. It’s been in our family for a long time. Unfortunately, because of my prescription plan, that will no longer be true.

In their infinite wisdom, my insurance plan,  through my teacher’s retirement pension plan, has determined that we can only get affordable prescriptions if we use their mail order service. I have researched this thoroughly because I don’t want to leave my local pharmacy, but I’m not going to have a choice if I want to stay financially solvent. After extensive conversations with both my health insurance company and the prescription company, it has become obvious that I am stuck with mail order. Let me give you an example.

Drugs are divided up into tiers. I have a prescription for a Tier II drug. My local pharmacy can offer this drug, since I had to change to my new health insurance policy/prescription plan, for $174/month. This is a drug I have to take. Since I am a retiree on a fixed income, that was just a bit beyond my means. So I started talking to the mail order company to find out why this is true. The mail order company told me that I can get the same drug, through them, for a $20 co-pay for three months.

You tell me. Am I being forced by this new health insurance plan to use the mail order company rather than my local pharmacy? Of course I am. If a large mail order company can be subsidized to the point where they can offer this drug in question for a $20 copay, why can’t the local pharmacy be subsidized as well so they would not lose their business? This practice by health insurance companies is not supportive of local business and, instead, forcing local pharmacies out of business. I could even go so far as to say it is creating a monopoly on prescriptions with mail-order pharmacies.

It is similar to the Wal-Mart phenomenon. When Wal-Mart came in to small towns, it drove many small town business out of business.

Large corporations, with government cooperation and their subsidies, are participating in driving small, local business out of business. This is not the America I know.

Posted in Non-fiction

Forgiveness

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

Forgiveness is divine.

Most of what I’ve written recently has been fiction. I may write a story or a scene from a story about this topic – forgiveness – as well. This post is more like a journal entry, a nonfiction post, about forgiveness.

Have you ever felt that someone has wronged you? Really wronged you in a hurtful way? Being wronged in an intimate relationship may be one of the worst ways to be wronged, but it is certainly not the only bad way. Parents wrong children. Children wrong parents. The list goes on. This post veers more toward two people hurting each other in a love relationship and how to achieve foregiveness. I do not profess to be an expert but a neophyte. I’m only jotting down my thoughts.

Some of us may find ourselves in a relationship that perhaps we shouldn’t be in. To make it more complex, maybe we should be in it but it isn’t ours to be in at that moment in time. We may love someone, but circumstances make the relationship complex, complicated, difficult, even impossible. No matter how much we want that relationship to work. Other people may be involved and in the line of fire to be hurt or damaged in some way because of this relationship. Relationships, as we all know, can be complex, convoluted, and involve more than just the two people involved.

Because of the stress on relationships that are difficult and complex, those relationships will splinter and shatter at some point. Both people may agree to go their separate ways. One person in the relationship may decide, on their own, that they must end the relationship. The optimal thing to do, of course, is for the two people to sit down, talk, and bring an end to the relationship together. I am not saying that would be easy, but it’s the best way.

But, people are complex creatures with highly charged emotions, particularly in love relationship. They have their own individual problems and idiosyncracies, complications in their lives, and individual ways of handling things. Not everyone is going to handle breakups of love relationships in the same way. Some people are non-confrontational by nature. Because of all these factors and others, someone is bound to get hurt when a love relationship ends. Maybe even both people, even though one is doing the ending.

So what happens next? Usually anger, hurt, grief, sadness, even the desire for revenge in some cases, though not necessarily in that order. How do you make your way toward forgiveness? Can that even happen?

As I said earlier in this treatise, I am a neophyte in this area, but I think it can. It depends on the people involved, of course. One thing I do know is that it takes time and thought. If you are the person who has been told that the love relationship is over, then you have to get past your anger in order to see things clearly. You have to try to put your hurt and sadness aside long enough to think logically about what happened and why it may have happened. You have to be honest with yourself. It may take some time.

Remember back to the time when your relationship was good. If you trusted your partner then, you need to trust that former partner now. Quite probably, there was a good reason that they ended the relationship that may have little to do with you. It may have more to do with the circumstances of the relationship and their life. Your former partner may not have done a perfect job of ending the relationship. In fact, that is almost certainly true. But, they did what they had to do and hoped you would trust them and understand.

If you can see this, you are at the beginning of forgiveness. Only the beginning, but you have taken the first step. If you can draw on the trust you had for your partner when you were together, it will help you take this first step. It doesn’t mean your hurt or sadness or grief will just go away. Of course, they won’t. The bad feelings you have about the relationships may start to lessen, however. You may start to see things from your former partner’s point of view.

If you are a vengeful person, you need to let go of any feelings of revenge. I, personally, am not a person who seeks revenge so I have a hard time relating to it. I tend to beat myself up instead. Revenge will hurt you far more than the person upon who you are seeking revenge.

If you need to remove the person who hurt you from your thoughts, forgiveness will help you do this. As for me, I want to forgive but keep the person in my thoughts. I’ve taken the first step. We had thousands of wonderful times together during our lives. I want to remember all those times without scarring them with the hurt of the end of the relationship. Yes, this part is a challenge.

I’ll be writing more on this topic. It’s cathartic for me and I hope a help to some of you.

Prompt #953

Posted in Non-fiction

I’m Sorry, Coal Miners, Trump’s Promises to you are Empty

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

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Donald Trump is right to want to put our nation’s coal miners back to work. He is not right to promise to put them back to work in a declining industry and make promises to them he cannot keep.

Trump recently signed an Executive Order relating to coal mining that did one thing and one thing only. It rolled back a regulation that stopped mining companies from dumping water from mining operations into streams, a regulation put into place during the Obama era. Rolling back this regulation will not give the majority of coal miner’s their jobs back because regulations are not what has taken away the coal jobs.

So what did take away the coal miner’s jobs? Automation in the mines, for one thing. Competition from low-cost, plentiful natural gas. Mergers and acquisitions within the coal industry that were unwise and didn’t work. This one mining regulation had almost nothing to do with destroying the jobs within the mining sector. Trump’s latest executive order is not going to help you very much for very long. If at all.

Posted in Non-fiction

There is Support for Autocratic Government

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

This is a blog post I didn’t know I was going to write until I ran across some information today. The research completely baffled me. It boggled my mind so I thought I would share it with you, my readers. This won’t be a long post. It is more a journalistic post than anything else.

In politics, there is a phenomenon called “democratic deconsolidation.” Sounds like some term out of a political science textbook. It happens when a significant portion of the population thinks that democracy is a fairly poor way of running a country. It happened in Venezuela. Researchers named Yascha Mounk and Roberta Foa decided to study this phenomenon using a three-factor model. The first factor was public support for the democratic form of government. Something odd happened or it was odd to many of us who live under a democratic form of government. Public support for  democracy in currrent democracies like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and others was low and falling, especially among the younger people.

In the United States, 75% of those born in the 1930s believe that a democratic form of government is preferable. However, among those born in the 1980s, only about 27% believed the democratic form of government was preferable. To make all this even scarier to people like me, many of the younger people believe that army rule (autocratic rule) is preferable to democratic rule. I will have to admit that I don’t understand that at all. But, then again, I’m only reporting facts in this blog post. The same phenomenon was found in Europe.

This is all I have to say currently except one thing. If you are one who feels this way, please take a class in political science.

 

Posted in Non-fiction

The Case for Political Correctness

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

Speak Out

In the spirit of speaking out, I believe in political correctness. There. I said it. Do you know why I believe in political correctness? Because I call it, for the most part, manners and being polite to other people. Maybe I’m old fashioned. Maybe my mother taught me well. I always thought that being respectful about someone else’s politics or religion was the polite thing to do. In fact, as I grew up, I didn’t know the political affiliations of most of my classmates or neighbors. Sometimes, I knew their religion only because I knew who I went to Sunday School with and who I didn’t. No one really talked about it.

Over the last five years or so, political correctness has been a hot topic. The consensus among the public seems to be, at least during the last Presidential election, that political correctness was not a good thing. Who am I to say? But, I think the lack of it has caused chaos in our society. Lack of political correctness pits neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. Why not just go vote or go to the church of your choice without making a big deal about it? Keep your business to yourself?

Dropping political correctness from the vernacular and from our behavior has had an effect on our society and, I say, a detrimental effect. As I run around out in the world these days, I feel like people are studying one another, trying to figure out these very personal things about each other. I further feel like that if you don’t pass muster, if you aren’t the correct political or religious persuasion according to their standards, then they aren’t interested in your friendship. Meet the galvanizing of America! Meet the red people and the blue people! Can this possibly be a good thing? I don’t think so.

I have many friends who have different political and religious beliefs than I do. We have lots that we talk about that is not associated with politics or religion. Don’t you? Are those two topics suddenly the only two that Americans can speak intelligently about? What happened to music, literature, relationships, and everything else that is going on in our world?

I refuse to surround myself with people who think just like I do. How boring would the world be if we all thought alike. On the other hand, I don’t want anyone pushing their beliefs down my throat. That brings us back where we started. To manners. And political correctness.

Does this mean that we can’t discuss these hot button issues? Of course not! We need to discuss them, particularly when we are electing the government of our country. We need to discuss them in the proper forums. If the government tries to ram its beliefs down our collective throat, then the people of the U.S. are going to rise up and protest as we should in order to protect our rights as a nation. The government needs to remember that not all the people support their particular point of view and the government is representative of all the people, not just half of them.

 

Posted in Non-fiction, Uncategorized

It’s Overwhelming to Relocate

Posted on by R.M. Carlson

I’ve been thinking about relocating for a long time. Years really. I moved to the town in which I live for two reasons. My mother, who lived with me at the time, wanted to move home. The town where I live is my home town. Second, my job was in this town. I had commuted for years and I was tired. Full disclosure. I didn’t want to move back to the town I had called home the first twenty years of my life. But there was my mom to consider. There was my job to consider. So I had a house built and I moved.

I found something out the hard way. You can’t go home again. Yes, I know it’s a cliche. I had been gone 25 years. I had changed. My friends had changed. The town had changed. I had one family member left in my hometown – my mother. She passed away two years after we moved.

I still had my job to consider. So I stayed in my hometown although I told my husband that I wanted to move when I retired. He agreed. I retired six years ago. We still live in my hometown.

There is nothing at all wrong with my hometown. The problem is simple. I don’t fit in there anymore. In some ways, I never did. I really don’t now. It is a perfectly nice small town in a beautiful area. But, for some reason, it’s just not “my place in the world.” In the 25 years I was gone, I learned to like things my hometown doesn’t offer.  I have forever friends in my hometown and they will always be just that – forever. We’re all different now and although I love to see them, I need to be in a place where I’m comfortable and happy. I found that place several years ago.

We finally decided to move. Our initial plan was to sell our house and move, bag and baggage, to the place that we found and love. We knew it would be hard, that finding real estate would be a challenge. We didn’t know how much of a challenge until we talked to a realtor in our most desirable place. We need to be in our place as soon as desirable property comes on the market because property sells almost immediately. We weren’t quite sure what to do.

Then we saw a small (tiny) place come on the market. An older couple had decided to sell their winter home as one of them is ill. They were selling it at bargain basement prices. It is not somewhere that we want to live forever, but for awhile, it will do just fine. We went to look at it, loved it for our purposes now, and bought it immediately.

Our plan now is to spend six months in our new place each year and six months in our current home. We’re moving to South Florida and we aren’t yet sure we want to be here during hurricane season, just in case. We feel really lucky because this will give us a chance to see if we like South Florida and want to live here full-time.

Lucky is not the only way I feel. I feel completely overwhelmed. I recognize that the way I feel is probably normal. Figuring out how to live in one place six months of the year and another place the other six months and they are 1100 miles apart has to be a bit difficult. What makes it more difficult is that our six months in Florida each year will not be consecutive.

One thing I know for sure. I’m not going to be here in the most likely hurricane months. It is frightening to me to think about our little place here so close to the coast. I know that I can’t  leave anything here that I consider valuable. I’m sure I’ll get used to living so near the Florida coast and less conscious of the hurricane potential!

Living in two places means having duplicates of everything and I’m not talking about housewares. I mean two doctors, two dentists, two pharmacies….you get the picture. I will be complex at first to get everything situated. We will need another automobile here.

Life will change and become quite a bit more complicated. I was ready for a change. All of these things that seem to be obstacles will work themselves out with our help. I am excited about my new life!