Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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ducks, geese, & some related marital advice

September 21, 2021

Rick Astlee the One Eyed Duck is, really and truly, living his best life. In many ways he seems worlds happier than before the incident last winter, and if you could spend a few days with him I think you would agree. His limited vision does mean that he tilts and leans hard toward the ground, so as to see where he is going with his one good eye; and this usually means he walks in circles. But more and more, he has been stretching those circles into longer and longer ellipses. He waddles in oblong, not too elegant loops, overlapping them with greater and greater distance every day. It is pretty amazing to watch his slow, steady progress and also watch him regain some independence. Mike Meyers Lemon, his smaller duck companion, the one with the wonky wing feathers, is genuinely concerned for his friend and tries to help. Mike calls rapid fire to Rick, “quack-quack-quack,” and Rick answers languidly, “quaaaaack” and Mike hurries closer, “quack-quack-quack,” like an earnest round of Marco-Polo, Mike stretching his shiny duck neck and waddling search of his circle-walking friend, bit by bit, voices easily distinguishable, until they are safely reunited. This drama happens throughout the day all over the farm, but the sweetest thing is watching it play out at sunset. We noticed that almost every night, if the south coop flock has retired to bed without Rick, the calling and fretting is even easier to hear. The trouble is that often Rick is fast asleep somewhere errant, deaf to Mike’s pleas. So either Handsome or I, accompanied by Klaus, scan the farm with a flashlight until we find Rick curled up beneath a cedar tree or within the hydrangeas, sometimes beneath the deck which is wildly troublesome, and then we carry him back to the coop. As Rick arrives safe for bedtime, Mike always loses his mind like a worried parent whose teenager has missed curfew. It is precious.

Snapshot from last winter, the Bathtub Days xoxo
When Rick Astlee makes it all the way to the shade garden on his own, we celebrate!

Meanwhile, Johnny Cash the lone gander has been heart breakingly attached lately. Attached in the neck-swooning, soft-whine-honking, gentle spirit way that MIA used to have with me. He has attached himself alternately to Chanta, our big gold and white paint horse, and Klaus, the world’s most loving German Shepherd. Johnny Cash is Mr. Lonelyheart when he wanders the farm alone, but when he is with his chosen buddy of the moment he could not be happier. Often we find him waddling after Chanta, Chanta’s thick tail swishing at him contentedly. Or we see the goose and his dog resting in the shade of a pine tree, supervising the chickens at scratch. A few days ago I brought Klaus a bowl of water plus a few golden Oreos to share with his friend, and his friend lunged at me, shooing me away from their bro space. Klaus didn’t seem to notice, which is good. Like, extremely good. I cannot think he would approve of any animal attacking his mama, not even his friends.

Out of the blue a few weeks ago, an old adage blew through my mind and settled with more clarity then ever: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” I suppose that most of my life have assumed it meant something like, what’s fair is fair, or maybe what’s good enough for women is good enough men, and vice versa. Like an obtusely framed anti-sexist thing? What have your believed it to mean?

I asked my husband his take on the expression, and he said, “You can’t have a double standard.” Exactly, right? No double standards.

Here a little extra I am putting behind the expression lately: What benefits one of the pair, benefits the pair itself. As if we are two streams feeding into one river, a thorough mix of waters, and the health and quality of each stream constitutes the health and quality of the river. That’s what I’m thinking.

My guy wrote this in the sand for me while on a business trip early in our marriage. xoxo

When we renewed our vows in July, one of the promises I added to our original ones was to remember that my husband is my teammate, not my competition. There’s a lot of private history behind that, and maybe I will share more as we go, but for today’s purposes I am just reflecting on how the better off he is, the better off we are. The happier and healthier I am, the more vibrant our union is.

20 YEARS!!

It’s not earth shattering new wisdom, but it is a timely reminder for me. And since my daily life is so filled with birds and bird behavior, the adage is likely to blow through my mind again and again. I appreciate this nodding wink from the Universe.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, because the goose and the gander are one. Their streams have fed willingly into the same river, and that’s very good. That’s really beautiful. It can be powerful.

In Estes Park a few years ago, before life changed in so many ways. We stayed in a cabin that opened to the river, rushing through snow and ice. Gorgeous!

Thanks for checking in, friends! May you have a buddy as devoted to you as Mike Meyers Lemon is to Rick Astlee, so that on the days your circular wandering leads you far from home at bedtime, that friend calls and calls to you until you are safe again. May you also find an unlikely friend, like our lone gander has found with both a horse and a dog. And if your stream mingles with any other, may all that water be clean and nutritious, with strong currents and sweet flavor.

XOXOXOXO

3 Comments
Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: animals, choose joy, ducks, farm life, geese, marriage, wisdom

romance right now

February 14, 2021

Happy Valentine’s Day, friends! Is your romantic celebration looking different this year? Ours definitely is. And I actually love it.

My husband has been working extraordinary hours this month. His normal Commish responsibilities, plus the weight of legislative season, all compounded by the ongoing complex problems brought to the utility industries by this crazy weather… The man is giving it all, 24/7. Although we have been together at the farm pretty solid since mid March of last year, these recent weeks he has felt a bit absent. Even when he emerges from his upstairs office, he is barraged with phone calls, texts, emails, and ongoing new emergencies at all hours of the day, every day. We never know how much down time we are going to enjoy together.

This may sound a bit grueling for our marriage, like a low key complaint, but that’s not at all how I mean it.

Not only am I immensely proud of the work he does, and the fact that he is happy to pour himself into it, but also I see a few beautiful daily constants remain for us:

We always drink coffee together in the morning; we never miss dinner together; and we always go to bed at the same time. There are plenty more sweet, unexpected ribbons of time together throughout each day, for which I am thankful, but the other day it struck me that those three rituals seem to be non negotiable. What a gift.

I am thankful that we have such a well established rhythm and harmony, so we can absorb disruptions of every variety and remain in step. I am thankful that our feelings come from somewhere deep, like abundant well water, rather than from intermittent rainfall. We can keep up with shifting circumstances, and I love that.

This snapshot was taken in the French Quarter at a very cool little artists’ walk we both love. He was refusing to let me smooch him like I wanted to. Then he grabbed me and held me up in the air. xoxo

For posterity, I feel like documenting what romance looks like this Valentine’s weekend, in pandemic, during an historic winter storm, while my man is purely exhausted from his day job:

Romance in times like these can look like chopping the frozen pond and troughs several times per day.

It can look like taking overlapping conference calls in ear buds so he can drive to town and buy horse blankets because his wife is worried sick about Chanta and Dusty.

Romance can be grocery shopping together well ahead of the snowstorm and unceremoniously handing each other boxes of chocolate to take home, then laughing out loud inside our masks like it’s the best joke ever.

Romance, in fact, is laughing together every chance we get, at anything we want. It’s also watching documentaries together, and freely criticizing strangers who join cults.

Romance is trading prayer requests with each other, for the people each of us talks to separately, as well as updating each other on good news and difficult news. Romance is counting our blessings as if it is the counting of them that makes them real.

Romance turns out to be old school, crayon-decorated coupons for massages that he is too tired to give and future outings that we cannot guarantee, because the tradition is old and good and happy. Romance can be homemade brownies filled with chopped up candy bars. Steaks that are sort of shaped like hearts and layers and layers of silky, fuzzy blankets.

Romance is obsessively loving every single animal together, so much. It is wearing your black felt cowboy hat and winter coat with the upturned collar (so sexy) to gather shivering ducks so they can warm up in the bathtub and then cuddling an overly attached a cat who won’t stop fake nursing our blankets. Romance is clearing ice from horse hooves even though your sweatpants are making you crazy and your eyes hurt.

Romance is troubleshooting every single cool breeze you detect and investigating every sound that might be a troubled pipe.

Romance is checking on your friends together and being proud of the kids together.

Romance is selecting television distractions that won’t drive your wife too crazy and playing UNO even when you are dead tired and she mostly wins. : )

A different hat than he gets to wear this week, but honestly he wears them all so well.

Sometimes romance is jewelry and rose bouquets, fancy restaurant dinners and cologne. But we have no need of that stuff now.

Gulf coast getaway 2019

Soon, babe, we will get dressed up, go out on the town, and maybe even travel. Until then, I am happy to get bundled up and care for the farm together.

I am so happy to cook our dinners and desserts here, take hasty hot showers to protect the septic field, and live thereafter in soft pajamas. These nine acres are paradise to me, and you make it all better. You embody all the romance in the world, and I am so glad you are still my Valentine.

NOW DRAW FOUR BITCHEZ
XOXOXOXO

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: choose joy, daily life, gratitude, love, marriage, romance, Valentine's Day

forty seven years and many more to go

October 25, 2020

On this cold and variable autumn weekend in late October, my beautiful parents are celebrating their 47th wedding anniversary. Rumor has it they stole away to their own backyard for a brief and covid-friendly date night, which is to say that they are finally getting a room. Get a room guys! hehe

Mom, baby me, and Dad, circa 1974.

My parents married especially young and had me almost immediately, then they had four more kids who were also, well, pretty good, depending on who you ask.

Genevieve, me, Angela, Philip, & Joey (not in birth order or coolness order either)

All my life our parents have been the young parents in every crowd, and I have loved it. I grew up very accustomed to my female friends having crushes on Dad and my male friends having crushes on Mom (a particular devastation, though, when I reached the age to have crushes on those boys). Moreover, I always just felt like part of them. No kids remember life without their parents; but I felt a unique sense of almost kinship or camaraderie because we were relatively close in age. Understandably, they were less advertisory about this fact to the world at large. I suppose, especially in the 1970s, people might be judgmental and have plenty to say about it. But I was always proud of them, and I still am.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to answer a question about their youth, when I posted about Dad’s 63rd birthday. A new Facebook friend noticed the narrow age difference between Dad and me (I am 46), and I quickly confirmed it. I am never shy about this. I said that yes, they were very young when they married, and the five of us kids have been the luckiest kids ever for their love and devotion, not just to us but to each other.

Growing up with young parents was gobs of fun. They were energetic, playful, driven, attentive, hard working, and always up for every good tradition, big and small. They fed us healthy food every single meal, read aloud to us and in front of us, took us on all kinds of trips, threw countless parties, fixed our cars, made us laugh, connected us to family and friends at every turn, kept us in Catholic school whether we deserved it or not, and endured all of our adolescent weirdness and young-adult griefs. They gave us everything, most of it made from thin air, and I honestly do not know how they did it. What I do know, in my bones, is that our charmed and beautiful family life was a product of sheer will, determination and, yes, passion (get a room).

The older I get, the more I realize how lucky we are to still have our parents alive and healthy, still married, and still celebrating their anniversary in personal, unique ways. They still tease us and feed us. They still laugh hard with us and read books and ask us what we are reading. They still try to get us all together as often a possible, whether it’s a weekend cookout or a special group travel plan or, during pandemic, a family Zoom. It sometimes makes me cry thinking of how much of their human lives have been spent, literally, on us.

group candids = the best

We have received the full force of their loving personalities for forty seven years, and now a whole batch of grandchildren are soaking it up, too. Maybe soon, great grandchildren.

Seeing Mom and Dad celebrate privately now, and seeing them enjoy their home in this brand new chapter of middle aged romance, is lusciously sweet.

The photo above is from when Mom and Dad renewed their vows in the Church. (Their first wedding was several years prior, and before Mom took her Catechism and joined.) See Mom’s wedding band on her necklace? My memory is that she and Dad both wore their bands this way for several months leading up to the ceremony. It was a very intentional second engagement, something they didn’t experience the first time around. I think about this all the time.

Mom and Dad, you never pretended like marriage has been easy, but man, you have made it look so completely worth all that was asked of you, and that is inspiring. Wildly encouraging. We might never really understand how hard it has been for you, or what you have sacrificed to be our parents. But we hope to have many decades still to say thank you and to encourage you to live life for yourselves as much as possible. Your efforts have not been in vain. I hope you feel as much joy and satisfaction, as we all feel gratitude. I hope your backyard pandemic-style anniversary celebration was romantic and happy!!

“You come from a long line of effort.”
~Mickey Sperry
XOXOXOXO

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: anniversary, family, gratitude, love, marriage, memories, parents

in a continuum, where does the story begin?

July 19, 2020

“The good news is that the heat seems to be exhausting our five million grasshoppers. Wait, let me back up…”

I was around nine years old, barefoot and in the middle branches of Mom’s mulberry tree, right there on the west edge of the house against our neighbors’ driveway. My hands were stained black with the wonderful inky juice, my skin brown from summertime and my hair probably tangled in the back. I was worried that something deep and important was wrong with me because I could never figure out the correct beginning of any story. I was fundamentally flawed, though I didn’t know the word fundamental yet.

I marveled at how people could just dive in and tell any story fluidly, discerning with confidence how to begin the tale and what details to include. To me, to my nonstop thoughts and conveyor belt lines of questioning, every beginning was really just the middle or end of something else, everything was very literally connected. Nothing, not even in fiction books, had a believable and well formed boundary.

It’s why I still have trouble telling stories. I never know where to start. What history can be excluded, can just be trimmed away as if it didn’t happen, as if it doesn’t matter any more.

What details matter not just to me, but also to the listener or reader? What details would be missed, if I attempted some economy? What precious context supplies the understanding that makes all the difference?

Nothing happens in a vacuum, and no man is an island. We all affect each other, and we are all affected by each other. That’s not a flaw; it’s part of our wonderful design.

As for how you tell me stories, tell me everything. Leave nothing out. I want to hear it all, even if it barely seems relevant. I want to understand the background stories, the moods and flavors, the weird implications, the spider webs of complicated stories that led up this exact moment.

The grasshoppers are numerous, but they are slowing under the weight of Oklahoma summertime. And the tomatoes are thriving. Tonight we ate a pretty delicious galette made with a few of those tomatoes plus fresh garden basil and a parmesean-cornmeal crust.

And we sat with and loved on our friends whose story is changing. Not suddenly, and not in a vacuum. I do not grasp where it begins, really, and maybe they don’t either. Tonight, though, we have this part of it, of this one part of a big and complicated story that is far from over. This moment in a continuum, this chance to do the next right thing.

I very much wish that someone would have told me, at nine, barefoot in that mulberry tree, that it’s ok to not know where a story begins. No one knows. We just get to dive in right where we are and pour ourselves out lavishly.

“You never know how hard it will be.
You never know when it will end.
You can’t control it.
You can only adjust. And, he added,

No one gets through it on their own.“
~Angel, Born to Run, Christopher McDougall

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: choose joy, community, gratitude, grief, love, marriage, storytelling, ubuntu

come what may

July 14, 2020

Today is our nineteenth wedding anniversary!!

This snapshot was taken in the French Quarter at a very cool little artists’ walk we both love. He was refusing to let me smooch him like I wanted to. Then he grabbed me and held me up in the air. xoxo

When I reflect on the last nineteen years, my heart feels overwhelming gratitude that so much of our marriage has burned brightly with real and true passion, with romance that’s more than an undercurrent; it has been the theme, the mood, our day to day vibe. We enjoy a warm and safe, balmy, equatorial connection. I refer to brackish water a lot, meaning that we have a mix of fresh and salty water in our life. But it is almost always warm.

And when we have found ourselves swimming in the colder, more violent waters of grief and trauma, chaos and general stress, we always manage to choose each other. We are always drawn to the safety and center of us. That is an easy thing to take for granted. This magnetism is the reason young couples cannot stand to be apart. But the older we get, the more I see how powerful and beautiful it is to also consciously choose both each other and “us,” and to know that the other person will do the same.

Complimentary spirits and personalities, different gifts that make a good team, that’s real. And being greater then the sum of our parts, that’s also real.

What else is real is the history we have built together, in just nineteen quick and beautiful years. We now share almost as many memories together as apart, and I love that. We share so many dreams, still, that we will need to live to 150 at least to see them all to fruition.

As we go, though, the day to day is plenty for me. Our simplest days are my favorite.

Today after perfect coffee at daybreak and a near miss with a skunk, he oversaw our final electrician repairs while I ran at the lake. Then we fed and played with the animals together, and I started removing all the artwork from our downstairs. (He recently gifted me a gorgeous new area rug, so obviously let’s just start from scratch now.)

It will not look this way for long.

This afternoon we delivered a mattress set and picked up seats for the Batmobile then, instead of eating our anniversary meal at a restaurant, stopped at Crest for steaks and shrimp. Once home, I worked on potatoes au gratin while he chopped up ripe garden fare for fresh, warm, homemade salsa, one of his specialties.

I can’t really share every good detail, because they are innumerable. Every hour feels important. Every detail worth capturing.

Mostly, we are home together, happy. And we know that we will sleep in the same bed tonight. Then have perfect coffee together again at the next daybreak. And we know that we are both praying and trusting for the same things, our energies and intentions fully supporting each other’s needs and wants and dreams and goals. These are gifts for which I am wildly, humbly thankful.

Happy anniversary, Handsome. I love you more than ever, and I love that we are on this adventure together, even on the simplest days.

XOXOXOXO

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: anniversary, choose joy, gratitude, love, marriage, romance

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Hi! I'm Marie. Welcome to the Lazy W. xoxo

Hi! I’m Marie. This is the Lazy W.

A hobby farming, book reading, coffee drinking, romance having, miles running girl in Oklahoma. Soaking up the particular beauty of every day. Blogging on the side. Welcome to the Lazy W!

I Believe Strongly in the Power of Gratitude & Joy Seeking

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