Abortion

 

If the Republicans are hoping abortion issues will go away by November's election, they are delusional.

Why won't it?

Because every fertile woman, everywhere someday may face having to make the choice for themselves or their underage daughters. Even many of those who said, "I would never get an abortion" when faced with an unwanted pregnancy opted for their "never." They will vote against pro-life candidates for their own well-being.

I spent almost a year writing Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles about the history of abortion in the United States. The book had a chapter with my grandmother and her friends, very proper Victorian ladies, talking about the "knitting needle solution" to keep their family size manageable.

It was a depressing year, because with each bit of research I became more convinced that abortion had the same chance of being stopped as prohibition was able to stop drinking but that attempts to stop abortion would be useless at a great price to too many.

I was always pro-choice but did not feel I had the right to decide for another.

Before Roe v. Wade, before birth control was available easily, many of my friends had abortions. One died. Almost all had horrendous experiences of back rooms including one abortionist making a pass at his patient, immediately after. There were dirty newspaper-covered tables and bad treatment.

People, who lost mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins, nieces to back- room abortionists, told stories of the pain at their deaths.

I was lucky enough to interview Bill Baird, who fought hard to make birth control available. He was also pro- choice and went to jail more than once in his crusade for women's reproductive freedom.

There were doctors risking their careers and groups like the Jane Collective  who made sure women could have safe abortions. 

There was the Clergy Consultation Service started by a New York minister and soon there were groups operating throughout the country. They sent women out of the country, including to Montreal where Dr. Morgenthaler in Canada performed thousands of abortions on Canadian and American women. The need was so great that he expanded to six clinics.

The more illegal, the more this type of group will start up. In some cases, it will help women who can afford an airline ticket or to take time off from work to travel to where they can be safe from their government.

I sent the book to every pro-life organization, every pro-life legislator or judge including the Supreme Court. 

Women do not want a government to control their bodies, to control the number of children they have. It is NOT the legislative role. 

It is not the role of anyone else but the women who is pregnant. 

Women: vote against any candidate that wants to control your body. The candidates who hope you won't care enough, are wrong. Prove it to them on election day.

Free Write --The house

 

Today's Free Write prompt came from our third partner in Geneva... Rick and I were at the tea room Mille et Une in France. A friend, Sammy, wanted to join us and rather than hurt his feelings we explained, but said we'd love to have him sit with us while we drank our mint tea and hot chocolate. One of the joys of our village is that we can never go anywhere without running into a friend, but it makes finding free write space without interuption is a little harder.

Prompt: In the light of the day, the house wasn't as bad as it was in the dead on the night.

D-L's Free Write

 In the light of the day, the house wasn't as bad as it was in the dead on the night.

Marina hated that house. 

Why, why, why had she married Tom. She knew he loved the house and would never want to leave it

It was built in 1790 by one crazy man who had fought in the American Revolution. The bullet from some Lobsterback was still in his brain.

Maybe that was why nothing was even: floors sloped and if they wanted to replace a window, the glass would have to be custom cut and was not even into a rectangle.

During the day light filtered in if, if, if it was sunny. During a snow or rain storm it was dark.

Sometimes, she felt the house was haunted. She had researched who had lived there.

In 1817 a man had killed his wife in the kitchen. In 1872 everyone had died to the flu, but there was no pandemic that year.

Tom was in New York on business. It was the first time Marina had been in the house alone.

Taking her camera she started taking photographs. Maybe, maybe, maybe if she redeocrated, she wouldn't hate it so.

The photos showed the rooms with all their faults. Some were unclear, a smoky image on the left side of many of the pictures.

It was an old camera. Or was it the camera?

The house creeked.

If this was a movie, and she was the heroine, she would investigate.

Instead, she put on her coat and grabbed her car keys. 

Maybe her friend Marge would let her stay the night...or longer. 

Rick's Free Write

“In the light of the day the house wasn’t as bad as it was in the dead of the night…”

The rain was coming harder now. A torrent. It always sounded louder than it was as it struck the expanse of Lexan above the dining area. 

Sometimes, when it was not raining, there’d be a loud ‘thud’ on the Lexan, usually a cat jumping down from the rail of the patio above. But the cat hadn’t come lately, spooked by the construction at the house next door, which had been his route to scale the grapevine up to the patio.

The rain suddenly intensified. No, that was hail. I lay in bed, hoping the stones were not large enough to crack the Lexan and cause a leak. Or worse, break the sheet and flood the apartment. That would be dangerous with all the electrical wires laying around the floor. I probably couldn’t even leave the bed in such conditions.

The dog started barking. Probably at the hail. Surely there were no dogs outside in this weather.

“Stop! No!” I yelled at him, and he reluctantly tunneled under the duvet.

I wondered if this storm would cause the little river to flood, the way it had when it washed 30 cars up on the bank. So the town fathers dug the riverbed deeper, and there’s been a drought ever since.

The hail subsided. But then there was a brilliant flash of lightning, followed quickly by an enormous clap of thunder. Must be right overhead. Not even time to count one thousand and one… Then another crash.

Hail turned to light rain, and I lay there watching the dog’s shadow on the wall, illuminated by the lone street lamp outside the front door. Eventually I must have dozed off.

In the morning sun, as I walked down the narrow street toward the church, I saw a large crowd. The top of the bell tower had fallen.

Julia's Free Write

In the light of the day, the house wasn't as bad as it was in the dead on the night.

They looked and looked – would it do?

They had first seen the property when passing by – they got lost – whilst returning from a friend’s new house around midnight. It was spooky at midnight but obviously abandoned. By daylight it was simply run down but still very much abandoned.

Would it do?

He was a carpenter, she an interior decorator. Low on common friends but with one shared and burning desire.

After that visit they enquired at the local mayor’s office and found out that indeed the last owner had died alone and without inheritors. Decent acreage and the city would make them a good price – anything to not only offload the property but to also improve the neighborhood.

A year later they were finished: what better place and what better use than a home for homeless men.  At midnight now the house glows with warmth and the former owner lies peacefully where he fell… at the bottom of the garden.

Julia has written and taken photos all her life and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/ 

Rick is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices. com

 

D-L has had 17 fiction and non fiction books published. Check out her website at: https://dlnelsonwriter.com

 

My Fake Father

 

                              

I've written about Serge before.

The first time I saw him, he was sitting with his mother in the café, I was sure it was my father. Both my daughter and cousin later agreed with me when they saw him.

Of course, it wasn't. My father died 42 years ago in another country.

At first when I spoke to him about the resemblance, Serge acted like I was a crazy American lady, but when I showed him a photo of my dad, his mother agreed with me.

She is 95 and was part of the Retirada, the 100,000-refuge march that survived crossing the Pyrenees fleeing Franco in January 1939. They ended up in concentration camps on the Argelès beach.

Little by little we became chatting friends. 

Last week at first, I didn't recognize him with his cap and sunglasses. I mentioned his chapeau. Casque, his mother corrected me. 

There is something reassuring about Serge in his own right. 

Rick says when he sees him, "There's your Dad."

Seeing him brings up all the good memories. I feel a surge of love for the man I lost decades ago. At the same time, I enjoy the now of knowing Serge for himself, his kindness to his mother, his smile. 

I wish my Dad were alive although he would be much too old and feeble at 111 to be here with me and meet Serge. Hopefully, by now my father would have come to grips with my decisions to live in Europe and become Swiss and Canadian.

Still, I like to imagine a photo of them, side-by-side sipping coffee at Mille et Une. His mother, Rick and I would be there too.

Note: Visit D-L's webpage at https://dlnelsonwriter.com

Saving the Christmas Tree

 

I know it's April so why am I writing about Christmas trees now?

Having a living Christmas tree is important to me. Even when I was with people who had fake trees, no matter how beautiful, I would make sure I at least had an evergreen twig during the holiday.

Before Rick and I added Sherlock to our family, we had a floor real tree,  but once we had him, we knew he'd consider a floor tree, his Christmas gift of an indoor toilet. 

We bought a table tree from Galdric, our local florist.

Two years ago, I bought a living tree thinking we could use it year after year and when it became too big, we could plant it in a nearby forest.

During the summer we left the tree on our patio and despite a friend coming by to water it, the poor thing became victim to the canicule.

I thought we would try again last Christmas. Galdric provided a wonderful tree that my daughter, husband and I lovingly decorated.

Then we went to Geneva for almost three months, again leaving the tree on the patio and with a friend to come in to water.

When we arrived back in France in March, we found it in a sad state.

Rick is convinced it has died. My suggestion to talk to it and to play music for it met with eye rolls. I suspect his suggestion to pipe music outside was tongue in cheek.

I don't want to give up on it. I plan to replant, nourish it and hopefully it will come back. I've brought other plants back to life. 

Of course when temperatures soar in another canicule this summer we will head back to Geneva I suggested we take it with us. When I mentioned this to my husband, his eye rolls reached a new level of motion.

Stove Stories

 

Food was a major part of my growing up with two great cooks: my grandmother who cooked traditional New England dishes and my mother who was a gourmet cook.

We would discuss lunch at breakfast and dinner at lunch. 

Meals were not just for good food but for sharing sometimes about the day, sometimes about activities, sometimes about current events, sometimes about books we read or TV shows we'd watched.

My mother had a late career as a journalist and after retirement, had a column Stove Stories in the Lawrence Eagle Tribune. She put them into a cookbook, but didn't publish it before she died.

I've put them into a blog. stovestories.blogspot.com

More than once in search of nostalgia for a certain dish and taste memory, I will go back to them. It works.

Free Write Clothing Decisions

 

Again our three free writers are in two countries: France and Switzerland. Rick and D-L took a photo and sent it to Julia. This morning was too cool to write outside at a café but we were went inside at Mille et Une. Free writing is great if you alone, but when done with other people, I am always amazed at the details each of us notice or imagine.

Julia's Free Write -- The Colorful Lady.

There she was in all her glory.

The hat came probably hand-knitted from her English grandmother, roses and all; the scarf reminded me of the biblical story, Joseph and his coat of many colors – and it was Easter, but it was probably a more recent purchase; reading glasses were hanging on her neck as she wore her sunglasses (purple that matched nothing else); a vest for warmth with an additional shawl thrown over it all – it was cold if sunny.

What was she doing in this small French village? New villager? There are many expats mainly Scandinavian and English.

Simply visiting whilst looking for warmer climes, or a grandmother come to see her grandchildren?

Possibilities seem as endless and varied as her costume.

I’ll look for her next week and perhaps have more information.

D-L's Free Write -- Grace

In school, Grace hated her uniform.

When she worked in a bank, she hated her uniform.

When she married Paul, he wanted her to dress a certain way, following the fashions of the day. She didn't like the looks.

Paul died when they were both 600.

Grace stared at her closet, then went to the kitchen and came back with several large garbage bags.

Skirts, blouses, dresses, sweaters and slacks filled the bags. She drove them to Goodwill.

She saw a striped hat, almost a turbin and a scarfe that looked African. She found solored sweat pants that Paul would have hated and a crazy quilt jacket. She bought them all.

Over the next two months she haunted charity shops for crazy-colored clothes until her closet was once again filled.

When she went out, she didn't care that people stared at her.

Ellen came on Saturday to take Grace to lunch. Her daughter had always sought the latest fashion. Now she was an influencer,

"Mother!" Ellen's voice dripped horror, "You can't go the restaurant like THAT?"

The two argued.

"If you don't care to be seen with me, fine." She didn't care. If she couldn't do what she wanted at her age, when could she?"

Rick's Free Write -- The Village Eccentric

Ermaleene is the ultimate free spirit. The village eccentric. Actually, one of several. But she’s their queen.

Never married, she lives with three semi-feral cats, a parakeet and an iguana in a 15-square-metre studio near the train tracks. (Cheaper because of the constant noise.)

She spends her days shuffling from café to bar to PMU, sipping espresso and cheap wine.

Everyone knows her, or of her. How could you miss the rainbow sweaters and scarves and hats?

But the multi-coloured costumes don’t mean to Ermaleene what many assume.

When she was very young, she had been in love with a garcon. They spent most of their days together, away from the crowds. He was free-spirited too, and a bit of a daredevil. Each day he would test standing by the railroad tracks to see how close he could come to not getting hit by the train. Until one day he stood too close.

And it’s by that spot on the tracks that Ermaleene now lives.

Julia has written and taken photos all her life and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/ 

Rick is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices. com

 

D-L has had 17 fiction and non fiction books published. Check out her website at: https://dlnelsonwriter.com