“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”
-Robert Browning
My dear friend, Amy, passed away twenty years ago in September. The following tribute is long overdue. I meant to type it and send it to Erin, her daughter, after her funeral, but I succumbed to procrastination. I tucked it into an old folder, which I recently discovered while looking for something else.
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
-Virginia Woolf
Yesterday I finished my fourth Gaston the Poodle mystery, entitled To Die for Pickleball. Megan and Tim’s wedding and shoulder replacement surgery interrupted my writing big time!
The road to recovery from chronic disease (Substitute shoulder surgery) is a long and winding road of small victories. —Yolanda Hadid
Am I on a superhighway or a pothole infested back road? There are days when I seem to have taken a detour on the road to recovery, and other days when I’m cruising in my convertible with the top down.
My daughter, Megan, asked me to speak at her wedding so I’m dedicating this newsletter to my beautiful, brilliant daughter and the man handsome and brilliant enough to capture her heart.
Having a dog will bless you with many of the happiest days of your life, and one of the worst. – Betsy Farrell
By the time you read this, my husband’s hip replacement surgery will be successfully completed and he will be on the road to recovery. When we found out he needed surgery in January, we debated foregoing our month’s stay in Arizona with our friends, Robert and Joyce, and scheduling surgery instead. But my husband desperately wanted to get away from the Wisconsin winter for a while, so we went as planned. Even if he couldn’t hike the mountain trails like in the past, Michael figured he could at least lounge by the pool and walk outside in sunnier weather. He didn’t know he was going to have an adorable, enthusiastic companion on his strolls. Her official name is Emerald Heart. She’s a Cavachon mixed breed, a combination of Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and Bichon Friese. Emmy provided better emotional therapy for us both than anyone encountered in the Sports Medicine/Orthopedic Clinic.
Hope if the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
And sweetest in the gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
–Emily Dickinson
I was a late in life baby. My mom was forty-three when I was born and my dad was fifty. When her monthlies stopped, she thought she was entering her change of life. Surprise! She was pregnant with me.
My mom and dad already had two children; my sister, Judy, was nine and my brother, Jerry, was six. They were both working hard to keep our small family farm going, and now a new baby came along to complicate things. But Mom rolled with the flow.
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
My newsletter this month was going to be about our return to travel after two long years of Covid. In 2020, we signed up for an ocean cruise to Norway and Iceland, figuring by 2021, a vaccine would be developed and Covid would be under control. We figured wrong, so we postponed the trip for another year, until August 2022, along with our travel buddies, Robert and Joyce. Nothing was going to stop us now. We got our second booster shot. As an extra precaution, I wore my mask in public places and stopped going to Zumba class at the Y because all the huffing and puffing spread droplets like crazy. I packed my suitcase weeks in advance and followed our destination cities on the weather channel every day. I bought new waterproof hiking shoes. I packed gloves, a wool hat, and my zip-in fleece lining for my rain resistant jacket. I was ready for anything!
Gaston the Poodle books by Janice Detrie are mentioned at 9:00 minutes into the video
“If you want to be a writer, your first stop should be the library.”
Angela Shelf Madearis
I confess: I’m never without a book (or two or three) nearby. I love sniffing new books. The sound of a turning page calms my jangled nerves. The feel of a book in my hands is a comfort and a joy. I’m a true bibliophile. This past month I’ve probably touched almost a thousand books. No, they weren’t books sold at my book launch in May. If I sold that many copies of my titles, I’d pop open the champagne and indulge in a triple caramel cashew sundae! I’ve been organizing books for my mission of getting kids to read over the summer called Books to Grow On.
Janice Detrie