{"id":555,"date":"2008-05-04T21:59:28","date_gmt":"2008-05-05T03:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=555"},"modified":"2010-02-26T21:02:10","modified_gmt":"2010-02-27T03:02:10","slug":"there-are-days-ordinary-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=555","title":{"rendered":"There Are Days, Ordinary Days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>58\u00a0 bar rises 29.80 2mph W dewpoint 30 Beltane<\/p>\n<p>New Moon (Hare Moon)<\/p>\n<p>There are days, ordinary days, days you can recall, when your life took a sharp angle turn, or created a swooping curve, perhaps dipped underground or soared up, up into the sky.<\/p>\n<p>It seems I remember, though how could I really, the day I got polio.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know how this memory got shaped or if it got shaped in the way all\u00a0 memory does, by our selective recollection of snippets of moments, but here it is.<\/p>\n<p>My mother and I were at the Madison County Fair, held every August on the grounds of Beulah Park.\u00a0 Mom had wrapped me in a pink blanket and we wandered through the Midway.\u00a0 There were bright lights strung in parabolic curves and the smell of cotton candy and hot dogs.\u00a0 I looked out from the blanket, safe on my mother&#8217;s shoulder, held in her arms.\u00a0 And I felt a chill run through me.<\/p>\n<p>Years later I was with my Dad, early in the morning.\u00a0 We sat in those plastic cuplike chairs in a pale green room.\u00a0 My mother came up in an elevator on her way to emergency surgery.\u00a0\u00a0Surgeons would try to\u00a0relieve pressure on her brain from the hemorrhage she had suffered a week before during a church supper.\u00a0 I got in the elevator and rode up with her.\u00a0 Her eyes looked away from me, but saw me anyway.\u00a0 &#8220;Soaohn.&#8221; she said.\u00a0 It was the last time she spoke to me.\u00a0 I was 17.<\/p>\n<p>The evening of my first marriage I wandered down a path in Mounds Park where the ceremony had taken place.\u00a0 I wore a blue ruffled shirt, music of the Rolling Stones carried through the moist July air.\u00a0 Butterflies landed on my shoulder.<\/p>\n<p>The night the midnight plane arrived from Calcutta carrying a 4 pound, 4 ounce boy.<\/p>\n<p>The third week of our honeymoon, a northern journey begun in Rome, found us at our northernmost destination Inverness, Scotland.\u00a0 We had rooms at the Station Hotel, right next to railroad terminal.\u00a0 It was a cool foggy night and we took a long walk, following for much it the River Ness, which flows into Loch Ness.\u00a0 We held hands and looked at this old Scots village, the capital of the Highlands.\u00a0 A mist rose over a church graveyard on our right.<\/p>\n<p>And today.\u00a0 Planting beets and carrots.\u00a0 Kate taking a phone call.\u00a0 The news from the lab about Gabe. Now, after this sunny spring day, life will go on, but its trajectory has changed, changed in a profound way,\u00a0in a way none of us can yet know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>58\u00a0 bar rises 29.80 2mph W dewpoint 30 Beltane New Moon (Hare Moon) There are days, ordinary days, days you can recall, when your life took a sharp angle turn, or created a swooping curve, perhaps dipped underground or soared up, up into the sky. It seems I remember, though how could I really, the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=555\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">There Are Days, Ordinary Days<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,65,87,243],"tags":[244,408,432,431,83,111,4361,361],"class_list":["post-555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-and-spirituality","category-family","category-garden","category-memories","tag-alexandria","tag-gabe","tag-granchildren","tag-hemophilia","tag-joseph","tag-kate","tag-memories","tag-mom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=555"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5536,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555\/revisions\/5536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}