Friday, January 25, 2019

THE LONE SHOVELER©


THE LONE SHOVELER©

By Linda Lee Greene, January 25, 2019




It was one of the big snowstorms of the 1990s in Columbus, Ohio USA. My apartment was on the first floor of the duplex I owned on Mithoff Street. I rented out the apartment above me. It was a day much like the days we have had here in Columbus over the past week: the ground and rooftops and tree limbs blanketed with pristine snow, and the sky a matching white and low-slung, an eerie closeness that seemed almost touchable and gave the impression that there was nothing beyond it, that the whole of the cosmos had been wiped clean of stars and planets and moons. As I usually do, I wakened very early that Saturday morning, and with my 35mm camera in hand, snapped a few photos from my little front porch. The silence was palpable, all but the scraping of a snow shovel up the street from me. And there he was: the lone shoveler, the focus of my shot.



Because I was yet to embrace my calling as a writer (that happened on August 10, 2000), I failed to recognize the possibilities in the incident for a story. Now I see in it the catchy title of a novel: THE LONE SHOVELER©. It might center on a torrid love affair that begins on a snow-covered city street when a woman approaches a man and inquires if he is for hire to shovel her sidewalk.



What storyline comes to your mind in this situation? Do you see in it a love story, or something else?






Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV)  was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hills Memorial Writing Competition. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

THERE’S MUSIC IN COLUMBUS, OHIO’S SOUTHWEST CITY AIR©




THERE’S MUSIC IN COLUMBUS, OHIO’S SOUTHWEST CITY AIR©

By Linda Lee Greene, January 22, 2019



On a bright Sunday morning a couple of years ago, I walked through the doors of a church located on a busy street in Columbus, Ohio’s southwest quadrant, not far from my former residence. The sign in the yard in front of the church announced itself as a denomination with which I was familiar.



For several decades of my adult life, I have been an on-again-off-again attendee of that particular denomination of churches wherever I have landed in my travels. I like the reliable diversity of people drawn to its philosophy. In my view, spirituality rather than religious dogma is its strongest underpinning and value, and I appreciate its respect and acceptance of other forms of belief, and even of non-belief, and lifestyles. Its doors are open to red-, yellow-, black-, brown-, and white-skinned people across all socioeconomic and cultural sectors. At its core, it is nondiscriminatory, and is the thing I like most about it.



While the church into whose hallowed hall I wandered so enthusiastically two years ago shares the same name, I learned over the course of that morning that it was not an official member of the church of my experience. The first clue of its difference was a broadly-smiling and elegantly-attired pair of black-skinned people who greeted me as I ventured into it. Further evidence presented itself when I saw that beyond them in the sanctuary gathered similarly-plumed, spruced-up, and cheerful African Americans. Considering my church history, these were clues that held little significance to me at first. My major response at the outset was that I felt underdressed, and because of it, woefully out of place.



I hesitated self-consciously and uncertainly, but then tucked my inelegant tail between my legs and entered the sanctuary. Sliding into a discreet corner of one of the back pews, I huddled and waited anxiously for someone who looked like me to enter the room. But no one like me ever did appear. I was destined to be the only white and under-adorned dot in a sea of exquisite black. But funnily, I soon realized that I was the only uncomfortable person there. Minutes ticked by, and finally I straightened my posture and adjusted my attitude correspondingly, and even engaged in eye-contact with the people near me. It wasn’t long before I gave in to the urging of my mouth, when exercising a will of its own, it tugged into smiles of greeting in answer to comparable greetings sent my way.



In my experience, it is customary for church services to open with music, which in its own right is a form of worship. Music is also a preliminary to the sermon, the sermon normally being the principle component of church services. Little did I know that morning that I was in for spiritual instruction of a different sort. The thrum of an electric guitar and a crash of a cymbal pulled all eyes to the front of the room, and a single beat of a drum was the cue that the service was beginning. A hundred or more, perfectly synchronized and harmonious voices accompanied by the guitar and drums rang out suddenly and soared to the cavernous ceiling. The sound shook the floorboards, it rattled the windows, it pulsed the walls, it vibrated the pews: copious, resounding, foot-stomping, arm-swaying, joyous, bewitching, hypnotizing, musical praise to God.



Following a full hour of nonstop gospel music, and among the best I had ever heard, the pastor walked up to the altar to give what I expected would be his sermon. But instead, he read from a sheet of paper a series of announcements of upcoming events and acknowledgements of births and deaths and birthdays and anniversaries. The pastor folded his notes and placed them in the breast pocket of his immaculate suit jacket; the women stood up and shouldered their designer handbags; the men pulled to their feet and adjusted their silk ties, and I realized that the service was over. I understood as well, that after that music, no further God-words had been necessary.






Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV)  was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hills Memorial Writing Competition. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com

    

Thursday, January 17, 2019

COLUMBUS, OHIO’S RIVER RATS KIDS©





 
COLUMBUS, OHIO’S RIVER RATS KIDS©

By Linda Lee Greene, January 17, 2019



We were called “River Rats” when I was a kid. That’s because West Second Avenue in our distinctly blue-collar, family-oriented neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio marched right up to the raised east bank of the Scioto River, as it still does, and we spent much of our playtime at the river. We gained access to it most easily on pathways on both sides of the Third Avenue Bridge that spanned it, as it does to this day. In what we called “Fly Town,” and today is officially “Harrison West,” the blue-collar ambiance has transformed to an upwardly-mobile vibe, as most of the remaining houses and apartment buildings of the area have undergone slick renovations. During the last couple of decades, large numbers of them were torn down to make way for stylish row-houses and condos, inhabited primarily by young, childless professionals on view profusely on weekends jogging the blacktop-paved streets. I visited my old stomping grounds not long ago and was heartened to find that the street in front of the house where I lived for the nine years of my childhood beginning at the age of six and ending at the age of fifteen was still comprised of its timeworn original bricks.  



I snapped a few photos while I was there, and then sat in my car as old memories swept over me. I recalled that back before agricultural and urban-generated pollutants and other development threats made the water unsafe for wading and swimming, seining for crawdads in the river at its shallow points under the bridge was a daily task on hot summer days for us kids. Principally, it was a male-oriented activity, but once in a while the boys stooped to allowing us girls a go at it. Females wore skirts and dresses, and rarely shorts then, and I remember well kicking off my shoes and pulling the hem of my full-skirted garment between my legs and tucking it up and into its waistband and wading gratefully into the rapids of the waterway. The goal for us girls was cooling off and impressing the boys with our willingness to participate in their labor, even though once the crustaceans were caught in the seining net, we wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. Part of the fun for the boys was eliciting squeals of horror from us girls when they scraped the icky, writhing things out of the nets and chased us up the riverbank with them.



Shivers of dismay prick my spine now when I think of the many times a gang of us inched our way into the tunnel beneath the bridge. It seemed then never to end as it bore east under West Third Avenue, but surely it is a judgment influenced by the outsized imagination of an adolescent girl. It was dark and teemed with mold, filth, and acrid leavings of the homeless who made of it their toilet and even their nighttime dwelling. We never saw them, though, as homelessness was uncommon back then—at least it was the case in our corner of the world.    



We lived on the kid-friendly streets then—not that they weren’t frequented by cars, but there was a kind of unspoken contract between us kids and drivers that allowed us full access to the streets as our playgrounds. Hardly ever were any of us kids holed up in our houses, unless we were sick or grounded. After school until dark, and summer vacations from early morning ‘til sundown, we gave those bricks on the streets a workout. Kick the can, hide and seek, Cowboys and Indians, jump rope, marbles, jacks, hopscotch—splashing in rain puddles—riding bikes, climbing trees, picking through trashcans in the alleys—sledding, snowball fighting, building snowmen and igloos, and on and on, the pastimes were endless no matter the season, or the weather conditions. Never was there a boring moment, or a longing for a friend.






Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV)  was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hills Memorial Writing Competition. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com

Monday, January 14, 2019

©THE LESSON I LEARNED FROM QUEEN ELIZABETH II




By Linda Lee Greene, January 14, 2019



A revelation came over me while I binge watched NETFLIX this past weekend in an effort to force myself to stay home and nurse an almost-cold. The majority of the time, I watched all of season one of THE CROWN. It is a take on Great Britain’s Royal Family and other luminaries whom rubbed elbows with it during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. At the center of the show is Queen Elizabeth II. In my estimation, it is excellent entertainment—great writing, superb cinematography, and outstanding performances, despite my hunch that rumor and speculation is elevated to Gospel Truth in it—although it might be just that, as far as I know. The thing about it that struck me most forcefully, however, is the portrayal of the queen’s struggle to separate the personal Elizabeth from the figure-head who wears the crown, referred to throughout the series as “The Crown,” an entity unto itself answerable ultimately only to God, a living thing that takes precedence over all else. Oh, how I relate to Elizabeth’s struggle, and boy, did I learn an invaluable lesson from her this weekend.



Like me and so many women of her and also of my generation, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten Windsor is described as an introvert in her true nature, a person who prefers to keep away from the limelight, who would have been perfectly content to be a wife and mother, and to live modestly and privately. But also like me and so many of my soul sisters in the arts, in business, in politics, in the clergy, and other areas, she had a calling, a destiny far bigger, more insistent, and more essential than her private self and its inclinations. No one else could do what she was called to do. I am of the opinion that not a day goes by that her job is not agonizingly difficult for her, that if permitted, she would choose to cavort with her horses and dogs, to read fine literature instead of government papers, to watch good British TV and films, and to show up at cultural events openly as an ordinary person. But she shows up at her job, more consistently and persistently, than any other British sovereign ever has done. “Why?” I asked myself. “Why, when her job has impacted so negatively on her family, and even threatened her marriage and her own soul, didn’t she throw in the towel like her paternal uncle did?”



I think she discovered a secret—well, not a secret exactly because countless others have discovered it since the beginning of time, and several of them were her tutors in that regard: her father King George VI, and Winston Churchill among them. The riddle I think she solved was that the crown is only a representation…it is not the true Elizabeth. The time she puts into it, the promotions she does on its behalf, take nothing away from her essential self. This shy person, who dislikes talking about herself, is not marketing herself. She is marketing the crown.



I caught onto the riddle this weekend, too, finally. Queen Elizabeth II taught me. She opened the dreaded box for me in which I stuff my battle with myself over promoting my work: my art, and especially my books. She showed me how to get over my fear that nobody really wants to know about my work, and how to stop worrying about coming across as a pushy salesperson. One of my fellow authors confided to me recently that promoting her books makes her feel like a politician. I get it, because that was me, too. Through the queen’s example, I figured out that my work is a living and breathing entity beyond myself that deserves its own life—not unlike that of the crown she wears. While my work is influenced by what I bring to it, and is channeled through me, it is not the real me. Nobody is going to view my paintings or read my books and through them catch me naked in my shower or sitting on my toilet. My work is not an invitation to invade my privacy or corrupt my soul. It is a painting…a book, and it is my job, and can only be my job, to wear my artist and author crowns with the confidence that they are my soul’s sacred callings, and cannot be prisoners of my touchy ego’s preferences. What happens to them once I put them out in the public eye is God’s choice, not mine.






Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the recipient of the 2018 Peter Hills Writing Competition for her winning short story, ELLA’S EDEN. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com

Tuesday, January 8, 2019


A New Yorker at Green Gables Drive-in Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio©

By Linda Lee Greene

When in the early 1960s I met my former husband Bobby, his driver’s license gave an address of Cambria Heights, Queens, New York City, a relatively placid neighborhood a mere stone’s throw from the Nassau County, Long Island line. It was his parent’s address, a place to which they had moved soon after Bobby’s senior year in high school. Born in Manhattan, and as a toddler had moved with his parents and older brother to the Bronx, New York City’s northernmost borough, they remained there until Bobby’s pre-adolescence. The family relocated at that time to Flushing, Queens. It was there that Bobby received most of his schooling, and is the place he considers home.    

It wasn’t that the little family was unstable…they were upwardly mobile. Bobby’s beautiful Spanish/Puerto Rican mother Paquita, and his movie-star handsome father Eusebio (Americanized as Frank) were always on the hunt for a better life for their little family. Both of them had immigrated to Harlem originally, Paquita from Ponce, Puerto Rico, and Eusebio from Barcelona, Spain. A seamstress in a “boiler room,” as she called it, Paquita commuted every weekday by train and subway to the garment district in New York City, a musty room in a highrise in Manhattan located between 5th and 9th Avenues to 34th and 42nd Streets. Frank was also a daily train/subway commuter to his job as a kitchen worker at the Chase Building in midtown Manhattan. I knew that I was an accepted member of the family the day that Frank carted home to me a special disk-like pan from that famous kitchen, a pan with the name of Chase Manhattan engraved on its bottom, a piece of equipment that I use to this day, and each time I do, I recall with great affection my long-deceased father-in-law.

At the time that Bobby and I met, he was the saxophonist, clarinetist, and comedian with a five-piece combo that traveled cross-country on one-night to eight-week-long gigs at every type of venue imaginable; I was a dance instructor at an Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio in Columbus, Ohio. Fate brought us together at a nightclub, the infamous Club Rubu, in Columbus where his group was appearing and where my dance-instructor buddies and I often headed after the studio closed in the evenings. Subsequent to some stops and starts in our relationship, I went on the road with him, and absent the benefit of having met each other’s families, we married in Palo Alto, California in the spring following the year we met.

Bobby’s biographical background is an important element to my story, especially as it relates to the geographical and cultural aspects of it, for it points out differences between us that were always sources of humorous situations, as this one demonstrates. Before I proceed, I will list just a few of our dissimilarities: to Bobby, white castles are repeaters; pop is soda; lunch meat is cold cuts; mayonnaise is Hellmann’s; gingerale is Vernors; and Houston Street is pronounced like “house” with “ton” tagged to its tail-end. As multi-dimensional as was his upbringing within the borders of the five boroughs of New York City, as well as his cross-country travels, at the same time, he remained oddly unsophisticated in many ways. It was an innocence that theretofore I wouldn’t have associated with what one would expect to be a stereotypically “jaded” New Yorker. It allowed him a refreshing capacity to be captivated by new experiences. For instance, never in his life had he seen, or had knowledge of, drive-in restaurants, an enormously popular American phenomenon from sea to shining sea in the 1950s and 1960s—other than those spots that had been Bobby’s turf, apparently.

St. Louis was the home-base of the other four boys in the band, and when our work in California dried up, we headed east with them, camping out in the home of the parents of the leader of the group for a week or so, a week or so until some work materialized and we would be on the road again. But homesickness bit all of us fatally instead, which was the death knell of the band. The only choice available to Bobby and me was packing up our electric skillet, our ironing board, our iron, and our clothes (our only worldly possessions at the time, other than his horns) and to head to Columbus in our old Chevrolet. It was time for Bobby to meet my family and friends for the first time.

The introductions went swimmingly—everybody loved Bobby and Bobby loved everybody in return. I called my friend Carol Richardson, who was Carol Treadway by then, and she and her husband Dick, and Bobby and I, planned an evening together. Dick picked us up in whatever boat-of-a-car he owned at the time (Dick always owns a boat-of-a-car), and Bobby and I climbed in the roomy back seat. The early part of our evening is a blur to me, but we ended up at Green Gables Drive-in Restaurant, the favorite haunt of all of the teenagers and twenty-somethings of our area of Columbus when we were growing up, and judging by the steady flow of traffic in and out of the place that evening, it was still going strong.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the drill of such places, you would park your car, roll down your windows, and a carhop would walk, or in some cases, skate up to the driver’s side window, and take your order. Presently, she would return with your food balanced delicately on a tray that she would attach to the driver’s side door and window, and then she would fade away until it was time for her to return to fetch the tray at meal’s end. Well, that was the purpose of such places for the older folks, but not for the younger crowds that frequented them. The real function for them was for the young motor heads to show off their automobiles, their 1950s concept cars, classic cars of today, and for the girls to hang out of the windows of the cars and wave and shout to all of their friends. Around and around like an endless carousel the cars would circle, passing up open parking spaces with abandon.

My husband was fascinated! While the other three of us in our car chatted away, Bobby was so caught up in, and befuddled by, the parade that was unfolding before his eyes that he failed to contribute a word to our discourse. You must take into account that this is a person from New York City, where a parking space is golden, and never remains empty for more than a second or two. Street fights and turf wars break out over parking spaces in New York City. At Green Gables that evening, there happened to be an empty spot right next to our car, the side where Bobby sat, a spot that had been passed up by the same cars time and time and time again. 

Finally, Bobby just couldn’t take it any longer. Thrusting his entire torso out of his open window, and his free arm jerking wildly like a frustrated traffic cop’s, in his New York accent, Bobby shouted to the driver of a particular car on which he had kept his eye, “Hey Buddy, what’s the mattuh with you? There’s a pahkin’ spot right heuh? RIGHT HEUH!!!”

Original posting on September 17, 2012 – Updated on January 8, 2019
To date, Linda Lee Greene has authored five novels: “Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG); “Guardians and Other Angels” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO); “Rooster Tale” (http://goo.gl/vNq32g); and “Cradle of the Serpent” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG), which was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. Scheduled for release in early 2019, her latest novel titled “A Chance at the Moon” will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com


Monday, January 7, 2019

LESSONS OF THE THREE A.M. HOUR©


LESSONS OF THE THREE A.M. HOUR©

By Linda Lee Greene, January 7, 2019



The three o’clock hour bewitched me again this night and pulled me awake. There are mystic presences in that middle-of-the-night-niche, charismas impatient to whisper secrets in my ear, or if not secrets exactly, Universal truths they wish me to contemplate that are too often shrouded in humanity’s repressive tendencies.



Floating on ethers deceptively soft and silky came the urgent word “responsibility.” I retaliated by stating under my breath that responsibility is a clear and obvious human principle. You and I exercise it all the time. We’ve got that one down pat. But these phantoms who visit me during the night don’t deal with the commonplace—their purpose is to challenge me to think beyond the familiar implication of things. I began by asking Google for the definition of the word. Google’s response was that “responsibility is the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone.” I understood that these few words held within themselves only a hint of what my middle-of-the-night-messengers wished to convey to me—so I searched further. I found it in a chapter titled “Responsibility” in a remarkable book I read initially a year or so ago and have been leafing through casually again in the last few days. Apparently, the theme of the chapter has stayed with me unconsciously. HOLINESS is the name of the book, written by the deceased British historian, theologian, and spirituality writer Donald Nicholl.



Nicholl hits on several key issues in the chapter, all of them addressed from a spiritual point of view. For instance in his discussion about one of the ways we use our tongues, he says on page 69, “…We are responsible for every single word that we utter with our tongues; and if we utter bitter words we not only harm others, we also harm our own bodies. Our bitterness produces chemical changes in our bodies that harm them; and if bitter speech is continually repeated, the body will eventually declare itself diseased as a form of protest.”



            Hurtful, bitter words are too often the accepted and/or ignored pattern in today’s world. I worry that the practice of it will manifest as a pandemic of disease and kill off a generation or more of us before our times.   



Saturday, January 5, 2019

TEDDY THE SQUIRREL AND THE OAK TREE©


TEDDY THE SQUIRREL AND THE OAK TREE©



By Linda Lee Greene, January 5, 2019



Teddy the Squirrel, whom I introduced to you in a blog posting over the Thanksgiving holiday, is mad at me. If you wish to read my origination story about Teddy the Squirrel, click here> (https://ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com/2018/11/an-air-of-gratitude-thanksgiving-2018.html?spref=tw). I swear that Teddy actually spat at me from his perch on the postern of my gate when I ventured out this morning to run my errands. It is pretty easy to figure out that the source of his ire is that I was the instigator of the slaughter of his favorite tree, which I believed at the time to be a menace to the roof and windows of my condo. I have since begun to question the wisdom of my actions. For the backstory of the saga of my tree, clink this link> (https://ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com/2019/01/my-conundrum-over-tree-by-linda-lee.html?spref=tw)

My tree was an oak, by the way. I have determined its genus based on the shape of a few remaining brown leaves on the ground. I am ashamed to admit that my ill feelings toward it prevented me from going as far as even acknowledging its identity before now. And is it any wonder that Teddy is mad at me? Now he will have to go shopping for his acorns far beyond his neighborhood, thanks to me. I am sure he yearns to move to a more convenient locality, and to get away from me, but he is an old and nearly feeble fellow, and moving might be harder on him than he could withstand.

One of my “go to” books when life throws me a major curve and I need help getting back on track is psychoanalyst and author Judith Viorst’s “NECESSARY LOSSES, The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow.” At the time she wrote the book, the bedroom she and her husband shared sat within the top floor of their multi-storied house. A wide span of windows in the room overlooked a small woodland. She enjoyed lying in bed and watching the squirrels beyond her windows scamper about in the canopy of trees. Her theme of the squirrels/trees reference in the book was to point out to her readers that unlike many human beings, squirrels have no illusions about who they are and what is right for themselves. At least in her and my corner of the world, squirrels are creatures suited to living in trees and earning their living by harvesting the bounty of those trees. Take them out of that environment and their form of work, and they would wither and die.

Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle in his book “STILLNESS SPEAKS” tells us that the essence of our Being is to be found in stillness and peace rather than in squirrel-like industry. I have scoured my neighborhood and have identified other oak trees in which Teddy might continue to express his squirrel nature. My wish is that he is up to finding them, for only then will my sense of peace be restored.



***




To date, Linda Lee Greene has authored five novels: “Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG); “Guardians and Other Angels” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO); “Rooster Tale” (http://goo.gl/vNq32g); and “Cradle of the Serpent” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG), which was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. Scheduled for release in early 2019, her latest novel titled “A Chance at the Moon” will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com
 

Thursday, January 3, 2019

MY CONUNDRUM OVER THE TREE by Linda Lee Greene


MY CONUNDRUM OVER THE TREE©



The front door of my condo faces due west. Five paces beyond the door at a southwest diagonal grew a towering tree, a tree nearly sixty years of age and that had outgrown the space allocated to it. Its canopy overhung the roof of my condo, and presented a constant threat to it. Every high wind or storm of any kind hurled broken branches at the windows and dropped them on the roof of my place. My yard was also littered with its debris all year long. I wrote a letter to the condo association requesting that the tree be cut down. Today, the dirty deed was done while I was out running errands. And now I feel positively unholy for having been the impetus behind the demise of that magnificent tree.



I know! I know! I suppose I am being absolutely irrational about it. But I can’t help it. I love trees. Trees are as sacred to me as are elephants and whales and tigers. None of those precious beings should be sacrificed for our comfort—die a natural death, of course, but mowed down to satisfy humanity’s cravings, no!  And to make matters worse, once the tree was down and all evidence of it erased from my landscape, I realized with sinking regret, and maybe even a guilty conscience, that in the year I have lived in my condo, I never got to know that tree. I was always so peed off at it that I closed my eyes to everything about it but its negative attributes. I didn’t study the texture of its bark or the shape of its leaves…I cannot tell you what kind of a tree it was. I don’t know if it was an oak or a walnut or some other genus of tree. Now I wonder if I will miss the shade it provided against the blaring western sun come summer. I also wonder if it screamed in pain as its arms and legs were lopped off; and I can’t bear to think about its consciousness, its spirit? Where did it go? Is there a tree heaven?  



Life just loves to throw me with conundrums like this one. On the one hand, the tree had to go, and on the other, it shouldn’t have had to go. Would trimming it have solved the problem? I don’t know. I am a tree lover, not a tree doctor. There is a glaring parallel here that I see in the relationships among people. Maybe it is suggesting that taking a deep breath and slowing down and setting aside our anger, and then taking a second look before cutting a fellow human being off at the knees just might reveal a middle way through challenging people situations.



—Linda Lee Greene, January 2, 2019






To date, Linda Lee Greene has authored five novels: “Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG); “Guardians and Other Angels” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO); “Rooster Tale” (http://goo.gl/vNq32g); and “Cradle of the Serpent” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG), which was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. Scheduled for release in early 2019, her latest novel titled “A Chance at the Moon” will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com