FROM JOURNALISM TO NOVELS TO MEMOIRS TO BLOG TO TV SCRIPT WRITER - GARNETTE'S JOURNEY
The Ulster County Branch located in Kingston NY of the AAUW, a national activist organization encouraging education, research and cultural enrichment for women and girls open to all persons, has been active in getting out the United States voter since 1884. We held the first White House candle-light vigil in 1919 for women's suffrage. NOW weekly until the general election in November, producers Garnette Arledge, branch president, and Janine Fallon Mowers, election voter education chairperson, will explore voting issues beginning with bringing back to the poles disenheartened registered voters, many women. Posted soon the schedule and public access channel information for Woodstock, NY. Yes, that Woodstock!
Available here, click my email link to order an autographed copy from me, or order on-line at Amazon. Bookstores everywhere will order for you. If you order from Amazon, please take a moment to review the book please. Thank you = Mahalo nui nui, Garnette
My Own House
By Elswyth Thane
Author, The Strength of These Hills about her life in Vermont plus 30 other books.
The smoke of my own house is better than my neighbor’s fire – Spanish proverb
I was driving to New England in the spring. Little white houses along the way, green lawns, old trees, early bloom – snug, serene, enigmatic. My own house when I came to it would look very much the same. But I carried to it an unreconciled grief and a bottomless fatigue.
So I began unconsciously to play a foolish game with myself as I went. That one, with the window boxes and the picket fence and a collie dog asleep on the porch steps – how would it be by some miracle to escape into the life which went on there, instead of my own? Who came home to it every night and from where? Or that one, with the two-car garage, and the awnings going up and the gardener setting out plants – a lot of money behind that one. How many people, to so much space? I’ve always wanted a really big house . . .
Or that one, just the size for one person, an elderly spinster with a competence, perhaps, self-sufficient and entire, all passion spent. How would it be to live her life from today on, what there was of it – restful and secure and without obligations? Or to start all over again in that one, very new and a little bare, but prosperous, with an almost bridal look in spite of the child’s small wagon in the yard – it was all ahead of them there.
I was feeling old and sick and platitudinous. I wanted to “get away from it all.” Anywhere out of here. That sort of thing.
The game lasted quite a while. I sampled vicarious paradises for about a hundred miles, willfully ignoring the obvious catch in it: each one of those establishments housed its own problem behind the serene front. There isn’t a house without one these days. Would I exchange? Would I really jump blindfold into anyone else’s life and take it up at that point and give them mine to live?
I would not!
The car turned into the winding dirt road that leads to my own white house with green shutters. It was waiting with the sun on it, the meadows on either side frosted with bluets, the red barn planted four-square in what in July would be deep hay.
No miracles, please. My sorrows are familiar ones, with roots. My joys are old and dear. My own is my own and I am at home there. I’ll sit this one out, where I am.
Wilmington, Vermont
(Reprinted from unknown source from a scrapbook found by the kindess of Meg Streeter)
Author Garnette Arledge books include On Angel’s Eve: the caregiver’s manual for meaningful times with your seniors and Wise Secrets of Aloha, as well as numerous newspaper, magazine and journal articles, poetry, fiction and her own grandmother’s collected stories:
Mama Sallie Would Love you: for great grandchildren, Eliabeth and Drew and his children, great-great grands Lilly and Cloux. More details on Biography Tab, just click above on dashboard.
