Carol Lynn Rivera

Life. In Many, Many Words.

Let’s Do This Thing

Copyright © 2018

Moon Over Olema

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moon over olema

I had a crush on a boy in high school. For the purpose of this story, let’s call him Boy.

Boy was cute. He had dark hair and dark eyes and he wore jeans and plaid shirts. He slouched a little, in that I’m A Boy And I’m Totally Cool way that makes a girl’s heart swoon.

I had a crush on him because he was so cute, and so cool. I was friends with Boy, too. Not Hang Out And Play Kickball friends, but Nod Sort Of Indifferently At Each Other At School friends. And we had mutual friends, which meant we sometimes ended up in the same person’s living room or participating in the same conversation.

Boy was really cute.

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The Good, The Bad And The Calories: A 2016 Retrospective

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muffins

You know those yearly “newsletters” people send out with their Christmas cards?

They usually tell you about how amazing little Jimmy is doing with the trombone and how he just got a scholarship to the Trombone Playing School. And big Jim, well he just made an amazing career shift and now he’s devoting himself to curing hunger and will receive his Curing Hunger Award from the president next month. And the whole family had such an amazing time at Disney last spring!

Maybe it’s more mundane. Maybe little Jimmy just took his first amazing trombone lesson and is enthusiastically entertaining everyone at dinnertime. And big Jim, well he just got an amazing promotion so now instead of counting widgets, he’s putting them in boxes, which is amazing because they’ll be able to save enough money for a Disney trip this spring!

Everything is always amazing and the family represented by said newsletter is always tremendously blessed, and inevitably a trip to Disney is involved.

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Tethered

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sky and cloudsI started to hate my house for a lot of reasons.

Two and a half years ago I watched my cat gasp her last breath and die in the middle of the hallway in front of me. It was hard to walk down that hallway afterwards, and hard not to walk down that hallway.

For the next two years I watched her brother die by degrees until there were no cats left in my house.

No cats sprawled in front of the fireplace or curled up on my pillow. No cats drinking out of my dinner glass or eating my unattended pumpkin cupcake.

There was just a house. And it’s hard to love just a house.

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Nineteen Years And Counting

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Nineteen Years And Counting

March 15, 1997

It was a chilly day and outrageously sunny. Also windy. The kind of windy that makes a person’s tiara fly off their head.

I know this, because I was trying to look good in one as I scooted from house to limo to church to reception hall on my wedding day. I know this, because “it’s windy” is about the only thought I can remember having on that day, other than, “I don’t care how late the next mass is going to be, I’m not walking down the aisle until my Aunt Rosie gets here.” [Read more…]

Of Igloos And Castles And Paint On The Floor

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Of Igloos And Castles And Paint On The Floor

When I taught kindergarten my favorite thing to do was to show up in the classroom with a stack of giant cardboard boxes and then build something awesome with them.

I started out my career as a teacher in a private school making $8 an hour so things like “supplies” and “furniture” were often hard to come by.

That’s not to say that the school didn’t provide the basics. We had pencils and construction paper, crayons and paints. There were containers full of Lego and other containers full of buttons.

But if you’ve ever flipped through a school catalog and seen everything from realistic-looking plastic eggplants to giant alphabet floor rugs, you know that “buttons” is sort of bottom of the barrel in terms of options.

And yet buttons are what we had.

Also, cardboard boxes. [Read more…]

A Dishtowel Made Me Cry

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A Dishtowel Made Me CryWhen I got married I had about a hundred dishtowels. That’s not even an exaggeration. I had dishtowels with watermelons and dishtowels with lemons. I had dishtowels with sunflowers and stripes and bears and hearts.

I had so many dishtowels that I started giving them away because I didn’t think it was possible for a human to ever need that many dishtowels in a lifetime.

I kept one of each design for variety but pared my collection down to just a few.

Besides, none of them ever worked. They looked like dishtowels, which might have implied that they would dry dishes, but all they ever did was push the water around until it was acceptably thinned enough that I could stack damp dishes in the cabinet.

The only dishtowels I really liked were these ultra thin white towels that my grandmother said she used in her shop – where my grandparents manufactured artificial flowers and arrangements for a living.

Every dishtowel I ever owned came from my grandmother. She stocked me up good. But the industrial towels, those special white ones from the shop, were the only ones that actually worked to absorb water.

She gave me about a dozen of those and I kept every one. [Read more…]

No, It’s Not Really All About That Bass

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No, It’s Not Really All About That BassThere’s a song making the rounds called “All About That Bass” sung by a pastel-clad Meghan Trainor. She looks like she belongs in a badly colorized parody of Alice In Wonderland but that’s beside the point.

In the context of the song, you may wonder what “bass” means.

I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the fish.

It’s not, if we’re being honest, even about the sound of bass, as in guitar or drum.

I’ve included it here in the event that you managed to miss it, so please feel free to enjoy. [Read more…]

I’m Ok With Spider Webs

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I’m Ok With Spider WebsI hate crumbs on the floor.

I like to walk barefoot for as many months of the year as possible and few things are as gross as stepping on crumbs and scraps of wilted lettuce and that one Cheerio that rolled away.

So I like clean floors.

I also like clean sofa cushions. I hate it when the crevices accumulate cat hair and little bits of dropped popcorn kernels. I’m perpetually washing and vacuuming my sofa cushions.

Mold is one of the grossest things of all. It’s black and it’s pink and it’s orange and it’s in my sink and my shower and sometimes on the baseboard in my boiler room closet. Give me a bucket of bleach and I’ll kill every speck of it dead.

But I’m totally ok with spider webs. [Read more…]

In Which We Are Reminded That The Universe Is Indifferent

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Bingo lying on her matWe had plans for the holiday.

We were going to spend Christmas Eve with my parents and brothers and their significant others – something we haven’t been able to do for ten years. We were going to spend Christmas Day on a blogging streak and then prep early with cake and popcorn for the Doctor Who special.

We were planning two weeks of alternating between super intensive get-stuff-done time and super intensive do-nothing-and-have-a-beer time.

Alas.

The universe didn’t care.

I was tempted just then to write, “The universe had different plans,” but the universe has no plans. It just is.

Indifferent to all things we want and expect and hope for, it keeps doing what universes do.

On a good day I find that comforting. I like the idea of existence just because. Things that happen, not for a good reason or for a bad reason, but just because that’s the way they are. If you stop worrying about whys and judgments and stop waiting for explanations, it can be very peaceful.

This year I found no comfort in that as I sat in the emergency room of the veterinary hospital at midnight on Christmas Eve, waiting to find out if my cat would live or die. Knowing I was going to miss Christmas with my family – the presents, the cookies, the oversized tree – because I was sitting in a veterinary hospital waiting for my cat to live or die. [Read more…]