All posts by Dona

Experiment

Social Media

I am trying an experiment. I’m staying off all social media for the foreseeable future. The reasons are many — the upcoming election is one. I’ve noticed that I am so much more anxious lately, and I think that’s because I’ve been hanging out on Threads a lot lately and my feed is full of other anxious people which fuels my anxiety. I also mistakenly replied to a negative post about Kamala Harris on my mom’s magat cousin’s page which made me anxious, mostly since my magat brother and magat cousin replied (I didn’t read what they wrote), I just saw the notification. I unfollowed my mom’s cousin and turned off notifications of replies on that post. (I unfollowed my brother and cousin long ago).

Another reason is that I spend far too much time on Threads. It was always the first thing I looked at when I unlocked my phone, including in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d scroll and read for hours.

I’ve always known that social media is bad for me but I didn’t realize just how bad it was until lately. I felt like I had friends out there because sometimes they would respond to me or like something I wrote.

They are not my friends.

I now wonder how long it will take me to stop mentally writing a social media post in my head after an insignificant thought. Or how long before I stop thinking of insignificant questions to ask my followers on Threads or Facebook.

My plan is to one-by-one delete my social media accounts, starting with ones I never use (Bluesky, Mastodon, Twitter). Then ones I use like Threads and Instagram. I’ll keep Facebook because of the few people with whom that is about the only way I interact with them, but I will severely prune my friends list.

Planting Ginny and Jack

Family, People, ,

Aunt Ginny died at the end of 2015, Uncle Jack followed her in 2020. They didn’t want funerals or obituaries. Uncle Jack told me that when he died he wanted his ashes mixed with Aunt Ginny’s and spread on his land in Mississippi. My cousin Joey, with whom the cremains resided for the past several months, said that Uncle Jack wanted their cremains scattered in the waterway in front of their house but Aunt Ginny disagreed because she couldn’t swim. That might be true — but she was actually repeating what her mother, my Grandma Green, said about her ashes.

That is good and all, but sometimes things don’t work out the way one hopes. He didn’t expect that their Trust would have been messed up so much that it took over three years to settle. By that time someone else lived on his property and when Dean and I came into possession of Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack’s cremains we were reluctant to knock on their door and ask if we could spread their ashes on the property. We also didn’t want to pour them into the waterway because of Aunt Ginny’s request.

While we were still in Mississippi I reached out to Joey to see if he’d be willing to have them on his property, mixed together in a biodegradable urn, planted in the ground with a tree planted over them. Another cousin liked that idea as did my brother but Joey never got back to me. I think he was just happy to be rid of the ashes.

We brought Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack back home, thinking maybe my brother could bury them on his property beneath a sapling (he wasn’t thrilled), or maybe we could find somewhere in Elgin or South Elgin might allow us to either bury or scatter them.

In the end I bought a kit from The Living Urn and when Clare was in town last month, put the cremains in the ground under a native butterfly bush. We had a small ceremony, played their song, Moon River, and that was that. Like I said on Facebook, it wasn’t what they wanted but it was the best we could do. The Mississippi cousins were neither welcoming nor helpful.

We were married in a cemetery and we now live in one.

The Fruit Basket

Family, Musings, Photographs, , , ,

Christmastime 1969 my family was given a fruit basket as a gift. It’s possible it was the first fruit basket we ever received because we took at least three photos of it.

In the above photo, Kevin, Mom, and I sit beneath the Christmas tree with the Fruit Basket in front of us. We’re all dressed up, so we must have been heading out to a relative’s soon — so it could be either Christmas eve or Christmas day.

This is a perfect photo to show off my mom’s creative endeavors. Mom’s painting of the African American woman was based on an image she saw in a magazine. It hung in the living room for a long time. I have it now, along with another, similar-sized painting of an Asian man with a rickshaw.

To the right, and below the painting is another craft mom made. It is a candle holder made out of several terracotta pots, partially spray painted black, then shellacked.

Also in this picture could be the only proof that mom made stained glass windows out of tissue paper and tape. I think mom wanted curtains over the windows and dad did not. Dad got fed up with the tissue paper stained glass and took a razor to them. After that she put black tape on the windows to represent segments of a stained glass window. I think Dad took a razor to that too. They eventually got wooden shutters to put on the inside for privacy.

In these two photographs Dad looks sad, angry, or depressed. Kevin looks mischievous.

Dad rarely smiled for photographs, but usually had a smile in his eyes, but in this case I don’t see any of that. I wonder what happened to make him so sad. It could simply be that he didn’t want to pose with the fruit basket but mom wanted him to so he was being passive-aggressive about it.

The first photo shows the curved shelf I remember well from the kitchen. I can see mom’s recipe box. on the second shelf.

I do have memories of the (or a) fruit basket and I think they might have gotten it from Dad’s workplace — this might have been the year he began working for Reber’s Appliance. I don’t know, however, why so many weird photos were taken of it.