Having just moved a household, family and two dogs across the country to northern California, I am happy to be getting back to painting. There is nothing like finishing a new work that moves my goals one step closer.

Still Living Momentarily

Don't know quite why this is on my mind. Maybe since I just moved 3,000 miles, from Virginia to California.

When I was a tiny kid, I have vague memories of picking up the phone off the wall in our kitchen in Naperville, Illinois, knowing my mom was on the extension. I don't remember knowing how to turn the dial to get numbers; maybe that hadn't even been invented yet. I could hear multiple chattering, somewhat familiar voices, which suddenly stopped when my phone clicked on. A dark pause led to my mother admonishing me to hang up the phone, please. Of course I did.

Those were party lines; mid-fifties. And party those women did with that new fangled machine, able to gossip easily, locally and with many households all at once. Somewhere in an AT&T or Ma Bell building, another woman sat at a huge console, plugging-in and linking wires so the neighborhood could run rampant.

Here we are, 3,000 miles from where we were a month ago and half a century from that memory. My iPhone 5s made the journey too. It has so many magical things it can do, I've only learned to use a fraction. Maybe it too can party-line, but what women now sit around the house and have the time or energy to gossip?

I didn't even have to change the number to use it in my new-found paradise, though some people ask why I have a Wisconsin area code (from two moves ago).

Imagine.