Around Town Continues

For those of you who have followed our family adventures in The Berthoud Weekly Surveyor, I have added a page to my blog focusing on our continuing adventures out of town. I have temporarily relocated with our children to sunny, humid south Florida while my husband slaves away in sunny, arid Colorado trying to get our house ready for sale. The inspiration for having a blog to begin with came from my constant struggle to keep our small two bedroom house clean and organized while our family continued to grow. Now I have an added incentive to blog as I will no longer be writing for The Surveyor. They focus on using local writers, which I no longer am. We loved living in Berthoud and have spent nearly ten years walking to Hays Market, drinking coffee at Da Bean, getting lots of help at Ace Hardware, borrowing books at the library, frequenting local businesses, and enjoying the small town charm of Berthoud.

During this period of crazy change, we have continued to get involved in the community where we are living; supporting local businesses, getting to know the people who work and volunteer in the community while enjoying the beauty and uniqueness of the place we are living now. The climate in Florida is drastically different from Colorado but people are people everywhere and we have been blessed to meet a lot of wonderful ones.
So if you were a fan of my "Around Town" columns for The Berthoud Weekly Surveyor, I will continue to supply you with a weekly dose of humor and family misadventures via my "Around Town Continued"  page on my blog. There will be a new post every Wednesday and you can expect the same fare as my column only they sadly will not be set in Berthoud anymore.
Just go to my blog and click on the tab that says "Around Town Continued." You can also sign up to follow my blog and receive email notifications when I have posted a new article. Or just check on Wednesdays. I look forward to continuing my journey as a writer as I journey around the country and hope that you will gets some laughs out of it along the way.

Is a simple life one to be remembered?

I have often seen the bumper sticker "Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History." I guess that is true, but what impression do "badly" behaved women leave behind them? Think of memorable women that people everyone would recognize, Marilyn Monroe is a perfect example. She is iconic, her image is everywhere years after her death, men still lust after her and women still wish they could look like her but for what good? She is dead, her life spent out at a young age and cut short by her own hand and a string of broken and disfunctional relationships ttmarked her personal life. The most desirable women in the world went into eternity lonely and alone.
My grandma has a book featuring the 50 most memorable actresses of Hollywood's studio era. The lives of most of these women were unconventional and daring. They had multiple husbands and lovers. They signified what it ment to be alluring and successful to generations of women. Yet the depth of fulfillment in the relationships of their personal life seems abysmal. Is making history really success?
One of my favorite novels is Middlemarch by George Elliot. George Elliot was an unconventional women who scoffed social norms by living with a married man and later in life marrying a man much her junior. She denied the Christian faith but continued to write novels reinforcing the morals taught by Christ and espoused (though not lived out) by her hypocritical Victoian society. She was a misbehaving women who left an indelible mark on history. Yet her own words speak of something else as the measure of success.
As Dorothea's epitath in Middlemarch, George Elliot says this...
"Her finely touched spirit had its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like the river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependant on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."