Category Archives: Choices

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Sundays On St Michael’s Mount

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Last Sunday found us fighting the wind to cross the water to get to church. Patrice and Lisa were finishing a three-week, three country, tour and we were happy to have a chance to share our part of the world with them before they went home. When I knew they were arriving on a Saturday, I insisted we plan a trip to St Michael’s Mount for Sunday services. I been a few times on Sunday morning and I’m always aware of its age and how people have worshiped there for over 700 years.

We spent a few minutes watching as the windsurfers left the beach and we had to run to catch the boat that would carry us to the island.

Speaking of running … here comes Patrice with Lisa right behind her snapping photos.

The boat filled before we got there so we had to wait for the next. I was worried we would be late for the service because having climbed the steps before, I knew that it might be slow going for Patrice who had knee surgery a few months ago. I used Lisa’s camera to get a windblown shot on the boat. It only takes a few minutes to get across, but it was long enough for the sky to clear.

We still had a long way to go once we got off the boat.
I was a bit pushy, nicely so, but still pushy. I found out later that Patrice told Lisa that she and I had run a marathon together and she’d had to listen me being encouragingly pushy most of the way.

Almost there …

We made it with a few minutes to spare. Lisa snapped a quick photo before the service began.  

  It was Harvest Sunday and the chapel was decorated with things from the garden.

There was a special card with a prayer not in the book. I thought it was interesting that it was Prayer E as E is what Patrice calls me and I recently wrote about my struggles with prayer in this post.

I took this picture of Patrice while Lisa, who you see behind her was taking the photo below.  

I came out first and the wind attacked me making it seem as it I’d had a hair-raising experience in church. Even the Vicar turned to look from the doorway. 

You can see part of the church behind Lisa as she’s walking towards us. It’s the building over her left shoulder not the one to the right. The one on the right was the Lady Chapel before it was converted to a sitting room.   

Lisa snapped this photo of me with John. It was pretty chilly that day, but not as cold as we look.

You can see the tide going out in this photo and people beginning to walk across the causeway instead of talking the boat.

Here it’s fully revealed and Patrice and Lisa are right behind me. John went on ahead to get the car.
 There they are!

I think I was saying, ” Hurry, we’ve got a lot to see today!”

I thought this was a blot on my image until I enlarged it and saw it was a bird. It may be time to get reading glasses soon.

The last photograph below shows the wind blowing sand across us. I turned my back to snap this and curled around my camera to protect it from the sand. It was pretty to see it skipping along the shore looking almost like smoke.

I’ve got more from our travels coming up. We took loads of pictures and while I won’t share them all, I think you might be interested in a few more.

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Tearful Reunions Taking Place In Cornwall

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Patrice & Lisa Arrive By Train

We’ve been showing off Cornwall to friends Patrice and Lisa over the last few days and I wanted to share our reunion with you. I think the sweetness in this hello has to be seen.

Patrice was saying “E,” a nickname some of my friends like to call me, only when she says it, it sounds more like “Eeeeeeee!”

I think everyone should have this experience at least once in their life where someone shouts their name with delight and opens their arms for a big embrace. We do it with our children especially when they’re young and I wonder how much better we’d all feel if greetings in general were more joyful and enthusiastic.

Lisa took this picture of me giving Patrice a big happy hug and the one below as well!

Happy Tears To See Each Other

Patrice and I have known each other for ten years and found a compatibility in our communication right from the first when I showed up in her physical therapy office needing help with a painful hip injury.

We chatted our way through my physical therapy appointments always running out of time with more to say so I suggested we get together for dinner after completing my course of therapy and we’ve been friends ever since. It’s difficult for some of us to find close friends later in life especially the kind you can trust with your secrets and it’s comforting to me to know Patrice is that kind of friend.

We’ve seen each other through some extreme times of sweetness and sorrow watching and supporting each other through major life changes that seemed to happen all at once in our 40s. We’ve laughed and cried our way through romantic disasters, shifts in employment, and the death of both of her parents in the last ten years. It has not always been easy.

Our 50s have a different look about them as we’ve worked to create lives that are more of what we want and while we still struggle occasionally with our individual areas of stress and compromise, I think we’ve both learned the joy in holding tightly to moments with people we love and value.

Patrice is here with her partner Lisa for a few days and John and I are having a blast showing them all the places we love. Their clear delight in everything (except apple cider) makes each day an exciting race to see more and I’m taking pictures of them like a mad paparazzi documenting moments we’ll want to remember.

The pictures above were taken at the train station Saturday evening and capture our happy reunion. We were both teary even though we had said goodbye in Atlanta only last month. I feel sure my tears were more about welcoming a dear friend to my life here in Cornwall than about anything else and it thrills me to see her enthusiasm and appreciation for the places I’ve come love and think of as home.

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9/11 Ten Years Later

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NYC - September 21, 2001

Like many people, I have a story about where I was ten years ago today. There’s nothing very different about mine and the details of my morning don’t really matter, but I do have something to say.

Ten days after September 11, 2001 I took my daughter to New York. I’d planned the trip for months hoping to make some special memories while celebrating her fourteenth birthday.

Within days of the destruction, we debated whether to carry on with our plans or cancel and stay home. Air travel became scarier in those days right after 9/11 and flying into New York so soon after was a challenge for me.

Every corner seemed to have an impromptu memorial or a flyer for a loved one who didn’t come home and the familiar landscape I’d visited many times before looked unrecognizable in places. It was a city cloaked in sorrow.

I haven’t written about my memories of that time on my blog before. I’ve blogged my way past three 9/11 dates with nary a shared story. I just couldn’t do it.

Every year as the anniversary approached I would go through my photos trying to decide which to use and what I might want to say, but most of my images seemed too personal to share so I didn’t.

Ten years later my story still doesn’t matter, but I do wish I knew more about the owner of the car above. I took the photo early during our trip and out of all my images this one affects me the most.

To say I find it haunting sounds melodramatic, but I can’t forget it and often think about why it was still there ten days after 9/11. I can’t imagine too many answers that have a happy ending, not after what we all saw, not after that terrible day.

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Birthday Surprises

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Elizabeth's First Birthday - September 10, 1961

This photograph is fifty years old.

Taken September 10, 1961, it’s one of me with my parents, Judy and Gene Harper.

It is a bit faded and blurry, but I’ve seen it so often I think I know it by heart.

For the longest time I focused on the hugeness of the cake preferring its sweetness to a sad memory of a mother with no contact and a father who died too young.

It’s funny how your vision can change as you grow older.

You go along adapting to the shifts that occur with perception and depth until one day you look at a photograph you’ve seen forever and your eyes see something you’ve missed.

Suddenly, this still young family looks different to me.

It’s no longer the size of the cake or the look on my mother’s face that draws me in, but the image of my tiny body leaning ever so slightly towards my dad and my small hand reaching for his.

I never really noticed it before … my hand in his, and it feels like a gift of awareness, a happy birthday of sorts fifty years later from my father to me.

 

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300 Year-Old Graffiti – What We Leave Behind

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I tend to think a great deal about what we leave behind when we die. I’ve always been this way. I went through a period at eight where I buried every dead bug I could find in our backyard just to have a reason to talk about the impact of their little bug lives.

What might seem a morbid fascination with death and dying was more of a training ground for creative writing and I got pretty creative delivering my sad little eulogies at the funerals of the roly-poly’s who’d curled up for the last time.

After assembling a collection of stuffed animal mourners, I’d go on and on about their contributions to the bug world and how they would be missed, but not forgotten.

I wonder if the craftsman who built this wardrobe for storage or the person who painted the design on the front for beauty ever considered how long it might last after they were gone.

Even the young want to leave their mark in some way. I guess it never changes, this need to say, “ I was here.”

Yesterday, while walking through a darkened side of a cathedral in Carlisle, I discovered some names carved into the wardrobe sitting next to a stack of modern-day chairs in the photo above.

They were left long ago by what looked like young boys and seeing them makes me wonder who they grew up to be and what kind of lives they lived.

Some of the names were dated over 300 years ago. I bet they could not have imagined they would be shared one day, going all around the world on something called an internet. It makes me think a bit more about what I write and where I leave it.

Today’s my last day of 50 so I’m looking back quite naturally at the past, considering in particular this last year and what I’ve done with it.

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Building A Bridge – Book By Book

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Artist Under The Respryn Bridge - Cornwall

Some people are natural bridge builders. They see an obstacle and look for ways to overcome it. Sometimes they work alone and sometimes they come together to do a greater good. There’s a lot of chat on the internet now about a book that can save lives. It’s a collection of essays from a few people I read regularly and a good many more that are new to me.

More important for me than the 62 essays is the collective idea that by working together, we can make a change. Some days you need a reminder that the world is bigger than your little part of it. Some days you need a bridge.

Take a second to read what Brené Brown has to say, she may be part of the bridge’s foundation, but you can still be a stone in the arch that supports it.

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

“But which is the stone that support the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “ but by the line of the arch that they form.”

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Eventually, the Great Khan adds: “ Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me!”

To which Polo retorts: “Without stones there is no arch”

~ Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”

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One Reason For Severing A Family Connection

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Imagine tossing out a family memento before you realized what you had. That’s the way I felt when I discovered the old photo I showed you in this post and talked about in the follow-up one yesterday.

In the mid 90s, I had a little plastic surgery. When I did it I unknowingly severed a connection to my family history. I have to admit I felt a little wistful when I saw the old photographs and realized what I had done.

Looking back, it seems fairly shallow and superficial that I spent so much time worrying about a physical characteristic that most people didn’t seem to notice. It bothered me a great deal though and when I got a bonus at work, I took a bit of the extra money and changed my look.

Elizabeth Harper - 1993

Ignore the mullet and how it oddly looks like both ears are sticking out here.

Not only did my right ear stick out in a way the left one didn’t, it was flat inside with none of the whirled bits that most ears have. I never considered I had the option of changing it until I was in my 30s and mentioned it to the plastic surgeon who reworked the area where my melanoma had been removed. She talked to me about the ease of having it done and before I knew it, I was living with a new ear.

When I went in for my post surgery follow-up, I said it felt like she’d cut my ear off and sewn it back on. The look that passed between my doctor and her nurse confirmed I was probably not far off in my sense of what it must have looked like during surgery.

My Ear After Surgery

Was it worth it? I never really questioned my decision not even when I realized the connection to other family members. After years of avoiding getting my hair wet while swimming, and wishing I could wear my hair cut really short, I could finally do both without worrying about how my ears looked. The only lasting negative side effect has been the way my ear sometimes aches when the weather’s very cold.

Elizabeth Harper With Jersey Girl

After years of turning my head to avoid showing my ear, I have trouble remembering to face the camera fully and it’s difficult to find pictures showing both ears at once even since my ear surgery. This shows me with longer hair, but you can still see that the ear closest to Jersey Girl is no longer sticking out through my hair.

I loved the results and rarely thought about it when looking in the mirror or tucking my hair behind my ears until I saw the picture of my great-grandmother and discovered that what I’d considered an imperfection was a family trait.

As someone who worked for years in an industry that liked to have cheerleader pretty types marketing their products, I was acutely aware that product knowledge needed to be balanced somewhere between bubbly attractiveness and at least the appearance of youth.

Elizabeth & Alley - 1994

I look hyped up on caffeine, but I had just rushed in from Atlanta to grab our cat so my daughter Miranda could have her at school for pet day. Notice the before surgery ear I’m trying to hide with my big hair. It’s hard to see my ear with that door knocker hanging off it. 

As a working actor, I recognized that pretty, and young, were often at the top of the list when casting a part. It’s no accident that my ear pinning happened while I was working as a drug rep and auditioning for film and commercial work.

Elizabeth Harper - 1996 - Funny Ears

See it sticking out on the left?

When I was working towards my university degree, I had an advisor tell me that I would not get much work as an actor until I was older as I was more suited for character roles. I thought at the time that he must be thinking that at 24, I was too old and not pretty enough. Having spent time a little time in front of a camera, I think he was right.

Can you find me in the photo below?

Elizabeth Harper - UGA - With The Major-General And His Other Daughters - Pirates Of Penzance

I haven’t done any acting since 1998 when I changed companies and didn’t have time to do both and these days I’d rather spend my time writing. I was never really that good of an actor, but if I’m ever moved to dip my toes back in the shallow and often ‘looks focused’ waters of the acting world again, I can totally rock a Dame Judi Dench haircut especially now that both of my ears match.

Dame Judi Dench (Internet Photo)

Elizabeth Harper - 2011

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A Perfect Day For Riding

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Dora Takes A Break As Elizabeth Takes Her Picture

While I played with the color on the image of Dora, we had such a gorgeous day yesterday that my photos really didn’t need any tweaking. John and I went out to explore a new area we’d not been through and I couldn’t pass the stile without posing Dora next to it for a few quick photos.

There were a lot more hills it seemed on this ride and I caught this one of John coming up one very long, long, forever without end seeming, hill.

This was just one view that waited near the top. Notice I said, near the top.

I shot this from my bike on the way home. John and I’ve walked right through the grounds before, as a public footpath goes through it.

The horses saw me coming, but were not bothered enough to move. I was shooting in motion while riding Dora. Thank goodness the car below gave me wide berth. The driver probably was thinking …” Tourists! ”

The horses did feel obliged to move over for the car and driver.

This little beauty was very friendly and not scared at all.

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Go Directly To Jail

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This morning I was stuck. WordPress was not working properly for me and even though I kept deleting and starting over, my photographs would not go up in the order I wished. After trying a few times, I got irritated and then I thought, Right, I’ll just put them up in reverse if they won’t load the normal way!

What you see below is what I wanted in the beginning. It did require thinking about it differently and going at it from another direction which is interesting if you consider the images and subject for this post.

Bodmin Jail, also known as Bodmin Prison, probably didn’t allow much deviation from their standard way of doing things. Rules were necessary to maintain order and it was funny that today’s post would not behave properly.

Bodmin Jail is a collection of old buildings that are mostly falling apart. A few have been restored and you can have a meal in the restaurant or stay overnight as part of a ghostly evening, but most of the buildings are not in use. Unlike historical ruins in America, walking and exploring are permitted and John and I stepped through an old main door and into a former cell without any problem.

Standing in a cell built for one, I wondered what prisoners thought when they stared out through the windows. I found it scary and confining as you might expect a prison would be especially one with such history. Bodmin prison was the first British prison to have individual cells and I wonder if that was better or worse than sharing with another person. They were keen on punishing with silence and isolation and I was surprised to see they had windows. I wondered if prison officials thought that watching others walking free might increase the pain of incarceration.

You can get an idea of the size of the space in the cell by the photo above. John had just stepped out and I was shooting from very near the window. I looked online trying to discover what the long narrow trough was used for. John suggested it might be for waste disposal since there was no indoor plumbing.

As Bodmin Prison was built in 1779 I’m not surprised by the lack of facilities, but it is odd that I could not find anything to tell me why the trough was there. There’s a good bit of info on this site, but be prepared to have to decipher a bit as John and I both agree that it could use some editing.

This same shot appears on the website I mentioned above and I took it in one of the first cells you see once you are inside the main hall. I can only assume that the photographer was as nervous as I was about being in a place where people were once publicly hanged for their crimes and like me, did not feel like photographing the other cells. I did poke my nose in a few others, but I was moving fairly quickly.

This was just one building that housed prisoners. I can’t imagine the despair at being sentenced to serve time here especially when you read about how minor some of the crimes were.

There was no one about guarding the area and one could easily climb around if feeling brave. John never seems to need as long to absorb the details when we see new places and I’m not usually bothered about lingering behind to snap a few more photos before hurrying to catch up with him, but on this trip when I heard him say he’d had enough and was going on, I decided I’d seen enough too and left with him.

 

 

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When Your Name Is Irene

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Bodmin Moor (Click to Enlarge)

Even though we are a long way from the threatening fury of Irene’s arrival, it has been the topic of conversation here. Last night at the pub we shared a table with some friends from the village chatting over the week’s events with, Ian and Irene.

You may remember Irene from the photo below. It was taken at the pub back in January and she’s sitting in exactly the same place as she was last night while we talking about the hurricane that has so many Americans now running for cover.

I know Hurricane Irene has been spreading herself around and she’s caused millions of dollars in damages as she’s blown through the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas in her flight plan.

That Irene and our Irene have nothing in common, but she did share a few of the comments and jokes she’s had to endure since Hurricane Irene made the news.

Irene & Elizabeth

John is the weather watcher in the house. Most days, I barely pay attention to what’s happening weather-wise. That seems to have changed since he gave me Dora and I find myself feeling a bit grumpy lately that the weather has made it so uninviting to ride.

Living in Georgia, I took good weather days for granted. In Cornwall, we have a fair amount of rain and it’s usually not an issue for me, but it’s been cool and wet for the last week and I find that despite a long hot summer in Atlanta, I am not ready for summer to be over here.

Summer Flowers - August 2011

We’ve got a break in the clouds so I’m heading out in a few minutes to squeeze in some exercise and move my moodiness out the door. I’ve got loads to do today and no reason to whinge on about weather and inconvenience when so many are in such a scary situation.

Thank goodness we have ways to track deadly storms and prepare for them. I have friends scattered up and down the eastern coast of the US and I’ll be tracking their movement, watching as they hopefully provide updates on Facebook and Twitter or blog about their experiences with Hurricane Irene.

Here’s hoping you stay safe and dry wherever you are today.