My maternal grandmother was a gentile southern woman. Quiet. I admired her spirit 
and spirituality. We shared a birthday and a love of cooking. There were only two places I’d spend the night when I was a child: Mama’s and my friend Leslie’s. For the past several months one of Mama’s stories has been with me……it’s time to let go.
ONE day Henny-Penny was picking up corn in the cornyard when–whack!–something hit her upon the head. ‘Goodness gracious me!’ said Henny-penny; ‘the sky’s a-going to fall; I must go and tell the king.’
2016 called us to a place of soul-searching. What it meant to be family and neighbor. Ultimately, asking a moral question of who is my neighbor?
When the sky really is falling, a helping hand, a compassionate voice, a casserole….a boat….a sledge hammer, a bottle of water. It was a record-setting year….one that shaped characters and cities. For some, the sky fell when a ceiling might have been shattered conjuring images of a dystopian world: Lines drawn. Another piece of the sky fell. Fearful.
In these days of twenty-four hour news cycles and social media addiction have we forgotten intelligent discourse? Have we forgotten that the sky will not fall if we agree to disagree? That drawing lines in the sand is not always necessary…and that neighbors are not always next door.
2016 was tough, no doubt…..but if you asked my grandmother, who was born in 1901, so was 1917, 1929, 1941, 1959 and any number of other years, although she would never have talked about the difficulties.
The take-away is the sky didn’t fall because her generation figured it out without falling apart. While holding the sky up…they held each other.
“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” —Cecil Beaton
Sweet h
ellos, bittersweet good-byes. 
Two weeks ago I was preparing for warm-up before a performance, playing with the Timehop app on my phone and saw a picture of myself from five years ago compared to today. History. Thinking about what has transpired over these years, my head started spinning.
I helped for a few hours to pack her mom’s house so they could begin the sheet rock and mildew removal. On the way out of town I was heading to the cemetery to visit the family plot but stopped. . . the water on the Ouachita River was so high.
Happy hunting!
BethSings 