Diary of Not a Wimpy Widow

Blog

  • Eight to Eighty-Two

    Eight to Eighty-Two

    “I like your butterfly earrings,” I say to Sara, age eight, and I show her my very similar dragonfly earrings, and we discuss dragonflies and the ones she has seen, and I tell her that dragonflies are very good at eating mosquitoes. We are sitting outside at a picnic table, enjoying cupcakes and popsicles and goldfish crackers. It is the last day of our Sunday school class at my UU church. This second grade class is called Moral Tales and focuses on how to build one’s moral compass. 

    I signed up to teach a year ago because I felt it was time for me to connect once again with a new generation of children, as I had eight years ago when I also taught Moral Tales. The children from that class now are strong, independent teens, who wave to me in passing, “Hi, Miss Kristin!” In two years these teens will be moving on to college. Time for a new crop of kids and parents and teachers to build new generational bridges for me. There is no neighborhood on the street where I live, only three houses, and no children. My church is my village. 

    Society tends to put us into boxes by age. I am trying to stay out of boxes. 

    Just before the class went outside, one of the girls Nora asked if we could sing Hollow Bamboo, a song that I had taught them several weeks before. So we stood up tall like bamboo and sang

    We are hollow bamboo

    Open up our hearts 

    And let the light shine through

    We are hollow bamboo

    Open up our hearts

    And let the light shine through……

    Kristin Moyer

    June 1, 2025

  • REMINDERS

    Reminders

    Don’t let anyone steal your joy
    Don’t let anyone dim your flame
    Don’t let anyone take your awe from the sunrise
    or that miraculous person who is ringing up your groceries

    We are all miracles

    Take a friend to lunch
    Plan something that gives you joy
    Donate to a cause you believe in
    Call someone who has been on your mind
    Protest wherever and however you can

    Stand Up

    Kristin Moyer
    March 2025

  • Snow Drops

    I turn away from my computer and see—-
    Outside my window the snow drops are blooming

    They do not know that my country is going to hell in a hand basket

    They only know that the earth has warmed
    That the days are growing longer
    That it is time to emerge from the earth
    And show their brief beauty

    It is a kind of courage
    I think 
    To push out of darkness into light


    Kristin Moyer
    February 28 2025

  • Time Travel

    Stepping into a gallery in the Washington National Museum of Art
    And greeted by a luminous painting
    All sky and light and possibility

    I exclaim out loud "Turner!"

    And the guard at the door swivels to look at me
    And I hasten to explain--Turner one of my favorite painters--
    And he shrugs and returns to his post

    While my mind goes back in time

    To seeing paintings by Turner
    In one of the museums in London
    Wall after wall of them
    All filled with light
    And how long I stood and looked at them

    And then further back to the Washington National Museum
    Where my father and I went every year together on his visits
    Just the two of us
    Our ritual father-daughter outing

    And the last visit before his stroke

    "Ah, Turner"
    He said, as we entered a gallery

    "One of my favorites"

    Kristin Moyer
    January 14, 2025

  • Carousels

    Carousels

    The recent news stories about the Minnesota State Fair reminded me that my father took my older brother Kit and me to the state fair one summer. I must have been six or seven. We were living in Minneapolis at the time. 

    I remember that it was warm and crowded and that we walked and walked. At one point we walked through the Midway, with tall painted panels advertising strange beings, like the Bearded Lady and the Tattooed Man. My father hustled us past those. Our destination was the carousel. 

    I was entranced—-the music, the motion, the painted images at the top, the lights, the horses with their wooden manes, forever gliding up and down on their metal poles. That was my first carousel ride, with my father watching me. 

    I have ridden many carousels since that day, long after I had given up more exciting amusement park rides. When my son and daughter were growing up, they rode the carousel on the Washington Mall, on our summer visits to the Smithsonian museums. Years later, my granddaughter Emma rode that same carousel in its new home in Glen Echo Park in Maryland. On my refrigerator door I have a photo of Emma age three on a prancing carousel horse, with Bill standing beside her, smiling and holding her securely. Forever going around to the music, while the painted pony goes up and down.

    Usually the carousel figures are horses of different colors, but sometimes there are zebras or other animals. The last carousel that I saw—-but did not ride, because it wasn’t operating that October day in 2018—was in the seaside village of Cascais near Lisbon in Portugal. It was a beautiful small carousel, with horses, but also a bull, a giraffe, a pig, a donkey, and for little children, a swan and a rooster, all carefully carved and painted. 

    I guess it is fitting for my love of carousels that I played the part of the carousel owner Mrs. Mullin in a community theatre production of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s musical Carousel. My daughter Melinda was in the production, too, as one of the children, and we had fun going to rehearsals together and to the cast parties after the end of the run.

    A wish: that I may ride a carousel one more time, before the music ends.

    “…And the seasons they go round and round

    And the painted ponies go up and down

    We’re captive on the carousel of time

    We can’t return we can only look behind

    From where we came

    And go round and round and round

    In the circle game…”

    The Circle Game, by Joni Mitchell

  • Clearing Out Clutter

    July 17, 2024

    I have been busy looking in corners and clearing out items I no longer am using or no longer need or wish to keep—-a child’s guitar, a computer keyboard, canning jars—-and today I opened a cardboard box of sewing notions and fabric pieces of various sizes. In the box were the last two pages of a letter from my mother—inside this particular box because on the back side of the last page of her letter she had typed instructions on how to replace zippers.

    Reading the letter, I can hear my mother’s voice again, chatting about the work she was doing in their garden in Oregon, the photo I had sent of my little son David, soon to be one year old, and the problems facing her mother-in-law (my grandmother) because my grandfather was developing dementia and needing more care. My grandparents lived faraway in Arkansas. 

    My mother wrote “I just hope that I die in a hurry while I still find the daily routine a challenge and a pleasure.” 

    I cannot stop the tears. She was sixty-one when she wrote those words. Twenty-two years later she would decline relatively quickly and die of congestive heart failure, surrounded by family who loved her. I held her hand. I closed her eyes.

    I fold the letter carefully. I will put this scrap of letter into the blue box that holds the last of my mother’s papers. 

    Not everything is clutter. 

    Kristin Moyer

  • To the New World….

    Late in the fall of 1886, Carolina Margareta Brandt, my great-grandaunt, left Sweden on the long journey to America. With Carolina age 39 traveled her niece, Milda Kristina age 14, and her nephew Carl Henning age 12. These two also were Carolina’s step-children, because Carolina had married August Johnson the widower of her sister Cristina Carlotta who had died 6 days after Carl’s birth. The youngest in the group was Carolina’s and August’s son Gustaf Albert, age 9. Another woman and her children from the village went with them. 

    The group traveled from their village near Lake Vanern in central Sweden to Gothenburg’s harbor. They sailed on the Diana from Gothenburg to Frederickshavn in Denmark, then took another ship to Bremen, Germany where they boarded a German steam/clipper ship the SS Hermann built 1865. 

    They landed in Baltimore on November 11, 1886 and traveled by train to Minneapolis where my great-grandfather August Johnson was waiting for them. He was sitting on the porch of a boarding house, when his wife and his three children came trundling along the walk, looking, according to the family story, like gypsies. 

    The iron-bound wooden trunk you see in the photographs also went to the New World, via Liverpool and then to Baltimore. I am sure the family traveled with smaller bags, too.

    What do you think Carolina packed in that trunk? Was my grandmother Milda Kristina allowed to put something in it? What would you take from home across an ocean to a new land? The trunk, a cherished family heirloom, now sits in the home of one of Milda’s great-granddaughters. 

    Last June, I stood on the bow of the canal boat M/S Juno built 1874 as it sailed out of Gothenburg harbor on its way to the Gota Canal system of rivers, canals, and lakes, and ultimately into the North Sea and the docks of Stockholm. I thought about those brave women in my family who sailed from that same harbor across the Atlantic Ocean, and that wooden trunk containing pieces of their lives. I felt a circle had been closed. And I was grateful for the traits of tenacity, resiliency, and courage I have inherited. 

  • Solar Eclipse, April 8, 2024

    And while the moon passes in front of the sun
    And thousands tilt their heads 
    And stare with their black opaque eyes

    On my neighbor’s roof 
    the men with hammers continue
    tapping tapping

    Across the pond
     a lawnmower growls into life
    ruthless with the spring

    And at my poolside 
    the men with their long brushes
    Sweep the walls slowly steadily

    The light dims, the day cools
    but the hammers tap tap tap

    (with some apologies to William Carlos Williams)

    Kristin Moyer
    April 2024

  • Singer of Birches

    The tree crew is here today. They came with a big truck and a chipper and had a difficult time lining up the truck to pull through the pasture gate and then turn around so the truck is heading down the drive. I stopped watching and went into the house. For the past two hours the team of three has been up the big maple tree in my back yard—well, two are up the tree, I think, and one on the ground. That tree is a glorious color in the fall, and then drops a thick load of leaves over my shade garden. For the past few years it has taken to dropping branches unexpectedly. Last month after a wind storm I discovered a very large branch had fallen next to the glider I had bought and put together in 2015 to honor what would have been my 50th wedding anniversary—-we made it to our 45th anniversary before Bill’s death. That heavy branch smashed a plastic side table and would have squashed me, had I been under it.

    But I love that maple tree nonetheless. Bill and I planted it in 1978, the year after we moved here. We also planted the two willow oaks and the pear tree….too close to the house…and then a long list of other trees, some we planted, others planted by landscapers. Not all the trees have survived, but I think we planted over thirty trees on this property, and the edges of the lot are ringed with wild native trees, including hickory, persimmon, wild cherry, eastern red cedar, and tulip poplar. 

    I grew up loving trees. I have early memories of the birch trees with their shimmering branches at our cabin northern Minnesota. My mother hung a hammock for me between two birches to the west of the cabin. I was three when I first rocked in that hammock, toes reaching for the blue sky and singing to myself. My father would come along and say, “What are you thinking about, CheeChee?”—-the name I called myself before I could pronounce Kristin. But I was thinking about everything and nothing. 

    There were tall straight Norway pines at the cabin, too, more stately than my sister birches. On the hill above the cabin there was a Norway that I climbed when I was nine or so, with the neighbor kids. A young sapling grew up next to it, and I could shinny up the sapling and then grasp the lowest branch of the Norway and swing up onto that first branch. And from there pull myself from one branch to the next until I was high enough to see over the other trees and across the lake. I remember hanging onto the branches high in the tree, feeling the wind on my face and hearing the cry of the loons, thinking myself invincible. 

    During that same time period we were living in Fort Knox Kentucky, in military rowhouses encircled by red clay, and there were few if any trees to climb there until we moved into a rambling house next to an old fenced cemetery  and surrounded by military barracks. But there was a big sassafras tree in the backyard, perfect for me to climb, with a low enough branch to start me upward and a very comfortable branch for me to sit on and sulk when I was mad at my mother…which seemed to be often during that time. I was in seventh grade. I liked to chew the young sassafras leaves and small twigs and smell the bark…it smelled like the South and summer. 

    By the time I was in high school I had stopped climbing trees but I never stopped loving them. Their dangerous beauty surrounds my house now, and in the late summers each year I return to the Minnesota cabin, and sitting in the hammock I sing to the birches my sweet songs. 

    February 16, 2024

  • Wanderlust

    And so we dream of adventuring

And store the travel brochures in shoeboxes on our closet shelves

And fall asleep singing to ourselves “on the shores of Mandalay where the flying fishes play”

And then find a man who has a compass in his heart too

Who hears the seagulls flying over Illinois corn fields

And in time

We take flight

So many places with strange sounding names…


Now in this octogenarian decade
The names still call to us, like sirens on the rocks

All those points not yet seen or touched

But the bed also sets up a steady hum

Home, it hums, home, stay here, be warm
Snuggle down in the sleek sheets
Never move again

Outside in the winter moonlight, the Lorelei sing

Kristin Moyer
January 2024