A Novel Creation www.WatersWords.com

Change...Only for the Better It’s still March. March is a month of change. We move from the days of winter into the sunshine of spring. Though my grass here in Ohio is already emerald green and daffodils are blooming, I know the weather is fickle. It can pour down snow as easily as rain any given moment. It can be overcast or sunny. We have a saying in my neck of the woods:     “If you don’t like the weather, give it a minute.”   That’s the tough part about those moments in our lives when we are transitioning from one reality to another. Dealing with unexpected change.   Someone gets a new job and the whole family moves. Children have to make new friends and attend new schools. Parents have to find their way in a new community and build new relationships.   I’ve faced many of those changes in my life. Some were made by choice; others by circumstance.   I am in the midst of a change of choice. In a couple of weeks, I’ll marry Michael Tyler.  I embrace t...

My Pick for Teacher of the Year There is this woman I’ve known for over fifty years now. She is smart and funny. She’s talented and caring. She’s beautiful inside and out. She is, quite frankly one of my favorite people on the planet.   She’s a teacher. In fact, we taught in the same district for a year or two. I was teaching in an elementary school and she taught social studies at the high school.  But that first year when she started teaching in the Fairfield district, we sat next to each other at the opening day speech offered by the school district’s superintendent.    She proved to be an excellent teacher. I recognized that quality in her early on. She was caring and sensitive to her students. And fair. She worked hard to make sure every student had every opportunity to succeed. It doesn’t get any better than that.   Like me, she wanted to be a teacher since childhood. I knew in second grade I wanted to be a teacher. She knew even earlier. She would li...

  If You Give a Girl a Closet   People who know me know I don’t like clutter. It makes me tired. Stresses me out. So this week has been particularly exhausting with clutter of my own making.   Yes, I said it.  I  created  the clutter.   It didn’t start out that way. It started with the simple notion of making some room for Mike’s clothes after we’re married.    As a first grade teacher, I  read a story by Laura Joffe Numeroff  to my students called  If You Give a Mouse a Cookie . It’s a wonderful book. Here’s the opening:   “If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.”   It’s one of those “one thing leads to another” kinds of stories.   Which brings me back to my closet.    I set out to complete  one simple task : clean the closet.    It was pretty easy to create a pile of “school teacher clothes” I haven’t worn since the eighties. I also tossed the “professor clo...

  The Downpour If you follow my blog, you know that my mother and I spent the month of February in Florida. It was a treat. The weather in the Tampa Bay area is deliciously warm in the winter. We fudged a bit. We gave ourselves a couple of extra days, returning to Ohio the first weekend in March.   March in Ohio is tenuous. The grass can be green one day and have frost on the ground the next. We knew what to expect when we returned.    It was the “in between” that got us.   The rain started in north Florida. Lightly at first. Then we started getting a heavier dose.  That torrential, white knuckles kind of rain hit us north of Atlanta. We stopped for the night.   The next day looked a bit more promising so we forged ahead. Rain poured down all through Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. I’m not talking about a drizzle here. I’m talking about a “can barely see in front of your car” kind of rain.  Think “waterfall.”   When I was a teen and learning t...