Until the snows came, Buddha rested on a tree stump in the corner of our yard. Now he waits in the corner of the porch, along with bike helmets and what will be the starting of seeds.

I wish I could wait like Buddha, without anticipation or expectation. Waiting in stillness as lives begin and end, as the first butterfly finds its way to our doorstep, as somewhere on a mountain, an old woman cries for stillness.

I am blogging from a Daily Grind coffee shop above the community room where my daughter and grandson are enjoying a Home School Co-op Thanksgiving party. My daughter is still on a crutch as a result of knee surgery and can’t drive yet. So I chauffeur.

For the first time in a long time, I feel that I am living a real life, part of a busy family. I mean REALLY part of a family. We do things together, and we do things separately. We take walks, we play games, we cook, and I continue to learn science and history facts that I never knew as I my grandson shares with me his Home Schooling learning adventures,

Over a year ago, as I made plans to move in with my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson, friends expressed some skepticism about the wisdom of my doing such.

Granted, it was a risk. But the risk was lessened by my adding space to the house so that I could have my own couple of rooms and by the fact that my son-in-law is unusually easy-going.

And so, for the first time in a busy while, I’m taking a few minutes to blog, sitting here by the window of the Daily Grind, since there always seems to be so many more fun and interesting things to do with my life these days other than blogging.

Including making slippers for various family members and playing baseball on my new wii with my grandson.

For every thing there is a season, and a time.

And I’m enjoying this time of solitude. And blogging. And now I will knit for a while as I wait for my family downstairs to let me know that they are ready to leave.

My 1950s charm bracelets and the charms from it. Rings I never wear any more. A chain from which a locket once dangled. None were more than 14K. We took them to a jeweler who buys gold.

If we weren’t in a depression, perhaps someone at an estate sale might have bought the bracelets, and we would have gotten a lot more money for them. The styles of the jewelry were none that my daughter would wear. If I had a granddaughter, she might (or might not) one day want the stuff. But the price of gold is at its highest in a long time. And there won’t be a Medicare COLA coming up, and the cash will come in handy.

I have never had an affinity for gold, except for a ring I bought for myself after I got divorced and stopped wearing my wedding ring. It’s a one-of-a-kind organic design, made with the melted wax method. It’s set with a gold moonstone and has meaning for me on many levels.

Otherwise, I wear silver or copper.

And so we sold the gold.

I was tooling around the website of the campus of which I am an alumna because I will be going with a college friend to his 50th reunion next month. As I was looking through the list of events for the reunion weekend, I noticed that the college library was having an event for former staff of the college’s newspaper to celebrate the fact that the old paper copies of the publication have been digitized.

Wow, I think. I must be in those digits somewhere, having been the Feature Editor and having authored several different columns over my coed years.

So I go into the data base and poke around the issues from time period that I was on the paper’s staff.

It’s a whole lot embarrassing to read what I wrote as a college junior that pretty much always appeared on page 3. I pretentiously called my column “The Prism.”

Oh my.

OMG.

Groan.

Another groan.

Well, at least this isn’t so bad.

We didn’t have a journalism program back then, and I cringe at what today’s journalism students would think if they had some reason to read what I wrote when I was young and full of myself and still trying out my voice.

The writers’ workshop I joined starts in a couple of weeks.

Funny, but back then I probably didn’t think I needed to take one.

I wasn’t sure that I was up to learning any new technology tricks (being almost 70 and just about managing to blog successfully), but I invested in an iphone and its expensive upkeep in a moment of brash consumerism.

But the damned thing has got me hooked.

Away on vacation in Maine for the past four days without a computer and wifi, I had the time and inclination to figure out just how useful my iphone might be.

Of course, there’s the camera, and I knew I would make good use of that feature. If there were a “panorama” app I might have been able to get both the beginning and the end of the rainbow which started on land and went out into the sea, but I can live with what I did get.

The “night camera” app I downloaded before we left enabled to me get some decent photos indoors without a flash.

My “Facebook” app enabled me to upload a couple of photos to keep my friends apprised of the good time I was having while wishing they were there.

My most pleasant surprise in recognizing the helpfulness and ease of iphone use happened on the way out to Maine, when my grandson needed to go to the bathroom and we were all hungry for lunch. Because I was driving, my daughter downloaded a “fast food” app and we got directed to a McDonald’s off an exit a few miles from where we were on the road. How cool is that!

We ate out a lot, so the “tip calculator” would have come handy had not my son-in-law been able to figure it all out just as fast. (Actually, I did use the app just to check his accuracy. And because it was new and I wanted to test it out.)

Before I left for Maine, I downloaded a WordPress app so that I could post to my blog if I wanted to. I posted once, just to see if it would work. I’m used to typing text on a big keyboard, so it was a bit if a problem to use the little iphone one, but, obviously, it can be done. Since I don’t do text messaging (there’s no one I know to text message to), I’m still not used to the little keyboard. But it’s good to know that I can do a blog post if I want/need to.

Since we were in a rented cottage with limited television reception, my evenings were spent using my iphone to listen to the books on tape that I downloaded free from my local library, check in with Facebook, catch up with bloggers whom I follow, follow my son’s exploits on Twitter (I don’t belong to Twitter, but I can read his tweets), and obsessively play my “Bookworm” app game.

While I’m still feeling guilty about the $70 or so a month it costs to keep my iphone connected, at least I’m finding the little machine damned useful. It’s gotten to the point that I’m never without it.

Before the iphone, I had a TrakFone, which I rarely used, and several cheap mp3 players, some of which would not play the WMA audio book files from my library. The iphone covers it all and more.

There are still lots of features on the iphone that I haven’t tried, and I figure that I’ll get to them when I need them.

I have one major frustration at the moment with the iphone. I can’t hear what a caller is saying unless I put on the speaker. Maybe someone reading this can tell me where the hell the phone’s volume control is. I can make the ringer louder or softer, but the voice that’s coming over the phone is barely intelligible.

If I can fix that problem, my love affair with my iphone will be just about perfect.

If you’re an elderblogger, then you probably know Millie Garfield, of My Mom’s Blog.

Thoroughly Modern Millie is celebrating her 84th birthday by going to the theater to see Jersey Boys.

We’ve been joining to celebrate Millie’s birthday online for the past four years. She became a celebrity among us when her son posted a series of very funny videos in which she starred. You can find them here.

Go there an have a laugh, compliments of Millie, and go to her blog and wish her a happy birthday,

Early in my marriage, I tried to grow some house plants and they all died. My once-husband used to say that I could kill plastic plants.

I grew up in a city-space house devoid of greenery. What did I know.

Later, when my own nuclear family moved into a house on a rural hillside, I started a garden. About the same time, I joined a writers workshop. Things started to grow, inside and out.

Today, the jade plant I’ve been nurturing for years is on its last leggy legs. Even the ivy in the hanging planter is drying up. My garden outdoors is wilting. This blog hasn’t been faring much better.

And so I’m on a quest for a Fall writer’s workshop. I need to get that green thumb moving, need some seeds, fertilizer. Need to stir that dirt, above and below.

The title of this post is the title of a book (that I have just ordered from Amazon), one of the authors of which I heard interviewed on NPR on my way back home today.

The authors’ website has a page on grammar myths that begins thusly and that is worth taking a look at:

The Living Dead

The house of grammar has many rooms, and some of them are haunted. Despite the best efforts of grammatical exorcists, the ghosts of dead rules and the spirits of imaginary taboos are still rattling and thumping about the old place.

It’s no longer considered a crime to split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition, for example, but the specters of worn-out rules have a way of coming back to haunt us. In the interest of laying a few to rest, let’s dedicate to each a tombstone, complete with burial service. May they rest in peace

According to the authors, many of those complicated rules of “proper” grammar that I expended so much energy on learning and then teaching my 8th grade classes back in the 70s are no longer worth worrying about.

Well, “makes me no nevermind,” as someone somewhere used to say. I’ve always known that language evolves. But is appears to be evolving faster than I.

I can’t wait to read the book.

Patricia O’Conner, one of the authors, appears on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 P.M. Eastern time. Click here on the third Wednesday of each month to hear Pat live. She appears on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 P.M. Eastern time. If you miss a program, click here to listen to a recorded broadcast..

We are all remembering that it was a year ago today. I see people smoking and I want to tell them. I want to tell them that they should have been there to see where it leads, what it leaves behind in those who feel his absence as much as they felt his presence.

I took a Valium this morning before my spinal MRI. I am still relaxed in reverie.

April is such a neither month — not yet really spring, still capable of the few flurries I spotted yesterday on my way from the mountains to the valley.

A wedding in April is a weather-chancy thing. My cousin’s daughter’s this past weekend took place in a venue that featured a panoramic view of the Hudson River and the foothills of the Catskills. If it had been a sunny day, the view would have been breathtaking.

The cousins of my generation sat together, recognizing that we were now the “elders” of the family, as our younger relatives stopped by every once in a while to chat with us. On that dreary April evening, the music and dancing and revelry reminded us that warmer vistas are just beyond sight. Youth and hope and love ruled for those several hours as a muted sun slipped behind the hilltops.

One of my cousins, who married into a family that, for generations, maintained a 24 room house in what is a nicer part of the city, hosted some of us from out of town. The house is theirs now, her and her husband, who spend part of the year in Florida. It’s a house filled with generations of ghosts, all of those who lived and died here, family and extended family. For generations. They might sell it if they could; but who wants a 24 room house in a one-family residential neighborhood. For now, it works as a home-base for a number of the clan, including their daughter and future son-in-law.

My cousins and I, for the most part, are very different — at least our lives meandered down different paths, mine having taken me a long way to the left. But they are tolerant of my politics, my lack of religion. They are probably more tolerant of my viewpoints than I am of theirs. They are able to interact and relate with me and with each other in ways that ignore all of those values that might divide us.

As we sit around the breakfast table over the kinds of food we all seem to like (little things, like corn toasties — which we don’t like to toast — and Polaner All-fruit instead of sugar-ridden jelly or jam) they make me laugh. They do not pressure, they do not manipulate. Together, we are the kids we were who grew up playing “Flies Up” on their front stoop, even through dismal April afternoons.

We relax into the neither-nor of April, a time of its own, of our own.

There is another family wedding coming in June. I will be there again, in the bosom of family.

Closer by, my mom slips inevitably into dementia’s final horror. I stopped her from eating a paper plate the other day. I strain to remember the Polish I used to speak so fluently so that I can understand her.

I am not there now, I am home in Massachusetts, but I will be going to visit her in a few days to help set up space for, and help to acclimate, a live-in helper who speaks Polish.

Perhaps I should take my Valium with me. After all, it will still be April.

While I was moving, I sorted through some of the stacks of poetry that I had written over the years and pulled out a batch of short ones. Perhaps Thursday will be the day of each week that I will post one of them.

I live in Pioneer Valley these days, but I wrote this one back in the 70s when I lived in another valley. I think one of the reasons I call this blog Kalilily Time is because of my memories of that past valley time.

I am thinking today of my late once-husband, who loved the power of words more than anything in his life, except his children. We shared both of those loves, but not in the same ways or same volume.

I am, once again, searching for the voice that I misplaced somewhere during this last decade.