Friday Round-Up: Have You Herd?

While I’m about to ruminate on the shed wool of this week, I am mindful that millions of people in Puerto Rico are praying that their country will gather itself and come with the help that is so desperately needed.

The fifth annual Time of the Month Club donation drive kicks off this week. Time of the Month Club collects period supplies – tampons and pads –  for distribution to women in Milwaukee who are homeless. It deals with some of the real nitty-gritty of homelessness. If you are a menstruating homeless woman, what do you do, where do you go if you have no supplies? A colleague told me about finding a woman leaning against a building one night. She was asleep, undressed from the waist down, her underwear and pants folded in a neat pile beside her. She had a job interview the next day and was afraid of staining her only clothes. So for this woman and hundreds of others, we do this drive.

This actually happened in our town. The Milwaukee County Board passed a resolution opposing the shackling of pregnant women during delivery of their babies. I’ll wait right here while you fact check me. So, yeah, the people who run our local correctional institutions had to be told that shackling women while they are in labor was not a good thing. It hadn’t occurred to them prior to this apparently. They were too threatened by the prospect of a laboring woman overpowering them, taking their weapons, and escaping out the barred hospital window. I mean, well, how would that look in the media?

I am taking to heart the writing advice that if you’re not getting 100 rejections a year, you’re not trying. I wince looking at my email list; today’s happy email encouraged me to congratulate the winners of a humor contest I entered. I wasn’t surprised. I’d turned on the piece almost the minute I sent it. Lame, I thought, even though it made me laugh. Who am I to judge what’s funny? Meanwhile, TripAdvisor publishes everything I write. My review of Mary Shields’ sled dog program is really popular; two more reviews and they say I’ll get my TripAdvisor badge. I’m going to sew it on my sash when it comes.

I shared a lane swimming laps with my broken-hipped son. He is a fine swimmer with an almost perfect stroke; his arms slice the water with a long, confident rhythm and when he comes to the wall, he does a tight flip turn. Watching him, you would have no idea that he still can’t walk. His walker is leaned up against the wall next to our towels and when it is time to leave, he will hop up the ramp to where I’ve brought the walker for him to use. It has been a long recovery from his bad car accident a few months ago but he’s lucky to be swimming and I’m lucky to be watching him and we both know it.

So that’s it for this week ending September 29, 2017.

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Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash