Celebrating April!

By Kathi Macias    

I love Spring. Really, I do! If only April didn’t have to happen right in the middle of it….

When I was a kid, I actually looked forward to April. Why? Because the last day of the month is my birthday. And when you can still count your age on the fingers of your two hands, birthdays are about as exciting as it gets! (I have long since run out of fingers and toes to count on, even when I use my husband’s!)

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In Like a Lion…?

By Kathi Macias

March is one of those in-between months that make planning anything nearly impossible. It doesn’t matter where you live—those hearty folks in Alaska or Minnesota, or the wimps (like me!) in Hawaii and Southern California—anything scheduled ahead of time had best be held indoors.

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A Love Worth Celebrating

By Kathi Macias

February is quite a month, isn’t it? Shorter than the other eleven, it honors everything from past Presidents to groundhogs. But by far the most celebrated holiday of the month is found smack-dab in the middle of it: Valentine’s Day.

Personally, I’ve never been too enamored of the chubby little baby with the bow and arrow who flies around trying to zing people into falling in love, but the sentiment is nice. To be honest, though, the actual holiday doesn’t appear to be based on such light-hearted frivolities as exchanging chocolates and cards and jewelry. The most commonly accepted start to the holiday came—at least so far as legend tells it—by way of a beheading. It seems a Roman priest performed weddings against the Emperor’s orders and paid the ultimate price. So how did we get from someone getting his head lopped off to lace and candy and sentimental poems?
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“I’m Still Sixteen Inside!”

By Kathi Macias

Every now and then I have one of those days when I understand what my grandmother, “Omi,” used to say so many years ago: “My body is getting old and worn out, but inside I’m still sixteen.” We grandkids would laugh and wonder what in the world she was talking about. Now Omi has long since graduated to heaven, and I am slowly but surely taking her place as the “oldie but goodie” in the family. Still, most of the time I feel relatively healthy and energetic; yet, as I said, there are days…

At no time are those days more evident than in January. Years ago I looked forward to January, as the month represented a new year, a new start, new plans, new resolutions…and a new membership at a new gym. And in those days, I actually used the memberships. Now? To be honest, I no longer waste the money to sign up.

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Christmas Shopping—Bah, Humbug!

By Kathi Macias

I am not a shopper. Seriously! Shopping—particularly Christmas shopping—is right up there at the top of my “despised things to do” list, right along with root canals and skydiving. (Okay, I’ve never actually experienced skydiving, but I promise you I’d hate it. I mean, you don’t have to get set on fire to know you don’t want to be a human torch, am I right?)

The worst thing about shopping is that you really can’t get out of it. When I was a kid, Mom used to drag me and my two younger brothers along on the bus just so we could trudge up and down Main Street and plod in and out of every store along the way. (That was before shopping malls, if you can imagine that!) My feet would hurt, I was mad because I wanted to be home reading a book, and worst of all I had to “keep an eye on” my two little brothers. Oh, that was fun! While Mom pawed through piles of sweaters and socks and underwear—none of which we kids had the least interest in receiving as gifts—I halfheartedly tried to keep my brothers from getting into trouble. They, on the other hand, were completely devoted to finding some new and innovative way of disrupting the entire shopping event. Of course, as I stood there bemoaning my fate and feeling absolutely wretched over the entire state of affairs, it never occurred to me that it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for my mom; somehow I was under the illusion that she actually enjoyed it!

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