Georgia (n.)

Georgia (n.) feminine form from the Greek word for “agriculture”, “earth worker", or “farmer" 1. A southern state I once lived in. 2. A country I think I can locate on a world map. 3.The name of my garden.

Meet Georgia, my garden.

My girl has suffered a lot of neglect over the past few years due to construction and remodeling projects, but we're working to get her her groove back and see her thrive. I finally planted some seeds over the winter, but that was mostly to see if they were still viable. Last month I got serious about cleaning her up and spending more time with her.

It’s also when I decided to name her and started writing about Georgia in my Morning Pages (I see you, Julia Cameron fans.) That inspired a decision to blog again. It’s 2025, maybe I’ll Substack it, too. We’ll see.

I'm no gardening expert, but I’ve always had plants around, be it houseplants or pots on porches. I’m definitely ramping up my efforts, and I’ll share lessons learned and observations made. In addition to gardening, I’ve also leaned into the fiber arts these last few years. Is this my “grandma era” of activity? I’m still actively raising kids, but I am a Gen Xer who’s older than my parents were when they became grandparents. So maybe that AARP application in the mail was laced with Miracle Gro and triggered my desire to sew, crochet, and take up residence in the garden section of my local Ace Hardware.

That’s it from me for now. I’ll share more about Georgia and the things she inspires going forward.

xo Nic

Identity Crisis of an Artist

Identity is a strange concept. Is it created, assigned, adopted? How malleable is it? How many identities can one individual have? Can you have too many?

When I became a teacher, I was hired, assigned a classroom and 150 students, and handed a curriculum. Boom. Teacher.

When I stood on a beach in Key West and repeated some vows, BOOM, I was pronounced a wife.

When I was handed my son in the delivery room, BOOM, mom.

Crazy how the actions of others can determine identity as well. My brother had a kid, now I’m an aunt. Your spouse dies, and now you’re a widow.

Where you spawn on this planet determines your citizenship, your social class, ethnicity.

I struggle to call myself an artist. I don’t “make a living” from my art. I haven’t shown my work in a gallery or show setting since college, I don’t have an online following to speak of, a specific style or medium I work in.

And yet.

I create work; I have a degree in fine arts; I’ve sold work I’ve created. I feel unsettled if I go for very long without making or creating.

It’s almost as though I’m relying on someone else to assign me that identity. Maybe that’s what is so unsettling. It’s having to own it and be willing to defend it. If I were to show in galleries, have money thrown at me, articles written, etc. but refused to claim the title for myself, could I actually be called an artist? Maybe it the ambiguity and the blurred lines around it. Artist (and for that matter, writer) lacks clear boundaries. Artist is a title you have to claim for yourself. And society in this country doesn’t love when women claim things for or prioritize themselves.

Old Folks: Three Acts in Five Minutes

Act 1

I’m in line at Publix, items loaded on the conveyor, waiting for the lady on an electric cart ahead of me to finish checking out. I’m in my rightful place at the beginning of the conveyor belt, patiently waiting my turn, when a elderly woman as tall as my nine-year-old walks up behind me.

Like, RIGHT behind me.

Pardon me, ma’am, are you familiar with personal space? Perhaps you’ve heard of Covid-19 & social distancing in the last few years?

But there’s MAYBE six inches of space open on the conveyor belt and she’s ready to move in, regardless of who’s in her way. When I don’t move, she literally tries to force me forward with HER CART. Slowly I feel the cart push up against me with more and more insistence. I simply brace myself and refuse to move because, again, IT’S NOT MY TURN and there’s nowhere to go. Would she have me hover over the shoulder of the cashier working at the register to my right or stand next to the woman checking out and watch her enter her PIN at the card reader? That six inches on the conveyor belt will not fit the entirety of your cart, and there’s literally two people ahead of you, so maybe just cool it for a minute, yeah?

Eventually the lady ahead of me finishes and the bagger, an older gentleman around 70, walks her out so he can bring back the electric cart. I advance to my place at the card reader and leave the old lady and her audacity behind.

Act 2

Fast forward and I’m walking out to the parking lot, hands and arms defiantly full of bags, cart left inside. That same bagger is now crawling back towards the store on the cart when our eyes meet. Slowly he swerves and aims his snail tank STRAIGHT at me, mischievous grin on his face, ready to play chicken with the company’s property and both of our lives.

I can’t help but laugh in appreciation at his playfulness, despite this technically being the second old person that afternoon attempting to take me out with a cart.

Act 3

I continue walking to my car and pass a woman around my age and a man who appears to be her elderly father. He takes a hold of her arm as they walk, seemingly to steady himself, and the woman jokingly asks, “You good? You need a piggyback ride there?” To which the man quips back, “You offering?!” and they both laugh.

I laugh, too, reminded of my dad, whose own mischievous ways and laugh I still miss 12 years later.

-The End-

Trickling Streams

Remember the days of cable when you had 500 channels and STILL couldn't find anything to watch? And then streaming came along, with the allure of content-on-demand, telling us we'd be able to watch whatever, whenever, without having to own a library of DVDs?

So why can't I find anything to watch?

Over the last several years nearly all the streaming services have creeped into my Roku…Netflix DVDs morphed into streaming & was the OG service for us, Hulu showed up, Disney+ for the kids, Paramount for my husband, and so on…$7.99 here, $4.99 here, $11.99 there. We cut cable a few years back when we realized we watched more on the Roku than the $100/month cable we were paying for.

And now we're spending well over $100/ month and I find myself spending more time on TikTok than streaming because it feels like the streams are drying up. Even before the writers’strike the amount of noteworthy new stuff was slowing down. My kids watch stuff on YouTube and are unbothered by ads, the lack of which was one of the promised pluses to streaming but is slowly disappearing, along with content we were told would forever be available on demand.

So now that we've reached a saturation point and we have so many services diverting our attention without enough content to keep us subscribed, how long until these services start drying up, disappearing or being acquired by bigger fish, only to sell us a package of content, complete with ads?

Oh wait, it's already happening. Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN come bundled, just like a basic cable package of the olden days. And now I'm watching people on TikTok share hacks for makeshift TV “antennas” to access the local live TV we abandoned for the dream of more choices and on-demand, only to return to last century's pre-DVR days of rabbit ears.

But will folks go back? With TikTok and YouTube out here serving up a never-ending stream of new content for basically the cost of our personal info that's already being scraped and sold off every time we pick up our phones or get online, where's the incentive (or ability with days stagnant wages) to keep forking out cash for dried up streaming services offering less and less while charging more and more?

It'll be interesting to see where TV, or rather, screen viewing and our attention flows as time goes on.

Life's Puzzle

Nearly two months ago I was diagnosed with ADHD.

I'm 48.

You might wonder why someone even bothers being evaluated at this stage in life…

Self portrait piece from college.

I see life as a puzzle, made up of experiences, personality traits, passing emotions, relationships, interests, jobs, etc. “Pieces of the whole" was a theme of my senior art show in college. To go through life is to gather pieces and complete your puzzle. If you’re fortunate, you'll feel a sense of completion, or near completion at least, before you die.

Yet for many years, it felt like I wasn't making progress on this puzzle. I had all these pieces, but I couldn't make sense of how they fit together, or if they were even pieces to MY puzzle. The edges felt incomplete, and everyone knows that framework gives the puzzle its shape and allows you to fill in the rest. It felt like I was forcing pieces from other puzzles to fill in the gaps, and while I could wedge some of them in, the picture was definitely not looking like the one on the puzzle box.

Getting evaluated and diagnosed with ADHD, especially as a woman, is to realize how many puzzle pieces weren't MY pieces. Or maybe they are but I've spent years working on the puzzle I thought I SHOULD be putting together, either because of expectations from society, folks throughout my life, or my own beliefs about myself.

It’s a disconcerting feeling, trying to figure out which puzzle pieces actually belong. There's been unexpected grieving, wondering how much time I've wasted, trying to make the wrong pieces fit or discounting pieces of myself.

But I still believe in the puzzle, and sometimes you have to make adjustments in order to keep making progress. So that's what I'm doing. I'm letting go of pieces that don't fit, while finding grace and appreciation for the ones that I thought didn't fit or that I didn't want to fit.

And although I can't see the whole picture of this puzzle just yet, as I remove many of the “shoulds" I tried to make fit, I grow more certain that the slightly chaotic yet colorful imagery of my puzzle will find a sense of order.

I wonder if my puzzle will make sense to anyone but me.

Then again, maybe it shouldn't.

Usually the Same, But Always Different

I take a “shoot a bunch now, purge later” approach to picture taking on our walks. 90% of these probably need purged.

When we take our neighborhood walks, we usually walk the same path. You’d think after a year and a half, it’d get boring, but the kids and I don’t mind it. We’ve learned that if we stay alert, we’re likely to find something new or changed from the last walk.

Maybe it’s an unknown birdsong we hear, a wildflower that’s arrived with a change in the temperature, or realizing that weird-looking squirrel in a neighbor’s yard is, in fact, a citrus rat (EEEK!).

It’s discovering a bird we’ve never seen before, finding Sheddy the Raccoon’s treetop hangout, or finding a bunny burrow and seeing where the grass has been munched down by them.

It’s the creativity our walks lead to, like when we realize how many different birds we see in our neighborhood, which leads to us imagining all the birds as various cliques, groups, and staff at “Bird High School”, or the children’s story we made up about a lonely gallinule celebrating its birthday and the ducks who end up joining him.

This isn’t to say our walks are these beautiful, idyllic moments of being one with nature, steeped in educational growth and intellectual discourse. There’s talk about Minecraft, Netflix shows, Roblox, and world events. There’s arguments, complaints about the weather, dropped breakfasts, ant bites, etc. You know, regular life, typical kid stuff. But within all of that are these great moments of noticing, of discovery, and of creativity. It's taking note of the little things about our surroundings and each other.

And it might be my favorite part of our homeschool days.