Mary van Balen

Watching dark plumes of oil and gas rise like dirty clouds from the broken pipe at the BP oil site makes me sick. My stomach turns over when I think of millions of gallons of oil fouling the earth every day. The thought that this will happen day after day for months is unfathomable.

Anger rising from my heart is as dark and dirty as the oily clouds. Read More 

PHOTO: A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Employee

Waiting for Dad to don pajamas and prepare for bed, I sat on a couch tucked away in a nook off the nursing home’s wide hallway. I checked voicemail, made a few calls, and then looked out the window beside me and watched a spider working on her web. She was large, her bulbous abdomen marked underneath with an orangey hourglass shape, and her long legs were darker at each joint. She waved them about until they detected a strand of silk, then she hurried along it to the end. Once there, she dropped quickly to another point along the window frame where she attached the new thread, then began waving her legs around again.

I looked at the web from a variety of angles but could see no pattern let alone the familiar radiating design I expected. Read More 

PHOTOS: Mary van Balen
While helping me clean my old house, a friend asked if I would miss it when I moved. There are plenty of things I will not miss: non-stop noisy traffic, a one-person kitchen that managed to hold four or five people when the children and I were baking or we hosted a party, and a narrow hallway with four doors that all opened into each other. Of course, all homes have drawbacks.

As I stopped cleaning for a moment and considered her question, a number of thoughts came to mind.  Read More 

PHOTO: "MEMORY SYNAPSES" - SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE "How Our Brains Make Memories"
A few days ago I had the unusual experience of watching my vocal chords in action. Chronic hoarseness and some difficulty breathing sent me to an ENT specialist. I had gone to one decades before when singing in coffee houses, churches, and at sing-a-longs pushed my voice past its limits, but this time technology had a new tool to offer: a rigid stroboscopic endoscope, or in layman’s terms, a long silver tube with a camera that takes a video with soundtrack of one’s vocal chords while the patient follows the speech and language pathologist’s directions for holding pitches and taking deep breaths through the mouth.

The procedure was painless, and the results were amazingly clear. Read More 

PHOTO: Mary van Balen
Where do you find a room full of enthusiastic authors, poets, and storytellers celebrating life together? At the Ohio Literacy Resource Center’s Writer’s Conference. For twelve years, the OLRC has sponsored a writing contest for adults enrolled in Adult Basic and Literacy Education (ABLE) classes throughout Ohio. From hundreds of submissions, the conference committee chooses poetry, memoir, fiction, and non-fiction stories and puts them together in a softbound book.

The published authors are invited to attend the daylong conference that from its early days has featured Lyn Ford, a nationally recognized storyteller who draws on her Native American and Black American heritage to mesmerize attendees with tales of wisdom laced with humor.  Read More 

I always liked walking into an elementary school building an hour or so before classes began, when quiet covered every classroom and office, inviting unhurried reflection as well as preparation for the day. Occasionally I saw a janitor pushing a wide mop down the old wooden hallways and making them shine. Now that I work at a large department store, I find similar calm when I arrive before its doors open for business. I also see the people who work behind the scenes to make most American department stores shine.

On Mother’s Day, I walked in the employee entrance and made my way downstairs to clock in at the register. I passed a number of workers, women mostly, wearing full aprons, pushing mops and buckets down wide aisles that reflected the dim lights of the early morning store. Read More 

Once again, I spent part of my day substitute teaching; this time it was language arts. The students were quiet as they took a long vocabulary test and then opened “With Every Drop of Blood,” a Civil War novel by James and Christopher Collier, reading until the period ended. I took advantage of the time and read the novel myself. It tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a Southern boy, Johnny, and one of his captors, a Black Union soldier named Cush Turner. As the boys become friends, they realize the erroneousness of many stories and stereotypes about Blacks and Southerners they had learned growing up.

At one point, after Cush ‘s fierce desire to learn to read and his reverence for Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address surprised Johnny, he began to rethink his assumption that Black slaves were inherently inferior to their white masters, and realized that he had never considered anything from the point of view of the slave. Read More 

PHOTO: Bead Creative
The call came early in the morning: A seventh grade history teacher was sick; would I like to sub?" Yes. As I prepared for the day, I smiled at the timing. For months I had hoped for calls to substitute, but none came. Then, after my first full day of working as a large department store associate, when I was looking forward to a hot bath and putting organization back into my office, I received the call.

Life has always been like that evidenced by expressions like "Feast or famine," and "When it rains, it pours." The mess of my office would have to wait.

After assisting students as they researched the Catholic Church in Medieval times (a particularly embarrassing stretch in its long history), I spent the evening with my father.  Read More 

PHOTO: Disney
Last night a couple of friends and I spent the evening at the local art theater watching Disney's new Earth Day offering: Oceans.
That it was short on storyline did not present a problem since I went for the images; the movie does not disappoint. I am an ocean soul and treasure every moment I can muster in the waves or walking the beach. I left the movie theater with a more profound respect for the complexity and wonder of the world under water.

The images were breathtaking: an octopus that looks like a silk scarf patterned with gold and brown undulating through its blue world, a leafy sea dragon that is almost indistinguishable from the plants it eats, humpback whales hanging upside down to sleep. The list is endless.

Some creatures travel thousands of miles every year while others that stay put like the leafy sea dragon that cannot survive if moved to a different depth or location.  Read More 

Spring rains pour down from the night sky soaking the earth and pounding against the roof making a familiar sound. Rainy nights often send me to a good book and a cup of tea, content to spend time quietly, but tonight rain sounds sink into my heart and remind me that I am alone with my book, computer, and thoughts. My stomach aches and my heart is empty as I finish another game of FreeCell.

I have not been alone all day. In the late morning I drove to my new part time job only to discover that the orientation had been canceled. I used some of the unexpected free time to find a pair of dressy black slacks, fifty-percent off. After a year of writing a book on my own schedule and then almost another year looking for work and moving, my wardrobe is tired and faded, not suitable for work.

Around two-thirty I headed home. As I approached the exit near my daughter’s house, I called and offered to pick her up and treat her to a late lunch, thinking we could buy cheap food, return to her place, and visit for a while. Read More