A year ago today we lost one of the most vivacious and positive people on the planet, Nancy Jones. I had known Nancy almost my entire life, she was my mom's best friend while I was growing up.
Nancy & Larry Jones
My mom passed away in 1985, a year later I moved from Michigan to Washington state, and for a long time I lost touch with Nancy. In 2008 we reconnected when she and her husband Larry traveled through Bellingham on their way back to Michigan after an epic road trip that took them to Alaska, and back to the lower 48 via the Alaska Marine Highway.
It was so wonderful to see her again, and we stayed in contact until her death. You would be hard pressed to find someone as uplifting, and happy to be alive. She was a natural conversationalist, intelligent, funny, just a beautiful soul. She loved the color orange, and I always think of her when I see orange flowers, especially California Poppies. She loved to cross-stitch and created the one that inspired the name of this blog. I will miss her the rest of my life, and am very glad I was able to call her a friend.
It's always embarrassing when someone starts singing from West Side Story when they meet me for the first time and hear my name. The next time that happens I can think of this and smile 😃
Last night I watched Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice on CNN. I had missed the chance to see it in the theater this fall when it came out, and am so glad I finally got to see it. By the end I was crying, I was so sad when I had heard in the last year that she could no longer sing because of Parkinson's Disease. I have been such a huge fan of hers for my whole life. Of course I can't begin to sing like her, but that doesn't stop me from singing along, and belting it out as best I can in the shower, or wherever no one else can hear me!
Towards the end of the movie I started crying when Emmylou Harris chokes up saying that there will never be someone that sings like Linda, because those are my feelings exactly. Most of the people I've met that are younger than me seem to have little interest in the music from the not so distant past, and have never experienced, and have no appreciation, for just how amazing her voice is/was.
It made me smile that the movie included a snip from her appearance on The Muppet Show - among others, she sang "The Shoop-Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss), something I always wished ended up on an album.
My favorite album is Hasten Down the Wind, and the song "Give One Heart", but I love it all, especially Canciones de Mi Padre, and the song "The Charreada", she could truly sing anything ♥
So I'm starting off the year with the hope that 2020 will bring wonderful new things. 2019 was a beyond busy year at work, which ended with me being laid off after 8 1/2 years, less than 2 weeks before Christmas. I was definitely very bitter to begin with, for many reasons, but I have slowly let it go, with the belief that I deserve to be somewhere that I am valued, and at the end, I wasn't.
I had a quiet Christmas with the cats, and today was the same - but today we had some beautiful sunshine for the first half of the day, and I appreciated it, and hope that is a good sign for the rest of 2020. I will be able to take a little "me" time for a short while, and I am looking forward to spring and hoping that wherever I land next work-wise I will be able to enjoy more of the summer than I did last year, and really for the last 8 years to be honest.
