Time Catches up with you...

and before you know it, TWENTY YEARS have passed since high school. Always believing in my eternal youthfulness it was strange to be confronted by the reality of my age. Former classmates married already years and years with children almost the age I was about twenty years ago. There I was, so many years, addresses, careeers and looks away from the nerdy-girl I used to be. Now a nerd-goddess I sat back and thought about who I was then and who I am now. HAPPY seems to be the word then and now. I think I look wonderful and life is moving at a pace that allows me to enjoy every minute and I'm learning more and more each day.
I'm still a kid with an infinite sense of wonder.

the Ninja wedding....

I can hardly believe it's been two years....TODAY! Lester & I slipped away to town hall here in Chicopee Falls and secretly got married. Our aim was to spend some of our time in California on a real honeymoon. Our original plans for a BIG family celebration in New Orleans would have prohibited that. So, I was ending my VISTA year and we were just about to head to California where I was going to perform a wedding for a dear friend.

Now we have two anniversaries and two very different and memorable moments. Ain't I a lucky gal!!

HAPPY LOVING DAY!!!

In 1965 Judge Bazile of Caroline County, VA stated that :

"Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix."

In 1958 Richard Loving & Mildred Jeter had been forced to leave there home and families in Caroline County because the childhood friends married. Richard was white and Mildred, black. Four years later, in exile they decided to make it back to their families. This sparked a court battle that would make it all the way to the Supreme Court and begin to change anti-miscegenistic laws. Finally in on June 12, 1967 Cheif Justice Earl Warren and the US Supreme Court decided:

"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

so today we mark the 40th Anniversary of that decision...
Celebrate the FREEDOM to LOVE
and to be LOVED!!!

morning's invasion

waking up feeling like I could sleep another two hours pressed against you, feeling that my whole body is set to your rythm, the rise and fall of your chest, that cacophy eminating from deep inside of you. turning over to beat the clock, to shush the noise of reality that invades my first seconds of realization, thinking is so difficult, breathing is the only effortless endeavor just now. eyes slowly open to take in another sense of the morning, until now I had only the image of you in my mind, the smell of you lingering in the air, the sound of your sleep and the feel of us. you stir, now awake and the invasion is complete.

Challenges...

I have never been one to back down from a challenge as family & friends will tell you. That's sometimes been my greatest and weakest points. I've taken on new projects at work and have been busy around the house creating a right cushy little nest for us cuckoo birds. I think I'm ready for a little bit of creative outlet again. I'm ready to start pouring out something REAL and new. I haven't a clue what will pour from this mind of chaos and schemes. I just know it's overflowing with STUFF ready to decant.

A Tropical Celebration

Lester & I along with our family & friends took a cruise down to Nassau, Bahamas on January 12th. We gathered in Miami the night before and many of our friends met for the first time. We laughed and drank and ate lots of good tapas. Saturday, January 13th we arrived at the port of Nassau and headed to the British Colonial Hilton for a little celebration.

See more pictures on our website: www.SkochiiandLester.com or our Friends and Family website.

going home...

I headed back home, New Orleans, for the first time since the storms. I was only there for two days, spending my time with family. More than a year has passed and there has been growth, change, progress and neglect. My mom has moved to Gert Town near Xavier and it seems that maybe three houses on her block are occupied. The rest sit like discarded paper cups, marked with spray-painted symbols. They have significant meaning those X's and numbers. I don't want to know what they mean. We drove to around mid-city & uptown, seeing the water marks, the holes in the landscape and the tiny signs of regrowth. I visited City Park and gasped as I drove up Carrolton Avenue seeing the museum. You used to not be able to see the museum driving up this way. There were live oaks shielding your sight. Live oaks weren't like decoration they were the solem natives populating the park, now so many of them are gone and the park sits exposed.
The most alarming parts were the empty streets, crossing Carrollton Avenue and not seeing the St. Charles Streetcar, the demolition of the Carrollton Shopping Center and those vacant houses.