Author: Laura Lee Carter

“Promising Young Woman” Subtle Genius!

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WOW! I just finished watching “Promising Young Woman” and it left me with a thousand different reactions at once. I was most impressed with its subtlety, defined on Goggle as “delicately complex and understated”, or “so delicate or precise as to be difficult to analyze or describe.” I should also mention the script and the visuals, beautifully imagined and constructed!

Best to begin watching this film with no underlying expectations. Don’t fear it or try to analyze it, just open yourself to experiencing it fully. You are about to experience what all films aspire to give their viewing audience, a surprising and unpredictable story which mixes the horrible with the hilarious into a vision of common societal biases and judgments. Underneath is all, this is a movie about sexual consent and freedom. How does our society define that? How do you define that, and how much is too much? Can we defend ourselves from culpability because we were so young or so drunk? Is it OK to just watch, but not take part in rape? Are college men who drink too much “just having fun” while college women, “asking for it?”

I find this film to be a powerful invitation to look inside and witness some of your own biases in this arena. I like to think most of the women who watch this will feel the rage of Cassie, and then look at what outlets they have found for that kind of deep rage. Please don’t let it descend into self-hatred. I wish all college kids could see this and then have a healthy discussion on this topic. Rape is so not about men versus women, but about severe anger and control issues.

Cruelty is never OK.

What is happening with Mom?

/ Laura Lee Carter / 2 Comments

“Be the most ethical, the most responsible, the most authentic you can be with every breath you take, because you are cutting a path into tomorrow that others will follow.” — Ken Wilber

I remember when our class met up in the mountains above Boulder at Ken Wilber’s amazing home built into the stones at the top of a flatiron, while I was at the Naropa Institute studying Transpersonal Psychology. I felt a real connection with his mind & perspective on life.

My siblings and I are now dealing with my mother’s slow descent into dementia in the most ethical, responsible and authentic way we can. As many of you know, this can be quite the challenge, further complicated by my Mom’s refusal to get tested by a neurologist. We see memory problems every time we see her, like asking the same questions over and over again, questions like “What time are we meeting?” Or “Am I supposed to bring anything?” She has always been a great cook, but not so much anymore. In fact she usually cannot remember what she had to eat today and prefers eating ice cream all evening. (I know, who wouldn’t?)

She complains of boredom and loneliness since Dad died last March, and we worry about her being alone and falling, so we are now in the midst of trying to convince her to move into an assisted living situation, one where she will be around other people (she lives alone now), be fed good meals, and have access to lots of different kinds of activities with others.

It’s so hard to know when to start telling her what she needs for her own happiness & safety… 

Mom fears her future. Who wouldn’t in her circumstance? But we are slowly realizing that we will now need to make some decisions for her. That is tough as a kid whose Mom used to have all the answers. She mourns so many things, the loss of her past, the loss of her things that remind her of her past, the way her world is slowly shrinking around her. Amazingly, she’s still a great driver, something she has always loved. Going out to dinner is her favorite pastime. She just forgets that she’s not hungry until after she orders food…

We have no diagnosis, we just worry about her a lot. What have the rest of you done in this kind of circumstance?

My latest early bloomers in spite of that bad rain & hail storm this week!

/ Laura Lee Carter / 4 Comments

This year I have a great crop of early purple penstemon volunteers in my sky garden, many more than previous years! I also had some beautiful small lupines, but they really got drowned by the hail and rain we had on Tuesday. My other penstemons are also doing fine in spite of the hail.

I also have a new experiment I planted last May, a “Blue Velvet” Honeysuckle bush (Lonicera korolkowii ‘Floribunda’) that was extremely happy until an inch of hail fell on it.

I started to notice which plants withstood the hail and four inches of rain best. Lavender could care less about hail. It is such a woody plant. Catmint suffered a bit, but is coming right back with its purple blue flowers now. Russian Sage seems to stand up to bad weather well, and the larger yarrow plants are OK too. That creeping thyme is amazingly resilient!

BEFORE THE STORM…

I had the cutest little Hissup plant that was just getting started and its leaves got so trashed, as well as the new leaves on my Blue Mist Spirea bushes

BLUE MIST SPIREA IN PAST SUMMERS

Does anybody know if those will come back this summer? I sure hope so. That is one of my favorite bushes in the garden!

WOW! What an amazing rain and hail storm up here this afternoon!

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I have been a weather-watcher from way back and one of the longest lasting CoCoRahs volunteers. I lived through the Fort Collins flood in 1998 and started measuring for CoCoRahs at its inception, but this afternoon was amazing to me! We live halfway between Walsenburg and La Veta in southern Colorado.

It started raining around 2pm and soon turned to hail, lots of it! It has been raining ever since…

Now, at almost 5pm, we have way over an inch of rain in the gauge and it’s still raining…

We LOVE to get precipitation in this part of Colorado, especially since we have been in a serious drought for years now, but not when it completely drowns my garden!

TOTAL precipitation from 7AM on May 17th to 7AM on the 18th at our home: 4 inches!!!

My garden plants were not amused with 2 inches of hail…

How a funeral, honesty, and the reading of a will can be a good thing for a family

/ Laura Lee Carter / Leave a comment

While I was away this past week, I found myself gorging on so many films that I have missed by being unable to stream out here in the wilds of Huerfano County. I know, hard to believe, but we haven’t had that ability until now. First we had the wildfire in 2018, which knocked out all Internet access for two months, and then the only service we could get didn’t have enough bandwidth for streaming.

So what was my favorite movie of the ten or so I watched this past week? Uncle Frank, introduced at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 and released in November 2020 by Amazon Studios. So many things about this film reminded me of me. The main character is a teenage girl about my age in 1973, it’s set in a small southern town, not so different than the one I grew up in in Kansas, and her family has a lot of biases and family secrets.

This young woman named Beth, is saved from that small town life by her Uncle Frank, a professor in New York City, who is the only person encouraging her to get out and experience the rest of the world. She decides to go to NYC to college at age eighteen, but she is still so naive because of her age and small town upbringing.

Beth meets a guy named Bruce and they show up unannounced to a party at Frank’s apartment. Through events that happen at the party, she discovers that Frank is secretly gay and has been living with a man named Walid (“Wally”) for over ten years. Frank rejects a sexual advance on Bruce’s part, then takes care of Beth when she gets too drunk. Then Uncle Frank pleads with her not to tell anyone else in the family his secret, and she agrees.

The next day, Beth’s grandfather and Frank’s father, Daddy Mac, dies of a sudden heart attack. Frank agrees to drive Beth back to South Carolina for the funeral. The family scenes back in Creekville, South Carolina are crucial to the story and bring back stories from Frank’s sad past, as well as his addiction to alcohol.

This left me wondering how many more family stories we had in both sides of my family. I know my Mom’s first cousin died young in a mental hospital of suicide and I remember how creepy my Uncle Bill felt to be around. He died young of alcoholism. One cousin has since died of a heroin overdose and my brother is doing a great job of smoking himself to death at this point. What in their family stories led them to such self-destruction?

On the other hand, while in Denver I did get a chance to see my Dad’s final book, completed after his death, the third edition, revised & expanded of “Trees and Shrubs of New Mexico” where the new editor Jennifer Bousselot wrote a marvelous introduction describing the total dedication my Dad showed his entire adult life to fieldwork and botany. My Dad always loved his work and it really showed. I have always envied his dedication to one goal, because I tend towards many interests and avocations.

It appears we cannot help but look back on our lives in our later years, and we are lucky if we feel good about it all. At this point, when I look back over my life, I cannot believe the multitude of places I’ve been with so many different types of experience! I sometimes wonder why I felt like I had to learn Chinese in my twenties or experience Venice in my thirties. They certainly weren’t always the best experiences, but I definitely did follow my heart…

Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on PBS

/ Laura Lee Carter / 3 Comments

“Writing is an extreme privilege but it’s also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone.” – Amy Tan

My fellow writers:

I hope none of you missed this incredibly personal and touching “American Experience” on PBS last night entitled, Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir. This piece was so beautifully put together, combining Amy’s own photos from her past, her intimate recollections, with talks she has given about her stormy relationship with her mother. Words fail to describe the gorgeousness and truth to be found in this two hour special.

Her delicate storytelling and truth-telling is at once fierce and so very sensitive to the human condition we all face, especially that of women. I was glued to my seat from the very beginning and could not move. She is my hero! I feel like I now need to go and re-read all of her books and especially her new memoir, “Where the Past Begins” from 2017.

Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on PBS, premiere May 3rd 2021