THINKING OF WALKING IN THEIR SHOES

I'm late posting my blog entry today. It's been a busy day - a made a big pot of beef bourguignon, some to freeze, some for super tonight. Then made a batch of spritz cookies (won't say how many I tested - they need to be tested, you know.) Then I sat! It's crazy trying to keep track of all that needs to be done and where I have to be in these days before Christmas. I've had three meetings this week, and I'm looking forward to just one next week, and then none until January 8th. Bliss!

But I digress...    ... here's a strange bit I thought I thought I'd write for you:

Catherine Parr
In those times, the clothing of royalty was just sumptuous. 

Some nights I have trouble falling asleep. A while ago, getting to bed after reading a mystery set in Tudor times, I began to think what it would have been like to be a woman in those mid-1500s, and to have been one of the historical characters in the book, Henry VII’s last wife, Catherine Parr.

Imagine being a comely woman and catching the eye of old Henry – and old and diseased he was. She’d know about the fate of her five predecessors: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, and beheaded. What did that bode for her? She did marry him and, fortunately for her, survived.

The point of all this is that lying there in the dark, thinking about someone else’s life, was both interesting – to a point – and soporific. Fleeting thoughts and impressions came and went. I got to sleep fairly quickly. I’ve tried that trick again since then. I’ve thought about being my mother, living in the Depression and through WWII, and the things she encountered and had to deal with. Thinking of her mode of dress, her marriage, and of the differences in lifestyles – all fleeting impressions. I’ve thought about being a movie star and what her life would be like. I thought about and put myself in the lives of a few others.

  

My parents on their wedding day

I’ve got a mental, short list of other lives to explore in my mind. It does work: puts me to sleep, and then gives me food for thought the next day – and to this day.