Day 116

I am changing my resolution to six months, half a year instead of a year.  A year is too long.  This blog takes away time from the other pursuits of my free time, like my piano, and painting, and reading, and other important life ambitions and everyday delights.

I hate to give up on things, I like to think I am someone with staying power, that person my parents taught me to be, long long ago.  But it is not anyone else I am giving up on, just my own silly resolution, and it is for good reasons, for the right reasons. 

So I am excited that I now only have 67 days left. I have still made it a round number, or if not a round number, a slice of time that means that I half-fulfilled the resolution, and I can be happy with that. 

Since arriving home from a day of helping friends move apartments, of heavy lifting and up and down stairs and lifts and through the labyrinthine corridors of the old Mill buildings in Lowell, I have been semi-glued to the webcams of my two little brooding females.  The osprey around the corner, and the barn owl far away in Texas, both incubating their eggs.  The barn owl with a clutch of five, and Ethel now has four!  I have noticed that they spend quite a lot of time dozing, and I suppose that they are also subject to those broody hormones pregnant women experience, the kind that numb your brain somewhat, that pull you a little further into yourself and the nurturing task your body is accomplishing.

They get up and preen themselves, exercise a little, then carefully, ever so carefully, they sort the eggs, move them about a little so that they each get a turn in the middle, and then gently lower themselves, their warm downy chests and tummies, on to the precious clutch.  It is a wonderful sight to behold.  

I have recently discovered this amazing singer, Fatoumata Diawara, and love both her singing and her music videos, so refreshingly different from the raunchy music videos of so many American songs these days, which all seem to feature barely-dressed women moving in extremely suggestive ways, and fully-dressed men pretending to be pimps.

She was born in Cote d'Ivoire to Malian parents, the same year as my daughter Jess, and, as a headstrong twelve-year old, was sent to be raised by an aunt, which is a very common practice in that society.  In fact she didn't see her parents for ten years!  Her aunt was an actress and one director cast Fatou in a couple of movies, and as a result she became quite famous.  Her family wanted her to settle down and marry and she was forced to give up the idea of acting and made a public statement to that effect.

But in 2002, after being offered a part in a show by Royal de Luxe, and having being refused permission to accept the offer by her family, (a single woman is like a minor in that society), she ran away, hopped on a plane, closely pursued by the police who had been alerted by her family's accusation of kidnapping. 

While touring all over the world with the Royal de Luxe company, someone discovered her singing backstage, encouraged her and, after teaching herself guitar, she has become almost exclusively a singer.  Her songs are about subjects like women's rights, relationships, the state of the world.

Fatou