I enjoyed being on the North Dakota Today Show!

Sophia Richards and I talked about my Great Reads Award from the Library of Congress, what writing The Clean Daughter was like, NDSU Press, and WHY should people read memoir!

Thank you, Sophia, for a great interview.

The date is set for the opera I wrote about my Grandmother, Sophia Jensen.

Thursday, March 27, 2025. 7:30 p.m. Concordia College. More to come.

If you want an evening out, it’s free, open to the public.

the opera story is about the hardscrabble lives of women from Nebraska, Minnesota, and my Grandmother, Sophia Frederickson Jensen, from North Dakota.

A few months ago, I wrote about giving up my to-do list, learning to rest, building brain reserve, and not chronically overdoing everything in my life. I’ve spent months slowing down and learning to listen to my brain.

After months of brain R&R, I was delighted to hear my therapist say “You’re ready to start exercising your brain!”

When I go to my weekly sessions these days, it’s part learning and part exercise. It’s like going to a brain gym! I come away invigorated, challenged, smiling, and tired.

If you’re curious, or if you’d like to play along, here are some of the brain exercise games that I’m learning.

• How many words can you think of, in one minute, that start with one letter of the alphabet. Say P. Any word will do except no names or proper nouns. No Paul or Pittsburgh. Set your timer. Go! Platter, paint, pull, peony, pinecone, practical, persistent.

• How many words can you think of that end in a certain letter. Let’s say N. Set your timer again. One minute. GO! Spin, thin, fan, can, men, hen, won, sun.

Okay, you’re warmed up. Next is a little heavier lifting.

• Words that begin with __ and end with __. Let’s say words that begin with B that end in T. Ready? Bat, bit, bullet, boat, bent.

Each week when I’m thinking pretty highly about myself and my progress, my therapist gets a twinkle in her eye and says, “Well done!” And each time I think, “I’ve done it!” she challenges me with something a little harder or longer.

• Pretend you are a thesaurus. What other words might you find that have similar meanings to “pretty.” I start off quickly: Beautiful. Lovely. Gorgeous. Stunning. And soon, I’m out of words and my brain is firing away and searching for more. Attractive. Cute. Fetching. The games are usually timed. One or two minutes. How many words did I find?

• Say a word. What ever two letters it ends with will be the first two letters of the next word.

Shine. It ends with NE, so find a word that starts with ne: Never. Never ends with ER, so find a word that starts with er: errand. ND ... North Dakota? Ha ha. Almost works.

Try again.

Buffalo. LO: Lowest. ST: Streets. TS: tsar. AR: are. RE: relax. AX: axle. And on and on the word chains go.

I go home each week with some homework suggestions. Things to challenge myself with. Things that seem random or strange to me, but are given with intention and knowledge. My therapist is like the smartest person in the world. I’m SO happy not to be in charge of my therapy, but to hand the reins over to someone who has a plan, who has seen this a hundred times before.

• Pick a letter of the alphabet and see how many words you can name in ONE category of your choice. No time limit.

I chose “P” and the category of anything medical. Pituitary, potassium, pineal gland, pain, pedicure, pneumothorax, psoriasis, pimples, pregnancy, preeclampsia, probiotics, pyloric stenosis.

I thought of words I hadn’t heard since my college nursing classes back in the 70s! I guess that’s the idea. Finding those words that you seldom use but that are housed somewhere inside your gray matter.

My therapist is also teaching me how to make my brain more flexible. To think in new ways. She’s teaching me activities with a slightly different manner or approach.

• Say the days of the week ... in alphabetical order!

• Name 5 balls used in sports from smallest to largest.

• Name five words that explain weather: say them in alphabetical order.

• Say a 4 word sentence that doesn’t include the letter “i”.

• Spell in reverse order the name of your father’s occupation.

• Name 4 animals, from smallest to largest, with 4 letters in each of them.

• Name the months of the year backwards, starting with May.

You get the picture. The game isn’t what is important, what matters is that you are doing normal things in a different way. Your brain is learning how to be flexible!!

Like any gym rat, after the warm-up and moderate exercise, comes a final spurt of heavy lifting. For me, at the end of an hour long session, when my brain is tired, my therapist looks at me with a smile and says, “Okay. Now you’re ready for some really heavy lifting.” Then she asks me to do something that would have been impossible just a few months ago.

CARDS

I set out one suit of cards. 13 in all. Then turn one card face up and remember it and turn it back down. I can turn over only one card at a time, in any order, and then turn it back. The goal is to remember all the cards. After I think I know them all, she says, “Now. Turn the cards face up starting with Ace, 2, 3, up to King. My brain hurt thinking about it, but I DID IT! I remembered and found and turned all 13 cards face up in the correct order with no mistakes, no second guesses.

My speech therapist is a Certified Love Your Brain Yoga instructor. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I came to her office one week and she said we’d be incorporating yoga into my brain work. After five minutes of easy yoga stretches and various stances, she asked me to balance in a tree pose. I’m not great at one legged balancing, but I’m okay at it. After I steadied myself, she said, “Now, while you balance, tell me the names of five restaurants.” That sounded easy enough.

“Um. McDonalds. Um. Hardies. Taco Bell.” That’s all I had. My brain glitched and just sort of quit. I couldn’t think of the name of one more restaurant! I stopped balancing, astounded.

“What happened?” I wanted to know. I could tell you the names of fifty restaurants. I could balance for five minutes. But I could not do both things at the same time.

“You’re asking your brain to share resources,” she told me. “It doesn’t want to share. If you maintain your balance, you can’t find your words. If you find your words, you’ll likely tip over. We are asking your brain to share. We are asking your brain to multi-task.”

Bingo. There was the magic word. Multi-task. Something I hadn’t been able to do since before my brain injury. By the time our session was over, I felt like I’d been lifting Olympic weights.

My new homework is to do balancing at home with any type of brain work at the same time: spell words backwards, do number sequences, build word ladders. The type of game or activity wasn’t the important thing. What mattered is that I’d be challenging my brain to share and to integrate.

My husband and I play some of these games together, and every once in a while, I do better than he does. He blames it upon the fact that English is his second language. Well, maybe. But maybe, it’s just that my brain is getting used to a daily workout at the gym! And it’s working!

Or maybe it’s like Farrah Fawcett said, “God gave women intuition and femininity. Used properly, the combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met.” :)

if you’re curious, the art work comes from a project I did with my grandkids. “Easy Marbling.”

BONUS BRAIN WORK: did you notice which of the art pieces I used twice? :)

Thanks for reading along. Happy brain games to you and hope to see you at the opera!

Love always,

Jill