Romanticizing...

My house is old. It is not Victorian old, or 1920’s old, which may have lent it some class, it is just old. Built in 1978 it clings valiantly to a steep hill, facing upwards as if looking where it had been and hanging on by sheer will power.

I love so much about it. It is surrounded by tall trees. Oaks, poplars and maples surround the property creating a cozy green hued nest. Flowering bushes have been strategically placed over the years to try to create some kind of permanent screen between me and the closest neighbors under the canopy. In the spring a riot of fuchsia and violet ring the back while white dogwoods and stunning pink Japanese magnolia blossoms adorn the front. In the summer hundreds of lilies and iris and Asiatics flower along the borders inviting hummingbirds and butterflies to stop and stay awhile. 

The ivy and honeysuckle wage war against my trees and I fight them every year. Ripping out their tenacious vines, pulling them off of my trees and away from my house, cursing them at the same time I breathe deeply of their scents and marvel at their beauty.  The fall is heady with roses and gardenias, the Indian summer days of a Georgian autumn making their aromas heavy and permeating. Birds and squirrels fight for the best nesting spots, both of them crowded in due to the disappearing forest in this now busy corridor. I have an overabundance of both, the racket they make is ridiculous sometimes, the squirrels pelting my house with acorns and the birds singing on the porch rails.

The house has huge windows in every room, a lovely fireplace and is cozy and welcoming…to a point…

My kitchen is hideous, smaller than the walk in closet of most new houses being built. Counter top and cabinets seem to have been forgotten entirely during the design and construction and just tossed into a dark corner as an afterthought. When I first moved in it had the original green and gold linoleum and blue and gold wallpaper. I shudder at the thought. When I move an appliance now and see the linoleum I stifle a scream at the reminder of what it once was.

The bathrooms are ridiculously small and all three bedrooms are the same size. The closets are tiny, 2x6, and had lost their doors long before I claimed them as my own. The living and dining room combo (how easily being here allows me to slip into the 70’s vernacular!) does not have a single wall without doors or windows or fireplace and so arranging furniture is always will it fit, not will it look nice.

All of these things worked for me for years because it was close enough to walk to stores and banks and bus stops. My children walked to school which allowed them to participate in activities that this car-less mother could never say yes to before moving here. They hated the walk, hated the schools, hated the neighborhoods because they were contrary children who did not realize that while far from perfect this house allowed us to live a much more normal life. As they grew up and out and made their own way the house did not become too big and empty, it became Mom’s House. I babysat when I could, I entertained in my beautiful backyard, I joined a gym I could walk to and visited the newly built library and settled into a lovely existence. I laughed when I heard the term empty-nester, wondering what in the world did we do all of this for if it isn't to see the children fly away?  

T(hanksgiving) Minus 2, 2012

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving dawns cloudy and dim. The leaves take forever to drift from the top of the trees, landing with a ridiculously soft thud on the leaf-brother covered ground. Sometimes they don't even make it, being caught half ways down by a log jam on a forked branch and making drifts of fall colors form a canopy lower than the natural arc of limb against sky. The birds are somnolent, no rustling, no joyous song of rebirth on this new day, just an occasional muted peep from some low slung russet and golden leaf shrouded bush.

My house is quiet as a tomb and almost as dark. Broad porches block the first and last sun of the day, which is fine when it is so bright ones eyes pour water like Niagara Falls, not so good on a dark and somber November morn when one is trying to track down their motivation.

Where the hell did I leave it? It took me so long to develop it in the first place. Having grown up in a family of tradition I was happy to just ride along and eat my mom's turkey and cornbread stuffing. We would arrive 'en masse' around noon or one, Pyrex casserole dishes in hand, dressed nicely though not formally. The cousins would collide and explode out of the house into the yard with footballs and pets and bicycles. Their meeting, their seeing each other was like a nuclear reaction, 4 kids sounding like 8 and moving about so that they seemed to be number much higher. Parents sighed in relief, watched them run for a minute and then nestled into the kitchen or living room, drink in hand and relaxed for the first time probably in weeks. For the next few hours the kids were entertained, we were surrounded by people we didn't have to prove a damn thing to and life was good and as it should be.

Conversation went from the kids to work, from funny books and movies to politics (people weren't so rabid then and rational discussions were still possible). From gossip (bless his/ her heart), to the food and back to the kids again.

Being a Holiday we often had brothers and sisters from out of state with their wives and husbands and children in tow. Random cousins of my parents and once or twice semi-strangers that had no place to go for the day. Everyone seemed to be welcome and sometimes the characters were a great source of entertainment, not just the year they were there but for years after. 'Remember when' was the favorite way to start conversation once we moved to the table and more than once we all fell out into laughter so deep our ribs hurt after.

My dad took it on it on himself that day to clear the table and do the dishes. He is a depression era baby and cannot leave anything on his plate or anyone else's for that matter. We would hoot and holler and tease him about being the human garbage disposal while he scowled and said it was just to be nice, to help my mother, which, regardless of the reasoning behind it, it did.

Swollen with food and warmed by wine or whiskey we would retire to the living room to watch a new movie with the kids or to play games, Trivial Pursuit being a favorite. The laughter continued, the love flowed and the night wore on into its deepest hour.

We would straggle out, kids filthy and exhausted, parents sated and sleepy and wend our way home, another year in the books. They were all perfect Thanksgivings.

My mother passed in 2004 and with her went those magical Holidays, the love and warmth and bonhomie we all cherished. I have tried and tried to re-create it but it is impossible. I don't know what magic she wielded that allowed us all to forget feuds and heartache and poverty and loneliness and envy and greed and fear and sadness that day.  I know I for one felt safe with her, always, she was the one that took care of business, took care of me and slayed my bogey-men, at least in my mind, but what was she to the others? Why can't we retrieve that special feeling she seemed to endow without meaning too. without any effort apparently at all?

I love my family to death, all of them even when I want to slap the bejeezes out of them. That may not be a politically correct expression of love but it is a true one. I want them to surround me, to let go and relax and forget all of the petty things that haunt us everyday. To let me help them carry the burdens of love and hate and fear and sadness at least for that short while so they can know again the feeling that comes only from family loving family, together.

Just thinking about those days restores me, sitting at the right hand of my mother on that day for years and years and years while she smiled and laughed and blushed and basked in the lives she had created and maintained and nurtured to adulthood out of sheer force of will. I am ready to roll up my sleeves, to bake, to roast and broil and boil and frost. I am ready to wipe down walls and sweep walkways and get out the kids movies and games for the adults, to uncork a bottle and toast the good Lord for all the bounty in my life. I will do so for myself, for my children and for anyone else that wants to grace my table.

My blast from the (hardly) past! "Thanksgiving" My favorite Holiday!

Seed Pearls, Swine's Ears: Thanksgiving: Thanksgiving is one holiday that is uniquely American. It is so ingrained in our culture that, even though the story of pilgrims and Indians...

Living the Van Gogh Life

I was sitting out on the front porch yesterday evening with my husband. He was pointing out beautiful birds in our yard which I was pretending to see.  Red birds, blue birds, buntings and starlings and thrush moved from pine to feeder to oak to bath and back to feeder again. I could see the motion when they moved from one place to the other. The titmouse has a way of fluttering its wings when it moves about that I can hear from 50 feet away. It is like a humming bird and I love it. I could see the huge lazy shadow of the buzzards riding the Indian summer heat over our heads. I just couldn’t see the birds, or the feeders for that matter.

I looked out over our yard and I realized my landscapes have become those of Van Gogh. Beautiful colors, swirls and whorls and dots that represent definable shapes but have no strict definition. No red birds or blue birds or thrush darting about, no flowers or chipmunks or squirrels are enjoying the evening as we are. I hear a vehicle roll by at 250 feet but couldn’t tell you anything about it. I can’t see even the motion any more at that distance.

 

I love Van Gogh; this is not a terrible state to be in. I do worry about what comes next though in this interminable process of losing my vision.

I used to know my family by the way they walked, turned their head, held their shoulders or moved their hands. No more. I have to be within ten feet of them now to be sure they are who I think they are. This frightens me on two levels. One, and this is the big one, I do not want to NOT be able to see the faces of those I love. These people are why I am here! If I lose them I will feel adrift and frightened. The second, which is really still the first but seen from a different angle is that I can’t see! I already can no longer ride a bike alone. I move faster than I can decipher obstacles like trees, curbs and psychotic killers. I am now afraid to walk alone because I no longer see well enough to see anything approaching, like dogs with foaming mouths and rabid foxes and psychotic killers. You can interpret this two ways… either I am just a scaredy-cat or I read the news and know that there are indeed rabid foxes, vicious dogs and psychotic killers whether one lives in a metro area or the heart of the country as I now do. With my track record for one in a million happenstances, (tornados, pregnant while taking the pill with my tubes tied, etc.), I choose to avoid them whenever I can.

For now I enjoy the hell out of my impressionist’s yard (people pay hundreds of millions to hang a slice on their wall. I LIVE it baby). The fluid lines and melting edges and glorious colors titillate and soothe by degree. The morning I wake up in a five year olds watercolor, splotches of color running together into browns, lines obliterated and subject up for anyone’s guess will be a sad day for me, I think, maybe not. I will have color and light and God willing my lovely and loved seeing-eye-people to help me navigate it.

Vincent Van Gogh (Duh!)

Night and birds by John Scott's Photography (my hubby, in my front yard.)

The Real Thing!



Happy Day all! I just thought you might like to see what is inspiring Bunky's Playhouse. 

There is a rabbit hutch underneath it. I found this to be horribly cruel to the poor rabbits who must have inhabited it at one time. Here they sit in the cedar bed, looking through wire as their species frolics freely about the ground. Did the wild rabbits taunt  the poor pet, probably named something disgustly cute like 'Bunnie', laugh at his pampered state? Did the poor incarcerated pet get the last laugh as he saw owls, ghostly and silent in the dark swoop down and snatch up his tormentors in their talons while giggling maniacally into the night? One can only wonder...

 

Bunky's Playhouse --CHAPTER 2—

Bunky is staring at me from the corner of the porch. I feel his eyes on me before I spot him eyeing me from behind the glider. He is tiny, a serious little man in a serious little world of his own. He wears a coonskin cap we found at a yard sale and swimmer’s goggles cover his eyes. His blue striped shirt, once fresh and clean looking, is faded, permanently wrinkled and shrunken, having been washed nightly for two months now. I think, as I always do, that I need to find a shirt he likes as well or he will go through life with his buttons popped and his seams split. His shorts ride low, waist band sliding under his rounded belly into a natural resting place on his scrawny hips. Just below his clay stained knees his rubber boots, bright red and shiny look huge and out of place and ridiculously new. He is dressed for adventure.

My heart jumps. I want to run up through the yard and onto the porch and grab him up. I want to swing him around and smother him with kisses and inhale his milk-and-dirt little boy smell. I want to sit in the glider with him on my lap and sing silly songs and tickle his sides until he begs for mercy through his giggles.  I want, I want, I want…

I stroll through the yard slowly, stopping to smell a flower, to pull a weed, to toss an acorn. I approach him coolly. Bunky is the epitome of cool. Four years old and outbursts annoy him. I nod at him as I settle on the porch steps, acknowledging his presence as he sidles up next to me and lays his hand on my shoulder. I pat the tiny fingers, softly, and we stay like that a while, looking out into the yard at the teeming wildlife and the luscious greenery, companionable.

Bunky tells me he wants to go adventuring, please, walk in the woods and find some interesting bugs for his collection. I shudder at the thought of more creepy crawlies at the same time I am bursting with pride at his inquisitive mind. I see that he has his mason jar ready. Holes punched in the lid and grass in the bottom. A magnifying glass, net and bug book sit next to it. They are in a neat row, laid out in a manner that tells me he was expecting an argument and wanted to have everything ready to point at if and when I said no. The book is there simply to make me happy. In an effort to curtail his passion for insects that actually moved and bred I bought him the book. As good as having them I explained, but better!  More variety, more color. You can learn about them without actually having them in your room! He had looked at me somberly and called me out. You only bought it so you wouldn’t have to hunt bugs with me. It is a simple, and true statement but the way he says it sounds so bad I cringe like I have been caught doing something mean and petty.

No worms, Bunky, I mean it, no worms and no grubs and no crickets. Deal? And nothing that bites or stings! And no stink bugs!

I am talking to myself; he has run off the porch and is trotting around in circles with his arms flapping erratically calling out Butterflies? How about butterflies? Are you afraid of butterflies? Are they scary granma? He giggles. My heart soars.

The Joy of Finding Stuff

I haven't been in this house long. I come in from the outdoors where I feel totally at home and find myself in some strange twilight world surrounded by boxes and barrels and bags. A haphazard maze beckons me with its mystery. Should I go left and open a neat clean box, taped carefully, unlabeled as are most of the rest, or should I cut apart the twine holding together the handles of the Disney Store bag and see what delightful possessions are making it bulge? Should I cut through the layers and layers of tape holding together a box which has been used to hold goods many, many times, its various labels, handwritten or printed by machine overlapping each other, black, red, blue, white and green looking delightful and happy together? I see a box that had held a space heater, a piece of masking tape over the bright image and lettering factory printed on the box saying only, teasingly, "STUFF". I WANT STUFF! I NEED STUFF!

Hang on now, what if it just that, just STUFF, nothing worth naming specifically? Perhaps the contents of the junk drawer in the kitchen, the paper clips, rubber bands and expired coupons, picture hangers and batteries (dead or alive? who knows but I can't throw them away), box tops and marbles and shoe strings and nail clippers and stubby pencils and dried up pens and mysterious phone numbers on the backs of envelopes or the cleaning supplies and extra rolls of paper from under the washroom sink. Maybe it is even worse STUFF, like crap I swept into a dustpan from the garage floor? Screws and nails and bits of wire and nuts and bolts and teeny Allen wrenches and dust and wire nuts and fish hooks and, well, you know, STUFF? I thought I had labeled those boxes GARAGE STUFF but I admit it. I am a slack labeler. I may not have gotten the word GARAGE on there at all.

Maybe it is personal STUFF. Knitting needles and yarn from my bedside table. Massage lotion (that's right, I said it, I ain't skeert), the book I was reading before the move which seems to have disappeared, six keys that go to God knows what, but when I find whatever it is I am sure it will be locked. A coin from Panama, where I have never been, a china dog my youngest daughter gave me when she was seven. Some loose Tums and Motrin PMs, 3 unmatched socks and a back scratcher. All of these things should be in a box somewhere, labeled PERSONAL STUFF but I haven't found it yet. Maybe I am just mis-remembering and it just said STUFF, or, knowing me, had no label at all.

I pick up the box and shake it. I can feel something heavy and off balance shifting, I hear rattling of copper and tinging of tin and silent noise of plastic bending.

I am doing it! I am opening this box next. I can't wait! I am getting my STUFF back! I slice open the tape, giving myself an adhesive rimmed paper cut in the process, I rip the flaps open and what do I see? Random freaking stuff, not STUFF like I had hoped but regular old running around while they loaded the truck picking up mismatched and forgotten items and tossing them in a box stuff. Two plastic coat hangers, a windbreaker, a Christmas ornament, a pot lid, a dust pan, a wonderfully silly tall top heavy metal sculpture of a frog, the key card for the community pool and the key to the large ornamental gas fireplace at the rental house. Two back issues of Southern Living and a wash cloth pad a cheap vase and one shoe sits sadly in the bottom.

Next time I am going for the bag...