A Post About the Holiday

For only the second time in sixty-one years, I spent the holidays away from North Carolina.The first time was when our kids were young and my dad took us all to Disney World for Christmas. It was strange being in the eighty degree weather in December, but we had a blast.

This year we spent the week of Christmas in New England. When we got there, there was a good bit of snow on the ground. By mid-week, the sun was shining and the temperatures reached the fifties. The day we left it was snowing once again.

I wanted things to have a holiday flavor, so we rented a house a few blocks away from where my daughter lives. I mailed our stockings and my favorite cranberry-scented candles, and bought a few things around town to decorate once we got there.

We had a wonderful time with my daughter's partner's family, and enjoyed the feeling of having young ones around once again. We ate heartily, opened presents, stuffed stockings with surprises.

But for the first time in sixty-one years I was not with my family. And I missed them terribly.

When my father died, we lost our center. His house was our holiday gathering place. The first year without him, we went there anyway. It snowed that year, unusual for Greensboro in December. The second and third year we came together at my house, our town being right in the middle for travelers from all directions. It felt like we might be finding our new way of being together.

In November, my husband and I became grandparents and the baby couldn't travel of course, so we and our other daughters chose to go to him. My sisters gathered at the coast and my brother and his family in Greensboro. My sister-in-law was home with one of her sons. We talked to everyone on the phone, but it didn't fill the void.

I loved our time in New England with the new baby and the snow, the beautiful countryside, and our new friends, but next year, just for a few days, I want us all back in NC. I want my whole family and my husband's family here at my house, opening presents, over-eating, laughing, catching up. 

I'm looking forward to this most amazing year--2014--and will share some of my excitement in my next post. I hope this year you'll talk to me about what I write. You can post anonymously if you don't want to 'sign up' or you can post a comment on Facebook. You can email me or heaven forbid send me a letter!  I like to hear from you.

It's a happy new year.

Falling into Winter

Fall came on rather dully this year.  The trees seemed to be changing one at a time and only a few times in early October did I have any wow moments of color.

At the end of October I went to Wildacres and the fall began to come alive.

In early November my sister and I took a trip to my hometown, Greensboro.  The purpose of the trip was to go see this amazing performance put on by the Touring Theatre of North Carolina.  While there we tripped down nostalgia lane by visiting relatives, cruising my dad's old house, strolling down Elm Street to see the revitalization of our old stomping grounds. The red- and yellow-leaved trees were in full splendor, especially in the cemetery where my parents and grandparents and several other relatives are buried.

As soon as I got home, I washed all my clothes and repacked in anticipation of the birth of my first grandchild, due November 19th. Within hours of getting the call that my daughter was in labor, my husband and I were ready to leave.

As we flew over Baltimore where we would change planes, I noticed that the fall colors there were brilliant. Clusters of color were everywhere as the plane prepared to land.

In the northern town where my daughter lives, the leaves were mostly gone but the weather was balmy and beautiful for the first few days we were there. My husband and I took a drive up into the low mountain-y area of the state and enjoyed the serenity of the landscape.  Everywhere there were large piles of stacked firewood. People were definitely thinking about winter.

For the time we were there, though, the main event wasn't the weather. It was the birth of our grandson, only the third male in my side of the family in four generations. All of us--parents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles--were beside ourselves with joy at the new life in our family.  After my other daughters and my husband left to go home, I was fortunate to have two whole days with the baby and my middle daughter before having to come home. I watched him at peace, sleeping in the same wicker bassinet that had cradled my mother, me and my daughters.

The morning I was to leave, the wind turned chilly and there was frost on the car window and the ground.  I wrapped my scarf around my neck and buttoned my coat; winter would be in this area of the country very soon.

On the way home on the plane, I realized that my life too has changed from fall to winter.  When I got the call from my daughter I was still a mother of older children. With the birth of my grandchild, I can feel the press of time more keenly.  I'm a grandmother. There's a richness in being the family elder, but a poignancy too, a tartness, a sense that every moment that I'm a part of this child's life is important. A sense that I cannot waste a single bit of it.

All the color was gone except for some red here and there when we taxied into Raleigh. I welcome the coming cool-down of the seasons. It holds the promise of the holidays and time with family. Time with that beautiful little boy and my strong and beautiful daughters.  Time that I will not use unwisely.

Family Celebration

This weekend eighteen of us got together to celebrate.  "Let's get the next generation started!" one of my nieces said when she received the invitation to the baby shower for my middle daughter. 

It's such an exciting time! May I apologize now to all my friends with grandchildren?  I had no idea how amazing it is! 

My oldest and youngest daughters planned the party, which was hosted by my sisters and sisters-in-law. The theme was Beanie Babies because we called the middle daughter Beanie when she was little.  Well, actually, we still call her Beanie on occasion. :)

I can't begin to tell you how special and detailed the decorations were. The scheming sisters made sure that everything was about the mother-to-be!  Questionnaires about her childhood brought hilarious answers and to tell you the truth I was a little dismayed to realize that I, her mother, couldn't remember some of the details. But I was busy then, you know?

We set up a "photo booth" in the alcove of our deck with a camera and a remote control. We took over 150 photos of us clowning around with Beanie Baby masks, a boa, and each other.  After everyone else had finished, my daughter and her boyfriend went out and took a few pictures of themselves. I could see their love for each other in the photos.  Then her boyfriend put the cat in one of the chairs. The end!

My favorite activity was writing  future birthday cards to the child.  The sisters had made a card for each year from one to twenty-one and those present chose one or two to write. I picked twelve and nineteen, realizing as I wrote my nineteen-year-old grandchild that I had picked the "last of childhood" and "last of teenage" years. Some of us put things in the cards (I won't mention what here because I'd like it to be a surprise for my daughter too). I cried to think that when the child is opening her nineteenth birthday card from me I will be eighty years old.

Sunday and Monday the house emptied, people getting into cars to drive east and north and to the airport. Today the roses that my youngest daughter arranged and put around the house still look beautiful. The house is back to its quiet, the cat wonders what happened to the rooms full of people, and I think about the wonderful weekend with family.

Most Loved

(I'm posting in-between times this week because I missed last week. I promise to get back on the Wednesday schedule beginning next week.) 

Today I'm sharing the first draft of a piece I wrote today in honor of Valentine's Day.  It's a little longer than my usual post, but I hope you'll stick around to the end. :) 

It's all too easy to think of February 14 as Lovers' Day instead of Day of Love. Maybe my words will inspire you to think of the day when you felt the most loved.

Most Loved

Hopeless.

That word circled my mind as I listened to my friend talk about her love affair with a married man.

On a trip they took to the coast, lying in bed in a hotel room overlooking the ocean, he told her he adored her. 

“He adored me,” she said, her face pink with love, a small smile unable to be contained.  “No one has ever told me they adored me.”

I think now, this week of Valentine’s Day, of the time when I felt most adored.

We sit on a flowered sofa, my great grandparents and I. There is cake; it is my first birthday. My great grandmother stares straight into the camera, a forkful of cake on its way to her mouth. Her head is wrapped in a scarf and the ties hang over her ample bosom. Black socks and shoes angle on the floor over her bare calves. Her glasses reflect the flash of the camera.

My great grandfather and I are the stars of this photograph though. I am leaning into my great grandmother, a smile lighting my face, my hands playing with each other in that way that children have when they’re so excited that even their hands get into the action. My feet are in motion too and there’s a tiny circle around one of them—from the flash? Today with my new-agey spirituality I might say it’s an orb, an energy ball, a symbol of angels or spirits.

My great grandfather leans away from us, pipe in hand, plate with a slice of cake in his lap.  Black suit—his Sunday suit?—over a tie-less white shirt, hair thick and silver. He stares down at me with the most delight. He adores me, his first great granddaughter on her first birthday.

Their last name was Brown and that’s the color I associate with them.  The brown sugar cookies she used to make, the first thing we’d smell when we walked in their house.  The brown walls and floors, worn with many footsteps, a few blackened places still remaining from a fire that caught up in a bedroom.  The brown boats my great-grandfather used to make.  The print in their kitchen of the little girl holding a brown hen that they always used to say was me.

Of course I don’t remember that day of my first birthday.  But in my father’s things we found many jewels, including old negatives.  The photographs must have been long sent to relatives or put in albums or cleaned out of drawers because we never found them.  At the time I was taking a darkroom class. My own attempts at black and white photography were mediocre so I took the old negatives into the darkened concrete room of the community center to discover the treasures they held.  When I put this negative in the light and saw the three of us on the flowered couch I knew that this was no ordinary occasion, not just a birthday, but a moment in time when I was truly loved.

I understand now, looking at the photograph on my desk, the reasons that my friend doesn’t want to give up this feeling of being adored. I feel lonely for the moment captured on the couch, a moment that I cannot remember.  I don’t blame her for wanting to hang on to it, this unabashed admiration of her lover. I can’t tell her to let it go.