Here's To the Next Times

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Sweet potato pie and Earl Grey Tea

It’s the middle of December. I awoke this morning to a world wrapped in cotton wool, all sound deadened in the mist. Today, we’ll add our star lights to the front porch.  We’ll take out our Christmas books and begin to read them. We’ll turn on the Christmas music. Soon we’ll decorate the tree.

And here’s where we are this year: Still in Virginia. Still in the last house we moved into, except for our youngest daughter, who has moved on to a place of her own. My husband is now working for a different company, and he’s finding his work there quite satisfying.

My son has happily changed his university major to athletic training, works all the hours God sends and has managed somehow to make the dean’s list for at least the last two semesters he’s told us about. My oldest daughter works at two hospitals and assembles electronic components, takes riding classes, belongs to a drama group, and several social groups as well as taking literacy tutoring every week. She has a lovely boyfriend.

Our youngest daughter loves her job at an animal shelter in a nearby town, and is settling in to her new digs in a neighborhood that seems to suit her well. I love the place. We text or talk every day, and we get to see her almost every week.

Sadly, we lost our cat, Panda, this year to old age. He was thirteen. His ashes are buried in the back garden under the new fig tree. But before we lost him, he had time to enjoy many happy arguments with his two new friends:  Starr, also known as The Devil Herself, and Jackie Chan, the Ninja Kitty, two kittens that we took it upon ourselves to house and provide for.

Now I have a wonderful word for any of you whose children or close acquaintances go to work at an animal shelter. It’s the handiest word ever if you use it, which I didn’t. The word is: No.

Our dog Scout remains as wonderful as always, just with more gray around the muzzle, but as ever, still a puppy at heart.

I continue to substitute teach, mostly at my favorite elementary school here. I also occasionally work for a company that organizes moving and estate sales, which I quite enjoy. I am blessed to work with overwhelmingly lovely people.

The mist is lifting now. Birds swoop and dive around the multiple feeders in the front garden. The hawk that lives just into the treeline must be hunting elsewhere this morning. Foxes live in that part of the wood as well. One of them occasionally saunters across the back garden at first light. I see him sometimes sniffing the woodpile as I pour my morning coffee.

It doesn’t seem like over two years since we left England. And then again, it seems longer. Sometimes it feels like time is one of those big rubber bands that stretches and stretches and then snaps back with a pop.

This is our third Christmas back in America. It has been such a long transition, this last one, the move from England. It has been so full of twists, good and bad. Such drama. And while I told myself I embraced my new life, still, I held a great part of myself back.

A moment of silence

 I have found it quite difficult to let go of the memories of what was our daily life in Harrogate, and to compare it with our life here: Our neighbors there, our friends, our home, our back garden, our doctors, dentist, favorite shopkeepers, pubs and restaurants, schools. The Harrogate Theatre, that wonderful old place. And Betty’s. Oh, Lord.

Without thinking about it, without realizing it, for the longest time, I silently held back my affections from this place, resenting it only because it is so different from the life we had there. Then realizing what I was doing, I stopped and took a good look around.

 This is not Harrogate. But it is a wonderful place, and we are lucky to be here. And now that I’ve forgiven it for what it is not, I’m really beginning to love it and to see all the wonderful opportunities the area offers.

Still, we’ll always love Yorkshire. Always miss it a bit. I’ll probably always pathetically tear up at the first strains of Jerusalem. Can’t help it.

It was a warm Thanksgiving this year. After a meal of fried chicken, baked salmon, mashed potatoes, green beans, creamed corn, collards and biscuits with lemon cake for afters, the five of us waddled out to the woods behind the house for a stroll on the trail. It was mild enough to remind me of my childhood Thanksgivings in Alabama.

We  meandered mostly together through the woods along the creek, gathering pine cones for the fire place.

It is a never-ending source of wonder to us that these big people in our lives are the same ones who used to be so little as to fit in our laps. And they won’t understand for years what it’s like sometimes for my husband and I to be with them as they are now, remembering how they used to be, and who we were when we were younger with them.

Or know the frustration of being unable to remember some of the last times--the last time we tucked them in bed;the last time we kissed an owie; the last time we read them a story; the last time they fought over who got to sit next to one of us; the last time we picked them up from school.

American fireplace--English post box

The frustrating thing about last times is that you don’t always think about or even know when they happen. Not for years.

Such is life. So here’s to the next times. The ones that we hope are coming. Here’s to watching It’s a Wonderful Life  yet again, and decorating the tree. Here’s to having our big, festive meal on Christmas Eve, and sleeping in on Christmas Day, and eating leftovers. Someday other family members will join us. Some Christmas we’ll be on our own.

A daily reminder

Because as we have found, life is mostly transition. And like my mother told me many times in an inadvertent lesson, “Don’t nobody want to fool with a fussy plant. Get you one that’ll bloom wherever you put it, and can take some rough handling.”

So Merry Christmas another year. We wish you happiness in whatever and however you celebrate. And we hope that you are always able to bloom wherever you are planted.

Still waiting for Santa

 Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays.  

Thanks for coming. Come again soon.

Leann

 

The Day Before Thanksgiving

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 I wrote this some few years back, when my children were teenagers.  It's interesting to think of what's happened since then. I wonder what will happen next?

 

It’s the day before Thanksgiving.    My kitchen is covered in cooked sweet potatoes, cornbread waiting to be crumbled, simmering mushrooms, chopped onions, garlic, cranberries, apples, and sage.  As I chop and simmer and sauté, I think of holidays past and future; of other homes; of my life in America and in England; of the many faces and voices that I love and miss.  Like the character in Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, I sniff the air and know Christmas is coming, “It’s fruitcake weather.”

            My three children are scattered to their own interests today.  They are moving in directions that don’t always include their parents now, wading in to the shallow end of lives of their own, and I prepare for this holiday in a quiet house for a change.

            I’ve never cared much for change, but I’ve come to make my peace with it over the years because I have learned in a long, slow lesson that everything changes, given enough time.

          And this is the largest one so far.  My babies are gone.  They have disappeared somewhere into the long legs, strong jaws, and steady eyes of the young adults I find myself surrounded by now.  It’s disorienting.  I miss their little selves sometimes; their soft, round arms and legs, their tiny voices; the whispery smell of sleep in their hair in the morning.  But I like these young people who think they own my house -- even with their immature attitudes about the division of labor and money in a domestic setting.  They give me reason to hope that, in time, they may just turn out all right.  Or at least avoid lengthy jail sentences.

            We went for a family walk not long ago, the five of us--something that doesn’t happen as often as it once did.  We took our dog, Scout, to the reservoir not far from here on a crisp, golden autumn day.  It was muddy underfoot, of course, and we trudged around the water talking, grouching, arguing, complaining and laughing as usual.  We are our own moveable circus of noise.

            Along a narrow avenue of trees I fell behind with my middle child, my daughter.  We walked slowly, and lazily watched the others ahead of us.  They played at the water’s edge throwing a stick for the dog and competing to see whom she would bring it back to first.

            Yards away from them, I stopped in mid-stride, entranced by the scene around me.  In a pause between two heartbeats I caught my breath at how beautiful my family looked to me just at that moment.  My feelings must have shown on my face.  My daughter asked what I was thinking.

            I told her to look closely at the family around her, as we were that day, because our times together like this would slowly come to an end.  What we had always been as long as she could remember--the circle of five-- would only last a while longer.  Before long our circle would change, and we would not go back.

            Standing under the falling leaves I thought about how families grow into their own private cultures.  They form and grow, and then change to form other circles, other cultures. Being with all of them that day was like watching a drop of rain gather on the edge of a leaf, just before it falls into the stream below and is carried away to become a part of something else.

            My daughter and I watched together as the others tussled over a stick and jostled each other and argued and laughed.  She put her arm around me and rested her head on my shoulder.  While we stood there our circle felt close and safe.  I thought,  “If I stand here very still and quiet and if I don’t move or breathe, this afternoon will go on always with no one having to grow up, or grow old, or separate, or die.”

            But our feet got cold.  Somebody started an argument.  Scout lost the stick.  Our moveable circus slogged back to the car where we ate crumbly cookies and shared hot tea from a plastic thermos lid and argued about who was muddiest, whose feet fit where, and who had more room on the seats.

            Driving through the Dales toward home I thought about how we are born into one circle--a good one if we are lucky, but how we have to cultivate the second one ourselves.   I drank in the three-hundred-sixty degrees of wonderful outside the car window, and I was so thankful for everything around me and behind me---for all of it---especially the birds.   I am so thankful for birds.

             There was a time in my life, a long time ago, when the only thing that comforted me was watching the birds that came to feed on the crumbs I left for them on the garden wall of our rented house in California.  That was a lifetime ago when my husband and I first came to understand that our oldest child’s autism would take our family down a different path than the one we had planned for ourselves.  I didn’t want to go down that path.  I didn’t even want to look down it.  I was scared to death then of the rest of my life.

So all through those dark days, I held on tightly to those birds.  I fed them and watched them every day until, well, we had some very fat birds in our neighborhood.  And after awhile, I found I was able see all the other good things in life again.  I am grateful for those birds.  There has been so much to enjoy, after all.

            Everything changes given enough time.  Everything. I don’t even know where we will be at Thanksgiving next year, or Christmas, or how often in the coming years the children will spend those holidays in our old circle. 

But today, it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and my kitchen is covered in a great plenty.  My husband and children will be home again soon. 

            Steam has stippled the wide windows that look over the walled back garden.  I crumble cornbread for stuffing and watch through abstract patterns of beaded water as the birds dart between bare branches and swerve through the air.  They collect the gifts I’ve left for them and fly on; high over the rooftops and into a horizon I cannot see from here.

Still prefers ham.

            Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks for coming. Visit again soon.

                            Leann

. . . so this old world must still be spinning around, and I still love you . . . 

Welcome, September

On my walk with Scout a few mornings ago, I noticed that some of the leaves are letting go, drifting down ever so slowly by ones and twos.  They settle on the walking path or land in the creek to meander along its length to places Scout and I seldom reach on our walks.

Setting out a pitcher for sun tea this morning, a thing I’ve done scores of times over the course of the summer, I couldn’t help noticing that today something was different.  In the slant of the sunlight, the temperature, the dew point. Something.

I’m still eating watermelon and peaches and strawberries.  But the cherries are gone from the shops now. And there is that thing, that feeling, that difference, that tells me the year is shifting again.

Seasonal change is one of the only changes I consistently face with any degree of enthusiam.  And my favorite one is almost here again.  When I hear the first geese call.  When the leaves have gone multi-hued.  When the sky turns that high, wide, forever-after, cloudless blue that comes with September. Then. Autumn again.

Warm fires at night. Apples. Jack-O-Lanterns and roasted pumpkin seeds. The spicy wildwood smell all around the outside of the house. Stew and soups and warm, buttered bread. Thanksgiving.

Soon, it’ll be time for pepper in my coffee again.

By January, I’ll be tired of Christmas, and by February, I’ll be weary of gray skies and snow.  But in September I’ll be drawing in, wrapping up in soft sweaters and warm socks. Baking. Knitting. Always writing. Dreaming of sweet potato pie in November, and the lights and songs and stories that December will bring.

I’m generally not happy about most change.  But autumn change is as comforting as the taste of pumpkin butter or the haunting call of geese at twilight or the musky smell of woodsmoke. And as hopeful as the morning chatter of neighborhood children, drawn to the corner of our street to await the arrival of the big, yellow bus.

Welcome, September.

If you love it as much as I do, please comment and tell me your favorite thing about September.

Still plays in leaves.

 Thanks for coming. Come again soon.

Leann

I end not far from my going forth

By picking the faded blue

Of the last remaining aster flower

To carry again to you.-Robert Frost

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqU8FpdgiZE

Sincerely Yours

Sometime, 1965

From where I sit on the counter, I can see the entire kitchen, even the top of the stove.  My mother bends to put the skillet of sizzling batter in the oven. The house is quiet.  My father is at a Meeting for Grown-Ups.  My brother and sisters are at a Big Kids Movie in town.

October, 1999                                                                                            

Mama,

         The first frost has come.  The rose hips all down the lane are bright red.  The blackberries are too ripe to jam now.  They might make a nice wine.  I brought in the pears a few days ago.  They are in the “keeping” room now where it’s cool.  I think I’ll try making pear honey with them.  

Leaning over the kitchen sink, my mother points out a dove feeding in the grass of the back yard.  She picks me up from the counter and holds me as we listen to its fluttering calls.  She tells me a story about doves that I haven’t remembered for years.

         I always think of you especially in the kitchen and the garden.  I think you would enjoy where we live.  The sheep are in the back pasture again, looking through my living room window.  From the front windows I can see the farmhouses dotting the hillsides all around with little puffy white sheep surrounding them, too.  In the evening the mist starts down at the river and climbs up the hill to our house just before the light is gone.  The last of the summer roses stand in the yard, still beautiful.  I don’t have the heart to cut them and bring them in the house.  I’ll let them enjoy the last few days they have on earth.

Together we walk outside to pick tomatoes, spring onions, and cucumbers for our supper salad.

         Sometimes in the mornings when the sun is low on the hills and the light is golden,

 I stand in the garden like the roses.  I like to be just where the angle of the sunlight meets the slant of the hill if there is really such a place.  There seems to be.  It is nice in the almost quiet of the hillside while the morning birds sing all around.  The bees are drunk on the overripe apples and they drone around slowly. There are feathered seeds floating on a breeze so light I can barely feel it.  The sun ignites them for just a moment before they float on, fade, and disappear.

We fill my mother’s apron and then carry our bounty over to lay it carefully on the edge of the porch.  Mother lifts me up to the pear tree, and I point to the fat little fruit with a blush around its edges.  She picks it for me and we sit together on the porch steps next to the makings of our salad while I take little bites of the pear.

         At times like this I am both happy and sad.  Happy to be here, walking on this earth, seeing and hearing and feeling these things.  I think of the people who were here before with their troubles and hopes and moments of joy.  And I feel sad knowing that there will be an end to my turn someday, too.  This place will still be here, but the world will move along as it does without me to watch the light change.

My baby teeth make a pattern of tiny holes around the middle of the pear.  I hold it up for her to admire.  She tells me those little teeth will fall out someday, and I’ll grow a whole new set. I tug at a front one, calculating, and she assures me that what she’s telling me is the really, truly truth. I wonder how she knows so many things.

         And I am sad for all the time I’ve had to spend so far away from you.  Sometimes I forget how far apart we are because in my mind you are always with me.   I carry you everywhere I go.

Back in the kitchen, Mother lifts me again to the top of the counter so I can watch her work. She opens the oven to check on the cornbread.  She carefully washes the vegetables, slices them, and arranges them in a small platter as if for company coming.  She tells me we’re pretend company tonight and we’ll make a tea party of our suppertime.

         When I was younger, I sometimes felt very critical of you.  Now that I am right in the middle of my child-raising years, I am amazed at how you managed as well as you did.  You were a motherless daughter who married a fatherless son.  But I wouldn’t trade my childhood with anyone.  I don’t know how you did it.  I think you have a great gift for loving people.

She sets the table with our good dishes and, once I have washed my hands, she shows me how to set out the flatware, just so.

         I love you and miss you every day.  Sometimes, though it is like you are right at my elbow.  I change bed linens and I remember helping you do the same.  I work in the garden and remember following along the rows with you.  I read books to my children and remember the ones you read to me.  I cook and fill the table with dishes all in the middle.  My family prays and eats and I am thankful for them and for you and for the feeling I had as a child sitting at the table you and Daddy filled. 

                                                                                                           

We sit, and my mother dishes tomatoes, spring onions and cucumbers onto our plates, shaking a bit of salt and pepper over each.  She cuts them into bite-sized pieces on my plate and tucks a napkin under my chin.

         Everyone needs that when they go out into the world.  No one should leave home without a few good dinners in them, some bedtime stories, and the smell of ripe tomatoes to fall back on.

Still, the first bite of tomato is much too large and I can feel the juice running down my chin.  My mother reaches over to wipe it away with her napkin.

         And the memory of laying your head on your mama’s lap, where everything will surely be all right.

When we finish our salad, my mother steps to the oven to take the cornbread out. It looks like the sun. It even smells warm and golden. 

         Thank you for the family dinners. For the nursery rhymes and the fairy tales, for the talks over coffee, for biscuits in the morning.  Thanks for telling me the truth as you knew it about life.  You have been right so often.

She slices the warm cornbread and crumbles it into two bowls, pouring milk over the top.  Bringing the bowls and spoons, she notices me gazing from my place at the table through the back screen door, enchanted at the red and purple sunset.  The dove’s call flutters around us like kisses.

         Thanks for loving me no matter what.  Thanks for having faith in me even through the times I disappointed you.  Thanks for paying attention. Thanks for giving me your time. 

We take our bowls out onto the porch, where we sit on the steps again and slowly spoon warm bites of cornbread and milk.  We watch the sun go down behind the pear tree, and follow with our eyes as the dove flies away to her roost at the top of the barn. We have all the time in the world.

         Thanks for your lap.  Thanks for showing me how to be a good mother.  Thanks for filling me with good feelings and memories.  They have held me up through this wide world so far. 

The horizon is a heart-stretching blend of colors. I am full of cornbread and milk. My mother smells of warm cornbread and lily-scented talcum and Jergen’s hand lotion. I scoot closer to her on the step we share, careful not to spill the milk left at the bottom of my bowl. Her arm encircles me. She kisses the top of my head.  I am completely happy.

         I love you, Mama. Thank you.

We sit until the twilight bleeds out into dark and she carries me to bed. I don’t know yet that she will begin to lose herself to Alzheimer’s before I turn thirty-five.  I don’t yet know that she’ll leave this world before I’m fifty.

         Your youngest daughter,

Sometimes the letter that means the most to you; that makes you happy and peaceful and thankful, is not one that someone wrote to you. Sometimes the letter you are most grateful for, in all your life, is one you sent to someone else in time. 

Still likes to sit on the counter.

                  Thanks for coming.  Come again soon.

                  

               Leann

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable. -K. Gibran

                

Really

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My beautiful daughter stands on the stage in a pool of light.  Her head is turned slightly to the left, her eyes tilt to the right.  She is smiling, and singing, surrounded by other young people, and a few older.  One is in a wheel chair.  All of them are smiling, just like my daughter. 

This is so fitting.  This is so circular, this moment.  If I look back down the years to her birth, I can see that this moment was waiting out here for her.  It arrived in a package from my sister just after she was born, my first child. 

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. My sister sent a copy of the book just after her birth, knowing how we'd both loved the story from our own childhoods. I read it to my daughter from before she could focus her eyes. I treasured its message.  But I didn’t know then how much more I would come to understand and appreciate it over time.

 
The play I am watching moves on, familiar, bittersweet, comforting.  The best stories are like that.  My daughter began rehearsals in November.  Now it’s March, and VSA Arts of Loudoun County is presenting the final performance of The Velveteen Rabbit  at the Franklin Park Arts Center in Purcellville, Virginia.

 
 It’s brilliant. Slightly imperfect, but perfectly Real.  

“What is Real?” the Velveteen Rabbit asks the Skin Horse, “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you’re made. It’s a thing that happens to you,” the Skin Horse answers.

“Does it hurt?” the Rabbit asks.

“Sometimes,” the Skin Horse tells him. “But when you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”

"Does it happen all at once, or bit by bit?" asks Rabbit. 

 “It doesn’t happen all at once,"  the Skin Horse answers.  "You become.  It takes a long time.  That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.  Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.  But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. And once you are Real, you can’t become unreal again.  It lasts for always.”

Over the years of  raising my own children and working with others, it has become my belief that, as well as pride in their accomplishments, every parent has at least one private fear for each of his or her children-- some concern for a personality trait or weakness or perceived shortcoming or flaw. 

With children like my oldest daughter, these fears aren’t hidden.  They are in full view for all the world to see.  There is no covering up autism and its attendant learning difficulty, language deficit, and behavioral issues.  There is no pretending to the world outside your door that your child is as perfect in every way as you'd always dreamed.

And so you become Real, real quick. Sometimes, it is painful.

The music swells, the cast returns to the stage for the final bow. For too many of the  people on the stage, there are not as many of these moments in their lives as they deserve.  But there is this one, now.  I clap until my hands sting. I stand.  I sing with them. I clap some more. 

All those years ago my sister wrote on the flyleaf of the book she sent my baby daughter:

“I know you’ll be smart and pretty, but I hope you will also be kind.  Not everyone has advantages or opportunities to become their best.  Even as you excel, think of those who have not or cannot.  How they must feel.” 

So many years ago. So much has happened since then.  Still such a long road ahead.  And I know that I won’t be able to walk beside her that whole, long way.  If only everyone in the world tried every day to be just a little more Real, I wouldn’t have to wonder so much how she’ll find her way when I’m gone. 

The night sky is a marvel as we leave the small theater.  We drive home under the stars and my daughter points out all the constellations she can remember.  Her favorite is the drinking gourd, because it helped guide runaway slaves to freedom long before she was even thought of in this world.  My oldest daughter strongly identifies with the underdog.

 As we drive along, she hums a little piece of a song from the play. I smile.  Sometimes a song in the dark is all you have. Sometimes it can see you home.  That is what, every day, I hope and pray.

Will grow up to be Realer than she ever planned.

     Happy Easter.                                                                       

     Leann 

. . . you are my sunshine . . .