Garden Party with Mom and Aunt Laurie

And this photo is just how I will always remember Mom and Aunt Laurie.  Can you feel their sweetness right through this picture, or does it seem this way to me because I know them?  Well, they are that sweet, and this image from yesterday afternoon captures them perfectly.  And o' the fun we had!  ♥  Just to see Aunt Laurie again, period, after her health scare earlier this summer. . . And to get to share with her and Mom one of this summer's rare afternoons with a nice breeze. . . . I could still cry thinking about it.  And LAUGH thinking about it too, since right after Mom and Aunt Laurie had arranged the pretty tables and chairs and dainty tea party supplies out in the yard, one of my parents' neighbors decided the time was right to pull off his shirt and take care of the field behind their house on his riding mower.  'Not quite the ambience they been going for, so while the neighbor zoomed back and forth on the mower across the lawn behind them, they began moving the festivities father away into Mom's actual garden.  I was finishing decorating my frog cookies--I had to include frogs for Aunt Laurie, of course--when Mom came into my room to recount the Tale of the Topless Interloper.  Then Mom couldn't get my bedroom door to reopen.  Aunt Laurie was on the other side, and we all began howling as we imagined our sliding a cookie under the door for Aunt Laurie and of her somehow trying to jimmy a window open to rescue us.  As we laughed, the door popped free, and we set off--finally!--to enjoy our party.  And found, of course, that the neighbor had since finished his lawn-mowing and Mom and Aunt Laurie had moved everything for nothing.  :)

We hadn't coordinated our tea party plans with each other pre-visit, so each of us literally just brought something to the table and we made it work.  It ended up being a yellow, red, and pink affair with mismatched florals and ginghams.  I had kept it simple by buying a package of gluten-free sandwich cookies and decorating a few as frogs for my (long-suffering) aunt.  I combined lemon and lime-flavored mini marshmallows with a handful of sweetened coconut flakes, a can of fruit cocktail, a can of pineapple chunks, a little whipped cream, and a few spoonfuls of pistachio-flavored pudding mix for a quick take on ambrosia, one of Aunt Laurie's favorites. 

Mom had a similar idea and simply mixed together sliced strawberries, whipped cream, and a little strawberry-flavored gelatin powder for an easy strawberry salad.  (You can make these salads with any flavor of pudding or gelatin mix, of course, adding whatever fruit complements the mix-flavor. 'No waiting for gelatins to set or puddings to cook or chill.) 

Aunt Laurie gifted me with these cute little paper plates, but I just had to use the first three during our party, of course.  She gave Mom this new tea pot, brought Hershey Kisses candies in pink wrappers, and baked gluten-free blueberry and cranberry muffins in red gingham liners. 

 Aunt Laurie loved her little scrapbook I'd made her--  :)

--and she looked at it and a couple other little gifts I'd found her while we ate.  Dear Aunt Laurie.  ♥

The afternoon would grow hot, but we were outside early enough to enjoy warm-but-not-too-warm weather and even a good breeze.  The rain held off another day, only falling this morning as Dad and I made the trip back to the bus station. 

And while the table and chairs would have looked sweet beside the bunny shed and field too, Mom's garden ended up being the perfect spot for our little party, with Mom's flowers in bloom all around us, a bit of shade from the Sumac tree that stands nearby, and a bit of privacy from Dad's grape arbors off to one side. 

Aunt Laurie showed me sketches she had made of dreams and experiences she had had while in the hospital during her sepsis care this June. . . .She was visited by her and Mom's dearly-missed grandmother and by their beloved aunt Ann.  Aunt Laurie said that even at her sickest, she was never afraid because she could feel like a protective force around her all the prayers and good energy we were all sending her way. 

Hearing that from her was itself an answered prayer for me, as was this entire get-together, of course. 

'One of our favorite times together, and that it could have so easily not happened at all--due to illness and weather and lawn-mowers and locked doors--made it, ultimately, all the sweeter. 

I captured eighty seconds of it on video too, but I will remember the gentle breeze, pretty flowers and goodies, and these sweet hearts even without it. 

Ah, love!  ♥  Blessed, blessed, blessed. 

I see Aunt Laurie today!

Two months after her sepsis-scare, Aunt Laurie's finally able to make a visit.  I have a tiny spiral-bound scrapbook ready for her, and she, Mom, and I are planning to have our long-awaited outdoor tea party sometime in the next couple days.  Yeaaaaaaa!  ♥

Together

This dear card--with its printed message inside of "Life's a journey.  'Glad we're in it together!"--will soon be sent to Aunt Laurie.  While I was finishing my last post, Mom called to tell me that my aunt was in the hospital with sepsis that had spread throughout her body, and even late that night when Mom called back to update me, Aunt Laurie's blood pressure was still only 80 over 40.  Terror.  I spent Thursday and most of yesterday dreading Mom's next phone call, choking up as I mailed another card to my sweet aunt from the post office yesterday afternoon, praying for more years and decades more with my faithful pen pal of an aunt.  

When I talked with Mom again last night, she said Aunt Laurie was doing much better and a Sunday hospital-discharge is even a possibility if she continues to improve this weekend.  Uncle Warren reported that when Aunt Laurie was at her sickest the other night, she said she could see angels standing around her hospital bed.   I don't know how close we just came to losing her, but I can imagine--all too vividly now--and it's been a few days that have felt like a hundred.  

Before she got sick, Aunt Laurie had been planning to visit in July, and I pray we can all make it happen still, although I'll likely be blubbering all over her as we hug hello.  Goodness, this life.   

Thanksgiving Fudge and Frogs

The sore throat I dodged a few weeks ago has returned, so the Thanksgiving mail I'd hoped to send out this week remains a stack of blank cards and unaddressed envelopes while I laze about trying to nurse myself back to better health.  We'll see how tomorrow looks.  Tonight I'm remembering this package of maple-walnut fudge I mailed to Aunt Laurie a few Thanksgivings ago.  (I think this was the recipe I used.  The fudge was quite rich, but good.)   My sweet aunt is not really a frog-collector, or to be more accurate, she is not really a frog-collector of her own volition.  As a kid, I told my mom that since her older sister's favorite color was green, we should start her a collection of something that color, and frogs were what I came up with--!?--so for about thirty years now, long-suffering Aunt Laurie has received frog-themed nonsense from me.  ♥  In 2011, I taped this Kermit inside the turquoise pencil case I filled with the fudge, and one Thanksgiving, a magazine clipping of a photo of Kermit-as-a-Macy's-Parade-Float adorned her card's envelope.  Fudge-making likely won't be happening here this week, but I hope to mail out a Thanksgiving sticker-ed card or two--and at least one bit of mail with some smiling green silliness for my dear aunt.  

A Dozen Cousins, Two Gnomes, and a Frog

"Ida was always my favorite," my mom says whenever the subject comes up.  "I remember she had dark hair and it was up on top."  Mom always tells me about her beloved "A Dozen Cousins" paper dolls the same way, with the same smile and the same words.  "There was a Fred too, I remember."  I've been hearing about Ida and Fred and the rest of their family my whole life.  And then:  "I always thought that was the sweetest idea for paper dolls:  All the cousins all different ages."  And finally, and here you may imagine me mouthing the words sitcom-style along with her as she says them:  "I wonder if kids still play with paper dolls?  Boy, your aunt Laurie and I used to!  For HOURS.  We'd make extra clothes for them too.  Mom would let us cut up the Sears catalog for the pictures. . . ."  

I spent years trying to find a set of these old paper dolls for her.  The one time I saw a listing for them on eBay, the bidding reached $200 by auction's end.  They're never at the flea market.  I've only seen a few mentions of them online.  Luck was with me recently, though, when I found an online seller with an uncut set of the dolls.  Fiiiiiinally!  For less than Mike and I usually pay for a pizza, dark-haired Ida and Fred and all the rest of the cousins were on their way here and will soon be an early Mother's Day present. 

And they are sweet, indeed, and so "Mom."  My mother has three brothers and three sisters and grew up with many cousins in her daily life, as well, so I've always understood that part of her affinity for these dolls, but now I can see why she loved them even beyond that.  Such darling details in these old illustrations. 

Like mother, like daughter:  I would happily wear just about any of the dolls' clothes.  I am honestly surprised, now that I see them, that Mom never embroidered a red-threaded "Valerie" onto the fronts of my undershirts when I was a kid. 

I get to go home to visit my family this weekend, ♥  and the surprise paper dolls are part of my goody bag for Mom.  It is an informal tradition that when Mom, Aunt Laurie, and I get together, we exchange what Louisa May Alcott in Little Women called "bundles":  Sometimes notes we didn't have time to mail pre-visit, flower seeds in the springtime, small tins of cookies, usually notecards and stickers for all our letters to each other, almost always silk flowers from Aunt Laurie, small handmade scrapbooks, thrift shop finds of vintage linens and tea cups and coffee mugs, sometimes a framed photo from a past visit for them from me, tiny bottles of cake decors and sprinkling sugars for cookies. . . .Both Mom's and Aunt Laurie's presents this visit includes gnomes, of course, and toadstool-shaped pencil sharpeners from Target's dollar bins. 

While Mom's little gifts are blue and red, Aunt Laurie's are aqua and green, as is also tradition.  The grocery store sells these 50¢ paper lunch bags in different colors, and I find myself buying them over and over again for small gifts.  Aunt Laurie's got jazzed up with "her" gnomes and frogs this time. 

I was supposed to go home yesterday but have been battling a cold all week and didn't feel good enough for the trip yet.  Hopefully, by the time I see everyone this weekend, I'll be able to enjoy it more--and laugh with Aunt Laurie over her frog-prince without falling into a coughing fit.  :)

Here's to family, dear Ida and Fred and all the rest included.  ♥

2013's Valentines

I've always thought of Valentine's Day as the highlight of post-Christmas winter.  Just when the season seems endlessly cold and bleak, Valentine's Day arrives with its cozy reds and warm pinks and its gifts of love and flowers and pretty sweets and kind words.  A little girl in my care at work last week put two and two together while we were making cards and exclaimed, "Hey!  Val!  Valentine!  VALentine!"  I told her that the fact that my name is in it was part of the reason I loved this holiday so much when I was her age. 

 I love it now for better reasons, rest assured.  Since I didn't have my first boyfriend or even date until I was 24, my love for the day was never about dolling up for a romantic dinner out or finding the perfect present for a man or any of the other things we're too often told are the point of Valentine's Day.  It is for me a whole week of finding and making cards, catching up on letters, looking up recipes, deciding what to bake and which tablecoth to use, admiring the stores' displays of flowers and sweets, and marching through snow to the post office to send my stamped and stickered greetings.  I set what remains my own record my freshman year of college by mailing 44 Valentines, but even years like this one, when payday was the day after and the holiday was a more low-key affair, simply sitting down with a cake recipe and a few cards, stickers, and stamps before me was enough. 

 I mailed out Aunt Laurie's card and then realized I'd forgotten to include a frog somehow, a Valentine's Day tradition she has graciously come to accept over the years, so I created a second little card and walked back to the post office with it so it would arrive on time.  

Aunt Laurie's own card arrived Thursday and was more of her amazing paper art.  Remember the incredible scrapbook she made for Mike's and my first anniversary last April?  Lately, she has been crafting these house cards--"Cottage Cards by Laurie," she labels them, inside a heart-shaped tag that hangs from the chimneys--with windows and doors that open to reveal images, the recipients' names, and other little surprises.  

 This Valentine's Day's sweetest surprise came from my friend Tina, who is also my friend Sommer's sister.  In a big red heart-covered envelope was not only a long letter, but also recent pictures of her and her family, a handmade fabric Valentine card, and a puffy cinamon-scented fabric heart to hang.  Tina and I have shared the most heartbreaking moments over the years, so to be exchanging happy hearts still twenty years after we met is now the sweetest gift of all--and one that likely delights Sommer.  ♥  Life is such a wild ride. 

 An exchange of cards and a small carrot cake for us here Valentine's night, leftover cake the next few days, and Valentine's Day/Week has now come and gone again.  Love to you all, and here's to a happy March.  ♥

For Aunt Laurie's Birthday

Aunt Laurie's birthday was this Monday, and while I was home a couple weeks ago, Mom and I decided to make a special birthday gift for her that Mom could include with the box of wrapped Christmas presents she was going to mail her the next morning. It began simply enough, with Mom showing me a pretty green gingham dishtowel she'd found for Aunt Laurie and saying, "I was thinking about decorating a little Christmas tree and putting it in the box for her. What do you think? This as a tree skirt? Or should I just wrap it by itself?" Mom should know better than to ask me such things: She and I ended going to bed sometime after midnight that night after spending about four hours constructing, instead, this miniature birthday party table, the gingham dishtowel now a tablecloth. :)

The table was a taco kit box from the cupboard. :) The cake began as a tiny container with cake/cookie sprinkles in it. I emptied it, flipped it over, painted it with acrylic paints until it looked frosted/decorated, and glued a few silk flowers onto the sides and a bit of a paper-doily-as-cake-plate underneath. A birthday candle from the cupboard was whittled down and poked via nail hole into the top. 

And of course, Aunt Laurie had to have a frog, so I made one out of a few tiny Styrofoam ball-type things from one of Mom's silk floral arrangements and painted it all up until it looked frog-like and glued it all into a mini gift-box with an even smaller "to/from" label attached. She had to have a frog? Yessssssss. :) When I was a kid, I told my mom that Aunt Laurie should collect something green since it's her favorite color, and I decided, much to elegant Civil War-era costume-making, Ann-Margret-adoring, lace-loving Aunt Laurie's dismay, that it should be frogs. Tradition must be upheld!

Her miniature card from me read "Hoppy birthday," of course, and Mom made a more traditional card for her older sister. A green button with cake sprinkles glued to the top became a plate of cookies or candies. The tiny gift packages began as corners of Jell-O boxes. We cut them into different sizes and wrapped them with scraps of different papers we had stashed away. Curling ribbon and more tiny silk flowers made perfect package decorations. The plastic lid of a perfume or hair spray bottle worked as a vase. :)

Paper napkins became smaller paper napkins, white plastic toothpicks were trimmed and glued beside them to suggest forks, and we cut the floral part of a shelf lining paper into circles as cake plates. I drew the balloons, "laminated" them with packaging tape, attached them to more toothpicks, and poked them into the top of one of the presents. We framed an already-right-size photo of Aunt Laurie with silk flowers. And hot-glued everything to everything until we could shake the entire table upside-down and nothing moved.

I only wish we could have seen Aunt Laurie's face when she unwrapped her "birthday party in a box." Now she has a little decoration she can bring out each year for her birthday, though. Since it is the day after Christmas, a hard time to travel, we never get to share it with her, but now we can, even more so than usual, celebrate together in spirit. :)  

Updated to add that Aunt Laurie has passed along this picture of her with her "birthday table."  

Sweet face!  It almost makes me feel bad for hiding the little frog in the gift box.  :)

Fall Leaves and Frog Stickers: My Pen Pal, Aunt Laurie

My sweet aunt Laurie is one of my favorite people, and she and I have been exchanging cards, letters, and other little "love notes" through the mail since I was a kid. The photo above is of our November correspondence from last year--she always makes collages and includes them with her letters, and I pass along pretty fall leaves that I know she'll appreciate. Her Halloween card, collage, and letter in response to my own arrived in Monday's mail, and although I just saw her in July for my brother's wedding, her words made me miss her even more than I already did. I have been missing my family a lot lately, as I had told her in my letter, and I wish I could be in at least three places at once. "I'd love to just appear at your door and offer some dinner and hugs," she wrote in Monday's letter. "'Sending hugs through the mail."

When my best friend died in 1995, Aunt Laurie was having a traumatic week of her own with one of her children, and I sent her a card a couple days after my friend's death to check in with her and to send love to my cousin. "Oh how I wish I could hold you and tell you everything will be okay," her letter back began. It is one of the things I remember verbatim from the haze of those first few weeks without my friend.

Knowing how I love holidays and seasonal meals, Aunt Laurie added an illustration to her Christmas letter's collage a few years ago of a woman studying a cookbook titled 10 Festive Meals You Can Make with Canned Peas. It still makes me laugh. :)

Aunt Laurie's a lover of all things Victorian, lacy, and pretty.

She writes poetry, loves to take nature walks and sew, and makes amazing Civil War reenactment costumes.

She is more than a little psychic and has amazingly vivid spiritual dreams. The pictures she takes often have orbs of light in them.  

She is soft-spoken--a bit Jackie Kennedy-ish--speaks slowly, and has a way of seemingly moving in slow motion, as well.  Her handwriting has the same almost-fragile quality. She has gentle brown "doe eyes" but can only be pushed so far before proving she's tougher than she appears.

She likes peanut butter and doesn't like chocolate. She sometimes drinks tea but adores coffee. She loves doughnuts but tries not to eat them since my uncle is always watching his weight and is too easily tempted. Her homemade bread is to die for--light and sweet loaves that come to loved ones covered in pretty dish towels.

She wraps presents beautifully. Her Christmas package is the biggest treat, since there are always linen snowflake doilies as package decorations, lovely fabric ribbons and rick rack with tree ornaments tied into the curled trims.

Her favorite color is green. When I was little, I told my mom we should start collecting something green for Aunt Laurie, and Mom asked what I thought we should collect for her. All I could think of that was green was frogs--poor Aunt Laurie!--so ever since, it has frogs and frog-related things for her. When her times are hard, I am sure to mention that "It's not easy being green," and "Have I toad you lately that I love you?" candy boxes have been known to appear in her mailbox on Valentine's Day.

She is the only person in my family who calls me "Valerie" instead of "Val."

She lives in a gorgeous old white farmhouse with her husband of 42 years and one of my cousins, she loves to garden, she gets a kick out of gnomes, and Lily of the Valley is her favorite flower.

The first gift I remember ever receiving from her was a lavender unicorn-covered diary I got for Christmas in the third grade. I still have it. For my birthday last May, she took me and my mom out for breakfast and presented me with a Rose afterward. While I was home in July, she threw me a mini bridal shower in the dining room with my mom and cousins present.

Aunt Laurie hates to be called "cute," always envisioning herself more like a sexy Ann-Margret, of whom she used to keep scrapbooks. (Aunt Laurie was thrilled when I performed in my high school's production of Bye Bye Birdie, and she and Mom reminisced all that spring about the songs and movies from their own high school years.) Aunt Laurie really is adorable, though, and even now that she is retired and has a granddaughter in high school, she still gets called "Honey" and "Sweetie" and "Sweetheart" by sales clerks and other strangers and has that air about her that makes people want to pinch her cheeks and cuddle her.

She lived across the street from my family for a few years while I was growing up, and I remember one Christmas, my mom, my cousins, and I were sitting in her living room while my mom read some silly magazine personality quiz to Aunt Laurie. "You want to go Christmas caroling with the neighbors," my mom read aloud, "but you know your singing voice isn't the greatest. Do you A.) go anyway or B.) stay home?" "Well, shoot, I'd go!" my aunt cried out in a surprisingly indignant tone, shocking my mom and making us all laugh at her unexpected response. "What do I care what they think? They don't have to like it!" It is probably twenty-five years since that conversation and I still can't hear mention of Christmas caroling without remembering Aunt Laurie's uncharacteristic outburst (and her younger sister's surprise at her boldness) and smiling.

When I was twenty years old, I mentioned during one visit that I had a small success to report. I had finally stopped biting my nails, was all, but before I could go on to explain that, Aunt Laurie quietly said, "Ah! That's good, Valerie. Small successes are good." :) She was proud of me for losing a lot of weight a few years ago but was happier to hear that I was happy and loving my life again after a number of years of not loving it very much at all. "Oh, Valerie, that's WONDERFUL!" I can hear her exclaim at every mention of something that I'm excited about.

Neither she nor I can easily stop laughing once we get started, and Aunt Laurie starts slapping her knee when she really gets going, which makes everything even funnier. In 2003, the subject of hair dyes came up while she, Mom, and I were hanging out looking at magazines over tea and coffee, and I mentioned that when Marilyn Monroe had been asked if she minded that people thought she was dumb because she was blonde, she had responded, "No, because I know I'm not dumb. I also know I'm not really blonde." Aunt Laurie loved that, being a brunette-turned-blonde herself, and laughed and laughed.

She adored her grandparents, has been with my uncle since high school, and is best friends with my mom, who rightfully calls her "Lovey."
 
Although there are phone calls and visits, as well, it is the letters that have kept us close over the years, each parcel of news and magazine clippings and recipes and dreams and quotes and fall leaves and frog stickers tying our ties a little tighter. My pen pal since childhood, Aunt Laurie can always be counted on to stay in touch, and that is no small thing to say about someone. Her jack-o-lantern-covered Halloween mail is smiling at me from a bookshelf this morning, and this year's November mail will soon be winging its way across the state to her, Kermit the Frog Macy's Thanksgiving Day Day Parade float pictures gracing the envelope. :)