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I spent some time last night looking through twelve years' worth of my photo albums on flickr, and it struck me that all those years--every year of the past twelve except this one--seemed to have been [easier? more creative? less of a blur?] than this one, but then it further struck me that this year was just not as well-documented as past years. :) I keep a journal as always, and I take pictures almost every day, but since I haven't sorted them all into an album labeled 2019 yet, and since there are only thirteen blog posts before this one to tell 2019's story in images and words here, this year just somehow seemed "less." (A-ha!) 'Funny how memory works. This year really has been a blur, though, as every year anymore seems to speed by faster than the ones before.
It seems like I was home for a visit with my parents Halloween-week maybe two weeks ago. It stormed almost the entire time I was there, sheets of rain pouring onto the deck's roof and then flooding it. I baked a gluten-free dark chocolate cake for my parents,
helped Mom figure out her first cell phone, and watched game seven of the World Series with Dad. Sometime overnight on Halloween, we lost power. Mom's many candles were put to good use all over their little house the next morning. The top photo is of their kitchen island as November began. It was the most perfect Halloween-week weather.
Mike's mom celebrated her eightieth birthday just as little Bianca was turning six--six?! She was just three! She was just BORN!--and somehow, cards, flowers (mother-in-law), and balloons (niece) made it to them on time. "She was so cute skating with her friends," Mom reported of Bianca's roller rink party a few weeks ago. But look at this dear little face--
--and tell me what she'd NOT be cute doing. 'So adorable. ♥ And still a little imp. :) She began kindergarten this fall. . . bows on her knee socks, stuffed animal on her desk, and answering the question of what she wants to be when she grows up with: "A detective." A detective! Of course, at her preschool graduation ceremony this spring, all the kids had facts about themselves announced to the audience as they walked across the stage. Bianca's? "Bianca likes cats." Bianca likes cats! Ha ha! Sweet girl. I get such a kick out of her. :)
I got this shot of my oldest and youngest nieces from the Thanksgiving table last week. ♥ The mind boggles. And what a rich time for my parents, I have been thinking, to be able to enjoy grandchildren who range from five-month-old to almost-sixteen. My nephew will be old enough to drive soon. Baby Dylan!? Precious times, and precious time.
Mike and I spent Thanksgiving day at my older brother's home and then spent the night at his mom's. 'Such a sweet holiday, and the craziness of my working life being what it is, this was the first Thanksgiving I'd spent with family since 2010. 2010. There are a number of changes I need to make in my life in the next few years, and changing things like that is high on the list. Late last Wednesday night, I finally decided what I wanted to make for dessert to go along with both brothers' pies, and especially given how little planning went into them, I'm so delighted by how both desserts turned out. 'Such a good feeling when a "baking vision" turns out. :) I went with gluten-free yellow cupcakes to have an option Mom could eat, and I tried the all-over-the-internet "pumpkin pie wedge" Rice Krispie Treats. The first batch of the Rice Krispie Treats I made standard pie-slice-size and took to Mike's mom's since there was to be a smaller gathering there. We totaled fourteen at my brother's home, so I made mini pie slices with that batch. 'Dollop of homemade buttercream on each to mimic whipped cream. :)
The tiny pumpkins were crafted out of homemade fondant, one of my favorite little baking/dessert-making/cake-decorating things to play with the past fifteen or so years. Mike is careful with his sugar intake, and I (always anymore, alas) need to lose weight, so I rarely make things like these Thanksgiving desserts, but it is so fun and relaxing, I should make the time more often and just give away all but a couple of whatever I've baked. Or maybe I should play it safe and just buy some poylmer clay to craft desserts for dollhouses. :)
Mike's mom had fall leaf-patterned flannel sheets on the bed for Thanksgiving night--so sweet ♥--and oh my goodness, it was the most comfortable bed and the coziest and most festive way to end the holiday.
We returned home Friday evening to a cuddled-up-on-a-chair Stuffed, still going (relatively) strong at twenty years old. ♥ I remembered just in time last week to get this fall's photo of him with the yellow trees outside the window, and he spent most of today on a nest of blankets beside the space heater while snow fell. Dear sweet Stuffed. ♥
I say life's been a blur, but I will also pat myself on the back here and point out that my Christmas cards have been ready to mail for a week, I'm almost done with my shopping, and I put up the tree a couple Sundays ago. 'Unprecedented holiday organization here, and it's making the entire month ahead feel better. Onward and upward, then, and may it not take me three months to find my way back to my little online space here. Happy December to you all.
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Stubborn Val couldn't wait for help moving the shelves Friday night and ended up trying only to pull a muscle in her left shoulder. See Val scream! See Val unable to dress herself or pull up her hair or sleep on her favorite side! See Val have to change her work-schedule! See Val buy Tylenol and ice-packs and pain-relief cream! See Val have to wait to assemble her bookshelves! And now, see Val unable to do Halloween baking and settle for a slice of store-bought pumpkin roll! But look, Val! There is a heart! See the heart! Learn and rest, Val! Learn and rest! ♥
A ten-minute walk around the block tonight to take a few pictures. Snow flurries swirled and stuck to my chest this morning as I walked, but tonight, post-flurries and then rain, it's cold but calm.
The neighbors' gardens still show spots of color, although not many houses have pumpkins on their porches yet.
This may be the fall I finally carve a cat jack o-lantern for our front stoop. I have yet to live anywhere that gets trick-or-treaters--none of the houses I grew up in ever got more than a few, nor have any of my apartments--so the decorate-your-home-and-stock-up-on-candy parts of this month never really factor in when I think of October to-dos. Maybe a big cat pumpkin for out front this year, though, just to add a bit of sweetness to the neighborhood.
Ah, fall! May Heaven turn out to be an eternal autumn. I love it so.
I also love the shade of green these neighbors have painted their garage door. It actually looks a lot like our bathroom walls now.
So much gorgeous, vibrant color. Love, love, love. ♥
I am not quite on the ball with Halloween card-mailing this year, but I have a few things ready to send out. I'll be getting just a few cards mailed today, I have a tiny box of cards and candy ready for my older niece and my nephew, and I had the book Where Is Baby's Pumpkin? shipped to little niece Bianca a couple days ago to mark her first Halloween. (The online book preview showed the baby peeking around an orange gingham curtain--
--and how could I have resisted?!) Today's outgoing mail also includes a combination Halloween-thank you card for Mr. V, one of my fifth and sixth grade teachers. He was one of my favorites and one of the best. I've found what I'm hoping is really his address and have now offered my long-overdue thanks, which makes me happy.
Mr. V was a sharp dresser and loved dogs and baseball--this was the era of the mid-late 1980s New York Mets and Darryl Strawberry, of whom there was a poster on one of Mr. V's classroom walls--and if I'm remembering correctly, the snazzy red car in the teachers' parking lot was his--but we students loved him because he cared about us, enjoyed us, and was simply one of the good ones. He was the first teacher who really encouraged my art skills. I painted or drew a picture of my Beagle in his class one day, and he not only praised it, but also took it over to a teacher who was visiting his room at the time--the equally wonderful Mr. M--and showed it off to him too. Tradition at our elementary school was that each year, a couple of the sixth grade students were selected to illustrate the cover of the yearbook. Instead of simply telling me in class the next day that I had been one of the two chosen student-artists, he knocked on the door of the other teacher's classroom I was in at the time--this time, dear Mr. G's--and asked if he could speak to me for a moment--He wants to talk to me?! In the hall?!? What did I do?! I didn't do anything! When I stepped into the hall, I found my best friend standing beside him, adding to the pure thrill seconds later when Mr. V announced that she and I would be the ones designing the yearbook cover. He could have just waited to tell us in class, of course, just as he could have notified us separately, but no: Instead he created a moment, and it was, clearly, a memorable one. It is that kind of "small" kindness that stays with a person.
Fifth grade was the year of our using microscopes for the first time too, and he shared our excitement as we saw insects and who-knows-what-else up-close for the very first time. When I asked him after class one day where he bought the tiny lights for the microscopes we used in class, he answered at-length, but all I remember now is that he said that even the little Christmas tree string lights' bulbs would work. That was the first year science ever interested me: I asked my parents for both a cookbook and a microscope that Christmas. There remains the feeling, almost thirty years later, that we all went through the fifth grade together: He experienced it right along with us, as it should be. And my gratitude is much bigger than I could ever express in a greeting card, but he'll be getting one in the mail this week anyway, and I hope it brightens his day as he brightened so many of mine.
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My younger brother's first baby is due any day now, and the rest of the family daily guesses names and marvels at the idea that there will be a whole new person with us very soon. The day my nephew was born, I wondered aloud to my mom how strange it was that I had just met him and already loved him so much. "I'd never even laid eyes on him until today, and now it's hard to remember the family without him." My mom replied with something along the lines of "Well, of course," but it was stunning to me how the heart instantly expands. It's a girl, my brother and his wife have already announced, and I'm eager to feel, for the third time now, that rush of auntly love and surely-you've-somehow-been-here-with-us-all-along when I hold my new niece the first time.
"Thirty-six," largely due to my younger brother's news, has been a year of nostalgia so far for me. Each year now seems to fly by faster than the one before, and maybe because 2013 has had me looking both forward and backward even more than usual, I feel like I've lost track of this one somewhere along the way. While I was home for my birthday in May, my sister-in-law announced her pregnancy. When I went home in September, it was for the autumn-themed baby shower. And next month's visit will find my younger brother now a parent. I remember riding the hopital elevator up to the maternity unit the day he was born in 1982. The next time I was visiting my hometown hospital's maternity unit, it was 2004 and my older brother had just become a dad. And didn't all these things happen just yesterday? No, really. I don't understand anymore how time passes. Lately the scene in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie keeps coming to mind in which Mrs. Bradley makes everyone in attendance cry on musical literary night by singing "Backward, turn backward, Oh Time in thy flight. Make me a child again, just for tonight." Picture me here pulling out my handkerchief along with Laura and Ma. My younger brother is days away from being a dad. Those who served as my former elementary school's principal, custodian, and secretary while I was a student there have all died this past year. And all of this while I continue write, little by little, a memoir of my 1980s childhood. "Those were nice years," my dad said of that time while I was home in September. "You kids were all still pretty young, and Papa and Grandma were still alive. . . ." My heart was almost too full to respond to him then, and it feels full-to-bursting now as I picture my once-Pound-Puppies-and-Connect-Four-loving brother with his wife and baby beside him this Thanksgiving. "They were such good years," was all I managed to get out to Dad, and I want to pause here tonight and just sit quietly and look at my favorite pictures from this fall before any more of it passes passes and say "Thank You." Because these are good years too.
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This week was the first in this apartment that found us sleeping in a "real" bed, since we just this past weekend assembled our newly-bought bed-frame and headboard. The bedroom is the last room of our new-even-though-we-moved-in-August-1st-of-2011 apartment to be arranged and decorated, so finally, this Monday night, we slept in a properly made-up bed in a room that looked like a bedroom and not just The Room We're Unpacking From. And it was the strangest of juxtapositions, the cold winds of Hurricane Sandy howling and its rains pelting the windows while Mike, Stuffed, and I curled up under quilts and comforters with a space heater on at the foot of the bed and a battery-operated candle flickering on Mike's nightstand: Never before had we had such a snug and sound sleep in our new home, and all the while, so many were suffering so horribly. Mike and I had watched CNN and the Weather Channel for hours before going to bed, in between checking on friends in New Jersey and Connecticut, so we knew it was getting bad and going to get worse, but it was still shocking, when Mike woke up at 2 a.m. Tuesday and read aloud a news alert that had come across his phone: "18 people dead." That number has since risen, of course, but at 2 a.m. Tuesday, to hear such a thing while safely cuddled up against my husband and cat in a comfy new bed, was stunning. And what was there to do at such an hour but cuddle closer and pray.
Soon after, I dreamed that I was walking past a store that had a group of Salvation Army bell-ringers out front, but they were not only ringing their bells hoping for the usual handfuls of change to be dropped into their red kettles for charity, but also singing, and it was the most beautiful sound I've ever heard, the most beautiful a cappella choir, their voices rising to the sweetest notes and harmonizing perfectly. I was so moved by the sound of it, I wanted to cry out to tell them how beautiful they were and what a tonic their voices were, but of course, I didn't want to interrupt. Dropping money into their kettles seemed almost too crass a thing to do in response to a moment of such beauty and grace. I tried to catch the eyes of some of the singers, but--it being a dream--they were staring above and beyond me while they sang and I couldn't get anyone to make eye contact with me. I decided just to leave whatever money I had on me, but after scrounging through my pockets and bag, I only came up with 37 cents. After wrestling with my embarrassment for a few moments, I decided that if that was all I could give, then it would just have to be enough--better that, than nothing--and I dropped my handful of coins into one of the kettles, trying again to make eye contact with the singers while I smiled at them, hoping they understood my appreciation and my offering.
This week with all its news of Sandy-related destruction and fledgling recovery has so heartbreakingly highlighted our fragility and strength. "True strength is delicate," as the saying goes. I have made my small donations to the Red Cross and the Humane Society, and I pray that those at this moment trapped in flooded homes and digging to find anything salvageable in burned-out yards can somehow sense all the prayers and good wishes we have all been sending and find strength in them. "I don't feel God around me at all right now," I remember whimpering in disbelief to my favorite teacher the day after my best friend died in high school. But He is here, he reassured me, explaining that God was my friends and my parents and anybody else who did anything kind or good to help me through my grief. I still believe that, seventeen years later, so now I pray that we are all somehow putting our best selves forward for each other, being the little kids' God who gives away not just clean dry clothes but also coloring books and Halloween candy in makeshift shelters, being the adults' God who sends rescue boats and helps with insurance forms and who hands out hot coffee too. Let our prayers and our offerings, even if they strike us as small, be enough today and in the days ahead. I believe that love changes the world and that God is always here, masquerading as Halloween candy, warm blankets, and handfuls of coins.
Saturday
night before watching Halloween movies, Mike, Stuffed, and I finally
got around to making the hand/paw print artwork I'd been wanting us to
make the past few years. I was just happy that the project was finally done.
Mike was his usual clever and cynical self--"This is who we are" is the catchphrase from "Millennium," one of our favorite shows--but went along without much fuss.
And Stuffed, upon feeling paint on his paw pads for the first time, inexplicably tried to kneel down onto the paper like a horse. But he didn't fight me too much while I scrubbed his now-blue paw with a warm washcloth, so all's well that ends well.
In any case, it's now on top of our crazy mantel, and I'm delighted by it.
We watched the Snoopy "Great Pumpkin" movie and the Garfield Halloween movie, and at the last minute, I found a Spider-Man cookie to add to Mike's goody bag, so that made me happy too.
Chinese food for Mike and a chicken salad for me last night after work, a phone call from my mom during which I got to tell her that I do indeed have Thanksgiving off this year so will be seeing everyone in a few weeks, ♥ and the pleasure of watching Stuffed in his cozy corner all weekend.
And we're not out of Kit Kat candy bars yet. My kind of Halloween.
Last week at this time I was putting together a beef stew supper and a bag of treats for Mr. Mike for Halloween and thinking about Halloween of last year and about just how much my life has changed--or how much I have changed my life--in the past twelve months. Halloween 2006 saw me working noon-nine pm at a job I hated, missing both a family dinner that day and the chance to see my little nephew in his scarecrow costume that evening. The misery I felt all day last Halloween was the same that colored so many of my days last year. But last Wednesday, in a new apartment in a new city on a day off from a new job and baking peanut butter cookies for Mr. Mike, I was overwhelmed by how happy I was and by just how dramatically I've changed my life in one year's time. Mom called while I was scrambling to get the Halloween show on the road here, and in the cozy glow of apple cinnamon and pumpkin pie-scented candles, I sat down to tell her I was happy. She has been telling me every year for what seems like forever that "this will be [my] year," and finally, last week, with only sixty-two days left of what has been an awesome year, I could tell her that she was right. I am so happy, and for the first time in a long time, I've had months in a row of looking not backward but forward.
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