Four Years Ago Today

Four years ago today, Mr. Mike and I got married.  This anniversary reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The First Four Years, and while we have had our challenges, let us thank God that our own first four have not been quite as difficult as Laura and Almanzo's.  My dear and dearly-missed friend Jane, author of the blog Manorisms, wrote to me in a 2007 email, "[Bob's and my] life together has been a good one, but one of my bits of wedding advice is for a couple always to remember that some years are definitely better than others."  That continues to be one of the wisest and most helpful things I've heard regarding marriage.  It hasn't all been carefree sunny days and sweet strappy shoes and colorful sugar cookies, but the older I get, the more I appreciate all of life's carefree and sweet and colorful, so maybe it more than balances out. 

♥

The surveyor's house was full of secrets. ~ the opening of the Christmas Eve chapter of Laura Ingalls Wilder's _By the Shores of Silver Lake_

One of the Christmas traditions that my dad and I laugh about how is how Mom still leaves a "Keep out!" note on top of her blanket-covered pile of Christmas presents in the basement even though my dad is the only person she lives with now that my brothers and I are all out of the house.  "Who are these notes of hers addressed to?!" my dad muses when I return home each December.  "I'm almost seventy years old!  I'm not going to snoop!"  Mom still makes her little warning sign every winter, though, and what makes it funny is that Dad and I laugh at her for doing this but also leave notes of our own.  My "Keep out!" is above, and it remains wedged year-round into an antique suitcase in my former bedroom's closet, since I sometimes buy gifts during my visits throughout the year and just store them at my parents' house until Christmas. Mom's note, below, contains no smiley faces or hearts, however.  She means business.

She is also artistic in her approach, clearly.  A very Mom-like combination of Don't-you-dare-ruin-your-Christmas-surprises! and Ooh!-Christmas!-Here's-a-cute-little-tree!  And Dad. . . .Well, Dad takes a different tack, and one that is all the more amusing both because he is so affronted by Mom's note-writing each December and because Mom is the only person to whom he could be addressing his own words:

The Ingalls family, we are not.  :)  But our Christmas home is, indeed, full of secrets every year.  ♥  And Mom and Dad (and brothers and sisters-in-law and niece and nephew, as well) loved Emmet, yes.  :)  That was one of the sweetest and most fun gift-giving moments I've ever had.  Oh, how everyone laughed as they inspected him!  Sweet, sweet, sweet.  One of my all-time favorite Christmas memories. 

And now off to make some more.  Christmas Eve tomorrow, my favorite day of the year!  ♥

If you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever. ~ Lauren Oliver

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.  

♥

All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about. ~ Charles Kingsley

One afternoon while sitting with my grandmother on her and Papa's front porch swing, flipping through the pages of a wildflower guidebook together, Grandma confided that sometimes when she couldn't fall asleep at night, she would try to think of a flower that began with each letter of the alphabet.  It has probably been almost thirty years since she told me that, but like Grandma, I've never been able to fall asleep easily either and I often find myself employing her alphabet trick.  Flowers tonight, I hear myself thinking.  Anemones, Bachelor Buttons, Camelias. . . .Some nights, it is birds, and sometimes they come even after the flowers if I'm still wide awake.  Auks (thank you, Laura Ingalls Wilder and The Long Winter [my favorite book in her series] for that one), Baltimore Orioles, Chicadees, Doves, Eagles, Finches, Grackles. . . .I'm not too strict with myself with my twenty-six-item lists.  I often skip Q and X, no matter the subject.  More often that not, the flowers, birds, places-I've-been, and words-in-Spanish aren't enough, and I decide to alphabetize my gratitude list or Things-I'm-Looking-Foward-To list.  It is not a bad note to end the day on, and there are certainly worse ways to fall asleep than by reflecting on all the good and sweet in one's life.   

A is for a big salad, I will tell myself tonight.  My mother-in-law recently bought us huge restaurant ware-type salad plates, and we used them for the first time tonight.  ♥  B is baking.  My third (and maybe final) attempt at meringues has been in the oven about three hours now.  This batch looks okay but isn't thrilling enough to me to bother with again.  Catching up on sleep.  That's always wonderful.  Sleep usually is on my list somewhere.  David Bowie:  Starman, an impressively well-researched biography by Paul Trynka.  There is so much glorious detail in this book.  As a boy, Bowie, along with his friends and apparently like so many children in post-war London, used to play in former bombsites, digging in the dirt, imagining, and unearthing little treasures lost until then to the war.  "It was unbelievable," one of his childhood friends is quoted as remembering.  "There were these huge spaces from the bomb sites, and ruined houses, which seemed like mountains to us, covered in Buddleia:  they were our plagrounds."  I will think of David Bowie every time I smell or see powder-scented Butterfly Bush now, and I like knowing that he probably remembers his childhood whenever he catches a whiff of the flowers too.  Dishes have been washed and are all put away.  By the end of the week, all the piddly and naggy little errands that have been on my to-do list for ages will all have been run, so E is errands all the way.  Fresh air.  (Months now of) Good health.  I cut back on sugar last fall to see if it would help my immune system, as I had read that it would, and who knows, but I have gone cold-and-flu-free for quite awhile now, so maybe. 

Heart-shaped leaves.  I prefer blue Morning Glories to any of the other colors, but their heart-shaped leaves always charm me.  I have tomorrow off from work.  Just hearing about a friend's maybe-possible-I-hope-we-can-go travel plans.  Knowing a letter likely reached my parents over the weekend.  One of my new loves:  Linen-scented candles, particularly Glade-brand's "Clean Linen and Sunny Days" ones.  My grocery store carries these for just a few dollars, and the scent is so relaxing, as if I'd just carried in a basket of laundry that had dried out on the line.  A movie I'm looking forward to watching (When Do We Eat?), thanks to Heidi who mentioned it on her blog a couple weeks ago.  Nancy Drew.  I bought the first ten books awhile back and just finished (re-)reading them.  As a kid, I was introduced to the Bobbsey Twins and Trixie Belden books by my mom.  I don't remember when I read my first Nancy Crew books, but it's been fun to dive back into her world of sporty blue convertibles and classic sheath dresses.  Organizing to pay bills this payday.  I'm determined to have one of my student loans paid off by spring, and I've been getting real satisfaction from playing the little if-I-pay-this-much-toward-the-balance-I'll-only-owe-this-much-but-if-I-can-pay-this-amount-the-new-balance-will-be-even-lower game.  Plans for next week include a visit home to my parents.  ♥  Quinoa, since I keep seeing recipes for it that I look forward to trying soon. 

A gift from a friend of a mini Silvertone radio that not only plays both AM and FM, but also looks vintage and fits onto my little corner shelf in the kitchen.  I will think of her every time I play it, making it even sweeter. ♥  Stuffed meowed at me this afternoon.  He rarely "talks"--he is silent most of the time and saves his few meows for Mike--so to hear anything besides the jingle of his collar was sweet.  Time to myself tonight and tomorrow.  Updating aunts in letters and email tonight.  Vanilla soy milk.  Creating another faux wallpapered wall tomorrow, this one pale green with bouquets of pink roses--the wall beside the mantel and that the wing chair will be against.  I might skip X as I usually do.  I never thought to ask Grandma what she came up with for the hard letters.  Maybe she fell asleep before she reached them.  Maybe that was the point.  :)  Y will be the 80s song "Your Love" by The Outfield since I've had it on repeat-play this past week.  And Z--Z, I can do, Grandma, if you've listened all the way to the end ♥--Z is for Zucchini-Tomato Tart, one of my favorite dishes and one that will be my supper later this week.  Any recipe will likely be wonderful, but I just throw sliced zucchini and tomatoes into a pie crust with feta or Parmesan cheese and maybe some olive oil and bake it about thirty minutes.  (If you could be my guest at luncheon, Nancy Drew, I'd serve you this tart with your oft-mentioned iced tea and fruit salad.)    

People are often asked what they've learned from their loved ones or their favorite teachers, and it seems that peoples' first thought is the grand life lessons, but Grandma's little alphabet trick is one of the things she told me that I most appreciate.  Some people get up to watch television or read when they can't sleep, but Grandma stayed-put and made mental lists of pretty things.  ♥  Pansies, Queen Anne's Lace, Ranunculus, Snapdragons. . . .It makes me smile now to think of garden-loving Grandma's silent recitations.  To know that the sun will come up eventually, even if sleep doesn't come at all, and to decide to focus on the happy and beautiful in the meantime:  This is a lesson worth passing on too.

Over Homemade Bread and Jelly

At my grandfather's viewing in April of 2001, one of his friends, a garrulous man named Sam I remember as a more self-assured and quicker-to-laugh Jackie Gleason, sat down with me and one of my cousins, the two of us Papa's only granddaughters out of seven grandchildren, and talked about how he had admired our grandfather. Our own generation would have to do a hell of a lot of work to become the kind of people our grandparents were, Sam told us. Papa and those of his generation seemed quite special and just good and strong in some way that later generations did not. The only other thing I specifically remember Papa's friend telling us was how rare and wonderful it was to know someone who, when you unexpectedly stopped by for a quick visit, would welcome you into his home and say, well, first, Papa's usual "Take your hat off and stay awhile," and then, "Here, pull up a chair. Mum just made some of her bread and we still have jelly from this past summer" and how good it was just to sit with Papa in the kitchen and talk over fresh homemade bread and homemade jelly. Sure, some people offer coffee or cake for a guest, Sam went on, but to be able to visit over bread and jelly! That our grandfather had no pretenses about such things and understood how good it was just to catch up with a friend over homemade bread and homemade jelly...! Sam wanted us to understand this. He went on and on about it. It was such a simple thing, he told us, but that was one of the things he would miss the most now that our grandfather had died, and there just weren't people out there like our grandfather anymore.

In one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, she mentions that her future husband, Almanzo, once asked her, "What kind of man do you think I am?" and Laura admits that she'd never given it any thought. But it is something I've given a lot of thought, and I remember deciding--no, not deciding, just knowing--that day at the funeral home that I would never marry anyone who didn't understand about the bread and jelly.