The Face of Christmas 2016 :)

When Niece Bianca, who is somehow now three years old, first saw my parents' Christmas tree decorated and with colorful bundles already under it--even before Santa's arrival, ooh! ah!--she immediately ran over to the gifts and tried to unwrap one.  My mom repeatedly redirected her:  This one is is actually for So-and-So. . . .We only open our own presents. . . .You can open them when you come with your mommy and daddy on Christmas Day. . . .Awhile later, little B carried a present over to my dad and said, "Mimi"--my mom--"said I could open this."  :)  Dad was amused but not buying it and eventually was able to distract her with a book.  When Mom next returned to the living room, though, Bianca was caught in the act yet again, sitting under the tree holding her stuffed animal and trying to tear into a gift.  "My bear wants to open one!" she explained.  :)  Dear sweet little imp.  Look at that FACE.  :)  ♥ 

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!  ♥

Family Weekend

'Still settling back into life here after a few days with family.  Dad's birthday and the annual family reunion fell on the same day this year, and his two sisters also spent the night at the house Sunday and were able to stay through lunch Monday, making this visit home especially memorable.  Dad cooked their grandmother's risotto--his best batch of it yet, we all agreed--and his just-picked tomatoes and cucumbers made a perfect side-salad.  'A special meal and sweet way for the siblings' visit to end.  Mom, Dad, and I opted for the Olympics over seemingly-ceaseless election-related-news-coverage in the evenings, I finished reading Judy Blume's latest book Monday night and began Bill Bryson's take on Australia in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, and too soon--

--I was back at the bus station, greeting its resident cat and waiting to board to come back here. 

Assuming Aunt Laurie's health remains good, I will be looking out the bus windows at Pennsylvania countryside again next week already for a visit with her and the rest of my family. 

This summer has been miserably hot and humid, but it's one that has found me both getting somewhere with my running finally and reuniting with family, so those are two Summer 2016 things that I will remember fondly. 

November's Visit Home, with Video :)

I knew even Saturday morning that I needed sleep more than the visit home, but I wanted to help Mom put up the Christmas tree, since she's only four weeks post-surgery and still can't lift much on her own and I didn't want her to push it, and I wanted to see my family, of course.  I was to have caught the bus home to my parents on Saturday but called them that morning to say I needed another day to sleep and catch up around here, so I returned home Sunday instead--and soon realized I'd uncharacteristically told my dad the wrong time to pick me up at the bus station.  When I called home to let him know, Mom said he was out for a walk.  After finally arriving at my parents' house around 9 am, I felt half-asleep again and ended up napping in my former bedroom until about 2:30 in the afternoon, only waking because Mom knocked on my door to let me know my brothers would soon be there.  The exhaustion just dogged me the entire visit.  I went to bed Sunday at 9 pm but woke up around 3 am and read til joining Mom when she got up at 7.  I napped from 1-4:30 pm Monday but then only slept from 10 pm to a little after midnight, reading the rest of the night.  I somehow stayed awake on the bus's return-trip today, finishing the last of the three books I'd packed for the trip, but then crashed once back here at the apartment and slept from noon-5, only rousing myself because I needed to run out for salad things for supper.  The book trilogy I'd decided to reread the past few days was The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and the disturbing world of the three books coupled with my collapsing into sleep, or confusedly emerging from it, all weekend added to the muddled-brain feeling. We all had a great dinner Sunday, though, and Mom and I did get the tree up Monday morning, so all was well, even if I felt a bit like I was underwater the whole visit.

The yard was coated in frost Monday morning, and the deck in ice, but the snow held off.  Despite the rain, my younger brother got a deer on the first day of  buck season, and when my two-year-old niece saw it in the back of his truck, she commanded him and my nephew to "Wake it up!  Wake it up!"  Sweet angel.  My older niece also simultaneously broke my heart and made me smile when I learned that after having eight inches of her hair cut off a couple weeks ago, she came home and wrote out a Christmas wish list and the first item on it was "My hair."  These girls!  It is so wild and funny and heartbreaking and beautiful to watch them grow up.  Here's a minute and thirty seconds of Mom with little Bianca:

Sweet, sweet, sweet.  And so begins December.  ♥

An Ode to All the Sunset Watchers

I love my parents more all the time for their appreciation of beauty.  "Who wants to see something pretty?" Olivia Walton asks her family after finding her Christmas cactus blooming in The Homecoming, and every Christmas when I watch the movie--it is one of my favorites--I think of my parents.  "Dad!" I called into the house while Mom and I sat out on the deck last week, "You should come see this sunset.  It's gorgeous!"  It didn't at all surprise me to hear him promptly push his footstool away from his chair in the living room to come join us.  I love that not only wasn't I surprised that Dad put his crossword puzzle aside to look at a  pretty sky, but also that I'd called out to him already knowing that that would be the case:  It was a given.  I come from people who appreciate beauty.  This fireball of a sunset was only embers on the horizon after just a few minutes, making the watching of it with my parents all the sweeter. 

Not everyone does appreciate it, I have learned.  Not everyone jumps up to look when news of a striking sunset or sunrise or moon or vibrant Cardinal-in-a-tree is shared.  And what a sad and shabby way of living that has to be.  Whether it is the flash of the red bird against the snow-heaped branch or the flaming sunset over the neighbor's house, after all, it is flitting.  As Mike well-knows, one of my biggest pet peeves at work is my asking someone how his or her day is going and hearing in response an Eeyore-like "It's going."  Gah!  Typically, those who answer once with "It's going" answer every time with "It's going" too, I've noticed.  Life is just passing for them, and there they are just dragging themselves along with it, ball with chain.  "It's going."  GAH!  It's going, all right.  Shake a leg, wise up, this matters, this is it, come look at the *&$@%# sunset!  

A thank you to all of you, then, who share your home (and is Jane's home not the dearest!?  ♥), your yard (← that is one of my favorite photos that talented Lisa has shared over the years), your garden (bliss!), your holiday traditions (love!) and holiday tables (so cozy and colorful!  Cheryl's!  love!), your passions (and your smile, Margaret!), your party-planning (everything Melissa touches is lovely), your determination to become your best self (my favorite line of this post highlights why I so love Heather's blog:  "Life right now is about recognizing small victories so I took a moment, spiked a football and then got down on one knee and pointed to the sky."  Ha!  Writing that shines ♥), your poetry (← a favorite writer), your family (this story! ♥), your sunlight (gorgeous first photo, that!), your self-care rituals (and most-everything eighty-something-year-old Ernestine posts is an inspiration), your love of history (← a treasure-trove of research), your miracles and wonders (so much big-hearted goodness in Yankee's posts), and even your (darling) picnics. . . .Oh, I love it all, I'm grateful for it all, I could go on all day.  With every shared word and photo, you prove your life is not just "going."  Beautiful. 

In the Woods

Like my dad, I call autumn my favorite season.  It is funny how peoples' favorite seasons rarely seem hard to guess correctly.  Aunt Laurie is a spring, and Mom is most definitely a summer.  Oh, sweet fall, though!  As Dad and I were saying last week, we would have it last until about the week before Christmas, then enjoy winter--even a blustery, freezing, and deep-snowed one--until oh, maybe a week after New Year's, and then move right into spring.  No gradual thaw, but just:  "Today, spring!"   (Remember in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter how in bed in the wee hours of an April or May morning after the months of one-blizzard-after-another, Laura realized the wind was no longer howling outside and she could hear water dripping from the roof's eaves?  "The Chinook is blowing!" she yells to Pa, and he answers that he hears it too and that spring has come.  Oh, yes.  That's the one-moment-winter-and-the-next-moment-spring season-change we're wanting.)  And no more of the wishy-washy "springs" we've had lately that seem to be a week of warm temperatures when snow is still on the ground that causes us all to chatter about "What a nice break this is, after being so cold for so long!" but then the welcome "break" from winter becomes  a stretch of days in the upper seventies and then Mike and I have all our windows wide open during Easter dinner and our air conditioners on for the "summer" that is now beginning in May.  No, a true spring.  And then a proper summer next, with warm becoming hot and then turning hotter and then even humid, and right when you can't take the humidity anymore:  Fall!  Well, Dad and I aren't in charge, and no one's asked, but that's our report on How a Year Should Be. 

Last Monday afternoon while Dad stayed inside with Mom, I spent some time walking in the patch of woods behind their house and hardly wanted to go back indoors.  Fall color is past its peak at home, but enough remained to awe me.  The creek Dad dips his watering cans into for his gardens through the summer reflected mostly-bare branches and was lined by the mosses' and ferns' deep green and the surprising remainders of leaves glowing ruby and gold.  Birdhouses that Dad had built and painted barn-red were vibrant in the gray branches of a few trees, while patches of orange Chinese Lanterns dotted the woods like twinkling string lights at the bases of others.  There was enough of a breeze to sweep the pine needle and soil scents through the air but not so much as to make picture-taking impossible.  The only sounds were the bubbling of the creek and the leaves brushing against the trees.  The sun was setting as I finally turned the corner to head back into the field behind Mom and Dad's house, gifting me with the shadow pictures I so love, and a last heart-shaped leaf was awaiting me beside Dad's compost pile before I climbed the deck's steps and came in to change into pajamas for the night.  Glorious fall.  

On a Blue-Check Sick-Bed

I returned yesterday from a longer-than-usual visit with Mom and Dad.  Mom is recovering from surgery, and with each day of that recovery, one of this fall's biggest worries wanes a bit more.  She has an outpatient surgery scheduled for spring, but to have one hospital-stay down and one procedure to-go is better than where we were a week ago, so we will focus on that for now.  And eat our weight in pumpkin muffins.  My brothers have been keeping Mom supplied with gluten-free groceries, and the muffins, rolls, and macaroni have all been hits.  I arrived Sunday with a basket of magazines, a handmade scrapbook, and a few other other goodies--and Halloween treats for my dad, nieces, and nephew--and set up camp in the living room with Mom, sleeping on one of the chairs at night while Mom slept on the couch.  Sweet Mom, who always gives so much of herself to everyone else, has been showered with flowers, baked goods, visits from her beloved "grandbabies," and oh! the most wonderful mail.  ♥  We kept lit in the living room a pumpkin-scented candle Aunt Laurie had sent in a pre-surgery care package.  We made cinnamon rolls from a gluten-free pizza crust mix my younger brother had given her.  We smiled over a get-well card my older brother's kids had drawn for her.  We enjoyed a visit with my dancing queen of an almost-two-year-old niece.  We enjoyed Dad's laundry service.  And the early November weather was mild enough for Mom to get some fresh air out on the deck, albeit still cuddled-up in a blanket, and for me to take a break and enjoy some walks around the yard and in the woods behind her and Dad's house.  We watched movies, old "Barney Miller" episodes--we share a Hal Linden crush--and the most striking sunset, and I myself found hearts, of course, while resting on the deck's steps, and while walking in the woods, and even while packing to come back here:  A red heart sticker we hadn't noticed before appeared stuck to the kitchen floor.  "Well, I'll have to think about that one," Mom murmured as she looked down at it during one of her required laps around the house.  "  I have no idea where that would have come from."  She had just told me the day before that she hasn't had any stickers to add to her letters and envelopes in ages, so stickers could be a Christmas idea for her, if I needed any ideas. . . .♥  I couldn't bear to scrape it off of the tile.  Mom can ponder it while she completes her daily laps, and assuming Dad won't notice it if he mops the floor, I will enjoy seeing it again when I return home in three weeks to help Mom put up the Christmas trees, to try our hand at gluten-free crescent rolls, and to give Chef Dad a break from cooking supper.  Here's to every good heart that graces our journeys, and let us not take any of them for granted.