A mother is the truest friend we have. ~ Washington Irving

Although I've been working at my current job less than three months, my manager kindly gave me both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, so after I finished my shift on the 23rd, Mike and his mom and dad dropped me off at the bus station and I headed home to spend the holiday at my parents' house. The holidays snuck up on me this year. I hadn't known until the 21st what my work-schedule even was for Christmas week, so it was hard to get into the spirit of things the weeks before the way I usually do. I eventually came up with gifts I was happy with for everyone on my list, and I got a few Christmas cards mailed out on time, but I just wasn't as on-the-ball as I usually am with these things. Even when Mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I could think of little besides the "givens": Stationery, stickers, vanilla perfume, fuzzy socks. . . . Over Thanksgiving while looking through magazines and catalogs she had been saving for me, I had been tickled by a toy catalog's picture of a goofy-looking stuffed blue cat named "Patches," but it was around $40 plus shipping, so I had just ooh-ed and ahh-ed over him to Mom for awhile before trying to come up with real ideas to give her. By the time the madcap weekend of the 23rd rolled around and I quickly prepared to go home, I had forgotten the few ideas I'd come up with for her and many of the actual gifts I'd gotten for everyone.

The night of the 23rd, after the parental hugs and hellos, I stepped into my former bedroom to set down my backpack and bags of Christmas presents and could make out in the dark a stuffed animal posed in front of my bed pillows. I knew instantly what it was and called out to my mom, "The cat! That's the cat!" She and my dad started laughing, and Mom came into my room to turn on the light so I could see him better. She told me she had made this "Patches lookalike" from a blue pillowcase, a white washcloth, and other scraps from her fabric bag. I laughed as I held him and looked him over, and Mom laughed with me and kept saying things like, "I know he's strange-looking, but I think I got it pretty close!" and "Your dad thought I'd go nuts--I had to keep staring at that little catalog picture with the magnifying glass to make sure I was getting it right!" 

That she had even remembered my Thanksgiving oohs and ahhs over "Patches" shouldn't have surprised me, since she is just that thoughtful, but I am still so touched and delighted every time I look at the stuffed blue cat that now sits on my bed here.  

Missing My Grandma

♥

"I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There's nothing more to say.

The poem ends, 
soft as it began--
I loved my friend."

--Langston Hughes

I slice cantaloupe once a week in the restaurant kitchen and am reminded every time I scoop out the goopey seeds of how my grandmother always saved cantaloupe seeds to place on the bird feeder--a simple wooden plank on a pole outside her kitchen window--for the Cardinals who always visited her and Papa's yard.

Yesterday as I walked home from work in the snow, I remembered the afternoon at Papa and Grandma's that found me and Grandma sitting together at the kitchen window watching the snow fall. I was trying to keep track of individual snowflakes as they fell to the ground when Grandma smiled and said conspiratorially, "Sometimes I try to keep my eye on just one snowflake from the time I first see it until it lands on the ground." I turned to her and exclaimed, "I do that too!!! I was doing that just now!!!" And she laughed and seemed so happy to hear that.

I just miss Grandma so much lately. "Little" memories like the cantaloupe seeds and snowflakes have choked me up a number of times in the past couple weeks: The Christmas I got a Cabbage Patch Kid and got so upset with Grandma when she said my doll was ugly. (She was comparing my dimple-cheeked and single-toothed doll to the kinds she had thought beautiful when she was a child.) The good laugh she, my mom, one of my aunts, and I had when Grandma pulled her roasted chicken out of the oven and I pointed out that she had unknowingly arranged the onion slice-rings into a smiley face on top of the bird. "Ohhhhhhhh! Count on my little artist to notice that!" she said, and we all laughed together some more as we carried the side dishes and the "grinning" chicken out to the dining room. How every Christmas, a Cardinal-red Poinsettia plant, an annual gift from one of Grandma's nieces, would sit in the same windowsill in Papa and Grandma's dining room.

Every few days lately, I walk around the display of red, cream, and pink Poinsettias at the grocery store and think about how I'd never really liked Poinsettias much until this year but how now when I see them, they remind me of Grandma and her niece and how real love lasts and can be relied on--distance and time apart be damned.

Christmas Card from Mom :)

I wish I could jump right into this picture.  ♥

Becoming Catty

I'd never had a cat before moving in here in September, and I'd never wanted one. My family had a few Beagles as pets over the years, and I've just always seen myself as more of a dog person than a cat person.  I've never been intentionally hurt by a dog, but I always seem to end up scratched in my encounters with cats. I don't like the way cats jump and creep around. They seem nosy.  And their eyes are spooky. The black and white cat curled up by the radiator as I type this is part of the Mr. Mike Package Deal, though, so I have been adjusting to the feline-filled life.

"All he does is sleep!" I commented to Mike about his cat, Stuffed, a couple months ago. "What's the point?! He wakes up, goes back to sleep, wakes up and eats, sleeps some more, wakes up to use the litter box, sleeps some more...." Surprisingly, though, watching the cat nap on all his various perches around the apartment has turned out to be one of the small joys of my new life here.  Sometimes Stuffed sprawls out along the windowsill until he looks two feet long, and other times he'll curl up on top of the couch with his paws all tucked under his body like a bunny. He naps with one arm outstretched sometimes too, and when he's safely on the floor he'll stretch out on his back for a second with all four paws pointing outward, then curl up into a ball again. Most adorably of all, he can sometimes be found asleep with his paws over his eyes.  "Go back to sleep, Stuffed," I hear myself softly saying when he begins to stir, and I sit extra-still as his fluffy football-shaped head slowly settles back onto whatever he's using as a pillow.  He scrunches up his nose every now and then, with his cheeks and whiskers quivering around it.  I wonder if he's dreaming, and I hope that if he is, that it's a good dream.  

I emailed Mike while he was at work one day in October to tell him I'd changed my mind about cats:

The thing I meant to tell you about Stuffed awhile back is that I've been thinking about what I said about him before--"What a boring life! All he does is eat, sleep, visit the litter box, and look out the window!"--and realized/decided a few weeks ago that some things, like cats, must just be here to be loved by us. They don't serve much of a purpose, so maybe they're "just" here to make us happy and give us something to love and take care of (and ooh and ahh over while they sleep curled up in a ball). That's my new theory and perspective on cats.

A couple months since that email, I have learned something else about cats, as well: I don't know anymore if I could ever consider a place "home" without one. Just as I feel when I look up from writing a letter and see Mr. Mike contentedly reading his newspaper and drinking coffee, it makes me happy to see Stuffed looking so peaceful here. I probably could have figured it would come to this--my slowly becoming a cat person. My childhood favorites had purring cats at their ankles, after all: Strawberry Shortcake had Custard and Holly Hobbie always had a kitten nearby.  Anyway, dear little Stuffed has found his way into my heart.  I'd tell him right now, but he's asleep.  ♥

Love your friends. Give them dignity and richness, and help make their time alive abundant. --Alexandra Stoddard

our first Thanksgiving together  ♥

My Year

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.

Enchanted by My Fairy Roses

Bliss!

To Papa and Grandma

Tomorrow, July 1st, is my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. To celebrate, I’m making Papa’s gnocchi and meatballs and Grandma’s chocolate cream pie for my parents and brothers. As at all of our family dinners, there will be much laughter and teasing and no small amount of love. At tomorrow’s dinner, we thank Papa and Grandma for setting the example.

One Sunday afternoon while we were all visiting at their house when I was a kid, Grandma started talking about her and Papa’s wedding day. They had dated for a year and a half and were 28 and 29 when they got married; Grandma was a year older. When she mentioned how “jittery” she’d been that day, I interrupted, “Why were you nervous?!? It was just Papa!” She, Papa, and the rest of the family laughed and laughed, but it was many years before I understood that they hadn’t always been “Papa and Grandma,” let alone that they weren’t “Papa and Grandma” to each other. I laugh now, too, thinking about it, but a part of me wishes I could sit them both down tonight and say, “Really, in all honesty, you guys didn’t know that it would work out like this? You truly didn’t know that this would be your story? You really didn’t see all of this?” Forget space: just as I was as a child, I am still at least as taken aback at the thought of “Papa and Grandma” having a beginning or an end.

Had I had the foresight, I would have been sure to ask my grandparents all kinds of things about their courtship and marriage, but I didn’t have what could be considered my first date until after they both had died, so by the time I cared enough to know the answers, it was too late to ask the questions. Once when I was in college, Papa delved into the topic, but I was too embarrassed and self-conscious to discuss it in any real way. “You’re not interested in the boys yet, are you?” were the words he found, and it was more of a statement than a question. Assuming he wouldn’t understand, I simply answered, “I haven’t found any yet who interest me. I’m—I’m picky.” Feeling stupid, I half-expected him to laugh, but he didn’t, of course. He just nodded his head slowly and, squeezing the back of my neck, responded, “That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with being picky.” Had I been braver, I’d have admitted to him and Grandma that I doubted I’d ever find a man I loved as much as I loved him—and that I didn’t think, dateless all my life as I’d been, that even if I did someday find such a man, that he would love me in return. Papa had set the bar. The summer after I graduated from college, I’d started writing a poem about him, but seven years later, I still haven’t finished it. I get as far as “You were my first hero, Papa, and the first man I ever said ‘I love you’ to,” and I again set it aside to work on another time. It has always just seemed too much to hope for: a husband as fine as my grandfather, a marriage as blessed as my grandparents’.  This is a conversation I now wish the three of us had had.

 When Grandma called one afternoon to let us know that Papa died, a few months before what would have been my grandparents’ 62nd wedding anniversary, my parents and brothers and I left our jobs for the day and raced to gather to be with her. As we sat around her in chairs and at her feet, Grandma handed me a book of her favorite poems and asked me to read “Should You Go First” by Albert Kennedy "Rosey" Rowswell. She had been reading it to herself just before we’d arrived, she explained. The last stanza buoyed her but further broke my heart; She was imagining their reunion--only five weeks away, not that any of us knew that then--and I was just aching for the past.  

“Should you go first and I remain,
One thing I'd have you do:
Walk slowly down that long, lone path,
For soon I'll follow you.
I'll want to know each step you take
That I may walk the same,
For some day down that lonely road
You'll hear me call your name.”
 

At Papa’s viewing, Grandma joined me at his casket and tried to get me to stop crying, but it was quite awhile before I collected myself enough to see and speak, and when I did, Papa’s hands were what caught my attention. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band. I asked my grandmother if she had kept his ring, and she replied that Papa had never worn one. I had never even noticed. He just never wanted one, Grandma explained, and the extra expense at the time they got married didn’t seem worth it. I nodded in understanding, and Grandma pulled me closer and said, “He always said that we were his jewels, our children and I--and later on, you kids, of course.” That set me off again, and Grandma rubbed the small of my back as I wept.
 

My grandparents didn’t exchange birthday or anniversary or Christmas presents with each other, and neither had grown up in a time or family that encouraged demonstrativeness or sentimentality. I never saw them kiss or hug. But Grandma would cook and bake Papa’s favorite foods, and Papa never returned from a walk in the woods without a bouquet of wildflowers for Grandma. He teasingly called her his “little Napoleon” because she was French—her family had come here from France years before Papa’s had arrived from Italy—and she would begin all of her retorts to him with a combination “Shhhhh!” and clucking sound. In 1993, my mom bought Grandma a book to fill out for me and my brothers in which she was to record her anecdotes and memories. A line in the book asks for a description of how she and Papa spent their days. She stayed busy with the “usual household chores,” Grandma dryly reported, and Papa spent his days “working, gardening, and picking at me.” I laugh as I reread that now, and I’m also remembering that my grandfather would often tell her, “You know what? You’re a good kid, Mum!” It would make us all smile, Papa working his charm this way on a now-blushing-but-still-pretending-to-be-annoyed Grandma. You’re a good kid, Mum!
As the final guests left the viewing, I asked my mom if she was sure that Grandma understood that she wouldn’t get to see Papa again after that night—it would be closed casket for the next morning’s funeral—and she said she thought so but went over to Grandma to see if she wanted to go up to the casket one last time before we took her home. Grandma did, and exhausted by the past few days, was gently led by some of the family to the front of the room. After a few moments, she collapsed onto Papa’s chest and whimpered, “Goodnight, my buddy.” My mom and just about everyone else in earshot completely dissolved then and hurried to help her, but I stood by momentarily too stunned to cry or move. It had just dawned on me that above everything else, my grandparents were each other’s friends. The very last thing she ever said to him taught me what I had most needed to know about marriage—and what I most wanted out of my own. After 62 years--more than six decades! more than half a century!--the very last time she looked at him, she was seeing “my buddy.” My buddy. “Papa and Grandma” was a friendship. Papa and Grandma were friends.


As a swift kick when we were already down, the morning we received the florist’s bill for Papa’s funeral arrangements, we also got the phone call letting us know that Grandma died. The only peace there was to be had that day was in the hope that they were finally (out of pain and) together again. Even in those short five weeks after Papa had died and we would speak of going to visit Grandma, it had been “going down to Papa and Grandma’s.” Before Papa had died, the only nights they had ever spent apart were those of my grandmother’s three maternity stays. Grandma had been ill the last six months of her life and had lived just as long as her doctors had predicted, but the fact that Papa passed on one month and Grandma the next still struck us as a detail most-fitting to their story. One of my second cousins told me at Grandma’s funeral that my grandparents “could have been a TV show!” As we sat beside each other waiting for the service to begin, she turned in her chair to face me and laughed in half-whispers, “Ohhhhhh, when they would start in on each other! You know, [your grandmother] didn’t have his sense of humor--she was so dry and quiet about things--but she still gave it right back to him! When we were kids, we’d look forward to their visits just to hear them together!”

Had I ever put any thought into it while my grandparents were alive, I’d have been able to figure most of this out, of course. That they were people before they were grandparents and each other’s friends above and beyond “Papa and Grandma” should have been no mystery. And I suppose I did understand these things on some level. While I was staying with them one summer week as a kid, the song “Friends and Lovers” came on the radio during lunch. Grandma liked it and asked why they didn’t make more nice songs like that. I was mortified--the song was about lovers!--and tried to change the subject. If 30-year-old Val could have a do-over of that moment, she would leave the blushing 10-year-old to her pancakes and listen more closely to the tale her grandparents were telling, for however long they had to tell it. Was Papa always your buddy, Grandma, or did he gradually become that to you? I am interested in the boys now, Papa, if you want to talk? There are no do-overs, though, so after saying thanks tomorrow for the gathering of family over gnocchi and pie, I will pray to Papa and Grandma that I paid enough attention to their story to shape a sweet one of my own.

Storybook Blooms and Little Girl Rouge

Although I didn’t start gardening until I was twenty-seven, my interest in it was sparked as a kid both by my grandparents’ wonderland of a yard and by a book my Mom bought me when I was maybe five or six, The Care Bears’ Garden.  My grandmother, for all the many flowers she had, never had Hollyhocks or Foxgloves while I was growing up, so when I saw them in the book’s illustrations, I thought of them as magical storybook kind of flowers--much like the giggling posies in the Chuckle Patch on "The Magic Garden," one of my favorite childhood TV shows and probably another inspiration. I didn’t know the cute drawings were based on real flowers. Hollyhocks and Foxgloves still delight me. This week, my own Foxgloves began to bloom.

My so-far-favorite rose, Louise Odier, also opened up this week. When I was little, the neighborhood girls and I would rub onto our faces the fallen petals of our neighbor Gracie’s roses, feeling quite womanly as we did so, of course. I’m transported back to those summer moments spent crouched in front of Gracie’s plastic picket fence every time I smell this flower.




All in all, I'm a happy five-year-old while in my garden this week, even if I've stopped rouging my cheeks with rose petals. 

Thinking About Miss Melly

For my birthday this year, my parents bought me prints of one of my favorite movie characters, Melanie from Gone with the Wind. I have loved these photos for years and think Olivia de Havilland is in this film the most beautiful woman ever to grace the screen. It has been an every-other-year-or-so tradition since I was thirteen for my mom and I to camp out on the couch with pillows and blankets and watch the movie together, and my parents have laughed at me every single time because I never fail to exclaim “Really! Why does everyone make such a fuss about Scarlett?! Melanie is beautiful! Look at her!” The film’s costume designers kept “Melly” in what they considered dowdy clothing and necessarily bland mourning clothes so as to contrast her with flounced-up Scarlett, but Melanie’s beauty, like all true beauty, wasn’t dependent on flashy makeup or fancy clothing anyway. (And I’d happily wear any of her Gone with the Wind costumes. Oh, for the opportunity to wear such gorgeous dresses every day! I’ll say it again: I was born in the wrong century.) Today ninety years old, Olivia de Havilland is still beautiful, but she herself has stated in interviews that out of her entire career, there was just something special about the role of Melanie and that ever since portraying her, she has found herself trying to live up to the character’s goodness. I think that goodness is precisely what sets Melanie apart from countless other pretty movie characters. Here is a woman who understands the wisdom of kindness--And you can see it in her face.

It struck me the last time I watched the movie that I’ve never heard anyone discuss Melanie and Rhett’s friendship. Delicate and modest, Melanie has more strength and smarts than maybe anyone else in the film, and Rhett himself is savvy enough to see and appreciate that. It is Melanie who listens to Rhett when he breaks down over his failings as a husband to Scarlett, it is from Melanie that an ecstatic Rhett comes up with the name for his newborn daughter, and when the little girl dies and Rhett refuses to see anyone or let the girl be buried, Melanie is the only one respected enough by him to be allowed in. When, after hours of being locked in the grief-stricken man’s room with him and his daughter’s body, an exhausted Melanie appears at the door and lets Mammy know that Rhett’s agreed to bury the girl and that she should bring him coffee and sandwiches, we know just what this woman and her friendship with Rhett is made of. On her deathbed, she implores Scarlett to be kind to him. “He loves you so.” Rhett and Melanie are unlikely friends but friends just the same. And even at thirteen, I only had to see how gentlemanly this playboy of a man was to her to know that he was ultimately good. Most women swoon over the handsome character as soon as they see him—my mom always says her “Ooh, Baby!” the first second he appears on-screen—but I couldn’t really like him until I trusted him. He passed that “Val-test.”

So now I get to see my beloved “Miss Melly” every day, and so I am reminded every time I look at her of the kind of person and lady and friend I want to be. In a line that stops me in my tracks, Melanie’s husband, Ashley, describes her as “the only dream I ever had that didn't die in the face of reality.”  Beautiful.