How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. ~ Annie Dillard

♥

Dad and the Val-Mark Corporation

I don't think my dad has ever received a store-bought card from me.  Starting when I was a kid, I've always drawn his card--he's the only one in the family who gets these goofy things--and the tradition continued yesterday with the mailing of his 2013 Father's Day card and care package.  Each year's Father's Day and birthday cartoon reflects some current in-joke or happening between us.  This year's was a depiction of him proudly standing beside the mantel he built for me and Mike.  He is, of course, clad in a Pirates baseball t-shirt and denim cut-off shorts.  (This is what he's almost always wearing in my drawings.  It's part of the tradition.) 

Another--and more integral-part of the hand-drawn card tradition is my tagline on the back:  "Val-Mark:  ♥  When you care enough to make the very best."  I considered that pretty clever when I thought of it as a kid.  Now, it's just tradition, and tradition must be upheld!  Dad knows it will always be there on the back of all of his cards from me. 

This year's card was nestled in a shoe box between a letter and some recent photos, a couple wrapped gifts, and a bunch of edibles.  An Almond Joy or Mounds bar appears somewhere in all his birthday and holiday gifts from me.  Once when I was staying with my grandparents for a few days in the summer, the day my parents were to pick me up happened to be my dad's birthday, and my grandmother asked me as we were out shopping the day before what I'd like to get my dad for his gift.  She just smiled as I went to a checkout line to grab a candy bar, and I overheard her telling my dad the next day, "I asked Val what she wanted to get you for your birthday, and she said she always gives you one of those?"  She sounded bemused, but I wasn't embarassed as I listened-in because Dad's response was something along the lines of a kindly laughing "Well, yes, it's tradition."  ♥ 

Dad's Beagle-and-heart-covered shoe box is winging its way toward him as I type this and should reach him tomorrow.  And until his August birthday rolls around, the Val-Mark greeting card industry has again closed up shop.  ♥

So Am I, Little Plant

One of our neighbors in the building set this out on the front stoop this morning.  ♥  The weather really is gorgeous here today after a week of cloudy gray-white skies and rain.  

I Stumbled, But I Never Fell: Eighteen Years Ago Today

Eighteen years ago today, I was hiking Cornell University's campus in Ithaca, New York and its nearby trails with my uncle Eric and one of his friends.  I had both turned eighteen and graduated from high school the month before and was spending six weeks of the summer living with my Ithaca family.  Eric, who has always been "Eric" and never "Uncle Eric"--a story for another day--and his friend were twenty-nine at the time, a fact that for some reason was shared in the seconds right before or right after this picture was taken.  I remember laughing ("You're not twenty-nine!  Stop!") before doing the math and realizing they weren't kidding.  This was the first time we'd seen each other since the early 1980s.  Here we are, then, at eighteen and twenty-nine, all sunburnt and nostalgic, on Cornell's Suspension Bridge in the summer of 1995.

My maternal grandmother had invited both me and my best friend Sommer to stay with her after our graduation.  Sommer died on March 1st that year, though, and in the picture above and every other one from the last ten months of 1995, I still look shell-shocked to myself, every smile tentative since happiness had become something I was afraid to feel, let alone show, for fear of having it abruptly snatched away from me as Sommer had been.  She was supposed to have been with me in all that summer's pictures and scrapbook pages, the two of us tanned and teasing and blissfully eighteen.  Instead, six mornings after Eric and I hiked around Cornell, I woke up from the first dream I'd had after Som's death in which I'd heard her voice--her voice again!  Sommer's voice!--and raced downstairs to find my family and breathlessly tell them about it.  And then the searing pain of her loss ripped through me again, because--Really?  This is what it had come to?  Being thrilled to have a dream in which I heard my best friend's voice?  This was the way life was for me now?  This was what was left for me?  Other eighteen-year-olds were spending their summer hanging out with their friends--in real life!  not in their dreams!--and shopping for their first college dorm room.  I felt like I was eighteen going on a hundred that summer.

June 5th of 1995,  though, was when I began to find my footing, both literally and figuratively, as Eric and I walked through Ithaca's gorges and hiked up and down its hills.  It was the hardest I'd laughed and the most fun I'd had in months.  Not pictured above are the high-heel espadrilles I was wearing that day.  I'm not a "shoe person," but I loved those shoes.  They had long ballerina-like laces that wrapped around my ankles, and they looked like cream crochet.  "Can you walk in those?" Eric asked as we set off on our hike that day, and I confidently said yes in that stupid way you confidently say yes when you know you're wearing beloved but utterly impractical footwear.  And then he and his friend had to walk down all the slopes ahead of me in order to form a sort of wall with their bodies that would stop my momentum as I laughingly tumbled my way down in the silly things.  To all our credit, I stumbled, but I never fell.  

Looking back, the day was clearly a turning point for me.  When we returned to Grammy's house late that afternoon, my cut-off shorts and once-cream shoes now muddy and my face red from the sun, she greeted us by noting that it looked like I had had a good time.  I had.  And if I had had one good time after Sommer's death, I now realized, that meant there were still good times to be had.  And if I had had one, then the odds were good that I would have another.  And if I would have more good times, especially with people I loved and who loved me, then this life business must still be a pretty good deal.  Eric and his friend had mentioned as we crossed the suspension bridge that day that it had been the site of more than a few suicide attempts.  I can't help but remember that whenever I remember this photo and day, and it is not lost on me that the point where others gave up is the point where I myself started to come back to life.  There but for the grace of God. . . .  And today it's been exactly eighteen years since our hike, and I am seven years older now than Eric and his friend were then.  Doing the math always drives the point home, doesn't it:  Life goes on.  And we are blessed as we go along with it, shell-shocked and sunburnt and silly-shoed as we all sometimes find ourselves, laughing despite our losses and fumbling our way forward. 

The Pink Pegboard Project

Like Mike and I now, my grandparents had little kitchen storage space.  The pegboard they kept above their kitchen sink was the first I'd ever seen, and I was always fascinated by it as a kid.  They keep their bottle opener and spatula on their wall?!  When we're done washing and drying these big spoons, we're just going to hang them on the wall?!  Decades--and more than a few small apartments--later, I agree with Papa and Grandma that vertical storage is the way to go.  Until I finished this project Friday afternoon, Mike and I had to paw through two green bins on top of our fridge every time we needed a utensil, so this is one more step toward a happier Mike and Val--well, I care way more than he does, but how could it not make him happier!--and a more organized apartment.  This turned out exactly as I'd envisioned. 

I wish, as I often do after finishing projects like this, that I'd taken a true "before" picture.  The pegboard is a small piece of the pegboard from my parents' garage-wall, and the frame is actually a picture frame I found at Goodwill years ago that used to hold a piece of canvas artwork.  When Mike and I made the trip to my parents' house for our first anniversary last year, I dug the frame out of my former bedroom's closet and brought it back with us, figuring I could use the frame for something.  At some point, it occured to me that the "something" I needed most was more storage space, so the pegboard idea for it was born. 

I cut away the canvas artwork last winter, ripped out all the many staples with pliers some time later, and asked my dad for a piece of 19.5"-square pegboard for my birthday.  (My wish lists are usually this simple, yes.  "What do you want for Christmas?" my parents and brothers will ask me and then quickly add, "And don't say 'Postage stamps and glue!'")  My dad gave me the pegboard and a few starter-hooks when we came home for a visit in April.  I used a birthday gift card from my younger brother to buy a few more hooks.  

Soap and water, wood glue, Super Glue, hammer and nails, and who-knows-how-many coats of green and (first paler pink and then bolder) bubblegum pink acrylic paint and protective gloss varnish later, I finished getting the pegboard together on Friday. 

 And now for us, as it was for Papa and Grandma, finding what we need in our little kitchen is as easy as reaching for its spot on the wall.  "Life is too complicated not to be orderly," as Martha Stewart says, and I agree.  Every time I walk into our kitchen now, I feel a wave of contentment come over me.  ♥

All done.  Cue the relaxed "Ahhhhhhh!"  ♥

We Who Here Read

From the plaque of a favorite local monument:  "With humility, gratitude, and remembrance, we honor forever those our neighbors who gave their lives. . .that we who here read might live in these United States in peace with both God and man."  ♥

God made the cat in order that man might have the pleasure of caressing the lion. ~ Fernand Mery

Stuffed the Magnificent.  Love, love, love.  ♥

Home Sweet Apartment ~ in Pink

Since bringing back from my parents' house the mantel my dad built for me and Mike last April, I've been painting it and fixing up the things that will surround it.  My treasured old "Home Sweet Apartment" needlepoint is the first piece I've revamped for the mantel-wall.  It was one of my very first eBay finds back in 2001, that most-miserable of years, and even though--or maybe especially because--I was unexpectedly living with my parents again at the time, I was thrilled when mine was the winning bid:  This vintage sampler, like a Field of Dreams-type "If-you-find-the-decorations-for-it-the-new-home-will-come" talisman,  gave me something concrete to work toward as a frustrated twenty-four-year-old.  

In the summer of 2002 when I finally had my first all-to-myself-with-no-roommates apartment, I delighted in unpacking the needlepoint and dolling it up, and what a year before had arrived pine green and maroon with an unfinished wooden frame became pink and aqua to match the little dining nook in my new place.  

"Home Sweet Apartment" behind me as I would sit in the corner seat under it there and work on school work for my second Masters program.  "Home Sweet Apartment" beside my newly-ex-boyfriend and I as we sat across from each other at this vintage tablecloth-clad table eating bowls of my homemade soup and awkwardly figuring out our post-breakup friendship.  "Home Sweet Apartment" above me as I bawled my heart out in this pink-dotted chair the following New Year's night after realizing we weren't ready to be "just friends" just yet and that we might never be able to in this lifetime.  The sampler over me and my mom when she showed up on a whim with two chocolate muffins from the bakery and listened as I made us tea and told her all about it.  The sampler over a whole bunch of us when I hosted both my first family dinner and first birthday party and relearned that as long as I had love to give--and gave it--I wasn't down for the count.  Before I moved out of this first "all mine" apartment, a former professor joined me for cookies and lemonade under the needlepoint and commented that I was good at making people feel welcome.  "Hospitality is your thing, isn't it," he thoughtfully noted.  And that's when "Home Sweet Apartment" really clicked for me:  I really had created a home here, not just filled and decorated a rented space. 

The pink and aqua needlepoint became a more subdued and not-very-Val-like red and yellow in 2007, so as not to overwhelm Mike with my pink-and-rainbow-loving tendencies.  Our studio apartment was so tiny, it was hard to do any real decorating in it at all, so the yellow and red actually didn't bother me too much.  When you can roll out of bed in your home-sweet-apartment and land on the kitchen floor, or open the bathroom door while sitting at the dinner table, the color combination of a sampler's matte and frame isn't your biggest homemaking concern.  Besides, the sweet sampler watched over me and Mike, this time hanging from the apartment's built-in mantel, during all our goings-on for four years the same as it had when it had been pink and aqua for me before.  Home was still love-filled and our favorite place.  Be it ever so humble, you know.   

Today it became pink again, though, and I don't see it changing after this.  It finally looks just right to me.  I covered the yellow matte with the dotted pink upholstery fabric that I had used to cover the captain chairs in my little circa-2002 pink and aqua corner.  I repainted the red frame black.  And I removed the glass-front since I don't trust this apartment's wall to hold its weight.  While I continue painting the mantel and fixing up the wall around it, at least this much is done.  That I figured out a way to incorporate the old chair fabric makes me especially happy.  

"Lighten up, Val--It's a sampler," I know, but when I look at it, I remember the journey it's accompanied me on and think of it as a witness to the past twelve years.  When Mike and I eventually move on from renting, I will pass it on to its next owners with a prayer for their own resilience and contented refuge in home.  

Sweet, indeed.  ♥

36

I turn thirty-six years old today.  I am the rare soul who loves to grow older.  I've loved my thirties and can't wait to be forty and have been saying since I was a kid, "Can you imagine being eighty or ninety someday!?  Knowing everything you'll know by that point and having learned that much and experienced that much and finally being able to see how so many of the pieces and story-lines of your life all fit together?!  Wow!"  Wow, indeed.  My older brother will be forty in February and has long been lamenting his "advanced" age, but I myself love it. 

We all had a sweet visit over the weekend.  My mom loved her paper dolls, yes.  As predicted, right after the "Oh my gosh!" and "Vally, how did you FIND this?!" came "There's IDA!  Oh, I remember her!  I always remembered there was an Ida with dark hair pulled up on top!"  :)  My younger brother and his wife announced that they're expecting their first baby in November.  Aunt Laurie and I sat at the dining room table with mugs of hot chocolate Sunday night and looked through a stack of old Country Living magazines that Mom had found at the flea market the day before.  Mom made my traditional birthday cheesecake (made with lemon gelatin) and wrapped my gifts in a pink polka dot paper.  (My brothers groan and make fun of me because I take so long to unwrap presents, but I admire the gift wraps and bows and cards so much and always save a scrap of each wrapping paper from birthdays and Christmas.  They thought and hoped I could open my gifts during the twenty-minute intermission during the hockey game they were watching Sunday, but alas, no, so they turned on the radio to listen to the next period while I finished.  ["Brothers."  :)])  My older brother gave me my traditional birthday bag of rhubarb from his garden.  My uncle showed me his new camera.  My cousin Mark and I caught up and watched a couple shows on the Food network.  My dad and I laughed at the fact that Mom is all excited about the "new" shade of blue she and Dad have been repainting the house this past week even though it's looked to the rest of us like the exact same blue since 1978.  My nephew regaled us with sports trivia, and my niece's ever-growing refrigerator collection of grinning cat drawings--each one labeled "HELLO KITTY!"--still has me and Mike giggling.  

I'm not 100% yet but am feeling much better.  Thank you.  ♥  I hadn't been sick since around New Year's, so that was a great good-health streak for me.  And I have a few more days to rest before returning to work, so this should be a restorative week.  

Last year's rainbow birthday cake took forever to make, although it was so fun and cheerful, it was worth it to me, but I needed rest more than rainbows this time around, so tonight's dessert for me and Mike was two slices of carrot cake from a local coffee shop.  

And especially since I never found pink Tulips for Easter or my beloved Daffodils at all this spring, I treated myself to a small bouquet of orange Tulips this afternoon.  It rained here almost all day, so orange was the way to go today.  Here's to another year of trying to shine brighter and to be better and wiser and kinder, both to self and others.  Here's to thirty-six.  ♥

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.  ♥