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In no particular order, here are a few of the many hearts that have graced my path this past year that hadn't made it onto the blog before.
And now feeling like Cliff Clavin showing the "Cheers" crew his potato that looked like Richard Nixon, I sign off. :)
I found this sweet shot of Stuffed with other saved photos and can't imagine why I didn't share it before. It is from February 2012. He looks like a kitten here but was around thirteen years old at the time. Could he be any more adorable!?! I can't imagine how he could have been any cuter when he actually was a kitten. ♥ (He was a few years old already when Mike saw him for the first time, and he was around eight when I met him.)
Ohhh, my heart, he's the dearest, sweetest thing.
'Love, love, love this little puffball. The perfectly-curled tufts of white fur that stick out of his ears! The half-black/half-white face! He's perfectly designed, a work-of-art of an animal.
The alternating black-white-black-white of his body! And that he holds himself like this while he sleeps! ♥
Truly like a favorite stuffed animal come-to-life, he's just such a precious little soul. (And the pink toes. . . ! Gah!) Sweet Stuffed. ♥
While I was home last month, my aunt Heidi passed around a folder full of old family photos, and one of them was this treasure from 1980. I had never seen it before, and I'm still transfixed by it two weeks later. This is one of the only candid shots of me and my mom that I've ever seen, and it's also one of only a few pictures of my mom from this time period, since she was almost always the one behind the camera. Look at her looking at me: Sweet Mama! ♥ (She was probably just wondering what she was going to do with her crazy-haired three-year-old, but we'll imagine that she had more poignant and profound thoughts at this moment.) And we are sitting in a gingham kitchen, of course. So dear!
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| ♥ Click to enlarge. ♥ |
Grandma proudly labeled this photo "Our Gum tree, fall of 1990," I saw when I inherited her photos in 2001. Papa and Grandma's trees and gardens were brilliant, and I always loved how their house was nestled behind the trees and Rhododendrons, but to me, the true caption for this picture is Home. Or Love. Childhood. Safety. Ever since I was a kid, whenever I've had those crazy panicked someone-is-chasing-me sort of nightmares, I've always thought "I have to get to Papa and Grandma's. I just need to make it to Papa and Grandma's." And in every dream, every time, their beautiful yard suddenly appears in the distance as I run and I know I just need to reach it in order to be safe. The Bad Guys disappear at my grandparents' house, Papa and Grandma's bee boxes and raspberry bushes and tree swing serving as my dream world's line of demarcation. People who have had near-death experiences often report that they passed through a peaceful tunnel and were greeted by a glowing light; When my time comes, I want to find myself in Papa and Grandma's yard--just long enough to get my bearings straight, you understand. Oddly, it is almost exactly three years to the day since I last wrote here about missing my grandparents' yard. Maybe autumn just makes me especially nostalgic. Or maybe there really is some magic in this simple gray-shingled house and the trees that surround it, just as there is something special about every place we love that we feel loves us back.
♥
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.
Mike took this photo of us in our hotel room on our wedding day two years ago. It's one of my favorites from that whole day. Our smiles! We had just finished calling our parents to tell them the news, and the blushing giddiness we felt after those laughter-filled conversations is still on our faces in the picture. "Oh, I figured you were up to something!" Mike's mom responded to his announcement. "You never call in the middle of the day on a Friday like this!" My own mom tried to speak normally but kept giggling and barely managed to call out to my dad in the background, "GENE! Val's MARRIED!" When she put my dad on, we caught up, and then he mentioned, in his usual Dad's Daily Diary-fashion, some dish he had recently cooked for his and Mom's supper that had bacon in it, and when I replied that it sounded like something Mike would love, Dad chortled, "That's right! Mike! I'll have to make it next time you're both here! For my son-in-law!" I love remembering these moments, all of us simultaneously shy and stunned-a-bit-stupid and and laughing during every pause in our conversations.
Tittering to each other and repeatedly rubbing our thumbs against the backs of our plain silver bands, Mike and I took one more picture and talked about where to go for supper. We decided on a restaurant. We commented that it would be Our First Meal as a Married Couple. We laughed some more. And hand in hand, we set off.
This is one of my most-treasured photos and was taken at my grandparents' house in February 1998 after a special dinner that Grandma had made to celebrate her and my two February-born brothers' birthdays. My family was getting ready to leave, but I insisted on a few pictures, and thank God: I love that this moment was captured on film. I was a few months shy of 21 here, and Papa had turned 86 a few months prior. I recently reread something I'd written in my journal years ago in which I mentioned that for awhile after Papa died in 2001, I would sleep holding one of his old shirts. I had forgotten that. I do remember working off and on for years on a poem about him that I began months before he died and never was able to finish to my satisfaction. "You were my first hero, Papa," it began. "...The first man I ever said 'I love you' to." Eleven Februaries later, those are still all the things that first come to mind when I think of my grandfather: We made each other laugh, I was devastated when he died, he was my first hero, and he was the first man to hear my "I love you." And I could not have been any more blessed.
I spent a lot of last year scanning family photos and adding them to online albums, and the peace of mind I feel at having them all together and accessible to me now when I'm hours away from my parents' photo albums and baby books and boxes of loose pictures makes all the time it took to sort, upload, date, and label them worthwhile. One of my favorites is this one of me and my younger brother taken in the mid-1980s. My brother was about three years old here, and I was about eight. (Even if I didn't know the date already, my Mary Lou Retton Wanna-Be haircut would be the giveaway for me.) When Mom announced she wanted a picture of us, Bri stood up on a kitchen chair. We threw our arms around each other completely spontaneously, which is what makes this one a family favorite. My grandparents kept this picture in one of their albums, and every now and then while visiting them, I would pull the old albums down from the little three-tiered brass shelf Grandma kept them on and would make my family look through all the pictures yet again. The stories that get told and retold about each picture never change, and so my mom has always said the same thing about this shot: "I asked you two to smile for me and you held each other like that as if you'd planned it." The photograph captures something my memory never would have: Bri and I looked so much alike in 1985! I hadn't realized as a child that we had such similar eyes and smiles. What I have always remembered, though, is how hard we were laughing both while the picture was taken and afterward. The fact that we'd both decided at the same moment to put our arms around each other like that struck us as wildly funny, and we laughed over it like loons. Both the picture and memories always make me smile. ♥
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