O Love-Star of the Unbeloved March ~ Sir Aubrey de Vere

The best thing about this time of year is seeing my beloved Daffodils in bloom all over town. Yesterday's rain and snow bent them some, but they're no less beautiful for it. 

Time spent with cats is never wasted. ~ May Sarton

Unconquerable

Today is the 16th anniversary of my best friend's death. Last year March 1st passed by almost unnoticed by me, making me think that maybe future March 1sts would be easier than they used to be, but this year the date is hurting my heart the way it used to, and I find myself reliving the play-by-play of the "original" March 1st. Likewise, the one-year mark, back in 1996, actually wasn't too bad--I wrote Sommer a letter in my journal and really felt okay--but the second anniversary found me feeling abandoned by her and again brokenhearted by the loss. Such is grief.

That second anniversary, March 1st of 1997, I was home from college for the weekend. I remember complaining off and on all day to my mom that I hadn't felt much of a connection to Sommer lately and that that was making this day even harder. I had recently transferred to a new college, after having completed my freshman year elsewhere, and I had yet to make any friends at school. It didn't seem like too much to ask, I'm sure I pointed out to Mom, for Sommer to let me know that she was still around me. I had been so lonely that fall and winter, watching seemingly every other student on campus hanging out with their own best friend. So maybe today, two years after her death, there could be a sign of some kind: A whiff of her perfume, a favorite song of ours on the radio, a sense of her hand on my shoulder--Anything.

Sommer had come through for me before since passing over, after all. One afternoon in my high school Spanish class in those first few soul-shattering weeks after she had died--and mere minutes after my teacher had thoughtfully asked how I was doing and if things were getting any easier and I had replied, trying not to cry in front of him, that no, sorry, I thought things were actually getting harder and worse--I wearily flipped open a book of Spanish literature I had been assigned in preparation for my end-of-year AP exams only to find myself looking down at a Pablo Neruda poem titled "The Dead Woman":

If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you no longer live,
I shall go on living.
I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.
I shall go on living.
For where a man has no voice,
there, my voice.
Where blacks are beaten,
I cannot be dead.
When my brothers go to prison
I shall go with them.
When victory,
not my victory,
but the great victory comes,
even though I am mute I must speak;
I shall see it come even
though I am blind.
No, forgive me.

If you are not living,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but

I shall go on living,
because above all things
you wanted me unconquerable,

and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man
but all mankind.
 

Upon reading it, I got up from my desk and carried the book back to my teacher, pointing at the poem with shaky hands. "Can you believe this?" I tried to whisper, since it was silent reading time. "Look at this! Have you seen this before?!" He quickly scanned the poem and nodded at me, understanding what I was and wasn't saying. By the end of the class period, I had memorized the poem and its beautiful lines had become my mantras. "If you are not living, if you my beloved, my love, if you have died. . .But I shall go on living. . .You wanted me unconquerable."
 

But two years later, March 1st of 1997 was passing without a sign from Sommer, and long after my parents and younger brother had gone to bed that night, I finally gave up on it and decided to turn in too.  I stayed in bed for awhile but could tell I wasn't going to fall asleep any time soon, so I grabbed a blanket and tiptoed back downstairs to watch TV in the living room. I wasn't much of a TV-watcher then--I haven't been since I was a kid--and I didn't have a TV in my dorm room back at college either, so I had no idea what was on, and I didn't care. The first channel I stopped at was showing a film I hadn't seen or even heard of before, and I soon found that it wasn't by accident that it was on: The movie was Truly, Madly, Deeply.  In it, Nina is grieving the recent death of her boyfriend, Jamie, and Jamie returns to her both to show her that he's still there for her and to help her move on with her life. This is it! My sign! I wanted to scream upstairs to my mom, but the rest of the house was asleep. I settled back onto the couch cuddled up in my blanket, stunned.

And then I was yet more stunned to hear Spanish being spoken in the movie, and to hear Nina saying to Jamie, "I know this poem." As I sat and watched, with a chill moving through me, Jamie nodded back at her, and continued reciting the poem's verses in Spanish while Nina translated them back to him in English.  I knew this poem too:

"If you are not living,
If you, my beloved, my love,if you have died. . .
But I shall go on living."

My spine tingled. This is Sommer. Sommer is here. Sommer is here! This time, I didn't even want to call upstairs to Mom. This was my time with my friend. As loyal as ever, she had not forgotten me, she had not abandoned me, and she had not forgotten how to make me feel better. After the movie ended, I remained on the couch in the dark silent living room, just thinking. Had I come back downstairs to watch TV even five minutes later, I'd have missed it. Before heading back upstairs to go to bed later, I would tear that day's TV schedule page from the newspaper to save as a reminder to myself: Death does not end relationships. All those I've loved and lost are still with me. Love is eternal. And I shall go on living. ♥

(The Spanish begins around the 3:25-mark.)

 

Sick Day(s) with Stuffed

'Hoping this miserable cold does not turn into the full-blown respiratory infection I had in August, I have spent the past few days in bed trying to rest as much as possible. Stuffed remains by my side, only stirring when jostled awake when I get up to get another orange or more tea. Sweet little cat. ♥

Fast away the old year passes

In early December, my friend Madai shared a photo of a dear little "Deck the Halls" sign tucked in with her Christmas decorations, and it just spoke to me. The font, the size, the simplicity, the weathered black and sepia, the frame, the message: I just purely loved this tiny thing. Imagine my surprise last week when a care package from Madai arrived and after gently undoing a small sheet of pale blue polka dotted tissue paper, I found "my" sign inside! I hadn't expected that, and while it was part of an entire box full of thoughtful and beautifully-wrapped goodies, the little sign and its accompanying note were what touched me the most and made me cry. Thank you again, sweet Madai! Stuffed soon abandoned it for his food dish, but I myself will treasure it--and you--always. ♥

I look forward to 2011, but I just don't feel ready for it. I don't feel done with 2010 yet. I just packed away the Christmas decorations Monday.  And 2010 was a pretty neat year: I redid our bathroom in red polka dots.   We survived the blizzard in February, although our ceiling leaked for a good week as the snow melted.   I continued to volunteer at the two places I started at in 2009.   I redid our kitchen in a vintage-ey green.   I shoved my shyness aside and forced myself to attend a volunteering-related banquet.   I ran my first half-marathon and my third and fourth 5K races.   I got to spend my 33rd birthday with family. I got a job at one of my dream-job places.   I finally got to see Tom Petty in concert.   My nephew started kindergarten.I made some new friends online.   My cousin Mark and I started keeping in touch with letters and postcards.   I entered Stuffed's picture in a photo contest, and he won.   I only missed three days of work while sick with the Croup/respiratory infection.   I received a couple great fortune cookie messages.   I finally got around to making the hand/paw-print painting with Mike and Stuffed.  I made it home for Thanksgiving and Christmas--this one last time for each holiday as "just" my parents' daughter and not as someone's wife too.    I had a fun phone conversation with my aunt Heidi Christmas afternoon.    I decided to watch more movies in 2010, and I did, and my favorites were Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State, Before Sunset, Lost in Translation, and Love, Actually.    I liked I'll Never Be French by Mark Greenside and Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies more than anything else I read last year.   I loved a few songs Mike introduced me to whose names are escaping me right now.   (Something by the Gorillaz was one.)   I cooked cream of artichoke soup, "lasagna soup," and a spinach-lentil soup for the first time.   I made maple cookies for the first time.   I began feeding the birds in our apartment's backyard.   I started making the trip downtown to share Mike's lunch-hour with him the days I have to work nights, so that we'll have that much more time to connect.   I played cards with my dad for the first time.  Goodbye and thank you, 2010, a month late.  

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. ~ Eden Philpotts

Before being hired for the position I've had the past six months, I spent two and a half years working as a cook. Although I love to cook and bake, the job was not my dream job, and although I knew I was still working toward my goals and doing the best I could, there were days it was all just maddeningly frustrating. Since it takes awhile to realize a pattern is, in fact, a pattern, I don't remember when I first started noticing this, but at some point, I began seeing hearts at work: Heart-shaped soap splashes by the kitchen sink's, one heart-shaped potato chip on the edge of the deep fryer while the rest of the chips had made it into the fry-baskets, a heart-shaped spill of maraschino cherry juice. My supervisor would call out from the walk-in freezer that a container of gravy had been knocked off of the shelf and would I please clean it up, and I would be greeted by a heart-shaped gravy spill before me. I would bend down to pull a red onion from their box and find instead a heart-shaped piece of Romaine lettuce on the floor in front of me. The other cook would bump his hand into my cup and my iced tea would slosh onto the table in a heart-shaped puddle. The daily sweeping and mopping of the restaurant would almost always find me reaching for my cell phone to take a quick picture of the heart-crumb or stain that was suddenly stubbornly stuck to the floor. If one of the hundreds of red potatoes was heart-shaped, it would be I and not the other cook on my shift who would blindly grab it from the bin. 

These moments sound like stretches of the imagination, but they happened so frequently, and only at work, and even then, only when I wasn't expecting them. If I looked down at the counter in deliberate search for anything heart-shaped before beginning to make a waffle for someone, I wouldn't see a thing, but two minutes later when the waffle iron would beep, I'd start to scrape the baked-on batter from around the iron's edges only to find that some had already baked into a perfect heart. I'm sure I was Cliff Claven-ish enough to show my coworkers the heart-shaped potato and chip, but I didn't tell anyone at work just how often this happened to me.



 
I began to believe at some point that all these hearts were not "just" hearts. Granted, they were not visions of saints in toast, but as crazy as it may sound to others--and as it did to Mike when I'd mention over supper that day's latest heart-discoveries--the hearts began to feel like signs to me. All those days working in a restaurant kitchen when I ached to be somewhere else doing something else, just when I thought I'd flip out and scream, I'd be "tagged" again and a heart-shaped bacon-piece would be left over on a guest's plate like a calling card from the universe and bring me some small comfort. It is silly and a bit sad, really, the things that help get us through the hard times, but whatever works, I say. Maybe the hearts were signs and maybe they weren't, but eventually I decided that every time I found one from then on, I'd take a deep breath, thank God that I had a job at all, and recommit to the goals of hanging in there and being patient while working toward something else.
 
What ended up being two and a half years passed, as time always does, and last May, the phone call requesting an interview for my current position finally came. Call me crazy, and point out that I reaaaaaaaally could have used some time off, but I take my magic where I can find it and am grateful for it when I do. I haven't noticed any hearts--edible, spilled, or otherwise--in ages. I found them when I needed them, and I am thankful.

The Blue Santa-Mouse

I decided while at my parents' house this Christmas to take pictures of their Christmas decorations that mean the most to me. This blue Santa-mouse ornament was in the "Santa's Secret Shop" at my elementary school when I was a kid. Do schools still have this? It was so much fun. The PTA helped sponsor it, I'm sure. Each December, our school library was transformed into a "shopping mall" with the tables filled with really low-priced gifts like this. (My dad got a Mallard duck letter-opener from it.) Letters were sent home to parents beforehand explaining that gifts would be available at such-and-such low prices. Each class would get some time to go down to the library and shop. It was a blast. I don't think I even spent $2 total there each year but always managed to find something for my parents and two brothers.

One year, I hadn't budgeted my "Santa's Secret Shop" funds well, so I had almost no money left when it was time to go back to class--and I still needed to find something for my mom. I saw this mouse and knew she'd love it--she has so many blue Christmas things--but I only had a nickel left. I put my little-kid-shyness aside and told one of the PTA mom "salesclerks," "I only have a nickel left. How much does this cost?" and she smiled and said "It's only a nickel!" I was overjoyed. I didn't realize until years later that it surely hadn't really cost just a nickel. :) What a sweet lady. Thank you again, Whoever-and-Wherever-You-Are. ♥  This silly little mouse has been on my mom's blue Christmas tree probably at least 25 years now. 

Sniff the air for cozy smells: smell of flowers, fire, and food.... ~ Mary Ann Hoberman

Especially in the fall and winter, I tend to keep a soup pot filled with water and spices simmering on the stove. In our tiny studio apartment, even the space heater can quickly make the room too warm, and the old radiator is almost out of the question, as it makes the apartment unbearably hot so quickly. The "cinnamon water," though, is just right, and it makes our little home smell so good. Having had colds the past couple of weeks has meant that we've treated ourselves to oranges more often than usual, so all the peels have made it into our water, as well.  So cozy. 

Happy Birthday, Mom

Happy birthday to my mom, The Most Thoughtful and Beautiful. When we would complain as kids about having to return to school after Christmas vacation, she would remind us that she had always had to return to school on her birthday, thus trumping all our arguments. 

Mom loves the color blue, Grover from "Sesame Street," Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings movies, Doctor Zhivago, and Sam Elliot. She never fails to say "Ooh, Baby!" when Clark Gable first appears on-screen during Gone with the Wind, and she is still sad that "Captain Kangaroo" is no longer on the air, as she thought it was by far the dearest "kids'" show. She used to do a lot of oil painting but later worked more with acrylics and has sold her artwork in shops in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Her great-grandparents were from France and Norway.  She adored her grandparents. She is known for singing out "Cup of tea!" when stressed, and she thought to bring my grandmother bouquets of garden flowers to the hospital to give Grandma life and color and beauty and a taste of home during her final days. ("Why do people always wait to give flowers to people after they've died?" she wonders.) 

Mom is better with children than anyone else I've ever met, and they gravitate toward her. She loves antiques and the ocean, Sophia Loren and red gingham, sugar cookies without frosting, and houses that are what she calls "small and chubby." She is creative in all things and talked my dad into tearing down our garage in the 1980s so we could use the space as a patio. She hates to sew but is always making pillows and curtains, and when a stuffed cat I fell in love with in 2007 cost so much as to be absurd, she made a replica of it for me as a Christmas present. 

She has three brothers and three sisters and helped raise the younger ones. She is still in touch with her best friend from high school, sweet Vickie. She is sarcastic and self-deprecating, and our sense of humor is quite similar. We can get each other laughing hysterically, although, as with most mothers and daughters, we went through our stages of not laughing together much at all. After my best friend, Sommer, died in 1995, she had dreams of her that were so detailed and lovely as to make me jealous. Without Mom, I would not have gotten through the rest of that year. My friends have always loved her, and she is still impressed that even now, when she runs into my former kindergarten teacher, Mrs. R remembers her and asks about us. She is short. She would live in her garden if she could, envies the "Hobbits" their little round homes, loves rabbits and miniatures, and she thought my dad was pulling her leg the first time they went to a baseball game and my dad told her there would be a seventh-inning stretch. ("But then everybody stood up! I just could not believe it!") 

Mom's favorite person in the whole wide world, although she would never admit to choosing just one, is probably her sister Laurie, pictured with us above. Mom doesn't like rudeness or vulgarity, and I've only heard her swear maybe three times. ("Yourmotherdoesn'tsaythat!" she races to apologize afterward.) She watched the "Guiding Light" soap faithfully, loved Robert Newman's "Joshua Lewis" character on it, and remembers watching the show with her own grandmother as a child. Daisies are her favorite flower, she thinks the world of Eloise Wilkins' illustrations, and she never forgets a birthday or anniversary. 

Somehow, in the haze of the past week and a half's cold, I still found myself in line at the post office December 30th to get her card and package mailed out on time, and since I'm determined to visit my family more often this year, I will actually get to see her again in just ten days. Happy birthday, Mom. ♥

The Christmas Cold

While my younger brother was at our parents' house on Christmas Eve, he croaked out something to me along the lines of "What?! You're not sick at Christmas?!" It really has been tradition for my younger brother and I to catch what we call The Christmas Cold. (And that tradition seems to have caught on with Mike, as well. He's been under the weather for a few weeks now, as he has been every Christmas and/or New Year's Day the past few years.) My younger brother was sick over Christmas last week, my dad was horribly ill, my niece had spent Christmas Eve morning at the doctor's office being diagnosed with an ear infection, and everyone else but me and my mom was either sick or recovering from having been sick. I left my parents' house Sunday morning amazed at my new!-and!-improved! immune system, took a nap back here at the apartment late that afternoon, and woke up that evening with a sore throat and a stuffed-up head. By the time I got home from work Tuesday morning, I had almost no voice with which to wish Mike a good day as he left for work. The tradition lives!

Intentionally napping, unintentionally falling asleep while watching Christmas movies, discussing which cold or flu medicines are working or not working for ourselves and for each other, stocking up on oranges and boxes of Kleenex, making tea, calling and emailing one another to check in and ask "Still sick?": These things, I've realized this week, have all become just as much a part of Christmas to me as the cookie-baking or gift-wrapping. And I'm not complaining when I say that. Although I'd rather be feeling better, there is something oddly comforting in knowing we are all in this together at the end of every year.

Some of my favorite memories from this Christmas are of we Christmas Cold-ers celebrating in our own low-key ways. While I ate a bowl of chicken Ramen noodle soup Saturday night, Dad and I played cards. He'd looked wiped-out all day, and as soon as he played his last card to win the game, he said he was going to bed.  Mike and I shared a belated Christmas together here Tuesday evening, and since neither of us felt up to eating at the table "like adults," we ended up eating our lasagna dinner on wooden trays in bed, with the box of Kleenex nearby and the "nighttime medicine" as dessert.  Supper was eaten side-by-side in bed again tonight, as I am feeling worse today and not better. But cherry pie and vanilla ice cream tasted good for dessert, and I beat Mike at Scrabble, so things really aren't so bad.  Tomorrow will likely be much of the same. And--let's just say it now, Younger Brother!--next Christmas will be, as well.