It’s been five years since my Dad died. His was a rather sudden departure, and although it was traumatic for those who were with him, most of us agree that it was a pretty good way to die. He was comfortable in his living room chair, talking with Mom… and then he wasn’t.
It hasn’t been every year that we’ve celebrated his memory but somehow it seemed fitting to do it in 2020. Earlier in the week I had asked Mom if she wanted to do something special to help her get through the day. It was a couple days later that she said she’d thought of something we could do. She wanted us to remember Dad as we ate a bowl of his favorite ice cream – maple nut.
Dad ate a lot of ice cream. Dad shared a lot of ice cream with others. His ice cream legacy will be the story of one of his grandchildren finding him late at night, sitting on the steps inside the garage (where the freezer was), eating ice cream from the pail. Of course, she sat down and had some with him.
So we shared the plan with family members and asked them to join us, wherever they were, at a convenient time for them. “Get some maple nut ice cream, and remember Grandpa Owen as you eat it. Take a picture and post it.” Some were able to do it, and others who couldn’t will be able to enjoy the pictures. I’m 100% sure that Dad would have liked to be remembered this way.
Death is strange. Memories are a gift.
We miss you.There are some things we’ll never figure out. But, it’s okay.
Here in Wisconsin, spring isn’t just a date on the calendar. It’s much more real than that. After being in various degrees of frozen for nearly six months, big changes have to happen and they have to happen fast because winter’s a comin’. I think spring happened today.
Mom and I were sitting on her patio this afternoon when my brother called her.
“What’s the weather like there today?“
“It’s been pretty stable, in the 40’s and 50’s, ever since it stopped being in the 20’s and 30’s .” (Last week)
“Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to happen? It’s spring, right?”
“I guess it is. Shirley is sitting here with a T-shirt and no coat.”
That’s right. It was so warm today that I didn’t see anyone wearing a coat. Yesterday was a different story. I was out in the soon-to-be garden in my heaviest hoodie and a scarf when neighbors Bob and LuRae, also coated and capped, came up to gift me. He had bought too many lily bulbs and just didn’t have room to plant them anywhere. He wanted to give them to me. Last year he did the same thing with daffodil bulbs.
I said yes. I had a pot with nothing in it but dirt and lilies would be nice. He came over with a rather large box. When I inventoried what he had given me I found eight bags of 10, with large sprouted bulbs begging to be planted. I spent a couple hours putting them around the lampposts of the twelve condos in our development. That’s a lot of digging.
As much as I shovel snow in the winter, I dig at least as much dirt in the other months. The major project is the garden. It has to go in pretty quick or not everything will get ripe before summer is over. But not too quick because it might still freeze at night. I absolutely know that I could walk over to Walmart and spend far less for the same amount of food, but I tell myself that the food is better and I need the sunburn and sore back exercise. I mostly try not to think about the logic in gardening.
I’ve only been “up north” for one “garden year” so far and didn’t have time to start perennials, so last month I ordered asparagus plants from Gurney’s. I was about to order the world’s most expensive raspberry plants from them too, when a friend let me thin her patch for free! I probably won’t get any asparagus or raspberries to eat this year but it will be good for me to exercise patience. It’s all about the future…
This morning Mom and I did the most definitive spring thing. We went shopping for flowers. We actually traveled 39 miles to a fabulous greenhouse where we bought almost nothing because the prices were… pricey. We stopped at two other establishments on the way home just because flowers are SO BEAUTIFUL! I bought, and got them all planted this afternoon. I have big pots of petunias, coleus and herbs on the patio. I am stiff, sore and a bit dehydrated.
It’s spring and spring is real. Putting my feet up now, just sayin’…
I’ve done the A to Z Blogging Challenge for six years now, and enjoyed it every time. I’m proud that I’ve finished them all, because learning to finish a writing project was my main goal. I was especially grateful this year to learn that I could take a theme, caregiving, and make a cohesive body of information, based on my own experiences. That’s almost like writing a book, and I did it! (A very short book however…)
I truly felt “cheered on” by a group of readers who read most all of my posts. This was valuable since it showed me that my topic did have an audience, and was possibly serving a need. All the comments were kind and helpful, and they weren’t even all from my family and relatives! So good. (That is not to say I don’t appreciate comments from family too – that didn’t come out quite right.)
I think the challenge was well managed and designed this year. The sign-up, master list, badges were all easy to access. Perhaps the smaller number of blogs participating made it seem more streamlined – it was easy to go down the list to find topics I was interested in. I was surprised by the number of blogs I went to read and found they weren’t taking part.
Thank you so much, organizing team and readers. Appreciate you all and hope to read more of you on the Road Trip.
This post is part of a week long Instagram writing challenge, with the prompt “rest”. But, (confession) I don’t really get Instagram yet so I’m putting it here too, where I can find it.
These peaceful scenes were photographed shortly before sundown very near where I live. Nothing speaks rest to me like nature when it slows down at the end of the day. The planet we live on is designed to have cycles, and so were we – cycles of work and rest.
Science bears this out. Circadian rhythms respond to times of light and dark, and there are even longer cycles like the weekly and seasonal cycles. When we tamper with these natural rhythms, we are walking away from our own health. If we fail to give ourselves the rest our bodies need, they will force us to rest by getting sick.
I’ve done my share of pressing the limit when it comes to lack of sleep and unrestful activity. Sometimes (when I was much younger…) I even felt cool, kind of grown-up, and invincible when staying up all night. I would laugh at the need for sleep. I’m over that. My body has lost the ability to adjust and it is telling me in many ways that it wants no more abuse.
Rest is more than sleep. It is stopping your work. It is doing something different, taking a sabbatical, clearing your mind, getting ready to work again. Those who write might even need to rest from that. New ideas come from a rested mind.
Take it from God, what better example. Even he rested from his work, not because he got tired, but because rest is good.
And if you’ve done nothing else during this pandemic, I hope you’ve rested, some.
My blog has been my stress reliever, my “learning place”, my experiment for the last eight years. I have written a lot, and the strange thing is I don’t remember everything I’ve written. There are things in there that I don’t recognize as my own (but they have to be). Sometimes I read a post and think it was really interesting, or funny, or insightful. Other times I read and think “I’ve got to get this out of here quick, so no one else will stumble upon it”. Time for a rewrite.
What a project! But I’ve found that I like it. It’s an historical review of life “back then” for one thing. Many of the posts are timeless and can be re-purposed and put back on the blog with a new freshness. And, believe me, having something to start with makes it a lot easier to write. Rewriting is a skill of its own – a skill that I’ve improved in over the last eight years. It’s encouraging when I can easily see improvements and make them quickly.
Spring is all about fresh and new. Rewriting is too. Let me at it.
We don’t all fit on one screen, and my family will know this isn’t our Mother’s Day screenshot, but it’s us the time before.
This has been such a strange day, happy in many ways, but with a pervasive sadness that feels almost like a home that I keep coming back to. In a way, I value the sadness too because it’s a precious emotion, indicating depth of feeling. I pretty much only get sad about things I really care about, and mostly those things are relationships.
We got word that my Aunt Irene (but we always said “Auntie Irene”) died today. She was 94. It was exactly two years ago on Mother’s Day that her husband, Uncle Bob, died and I think she has been trying to join him ever since. She was the last of my father’s siblings. One more generation of that family is now gone. They were all interesting, loved, important people to their children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews. At times I was very close to Auntie Irene and I wish now I had been more attentive to her in these last couple of years. Some things about being 94 are probably okay, but when you consider how many of your friends aren’t around any more at that age, it has to be lonely. I am sad thinking about the loneliness of old age.
One of my nieces who has miscarried and lost her unborn children was gifted, anonymously, a beautiful Mother’s Day orchid with a note attached. It reminded me of several women I know who grieve on this holiday. It reminded me that I used to feel that way, and I want to hug them and cry too. These things would not hurt if we did not love. But loving is worth hurting.
Lastly, nothing speaks depth of family relationship like a reunion, so we all braved technology and Zoomed together this afternoon. (Well, almost all of us – it’s bittersweet when some of our special adoptees can’t get on the internet highway and join us.) It’s always a wonder to me, to see the faces appear on my screen, one after another – the family matron (my mom), the elders (my generation), the next tier down (all the cousins), and the littlest kiddos who have no idea what they are part of. North to south, east to west, we are all over the country but together on the screen because something tells us it’s important. Our stories are not all perfectly happy, but we are together, trying to build depth into our relationships. I look at them all and want to tell them “Please, don’t ever let loneliness have the last word. You have a family. You belong and are loved.” But I might not have actually said that. I should have.
So I hope that this day so closely connected to family relationships was a good day for you. I hope you know that whether you are a single, or a couple, or a whole tribe, you are capable of family relationship because you were made to need something of what that offers. A good Creator would not have created us with desires that couldn’t be fulfilled. It wouldn’t make sense. Have hope and love those around you with all your strength. Make family a reality.
Life produces many small stories. Being small doesn’t make them “less than”, except maybe in word count.
Static Electricity (or What Is That Doing Out Here in the Field?)
I will start by saying that I don’t have a clothesline so I dry our laundry inside with an electric dryer.
It was about a week ago in early spring, so early that neither Mom nor Dennis, the husband, had been outdoors much. We were a month into the COVID 19 pandemic and tired of it already. Snow had just melted and the fields were bare, but it was a warmish , breezy evening.
We had just finished a “tea party” with family and weren’t quite ready to quit having fun. In a rare burst of energy the husband decided he wanted to walk down past the barn and to the pond to see whatever could be seen. Off he went.
Mom and I had the golf cart out for the first time of the season and we headed out past the pond to tour the wetlands and meadow. It was exhilarating, partly because the wind was still chilly. We did one big circle and headed back. I could see the husband had passed the pond and was making his way toward some neighboring condos. He had been in one of those “do it myself” moods so I decided to get Mom home first and then come back to see if he was tired and wanting a ride.
We had just crossed the bridge when I saw something on the ground ahead of us. It didn’t look like debris and it hadn’t been there when we passed by earlier. It looked like clothing of some sort.
Coming closer, I thought it looked like underwear! How strange, I thought.
And closer still, it was underwear, and in fact, it was MY underwear. What!?
I swerved over and snatched them up, and once again I noticed the husband in the distance, his pant legs flapping wildly in the breeze. There was no other way those panties could have made their way out into the field except he must have had them. They must have been stuck inside his pant legs and the wind had shaken them out as he walked. He never noticed them stuck in his pants and never noticed when they left either. His “do it myself” mood had started earlier when he had taken his shower and had chosen his recently washed and dried pants to wear. Let’s just say he’s not a real careful dresser. (But I would so have noticed if someone else’s underwear had been stuck inside my pants…)
For a minute it looked like Mom might fall out of the golf cart, laughing as hard as she was. I figure with the pandemic and all going on, God knew we needed some comedy and decided putting something common in a very uncommon place would fit the bill. (At least it was some of my prettiest underwear…)
I Just Have to Say... 