we have few vices. very few, actually. we love coffee. we enjoy a glass of wine. and chocolate – well – sometimes chocolate makes the list (more often for d than for me.)
so when our dear dear friends made us a care package for a recent roadtrip, they included all three. a bottle of wine, a box (yes! a whole box!) of hostess cupcakes, and a bottle of stok cold brew coffee. there were other goodies too – nuts and chocolate bars, munchies galore.
the first night was following ten hours of driving. though we have decided we prefer (wholeheartedly) to drive road trips in reasonable daylight hours now, we were past sunset and were driving the last of our journey that night in the dark. naturally, this was on windy, hilly, non-lit roads with the presence of deer, both alive and deceased. stressful. we went slow and were anxious to get to our accommodations in a little town in the mountains.
we warmed up the pre-prepared dinner we had brought with us and sat down at the tiny counter with a glass of wine to eat, exhaling from a long day and the last hour of our travel.
though we haven’t indulged in a hostess cupcake in forever, it was our obvious choice for dessert (gluten or no, it was clear!). we cheered our glasses and raised our cupcake to jen and brad as we sat, talking about our trip and the gift of having people traveling alongside with you, cheering you on, buoying your every mile.
because the hostess cupcake and the bottle of wine and the stok weren’t so much about the hostess cupcake and the wine and the coffee as they were about the talismans of support and love.
there is nothing like people walking – or driving – or flying – or just holding steady with you.
we raise our hostess cupcake to any of you out there who do the same for others. i’m pretty sure that – THAT – is what being in the world is about.
“life hack: stop trying to be cool. be nerdy and obsessive about the things you love. enthusiasm will get you farther than indifference.” (posted on barkersounds IG)
this could possibly be my new mantra. nerdy and obsessive and (possibly overly) enthusiastic.
indifference slays me. the whole aloof, apathetic, flippant thing. all that gets under my skin, which is particularly sensitive to all the stuff on the opposite end of the spectrum from nerdy, obsessive about the things you love, and enthusiastic.
so that might explain the excessive photographs of barney, the old piano in our backyard, losing keys and structure in each season, its patina dusty wood. it might explain the innumerable pictures of breck – in every season – its leaves – budding in early spring through its golden age in autumn. it might explain why i take a zillion photos and generally completely annoy my adult children with my wish to capture them on film (well, “film” so to speak).
my sweet momma was a person who was also pretty nerdy and obsessive about the things she loved and, most definitely, enthusiastic. her “wowee!!!” goes down in history as a word she owned, and each of us knows we are referring to our beaky when we use that word.
life is short. that becomes more and more apparent as the years go flying by. the age spots on breck’s leaves are like the age spots i find on my own person. everything is fluid and keeps changing and the youth of our budding – like our aspen’s – is fleeting.
i can see no reason to not be nerdy. i can see no reason not to be obsessive about the things i love. and – yes – i can see no reason not to be ridiculously enthusiastic.
dogga must have known. he woke us up well before the sun: it was time for his breakfast, for our coffee, for him to go out and about in the backyard. but it was still dark and the sun still had some coming-up to do.
he must have known, though. somehow, in his dogga-dogga heart, he knew it had snowed. not a lot of snow, really, truly, just a little, a dusting. but snow, nonetheless. and snow is one of his absolute favorite things in the whole wide world. snow is his favorite season. snow is his glory.
so he must have known.
it is a bitterly cold morning as i write this over the weekend. i jump up to go push the heat up over the frost-zone mark. i am a frugal thermostat-monger. more layers, i think, more layers.
last night – after a long day of painting some vintage furniture and walls (yes, also technically vintage) we snuggled under a blanket with our (yeeesh – matching) red-and-black buffalo plaids and some thick socks to watch other people pick out homes on hgtv. dogga – rejecting the bit of heat generated by laying on the area rug in the living room – stayed on the sunroom’s tile floor. he could feel the cold building outside, i guess. temperatures dropping and his spirits soaring.
and he must have known, somehow, about the imminent snow. (which, by the way, turned out to be about 12″ (!!) here on the lakefront.)
there were multiple times – when my sweet momma was here on this earth – that i brought her yellow roses. they were something special between us – an expression of love between mother and daughter.
yellow roses have a different significance than red. they are indicative of friendship, the deep bonds of love, warmth and joy, fresh starts, gratitude, hope. i read that in japan yellow roses symbolize courage and inner strength.
months ago, a dear friend gave me a small mini yellow rose plant, likely purchased at the floral section of a grocery store. it had several miniature yellow roses blooming and several buds in the waiting when i received it and i figured that it – like other more temperamental plants – would run its course.
it is months later. and the yellow rose is still in its original pot. it appears to love its residence next to the old garden table, on the deck, sharing a bit of space with the basil. it has flourished – bud after bud, bloom after bloom. it has embraced life beyond our expectation. even now, with its leaf-nod to the approaching fall, it has three buds – three bursts of beauty in the offing.
and, every day i look at it i think of my sweet momma. and i wonder about how this particular plant has been so resilient. i wonder if it had a littlebitta help from her.
i wonder if this plenty – this profusion of buds and blooms are tiny messages from her – sent in love, delivering bravery and perseverance. they are certainly well-timed.
and – if my sweet momma is the one whose green thumb from some other plane of existence has helped along this little plant aspiring to burst past what’s expected, to burst past little-life – i remember she is the same woman who wrote: don’t underestimate me…
here at the end of september – heading rapidly into october – elton john’s “your song” lyrics – “how wonderful life is while you’re in the world” – are relevant to me. we soon will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary and life is truly wonderful for me because david is in it.
so the card at the antique shoppe caught my attention as we passed by it a couple weeks ago.
just as quickly as that charming card caught my attention, so did one hanging on a rack below it: “i tolerate you“.
putting them together – a yin-yang spectrum – they made me laugh aloud and i showed david. because – you know – blissful adoration and barely tolerating someone go hand in hand.
we both had a good laugh then. people in the shoppe stopped and looked at us. we kept laughing.
as we move through the days remaining of our ten married years and into the beginning of our eleventh married year – particularly at this time in our lives – we take heart in this laughter. as victor borge said, “laughter is the closest distance between two people.“
it’s one of the things i love most – laughing together. particularly when i am feeling tolerant of him.
“we are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” (dr. seuss)
“life is strange. you arrive with nothing, spend your whole life chasing everything, and still leave with nothing. make sure your soul gains more than your hands.” (no attribution)
it’s happening.
we can feel it.
i stood in his shop’s driveway talking to our beloved mechanic. “a simple life,” we agreed. we just want to live a simple life. not a life lived for or gauged on the stuff we have.
because that stuff – the stuff of life – inundates us. everywhere we look people are chasing it – a materialism that just never culminates in any moment where it is “enough”.
and in these unbelievably fraught times, stuff seems even less important than it ever did.
one of my best friends from high school sent me a bunch of texts early this past week. we were out on a trail, trying to soak up sun and hold at bay the yucky cold symptoms we were experiencing. suddenly, there were multiple notifications. he had become a first-time grandpa.
i stopped short on the trail and looked at the photographs of the baby girl just born into this world. i was overwhelmed by the sheer miracle of that and the miracle that this man and i had been friends for over fifty years (despite seeing each other only once in all that time since high school) and – back then – it would have been hard to imagine the moment i was experiencing: standing on a trail in a completely different state five decades later while he shared the moment of his entry into grandparenthood. truly a remarkable gift.
there were other moments this week, moments when i felt more connected to the world: talking with the woman with the jeep in the parking lot at the market when we went to pick up more advil, the frog that suddenly showed up in our pond, the jalapeños we grew that were ready for picking, a note from a dear friend to “stay strong”. we virtual-tracked our daughter running an incredible half-marathon in the mountains and we listened to our son’s music online. friends checked in to ask if we needed anything. the other side of the spectrum from feeling appalled by the world.
soon it will be time to resume the cleaning out. i told our mechanic about the sentimental person’s guide to decluttering book i had purchased (hoping for osmosis to make it stick) and another title i had seen: “nobody wants your sh*t“, which we both found infinitely funny. and true. because it is. true, that is.
i remember when my sweet momma – in acts of generosity and kindness – began to give away possessions. she knew. she knew how little all that stuff really mattered. and, in these quieter moments of getting a bit older, i – we – can see that, even more than before. especially in these times.
it would seem that dropping the shopping bags and the trappings of the ladder are thresholds into the gains of one’s soul, into the real stuff of life – because, as my poppo used to say about the other stuff, “you can’t take it with you.“
and it would seem that – instead of the receipts of chasing and chasing – the buddhist prayer is that which to hold close:
“may you be happy. may you be at peace. may you be free of danger. may you be loved.”
in ways i can explain and can’t explain, i am really dedicated to sephora. a few years back when our daughter was visiting we went to a greenhouse and nursery. she has a green thumb and it was cherished time to walk around with her and chat. she pointed to this plant – an arrowhead – and said she was growing one back at her home. i instantly decided to add it to our sunroom and named it after another adventure we had the days she was here. it is important to me that sephora thrives, just like charlie – a heartleaf philodendron she gifted me previously.
i watch sephora like a hawk…always trying to figure out if she needs more water, less water, more sun, less sun, more fresh air, less draft. we have a complex relationship; i think sephora knows the power she has over me and she wields it abundantly. i comply nevertheless. like i said, dedicated to its survival.
even as sephora’s individual leaves turn yellow from time to time (causing me much angst) i find this plant to be so beautiful – the light from the window causing the leaves to glow and radiantly light the space.
a girlfriend and i were talking about the cleaning-out process in our homes. she has readily cleared out much of what her two daughters had accumulated – but not taken with – in their growing-up years. they both live nearby now – in the next town over – all grown-up – and she sees them and their families regularly every week. my friend no longer has much stuff of their youth; with their proximity, she found it easier to dispose of most of what they no longer wanted, even in recent years giving away all the baby clothes and paraphernalia she had saved for possible reuse. she was surprised to hear i still have so much of all this. she laughed at my difficulty – surely a form of paralysis – in getting rid of everything.
i thought about this a bit, trying to figure out why i am so thready – besides the fact that i was born thready, have always been thready and likely will always be thready.
i realized that, though some of this is simply my heart-on-my-sleeve personality, it is also a holding-on of sorts. a peril of motherhood.
it would be dreamy – absolutely dreamy – to have my adult children living nearby, merely minutes away. it would be amazing to see them often, though always respectful of their busy lives. we are fortunate and joyous that our son is just one big city away, a couple-hour backroads drive or an hour plus on the train. to be able to jaunt over and see our daughter at any old time would make my heart burst. she has lived far away – with many states in-between us – for over a decade now, so visits require planning and are much more complicated.
i remember when my parents would come visit from florida – or we would go there – it would be an intense time of visiting in the days they were here – or us there – before it was time for them – or us – to leave and a big expanse of time would gap our shared in-real-life moments. i believe it is harder that way – the concentrated-period-of-time visiting instead of bits and pieces of life scattered like seed throughout the calendar.
in moments of looking through my momma’s things after she died, i could see the remnants and relics of me that she had saved. for in her lack of ability to see me as often as she would have wished, she held on with artifacts of our time together. the dots lined up. i completely got it and it became one explanation for the difference in the ability of my friend and me to let-go of stuff.
my holding-on – of the stuff left behind, the trinkets of their growing-up, the mementos of any grown-up visit we have had, wherever they have lived – it is the holding-on of love.
as claire middleton (the sentimental person’s guide to decluttering) points out, “we think that keeping all of those things will let us keep a little of each child who left us.”
my heart skips a beat.
ahhh. to be a thrower-outer, a clean-sweeper.
i’m working on it. i just had my first two sales on the resale site poshmark, which gives me incentive again. the baby and toddler clothes are bundled up and waiting patiently to go to the mission that gives them away to people in the city who need them. the cassettes are in a box, to be sent with payment for recycling. there are things on marketplace and ebay and craig’s list and the goodwill stack is ever-growing.
but nothing, though, stops my my-name-is-kerri-and-i-am-thready momheart from the wistful.
and, as i gaze at sephora’s stunning golden leaf – sunlight shining through it – i hold my beautiful golden daughter close, blow her a kiss, and miss her.
there are small house sparrows that make themselves at home under our awning. they perch and flit about and, every so often, attempt to start building a nest, from which they usually fly off after a bit. but they are clearly at home by our back door and we can see them through the window and across the deck as we sit on the raft and write.
as we entered the back door the other day – home from the market and with bags in our arms – i saw the feather, tucked into the old screen door. a sweet i-was-here…maybe a little we-are-all-in-this-universe-together symbol of reassurance, hope. this tiny grey feather – stuck on our back door – a tiny sign of encouragement, perhaps a nod of being watched over in distressing times. any way you look at it, we won’t remove the little feather,
distressing times. i’d say so.
from the smallest concentric circle in to the furthermost concentric circle, these are distressing times.
and, in the middle of reading tarana burke’s book unbound i read this sentence: “indeed, i don’t believe you can practice love and be in community with folks without an incorporation of accountability as an ethic and a practice.”
her book – all of it – was profoundly moving. she is the originator of the #metoo movement. her story resonated with me over and over again. accountability. accountability. i read and re-read it, this simple statement of ideology.
particularly in the context of this country as it is right this very minute, i stopped re-reading and snapped a photo of this sentence.
for there is not much more infuriating than to be in community with others who stress their transparency and, thus, following, their accountability to the others in the community but who are the least transparent and the least accountable. there is not much more infuriating than to see those who have wronged others – regardless of the community, the institution, the organization – big or small – get away with it, to take in those silently complicit, to watch the fallout, to bear witness to the lack of ethics indicative in letting others “get away with it”. there is not much more painful than being the victim of a lack of accountability, the dust – radioactive gossip, the decimation aimed and fired, the shock long-lived.
to practice love and to be in community would suggest holding each community member as important, as a cog in the wheel, as contributing, as morally obligated as the next.
to practice love and to be in community would suggest a set of expectations – rules, bylaws, laws, moral codes – that would reign supreme, guiding the steps and actions of the community.
to practice love and to be in community would suggest holding the fragility of love and its mutual obligation to each other as paramount. it would suggest leading with love, leading with respect, leading with support.
to practice love and to be in community would suggest holding to truth, to honesty, to responsibility and, thus, to accountability.
to practice love and to be in community would suggest that not taking responsibility, skipping any kind of ethical standard, having zero expectation that all in community would be accountable to each other and to the bigger picture would be the very antithesis of practicing love and being in community.
to be in community – in a freeforall devoid of moral compass – in a lack of answerability, no effort of liability, a structure without structure, without compassion or empathy, without the abiding of laws, sans checks and balances on the collective or those in charge, a governance with leadership lacking virtue – this is not a practice of love nor is it being in community. this is here and now.
grey feathers are said to be a sign that there will be a period of calmness and clarity. it is a buoying keep-on-going.
it will stay on the door as long as it stays on the door. and tarana burke’s words will echo in my mind as a north star message.
when we moved here – 36 years ago – there was no deck in the backyard. there were concrete steps leading up to the back door, a cement sidewalk from the driveway around the back of the house to that set of steps.
the people who lived in this house before us had some – interesting – decor ideas. granted, it was the 80s so that offers its own bit of explanation. they generously offered to teach us how to remove and apply new wood grained contact paper to the kitchen countertops and backsplash – which, i guess, they thought coordinated nicely with the peach colored cabinets. (we declined, removing all semblance of contact paper from the counters and peach from the cupboards.) curtains and valances and priscillas and cafes covered all the windows – and there are a lot of windows in this house. there was brown carpet everywhere but for the orange and green shag in the sunroom. it all felt a bit dark and closed-in, suffocated even more by the rows of hedges literally everywhere outside.
but when i walked in – despite the overabundance of brown – the plethora of double-hungs draped in fabric – doors hanging in door frames serving no purpose but for taking up space – butter yellow shingles with brown (yes, more brown) trim we soon replaced with narrow white vinyl lap siding – a house with few personal touches, a house that desperately needed to breathe – it felt like home.
it still does.
and, despite all the changes this house has gone through, there are still multiple projects that linger on the list – deferred or just dreamy. but it breathes – in and out – and we can feel its heart beat.
it wasn’t long after we moved in that we decided to build a deck out back and my children’s father and grandfather set to that project, designing a smartly shaped L with a deck railing that would protect our small-children-yet-to-be from falling off.
soon after – seemingly a minute or two – there was a swing set with a slide and a glider, a fort and a turtle sandbox. five minutes later we added a basketball hoop. eventually, we took down most of the railing. i had all the hedges taken out and planted ornamental grasses, for this house is a graceful-on-the-breeze ornamental grasses kind of house. i added a pond, a focal point – while ever changing the plantings around the perimeter of the yard, dependent mostly on friends who had extra bushes or plants. we laid a stone patio – a place for slow dancing and dinners al fresco. we thoughtfully designed the garden along the new fence in the back. we gently added peonies and built a barnwood potting stand, laying slabs of rock in that corner garden and around the pond to protect our aussie’s circular run around it. we brought breck home from breckenridge and tenderly tended this aspen tree – the only tree either of us have ever purchased – finally finding its preferred home in a small garden in the middle of the backyard. and the sedum cuttings we placed there took, surrounding breck with green serated leaves and yellow flowers.
just the other day we noticed that this very sedum groundcover had somehow planted itself under the deck – in an obviously dark space inhospitably filled with rocks; its tiny volunteering stems were peeking out from underneath. it is growing out – reaching east – and we will not eliminate it from this new place it inhabits. we will do all we can to encourage it, foster its growth, help it soak up sunlight and continue to proliferate along the edges of the deck.
gardens are a constant source of surprises. we find volunteer switchgrasses in places we didn’t expect. there are day lilies in the most challenging of spots. and ferns have tenaciously found their way to places where there is clearly a bit too much sunlight for them. we tend all of these and transplant the fern volunteers into the shadier fern garden out back.
but the surprises are just that – surprises. joyful. they are a tiny nod that we – even in our seemingly infinite non-knowledge of gardening – are doing something right.
i honestly don’t think it has anything to do with providing the right soil or the right nutrients or the right fertilizer or the right amount of sun or the right amount of watering. we are guessing on all of this – with the aid of research we desperately try to apply appropriately.
what it think it has to do with – more – is how much we mindfully love it all – our house, our front yard, our backyard, our deck, our gardens, our patio. surely it all can feel that.
people respond to love and nurture the same way – coming alive, seeking light, growing and changing, thriving, nurturing back.
and i wonder how it is anyone would treat people – members of a community – respectful participants in the weave of the concentric circles of humanity in our towns, our states, our country – any differently than a garden.
why would anyone not wish to foster a nurturing and supportive environment – any community of people – any town, state, country – where all may grow and thrive?
reverse threading 