Hold a Mirror Under My Nose

My first six years of formal education were spent in two schools. I lovingly call my present hometown Small Town, but those schools were in REALLY small towns, each consisting of a grain elevator and a post office and not much else. The first school (where I completed grades one through four) was six miles from our farm, and when my father left his teaching job there to become administrator of a school in the opposite direction, my siblings and I transferred to an even smaller school only two miles from home.

In Even Smaller School there were only two classrooms--one for the 11 kids in grades five through eight, and one for the dozen or so in grades one through four. Two teachers taught academic subjects, plus music, phys ed, and art; collected milk money; and supervised our recesses in the windbreak behind the school. It was glorious fun and amazingly good education.

Mr. Tilley, the teacher in the big kids' room, was also the principal of the school and he was conscientious about safety. He knew that our big old building would go up like a Roman candle if fire ever broke out so he sat us down and gave precise instructions for that eventuality.

"If your hear the fire alarm go off and I'm not in the room, the eighth graders [who happened to be three boys] need to take care of the fifth graders," he told us. "That means if for some reason you can't get out the door, you may have to climb out the windows, and if that's the case and the younger ones are scared, they may need to be pushed."

It was such an exciting prospect that when Mr. Tilley scheduled a fire drill and blocked off the north door the eighth graders didn't even check to see if the east exits were clear. These strapping farm boys just pushed the screens off our second-floor classroom and began flinging out fifth graders like bales out of the hayloft at feeding time.

I can only imagine the horrified look on Mr. Tilley's face as he saw us fifth-graders landing in a heap (having missed the concrete sidewalk by inches), but the story has a happy ending: The worst injury was a sprained ankle, and certainly we learned to check other exits before jumping to a conclusion.

I thought of that incident last night as we were wheeling the final boxes out of my mother-in-law's apartment. In addition to the 20 boxes of Christmas decorations (no, I am not exaggerating) we packed up the most horrifying animatronic cat ever manufactured, and I once again gave instruction to the Boys who were doing the heavy lifting.

"When your father and I breathe our last, just carry out our bodies and set the house on fire," I told them.

That's when the image of our grade school fire drill crossed my mind. I hollered down the hallway after them.

"Hey! If we pass on a Sunday afternoon, check our pulses before you strike the match--we might be napping and not dead."

No, I did not try to explain that conversation to the residents in the other apartments.

Perfect Ending

I love my job. Really, I do.

Every so often, though, I arrive at the office with a sigh.

"I really, really wanted to stay home today," I tell anyone who will listen. "It was so cozy in bed, and I didn't want to bundle up and get out in the cold. I wanted to read a good book and drink tea and knit. I really didn't want to come to work."

Yesterday I was a world-class whiner. Instead of getting my Sunday afternoon nap I went--again--with Husband to the apartment where we are cleaning out his mother's belongings. My back hurt, I was tired, and I knew at least three of my children were on the road from one place to another (which in spite of my confidence in them brings a tiny worry).

"I knew this move would take a while," I snipped to Husband as I lifted one end of a mattress, "but I didn't realize it would take up EVERY SINGLE FREE MOMENT of my Christmas vacation."

Graciously, he didn't respond to this childishness with the eyeroll it deserved. Instead he offered to let me stay home while he picked up the Boys from the airport, an offer my behavior certainly had not earned.

Today Husband is scrambling through the end-of-year scrambling accountants do and I had planned to finish up the packing.  Instead, I woke up to the sound of tires slushing through the intersection next to the House on the Corner.  Huge flakes were drifting straight down, turning our view of the campus across the street into something from an improbably perfect movie set.

And because it's New Year's Eve and not the typical Monday morning there is nothing pressuring me to get going. No calls to be made cancelling classes, no alertness for students making bad sledding choices, no scramble to find boots and scarves. I plan to read a good book and drink tea and knit. The packing of the apartment will have to wait until tomorrow, when roads are cleared.

I'll turn on the Christmas lights one last time and think about how blessed I am, to have a perfect ending to this year that has been so full of unearned blessings, blessings my own behavior surely would have forfeited.

God is good.

The Loveliest of Days

This post must be prefaced by a caveat: I have loved being the mother of all boys.

The 15-year-old me would not have believed this statement. Oh, how I wanted baby girls! I wanted to dress them in frilly diaper covers and Scotch-tape oversized bows onto their bald little heads. I wanted to teach them to make pie crust and appreciate brainy boys. What was I going to do with sons?

God laughed, and here I am several decades later, having absolutely loved being the queen bee.

Occasionally, though, I still gave a little sigh of nostalgia at the thought of my phantom daughters whose hair I've never French-braided (probably the reason I have only boys; God also knew the extent of my hair-impaired-ness) and whose newborn babies I will not be the first to bless. When I thought of my sons' future weddings I remembered wistfully how my own mother had altered the dress in which she was married so that I could have my dream-come-true wedding day. This relationship, I knew, was something not meant for the mothers of all boys

And then Lovely Girl entered our world on Boy#1's arm and heart.

Really, all she needed to do was love my son and I would have thought she was wonderful. But since they told us they would be getting married, she has brought me into the world of having a daughter, a world she could so easily have kept to herself and her mother. She invited me and my Much Older Sister to be part of the wedding dress shopping day, and I felt as if I had just been given the secret password to a wonderful sorority.

The shopping posse (the bride, the maid of honor, two mothers, two aunts) turned out to be wonderfully, raucously compatible as Lovely Girl tried on gown after gown. LG's beauty is vintage,with  porcelain skin and enormous eyes in a tiny  5'2" frame, so she knew her perfect dress probably wouldn't be easy to find, and the posse was ruthless.

"Mmmm, no," her aunt declared when the bride-to-be minced out in a strapless number so tight her bouncy walk was muted to a mincing hobble.

"And just what to you propose to carry on that tray under your chin?" someone said about a too-boned bodice.

Other dresses were okay, but they looked just like every other bare-shouldered bride on the society page.

But then, our Lovely Girl walked out of the dressing area beaming. I found myself with my hands clapped to my face, like the melodramatic girls in those Jumbotron proposals.

She stepped onto a tiny platform in front of angled mirrors and the fitter made a few final adjustments, straightening the train and twitching the veil over a shoulder. By now all of us were on our feet, wiping our eyes and making delighted sounds. We pointed at her tiny waist, and how the ivory shade brought out the beauty of her skin. We remarked on how this dress somehow looked like her.

"We have one more dress on the rack," the fitter pointed out. "Do you want to try it on?"

"I might as well--" Lovely Girl started to say, but then she looked in the mirror again, and a smile broke over her face. "No. This is it. This is the one."

And it occurred to me, again, how well Boy#1 had done in choosing a bride: He also chose my daughter-in-law, and she chose him.

This is it. This is the one.

One Cup, Packed: A Christmas Metaphor

Well, huh.

Merry Christmas to you!

And Happy New Year, in case I miss that holiday, too!

To tell you what Christmas was like in the House on the Corner I must resort to a metaphor. Christmas 2012 was like cooking something sweet and delicious, where the recipe calls for a cup of brown sugar.

My pre-Christmas intention was to dig the measuring cup into the brown sugar bag and pull it out, comfortably filled. I had a full-to-the-top schedule that included time with Husband and the Boys, a couple of holiday parties with friends, a smattering of visits from loved ones, the singing of my favorite carols, a day-long marathon of A Christmas Story.

But whoops, the recipe calls for the brown sugar to be packed so I pushed in more molasses-y goodness--one of the parties was at the House on the Corner so there was cleaning to be done, and the football bowl schedule and marching band responsibilities meant two of the Boys needed to catch a plane in the next state at 7 a.m. Christmas morning so the family Christmas festivities moved to Christmas Eve. I found soft yarn on sale and decided to knit an afghan for my mother-in-law's Christmas present, and vowed I WOULD FINISH Boy#2's t-shirt quilt.

And then, when every last molecule of space had been pushed from between the grains of sugar, we added the moving of my mother-in-law to new living quarters, and have been drop-jawed with amazement at how many cubic tons of memories had been stashed into a smallish two-bedroom apartment.

That was my Christmas holiday. It has been packed so tightly that not one more molecule could be jammed into the measuring cup and as I dump it out to see how I might re-enter the blogging world it's a big solid lump. So sweet, so wonderful, that I will be tasting it for weeks.

Tomorrow (or sometime soon): The loveliest of days with the Lovely Girl.

Pulling on the String

My mother-in-law made this intricate gingerbread house many years ago

It may not look like it on the surface, but there are some things in my life I simply don't write about here. Some I censor because they're not my story to tell (even though Husband and the Boys have been wonderful sports about my public ramblings), some I hold back in the name of good taste (you're not going to read about...well, lots of stuff).

But there is a huge part of the empty nest life I haven't shared here before because it's difficult and sometimes sad and almost impossible to describe without a certain degree of frustration: Our parents are old, and going through this stage of their lives with them is much, much more difficult than having teenagers.

With teenagers, a parent's role is to gradually release the string of the balloon, gauging abilities of the child and allowing more privileges, demanding more responsibility, giving more freedom until the balloon is flying by itself. With aging parents, the process is reversed. As our loved ones' physical and cognitive abilities decrease, we begin to watch them more closely and gradually share their responsibilities, pulling in the balloon and trying to protect them.

Husband's mother is 91. In her prime she was one of those women who's always in motion--directing the choir, stitching needlework, organizing dinners, traveling. She was already slowing down when her husband died seven years ago, though, and she moved to an retirement complex near us when it became increasingly apparent that she should be closer to family. She wasn't eating right, had taken a couple of falls, and her driving was becoming suspect. Here in Small Town she could see the Boys when they were home from college, and check in with us by phone several times a day. The apartment managers were compassionate and responsive and she filled her apartment with her dozens of stuffed animals.

But time doesn't stop, and the reeling in process is inexorable. First she had to be limited to driving in town, then we told her we would chauffeur her anywhere she needed to go. She began using a walker to get to the communal dining room. A personal assistant was hired to make sure she took her medicines properly.

This week, two months after a fall left her in the assisted living wing of the complex, her sons had to tell her that she would be safer and happier if she did not return to her apartment as she had hoped she could. We know the first of those is true; we can only hope the second is also.

Yesterday she sat in a chair while family bustled around her, cleaning out the apartment and choosing just a few pieces of furniture to go in the single room that will circumscribe her world from now on. She saw us dumping entire drawers into bags to be taken to Goodwill or thrown away. It may have been easier, or kinder, if she had not been there but that was not what she chose and we did not have the heart to deny her this final choice. She picked two stuffed animals to go with her and another two to be sent to young great-grandchildren; dozens more are bagged for storage along with the furniture she and her husband accumulated over more than six decades of antique hunting.

The balloon is almost completely tethered now, and no one could have told us how hard this would be.

This morning I walked out to find the first snow on the ground and remembered that this is the next-to-shortest day of the year.

Christmas Gifts

Twisterfish put it kindly in a comment on my post about cutting down on my self-imposed Christmas expectations. "This seems to be the theme for the year for many people, myself included," she said.

Let's sing it all together: "I'm doin' NUTTIN' for Christmas!"

It's a heady decision, to decide that some seasonal traditions have moved from the meaningful to the burdensome side of the balance, and that they must be taken off the scales or everything will crash into stress and chaos. So we decide to not decorate sugar cookies. Or we limit the number of parties we'll attend. Or we take ourselves out of the running for Mother Who Makes the Best Home-Crafted Gifts and hand Johnny's teacher a gift card to Applebee's.

It feels good, this decision that the season is more important than the stuff.

And still. Still.

We weep at the news coverage from Connecticut, first thinking of the children, then of the parents, then of the town, then of the entire nation that despite our best intentions remains imperfect. We mourn and once again are reminded that we are not in control. The school had done everything it could imagine to guard against this, the unimaginable, and still....

We find ourselves fretting about whether we've pared down enough. Have we cut out enough I-HAVE-TO-DO-THIS items that we can enjoy the peace of the season with our family and friends? We hope we have,and still....

What we forget is that Christmas peace is not an entitlement, it is a gift, and "every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of heavenly Lights, who does not change with shifting shadows."*

We are not entitled to any of His gifts, but in spite of our imperfections and inability to get things right, the Father of heavenly Lights sends us the good and perfect: Peace. Joy. His Son.

This is what we're preparing for, waiting for, and I pray those gifts for all.



*James 1:17

All Over the Crafty

So, a little Christmas quiz about me. On a scale of 10 to 1 to negative 1 gabillion, how crafty do you think I am?

Yes, you can push that indicator all the way to the left, way past the 1 gabillion into infinitely un-crafty. I am HORRIBLE at crafts. I can't cut a straight line or tie a good knot. But as I've mentioned before, Pinterest has deceived me into thinking this is not true. Oh, Pinterest. You horrible, horrible deceiver.

After seeing all the CUTE! and EASY! Christmas crafts on the boards proctored by people who know how to use glue guns without burning their fingers, I decided I was smart enough to do this.

Well, it turns out that finishing a Christmas craft isn't so much about handiness with scissors and glue as it is about picking the right project.

My project is named Christmas Card Display-er, and I made the pattern myself. Every year the postman delivers a couple dozen gorgeous Christmas cards to the House on the Corner, and I love them so much that I throw them into a basket and never look at them again until they're discarded in the pre-holiday cleaning frenzy the following year.

"I want to see those beautiful pictures!" I whined to myself. "I want to remember these loved ones who remembered us."

So I took an old shutter we had in the basement:

Yes, that's my arm at the left. Ansel Adams had the same problem when he held up mountains.

Bought two rolls of ribbon at 47 cents each:

Red and gold, because it's Christmas.

Punched holes in the corners of the Christmas cards and tied them to the shutter.

Great lighting, Ms. Photographer

Then I propped my Christmas Card Display-er up next to my little lamp filled with left-over tree decorations, and voila. It's a craft.

Take THAT, Pinterest.