Remembering a Gift

I don't remember most of the gifts I was given at Christmas when I was growing up.  I recall sweater sets, a doll, books, and I still have a stuffed Rudolph that may be one of the first sold when the song came out. But one present I could count on to be the same every year was a box of chocolate covered cherries from Daddy. For many years after his death, I would buy a box for myself and remember.  This year, chocolate covered cherries have returned!  Skye came over last night to help make Christmas mice, my old favorite in new form.  Don't tell the cats.

Making Bread, Making Memories

Maddie baked Cranberry Bread with me on Thanksgiving morning.  This is the way we do this:
1.  Read the book.  When her Daddy was just her age, he and his brothers loved a book called Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin, the story of a little girl and her grandmother and a famous cranberry bread recipe. We still have the book!  It has the recipe on the back cover. 2.  Assemble the ingredients (more fun than an Easter Egg hunt!)  3.  Find our bowl and measuring "things".  4.  Let the mixer do most of the work except the important things like cracking the eggs, adding everything, and licking the spoon...all Maddie's jobs.

 

Handwriting on the Wall

On a wall in a small shop I recently saw these words.  The shop owner is an artist.  She has great talent for creating, but she knows who makes her day.

Lord, create a Genesis week from my chaos.  Let me not get so busy with Christmas lists that I fail to fully attend to being aware and attentive and astonished at the gifts you give me every day.

My Room with a View

I confess, I tend to think of the kitchen as my room .  I do spend alot of time there, mostly by choice, doing what I love (cooking) and things I need to do (cleaning up).  But also because by standing at my kitchen sink I can look out this window.  Beyond the glass I look at the crepe myrtle in changing seasons with its backdrop of mossy weathered wood.  Looking down at the ground I can see  pepper bushes which have had a fruitful season.  But the most special part of the window is gathered there on the ledge, my small kitchen altar, full of reminders of faith and family, the here and now and the there and then.  The piece of stained glass joined the family when we were in Indonesia.  I love its rich glowing colors and the Trinitarian candles.  Now, at the beginning of Advent, I add a small nativity scene and a candle.

Smile!

The smiles on their faces are mirrored in mine as I thank God one more time for these two!  Maddie in my hat, Skye in her Papa Joe's, kept everyone smiling a few weeks ago when we went to Texian Days Market at George Ranch, just down the road from our house. George Ranch is a living history  museum, a working ranch. http://www.georgeranch.com/ .  In order of preference, the girls enjoyed climbing to the tree house, riding hay bales, joining a banjo band, eating cornbread and funnel cakes, spinning hoops,  watching spinning and weaving, going up in a cabin loft, and a civil war reenactment. 

My longtime friend calls her grandchildren "grandjoys".  Well said, Jane!

Home

Eudora Welty said that “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” and “There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed.”


I am grateful for my growing up place, within a family helping me understand people will always be more important than place. Odd, because that family of origin mostly stayed in one place: rural and small town East Texas. Important, because after I left home at 17 for college, so many places would take their turns in becoming the place of home. One brief passage of time the leaving and the return intersected to be called home. I do believe we make our homes where we are, but there are times when we have a more intimate connection with the place of home. My favorite place happened to be at that intersection,one which my family occupied for only slightly more than a year. But I still have pictures of it hanging on my wall and a doll house replica that my grandchildren love. I think each of us would vote it our favorite house.


When my sons were 13, 10, and 8, we bought a 100 year old Victorian house on 3 acres of oaks and magnolias and pecan trees in East Texas. It was in the hometown where both my husband and I grew up, so both his mother and my parents still lived there at that time. There had been some renovation to the house in the 1940's, but not much since, so there was much that was necessary to live there safely and comfortably. We restored, repaired, renovated, and resuscitated in ways we never knew we had any skill for. We stripped the staircases to find tiger oak, pulled up carpet to find lovely wood floors, added wood burning heaters, updated plumbing and electricity and found ways that old houses need you that amazed us. It was a wonderful adventure.

During the time we were there, I did the research and writing necessary to acquire state historical landmark designation for the house, which was built for John Wesley Love in 1904, to house his wife and 13 children. He had 700 acres of peach orchards adjacent to the house, which was built near the railroad tracks. We discovered that my father and uncle had picked peaches in the orchards, and that Joe's Daddy had painted and wallpapered there in the 40's. It has been 26 years since we lived there, but I can still feel the sway of the porch swing and smell the fragrance of the wisteria dripping from the trees. It was work to live there, but it was magic.

The planned changes in my husband's job did not happen, and we knew our boys needed a father at home more than they needed a certain house, but oh, we loved it. Since we went back there for visits to relatives, we went by the house every time, and I cried every time for years!

Strangely, it took another turn of events in our family life for me to honestly say goodbye to it. Over 15 years after we left it, with the house having gone through several owners, it was very expensively refurbished and opened as a venue for receptions and weddings and other events. When my son and his fiancée planned their small wedding, we arranged to have it there. The bride’s dressing room was Sean's old bedroom! The gathering room for guests was our master bedroom. The ceremony was held in front of the fireplace in the parlor where we had celebrated my parents' 50th wedding anniversary in 1982. The wedding was wonderful; the house was grand in her new finery. She didn't need me anymore, and I felt a closure I had been unable to achieve before. Neither Joe nor I have any living relatives there anymore, but I still say hello to the house when go back to our hometown. I can almost see the 3rd story cupola window wink back at me.

I am glad that although a sign now marks it as commercial offices, that place speaks home to me. I am even more glad that after many years and many moves, I am rooted (not root bound) in my present place. I love being at home.

Wild, Wonderful, Crazy Art

I have missed writing here, but I have been writing, and taking some online courses which I have loved.
Story Circle Network chose a piece I had written  for Story of the Month for October.  I am posting it here with an apology for being absent so long from the blog.


Definitions of "art" vary widely in focus and scope depending on the research source . I like the wrap-around description that art is "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance." This approach to thinking of any field using the skills or techniques of art., or skill in conducting any human activity broadens our concept, especially of ourselves as artists.


When my 70th birthday arrives, this year, I am thinking I will look back on my 60's as the most creative and productive period in my life...in my poetry, in my family narratives, in the widening of my circle of interest in literature and gardening and art (I do consider gardening an art!). BUT my twenty somethings were my forte for forging a foundation of education, shaping my choices for how I would spend my life, and with whom. My late twenties and thirties were my most creative and productive in bringing wonderful, unique, and precious human beings into the world. Nothing I ever write or read or experience will ever rival those moments of birth and breastfeeding and mothering.

My forties found me moving all over the world and increasing the most in my world view and understanding of other cultures. I grew a great deal in tolerance and understanding and navigating the rough rocky waters of teenage rebellion and spousal crisis! Did I get tired and throw up my hands at times? You bet. And I still do. But in my marriage, in my mothering, and now my grandmothering and in my relationships with my son's wives, I am crafting the most crazy and wild and wonderful art in the world...and I revel in being a woman. Whether I am gathering herbs I have grown to create a delicious and "work of art" meal, or bringing roses in to grace the table and fill my home with fragrance, caring for a husband recovering from surgery, managing a business, gathering people around my dining table, or building a memoir, I am filling my life canvas with rich color and depth of imagery and story.


I know I have choices. I can say no to keeping a two year old and her 4 year old sister for a week (I said yes to that last week). But when I say yes, and it means putting a story on hold or not blogging for a week, I don't feel like I have made a bad choice or that I am somehow deprived of my "real" work as an artist. It is just all part of my life, and my relationships. If I didn't have that I am not sure I would have the "want to" to write, craft or create And when I sit with those little girls and read book after book, sing with them, chase butterflies with them and help them learn about growing and picking and cooking with herbs from the garden, I am not only having the time of my life, I am passing a torch. If I never finish the memoir, I have written it. Making the memories is even more important than recording them. Who knows, Skye may be the one who eventually publishes an audiobook and podcasts about the filtered images of a grandmother. This week, she is enjoying learning to chain stitch with a crochet needle that belonged to her great grandmother. Maddie could be the one who composes music that we started making together. When she sits in my rocking chair and sings to me, the chair that holds her once held my mother and grandmother as they rocked me and sang to me. Jordann may paint many more works than my odd canvas of color. She cradles her doll, not knowing at all how many nurturing women, her grandmothers long generations back, have done the same. Lauren went to her first prom this weekend and came by for me to see her in her finery. Already, a beautiful young woman who is headed into choices that perhaps hold a part of me in the story. She wanted to see pictures from my high school proms, and pronounced me beautiful in the dress my mother made for me.

Just a note, though, I may pass the torch, but I am not quitting the race. And I am excited about every tomorrow I will have. What have I said? Maybe, just that it is in relationship (with my Creator, my family, my friends) that I experience the deepest level of creativity and the wildest surge of motivation. In the weaving of this rich tapestry of relationship....wild, wonderful, crazy art.