Box of Love

The box arrived in the mail a few weeks after Thanksgiving. The contents:

1 bag of shaped chalk (a baseball, basketball, and soccer ball)

2 pairs of white socks

3 sets of "Bob" Early Reader books

1 book about spinning tops (?)

1 yard batik fabric

6 crocheted cross-shaped Christmas ornaments

11 vintage hankies

A collection from my mother, of love and faith and memory. Items that we had forgotten at her house on our Easter visit. Books collected during her teaching days and no longer used but just right for one grandson learning to read and another whose voracious reading habit is hard to keep supplied. And crafty goodness she had picked up at yard sales and thrift stores.

I can imagine her filling that box one item at a time, remembering us as she did so.

The vintage hankies she found at a thrift store in the Great Smoky Mountains, where she volunteered on a visit to a Tennessee friend. She bought a whole box of hankies. She washed them on gentle cycle and carefully pressed them with starch.

The handkerchiefs hang like diaphanous flags on the wall of my craft space. The winter light picks out worn patches and shines through the linen. Red tatting edges cream linen. Openwork crosses a blue linen hankie with a monogrammed "P." Brilliantly colored patterns have faded to lovely shades from frequent washings.

  

Happy birthday, Mom!

Love Letter

My grandmother had thick, straight hair when I knew her. It never took a perm, so she kept it short, in a choppy pixie cut. Her hair was iron gray from far away, but up close I could see strands of silver, white, and black side-by-side like interwoven threads.

Her hair was the first thing I noticed as my parents' big boat of a car, their yellow Chevrolet Impala, pulled into the driveway next to her apartment late on a Friday night. She leaned on the doorknob, holding the door open for us, the kitchen light spilling out into the night and making her hair gleam like moonlight.

Small, tired me pushed my weight hard against the Impala's heavy door until I felt its weight catch on its fulcrum, opening up to the Texas night and into my grandmother's country of cicadas whirring in mesquite trees and profligate stars sprinkled like crumbs across a deep velvet sky.

I raced my brother and sister to the door, wanting to be the first one my grandmother leaned down towards and wrapped in her arms, the first to be enveloped in a cloud of spicy Jovan Musk perfume and the lingering scent of sweet powder she patted in a cloud between her breasts.

My little sister with her long braids was my grandmother's Little Raggy Doll. My older brother was "mijito." In between them, I was loved and petted but without a pet name.

My grandmother was famous in her small town, or so it seemed to me. When we went to the Piggly Wiggly with her, or to shop for clothes at the Terry Farris, people would stop her. They would tell her how much they loved the hamburgers she used to grill and the milkshakes she made at the drug store's soda fountain.

A few times before it closed she took us to the soda fountain for a special treat. When she stepped through the double glass doors, people in the booths turned to look.

"Barbie! Barbara! Barbarita!" they called out.

She ushered us to a table of her former customers and introduced us proudly. "Estos son mis nietos."

In that moment I knew she loved us, that she felt intense pride just for the simple fact that we existed. Inside her small apartment, we got on her nerves, played too loudly, argued too much. But there in the drug store, when she told her friends that we lived in the big city or that I made straight A's, she was free to express her joy in our accomplishments. I blushed with embarassment, but also a secret sense of happiness for that knowledge: the sweet knowledge of a grandmother's love.

Winter Love

A quick weekend trip to see friends renewed my winter-weary spirits.

I talked for hours with my daughter about music and books on the long drive. We ate Thai food. I saw art. I wrote and shared stories with a circle of new friends. I ate hummus and baba ghanouj. I celebrated the arrival of a new spirit in our community of friends.

I enjoyed the winter light. I hung love from a hook in the sun room.

These lovely 3-D hanging heart cutouts, by accomplished artist and teacher Jan (aka SnippetyGibbet), tell me that love is light, intricate, fragile, beautiful.

There are still a few hearts left in Jan's Etsy shop, so you may still have time to share one with a friend.

Mine arrived as swift as Cupid's arrows. Now to decide whether I should keep mine, or share. :)

Winter Kindness

The East Coast was just hit with a snowstorm this past Wednesday. We got about three inches of snow overnight Tuesday,  just enough snow to cover the winter-brown grass. A beautiful sight after a bleak winter. And it was packing snow: wet and heavy and just the right kind for making a snowman. The kids played in the snow and enjoyed their snow day. The boy across the street joined them. I shoveled the snow off the driveway, happy enough to be outside on the cold but sunny day.

Early afternoon the freezing rain started. My daughter checked the forecast; we were worried about my husband who was driving back from New York. Weather Underground predicted "a mix of rain and sleet will change to all snow by 5 PM. There may even be a clap of thunder before the changeover. Once the changeover occurs...expect a period of heavy snowfall to occur through the early evening hours across the entire Washington Metro area. Visibilities will be reduced below 1/2 mile. Snowfall rates of 1 to locally 2 inches an hour can be expected early this evening."

Soon after, we saw a flash of lightning and, as predicted, thunder. Within less than a minute, the sleet had turned into a steady snow. Thundersnow, it's called.

The thundersnow came down so fast that the snow plows couldn't keep up with it. The heavy snow brought down tree limbs and power lines; tall trees fell into the roads. Big trucks jacknifed. Cars slipped and slided. Others were stuck in traffic jams on the highways; the already long Baltimore-Washington D.C. commute times stretched for hours. Many people stuck on the freeway abandoned their cars and walked through the falling snow to a hotel or other safe place for the night. 

My husband got stuck in one of those traffic jams. For five hours. I waited at home. And worried. After the kids were in bed and the heaviest snowfall had passed, I went outside and shoveled the driveway. I turned on all the outside lights. I stayed up and watched television and sewed. (And ate through half a bag of Nana's Cocina tortilla chips.)

My husband finally made it home, at 2:30 a.m., and he told me about sitting in his car for those hours. He turned off the car, restarting it only once an hour to run the heater. He did some work on his laptop. He tried to sleep. He talked with some of the other motorists. Most of all, he stayed calm, cool, and collected.

And when he saw taillights lighting up ahead of him and traffic inching forward, he started his car and drove on through the snowy roads. He swerved around cars abandoned in the middle of the highway. He skidded only once, on a thick patch of snow that had frozen into ice. He told me he felt so welcomed when he saw the lights of the house and the cleared driveway. 

I'm happy to have him home.

Mom Rant

An adjective is a word that qualifies a noun; that is, it gives more information about a person, place, or thing. It describes; it modifies; it identifies, it can even quantify. An adjective answers the question, “What kind is it?” It can denote the noun’s purpose. A qualifier, the final adjective in a series that sits next to the noun, is the “final limiter” and is considered an integral part of the noun.


Here are some popular adjective+noun combinations to consider.

Soccer Mom. Hockey Mom. And, most recently splashed across magazine covers and argued about in online forums: Tiger Mom. The last combination is not a new stereotype, to be sure. But it is packed with such a potent mix of ethnic and gender stereotypes as to encompass the whole nation’s anxiety about a lingering recession and its geopolitical decline.

“Tiger Mom” calls to mind the economic dynamism of the “Asian Tiger” economies (compared to the anemic U.S. marketplace). It conjures up the image of the stereotypical high-achieving Asian student (compared to the typical TV- and video game-addicted American slacker kid). It ascribes almost warrior status to the strict, demanding Mother who pushes her children to excel (compared to the permissive American moms who compliment their child’s every scribble).

Those adjectival appendages (Soccer, Hockey, and Tiger) are all nouns modifying nouns. They are called noun adjuncts, and, appropriately, they are grammatically optional. Irrelevant, you might say, to the correctness of a sentence.

In the popular press, these noun adjuncts are trendier than those adjectival modifiers that classify a mom’s role based on her employment status. Stay-at-home Mom. Work-at-Home Mom. Working Mom, which is semantically redundant. Full-Time Mom or Part-Time Mom. As if there is ever a time when a Mom is off the clock.

When did “Mom” become an insufficient signifier unto itself, when it is just one of the many roles a woman might play in her life?

And is anyone else tired of this constant ratcheting up of the mothering bar? Now moms are not just expected to be full-time professionals and nurturers (however they balance those demands). They are also expected to tackle the nation’s obesity epidemic by carting their children to soccer or hockey or any number of other sports. At the same time, they are tasked with bolstering America’s lagging educational performance by forcing their children to study and practice piano or violin countless hours a day.

And where are the Soccer Dads and Hockey Dads and Tiger Dads in the headlines? Are mothers single-handedly bearing the burden of raising the nation’s children, and, by extension, determining its geopolitical future? Last time I checked, the mothers around me have spouses or partners (male or female), parents of their own who help out, and a whole infrastructure of friends, neighbors, nannies, babysitters, day care centers, and schools who share that privilege and burden.

Can’t we all relax and ditch the adjectives that limit a woman to how successful her children are? Can’t there be as many different (and healthy) ways of parenting a child as there are parents and children? And, rather than placing the blame for our current national malaise on one particular group, can’t we focus on our connectedness and responsibility for each other? Focus on giving our children—and all children in our community, whether we are parents or not—our unconditional love? From that love follows the support, guidance, and structure (strict or lax, wherever you fall on that continuum) that all children need.

RUOK

Two weeks ago, as I was getting over a long bout of illness, my five-year-old passed me a little slip of yellow construction paper on which he had written, "RUOK."

That's what you may be wondering about me, since I have been so long away from blog writing. I am happy to report that I am finally doing OK. I'm over the bronchitis and related ailments I had over the Christmas holiday, and I've started paying more attention to eating foods that are right for my body. Holiday eating this year derailed my gluten-free, dairy-free diet for a while, and my overall health suffered. I've read that 70 percent of our immune cells are in our gut, so it makes some sense to me that if our tummies are ailing, we will too.

I just celebrated my 44th birthday in late December, and I'm looking ahead to my 45th. I want to make it a fabulous celebration, so I am setting goals to make healthy choices every day to be fit to celebrate my mid-life milestone. Getting back to running and stretching regularly has been my challenge this past week, and I'm happy to report I met my goal of running three times this week. It was painful the first few days, but I got into a good rhythm today and had a very satisfying stretch afterwards. I took a picture of myself post-run, ruddy-faced but happy, to remind myself how good it feels to move my body.

I have a few crafty things to share from my Christmas trip to New Mexico. It may not be soon, though, because I am getting used to my new camera, which was a Christmas present. Just this week I figured out how to actually take a picture and upload them to the computer, so it may be a slow learning curve.

Now, I'm wondering, "RUOK"?

"Thy Life's a Miracle. Speak Yet Again."

High Desert Dawn, With Moon and Snowclouds

I don't have many words to express the sorrow I'm feeling at the attack in Tucson on Saturday. Sorrow at the deaths and at the election-year hate-mongering and violent rhetoric that preceded the event.

I am finding a little solace in the words from Shakespeare's King Lear:

"Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again." (King Lear, IV, vi, 55; as quoted by Wendell Berry in Life Is a Miracle; An Essay Against Modern Superstition)

My hope on this day of mourning, in honor of those killed and for their families and our grieving nation, is that we continue to speak--to speak up for hard truths; to speak to each across political divisions and other artificial separations; to speak out against ignorance, hatred, and violence when we see it.