things I recall with gratitude

Beautiful Blooms!

2007-04-14T14:34:00.000-05:00

It's a warm Florida day, presaging the heat and humidity to come soon. As I step outside my front door in my pajamas to photograph the beautiful PURPLE iris I saw from the French doors, I note that the amaryllis that our 92-year-old golf and bridge and organ-playing friend gave us 15 months ago. It is proudly, boldly, sensationally abloom! So YOU get to see them both!

MOUNTAINS!!!

2007-04-05T18:37:00.000-05:00

With this weekend's trip to Asheville, I am reminded of how much I love MOUNTAINS!

Those wonderful overlapping ridges of blue, the serpentine turns of the road, and the way the clouds and mist hang about the peaks, are all thrilling to me. Let's not forget that Florida is a sandbar, and except for a place called Lake Wales, it is exceptionally flat. Bridges are truly the high points around this area.

New Hampshire-born and raised, I revel in scenes like this:

THE INTERNET!

2007-03-25T10:57:00.000-05:00

When I think back to pre-internet days, I marvel! These days, when I want to know something, like what is the prevalence of the flu in Florida this month, I GOOGLE it! When I need a recipe for sweet potato, I am as likely to do an internet search as to look in one of my many cookbooks.

Sometimes I am annoyed by spam or popup ads, but woman has never had so much information LITERALLY at her fingertips! I really am grateful for this - how prepared I will be in Asheville next week when I go looking for a place to escape the summer heat in Florida.

It's Been FIVE Years

2007-03-20T08:17:00.000-05:00

Five years ago last Sunday my life underwent a massive upheaval!

The STROKE I had changed the parameters of my life - what I was able to do, how I thought about myself, and much more. I was also at that time uninsurable! No one would issue any kind of policy on me.

Rejoice with me that FIVE years have passed, I am now eligible for insurance, and my life is better than it ever has been!

Okay, it isn't perfect, but I don't expect or even want perfection. I'm wiser than I was - I understand the limits of my patience and know better what drives me over the edge into unbearable stress.

The paradox of time is that it hardly seems like five years, and yet it also seems a lifetime ago.

A Song in My Throat

2007-03-13T08:06:00.000-05:00

Singing - such joy!

My mother was a 13 year old, singing live on the radio in Burlington, Vermont. Wish I had seen and heard that!

Thanks to her, I grew up listening to favorites, such as "How Deep Is the Ocean?" and graduated to show tunes before I hit double digits. I idolized Julie Andrews.

Next I embraced the Kingston Trio - "Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooly". In college, I sang folk music - Eric Anderson, Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins.

At some point I discovered the passionate native American, Buffy Ste. Marie. Hers was not always a beautiful voice, but one full of pain and struggle. I remember being deeply moved by a quote, which must have come from a record jacket, about life being about the wonderful feeling of having a song in your throat. I can feel that, too.

In the hospital, after the stroke, I sang whenever I had the chance, just to prove I still could.

Yesterday, I sang through "The Bell Song" for the first time in years. Wow, did it feel good! Well, except for the final sustained high E; still, though the E may be gone, the rest felt miraculous.

Laughter

2007-03-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

I am very thankful when we have the grace to laugh at ourselves. I was blog-surfing and found this entry about Bloopers that have happened in church. I laughed out loud when I read it. Enjoy!

Daily Thanks

2007-03-10T08:56:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me that I really should post here on a daily basis! I am truly thankful for many things, though not all warrant a long discussion. So said, here I go:

Yesterday was a wonderful celebration of friendship, particularly among women. Spoonbill and I had a delightful lunch, with conversation ranging from movies to our children, to the "whole ball of confusion" that is racial identity in this country. We followed that with a visit to MaGoose's Stitch-In. Just imagine, 2+ hours of stitching and more enlightening conversation in Ma's sundrenched living room, as the breeze eased in off the bay. Ah, that's living!

2007-02-27T18:26:00.001-05:00

Nearly 5 years ago, I suffered a stroke that left me with numbness and lack of coordination of my right hand and arm. For awhile, I could not speak normally, and I couldn't say my husband's name. With time and occupational and massage therapy, sensation began to return. My speech cleared up within the month. I relearned how to brush my teeth and hair, how to butter toast, how to handle a fork. I used a speech program on the computer for several months, because my right hand could not type. I am very grateful for the lessons I learned from this experience. After 5 years, a person is considered to be at no increased risk of having another CVA (cerebrovascular accident). That's my upcoming milestone!

Light of my life

2006-05-10T08:07:00.000-05:00

I treasure this beautiful young woman. She is my 28 year old daughter. I was sick all through my pregnancy with her - all day long for the whole nine months! And then delivering her was awful. She was turned sideways and I was unmedicated by choice - natural childbirth. But she was worth all the pain. Always sweet and outgoing, she would have made friends with Jack the Ripper if he'd come along. She never had a moment's shyness or that wariness that babies sometimes display. She was cheerful and curious.

One of my most delicious memories is her singing. Before she went off to public school, she would amuse herself by making up beautiful songs and I could hear her singing sweetly and joyfully about what she was doing or to Jesus or to one of the cats. The choir director at our church told me, when Sarah was 2 1/2 that I should make a recording of her singing "Winter Wonderland". I wish I had!

S with her cousin K
She was a delightful child, easy to love and with a strong sense of fairness. The only rough years coincided with my estrangement and divorce from her father. She became very rebellious and self-centered. She made some decisions that were very hard to understand and live with. But she pulled herself out of it and went far away for college - all the way to Arizona. From there, she began to find herself. She got her degree in
Elementary Ed and has gone on to teach both 4th grade and now 1st. Her students and their parents LOVE her. She is a wonderful teacher, modeled on her Aunt.

I am very proud of her. And I am grateful to have her in my life. I have so many wonderful memories - like when she was 4 and we held a Christmas open house and She appointed herself the official greeter - and told guests where to put their coats. Or her courage when 3 days before 4th grade she broke her ankle, but went to school on crutches the first day. Or when she was an apprentice docent at Old Museum Village in Monroe, learning to spin a hoop, make a broom and teaching all who visited about the way of life in the 1800's town.

Reading to her 4th graders

my grandmother Grammie

2006-04-18T10:20:00.000-05:00

My Grammie was a special woman of courage and conviction. Born the 6th of 7 children, she was the only girlchild of Dwight and Isabel Claflin Rich of Lyme, NH. I can only imagine what it meant to be the only girl in a family with 6 older males and one younger.

As I child, I loved to be in her kitchen on Fridays - she baked 4-6 pies and fried doughnuts. She used to let me take the left over doughnuts holes and dip them in powdered sugar. She also let me make piecrust cookies of the leftover crust. Oh, the aromas in that kitchen. When the men came in for lunch, there were pies and doughnuts cooling on racks about the kitchen.

She loved her plants and garden. She had geraniums and ferns growing in knee-high rectangular planters in her sunporch and I used to help water them. I loved following her around the gardens and seeing the pansies, johnny jump ups, phlox, etc. To this day, I can see a plant and from some hidden and nearly forgotten part of my mind its name floats into consciousness. The garden was cool even in the damp heat of the day. Her beloved plants were varied and colorful and though I don't recall her working on them much, she visited them when she could and just loved them.

She was often very sick when I was young. She had both breasts removed 5-6 years apart for cancer. Those were the days of radical mastectomies. Some few years later, she developed rheumatoid arthritis, and she always battled with lymphedema in her legs - her ankles were always swollen. She never complained of them, though. In later life, her hands became quite disfigured from the RA. I know they caused her pain. Her severe asthma often had her sitting up through the night in her rocker. She seldom complained.

I sang at her memorial service when she died at 93 (or was it 92? I must find out from the genealogical things my dad saved). I sang a song she used to sing to soothe me - Hushabye Time.
"It's hushabye time at the edge of the woods,
A cricket has told me so.
Grandfather Robin is calling goodnight,
And surely he ought to know.

"Little Tom Chipmunk won't come in at once,
A very annoying trait.
His mother has chattered and called three times
'Come home, it is getting late.'

"The youngest deer has gone down for a drink.
All children need one, it seems,
Just when they ought to be closing their eyes
And waiting for happy dreams.

"A blanket of mist creeps softly about.
The fireflies gleam and glow.
Oh, it's hushabye time at the edge of the wood
A cricket has told me so."

She didn't have a beautiful voice. But the timbre was warm and her love shone through, and I cherish the memories of sitting in her lap or next to her on the couch while she sang it.

I am so grateful to have had her stabilizing presence in my life. I was something of a drama queen (perhaps with reason, too) and she usually could keep me afloat above the high drama of my life. Perhaps she is the reason that the concept of trying to keep positive energy flowing was able to take root in me. She cultivated my emotional soil to receive it!

I have more thoughts about my Grammie, but I will post them later.