Voices Past and Present

I'm at that odd moment on Thanksgiving Day where things are cooking, but it's too early to cook the final things, and we're still waiting for guests to arrive. There's a short lull before the next flurry of events, and no one needs me right this second. In this bit of quiet I thought I should write.

We've been working on doing a real cleaning of the house this week in anticipation of hosting the big meal today. We have most of the downstairs looking presentable. We organized the game cabinet and moved furniture and dusted all the Mold-a-Ramas. Part of all that cleaning involved pulling all of my old collection of cassette tapes out of a few drawers. It was at the end of the night, and Aden and Quinn were the only ones still up with me. They helped me sort what was there.

I explained the fun of mix tapes. There was real effort to making a good one, often having to tape things off the radio, or a record. I have several old mix tapes--a few from an old boyfriend, a bunch from my brother when he lived in California, one I even made labeled "Baby Tape" that I used to play in our old kitchen as I danced baby Aden around in my arms to calm her when she was fussy. Do kids still compile songs they like to share in a digital format? Or is that completely passe?

I found some embarrassing recordings of my friend Gabby and I making "radio shows" in my basement. Oh we were annoying children--I don't know how our parents could stand listening to us laugh at nonsense all the time. I found bootleg tapes Gabby made for me in the parking lot of Pine Knob where I went to hear concerts by Sting and Nik Kershaw and Depeche Mode. Gabby was more interested in the pre-concert fun we had at those events than the music, so she'd wait out the show with a boom box and make recordings I could enjoy later. (She was and is a good friend, and we are still probably annoying to listen to when we get together and laugh at nothing, but thankfully there is no recorded evidence of that.)

Among the old tapes, I found a few I made of conversations with my grandma. One in particular stands out where all seven of her grandchildren were gathered in her kitchen in Ohio and she was making us breakfast as she told stories. I'd forgotten just what a good storyteller she was. I think of my grandma as more of a listener, but I loved hearing her talk.

I played that tape for my kids in the only working tape player I currently own--a small voice-activated thing I used for recording my lessons before they were born. I only intended to play a few minutes of that tape, but we all got caught up in the story of my grandma getting her first dog, and then about how she met grandpa, and what it was like when he was preparing to leave for the war. We listened to the whole first side of the tape before I decided they really should go to bed.

The tape I keep thinking about most was one from when I was about two and a half, maybe three. My brothers were babies who would occasionally squawk, but for the most part it's my grandpa asking me to recite nursery rhymes. My grandfather had a deep, friendly voice. Aden looked up in wonder when he spoke through my cassette recorder and asked, "Is that my great-grandpa?" She'd never heard him before. He died when I was fifteen. She teared up and listened intently.

In the background on that tape, somewhere behind me and my grandpa, are my dad and grandmother, who sound like they are at the kitchen table. They are chatting and laughing.

It's wonderful to hear, but at the same time overwhelming to realize how many people in that recording are gone. Even little toddler me doing a dramatic rendition of Little Miss Muffet doesn't really exist anymore. I miss my grandpa, and grandma, and dad. I miss the world where that littler me used to live.

I'm looking forward to dessert tonight, when we can break out the tapes for everyone at the table. We can listen to my cousins messily reciting the alphabet and adorably singing for my grandpa. We can hear Arno plunk out simple songs on the guitar, and me and my brothers doing a screamy version of Frere Jacques because we thought it was hilarious once upon a time. And we can listen to my grandma tell stories again. The way she used to at Thanksgiving dinner.

Time to take the turkey out, and start working on potatoes and beans and rolls.

Have a wonderful day, however you celebrate. And remember to be thankful for the people you share your life with. They aren't around as long as we'd like.

Lessons from the Food Pantry

We don't have as many opportunities to volunteer as we'd like (coordinating the schedules of five people in one house with lots of activities is mind-boggling sometimes) but we try when we can to help at a food pantry on the north end of town.  I'm pleased that my kids jump at the chance to go when I can find someone to cover me at work and can arrange to volunteer.  There are lots of important lessons to be learned there.

In this season of food drives and increased interest in charity, I thought I'd take a moment to share what we've learned at the food pantry in the hopes it may help guide people in their giving.  Maybe these are things that only surprised me as I saw what items people in need selected, but maybe it's information others can use as well.

The most popular items on the shelves of the section of the food pantry I've helped with were: cooking oil, cooking spray, flour, sugar, and spices such as cinnamon and garlic powder.

These are things I have never thought to donate, and yet they are the kinds of things I make sure are stocked in my own kitchen all the time.  Why would I think someone else's kitchen would be that different?  I think it comes down to looking around more at what you can spare when you make donations, rather than for what other people actually need.  People coming to the food pantry need the same things we need.  Now I buy extra of those things so I can spare them.

Escape to the Cottage

Mona at the cottage

We got a little time up at our cottage in Michigan right after 4th of July.  Ian, the kids, and the dog all headed out first, and I followed a few days later on the ferry because I had a concert to play, but it worked out well.  With everyone gone I was able to clean areas of the house and enjoy that they actually stayed clean when I walked away from them.  (Proof I am old that that made me so happy.)

It was wonderful to be at the cottage.  It's the one place where I don't feel obligated to really do anything most of the time, and I need that periodically.  It's a place to just kind of be. 

Returning the Cart

It's hard to be appreciative of everything all the time.  In some ways that would be unhealthy, because being dissatisfied can inspire positive change and progress.  It's also distracting not to be able to take basic things for granted, or else we'd never get anything done.  As with most things it's best to find a balance.

But for the most part I don't think people appreciate what they have enough.  I'm often surprised by the kinds of things many people become openly dissatisfied with.  It's a miracle most days just to breathe, and when I'm healthy I try not to take even that for granted.  When I get outside in the morning I try to remember to take in one good breath and just be happy that I can.  It would be insane to try to appreciate everything we should be grateful for every moment, but I figure one or two representative moments can help put things in a better perspective.

Probably the most unlikely thing I do that I remember to mark in this way is every time I put away a grocery cart.  I know it annoys most people to have to return the cart after unloading groceries in the parking lot, especially when the weather is bad.

Spring Break--Now with More Snow!

We just returned from a lovely (if too short) trip to the cottage.  My kids' spring break didn't completely overlap with their cousin's this year, but we were able to meet at the cottage in Michigan and spend Easter together, along with my brother and our parents.

Picture of my Gram we keep at the cottage

Is it strange that coming on our second anniversary of buying my grandmother's cottage it still hasn't fully sunk in that it's ours?  (For me, anyway.  Ian's the one who sees the bills and pays the taxes and does annual toilet repairs, so I'm sure reality has set in for him by now.)  When I clean up at the end of a stay I make the beds the way my grandma liked and put things back as if she were visiting next.  Which is probably silly since she would have been the first to say that we should redo things to suit our own tastes, but aside from removing items that make my husband sneeze we've left everything pretty much the way it's always been.  It feels right, and that consistency is part of why we love it.

The cottage is a family place where we can relax and play and talk about our history while making more of it.  We brought along a 750 piece puzzle to do, the kids made up their own games in addition to playing favorites like Settlers of Catan and Set. We read, my mom cooked amazing food, and generally just enjoyed hanging out in a shared space.  The TV stayed off except for movie night when we watched Elf.  (Hey, it's a good holiday movie!  Does it matter what holiday?)

Despite the calendar suggesting it should be Spring, we had snow.  No buds on the trees yet, no flowers.  But no matter!  We were able to walk across the frozen lake and birds were easier to spot.  The interesting thing about the cold up north is that normally we can't see much past the porch for all the green, but with the trees all bare we could see straight across the lake.

Better

Thanks to everyone who contacted me about my last post.  It meant more than you know.  I wasn't fishing for the compliments I got--just some reassurance that I wasn't crazy--but they were certainly appreciated.

I was already starting to feel better by the time I finished the post, but felt like I still wanted to get that out there while the mood was in my mind.  We can be so self-selective in social media that it can border on dishonesty.  I don't want to imply by not discussing negative things in my life that there aren't any.  I have good days and bad days just like anybody else.  My house is never quite clean, we opt to just grab a pizza for dinner more often then I'd like to admit to, we don't regulate our kids' screen time, and the dog has started pooping in the house again for reasons unknown.  Some kind of oasis of family perfection we are not.

But I am definitely out of my funk and ready to tackle things in a more productive manner.  You know the old adage about how the surest cure for hypochondria is a real disease?  Well my husband became suddenly ill, and there is nothing like a real problem (and some vomit) to put non-problems in perspective.  (He's doing fine now but it wasn't pretty there for a day.)  The things that were bringing me down aren't real problems, just low points in a larger process.  I was wallowing in the empty half of the glass, I guess.  Because it's not about that I can't find an agent and that my violins could be better, it's that I get to write and that I will improve my violins.  Yes, the weight thing is frustrating but it's also sometimes stupid to turn down pie.  There are people in my own zip code suffering food insecurity and my 'problem' is too much pie?  Yeah, I'm over myself for now.  Life is too short to choose to be sad.

Moods are interesting, though. 

Living Tribute

We just spent the last two weeks at the cottage.  It's still hard not to write "my grandma's cottage," but I'm getting closer to being able to say "our cottage."  It's finally starting to sink in after owning it for a year that it belongs to us now.

We signed the paperwork last summer on my grandmother's birthday, more than half a year after her death.  I think she probably pictured her summer cottage in the woods being shared by her children for a time rather than moving so soon into the hands of one of her grandchildren, but I think she'd just be pleased that it's stayed in the family.

When we are in Milwaukee living our busy lives and we get the bills from Michigan to maintain another house there, one with taxes and fees and things to fix, I wonder if it's worth the expense.  But when I'm there I know it is.  It's a home of my childhood that doesn't change.  When I'm at the cottage it's like being with my grandma again.  Like being with the family I grew up with while getting to share that with the family I have now.  It's magic.

Choosing not to Choose

I recently made a cringe-worthy awful mistake in a comment on someone's blog.  I didn't mean to upset anyone, but it left me feeling kind of sick.

Heather Spohr in her blog on Babble wrote a post about why she thinks it's fine to say she loves her children more than her husband.  Apparently this was the hot button issue of the week since we are done being shocked by the 'Are You Mom Enough' Time magazine cover (which I hope has now gone the way of Tiger Mom and Octo-Mom and any other mom-centric craziness of the moment that people want to get worked up about).

Anyway, her argument was essentially that her love for her husband was conditional (based on whether he cheated on her or molested her children) but her love for her children was not.  Personally I don't agree that love of children is unconditional, because if I had a psychopath for a child who killed others without remorse I would be sad and wounded about it forever, and probably not wildly and unreservedly in love with my kid anymore.  And what if one of your children grew up to molest your grandchildren?  This standard of whether or not to revoke love applies to spouses but not kids?  (Extreme, I know, but my head goes to extreme examples to test rules.)

I was most struck by the absurdity of wanting to quantify love to begin with.  Love for a spouse is so completely different from the love for a child that it's strange to even begin to compare the two.  It seems like asking me if I'd rather have my hands or my eyes.

So, thinking of my own children, or of me and my brothers growing up, I commented that if love was quantifiable, would you feel comfortable saying you love one child more than another?  Would you love the first more because you have more invested, or the youngest who happens to be more reciprocal with his or her love?

Well, not being a regular reader of Heather Spohr's, and somehow having missed a crucial bit on my first read through of her post, I didn't realize that her oldest child died three years ago, which she brought up in her reply.  My stomach dropped.  I hadn't meant to be insensitive.  I was using 'you' in a general 'you' kind of sense, not her specifically.  Just...ugh.  I hope she accepts my apology because it's sincere.

But it got me thinking about why on earth are we even asking such questions to begin with?  What purpose does it serve to speculate which loss would be greater or which person you love best?  Why put ourselves through the anguish of a Sophie's Choice moment when no such choice is necessary?  In a real crisis none of us knows what we would actually do anyway, so... Why?

I'm not saying that it's not an interesting exercise to examine the relationships in our lives periodically and see where things stand, but I honestly don't want to know where I stack up against my brothers or my husband or our kids or my parents.  I can only think of one instance in my own life where such a question arose and it was painful.

I was spending the evening with my grandmother in her home in Ohio.  It was a few years after college, that much I remember, but there was a timeless quality about visiting with my grandma that makes pinpointing dates fuzzy for me.  I was alone with her in the family room, she was in her favorite chair, and I was on the floor near her feet.  We were talking the way we always did about nothing and everything, and we wound our way to the topic of grandpa.

We'd talked plenty of times about how much she missed grandpa, but this was different.  This time she talked about the many things that were hard about being alone, but claimed the hardest was not being the most special person in the world to someone anymore.  She wept as she said, "I'm not number one to anybody now.  I was number one to Tony, and when I lost him, I was no longer number one."

She cried for a long time, and I hugged her, and I couldn't think of anything to say.  Because the horrible truth was she was right.  If you looked at love in that manner there was nothing but a hole in her life that would never be repaired.  I loved my grandmother dearly, but it would be wrong for me as a married woman with children to put her above all others in my life.  She wouldn't want that, even if it was something I could give.

My mind raced around to all the relationships in our family, to see if I could single someone out to whom my grandmother could be number one again, but it was as if everyone had already been chosen for teams and my wonderful grandmother was left on the sidelines, unpicked.

But she was not unloved.  Not by a long shot.  My grandmother touched many lives and made a difference in this world.  I loved my grandmother.  I hated the idea that my love, or the love of the many people in her life, could be ranked, and that any of the love we had to offer could be seen as simply insufficient because it didn't compare to the love of my grandfather.  I understood what she was saying, and she was entitled to her pain, and no, no other relationship was ever going to match the one she had with her husband.  But there is more than one kind of love.  I was her first grandchild.  I know the love we shared was special to both of us.  It was a completely different sort of relationship from the one she had with her husband.  They shouldn't be compared, and I don't think they're meant to be.

It's a destructive process that allows us to take something as precious as love and quantify it for comparison.  It leaves us diminished, not enlightened.

When I had Aden, I learned how deep love could be.  When I had Mona, I realized love could be huge.  When I had Quinn after suffering a couple of miscarriages, I knew not to take love for granted.  Love is not a commodity.  It is a gift.  We should not be reckless with something so important.

I love my kids.  I love my husband.  I love my parents and my friends and my cousins and my brothers and my niece and my uncles and my aunts and so many others including my silly dog who barks too much.  I'm not interested in ranking any of them.  I can't live on one kind of love and be a whole person.  There is a lot of love to go around without wasting time announcing who gets how much.  Let's move on to a new game.  This one serves no purpose and I'm not playing.

The Start of Cottage Season

I still can't quite believe we own my grandmother's cottage.  When she passed away my uncles and mother prepared to sell it, but then my husband (always my hero) said he thought we could find a way to afford it.  And now it's ours.  I love it more than I can say.

On the glass half empty side of things, it's hard maintaining a second house from a distance.  We arrived to discover the downstairs toilet cracked and leaking, but luckily my husband (did I mention he's my hero?) somehow knows how to fix such things.  He's had to replace the sump pump.  We need to replace (or maybe clean?) the couch because it makes Ian sneeze.  There are taxes and expenses that at times seem a high price for the amount of vacation we may actually be able to spend there, and it's quite a drive from Milwaukee that includes the frustration of Chicago traffic.

But the half of the glass that's full is so rich and wonderful that it's the only half that really matters.  The cottage was my grandmother's other home, where she spent every June and sometimes a week in July or a Labor Day weekend every year since she and my grandfather built the place until she became too weak to travel anymore.  Her needlepoint work is on the wall, the table grandpa built where she fed me many pancakes is there, her dishes are in the cupboards, her tea kettle on the stove, and one of her jackets still hangs in the closet.  The greatest treasure we found when we first began assessing the contents of the cottage after we signed the mortgage papers was a box of recipes on index cards all written in her own distinctive hand.  She is everywhere at the cottage from the wood trim she helped stain to the plants out front.  I feel like I could come back from a walk in the woods and see her reading in her chair.  It's worth whatever price we're paying for that alone.

And yet there is so much more.  My children love it at the cottage, and I love who they are when they are there.  Mona in particular is so inspired and excited by nature that she revels at the chance to spend time in the country.  Quinn, who I sometimes think of as delicate back home, toughens up and runs barefoot all the way down to the lake.  My kids spent our vacation building sand structures even though it was too cold still to go in the water.  They listened to me read the novel Hatchet.  Aden crocheted, we made tie dye shirts, they collected rocks, they planted a sapling that they named 'Pinwheel' (after the bakery near Detroit that gave it to them), played Battleship, stacked pennies just to see how high they could go, serenaded deer on their violins, and made cookie dough unassisted and without a mixer.  We let them bring their laptop but they never even took it out of the bag.

We had the added fun of getting to introduce my niece to the cottage.  My brother hadn't been there since before she was born, and it was lovely to have time with both of them there.  It's not like spending time almost anywhere else because there is such a blend of fond memories and a lack of urgency that it's peaceful in a way family time other places can't always be.  The internet connection is just spotty enough to keep us from attempting to be productive online, and there are relatively few chores because the space is small.  The big decisions tend to be about what to make for meals.  I'm not normally good at doing nothing, so to have the chance to truly relax and do simple things like read for as long as I like, is not only pleasant, but fun to share.  My brother and I had time to talk, and sit, and skip rocks on the lake.  I wish moments like that weren't so rare, because they are among the few that matter to me.

The only odd part about our recent trip was that Ian had Army obligations in the second half of the week that made for some weird logistics.  On Easter he and Mona and the dog went straight to the cottage to open it up and stock it with food, etc.  Quinn and Aden and I headed to Detroit to visit my parents and pick up my brother and niece from the airport so we could drive them to the cottage.  Ian and I only overlapped for two nights there before he had to head back to Wisconsin, and I had to close down the cottage alone which I'd never done before (so I'm hoping I didn't screw it up and we return this summer to a family of raccoons playing next to another broken toilet or something special along those lines).

But you know you are a lucky person when your biggest complaints are about not having more time with what you already have instead of wishing for something else.  My vacation could only have been improved by more nights with Ian, more talks with Arno, more chances to read stories to Ellora, more games with my kids, and more walks with the dog in the woods where we got to take him off the leash and see him blast away like a furry bullet along the horse trails happy as can be.

There were some less than ideal moments on our trip, but they just don't have the weight they do at home.  There is space to turn problems into teaching moments instead of just reacting too quickly.  But that's for the next post.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from our trip:

                          This is my niece with our dog, Chipper:

 

All the children at some point or another with binoculars:

 Mona with a cattail gone to seed like some kind of whole grain cotton candy treat:

 

All the kids by the swamp (where we went looking for turtles) making a cattail seed blizzard:

 

Kids on the beach, where hours were spent digging deep holes:

 

We experimented with a tie dye kit that came with a tube to put the shirts into while applying the different colors in order to keep the process from getting messy.  I still ended up with hands stained as if had been berry picking all day, but the kids did stay clean.

 

Aden with her beloved Pinwheel the sapling.  I'm still not sure why a bakery was giving out saplings, but Aden has quite the green thumb and could not turn it down.  (Her ability to keep plants alive is something that skipped a generation because she gets that from her grandmother and not from me.)

 

Quinn, Aden, Mona, my brother Arno with Pinwheel freshly planted between his feet, and my mom:

It was good to be there and it's good to be home.  I suppose what that really means is it's just good to be.

Home Sweet Homes (Babble)

We’ve just returned from two weeks of vacation.  Typically when Ian has his two weeks of Army training sometime in the summer I close up the store and take the kids to visit friends and relatives in other states.  This year got complicated because we were planning our trip around one set of dates, then that plan got scrapped for a new and improved set of dates, and then the Army decided rather last minute that never mind, not this summer.  (The Army is fun on so many levels.)  The upside to all that confusion was that, in the end, Ian got to come with us on our vacation.  It’s been a great couple of weeks.

The first part of our trip took us to the cottage, which by the end of the trip was our cottage.  I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that, but one of my cousins who is a lawyer wrote up the appropriate paperwork, and while Ian and I and my mother and uncles were all gathered on a Saturday evening we signed papers and wrote checks and now the place is officially ours.  Amazing.  But I have a whole separate post I’d like to write about our cottage adventure after I’ve had a minute to sort through our photos.  Today I want to express gratitude for the embarrassment of riches I have in terms of places I get to call ‘home.’

Because the second part of our trip was to the Sunny Detroit area, which is where I grew up.  About twenty people gathered at my parents’ home on what would have been my grandmother’s 93rd birthday.  People from Baby Kate, the youngest member of the family at 13 months, to the oldest members of the family (none of whom look a day over 39 I swear) were in attendance.  My mom cooked some of my gram’s best loved recipes, including her cheesecake, something called a blitz torte, and her famed orange jello.

The whole Saturday party was a bit of a whirlwind.  Lots of people and food and a lot of work for my mom who already had too much on her plate between my dad’s health issues and the closing of their art gallery (the contents of which she has somehow fit into the house which is a ninja level feat of organization).  But it went well, and it was nice to be with people who remember and miss my grandma.

Aside from the big party, the real event for me was just spending time in my childhood home.  I love to walk around my old neighborhood and see what things have changed (lots of house additions and gardens) and what things haven’t (the old section of sidewalk down the street with paw prints in it).  I always appreciate walking among trees that seem like old acquaintances, and watching my own children play in the same park where I spent every recess from kindergarten through sixth grade.  Hearing my kids clomping down the steps to the kitchen in the morning the way I must have done, and eating at the same table off the same plates is surprisingly moving to me.  Being in my childhood home is one giant reminder of ‘the more things change the more they stay the same.’  That house is still home.

But the cottage is also home.  It always felt like home, but now that it’s legally ours, it is truly and officially our second home.  So we traveled from Detroit (which I think of as ‘back home’) to the cottage (which is our ‘vacation home’) back to Milwaukee (which is simply ‘home’).  So in a way we were gone for two weeks without ever being away from home.  That’s peculiar and comforting all at once somehow.

I don’t know what it’s like to function without a place to call home.  I am fortunate, because I need that sense of place to accomplish anything.  I need to feel grounded and safe or I become agitated and fearful.  I remember when Ian and I broke off from the rest of my family during a trip in Italy to visit Cremona.  It’s the city where Stradivari lived and worked and it is still filled with violin shops.  (It’s also the place for which Mona is named.)  When we arrived in Cremona it was sunset, we didn’t know where we would stay, and I was anxious.  Everything looked dirty and sketchy as we walked from the train station looking for a hotel.  After we found a place to sleep and drop off our bags–a temporary home–we headed back out into the streets to explore the city and find some dinner.  It was like seeing Cremona with new eyes because I noticed for the first time it was full of fine shops, like a Rolex store.  But when I didn’t know where I was going to sleep I didn’t like the look of any of it.

I think the stress of actual homelessness would be damaging in ways I can’t even imagine.  When I read about teens forced to live on the streets, or people whose homes are destroyed in a disaster, or refugees in exile, my heart breaks for them.  Everyone should have at least one place to call home.  I have three, which seems beyond decadent.  As for my husband, he says wherever I am is his home.

I think a lot about what home is to my children.  I want them to have that sense of place where they are loved and safe; where they have a foundation they can take for granted so they are free to be creative in ways they might not be if they were searching for things that are currently a given.  My kids are at a stage where they love their home so much they insist they will never leave.  When I say things about ‘one day when you grow up and move on’ they all get very upset and insist they want to live with me forever.  They want to raise their own kids here.  That’s actually fine with me, but I tell them if they change their minds it won’t hurt my feelings.  It’s okay to build a new home.  They can always come back and visit this one.  Or the cottage.  They have many homes.  (And I’m glad.)

And now, for the worst segue ever, photos!  Among the things that changed yet stayed the same was the community pool six blocks from my old house.  They remodeled it, added cool new fancy wading pool things that pour water on people different ways, and made the changing rooms and snack area much nicer than when I was a kid.  But there is still the dreaded ‘Adult Swim’ for the last ten minutes of every hour where all the kids must leave the pool just long enough for their suits to dry out and make adjusting to the water annoying all over again.  However, my brother and I got to enjoy being adults in that pool for the first time in our lives, taunting our poor children waiting on the edge while we swam back and forth with no one in our way.  That was awesome.

(Quinn at the water’s edge.)

(Dumping buckets.  How fun is that?  Even my kids who don’t like getting splashed liked all of that.)

I also came downstairs one day to find my four-year-old son playing Scrabble with my dad.  Quinn understandably needed a little help and they did not keep score, but the whole thing was adorable.  Quinn reads at about a first grade level, so he’ll be beating his grandpa at a real game soon enough.

Our time in Detroit was too short, but it always is.  I did get in a dinner at a restaurant with my friends (which was a lot of catching up and laughing), some nice walks at night with my mom, and my dad showed me a folder he recently put together of old photos from his side of the family.  I don’t think I’d ever seen pictures of my great-grandparents on that side before.  I wish being able to pop over to my parents’ house was a simpler event.  It would be nice to play a game of Scrabble, share some dinner, then go tuck the kids into their own beds on time.  But our life is in Milwaukee, and that’s the trade off.

What a problem to have–too many places where we are happy and want to be.  Life is sweet in any of our homes.

House of Dreams (Babble)

I miss my grandmother.  She died in November. I think of things every day that I wish I could share with her.  I want her to come help me make pie in my new kitchen that she never got to visit, and to hear about the people who come into my violin store.  I want to talk with her about books and movies.  I want her to see how much my kids have grown.

A few years ago, when she first had to be moved into a nursing home, her house had to be sold to help pay for her expenses.  This was a reasonable and logical step.  No one could argue with that, but it’s hard when the right thing hurts.  We want the right thing to feel positive, but that’s not always the case.  Sometimes the right thing feels wrong.

Since her house in Ohio was sold I have only been by it once.  I won’t do that again.  I just wanted to drive those familiar streets and see the place where I spent so many Christmas and Easter vacations as a child, the last place I ever saw my grandpa alive, the home where my parents got married and the first place that made my husband feel part of our family.  It was painful to see it and know I didn’t belong there anymore.  The house may remain, but the home I knew inside it is gone.

I know loss is part of life, and I know I am lucky to have had such a wonderful grandma at all.  I’m just not ready to let certain things completely go.  And the last place I still feel my grandma is at her cottage.

(Aden in 2009, standing on the steps my uncle built leading to the cottage porch.)


My grandparents had their cottage on the Western side of Michigan built back when I was in fifth grade.  My grandmother pored over dozens of house plans before she came across the perfect one.  The layout is such that you can comfortably live on one floor, (which they figured would be useful as they got older), but there is space to share with visitors upstairs.  It’s somehow cozy and spacious at the same time, and it’s the most relaxing place I know.   It’s a place for all the family to use, and the more people used it the happier it made my grandparents.

(Quinn and Mona jumping on and off the bed, cottage 2009)

Until my grandma became too frail to travel she used to spend a month up at the cottage every summer.  It’s been the site of family gatherings, weekend retreats, visits with friends, a big New Year’s Eve bash, and it’s where Ian and I spent our honeymoon.  My kids are crazy about the place, and when we go they catch frogs, play in the sand, and look for deer.  I love the cottage.  Everyone in our family loves the cottage.

But while talking to my mom recently, she mentioned the time had come to sell it.  The market is terrible in Michigan right now, so they didn’t expect to get too much, but the upkeep and the taxes and the fees have become a burden on the relatives who have been entrusted with it over these past few years.  It was time to let it go.

The thought of the cottage leaving the family broke my heart.  When I’m there, it’s home.  It’s timeless.  And my grandparents’ touch is in everything.  I don’t want someone else moving in and taking out the table and bookcase my grandpa made.  I don’t want the birds my grandma did in needlepoint to come off the wall.  I want her chair to stay where it is, and the oars to the rowboat hanging in the garage and the ancient collection of board games to be in the utility closet.  I want the cottage to stay the cottage.  I want the cottage.

(My kids at the same little beach where my brothers and cousins and I played)

Ian and I aren’t rich by any stretch, but we are careful with our money and we work hard.  And one of the things I love about my husband is he makes my dreams come true.  That sounds sappy and weird, I know, but it’s the truth.  If it weren’t for him we would not have the home we have, I would not have my own business, and the proof that I’m with the right person is in the smiling faces of my children.  I can’t ask for more.  And yet, when Ian saw how sad I was that the cottage was for sale, he pulled out his laptop and crunched some numbers, and said he thought we could afford to buy it ourselves.

It’s impractical, it’s expensive, it will probably be complicated…. But the worst case scenario in my mind is we try owning it, it proves to be too much, and we sell it ourselves down the road when Michigan’s economy improves.  In the meantime at the very least it buys the whole family a few more years of playing at the lake, walking the trails, and making s’mores under stars while the leaves of the poplar trees rustle like rain.

I think that would have pleased my grandparents very much.  I know it pleases me.

(Quinn at the lake)

How do you hold onto something you cannot touch? (Babble)

Memory is fascinating.  When the topic comes up, most people think about how good they are at keeping track of details or how far back they can remember.  But memory is broader and deeper and more ethereal than that.

When my grandmother started showing signs of dementia, the way in which her memory defined her was both alarming and intriguing.  The rules of conversation had to be completely rewritten to accommodate her when we visited.  Relationships formed in recent decades went out of focus, but figures from the past loomed large.  The purpose of time spent with grandma had to be accepted in new ways because we would travel ten hours to visit with her knowing as soon as we left our efforts would be forgotten.  I hadn’t realized how much I considered visiting people in terms of ‘creating memories’ until that part of it left the equation.

Being with grandma toward the end was about being purely in the moment because the memory would be one sided at best.  In the case of someone like Mona, neither she nor my grandma would likely retain a memory of their time together, Mona being too young to remember and grandma being too old.  To watch any interaction between them was surreal knowing I would likely be the only person in the room to come away with any memory of that time at all.

I seem to have a pretty good memory, although I wish it were better.  One of my brothers doesn’t remember much from his childhood from before age 12, so when he wants to recall something from his past he asks me.  He declared me keeper of family memories at one point.  It’s a nice role, I just hope I do it justice.

But parenting has altered how I think about retaining memories.  I used to fear losing any memories about my past because it felt like part of me was disappearing.  I kept things simply because I had clear memories associated with them, whether those memories were worth holding onto or not.

That changed when I was pregnant the first time and was clearing space for the baby.  I didn’t care about the details of my past the same way.  My childhood was done.  I was excited about the new memories coming that would be about a new childhood.  Building memories for the baby mattered to me more than preserving my own past.  I was able to let many objects go.  I would look fondly at something, enjoy the memory that went with it accepting that it may be for the last time, and then give it up either to the trash or Goodwill.  Having children is more about looking forward than looking back most days, and I’m fine with that.  It’s almost a relief.

It has been stunning to observe how memory works in my children and what they experience.  I am constantly amazed by either something they remember or something they don’t.  Aden has an excellent memory for the objects in my parents’ house in Michigan, for instance, even though typically we only visit once a year.  She also has a very good memory for language and emotions.

Mona seems to have very strong tactile memories which help her when she’s building things, but labels don’t concern her.  She can never remember which room I mean when I say ‘the living room’ or ‘the dining room.’  She has no interest in remembering which of her twin uncles is which and uses their names interchangeably, even if only one of them is around and she’s been told which one it is.  But obscure moments from visits to the cottage she can describe in detail, or whole strings of dialogue from a show she likes that we haven’t seen in awhile will roll off her tongue with no problem.

Quinn learned the name and location of every country in Africa in three days at age two.  It was impressive, and then he was bored by it and forgot everything.  He’s gone through several different phases of learning something incredible and then just letting it go.  He recently rediscovered his love of sign language, and I can’t tell if he’s picking it up quickly because he remembers any of it from when he was a baby, or just because he picks things up quickly.

I think a lot about where the cutoff for some memories are.  I can tell you with certainty what I ate for lunch yesterday.  A week from now that will get sketchy, and at some point it will be gone.  I think about how that relates to what my children know.  All my kids have been to visit their grandmother in Portland, Oregon.  If you’d asked them on the day we returned to Milwaukee if they remembered any of it they would have of course said yes.  A week later that would have still been true.

But somewhere between now and then there was a day where it slipped away from them, and they no longer remember Portland.  Fall of 2008 was half of Quinn’s life ago, so he doesn’t know what I’m talking about when I refer to something we did on that trip.  Mona might remember it if we returned there, but can’t recall anything on her own at this point.  Aden, if you jog her memory a little, can remember quite a bit, mostly about a unicycle race in the mud we saw.  She can tell you a bit about her grandmother’s house, but those memories are not very stable.  I wonder about knowing something one day, and having that memory evaporate the next.  I think that’s how our memories of being babies vanish, one day at a time.

Today my grandma lives only in memory.  I feel her keenly, some days more than others, but I wonder how strong any of my kids’ memories of her will be over time.  Quinn does not remember her, and I don’t expect Mona to for much longer.  Aden clings to memories like precious objects the same way I tend to, so she will resist letting her great-grandmother go.  Photos will help, but photos can trick us into thinking we remember things that we don’t.

I have a feeling Aden may be the keeper of our little family’s memories in the long run.  She’s a sentimental pack rat who likes to bake and that’s a recipe for handing down family stories and traditions.  I wonder who I will be to her when I’m no longer here.  I trust Aden to edit me in a good light one day, but I think about that as I interact with her in the present sometimes.  I can’t know which of the things we do now will stick with any of my kids.  I can only hope they look back one day and see a lot of love and maybe a few really good cakes.

grandma and Mona at the cottage

Memorials Are for the Living (Babble)

A long time ago a college friend of mine told me of an odd dilemma.  An artist she knew was frustrated because her dying wish was to be cremated and her ashes fed to her friends in the form of brownies.  Everyone was appalled and no one wanted to eat the death brownies, so the artist asked my friend if she would sneak her ashes into brownies on the sly and feed them to her friends anyway.

Now, I don’t think the artist had any realistic expectation of an early death approaching, I think the whole thing was some overwrought creative thought process gone wrong.  But my friend was concerned.  She took the idea of a dying wish very seriously, and wondered if she should promise the artist to do as she asked even if she herself didn’t approve of it.

I looked at her and laughed because the whole thing was so gross, and then reminded her that dying wishes aren’t for the dying, they are for the people left behind.  It gives us something to do at a time when we are helpless.  It’s comforting to feel we are honoring the person who as died, but the dead person doesn’t know about it.  Memorials are for the living.  I told my friend that if it gave the artist a sense of peace to think someone would carry out her strange wish, go ahead and say she would.  It didn’t mean when the time came that she actually should, and in fact, I thought she owed it to other people not to.  My friend hadn’t considered that option and seemed relieved.  The dead have only as much power as we choose to give them.  And they don’t get to bake or serve brownies, with or without ashes to taste.

I thought a lot about the influence of the dead this past weekend when I was attending my grandmother’s memorial service.  I don’t think it could have gone any better.  Like many families we have issues that surface between certain relatives that can cause tension, but for the most part everyone loves one another and gets along well.  My grandma would have been pleased with everyone in attendance.  My mom and I brought several of her signature desserts.  I played my viola, although I admit I have never had more trouble focusing while trying to perform, so I hope my mistakes weren’t too noticeable.  My cousin, Tony, did an excellent job of organizing everything and keeping the service on track.  I was holding myself together pretty well until he began reading quotes from some of the letters from people who had been recipients of my grandmother’s charity work.  She ran a food pantry out of her basement and every Christmas she anonymously sent gifts to needy families.  One letter thanked ‘the friend’ who had provided so many beautiful presents for their children who had been expecting nothing that year, and who turned to them all bright eyed and happy Christmas morning saying, “See!  There is a Santa Claus!”

We had the opportunity to pick through the last of my grandma’s possessions.  That was bittersweet.  I only took items that sparked specific memories for me, and I felt self-conscious asking for certain things.  I took a couple of old lady plates, a vase because Aden liked it, a can opener, her sugar spoon….  The item I’m most glad to have is her favorite glass Christmas tree ornament.  It’s a funny little silver and red and green thing that looks a bit like a cross between a spool of thread and an accordion.  When I used to help her put up her tree when I was in college that was the ornament she was most careful with because she’d had it the longest.  I will be honored to hang it on my own tree this year.  My Uncle Joe also made sure I got her large Christmas plate that she used to serve cookies on when she had company.  He told me she specifically wanted me to have that, and just typing that sentence is making me tear up again.

I felt like I had taken too many things while I was in Ohio, but when we got home and unpacked the grandma box I realized I really hadn’t.  There’s just something so unseemly about taking things that aren’t yours, even if the owner is gone and would like you to have them.  The nice thing, though, was that since people were only interested in keeping a bit of grandma and not in actual things, there was no squabbling over any of it.  My cousin the lawyer laughed as all seven grandchildren looked at the knick-knacks spread before us, and said that these were the kinds of items that keep people in the court system for years.  I’m glad that’s not us.  And a big part of the reason that’s not us is because of who grandma was.

How do people survive losing too much at one time?  Or at the wrong time?  On my father’s side of the family we lost relatives in the Holocaust, and when I read stories of people who literally lost everyone in their family it takes my breath away.  I can’t imagine suddenly being that disconnected in the world.  That’s a pain I can’t fathom.  My grandmother was 92.  I will miss her until the day I die myself, but her life was full and wonderful.  She had her struggles, but she would have been the first to tell you she had a great life.

My grandmother’s ashes were encased in a small stone box and lowered into the ground alongside my grandfather.  It was so strange to be at the grave site a quarter of a century after the first time we all gathered there.  A nearly identical collection of relatives as for my grandfather’s funeral, but this time the grandchildren were all grown and standing with our own children.  To know that without the loving existence of the two people buried at my feet that my children would not be here was sobering.  I owe my grandparents everything.  To see their legacy standing in the cold in the form of parents and scientists and artists and kind souls was moving.  Their lives mattered and continue to matter.

There were a few simple readings, and then each of us was offered rose petals to drop into the hole as we walked past the grave.  The only person who declined was Mona.  I’m not sure why she didn’t want any rose petals, but I credit Mona with a brief bit of comic relief at a time it was needed.  In packing for the trip to Ohio I neglected to check that the kids brought their coats.  That seemed like such a no-brainer during a blizzard it never occurred to me that Mona would leave her coat on the hook in the house, but she did, and at the cemetery Ian and I dressed her in as many layers of our own sweaters and sweatshirts as we could find.  So she stood looking lumpy in a huge, red, hooded sweatshirt, staring into the hole for an inordinate amount of time, until I was finally able to usher her along.  There was something so strange and sweet about watching my little girl stand there in her sparkly shoes, the day after she turned seven looking so old and so small at the same time.  The sight would have made my grandma smile.  I’m sad every day that my grandfather never got to meet my husband or my kids.

I’ve read lots of opinions by people about whether or not it’s appropriate to take children to funerals.  I think the answer to that varies greatly depending upon the kind of service and the temperament of the child, but in our case I was very glad to have my children along.  During the memorial service itself they mostly played with their cousins in another room, but they understood what the occasion was about (as much as any children can be expected to understand death) and showed the proper respect when it mattered.  Death is hard, but it’s the ultimate contrast for appreciating all we have.  The memorial was not for my grandma.  She’s gone.  It was for us.  And I think for my kids to see a family coming together to acknowledge all we’ve been given and to celebrate life while still mourning our loss was important and powerful.

It was a long couple of days, but there was music and singing, good food, some wonderful stories, and overall I’d say more laughter than tears.  Just the kind of gathering both my grandparents would have loved.  I can’t believe my grandma had to live such a long portion of her life without her husband at her side.  May they both rest in peace together.  They are missed.

Cookieland (Babble)

Today was all about baking.  If I’m on some kind of serious baking deadline I have to kick everyone out of the kitchen so I can be more efficient, but whenever possible I try to leave the whole day open for baking so my kids can help, too.  If there is time and space to make mistakes, then baking with my kids is a lot of fun.

There are lots of skills I want to make sure my kids have under their belts before they head out into the world on their own, and baking is one of them.  I’ve often been amazed by how many people I run into, some of whom are good cooks, who are intimidated by baking.  I never have been.  That’s not to say I haven’t had my share of disasters (Quinn’s recent birthday cake involved much airing of smoke out of the house), but that’s just life.  For the most part I bake fine, and I want my children to know how to make cookies and cakes from scratch if they feel like it.  So far they’re on their way.

My most intrepid baker is Aden, who has been making cookie dough almost entirely on her own since she was four.

(Aden with one of the first cookies she ever made.)

She likes to experiment, and even came up with an odd cookie during the summer with a friend of hers that had marshmallows in it which melted into weird craters all over the surface of the cookie.  They tasted pretty good, though.

Anyway, I had a talk with her again today about some baking basics, like creaming the butter before adding the sugar, and a little about respecting the chemistry of baking so that she keeps the proportions of things right.  I reminded her about not dumping in big cups of flour all at once to keep it from flying everywhere, and to remember to scrape the bottom of the bowl.  She knows all of that, but I’m her mom so I have to say something, and she listens politely.

Aden and Mona are both good at cracking eggs (I usually have them do that in a separate bowl so I can inspect for bits of shell even though most of the time they crack clean), and I feel bad that Quinn hasn’t mastered that yet but there is so much competition for cracking a couple of eggs that he gets edged out.  (We’ll have to make omelets for lunch sometime when his sisters are in school.)

Today’s baking was in preparation for next weekend which is when we’re going to my grandmother’s memorial service.  My grandma wanted to be cremated, so there was no rush to burial after she died.  We’ve had some time to plan which I think has been good.  I’ve prepared some music to play on my viola while people are arriving, most of it pieces I used to practice at her house on the weekends when I was in college.  At first I was worried that I might be too distraught to be able to play well, but now I think I will be glad to have something specific to do.  My grandma was important to me and I wanted to do something for her service, and music seemed like the appropriate contribution for me to make.

However, big family gatherings, whether in celebration or mourning, mean food.  And it’s hard to get away from the fact that this time of year is also when grandma did most of her baking.  For Christmastime to feel right to me it needs to include my grandma’s cookies and stollen.  I decided the best way to remember grandma at her memorial would be to make some of the desserts that I associate only with her.  This coming weekend is also Mona’s birthday party and I promised her I’d make a dragon cake (which sounds involved, but I’ll figure something out), so I wanted to get as much baking for the memorial service done today as I could.

The things that would keep best are the spritz cookies and the stollen, so those are what the kids and I tackled today.  Spritz cookies we make regularly.  Grandma showed me exactly how she made her wreath and tree cookies many years ago.  Spritz cookies are crisp little butter cookies that you squeeze out of a cookie press.  Grandma’s was incredibly hard to use, and she told me not to carry on that annoying part of the tradition but to get one of the more modern ‘gun’ shaped styles which we did.  For Christmas she would make little wreaths sprinkled with green sugar and decorated with two tiny bits of red candied cherry for bows.  The trees she sprinkled with tiny colored balls.  There are lots of other shapes that come with the cookie press, and we have lots of different kinds of sprinkles in our decorating arsenal, but I told the girls for this particular batch of cookies I wanted them just like their great-grandma used to make.  Aden helped me mix the first batch of dough, and then when I needed a second one she did it completely by herself (even doing the math correctly to double the recipe).  Mona decorated all the wreaths, and Quinn did a tray of trees.  I should have enough to give a box to each of my uncles and cousins at the service, plus a plate to have out for everyone.

The stollen was a funny experience.  For those of you not drowning in German heritage, stollen (pronounced ‘SHTUH len’) is a bread-like little cake with dried and candied fruits inside and topped with a simple sugar frosting.  I don’t know if anyone in the family actually likes stollen, but if there was ever a year to break out grandma’s recipe and make it, this seemed like the year.  I remember grandma’s stollen at Christmastime being something we kind of ate while we played cards because it was there.  It had those weird red and green candied cherries on it.  It wasn’t bad, but I never craved it.  This year its nostalgia value outweighs everything else about it, so it’s baking as I type.  It takes forever!  I’m amazed grandma took the time to do it.  It has yeast in it, and you have to scald milk and add sugar and everything rises for a couple of hours, and then you add candied cherries and spices and raisins (and citron which I didn’t have so I left out) and let it rise again, and then you knead it and cut it into three loaf pans where it’s left to rise again before you can finally bake it.  One loaf I’m going to share with my kids this week, and the other two will go into the freezer before the drive to Ohio.

My hope is to bake two more of grandma’s cakes right before we go.  One is called a Jersey Coffee Cake that’s made with sour cream and cinnamon and pecans and was the kind of thing she used to make when her bridge club was coming over.  The other is a coconut cake that kind of screams of the era when my grandma learned to cook.  The first ingredient is yellow cake from a box.  There is a strange step of poking the cake to death with a fork and then pouring a heated mix of coconut, sugar and milk over the top of it.  Eventually you top it with cool whip mixed with coconut and then top that with more coconut.  Sounds odd but it’s delicious.

There are few ways of conjuring up old memories better than with food.  I hope these foods help other people at the memorial service to picture grandma more clearly even though she’s gone.

And in the spirit of sharing and cooking, I want to pass on my grandma’s pie crust recipe for anyone out there who may want to use it.  We make quiche regularly, and I always like to have crust on hand in case I need to throw together a pie at the last minute, so we use this recipe a lot.  It’s a pie crust that you can store in the freezer so we always have some on hand.  It’s convenient and it tastes good.  I have no idea where my grandma got it from, but here it is:

Perfect Pie Crust

Combine:  4 cups flour, 1 Tbs sugar, 2 tsp salt, 1 3/4 cups shortening

Then add:  1/2 cup water, 1 Tbs white vinegar, 1 large egg

Once it’s all kneaded together (we do all of it in a Kitchen Aid) cut it into 4 equal parts.

Wrap each ball of dough with some plastic wrap and then again in foil for freezing. 

It thaws in less than an hour usually, but I’ve even warmed mine up in the microwave for 20 seconds and it works fine.  You can roll it out or just press it with your fingers into the pie plate. 

I know pie crust purists who don’t believe in over handling dough and that people can be scared of shortening anymore, but for us it’s convenient and tasty and it reminds me of my grandma every time we make it.  Maybe someone else can use it to start some new memories!  How nice would that be?  Happy baking.

Eulogy for Grandma (Babble)

I don’t know if I have the right words to express just how much I loved and admired my grandma.  I suspect I don’t, but I owe it to her to try to find them.  I’ve been thinking about what I want to say at her memorial service planned for early December.  If I had to give a eulogy today, this is the one I would give:


Grandma loved babies.  She told me she always had, as long as she could remember.  When I had my first baby, she came out to Milwaukee alone. It was just over a month after the comotion of the holidays when everyone had come out to see Aden right after her birth.  Grandma came out then, too, but the visit in February was special and quiet and private.  We got to spend hours just looking at the baby and admiring all the cute things new babies do.  One of those evenings, sitting in the dining room watching Aden smile and wiggle her hands in the air, we got to talking about our thoughts on life and death in general.  Grandma was always interesting to talk to, and I could talk to her about anything.  I asked her what her thoughts were on dying one day; if it scared her or if she thought there was an afterlife.  Her response was the best one I’ve ever heard on the subject.  She said, “Well, I think about all the amazing people who came before me who accomplished so many impressive things, and how they have died, and I think to myself, if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.”

My grandma was amazing.  When she was born women still didn’t have the right to vote, but she loved school and earned a college degree.  She had so many interesting stories about working in adoption and I used to beg her to write some of them down.  She never did, but I remember the ones she told me, and maybe I will find ways to write them down.
There isn’t a day of living in Milwaukee that I don’t think of her.  Sometimes I pass the house she was born in, on the corner of Locust and Cramer.  I live on the side of town where my grandpa grew up and I imagine myself and my children retracing his footsteps when we walk by his high school.  My grandma’s stories of her early life and meeting my grandpa take on new life for me now that I live in their old town.  One of her favorite stories was about how she got to know my grandfather because he would walk her to her bus stop after class because it was on his way home.  My husband is a map and transit connoisseur, and he told me he would never tell my grandma this, but he figured out that grandma’s bus stop was nowhere near grandpa’s way home.  He was merely going out of his way to be near her.

I know a lot of stories about grandma, how when her kids were at school sometimes she and a neighbor would occasionally wile away an entire afternoon playing Scrabble and feel they were being quite wicked.  Or about when she and her friend Florence would visit a place known only as “Lake Twelve.”  Or how she used to help her mother do the laundry which was a full two day project every week, and that in the winter they would hang the wash in the attic where it would freeze solid and they would spend the second day ironing it all dry.  I once asked her if there was any particular modern convenience she’d seen invented over her lifetime that was especially important and without hesitation she said, ‘The washer and dryer.”

There are so many interesting stories about her as a child and a student and a young married woman and mother, but my own experience with her was as a grandmother.  And she was the best grandmother possible.  When I was little we would visit my grandparents in Columbus for Christmas and Easter and it was always special.  Grandma kept a beautiful home and it was always welcoming.  She cooked us wonderful meals, and whenever there were homemade treats on the counter and we’d ask if we could have one she would always say, “That’s what they’re there for!”  She was the kind of grandma that made you feel secure and safe and loved.

But I was particularly lucky to have the chance to get to know grandma better while I was in college.  I wanted to go away to school, but I also wanted to be near home.  By going to Ohio State I was able to be out on my own, but having grandma nearby was like still having a familiar home when I needed it.  I started school nearly two years after grandpa died, and gram and I were able to be there for each other.  She would pick me up from campus nearly every Sunday.  I could do things for her like set the VCR or help with things in the yard, and she taught me how to do laundry without making the washer hop across the basement.  She looked forward to cooking me a real meal once a week and I looked forward to eating it.  She let me bring my friends.  She was the first member of my family to get to know Ian.  Grandma came to nearly every performance I gave while I was at Ohio State, and when I graduated she gave me a box of all the programs from everything I’d played in for the past five years.

When I found myself home more because of pregnancy and babies I got into a habit of calling grandma at least once a day.  She was wonderful to chat with, and was the perfect person with whom to share baby updates because she never found them boring.  She would tell me what was going on in her neighborhood or we’d talk about the news or books or movies.  And when Ian was deployed, grandma was the only person I knew who truly understood what it was like to be pregnant and caring for children in Milwaukee while fearing for a husband at war.  She would listen to me cry and say, “I know, Kor.”  And she really did.

My grandma was smart and kind and made the world better for those around her.  She was the best listener I ever knew.  And she loved me, and I never doubted that she was proud of me.  When I read her some of my earliest fiction she beamed at me and said, “Oh Kory, you are a writer–A real writer.”  And because she said it I believed it could be true.
These past few years have been so difficult.  It’s been heartbreaking to watch grandma slowly fade to a shadow of the person I knew.   There were glimpses of her now and then when I would visit, but the truth is I began mourning the loss of my grandma awhile ago.  That doesn’t make this final goodbye any easier.  There is no way to accept that my grandma is not in my world anymore and have it be anything but profoundly, crushingly sad.  But maybe grandma is finally with her husband again.  Or maybe she has simply been released from the pain of an existence she had degenerated into that I know she wouldn’t have wanted.  Either way I hope death meant relief for my grandma.  And in those moments when I contemplate my own mortality, I can think to myself, “If it was good enough for her, it’s good enough for me.”

I love you, grandma.  And I miss you.

(Last photo of me and my grandma when I visited her at the end of August)

Goodbye Gram (Babble)

My grandma died this morning.

It’s so odd to post this right after posting my essay about losing my grandfather 25 years ago. I feel as if I should say more in her honor but it’s too much right now. I don’t want my grandma to be gone.

She was non-responsive the past couple of days and I have been torn about whether I should have dropped everything and driven out to Ohio. I kept thinking would she want me there? Yes. But would she want me to see her in a coma and have my last memory of her be like that? No.

There’s no right answer to that one. Either way I’m left crying.

So Many Roads (Babble)

Whew.  I did a lot of driving this past weekend and I’m still feeling a little dazed.
My cousin and his wife are expecting a baby in June and they had a shower for the occasion in Ohio on Saturday.  I love my cousin and I’m very excited for them and thought to myself how hard could driving out there for a quick visit be?  Ha.  The only real problem with the timing was that the series finale of Lost was on Sunday and I had planned to watch it with my mom.  She’s in Michigan.  So I added a trip up to Detroit to the itinerary, checked a couple of DVDs out of the library for the kids to watch in the car, packed a bag and an air mattress and we hit the road.

I pulled the kids out of school on Friday and did the all day drive with many potty stops and a meal at Denny’s in about ten hours (I think–I lost track with the time zone change).  We were planning to stay with a relative when we got to Columbus, but halfway there we found out she was about to bury her adorable but ancient dog Smokey Joe who had died a couple of nights before.  I didn’t want to burden her with house guests while she was so sad, so we called a friend who we trust really means it when she says, “Come stay with us anytime!”  Short notice indeed for a minivan full of freeloaders to just arrive and stay two nights, but my friend couldn’t be nicer, and she really didn’t seem to mind.  (She even seemed a little sad we couldn’t stay longer, which means she’s also a little crazy, which means I love her even more now.)


I think it worked out for the better that we ended up at my friend’s home.  My kids are comfortable there and toys are abundant.  But the nice thing for me was that I was able to leave my kids playing happily for a couple of hours while I visited my grandma in a nearby nursing home.  She’s been moved to a higher level of care since I last saw her, and it was good to be able to spend a little time with her quietly, without my kids along as a distraction.

Seeing my grandma anymore is surreal.  She’s fading away.  She seems to live in a dreamlike state, and I hope with all my heart that it’s pleasant for her.  But in certain surprising moments she’s still my grandma, and during those moments I realize just how much I miss her.  She asked me several times (each time as if it were the first) when Ian is coming home.  I would catch her up on how he’s doing, but all that talk of a beloved husband returning to Milwaukee from a war kept morphing into grandpa in her mind.  It’s hard to know when she makes a comment what she’s actually commenting on.  We could carry on a conversation, but I have no way of knowing if we were sharing the same one.  I told her how Ian asked if we could please go to the cottage in Michigan for a little vacation when he gets back from Iraq and she looked delighted.  My grandma loved her cottage, and after a few moments of thinking about it she started talking to me as if we were there.  I suppose if you can live in a nursing home but in your mind live in your favorite place from any moment in time, that would be the silver lining of what’s happened to my grandma, but it still makes me sad. 

I miss her so much, and it’s confusing to miss her most when I’m holding her hand in my own.  It usually upsets her when I tell her I’m leaving, so now when I go I just tell her the next thing I’m doing in lieu of goodbye.  I told her Saturday when I took her to the dining area for lunch at the end of our visit that I was going to check on my kids.  I don’t know if she waited for me to return, or if she even remembered I was ever there a few moments after I was gone.  I just don’t know much about my grandma anymore.  But I’m certain she still loves me, and for that I’m humbled and grateful.

(My gram and me.  We’ve both looked better but it will have to do.)

The rest of that day I spent out with the kids at the baby shower.  The jumble of emotions at that event was bizarre.  I was still reflecting on my visit with grandma which was bittersweet, I was thrilled for my cousin and his wife, sad about the dog that had died, proud of my kids for behaving well, anxious about being shy around all the people I didn’t know, happy to see relatives I’ve missed, and depressed that Ian wasn’t there.  It was a wonderful party and well worth all the driving, but I was emotionally wiped out by the end of it.  If I were to write the experience down as fiction people would complain that juxtaposing large themes of birth and death and love and loss into such a condensed setting would be unrealistic.  But life is really like that more often than we care to admit.

That night my kids got to bed way too late because I’d tried to read the new kids’ book club selection to Aden (The Witches by Roald Dahl) and it made her so scared she cried.  I was up telling amusing stories about our old pet rabbits for a good hour so the kids would go to sleep happy instead of upset.  Poor Aden.  Part of me appreciates that she’s so tenderhearted, and part of me thinks I need to toughen her up fast or the real world will destroy her.

The next morning we hit the road again and made it to my parents’ house by mid afternoon.  I do have to say that my kids are troopers in the car.  It’s hard driving for such long stretches, but it would be infinitely worse if my kids weren’t so nice to travel with.  They watched movies in the backseat and laughed and sang and slept while leaning on each other, and I couldn’t have asked for them to be better.  I was never that good so I don’t know where they get it from.  Must be their dad.

Anyway, when I arrived at my parents’ house and mentioned something about looking forward to watching the last episode of Lost on the big TV, my mom said, “Oh, no, we only use that one for DVDs because it needs a converter box.  We’re going to watch on the little TV in the kitchen.”  I let out a small scream and said I did not wait six years and drive all those miles to watch my one show wrap up on a small kitchen TV.  No no no.  I don’t ask for much (my husband is reading this on another part of the globe thinking “Except for a newer bigger house….”) but Lost has been my one little entertainment luxury that I cling to desperately, and even though it was rude I said we needed to find a better place to watch.  My mom, being awesome, called a neighbor who was out of town to get permission to use her TV.  This turned out to have the added bonus that I got to watch without my kids in the same house, so it was a really nice break.  (There was also the amusing element of a friend of my mom’s watching with us who hadn’t seen the show in years and asked me to get him “caught up.”  I told him there was no catching up on Lost.  You either invest yourself in it or there’s no point to it.  It’s just not a casual show.  I found myself doing some impolite shushing during the program that I’m embarrassed by, but you just can’t jump in at the finale and ask me what’s happening because I barely know myself and need to pay attention.)

So getting to watch Lost with my mom was fun, and my kids got to draw with my dad which they loved, and then first thing Monday morning we were back on the highway.   The things I was reminded of during this leg of the journey was how amazing it is that there can be nothing appealing on so many radio stations across much of the midwest, and that there is no good time to drive through Chicago when the sun is up.  We got home in time for a late dinner and even later baths.  The nice thing was I had hired some friends to install a few sorely needed outlets in different rooms in my house while we were gone, and coming back to little improvements was like getting gifts from unseen elves.  (Electrician elves are among the best kind.)

That was my weekend.  I’m glad we did it, and I’m glad it’s over.  (And it got me fantasizing again about how marvelous a transporter a la Star Trek would be for certain trips.  Someone is working on that for real, right?  Please?)

(RIP Smokey Joe.  We loved you.)