I’ve decided 2012 is the Year of the Rainbow.
For my friends and me, some of the happiest moments have come at the tail end of some deluges, both figuratively and literally.
Here are the top seven. …
Tag Archives: friends
Perennial Christmas
The sedum bloomed beautifully, taller than most sedum and full but tightly constructed like a cheerleader’s pompon, just like it did the year before and the year before that. The difference was that as it grew, the stalks separated from the middle of the original plant, spreading all over that part of the garden and leaving a hole in the center that mildly annoyed the gardener but not enough to propel her to do anything differently.
She cut stalks and decorated her home with them, arranging them with sprigs of rosemary, a plant with the same sort of beautiful, unwieldy but predictable center-holing attributes.
The best thing about the sedum was that when it dried, it looked almost exactly as it had when it lived. The other best thing was that the seeds were easy to harvest, and the gardener did so each holiday season, tucking them into Christmas cards (real Christmas cards, often homemade) that she wrote for people she loved.
She found many people to love each year.
The most precious people were the same ones as the year before, and the year before that.
She knew good people and she knew good plants, with annoying habits and otherwise.
One night she sat alone in her house, a little sleep deprived and a little buzzed on red wine she’d enjoyed with one of those good people, and she realized that people and plants were the same because the world – lovely as it is – does not allow for too much deviation from what has already grown.
A Christmas tree glowed in the background.
A year ago she found herself alone and wrapping presents, feeling 50% sentimental and 50% melancholy, in a state of wonder about all the ways she and the world around her had changed in 12 months. That refrain would repeat, and repeat again. Fundamental change, when it happens, takes many lifetimes.
The sedum flourished. The gardener flourished.
It was Christmas.
The people who loved each other toasted another year, and were surprised at their surprise.
How to deliver bad news
This way: You are an awesome person and I enjoy spending time with you, but I am not looking for a girlfriend / boyfriend.
Or this one: We have conflicting goals. You want to make pottery in Maine and I want to help starving children in India. You want to have a baby and I want to start a commune.
Not: You’re too good for me.
Certainly not: {no response, no response, no response, no response…….}
We think we’re being kind when we soft-pedal or outright avoid difficult conversations because we fear having them will hurt someone. But those fears are based on assumptions we’ve constructed from our own tender egos.
The Best Songs Ever
Right now she’s 11 and has a playlist called “Best Songs Ever” which has 125 songs on it. As she gets older, the list will narrow.
She’ll get better at making lists, but “Best Songs Ever” – if she still has a list like that – will have (I predict) eight songs on it. Maybe nine.
One song for when she was 13 or 14 and was nursing her first heartbreak. Maybe it’s actually his heart and she broke it. She’ll lay on her bed in her room and lock the door and write in her diary and listen to that same song over and over again. It’ll make her feel as sentimental as a kid can feel at that age. She’ll write something along the lines of “I remember when life was much simpler and all we worried about was whose house we were going to have dance practice at.”
Shag: A timeless mother-daughter movie
We are on vacation in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with three moms (one is a step-mom), three girls (almost 11, 9, and almost 5), and one dad. For four nights in a row now, we have come in from the beach, chased the dad out of the room, and snuggled up with cookie dough, kiddie cocktails / wine spritzers, and the movie Shag.
The girls have picked up on the same quotes the moms did 20 years ago…
The Ways To Love
Let’s talk about all the ways there are to love… Continue reading
Consistencies
A made bed
Breakfast
Cut flowers in my house
Music
Good scotch
A good manicure
Real conversations
Unreal ones
Time alone
Friends
Parties
Family
Hard work
Movement
Plans
Writing
Mad, mad love for all y’all.
How to argue
We are debating over whether to do it this way or that one. My way or his.
You’ve been there. Everyone has.
You see it your way, and your way makes the most sense for the world as you see it.
His way makes the most sense for his world, the world as he sees it.
If you budge, are you compromising something that’s ok to compromise, or are you compromising something that’s not ok to compromise?
He’s asking himself the same question.
Maybe there is another way to look at all this.
What are you trying to accomplish with your way? What is he trying to accomplish with his?
Can you do things his way and still achieve your underlying goals through other means? Can he consider things in a likewise fashion?
What about an altogether third way neither of you have considered?
If I know nothing else, I know the world has more options than arguments.
Related, perhaps: How to love
When time is the healer
My freshman year in college I had a roommate who stayed out late, went to fraternity parties, flung clothes all over our tiny dorm room floor, and watched loud soap operas in the middle of the day.
Can you imagine.
We had a falling out that culminated with (me) screaming, (me) sobbing, (me) throwing things and (me) – god, this is so embarrassing – packing the television set up in my car and driving it back to my parents’ house several weeks before finals. I showed her, man. No more soaps for her (and no more X Files for me).
Poor thing. While she was busy being a normal college freshman, I was clinging to my goody two shoes. (I hate to say I also mean that literally. I only recently tossed out the pair of penny loafers I bought in junior high school and continued to wear through most of college.)
We were not two girls thrown together randomly by a campus housing computer program. We had grown up together. Our mothers were close friends who taught in the same elementary school. We spent countless nights at one another’s houses with my younger brother and her younger cousin. She was the first to know of my long-held secret crush on another teacher’s kid. I always knew of her myriad not-so-secret crushes, little childhood “relationships” she (unlike me) always had the courage to reveal. We drifted in and out of each others’ inner circles during junior high, growing closer again in high school. We thought we would be compatible roommates.
Close but not clingy. Complementary, but clashing.
But college freshmen are not so circumspect.
What I regret most about that year is how my exhausting self-riteousness not only prevented me from having any fun, it cost me a friendship and stopped who knows how many others from blossoming. Worst: it blinded me to how smart, giving and perceptive my roommate was.
Is.
…
Good Friday: An Optimist’s Approach
Easter Sunday, First Presbyterian Church in Dadeville, Ala. My notes scribbled on the back of the bulletin from my grandmother’s church:
“Good Friday wasn’t the worst of mankind. In fact, it was the best man had to offer at the time: a confluence of Jewish piety and Roman law. It wasn’t man’s worst day. It’s just that Easter was God’s best day.”
I meant to write about this before now, but a health scare got in the way. I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled the Monday after Easter to follow up on a couple of ovarian cysts I knew from a previous ultrasound were large and complex. My doctor wanted to see if they had grown or changed in makeup. They had. She scheduled surgery to remove and biopsy them. Then, that night, one ruptured and sent me into a tailspin of serious pain.
For some stupid reason I went to work, made it a few hours, then went home and passed out. I called my doctor first thing in the morning. She phoned in a painkiller and rescheduled my surgery to the next available operating time, some 36 hours later. It has now been a week, and I am exhausted but feel better than I did before the rupture of the cyst. The cyst turned out to be a symptom of endometriosis, which she was able to remove during the surgery.
I cannot believe how wonderful my family, friends and coworkers have been throughout this ordeal. They’ve kept me fed, kept me company, kept me comfortable, and kept my daughter. When I was freaking out before having a diagnosis, they offered perspective and reason. I have felt warm, loved, deeply blessed.
What does this have to do with the Easter sermon at my grandmother’s church?
