Home

I made a nostalgic tour of my hometown in late October this year. Getting to go inside of the house that my parents owned from 1962-1979 was a highlight of that tour. One of my childhood friends asked a logical question: “Why the fascination with the house on Little Street and not the one you lived in from age 4-16?” I couldn’t adequately answer and the question continued to haunt me.

I recently read The Longing for Home by Frederick Buechner and found some clues to why that particular house still holds my interest. What makes a house a home for me has to do with history—my own and that of the house. Buechner starts his book with the metaphor of time and tide. Time that moves us ever farther from shore into the depths and away to an unseen horizon and the tide that rhythmically returns us again and again to touch the shore from where we came.

My strong compulsion to return repeatedly to my hometown seems odd to a lot of people. I’m not sure I understand the draw either, but I know that my time there is a touchstone. I’m reminded of who I was and where I came from. My time there isn’t an attempt to return to my youth, but a simple review of my younger selves. I remember events when I’m cued by locations. I think “you foolish girl,” or “how brave,” or “I remember that stretch of loneliness.” The memories flash by and I attend to the previous versions of myself like you would focus intently on a grandchild with your face beaming affection.

The house on Little Street holds more memories of the person I was becoming than the house where I spent my childhood. There are memories in the Little Street house of my high school years. My wedding showers were held in that dining room. I took my babies back to that house. I helped host big celebrations. I watched my siblings grow up there. My parents aged. The house was the backdrop for so much change. It was always full and noisy and chaotic. It held all the people I loved before we all went our own ways.

My sense of home includes lots of people and moving parts, an energy fueled by relationships. There were four places that I lived in entirely alone: my first apartment after my divorce, the townhouse that I rented in North Carolina, the first house that I purchased on my own in Delaware, the house I bought in Texas before I re-married. They were houses—not homes—showcases that I put together like the doll houses from my youth. I slept there, cooked, cleaned and occasionally entertained, but not much real living happened there. Nothing was ever out of place. The rooms were always quiet. The houses could pass as model homes.

I knew even then that those houses were temporary stops on a particularly confusing journey during the ten years that I was divorced. I never really felt at home in any of them. I can remember rooms and furniture, but I can’t recall a single spot in any of them where I truly relaxed. A home, for me, has to hold relationships and witness change over time. It’s a place where you can be yourself—imperfect, incomplete and messy.

I think that the house on Little Street was special because it was old and home to the stories of multiple families. There was history before we moved in and decades of history after my parents left. I saw it as a container that reflected the history of the hometown that I loved.

My research revealed that the probable builder was a man who managed a window glass plant, directed a military drill team that toured Europe and homesteaded in Wyoming before selling the house. The next owner was a bank president who remodeled the house for his bride. They held cultural events in the house. His widow sold the house thirty years later to a couple who divided the house into apartments during WWII. They sold it to my parents who remodeled and then sold the house to a local doctor who again remodeled and expanded the footprint. He sold the house to a local dentist who lived there for 31 years. He and his wife are ready to sell again having recently retired. I wonder who will be next and hope that they care for the house. I wonder what new stories will happen there.

What makes a house a home? For me, it is a sense of belonging, of permanence, the promise of continuity, an accumulation of life, love. Buechner says it better: “…each of our stories turns out to be a story of us all, and the home we long for has in all likelihood been home to theirs whose names we don’t even know and will be home again to still others when the ever-rolling stream of things has long since borne us away.”

Time and tide. It gives me comfort knowing that my story is added to many within that house in that small town.

Old friends

I am blessed to have many old friendships—some going back to my toddler days. Every once in a while some researchers or journalists report the findings of a study on how to keep friends that someone (probably we taxpayers) paid them to conduct. It seems like there has been a proliferation of studies since the pandemic of 2020 when the effects of isolation and loneliness were obvious to us all.

I read such a study today on The Atlantic, written by Wenjia Tang who interviewed friends over a period of three years. She summed up what those of us with lifelong friends could have told her from the outset. Friendship takes time and effort. She expanded on my shorthand saying that there were six factors: accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination and grace.

Accumulation is the time factor. We may be infatuated with someone when we first meet—attracted to the interests we share or drawn to her sense of humor, for example. But, it takes repeated connections to form a bond. Initial impressions aren’t always accurate. Compatibility often grows over time.

Attention is something I write about a lot. It’s rare to find someone who really listens, who puts her life on hold when I need to be seen or heard. Someone who opens up enough to let me see who she really is. It’s keeping track of what is going on in someone’s life and offering support when she needs it.

Intention is taking the initiative to connect. It’s making friends a priority, reaching out, suggesting getting together. My closest friends seek me out and respond to invitations even when life is busy.

Ritual fuels the accumulation of connections. I have several friends that I get together with just once a year, but it’s a routine meeting that we all look forward to and put on our calendars sometimes a year in advance. Other friends and I have regular places that we go together—favorite restaurants, music venues, boat cruises.

Imagination was one factor that I hadn’t thought of but it made sense. Sometimes I have to be creative to connect with long-distance friends. My BFF and I have sustained our sixty-year friendship through letters, email and rare in-person rendezvous.

Grace was also a novel factor for me to consider. The author of the study defined it as “forgiveness that is undeserved or unearned.” To me, grace is the key factor in long-term friendships. We change. Life circumstances change. We may manage closeness under some circumstances and struggle during others. But when you care about someone and value her friendship, you “cut them slack” as we said in our teens. You understand that there will be peaks and valleys in any relationship. You’re patient and waiting for when the time is right again and then you slip right back to a rhythm and take up where you left off.

Many of my friends are loyal readers of this blog. Thank you for your friendship. It sustains me.

The gift

All my Christmas gift buying is done. We celebrated a combined Thanksgiving and Christmas with our younger son and his family last week. Gifts for our older son and his daughter will travel with us to Arizona soon. Anyone who knows me well, understands how much I hate gift-buying this time of year. Everyone in the family has more than they need. Finding a gift becomes an exercise of obligation and excess—both of which exasperate me. I know grandparents who have solved the dilemma by gifting an experience—tickets to a play or sports event that can be shared, for example. But, for multiple reasons, that doesn’t work in my family. We still give things and the task gets harder each year.

I also hate getting gifts for the same reason. I have everything I need. The kids insist on a list and I wrack my brain to come up with suggestions. I remember when my mother-in-law was in her 80s. Although she had always been a borderline hoarder, she finally reached a stage where she decided she too had too much. She asked for postage stamps so she could write to friends. She didn’t want stationery or fancy notecards. She had plenty of those. She just wanted stamps. We found most of those unused in a drawer when she died.

Every year I tell the kids what I really want is time with them. I’m not looking to share an event or an activity, just hanging-out time together. Focused time is rare these days. I think back to holidays with my mom and mother-in-law when they were the age that I am now. I wonder if I gave them what they really needed. Did I ask them what was new or did I assume that nothing was? Did I ask what they were thinking or feeling? Did I reminisce with them? We shared some wonderful times together that would have been fun to remember. Did I listen, show interest, give enough hugs?

I want what we all want at any age—to be seen and heard by the people we love. That gift becomes more precious as we get older and harder to ask for without sounding whiny. Life is so short. Time passes too quickly.

I read a beautiful quote on friendship yesterday by the poet David Whyte. He said, “the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

Yep, that. That’s what I want for Christmas again this year.

Lagging

I have a friend, who refers to the extra weight she carries, as “baby fat,” even though her baby is over 50. She calls it a “lingering effect” of pregnancy. When this time of year rolls around and I see women around me clocking 20-hour days to get ready for the holidays, I am exhausted by the efforts I made years ago. It, too, is a “lingering effect” that may have started with pregnancy hormones.

Once my kids were born, I became a holiday-making machine. I remember the year that I hosted a Christmas party for all the officers and their wives when my husband was stationed on Midway Island. I hand made over 300 lumpia, the Philippino version of egg roll. I baked dozens of cookies and stirred up over four gallons of spiked egg nog. I made up my own version of the then-popular Newlywed Game to play at the party, which lasted until 3 AM. Years later in Plano Texas I designed and made 25 salt dough ornaments for family and friends, made wine jelly and jalapeño jelly that I gave away in fancy glass jars and trekked all over north Texas to find the Star Wars figures that our sons wanted, but that were sold out in the Dallas area. As recently as a few years ago, I hosted a buffet dinner for twenty couples and decorated five trees on three levels of our timber frame house here in Wisconsin. One of the trees held 36 hand-sewn ornaments. Dozens and dozens of cookies, over a hundred Christmas cards with personal notes and a slew of presents were par for the course every year.

The last few years have been different. I decorate the front porch here and have a small tree in our Arizona house. I do minimal decorating for my oldest son and his daughter in Arizona. Immediate family and my BFF get presents, but the choices are often unimaginative. I bake one batch of my youngest son’s favorite cookies and make the traditional Christmas Day dinner in Arizona. I write a limited number of Christmas cards, which sometimes don’t make it to the mail until the new year.

I tried to remember when my mom retired from Christmas. I know she was done by the year my dad died—and she was only 63 then. She was content to let me decorate a small tree for her. She gave us each a check for Christmas. She sat at the table Christmas Day and watched the rest of us scurry around the kitchen. She was always the first to leave after dinner.

I’m torn. I’m tired and ready to retire from Christmas, but then the festivities start and I’m pulled in by the sparkle and the air of celebration. The heart is willing—I love making a good time for others—but the body is weak. Play a few Christmas carols, and hopefully, I’ll be ready to don my apron and pitch in one more year.

Choose joy

I’m at the age where loss follows me around daily nipping at my heels. It seems like every day I hear news of another peer receiving a grim diagnosis, or worse yet, dying. I fight thinking of myself as frail or vulnerable, yet just the other day one of my most active and fit friends had a fall in a public place and broke her wrist. She’s in surgery this morning. it’s hard to deny that we are aging.

Physical fragility is hard to bear, but the personality changes that have happened to a few of my friends are even worse. I’ve watched friends become negative and bitter, merely enduring a paranoid version of life. It’s a miserable way to live and I find myself shunning their company. I’m not a Pollyanna. I don’t deny that there’s a lot that’s wrong in this world. I just choose to focus on what’s good in life.

I recently made a significant shift in the way that I deal with loss. I’m not even sure when it happened or why, but I think the change coincided with the memoir that I wrote this summer. That writing prompted a careful review of years of my life that I hadn’t thought about in decades. For nearly 36 years I carried the grief of losing my sister when she drowned at age 32. Memories of her death haunted me, especially around the anniversary of her accident. One morning a few weeks ago when I looked at her picture on my dresser, I recalled a happy scene from our childhood and then another. I focused on her life, not her death.

Grief can be all-consuming at my age. Losses compound. Grieving is a healthy process, but it needs to have a time limit or we risk focusing on the end of a story rather than the fullness of the life lead. I’d been grieving for years the fact that I didn’t have enough time with my sister—but is there ever enough time with someone you love?

I’m choosing now to remember the time we did have together and to celebrate the joy that she brought to my life. Once I started down that particular path of memories, I realized that there were so many things I’d pushed aside when I focused on her death. Now there’s a rush of fresh happy memories to enjoy.

I’m experiencing what psychologists call “the frequency illusion”—a phenomenon that is a function of selective attention. It’s like when you buy a new Honda CRV, you suddenly see them everywhere on the road. I may not be able to stem the aging of my body, but I can do something about the hardening of my attitude. In choosing to focus on the full lives of the people I’ve lost, instead of the moments around their deaths, I choose joy and I’m grateful for the time that we shared.

Mind games

I read once that assassins rely on their targets being creatures of habit. I’d make it easy on the evil sniper. I get up around the same time every morning. Since I’m the first one up in the household, I make my rounds of the living area turning on lights and switching on the Keurig machine. Then I take my cup of coffee to the same barstool at the foot of the kitchen island and perch there for my online routine on my iPad.

I start with CNN, scanning headlines to see if anything warrants my attention before the evening news. From there it’s a quick check of today’s weather on the Weather Channel app and then off to scroll FaceBook posts passing over ads and the results of my friends’ games giving them holiday names or telling them who is supporting them in Heaven. I do a quick scan of my email next, deleting solicitations and noting which messages require a response later. I look at The Atlantic offerings for the day and read whatever catches my fancy. Then I open the Wordle app for today’s puzzle.

I like Wordle. The word puzzle is really more an exercise in deductive reasoning than it is of word recognition like some of the Scrabble-like games that I also play daily. I rarely fail to solve the puzzle. I always start with the same word—laser—because it contains frequently used letters (but has never been the answer to a puzzle.) I don’t do well finding words that begin with a vowel because that placement is not common in English words. The words that really give me a fit are those that vary by only one letter. For example, I’ve wasted a lot of guesses running through the list of words like shade, shale, shame, shape, share and shave. Yesterday’s puzzle stumped me for a long time. The answer was queue. I use that word maybe twice a a year when I’m feigning intelligence. Otherwise, I say “I was in line.”

After Wordle, I’m awake and ready to tackle a blog post based on whatever rolled around in my head during the night. Based on the exciting content (she said sarcastically), I might need to watch for that sniper hired by a bored reader of this blog.

Little things

Last week was a rough week for me for several reasons—none of them Earth-shaking. I had my cardiac tests, waited for results; my oldest son had a difficult tooth extraction; we discovered rodents in the attic of our home in Arizona; and I had computer issues going to the wire for the printing of the memoir that I wrote for my granddaughter. The kindness of friends, family and a stranger made it all easier.

I got an early morning text on Monday from a friend wishing me luck on my tests. Several more came in from family. I was sitting in the hospital waiting room when another text came in from a different friend. “What time is your appointment?” she asked. When I told her that I was there waiting to start, she commented, “I’m there with you in spirit.” She checked in later to see how I fared. Several friends weighed in later in the week inquiring about the results. One friend said she didn’t want to bug me, but was concerned. Their constant vigilance helped me know that I was in their thoughts.

My sister-in-law dealt with the exterminator in Arizona for me and went back to our house a few days later to check to see how things were going—a big relief when I’m 1,400 miles away from what needs to be done.

My husband pitched in and figured out how to set margins for two-sided printing of the memoir. He proofread the document for me looking for spacing issues. I had my fingers crossed when I submitted the final pdf. Months of work went into that document. I’m not sure how it will be received by my 17 year-old granddaughter, but it is a gift from my heart to her.

I am blessed with good friends and family. I fear that I might take their caring for granted at times. It’s always there, a steady lifeline of love. But, I was surprised by the kindness of a stranger when I picked up the finished copies of the memoir. I made nervous small talk with the clerk at the printer saying that the copies looked good and that I was worried when I left the flash drive with them. She looked me right in the eye and said, “It’s beautiful.”

I wonder if it was a slow day at the printer and she read some or all of my document. Regardless, her comment made me believe that she understood my intent in writing it and that my efforts will be worth it.

Where would any of us be without the network of kindness that supports us? I am blessed.

Taken for granted

I can write when I’m happy, sad, depressed, tired, silly—but evidently—my brain is highjacked when I’m anxious. Until this morning, there was a long dry stretch of absent blog posts.

I’ve been experiencing heart palpitations and some light headedness for weeks now. I wore a heart monitor for three days, which captured the arrhythmia and then I had an abnormal EKG in the doctor’s office. He speculated that I had mild calcification of my aortic valve. He ordered a stress echo plus a regular electrocardiogram for this past Monday.

I had one previous stress test decades ago for a reason I don’t remember. I do remember the test itself, though, and found it unpleasant. They must have given me the “over 75” version this Monday as I was breathing heavy by the end, but probably could have gone on longer. The echocardiogram was fascinating, however. I not only got to see the images of my heart working away, but got to hear it too.

I finally got the results of my tests this morning via MyChart: “Essentially normal echocardiogram and stress echocardiogram. No evidence of coronary artery disease or significant structural heart disease. See me in 3 months or sooner if needed.” No explanation for the source of my palpitations. I replied asking for clarification. I suspect the cardiologist will say that he doesn’t know, that sometimes these things just happen. But the good news is that there was no mention of significant valve issues.

I am reassured that nothing serious is wrong and the tests themselves gave me a new appreciation for my body. That heart that I saw and heard beating has been working hard constantly for over 76 years. It made me think about the other systems in my body silently supporting my life and keeping me going.

When I meet with peers these days, we usually start the conversation with an “organ recital,” listing our various maladies. A friend today said, “You’re only as old as you feel” and then we both laughed! I have continual pain from my breast cancer surgery in my left armpit spreading down my tricep and over my chest, floaters in my eyes, constant tinnitus and the usual aches and pains of old joints. It’s easy to focus on what isn’t working.

I’m thankful to be this age and able to do what I do. My brain works well enough to bang out blog posts several times a week, keep our lives organized and remember more than a lot of my peers. I read two books a week on average and I’m getting ready to teach two classes in Arizona and volunteer to ghostwrite memoirs. I’m leaving for my daily walk in a few minutes and will give thanks as I stop to gaze out over the lake for all things my body does to keep me going. I may even add an extra mile to my walk. Life is good!

Messages

I’ve checked out 129 books from my local library since 7/22/22. I get books that are funneled in from all over our area. The library network includes dozens of libraries. I only live here six months out of the year. That’s a lot of books from all over southeast Wisconsin!

A couple weeks ago I found a laminated bookmark that someone left in a book. It was about 3 x 5 inches printed in pastel colors with a border of roses. On one side it said “Daily Prayer.” You can see the other side in the photo above. I treated it as an angel message telling me to calm down—a reminder that I can always use.

Yesterday, I found the other two items in another book. They were references to a couple obscure facts in the narrative. Strange! Each item had been carefully copied and cut precisely. They were edged with transparent tape to preserve the edges. I began to wonder if this was a thing—leaving messages in books like the old message-in-a-bottle trick. I’m still trying to determine the significance of these recent “messages” for me.

I Googled, curious about finding things in books. Apparently, people leave things in books fairly regularly. Some maybe on purpose, others simply forgotten. One enterprising librarian even had a social media site with over 20,000 followers interested in the things she found. People leave grocery lists, love notes, drawings, gum wrappers, leaves, poems, photos, recipes, money.

I used to love the old library systems that recorded people’s names on the checkout list attached to the book. Especially in a small town, it was fun to see who had read the book before me. It gave the book a history and was proof that others shared my taste in certain reading material.

In all the books that I’ve read over the years, these three are the only items that I’ve found left behind. Now I’m considering what I might leave for people in the books that I read. Little notes of encouragement, favorite quotes, funny sayings?

Please comment if you’ve found something of interest in a book you’ve read. And, if you’ve found money, I probably forgot it. Please return.

Right Words

I finally got around to reading Joan Didion’s classic collection of essays from the Sixties this week titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In the title essay she highlights the empty lives of the young people she met in Haight-Ashbury. There are stories of runaways, spoiled trust fund teens siphoning daddy’s money for an idle life focused on getting high and vignettes of adolescents wandering the streets looking for life to happen. Didion said, “These were children cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values…they are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it.” They parrot platitudes from gurus because they still haven’t found their own words to know what they think, who they are.

I grew up a part of that generation, but I was protected by the web of community in my small town. Were the values I mimicked any truer to what I really believed, though, than the platitudes adopted by the hippies in San Francisco? I wandered, too, and took a long time to grow up. I didn’t “drop out” or take drugs. I never lost touch with family, but I thrashed around in my forties—a late bloomer—causing collateral damage until I decided who I was.

Growing up is a process no matter what circumstances you come from. Some people rebel or misbehave making an external show of their struggles. Other people hammer out an identity through internal trial and error. A few freeze in place living a Groundhog Day life of perpetual adolescence. For others, life changes them without asking permission.

In a subsequent essay, titled On Keeping a Notebook, Didion again talks about growing up and how her compulsion to write helped her discover what she thought and who she was. Her writing helped her trace the path of her life, to give her perspective on how she changed over time. She says, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”

I’m pretty sure that’s the motivation for my writing at this stage of life. My fixation on the subject of how we grow up, however, comes from the fact that my granddaughter’s adult life is in motion having left for Ohio State in August. I can’t help but compare this point in her life to my past. I was the first in my family to go to college. My parents were unable to provide guidance and I floundered on my own. She has tools and resources. Her parents are strong guardrails. Regardless, I worry. I know that even with the best support, life isn’t easy. I think about my oldest son. I worried about his ability to get a good job since he passed on college and didn’t have a trade. I never envisioned that his hardest challenge would come later in life when he was a single dad to a severely handicapped daughter.

A Christmas gift suggestion keeps popping up on my FB feed. It’s a key chain engraved with “Don’t do stupid sh*t—Love, Grandma.” It sounds like something I’d say and I’m tempted to buy it for her, but I know that no talisman will help her make good choices. I hope that I’m around to see her grow into a woman. I hope that the process is easy for her. What I know for sure is that it is her story to write however long it takes.