One of life's simple pleasures is having breakfast with people you love. Not too long ago, I got to do this with my great-grandmother. You need to know two things about her. First, I firmly believe she must have been a red head in her younger years, because she is one of the spunkiest, fiercest people I know. And second, she is 95 and can still get down on her hands and knees to play with her great-great-grandkids. Grandmother has lived through almost all of the major events of the 20th century: she was a young wife in the Great Depression and kept a victory garden during World War II. Her sons served in the military during the Vietnam War. She remembers when astronauts landed on the moon, and the Cold War, and September 11th. Over cherry pie and coffee, on Thanksgiving afternoon this year, she told me about her early life in Kentucky, about not having a car and so hitching a ride out to Illinois when she and her little family decided it was time for a change. She told me about air-raid drills during the wars, about making her own clothes, and about her prize-winning vegetables. In her little home there is a shoebox filled with yellowed newspaper clippings, each announcing a largest pumpkin or sweet potato. When I was little, I would go over to her house to help her can vegetables from the garden. Harvesting, cooking, labeling jars, stacking them by group on the long, sturdy shelves in the basement. Homemade jams--rhubarb, raspberry, apricot, strawberry, blueberry, and blackberry--line the pantry. Laundry hung on a rigged-up clothesline near the washer, plants spilling out of their pots, propped up on ground-level window sills, retro clock ticking away after all these years from its perch on the concrete wall. Working our way around crates and old handmade chairs and straw brooms, we could find Granddaddy's workshop in the darkest, furthest recesses of the basement--ancient looking hoes and plows mixed with sawdust and nails. Finishing pie, stacking plates: Grandmother has invited us over for breakfast the next day. She says she will make everything; I feel bad; we stop at Bojangles for a bucket of biscuits, our meager offering to the meal. When we arrive she has the frying pan on, but hasn't made anything because she wants to take orders: some eggs fried, some scrambled, some over easy. Sausage, bacon, coffee, and those homemade jams already sit on the table, white plates with pastel flowers resting nearby. We wander around the house that hasn’t changed in 40 years. My dad spent his childhood Sundays here--he says that even as a kid, coming here was like stepping into a time machine. Same basement: some of those vegetable soups were probably ones I helped can, the bright red and blue mesh baseball cap, straight out of the 80s, still hangs on a peg by the stairs leading back up to the kitchen. With Grandmother's help we find the Rubbermaid full of my old dolls and little fairy Barbies that I now show Amy and Kate. They are charmed. We find the old Barbie sports car, the quilts I helped wash and stack, and the cars Ben and Sam used to play with.
It's a rare treasure to know someone very old. I may not speak for everyone, but I for one am fascinated with all things historical. I love period dramas, historical novels, learning about the past. It often seems so distant and completely unreal; it's hard to imagine anything ever happening except the very-present now. But conversations with an older person create a tie to the past. These are real people with real stories and memories from a time when things were different. They are living history books, full of experiences we love to watch on TV shows but don’t seem to have the patience to hear in a nursing home room or prolonged chat. When my dad was a young doctor he worked at a little hospital called Edgefield; when I was only three or four he would take me with him on his over-night shifts to visit with Mrs. Hurlong. She and I would prop up with pillows in her hospital bed and munch on trail mix while watching Jeopardy. Around 8:00 my dad would come in and check on her and then carry me back to my sleeping bag on the floor of his room. At the time I mainly cared about the free candy Mrs. Hurlong “shared” with me and the chance to watch a few hours of TV, but now I see that my parents were helping me learn to care about the stories and lives of people not exactly like me. They were trying to help me listen better. Most of the time, I fail. But this particular day I wished we had longer to enjoy the retro rhubarb jam and fried eggs and the conversation seasoned with the wisdom only old age can bring.
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It's not going to be the red season for much longer—that's the first thing making me blue. We went into the flagship Yankee Candle store here in Williamsburg yesterday, and as I was sticking my nose into every single Christmas scent I started tearing up because "everything is almost over." One in particular ("Frosted Magic Forest," or something like that) smelled exactly like the boxes my mom used to keep Christmas decorations in. Pulling those boxes out of the attic, stacking them on the dining room table, cracking open their lids and letting the mothball and candle smell trickle out—these are some of my favorite memories. I always have a huge letdown after Christmas. It's the curse of letting yourself get very involved, the whole "love hurts" phenomenon. Christmas for me is the time to be a kid again; I refuse to check email, hardly look at my phone, and try as hard as I can to recapture the imagination I once had, when the nativity set came to life and the cranberry sprigs in the Christmas tree were my North Pole Fairy wands. The imagination part gets a little harder every year. Now the few days leading up to Christmas morning look like laying around the fire sipping coffee, playing far too many strategy games, and talking, talking, talking. It's such a blessed time for our family, especially now that Ben and I both live away. It's the once or twice a year when we are all together and we can re-ground in a more meaningful way than the catch up on the phone. Leaving this is hard. This year in particular. Ben and my mom left yesterday for a month-long mission trip to east Africa. Ben is our happy guy and, well, it's just weird to not have mom in the house. I'm mainly feeling sorry for myself (we only got four days together!), because I really am excited for them and so proud of what they are doing. Ben has done an incredible job as the leader of the team, coordinating a group of peers from his college and planning a sports camp and VBS in partnership with a local church. My superstar mom is going along as the leader emeritus, providing adult wisdom. They both have such a heart of service for other people, never batting an eye at any inconvenience, big or small. It's certainly blue to not have them here during my last few days of vacation, but it is a joy and privilege to have a family who constantly encourages you to love others better. Their absence has made the house empty this morning. It's very, very grey (as it has been for the past two weeks, another major cause of the blues), soggy, and quiet. Growing up with a large family makes me wary of the quiet. Happiness means a constant rumble. I haven’t written since Thanksgiving, and barely read, the two markers, I'm coming to find out, by which I judge my failure or success in the Well Rounded Department. I have the excuse that work between Thanksgiving and Christmas was extremely busy and any free time was filled with holiday prep, but I'm tired of making excuses. There are so many things I want to change this coming year. Do you know that I have basically failed to exercise my entire college career? I'm serious. My excuse here is that living in New York necessitates an active lifestyle, which is certainly true to an extent. I do end up walking at least a mile or more a day, but for five years now that little, pathetic excuse has kept me from kicking my butt into gear. My one major New Year's resolution is to make exercising a routine in my life in 2016. Other goals include: 1. Actually writing. Keeping this blog going. 2. Actually reading. 3. Being content where we are. Chris and I are SO ready to begin the med school phase of our lives. Many of you know the story, but the short version is that Chris' senior year of college saw a heart and future career change from law school to med school. By the time Chris starts med school (Lord willing) in the summer of 2017, it will have been a three-year endeavor just to prepare to get in. He has been plugging away at all the prerequisite classes that he never took in college, fitting in clinical hours, initiating and working on research projects, and being an all around star. God has taught us so much about trusting his timing, even when it seems to be taking too long. My prayer is that Chris and I finish out our time in New York well, that our choices will enable Chris to flourish as he prepares to take the MCAT in May, and that as we begin to apply to schools this summer, we will hopefully trust in the Lord's plan, knowing he has the perfect place picked for our family. This was supposed to be a post about my Christmas blues. I think I misidentified the weight on my heart when I first sat down to write. I'm not sad so much as expectant and a little nervous. I've enjoyed such a wonderful Christmas season that letting it go and facing the real world again feels daunting. The next few months will be a lot of hard work—my job is stressful, Chris works full time and basically takes classes full time (it's a miracle), and now we are adding hard-core MCAT study into the mix. We are longing for the warm weather of spring and the start of a new adventure. I pray for faithfulness in the mundane. Faithfulness empowered by the Holy Sprit and allotted to me by the moment, not even by the hour or day. Many days it feels like I can only fathom being faithful in the very moment I am in, not even able to consider being gracious on the commute home or cooking dinner with a smile. I pray for joy to season moments. I pray for a heart of love for others that overpowers my love of self. I want to look up rather than in. This year was a year of growth. Chris and I came into our own as a family. We got fired up about debt-free living and implemented a sound financial plan that is helping us save and spend wisely; we started figuring how to run a home and started our first full time jobs post-college; we celebrated our first anniversary and bought a new car. The year went fast. It was hard. It was good. On this grey end-of-year day, I speak one of my favorite lines from a great Puritan prayer in The Valley of Vision, “Give me summer weather in my heart.” |
Authorwife to a med student and mama to three under three, seeking the joyful and learning to live by faith. Find me on Instagram and Pinterest or shoot me an email. I'd love to hear from you!
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