It’s Holy Week 2020, and I think we can all agree this has been an especially Lenty season of Lent. When I was a kid growing up in my big, Catholic family, Lent was something that set us apart. It began with having to explain to my friends why I had a black smear of ashes on my forehead. Then, it was a steady procession of opting for fish on Fridays in the school cafeteria as a means of weekly fasting from meat, and of course, the obligatory giving up something dear for forty days–usually chocolate or gum because what kid is interested in actual painful, long-term self-denial?
For much of my adult life I walked away from the liturgical season of Lent. It represented rigidity and rules in a practice only “high church” people adhered to. What a year 2020 has been, though. Ash Wednesday fell on February 26, when cases of COVID-19 in the United States had barely reached double digits and churches openly held services, priests and pastors boldly marking participants with ashes from palms burnt the previous year. Corona was a distant storm gathering strength on the horizon.
2020, for so many of us, has brought us to the foot of the cross. You might say we’ve been given 20/20 perspective or vision.
This spring, for the season of Lent, I committed to a forty-day word fast. Nothing so austere as a complete vow of silence, but almost as challenging: being mindful and censoring words of complaint, judgement, grumbling, or criticism. Perfect timing for mind-blowing news reports, crushing anxiety, and a houseful of bored family members. Turns out words were only a drop in the Sacrifice Ocean.
A pandemic has brought Lent, unbidden, to our doorsteps. The forty-day period before Easter is meant to remind us of sacrifice and suffering, to place on our tongues a small, bitter taste of going without and denying self. Lent suggests that we, in the smallest of ways, mirror the path Jesus took, the one that began with His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of Him and those that followed shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David!’ “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Hosanna in the highest!”
Matthew 21:8-9, NIV
Could they have misread the situation any more? As the hooves of the donkey that carried Him crunched atop the palm-strewn road, Jesus was headed not toward the powerful kingship they expected but towards an unimagined sacrifice. In the span of a week, the world would turn upside-down, power would be reversed, and suffering, what most of us seek to avoid at all costs, would hold all the meaning in the world.
Who are we in that palm waving crowd? The faithful disciples, thinking we know what’s what, sure of the ministry of the Teacher, who casually healed two blind men on his way into the city? Celebrants, happy for a diversion, the latest talk of the town capturing our fickle attention? The donkey, doing our ordinary job on an ordinary day, oblivious of Who travels our same path, heedless that we, too, will be called to take up a cross and follow?
A few days pass on what becomes Holy Week. Dinner is served, Passover celebrated, and shifty-eyed Judas makes his move. The rest unfolds in a contradictory tumble–camaraderie and betrayal, pacifism and violence, innocence and guilt. Then, the worst:
From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land…the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split.
Matthew 27: 45, 51 NIV
All was lost. Or so they thought.
So much sacrifice this season of Lent, so much giving up. We see how paltry our offerings of chocolate, wine, or screen time actually were. They lay on the altar in small measures, nowhere close to first fruits. We didn’t realize–until we did–what sacrifice and denial actually meant, what it could cost. Forced to forfeit school, jobs, human contact, health, and life itself, our vision clears.
We have 2020 vision now. Sacrifice and suffering, once more, have been brought near and given flesh. We’ve seen the nurses and doctors, faces bruised from masks. We’ve watched elderly residences ravaged by disease, and those we love lonely and afraid. Too many are gone too soon.
The season of Lent lasts forty days to reflect the number of days Jesus spent in the desert in prayer and fasting, leaning all His weight on the Father. It’s likely our current season of going without will stretch longer than that. Even so.
Lent points beyond itself. It prepares us for a rejoicing that we could never have imagined.
The tomb was empty, after all. When the sun rose that first Easter morning, the world was redeemed, reset by love.
Beyond anxiety, beyond sacrifice, beyond even death, grace waits.
Our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
Romans 8:18, NIV
On the other side, if we let it, we can carry with us the lessons: what falls away as chaff and what remains important, how a simple moment of joy can be a prayer in itself, how life is both beautiful and violent, fleeting and full of boredom.
Next year, if all goes well, once again we’ll bear the evidence of palms burned to ash on our foreheads. We’ll carry the lessons from 2020 somewhere inside us, but because we are human, living in fickle bodies with feeble minds, we’ll always need reminders. We need spiritual disciplines and seasons of sacrifice, even small ones, to call us back and back and back to the foot of the cross, to walk through suffering to the amazing grace laid bare on the other side.
We are hard-wired for panic. Good thing, since a ho-hum reaction to the saber-toothed tiger hiding in the bushes would’ve sent us the way of the dodo bird long ago. Fight or flight jolts of adrenaline get the blood pumping and spur us to action and, by design, safety and preservation of the species.
So when we’re faced each morning with news of a pandemic and climbing fatalities, when the world as we knew it now seems fundamentally unsafe, our brains are primed for the panic response: a saber-toothed tiger lurks in every shadow. A wary reaction may be warranted, even wise, but a measured wariness is different from spreading anxiety and fear far and wide.
Unfortunately, panic, like the invisible virus we’re up against, is also contagious.
I keep a small flock of hens on our small-acre farm. The other day I casually walked past their pen carrying one of those large, folded patio umbrellas, and one or two of them mistook it for a chicken-slaying pterodactyl. All at once, fourteen hens flung themselves against the furthest reaches of the fence, feathers in a tangle, squawking and trampling each other to escape. (Hens are not the brightest of God’s creatures.)
Author’s photo
The world stage lately has reminded me a lot of those petrified hens. Someone detects a menace, media rushes on the scene, and suddenly we’re all flinging ourselves against the far fence, the contagion of anxiety and fear in our collective hearts. It was like this after 9/11. Then, too, we were glued as a nation to our televisions. Then, too, we whispered tightly to one another, “did you hear? have you seen?” as stories, each more wrenching than the one before, left us paralyzed with loss and fear.
It’s true: none of us is immune from the grief that’s struck us from all sides, losses large and small, from restricted social events to illness and death. We can and should take time to mourn all the very real and abrupt endings facing us.
But then.
Then, because we are human and not poultry, because we are not a herd of zebras on the savanna, we can give ourselves a beat. We can intentionally practice calm. Calm must be a deliberate focus and practice because it does not come as naturally, as immediately, as panic and anxiety. Is this frustrating? Yes, but we can do hard things. When faced with anxiety, Brene Brown suggests we pause and ask two simple questions:
Do I have enough information to freak out? Will freaking out help?
Here’s a revolutionary idea: we are not the thoughts that ricochet through our brains trying to convince us the patio umbrella is out to get us. The brain is just another organ, like a kidney or a lung. The kidney clears toxins; the lung exchanges air, and the brain has a job as well. The brain’s most basic function is to help us (its host) survive all threats. It wants to take the easiest path — run! hide! fight! — but if we give it a minute, we can observe those primitive suggestions as they float on by, simply noticing them as “thoughts generated by the brain.”
We can observe such thoughts much like we do cars when we’re driving through traffic. Instead of panicking and jerking the wheel like a new driver at each vehicle we see — police car! big truck! bus! — we drive on auto-pilot, steer smoothly, hear the song on the radio and let the cars go by. We can practice calm, breathe deeply, and pump the brakes on anxiety and panic.
Deliberately practicing calm allows us time and space to look at our options.
We can foster small actions that minimize risk. We can look for ways to be positive and not add to the melee. We can give a name to the feeling — grief, sadness, fear — thereby removing some of the power it wields over us.
Recently, I set up a few new beehives. Bees (like humans, you might say) are sensitive and particular about their space and routines. For a few days, I had to leave out one of the wooden frames in their hive to allow room to release a new queen. This extra space — the loss of their ordinary structure and environment — sends communal species like a hive of bees into problem-solving mode.
When I opened the hive to give them back the missing frame, the bees had formed a chain with their bodies, linking their legs to each other to span the empty space.
This behavior is called festooning, and no one is quite sure why they do it. It could be their way of measuring the distance between the comb, so they’ll know how much extra they’ll need to build. It could be because bees prefer a certain proximity (called a “bee space”) within a hive for communication and sharing resources.
Whatever the reason, it was a lovely image of how the best of us, in dealing with our own “missing frames,” are reaching out to each other. In times of uncertainty and anxiety, when our structure and routine is a mess, we’re checking in and spanning the distance, figuring out how to “fill in” until things reach a new normal.
One thing you want to be sure not to exhibit when working with bees is panic and anxiety. The last thing you want is a hive of unhappy bees, feeding off your agitation. The bees let me know by their behavior when I need to step away and practice calm. Often, I find myself humming or singing while working the hives. It’s the same reason good horse people speak to horses in a low, easy tone or mamas sway and hum with a colicky baby.
Calm is also contagious.
We were never meant to operate in constant panic and anxiety. Our bodies (and mental health) can’t sustain it long-term. Given that none of us really knows how long we may deal with this virus that’s reining us all in, we might learn something from the natural world. The birds and the bees, it seems, are timeless teachers.
Families tend to be littered with characters, most of them ordinary–playing their vital roles and fulfilling their duties in matter-of-fact ways–and a few exceptional, the sprinkles on what might otherwise be a rather vanilla family cupcake. My mother’s younger sister was the sprinkle.
I knew nothing of their childhood until I’d grown well past my own. My mother’s sister was the only one who ever called her Ethel, her given name, instead of Sally. Even as a kid, this drew me to my aunt as a holder of mysteries, a figure able to conjure things about my mother no one else could. But I admired a host of things about my aunt. For one, she had one of those quintessential double Southern names that you pronounced all of a piece–Bar-bran. Barbara Ann. She used it as it pleased her, going as Barb or Barbara professionally and slipping casually into the double moniker when she visited family. I imagine she got a lot of mileage in her mid-twenties out of the Beach Boys’ smash hit. I know every time it crossed my radio’s air waves–Ba Ba Ba Ba BarbaraAnn–there was only one face I pictured.
In contrast to my rather gallumphing, tomboyish tumble of a family, Barbara Ann was a movie star. She might have seemed more at home posing with Princess Margaret or Jackie O than hobnobbing with our lot. On a visit to our grandparents’ home, we’d pile out of the family station wagon, rumpled and cranky like a pack of stray dogs, and she’d breeze in later, headlights sweeping across the front window, usually having driven straight from work with her single son in tow. She’d climb out of her sedan with hardly a wrinkle in her pressed pant suit, smelling of perfume and cigarettes. We were solid suburbanites; she’d lived in the big sprawling city of Atlanta ever since she’d left the sleepy fishing town of Panama City to forge her path. She casually drove its spaghetti highways and thought nothing of commuting downtown in the city my father never drove through without white knuckles and cursing.
In the mornings at my grandparents’, where there was only one small bathroom, she’d rise early with a cup of coffee and settle in at the dining room table. Here, I’d watch, fascinated, as she set up a lighted, magnified mirror and pulled out a tackle box full of creams, paints, colors, and brushes. Under her expert hand (where had she learned this wizardry?), she’d transform her angled pixie face like a canvas until she looked like a magazine model. No one in my family did this. My mother’s beauty regimen consisted of baby oil and lipstick. Barbara Ann had nowhere to be and no one special to see, Lord knows not on the docks by the bay, but it made her feel good to look good, she said. And she did. Her trim, petite frame was always draped with artful size two clothes and her dark, curled locks always tidy. She’s the reason I don’t leave the driveway without at least a cursory attempt at being presentable.
She lived on a sloping, wooded lot with a creek in a two-story house which she filled with a mix of Art Deco furniture and glassware she’d scoured from antique shops. The woman could shop. She knew just where to go to get a bargain, and her closet was a treasure trove of colors and style. On one visit back in the early 80’s, she sat my mother and me down on her silk-covered bedspread and instructed us on the finer points of the Color Me Beautiful philosophy, trying different scarves and draping us with colors to demonstrate her point. “See?” she rested her case. “You’re winters,” she told us. “Neither one of you was ever meant to wear mustard yellow,” something I wish someone had told me before my 7th grade school pictures.
She managed to make it look easy: living as a single mother in that big house, taking care of everything. She had the tenacity of a hungry badger, going after what she wanted and standing up for herself. Facing some rough seas, she did battle against those she saw as takers, refusing to let injustice have its way. Some of this she learned from her father, a salty burl of a man who had his own way of doing things. She once helped him pilot his fishing boat down the Gulf coast from Mobile, Alabama to Panama City–in a full-out hurricane because it seemed a good a time as any and a little wind never hurt anybody. And some of her spunk and perseverance she got from her mother, who single-handedly cared for Barbara Ann’s disabled brother for decades. Perhaps this is what enabled her to remain a die-hard Braves fan for so long, despite–well, everything.
While Barbara was certainly beautiful and carried herself with poise, she could hoe a row of okra, kill a snake in the creek, and knew how to catch a fish that weighed twice what she did. She knew how to laugh and loved to dance. She had vices: she could hold a grudge with both hands and never let go; she couldn’t give up cigarettes. If you crossed her, she might jerk a knot in your tail, but she was a softie inside, taking in ugly stray cats and watching the birds from her window. After my mother passed away, I know Barbara keenly felt the sting of that sister-loss. We should have spoken more, should have visited more often, but hearing my mother’s voice come out of her mouth–that familiar cadence and the way she rounded out her O’s with the trace of an accent–would completely unravel me every time we spoke. The ghostly echo was uncanny.
A woman named Jenny Joseph wrote a poem in the early 60’s that became the mantra for aging gracefully. The first bit goes like this:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth. I shall go out in my slippers in the rain And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens And learn to spit.
This, fittingly, reminds me so much of Aunt Barbara. She and her Red Hat Ladies spent some fine times in their slippers learning how to spit. I’m sure she was right at the helm of that particular ship, sailing into the hurricane with her face to the wind, determined to hit the shore of 80. Happy birthday, Barbara Ann. Have a cupcake wherever you are. And make sure it’s got plenty of purple sprinkles.
It’s a rare thing in our transient and fickle world to meet with the kind of steadfastness and constancy that spans decades. How could I have known that in my ninth year, when my greatest desire was to spend an afternoon with my nose in a book, that I would find my first real and enduring friend? She turns 50 today, and it seems fitting to mark the milestone with a tribute of sorts. It was the late 70’s when we met, when summers were spent running through sprinklers and being told to “just go outside,” before the Adam Walsh incident injected fear into the suburbs and parents hovered, constant hawk-eyed supervisors. At nine, we’d both ridden our bikes to the community rec center to discover that hanging on the bulletin board was a holy grail disguised as a tattered and smudged sign-up sheet for lessons in horsemanship, something that required no experience or skill with a ball of any kind.
An instant friendship began as Linda and I penciled our names on the list. Turned out she was also in the fourth grade at my school, both of us transplants into central Florida that year. My father had been transferred from a military base in South Carolina, and hers within PanAm from the island of Antigua. In the interest of saving gas money, our parents alternated carting us to and from the barn that summer–and every weekend for the next five years. That first summer together we learned how to curry a horse’s coat, clean out a hoof, and ride. From there, we worked at the stables in exchange for lessons, mucking stalls, creosoting miles of fencing, and oiling endless tack.
Our chief language was equine-speak. When we weren’t at the stable riding actual horses, we played with model horses instead of Barbies. We alternated between being famous trainers with our stables full of noble steeds to making up dramatic sagas with the horses playing speaking roles as they journeyed through treacherous arctic tundra or across barren prairies. Occasionally, we’d even hitch one another up using robe ties or belts and careen around the yard clearing broomsticks between lawn chairs. When we could entice my younger brother to play, we’d enlist him to catch a handful of green and brown anoles, the lightning-fast small lizards that bask in the Florida sun. Fashioning “reins” out of yarn, we’d hitch the unfortunate reptiles to “carts” made of leaves and drive them around on scalding sidewalks. Eventually we released them, but I’m sure generations of these creatures told strange and horrible tales about their giant captors to their stunned offspring.
We spent so much time together between fourth and ninth grade that our families were interchangeable. We called each other’s parents mom and dad and were as comfortable in each other’s kitchens, bedrooms, and yards as our own. I was the fourth girl born into my family, and Linda was the first (and oldest child) in hers. This birth order may be the reason she rankled at comparisons, never bearing labels or playing designated roles. She is exactly three months older than I am, a fact I liked to point out smugly as we grew, both of us late bloomers in middle school, but she enough later that I lorded it over her, my one pathetic competitive edge. Being brought up in the “no worries” Caribbean island atmosphere may have had a part in her naturally breezy and que sera sera approach to life, which fascinated me since it was decidedly different from my more rules-based childhood. Once (and only once), she came to church with us and during communion impetuously demanded to know why she “couldn’t have one of those little wafer thingies.” Glancing wide-eyed down the pew at my father, I mumbled something about having to talk to the priest first and shushed her to be quiet.
At Linda’s house they played soundtracks—albums from The King & I and My Fair Lady, while at mine we heard Pat Benetar and Michael Jackson courtesy of my older sisters. It was just as well because she danced like a thespian with flair, not an 80’s teenager emulating characters from a John Hughes movie. She peppered casual conversations with vintage movie stars I’d never heard of and was the only person alive I’d ever met who’d read more and more widely than I had. She constantly handed me books–whole series of them–that she’d finished in a week, forcing me to up my game and reading capacity. She never wanted to waste an afternoon in front of the TV; growing up in the British Isles had spared her some American vices. When I was with Linda, we climbed trees outside, in kingdoms of the “Tree People,” with names like Queen Oleander and Princess Poppy. We’d ride our bikes for miles, often ending up at the Ben Franklin drug store in the Plaza, in predetermined dramatized roles where we’d speak in only loud butchered Spanish, as if the suburban moms and sales clerks couldn’t see straight through our lame middle school antics. No chance either of us could be mistaken for exotic Latin travelers, despite our single Spanish class in junior high branding us Luisita and Bonita, names we call each other to this day. Or, one of us would lead the other one–who one day would be blind, the next day deaf– through the store, either for attention (me) or practicing for future dramatic scripts (her).
She was coltish–tall, thin, and easily tanned, completely unconcerned with middle school popularity or pop culture of any kind. By eleven, she already moved through the world like a movie star or model, long-legged with her hands floating in practiced, graceful gestures. Her innocent gray-green eyes and quick giggle belied an unmatched vocabulary and imagination, not to mention a cultivated lack of blind acceptance for authority or that anything should be so just because an arbitrary adult declared it. Knowing this last to be true, I was astounded when I heard she’d enlisted in the Army years later, once I’d moved away to dutifully attend college. Seeing her in fatigues was like seeing a peacock hula hoop atop a polar bear–preposterous! In true Linda form, her Army experience resembled little of what I knew of the military from my own family. She was a journalist, stationed in Germany and Fort Knox, even snagging a spot on the Churchill Downs infield to cover the Kentucky Derby itself–the horse race we’d once dreamed of attending as either trainers or jockeys ourselves. Of course I wasn’t surprised.
reading, always reading
bridesmaid
Off Broadway in NYC
trying Korean bbq, NYC
1977, the year we met
lunch in NYC
It’s been over forty years since that sign-up sheet knit us together as life-long friends. She’s a New-York sophisticate now, traveling the world with her interesting and talented husband and occasionally singing with his band. She plays different roles now: carefree aunt and sweet daughter, charming hostess and, when I visit, intrepid taxi-hailer and city tour guide. She wears funky jewelry and browses vintage thrift stores for the kinds of clothes she’s always been drawn to–distinct, unique, with character, clothes that mimic her personality traits. We still trade book recommendations and stories about horses. I still call her mother “mom.” We’ll always be different–that’s what I love about her. I’ll probably always nurse a shred of jealousy over her confident, sure-footedness and the way she navigates without hesitation through life which is, come to think of it, a lot like the horses we rode endlessly under that hot Florida sun. Happy Birthday, Luisita!
If you’re lucky, despite your lack of merit or any earned grace, you may be fortunate enough a handful of times for a kindred spirit to come alongside you and walk a ways. Over three decades ago, due to the single-handed determination and strong will of her mother, one of those unlikely blessings knitted herself to me at the fragile and tenuous age of fifteen.
Today marks her fiftieth birthday. At the entrance to yet another decade we are lucky to face together, it strikes me that one of the things that most binds us is that we knew each other when. Should time clasp its stingy fingers around one of us, which inevitably it someday will, the other will remain to testify to our children. I knew her when.
What a different portrait we can paint than what our children know of us. To them, our moniker is simply “mom,” our presence a given in their universes. Everyone needs a person like this to keep them humble and grounded, to remind them of past innocence and the effort it took to get from there to here. She and I know each other differently, deeply, because we linked arms to weather puberty and periods, chemistry and college, self discovery and the social minefield of high school and beyond. We’d go out on the weekends with friends, me perched on the lid of the toilet while she did her hair and curled her eyelashes. There were braces and boys, angst, acne, and anxieties. Maybe our collective offspring would find it amusing to hear of our exploits, the episodic stories of our coming of age perhaps quaint or provincial to such sophisticated and worldly young adults of 2018. But maybe there’d be a little shock and awe thrown in for good measure at what we each have overcome.
One of my sisters dubbed her “four o’clock Michelle,” because every afternoon after school, our phone would ring and I’d tie up the line for a couple of hours as we downloaded the events of each day. Weekends, we swapped time at each other’s houses, our mothers in the background doing whatever it was mothers did. She taught me how to make excellent snicker doodle cookies, coached me through calculus and chemistry, and exponentially upped my ping pong game in her family’s basement.
Together, we were “not from around here,” having moved in to start high school from out of state–she from Ohio, me from Florida. We shared a lack of southern accents, lots of siblings, and a love of Abba. If that doesn’t say soul sister, I’m not sure what does. We danced to Bananarama and Madonna in the 80’s, were each other’s maids of honor in the 90’s, and compared experiences with marriage and raising children in the 00’s and beyond. I learned to two-step at her wedding when she married that boy from Texas, and, years later, it was her mom I turned to for parenting advice in the absence of my own mother.
Even twenty-five years after my mother’s funeral, she calls or texts on that anniversary to remember and say she’s thinking of me. I follow her parents’ and siblings’ lives, cheer for their successes, and worried over her dad’s recent heart issues. When I saw her standing with her family while we took pictures after my daughter’s wedding, my eyes stung as the emotions welled up. She’s always present for the stuff that matters.
Once, for a month, we were roommates on a college campus. Although we spent almost every moment together in regular life, we didn’t do so well as live-in roomies. Too much of a good thing. But the summer her family camped across the West for a month, I almost died from loneliness. It was before cell phones, and waiting four whole weeks for our reunion was the worst kind of torture. We got used to separation, attending different colleges, for instance, in different states. For years, I visited her in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Texas, while I stayed put with a family business in Tennessee.
For now, she’s only a short drive from here, and we’ve been able to visit more often, each time picking up where we left off, falling into real conversations and the ease and comfort of each other’s company. In construction circles, there’s a thing carpenters use to aid a weak or sagging joint. Apparently, the easiest way to repair a compromised joist is to attach another board of equal or larger size alongside. This board is called–wait for it—a sister board, and the process is known as “sistering.” How brilliant is that? It’s the perfect illustration for life-long friendship, for the person who steps in and holds you up when you’re sagging, who knows just where you need help and just where you’re strong. Who knew you when, knows you now, and loves you anyway. Happy 50th birthday, sister!
In the primitive playgrounds of my childhood, my father pushed the hot metal merry-go-round at breakneck speeds, my brother and I shrieking and holding on for dear life. We learned to hold tight to the nearest pole, arms and legs wrapped like baby monkeys around our feeble anchor. Had we let go, we would’ve been flung into the whirling scenery, small human projectiles. When the spinning stopped, the background kept going, and we staggered like diminutive drunks, our arms akimbo attempting to balance.
That’s the best feeling I can conjure for what it’s been like for the past few months. In the space of one summer, we had two graduations (one from college, one from high school), a wedding, an out-of-state move, and finally, packed our last fledgling off to college. When that merry-go-round stopped spinning and the busyness subsided, we blinked at each other in the quiet, clutching hands for stability. Our nest of four had suddenly become a party of two.
The old spots I used to rely on to prevent dizziness in the spin of parenthood were missing, and for several weeks a sense of disorientation and unease was unshakable. We knew the house would be quieter, but we didn’t anticipate the other changes that made us feel shifty and uncomfortable, like wearing a sweater a few sizes too big.
The contents of the pantry and fridge changed. No one drank the milk each morning (or early afternoon) with cereal, so we no longer keep the familiar half-gallon on hand. In fact, entire aisles at the grocery store are now obsolete. Obviously the diapers and baby products were abandoned long ago, but off the list went the requisite teenage boy snacks. We notched up the a/c upstairs, the bedrooms uninhabited. We only need to climb the steps when we need a suitcase from the bonus closet, so might as well save on the electric bill. It takes longer to amass a full load of laundry, and the dog needs extra walks because the boy who could always be counted on to play tug-of-war or chase isn’t blowing off steam in the afternoons after school.
We still liked each other, the spouse and I. We had to say that out loud every now and then as we renegotiated and adjusted our routines and rhythms. Our dance steps were a little off–we stepped on each other’s toes as our expectations of ourselves and each other shifted. Our conga line had become a tango, and the tempo had changed. Admittedly, there was a bit of tip-toeing around, eyeing each other sideways and trying to gauge moods and emotional availability. This is the same thing that happened when they were newborns. Children up-end your life both coming and going, it seems.
After twenty plus years of mentally juggling four lives, my attention was my own once more, and it was strangely unsettling. “Give me a week,” I announced. “Of sitting in this before you need me for anything.” I wanted to feel the house’s stillness, mull things over in my mind about our next chapter, and yes, be sad over losing the way things had been for so long. So I did, and I was. But my curiosity about what lay around the corner and my pride and excitement for the paths our kids were on burned away the fog of melancholy soon enough. They’d launched, and the two of us back at headquarters were still full of pluck and vinegar.
A Scrabble tile rack with a handful of letters sits on our bookshelf. I use it to spell out one-word attitude reminders like “joy,” “kindness,” and “love.” For the longest time, I’d place a word for the week and come back to find it had been rearranged into some garbled nonsense or, more often, an “alternate” word choice. Kindness became “dinkness,” for example. This, of course, was my son’s doing: his idea of subversive hilarity. What even IS that? I’d cry in mock outrage. We’d go back and forth at it, each of us changing the word and seeing how long it would take for the other to discover the sabotage.
When we moved this eager sapling boy into his dorm earlier this year, he got the last word. I was too busy checking off lists as we packed to notice the Scrabble defacement. It was days later, when my eyes wandered to the shelf as I waited for my coffee to brew, that I had to laugh. He came home briefly the other day and I caught him smirking in the kitchen.
“What?”
“You’re not very observant, mom.” He glanced at the shelf. I smiled up into his triumphant blue eyes.
“Oh, I noticed it. I just thought I should leave it there.” I got a rare hug. Perhaps he felt, too, how the familiar house had changed in his absence, how the buzz of activity had lulled to a low hum.
In the days to come, as we enjoy our new routine and menus and discover this new rhythm in our roomier nest, that tile rack will remain unchanged. It’s a good reminder to us to keep laughing, even when it stings a little, and to treat one another gently. No matter how strong we are, there are times when we can all use a little human dinkness.
