Category Archives: Life at Home

Irish Sensibility

17 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

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I listen to wet tires whoosh down Walker Avenue.  I hear soft rain piddle its tune upon wet stone.  They are bits of grace,  from a soft Irish rain falling outside my window.

A rain like this always soothes my spirit.  It makes me drowsy.  It makes me long for the comfort of my soft bed.  And even though it’s on the cool side — mid-fifties, I think  —  I’m going to crack my bedside window and cuddle up in warm blankets.

It has been a dry Spring.  The parched dirt must be quenching its thirst with this lovely Irish blessing.  The garden glistens like glass.  Twenty-four hours of straight rain has made my garden happy and plump with wet green.

What is it about a gentle rain that fills me with hope?  It makes me think baptism.  I feel wash cleaned.  Fresh.  The rain makes all things new.  The rain is holy, like that dove that swept down from heaven, all those years ago.

Perhaps a small drop will cure my spider bite scar, that even a week later, is still warm and tender with fever.  Or better yet, maybe it could wipe away Daddy’s pneumonia.  The nurse is worried about “Pappy.”  That’s her name for my father — who in younger days, was a more respectful ‘Mr. Pappas.’

Pappy, indeed.  The nurse says it’s hard for the elderly to bounce back.  Is she trying to prepare me?  Or herself?  I should have told her, if anyone can bounce back, my father can.  Doesn’t that sound just like a child, bragging about what her daddy can do?

Do raindrops taste as good as when I was a child?  Back then, I didn’t care whether I stayed dry or got wet.  Before I ‘got’  better sense, I would turn my small face up to the sky.  Open my mouth.  Wide.   Wider.   And catch raindrops with my tongue.   Sweet success.

I was  a young thirsty flower with no need for doctors or tongue depressors to tell me to say “Ahh.”  I knew good medicine when it hit me in the face.

Out of Service

12 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by in Life at Home

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Sometimes I ignore the messages my body is sending.  Especially when the word “STOP!” is part of the communication.

Like yesterday, for example, when I had plans to pick up my brother and visit Dad.  And when, on the way to Dad’s, my brother and I were stopping in to help Christi finish sifting through the final boxes of our parent’s lives.  After five dumpsters, we are all ready to call this phase of our work ‘done.’

So what if I’d contracted a nasty insect bite on Saturday, that caused me to lose sleep, my face to swell up like a red toad, and my entire body to flush pink heat?  And what did I care about the lovely purplish-black, hard-as-a rock swelling on my upper right thigh, that even now throbs to let me know it’s there.

The bite site looks as if the culprit may have been a Brown Recluse Spider — though the doctor thought it might also be the work of a Black Widow Spider.  Either loves darkness and thrives in cluttered spaces.

I thought I had learned these lessons in my Master Gardening training.  But somehow, out of the classroom, and immersed up to my eyeballs in the stuff of my sister’s scary inheritance, I forgot everything I thought I knew.

I hate to be ill, to be less than one hundred percent, especially when there’s much to do — so much I want to do. So yesterday, when I began to feel somewhat better after taking a couple of Advil, I called my brother.  And he told me I sounded disoriented and that we should stay home —  something about how it’s not good to drive while disoriented.  Then I called my sister and she too, offered me an out.  Then she upped my brother’s ante by telling me I needed to check in with Kate and Glen — our family’s resident medical community — for further advice.

Boy, I really did not want to call my daughter and son-in-law.  Perhaps because I knew I needed to get myself looked at by an expert?

Of course, they advised me to go the Emergency Room; and after I slightly balked at that, we settled on an Urgent Care facility.  Do I need to say that I went like a sheep to the slaughter?

But to my pleasant surprise, I found it rather painless, as far as doctor’s visits go.   A short thirty minute sentence allowed me to walk out with two prescriptions in hand and a standard recommendation to follow-up with my primary physician.

So here’s the test:  What have I learned from all of this? Just this.  Everyday life offers many lessons.  Sometimes I think I’ve learned them.  And other times I  don’t even bother fooling myself.  And in this one tiny compartment of my life, I know myself too well — I will always balk at seeking medical care, unless I’m pushed to go.  It definitely helps to be surrounded by safety valves.

However, some areas of my life need little pushing.  Lessons aside, I’m hoping to be back in service Wednesday.  Because I have a really hot date with a paintbrush and the outside of my sister’s house.

For the time doing

06 Tuesday Apr 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, Mesta Park, Soul Care, Writing

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Some questions come up every Spring.

They grow out of  desire for renewal, from seeds planted deep within my soul.   However, the changes I wish to cultivate are not usually ones to myself.  These are too difficult.  These require too much energy.  These would require me to really know myself.

I stumble for answers when I come up against questions of identity.  At best, I’ve learned that I can only get at knowing myself — that through spiritual direction and contemplation and even writing and other acts of doing, I  am able to uncover layers of my buried identity.  But in the end, I know that I can never fully know myself.  I am mystery.  I am mystery to myself and I am mystery to others.

It’s the same for all of us.  We are all mystery.  We are mystery to ourselves and a mystery to others.  No matter how much time we devote toward self-knowledge, for now, we must be content to scratch the surface, to know only bits and pieces of our personal truth, as “we see through a glass, darkly.”

So outside of Lent, I let go of those harder questions of “who” and unite with Spring by concentrating on my doings.  I involve myself in some new creative undertaking, like my sister’s home remodel.  Or I attempt to develop some new skill or improve old ones, as with my online writing class at Shewrites.com.

But the desire for change responds not only to the questions of ‘who I am” or “what I’m doing.”  Always, always the desire infects the question of  “where I am.”  Each Spring the question arises, with respect to whatever place I currently call ‘home,’ — Do I stay or do I go?

I love living in this old house in Mesta Park.  I really do.  But in the restless Springtime, I began thinking about new old houses to live in, I begin looking at home ads, the local MLS and even that wonderful website called Zillow.com.

I don’t know whether the desire to pull up roots and transplant myself is just a natural outgrowth of the renewal that comes with Spring — a sort of keeping up with the Jones’ — the Jones’ being the Daffodils and Creeping Phlox that decorate my Springtime garden like painted Easter eggs.  Or whether my desire for a new dwelling springs from my deeper most being — to turn a sow’s ear of a house in desperate need of tending, into the proverbial silk purse —  that somehow, has always been part of who I am.

But wherever the desire springs from, I know that it will lead my husband and I to drive around other historic neighborhoods in search of a better fit — as it leads me, for the same reason, to look more closely at other houses in our own neighborhood while on our evening walks.  And it will lead us to attend ‘open houses’.  And it will lead us to closely regard the homes featured on various historic home tours.

Of late, of Lent, I’m wondering whether the focus on “the wheres” and “the whats” of life are mere subterfuges for the deeper questions of identity, a sort of fleeing from the harder work of uncovering true self.  Or whether the desire for change is, underneath, a longing for a home that is not here but out there in the great unknown that waits beyond death.  These two questions are too difficult to answer.  Who but God can say?

What I can say is that I’ve never found a home I’ve liked better, in the last four Springs of looking.  And what I know is that this place I call home soothes my spirit the minute I walk in the backdoor, after being gone all day, as I was this past Saturday, when I went to work on my sister’s remodel.

And this too,  I can tell:  On Easter  morning, with coffee cup in hand, I looked out my kitchen window onto my lovely Springtime garden.  And I turned to my husband and said, “How could I ever think of leaving my garden?  How could I ever think of leaving a place so perfect for our needs?

So in two easy questions, it looks like I’m home.  For the time doing.