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All Dressed Up…

All Dressed Up…

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It’s the day after Labor Day, a momentous occasion that used to strike fear and excitement in the hearts of my children and all the kiddos in this area — and equal amounts of glee and relief for their parents. 

It was a day marked with the arrival of the big yellow buses lumbering down the street and stopping at the corner, where a parade of scrubbed schoolchildren with shiny new backpacks would step into them — and be whisked off to their new lives. 

That has all changed this year with the decision to hold virtual classes only in Fairfax County. There’s little glee and relief for parents, who are trying to make their children sit still for six hours of online education.  And there are no big yellow buses plying the neighborhood streets. Caption them … “all dressed up — and nowhere to go.”

Every Loop

Every Loop

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Having just completed an afghan for my first grandchild, I’m now beginning to crochet one for my second-born grandchild, due in seven weeks. It’s highly likely that the baby will be born before the blanket is completed — especially if, as seemed likely last night, I can’t even get the thing started!

I’m not what you would call a crafty person, but I believe wholeheartedly in the beauty of the homemade, in giving a child — and now a grandchild — a gift I have created with my own hands. There may be dropped stitches and other flaws, but what matters is the love worked into every loop.

This morning I decided to eschew the Youtube instructions I found last night, which got me started with a slight deviation that made me crazy, and now I’m back on track. It may not be the world’s most perfect afghan, but it will be my own — until it’s my grandchild’s, that is. 

Stretch Marks

Stretch Marks

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This is a house that has expanded and contracted so often during the last few decades that I almost wonder it doesn’t have stretch marks. 

After so many comings and goings you develop a feel for the ebbs and flows. There is the excitement when it fills again, the sense of life returning to the old place. And when that life departs for other climes, there is, of course sadness but also calmness and stability. 

While it would be easy to call the house emptier after one of these leave-takings, I know that the old place is really just holding its breath. There will be visits and returns. There will be grandchildren crawling on these floors (goodness, I’d better mop them!). 

There is life in this old house yet.

The Grandparents Among Us

The Grandparents Among Us

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Within the last week, moving vans have twice lumbered down our sleepy street. In one case to move a grandma into a family’s home; in the other, to move a family with a resident grandma out to a roomier place west of town. 

The disruptions of the pandemic, including virtual school, have put a new spin on resident grandparents, on their helpfulness and the value they add to nuclear family functioning. 

I wonder if some of these changes will become permanent, if we will move back to an older way of living, one where three generations living under one roof was the rule rather than the exception.

Now that I’m a grandparent, I wonder more about these things. 

(The old Vale Schoolhouse, which itself harkens back to an older era.)  

Why We Write

Why We Write

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There are certainly mornings when I wonder what I’m doing here. Why share these observations with the blogosphere when I could just as soon express them to family or friends or jot them down in my journal?

I know the answer to that question, but I’ve seldom seen it explained as well as Susan Orlean does in her 2018 nonfiction bestseller The Library Book. 

Admitting that before the idea for The Library Book struck her she had sworn off writing books — “working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match,” she wrote — she goes on to talk about why the idea pulled her in. The book, which recounts the Los Angeles Public Library’s great fire of 1986 and the beauty and fragility of libraries in general, grew from the love of books Orlean developed as a child and the memory of afternoon excursions to the Bertram Woods Branch of the Shaker Heights (Ohio) Public Library system with her mother. Her mother, much older now and in the throes of dementia, wasn’t remembering those library visits anymore. That left Orlean to remember for both of them.

“I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons. I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the memory was saved, somehow, from the corrosive effect of time.

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. …

“But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and you can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are part of a larger story that has shape and purpose — a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future.”

In Person

In Person

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Yesterday’s rain has cleared out — an affront to the beautiful bridal shower my sister planned for her oldest daughter, a shower that went on as planned despite almost horizontal rain blowing into and around the gazebo near the Severn River, where it was held. 

The shower had already been moved outside to thwart the coronavirus, so the fact that we ended up with an atypical August monsoon made for the kind of event where everyone just shrugged and went on with it because, really, what else can you do.

But being there with family and friends yesterday reminded me of what life was like before mid-March, reminded me of gathering and chatting and pleasures we formerly took for granted. 

I know we must be careful when we meet in person, but it’s good to be reminded that behind these squares on a screen are real flesh-and-blood people. They’re around now and will be later, when all of this is behind us.

(The Severn River at sunset — in calmer, drier weather. )

Made with Love

Made with Love

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Though I’m not of the Facebook generation — and am barely of Facebook — I know enough about its etiquette to know not to publish a photo of my new grandson before his mother does. But there’s no law against grandmotherly gushing, so gush I will.

In short, the little guy is perfect. His dear little fingers and toes, his full head of dark hair, his skin that is so soft it’s like you were touching nothing at all. I could have held him for hours, just looking, marveling at his dear face, his sudden yawns and stretches. 

A week ago, Claire and I had sat knee-to-knee going through her old baby clothes that I had washed and brought over. There was the little bib that spelled “C-L-A-I-R-E” in counted cross-stitch, the pink shirt that said “Special Delivery: Reston Hospital Maternity Center” — two girly things this boy baby may never wear. But plenty of gender-neutral duds as well, and those he will don, along with all his new clothes that at this point still swallow him up. 

I was struck yesterday, as I will be over and over again, of life’s repeating itself in endless variation, of the love of his parents for him and for each other.  In another universe, with other rules, new life may spring fully formed from soil or wood or metal. I’m glad that in this universe it arrives in an impossibly tiny package, made with love. 

On This Day …

On This Day …

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Yesterday, still giddy with the news of our first grandchild, I had no time for the details. Today, I look up, note the day, August 14, which was Claire’s due date, and the famous people who were born on it: comedian Steve Martin; Russell Baker, author of the lovely memoir Growing Up; “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson; and Doc Halliday, who survived the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. 

Those would have been interesting birthday mates, for sure. But it turns out there are some interesting characters born on August 13, too. There is sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and was the most famous woman in the world at one time; William Caxton, the first man to print a book in 1475, using the printing press that had just been invented 25 years earlier; and director Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Psycho, “Vertigo” and “Rear Window.”

So the little guy will have plenty of birthday company as he makes his way through life. For now, he is eating and sleeping and getting to know the world. For now, he is still pure potential. 

(Thanks to the Writer’s Almanac for these facts.)

Happiest Day

Happiest Day

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“The happiest days are the days when babies come,” said Melanie in “Gone with the Wind.” For my family, this is a happiest day, as we welcome our first grandchild and first boy baby in a generation.

It’s an awesome thought, to know there is this new life in the world: the little fingers and little toes, the face that seems old and wise, a visitor from beyond.

We are grateful and excited, though nowhere near as much as his proud and weary parents. And we look forward to tomorrow … when we hope we’ll be able to hold the little guy. 

(Using this photo again, though I used it less than a month ago, because it’s of my sweet Claire, already loving babies, though she was barely more than a baby herself. Now she has a baby of her own!)

Most Beautiful Day

Most Beautiful Day

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Today we celebrate the birthday of a daughter who is about to become a mother. It has me thinking back to the day when she was born, a most glorious day, as all three of the days were when my children came into this world. 

In this case, however, July 28 was the day when an oppressive heat wave had finally broken. My second-born, who was due almost two weeks earlier, had apparently been waiting until the temperature was back below 90 before she made her appearance. The weather had turned overnight, a cool breeze had sprung up, which led the TV weather person to announce “This is the most beautiful day of the year.” 
It’s something I’ve always repeated to Claire, and today was no exception. “It’s certainly not the most beautiful day of the year today,” she responded, referring to our high temperature and oppressive humidity. 
“That’s because it’s waiting for when your baby is born,” I said. And of course, no matter what, it will be.