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New Blue Shoes

New Blue Shoes

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Every year or so I buy myself some new tennis shoes. I usually reprise whatever make and model I’m currently wearing, as long as it fits and has held up to my daily battering. Which means that I don’t choose by color, only by comfort.

Some years I end up with garish purples and greens. Others with white. But this year, I hit the jackpot: a pastel beauty that’s mostly the color of sky, with just a hint of aquamarine.

The minute I saw these I thought they should be Celia’s — my youngest daughter loves this color and looks great in it. It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized there’s also a connection with my middle daughter, Claire. One of her favorite books growing up was New Blue Shoes by Eve Rice.

The book is about a shoe-shopping expedition and a little girl who knows what she wants — new shoes, blue shoes, new blue shoes — and will have no other. A perfect favorite for Claire, who has always known what she wants, whether it’s pink stiletto heels or a new puppy.

I like my new blue shoes, even though I didn’t fight for them. Maybe I should have!

Wild Blue Yonder

Wild Blue Yonder

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Turned on my iPod the day before yesterday and took pot luck. The song that was playing: “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder,” the Air Force song. I downloaded it for Dad’s funeral and it lives on in my music files.

Hearing it by surprise didn’t make me sad. It made me smile. It was as if Dad had suddenly inserted himself into the day and was walking with me along the West Virginia lane.  I set the iPod on repeat and listened to it four or five times. It’s an upbeat song, and it quickened my step.

I’ve been hearing the melody in my head ever since. But the only words I can recall are the first and last lines. Here, in honor of Memorial Day, are the rest:

Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun;
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder, 
At ’em boys, Give ‘er the gun! (Give ‘er the gun now!) 
Down we dive, spouting our flame from under,
Off with one helluva roar! 
We live in fame or go down in flame. Hey! 
Nothing’ll stop the U.S. Air Force!

Almost Done

Almost Done

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It’s the 11th hour, an unusual one for me to write. The day is almost done instead of just beginning. But the house is as quiet as morning; the same clocks are ticking.

Tomorrow will be a weekend family getaway. I’ve loaded the car with groceries and will pack the perishables in the morning. Monopoly and Scrabble are going, and a deck of cards.  The dog and the thousand-piece puzzle are staying home.

You can’t wait for the perfect time; you grab the time you have and make it work. That’s how I’m feeling now, knowing that gratitude will well up soon, it always does.

Pink and White

Pink and White

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They were selling pink and white carnation corsages at church yesterday — pink if your mom is living, white if she is not. I bought neither, but even the choice made my eyes sting.

I can remember wearing corsages on long ago Easters and maybe I could even fish up a memory of wearing a corsage on Mother’s Day. It wasn’t reliving memories that made me sad. It was knowing that, if I had bought a flower yesterday, it would have been white.

Which is why I was even more grateful to come home, take a walk and spend the rest of Mother’s Day on the deck with my daughters. There were some vague plans for a group hike, but we all agreed that just sitting and talking was best.

There was a fullness to the day that doesn’t come often enough and is all the more precious when it does. There was laughing and talking and cooking and eating. And there was this thought, poignant and comforting : If my girls were wearing corsages, theirs would be pink.

Last Hurrah

Last Hurrah

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The day is winding down, I’ve edited what feels like a bajillion documents. Done some writing too, though not enough, never enough.

I come to this blank page, a page that’s been waiting for me since early this morning.

Must get an earlier start tomorrow. But still, there are a few minutes left of the business day, just long enough to find this photo, one I took walking around a farm park where I used to take the girls when they were young.

I was missing their young selves so intensely that day. So much so that I could almost hear them laughing and chattering from inside this barn.

But they are all grown up now, and other little voices fill this space.

Burrowing

Burrowing

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I’d like to say the thunder woke me up, but I was already awake and reading when I heard the first clap. But it did jolt me, and, more to the point, it upset Copper so that he scratched on the door to be comforted.

I escorted him to the basement, his place of safety — though if he only knew how many precariously stacked books and boxes are down there he might seek higher ground.

But burrowing and sheltering have their appeal. I thought about this over the weekend when I draped a comforter over some chairs on the deck to air it out and was immediately reminded of the blanket forts my brother and I made when we were young.

How cozy they were, how beguiling, as if no one would ever find us, as if (it seems to me now), we would never grow up.

Name That Path

Name That Path

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A recent walk through the Folkstone woods led me past a shady glade and creek curve where the girls used to play. They called it Brace Yourself. Maybe there was some feat of derring do they had to perform there, walking across the creek on a log or picking up a crawdad. I’m unclear why they gave it that name, but the point is that they did.

Brace Yourself got me thinking about the joy of naming places. I remember doing that when I was a kid. There was the Valley of Eternal Snows — a sheltered cove in the Ware Farm field behind our house, a place where I had once found some dirty snow late in the season.

And then there were the Block-up Boys — not exactly a place, I know. They were the bullies on the street who wouldn’t let me ride my tricycle to the top of the hill. (So there was a place involved, sort of.)

When we name a place we make it our own.  We look at it with fresh eyes; we see it whole. Why do we stop doing this as we get older? Do mortgages and responsibilities drive it away, this penchant for staking imaginative claim to the places we love?

I made a tiny vow right there at Brace Yourself. I decided to start naming the bridges and paths, the springs and glades. Even if no one else ever hears or knows these names — I will.

Staying on Track

Staying on Track

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Yesterday, a return to a favorite hike, the Cross County Trail between Colvin Run Mill and Georgetown Pike. The path was busy with mountain bikers, runners, families with grandparents and kids — including one grandpa who stepped off the fair-weather crossing into this stream.

He righted himself quickly and kept on walking. That’s the spirit: staying on track!

I hope I do that when I’m a grandparent (which, with a married daughter and son-in-law, may not be too far in my future). The key with the hiking and the crossing is the keeping-on part.

Yesterday made it easy: a springlike day that made an unexpected step in the creek not the worst thing in the world.

Missing Halloween

Missing Halloween

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Halloween makes me nostalgic for the days of young parenthood. With most other holidays, the nature and tenor of them, how we celebrate, changes as children grow. Christmas isn’t the same as it was when Santa or the Easter Bunny made “appearances,” but the days are still fundamentally the same — and we celebrate them together.

But Halloween is for little kids, and my kids … aren’t little anymore.

Still, Tom carved the pumpkin and I roasted the seeds. We handed out Snickers and Sour Patch Kids. Copper was his usual crazy self.

But I kept remembering when the girls would come back with their big pillowcase hauls, masks askew, makeup smeared. They would sort candy by size and brand, then commence trading.  Who wants my Milky Way? What’s a Heath Bar? Oh, no, not raisins!!

Which is all to say that the ghosts I saw last night weren’t creepy or scary. They were cuddly elephants, cute clowns and beautiful princesses — the memories of my own sweet girls when they were young.

Farewell to the Van

Farewell to the Van

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“For many families, it was a compromise made long ago,” I wrote back in 2003. “For us, it is a new one. The day we bought our minivan it rained for the first time in weeks. It’s a sign, I said. Even the heavens are crying.”

Now the heavens are crying again, this time because the van has given way to a shiny new Toyota Corolla.

Though initially resistant to van-dom, I grew to love the old car. After all, it was the spiritual heir to the ’60s woody station wagons, and as such reminded me of my youth in the back seat. The van was more comfortable, of course; these are modern children. But the basic principle remained the same: buy large vehicle and pack it with kids.

The van was a workhorse. It lapped up the miles without complaint, and wore its 240k with grace. In 14 years it gave us very little trouble. Though short on style it was long on practicality.  Its motto: I will get you there.

Oh, the carpools that car has known, the cellos and clarinets and sweaty track kids it has transported. The boats it has towed, the trips to college it has made, the moving of furniture into first apartments, including, just last month, the transporting of newlyweds to their home in Arlington. (We threw rice!)

All of which is to say, what a lot of living that car has known! So I can’t let it go without a backward glance.

Thank you, dear van! We’ll miss you!