Life Lessons

from love in the slow lane…

Gallery

DIY Decor: Pillows in Progress, or Making a Beautiful Mess

1 Comment

When you visit a craft fair or art show, you see shelves and racks and cabinets filled with beautiful finished products. Fat colorful coffee mugs rounded to fit the cup of your hand, stunning framed photos of frozen waterfalls or birds in flight, the striking drape of a woven wool and silk scarf: their unique beauty stops you in your tracks, earns your admiration, perhaps even secures your ownership.

What we don’t see at the fair are the hours the artist spent bent over the pottery wheel, the precise balance of brute strength and fine pressure required to throw a symmetrical vessel. We don’t witness the lopsided learning curve or the moment of inattention that sends a blob of clay whirling across the studio. We don’t wait with the photographer, bug-bitten and motionless, in the field, or feel her boot crack through the ice that covers a trail of mud. We aren’t privy to the knotted tangles of thread, the beads lost under the radiator, the two discarded muslin mock-ups in the sewing room.

Or the cat who insists on helping.

Anyone who’s ever made anything knows the truth: The creative process is messy. And hard work makes more art than does inspiration.

The same might be said of love and relationships. Continue reading →

Image

The Wedding Present

2 Comments

Steve and I received our first wedding present shortly before Christmas. Steve’s mother Judy, a widow who lives in a retirement community outside DC, asked us to visit so she could give us a special wedding gift, a crystal wine decanter. The decanter had been a present to her and her husband Jack, Steve’s father, when they were married in Tampa in 1954.

In a note she sent to Steve, she indicated she wanted to give us the decanter now while she still felt in reasonable control of her health. Her vision is failing, as is her memory, and she’s aware of her fading faculties. We’d wanted to make a visit anyway, as her 85th birthday fell in early December, and we knew we’d be away for the holidays. So we drove up to take her out to dinner and sit for a while.

Steve and his mom Judy

Steve and his mom Judy

Petite, with short gray hair, Judy welcomed us warmly with hugs when we arrived. Despite her frailty, she carries herself with poise. After dinner at an Italian restaurant, she gave us the decanter, wrapped carefully in a towel and tucked into a handled shopping bag. It is a striking piece with family history, and I felt honored she wanted to pass it on to us. As we chatted, her frustration with her increasing limitations became evident. She struggled to see the particulars of the engagement photos we’d brought her as a gift, and when she’d begin to tell a family story she would often frown and pause a few sentences in, shaking her head. “Now, where was I going with that?” she’d say, and give a rueful laugh. She held significant events fairly clearly in her mind: she knew we were soon headed to England, and that she would be spending Christmas day with her daughter’s family. But the finer details frayed at the edges, and sometimes the thread was lost altogether. Continue reading →

Image

(Not Too) Much A-Do about Being

1 Comment

A few weeks ago on a quiet Sunday morning, fiancé Steve and I were seated across from each other at my dining table. Having shared a homemade omelet and fruit and still working on our respective cups of coffee and tea, Steve sat with his paper calendar in his lap, his laptop open to email, while I had called up my calendar on my phone and sat with the wedding notebook in front of me. As we compared notes, I made a to-do list on a legal pad: we needed to call X, send a follow up email to Y, compare quotes from Z and Q. We divvied up the duties and decided on a timetable, determining what had to be done before the holidays, what could wait until after.

Once we each had our assignments, I slid my reading glasses off my nose and snapped the frame closed, the muscle memory of the movement recalling something far removed from a leisurely morning lingering over breakfast with my love. I sat back in my chair in consternation.

“What?” Steve asked, closing his calendar.

I sighed. “I know planning a wedding is supposed to be fun, and it mostly is. But it feels like we just spent our morning in a business meeting.” Continue reading →

Image

Carol of the Shells

2 Comments

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” –E. M. Forster

I collect seashells. More accurately stated, I am constitutionally incapable of walking near any ocean body without searching for seashells. So when Steve and I spent a week at Holden Beach, North Carolina back in July, I was combing the shoreline, back bent, eyes peeled, within hours of our arrival.

We did go night-shelling--Steve's a patient man!

We did go night-shelling once–Steve’s a patient man!

I didn’t find a lot that first day: a few baby’s ears and some slipper shells, which appeal to the little girl in me who can’t help but think of doll shoes. Steve–-who isn’t a sheller but does love a good beachwalk, and so indulges me–-found a beautiful olive. I swooped down excitedly more than once, thinking I’d found a moon snail, only to be disappointed when I’d pick the prospect up. A lovely whorled front would have the back cracked off, or, if the back was whole, the front had large holes in its fragile top curve. Barnacles marred one, having made their home on its swirl.

When I first started shelling, I would often pick up blemished shells. I would settle for the conch with a hole in the back, or a slipper shell with a chipped, jagged edge. The pickings were often slim, and I didn’t have the patience, or maybe the fortitude, to leave the broken shells on the beach. Sometimes the brilliant coloring or the graceful whorl exposed in a fractured shell looked too beautiful, even in its brokenness, to leave behind. Besides, if you turned them just the right way, looked at them from just the right angle, you couldn’t see their flaws. Still, they never seemed quite so impressive once at home as they had at the beach. When I grew tired of the fragments cluttering my collection, I decided I needed to raise my standards. I vowed then to collect only perfect specimens: bright color, shiny finish, completely whole with no marks or blemishes. But therewith came the problem of the perfect: such shells were elusive. There were few, if any, to find. Continue reading →

Image

Steve Speaks: FsSTG meets FsFTB

9 Comments

FsFTB readers: Every so often my fiancé Steve will be chiming in with a post of his own—this is his first! 

Hello. My name is Steve, and I’m a fifty-something second-time groom.

I’m honored but somewhat intimidated to be invited to guest-blog here. I write a lot as a member of the forestry faculty at a state university, but what I write for work is mostly scientific and technical stuff about maps and carbon sequestration. Don’t worry—there won’t be trees or maps in this post! For balance, my forty-something first-time bride, Sandee, has invited me to tell my story, that of the fifty-something second-time groom. With two grown sons. And a dog. So to start: how can I discuss what the “second time” means without acknowledging the first time?

I was married in 1985 to Karen, a forester who worked in South Carolina when I worked in Georgia. We became engaged less than a year after we started dating, and there were fewer than six months between engagement and marriage. Quick, huh? I’d gotten a job offer in Alaska, which meant a compressed schedule for the wedding. We married in March in upstate New York, and our honeymoon consisted of a cross-continent roadtrip in a pickup truck with her golden retriever, followed by a three-day ferry ride from Seattle to Haines, Alaska, and a two-day drive from there to Anchorage. (Sandee and I don’t know yet where we’ll be going for a honeymoon, but let me go on record here as promising it won’t involve a dog and a pickup!)

Karen and I had twenty mostly very happy years together. The last twelve were under a slowly darkening cloud after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She died in January 2006, closing a chapter in my life and changing the nature of the family that remained: I became a single dad raising two teenaged sons. As it tends to do, time has healed wounds and filtered memories, so that most that remain are the good ones, and I look back on what we had with fondness, love, humor, and gratitude.

Steve&Tucker2

With oldest son Tucker

Fast forward: there’s this house on the end of my street. The yard is not very well kept. Holiday decorations appear only sporadically. Three guys, plus one canine (born male but subsequently modified), live there. Two of the guys are recovering adolescents; the other has gray in his beard as a result. It’s a testosterone-rich, estrogen-deprived zone, and you can tell it by the décor. And the state of the bathrooms. So, who is the guy who owns that house?

Well, I guess that would depend on who you ask. My neighbors see the guy with the unkempt yard. My students see a professor. My sons see a father, and my dog…well, judging by his greeting, I think he sees me as the center of the universe!

As I left my teens and progressed through adulthood, I tended to identify my “self” with the primary role I was playing at the time. I was a flannel-shirt-clad forestry student during college and graduate school. When we moved to Anchorage and our initial friends were all from Karen’s recreation-league soccer team, I became “Karen’s husband.” To those in the forestry company, I was the guy in charge of the number-crunchers in the technical department. When my boys started playing sports and joined scouts, I became identified as “Tucker’s Dad” or “Dusty’s Dad.” Returning to academia as a professor, I was the guy going up for tenure in his forties. Later, I became the guy who lost his wife. Continue reading →

Marry? Scary! On Fairy Tales and Fears, 2

3 Comments

Some days the thought of getting married terrifies me. And I’m not talking about the fear of making bad decisions, like inadvertently hiring a DJ who insists on doing the chicken dance in full costume, or the inevitable wacky wedding day mishaps: a dropped bouquet, forgotten socks, a delayed bagpiper (ask my brother about that last one). I’m talking about the actual marriage part, specifically the 24/7 commitment to sharing not only my heart (which I give gladly) but also my bathroom and my brain-space.

I love Steve and always enjoy his company—as well as the company of his two smart and funny grown sons—and it will be nice to have someone else around to take care of scary spiders. But it does make me anxious to think about bringing not one but three people onto my permanent radar, into the closest circles of my heart and head. After all, aside from felines, I haven’t had a long-term roommate since 1995. At times I’ve been lonely, even profoundly so, but on the whole, I enjoy solitude, and as an introvert and a writer, I require a fair amount of it to function. I spend a lot of time in my head, reading, thinking, processing and, well, writing, and I’ve grown used to devoting much of the brain-space and energy not claimed by work to creative endeavors.

I’m also what’s known as an HSP, a Highly Sensitive Person. There are lots of great articles that describe what it’s like to live as an HSP, as well as an online diagnostic tool for the curious. In brief, HSPs are extremely sensitive to and deeply affected by sensory stimuli, which has both advantages and disadvantages. For example, HSPs tend to startle easily and often cannot tolerate loud or constant noise, and they may feel overwhelmed by visual excess. For example, when I’ve visited my brother and sister-in-law’s very full house (2 parents, 5 kids, 3 friends, 2 dogs, and 3 cats, plus grandparents at its peak), the sheer number of people and sources of sensory input—conversation, computer games, clinking dishes, cat meowing,  television, piano music, a Facebook video on another computer—make for an intense experience. There is also much love and warm laughter—a truly beautiful sound and something I feel privileged to share. Still, after a while, Aunt Sandee needs to fold up in a quiet corner to recover and re-boot!

On the positive side, HSP’s heightened sensitivity also increases our awareness of subtleties. We tend to pick up immediately on the emotional tenor of a group of people when entering a room, and we often experience art, literature, foods, and the environments we encounter more deeply. My keen color sense is no doubt attributable to being an HSP. And there’s a somewhat counter-intuitive flip-side characteristic: HSPs may crave and seek out new and intense sensory stimuli that is pleasurable, because it is a powerful natural high. I have an almost physical response to a pleasing color combination or a beautiful line of poetry. I even love wandering down a big city street, absorbing the cacophony of crowds and cars and shops and signs—but only for short periods of time. A little goes a long way.

Thankfully, one reason Steve and I work so well together is because he understands how much I need to be alone. In fact, long before he ever proposed marriage, he proposed something else that told me he was a keeper. “If we had a house together,” he said, “maybe you could keep a studio or an apartment that you could go to when you needed some alone time.” You would do that for me? I thought. You would be willing to invest in something like that so I could have us AND solo time and space? Of course, he would get solo time and space in the bargain, too, which–an introvert himself–he also enjoys and requires. But that’s when I knew he really understood me. Continue reading →