Resolution Work

Security. At New Year’s I chose this word to live for the year. It was a word that I was going to think about, read and write about and decide its meaning in my life. By January the stock market had already been acting silly for a while. But nothing like it has been doing lately. Now we are down around 7000. I remember when 10 was a bummer.

I also remember when we chose our investment strategy based on something called a risk assessment. (Is risk the opposite of secure???) We spent many hours considering our own risk tolerance and decided that we were risk friendly. We were still in our high earning years, we had a long 20 plus years to go until retirement, and I bought and sold companies, started new ones, borrowed enormous sums of money, sometimes made it and sometimes lost it, and generally lived in world where managing risk was just part of the daily grind.

But now that all seems like a long time ago. Having a high-risk friendly portfolio meant one might expect swings of up to 30%. Could you stand to lose 30% of your net worth in one day? If so then you were risk friendly too, and probably had lots of small caps and emerging market investments in your portfolio. But today the very notion of risk has changed. Can you stand to see you ret worth plummet to zero would be a better question today. It is a very insecure feeling. I hear of people whose portfolios are only down by fifty percent. They look like geniuses to me. We are down deep into the 70s.

So if risk has a totally different meaning today, what then of security? How do you get it? And if you are or were a risk friendly person is security even the goal? What does it look like?

I have lately been thinking that if we are going broke anyway, maybe we should sell everything, jump on a plane, and move to Italy for a year. Getting on a plane has always been one of our first answers to whatever problem needed solving. Maybe we would decide to stay or maybe we would move back and start over. This is highly impractical for a family with one recent college grad and a college sophomore deep into her program. When I realized that these were my musings in the middle of the night, I wondered if my risk profile had really changed much after all. I am building another business these days. It is coming along nicely and since language and the power of words are crucial to its success it is not likely something I could translate into an Italian business. Or at least I would need to know how to say way more than Prego if I did.

But if security is knowing that you can be happy a lot of different ways, then I am secure. Because I have been happy richer and I have been happy poor. (Richer was better,) And rich of poor you still only get just this one life. So shouldn’t we be doing the soul work that makes us sing? Marrying John and having these kids is the truest work of my soul. And these old Vermont Mountains made me sing. So did the chickens. They do still. I suspect Italy would be like an opera. And I might even need to live one day in the bustle of Manhattan. I think that would be a marvelous place to be old, with your grocer, your theater, and your coffee shop all on one city block.

Maybe security has nothing to do with money. That is a radical concept for someone who has always tried to make bunches of it for the really good schools and fabulous trips, and gorgeous old houses filled with good balsamics and walls of books. But maybe security comes with the choosing. We are people who intentionally choose these lives we lead. We choose our careers, our friends and the places we live with intention as opposed to habit. Maybe the old empty spots leftover from an unhappy childhood where there was never enough…love, happiness, attention, or money…..where wishes and desires were berated and belittled as the selfishness of evil…maybe those old wounds have been filled up with the happy power of choice. Maybe security and choice have always been one and the same.
It’s a new concept. Luckily I have ten more months to get it right…..

It's a Bird. It's a Plane....

There are five seasons in New England. There are the same four that everyone knows about plus mud. When the snows melt and the rivers start to flow again, things get pretty muddy down here in the valleys. There are several feet of snow on the mountains and before long it will all be rolling downhill our way. We had two blizzards here this week and there are a couple of feet of new powder out there now, so it will be a while before we have to haul out the muck boots. But a couple of weeks ago we had a few fifty degree days in a row and another sign that spring might be coming back to Vermont making the rounds at coffee counters in all the country stores.

Our friend Irma was one of the ones telling the tales. She and her son had been driving along RT 30 enjoying the sun and avoiding the slippery melting ice when they heard it. It was a loud thwump. It scared them both. The ice must have fallen off an overhanging tree. Luckily it hadn't hit the windshield. These falling icicles can be real hazards, off of houses onto pets and people, and from draping trees across windshields and car roofs. They figured they'd better pull over and check for damage. Sometimes, the ice gets stuck up there on the ski rack and what didn't crack any windows the first time gets a second chance when it rolls the rest of the way down.

Irma's son pulled over and got out to check things out. A minute passed in quiet sunshiny stillness. He slowly got back into the car. Irma, asked "Well, did you see what hit the car.?"
"Yep."
"Well is anything broken?"
"Nope."...(Her son is a fifth generation Vermonter. Why say in 42 words what can just as easily be conveyed in one? Irma is from CT. She has raised three boys here with her Vermonter husband and has yet to fully adjust)
"Was it ice? Did it roll off somewhere on the road?"
"Nope"
"Well, come on then. What was it?"
"Fish."
".....Oh nooo...."
"Yep."

And then they headed quietly, in stoic New England fashion, to the car wash.

You see when the river ice begins to crack, the rivers start to flow, and the hawks can finally find breakfast again. The fish are big and fat, and cold and the hawks seem to drop more of them from Feb-April than at any other time. They make a horrible noise apparently when they hit the car. And the fish scales can be found affixed to windows and radio antennas for months. There are a lot of these stories right about now. Maybe the hawks mouths are too cold to hold them just yet? Maybe the fish are too cold to be held. Everyone has a theory.....

So, yes, fish falling out of the sky. Really.

Irma and her son went to the car wash, and unfortunately, there were bits of trout caught in the ski rack that sort of baked on in the car wash. The car smelled liked cooked fish for a few days. Luckily the blizzard froze it again, and so the smell is gone for now. The benefits apparently of unending winter.....
We have fish falling out of the sky up here.
Maybe Job was from Vermont.

Hannah

I always wanted a girl. I imagined long flowery hippie dresses and funky jewelry with flowery hats. I figured we'd play dolls together for hours at a time. I dreamt of long cozy talks and painting our toenails with minty glassed of iced tea and a pile of magazines between us. I figured we'd trade books and secrets and I vowed we would never have teenage screaming matches like I did with my own mother. I imagined it all good.
What I got was even better.
Some of us are lucky enough to get two chances at the mother daughter bond. You don't have much control over it the first time around and you get a scary awesome amount of control on the second.
Hannah Isabel came into the world on February 19, 1989. And for the last twenty years she has brought us thousands of hours of pleasure, mixed with hardly any worry and lots of pride and amazement.
We were thrilled when we got her and we are thrilled still. Her daddy kissed her 10,000 times before she was one so no man would ever be able to say he kissed her more. This anyway was his plan.
When we moved to Vermont the year she was thirteen one of her friends advised her to pout and complain and not just go along with our harebrained scheme. But our Hannah has always been a pragmatist. "They have decided. I might as well be cheerful about it because we are going. And they promised that if we are miserable and I am right and they were wrong we can move back. Besides I am going to ask for a horse to make it easier"
She got the horse and I got one too and we rode into Vermont and her teenage years together.
We spent hours on the balcony looking at the mountains and talking about boys while we soaked up the sun and painted nails and read about teenage fashion. ( She tends toward quirky Free People mixed with her easy elegance.) The smell of coconut oil instantly takes me back to those sun soaked afternoons which I will always cherish as among the best of my life.
We followed her to soccer, horse shows, softball, and plays. She was born curious and she tried everything there was to try. She is a student of life, practicing until she accomplishes whatever she decides she wants. Always interested in fairness and justice, she discovered constitutional law in high school and wound up studying it for three years even adding an independent study when they ran out of classes for her to take.
She dated one nice boy after another and we dissected them like rats. She was an astute observer of human nature and she knew what she liked and more importantly what she didn't. Tall, well mannered and funny were at the top of the list. She likes warm cars, open doors, and liberal politics married to sweet attention and playful Saturdays at the beach or on a sled.
She was an organizational wonder who forgave me lost keys and missed appointments. She never met a rule she didn't like and she made the trains in our house run on time. She was a born gown-up and God knows there were plenty of times when we needed one around here.
Hannah is trustworthy and smart, reliable and funny, silly and true. She is a great big sister to her younger and older brother both. She is the most fair and rational person I have ever known. I have always admired her and often strive to be more like her in this cool-headed poise especially.
At nearly six feet tall she looks like an elegant racehorse. Her hair is always neat and her beautiful face clean and shiny. Only this girl is built for speed and duration. She is the kind that lasts.
Why fight, we know we have a good thing. Hannah compares our relationship to her friend's relationships with their parents and she says we are closer than almost anyone she knows. Since many of her friends spend their vacations here she figures they want what we have. Some of her girlfriends have become like daughters and sisters to us, and have spent more holidays with us than with their own families.
We do read together and we get manicures and pedicures and cook big elaborate holiday meals. The family recipes are in their fifth generation from John's Great Grandmother down the line to Hannah.
We are plenty lucky and we know it. She is exactly what I was dreaming about all those years ago when I had dolls spread out all over my bed. Only I didn't know back then how big to dream. Hannah has shown me how.
Happy Birthday Hannahbella, no longer a teenager and now more woman than girl.
I love you more and more and more....

Cabin Fever

We have it. All of us. We had a run of those fifty degree days where a bunch of the three or four feet of snow we had melted, followed by a few more inches and a nice little February ice storm. Then we got some more warm days and the driveway and the steps were like a skating rink. I was afraid every time I stepped onto the marble that I would do one of those cartoonish back flops only they don't feel like cartoons when you are 46 and counting. I have been afraid to go anywhere. Only of course work beckons in spite of chills and hacking cough. So John walks me out like maybe I am 102. He warms up the car and even drove me around like a sweet chauffeur on the really whiny days when I couldn' face the mountain roads.

Everything in our house is sludgy and there is salt stuck between the old hardwood boards. The old wooden pharmacist's counter has been oiled five hundred times this winter, but still it looks dry and forlorn. Our mud room smells like old wet winter. The boots are in piles, and they look worse for the wear. There isn't a scarf out there that doesn't have little pulls and the gloves look like maybe we milked cows in them. They are stiff and yucky and begging for spring. Our lips are chapped, our hair is dry and no amount of olive oil and honey face mask can hide the cracks for long.

Eli and John are on winter break. Benjamin is home with his ankle surgery scheduled for Friday and Hannah will be home for her birthday this weekend. But everyone wants to know the same thing. What is there to do? Sledding has lost its allure. And of course there are grassy patches here and there amidst the snow, but then since we are expecting snow again for the next two days I guess those will be gone by the weekend. And every time it warms up our mudroom fills with the detritus of being on the downhill side of all that melted snow. The French drains are all ice down there and doing nobody any good up here. It is Godawful.
We are pitiful and getting pitifuller.

So what is there to do around here anyway? Well we can make repairs. Eli's ipod isn't charging so phone calls to Apple, the box got here and it is on its way. His 360 also was on the fritz. Benjamin handled that one and the replacement is already here. Our closets have clothes we will never wear and that we meant to give away last spring. And there is a tub fill of pictures just waiting to be organized into big satchel sized envelopes maybe by date, and then put into albums bought two summers ago and put away for winter when there would surely be days with nothing to do. Oh gosh look there's Benjamin playing ice hockey int he fifth grade. We really need to organize these pictures. The basement and the attic look like refuge camps. Why not give all that stuff away and organize the rest? Somehow I think that TV from 1987 could be pitched.

There is plenty to do as it turns out. I re-organised our closet which is also a dressing room. John had three thousand coins strewn hither and yon now all neatly contained in a giant vase with butterflies. And my kids are too old to want their old childhood art adorning our home, but I love all that junk, so I plastered the walls in the dressing room with it. I added a nude John did of me with his Christmas acrylics. I look like a Rubens, round and happy with a wild mountain of cherry coke hair. Not fit for the kitchen perhaps but perfect for the dressing room.

What is there to do? This is the time for all those projects that were put off for a dreary day. Well they are here. A whole bunch or them and more on the way. Projects! We must crawl our from under the covers and move. Weekends are not for hibernating. We are not old fat bears after all. Well we are dfinaitely not bears anayway.This is the time we were talking about when we said later. It is later than we thought and we are bored and out of our minds. Maybe I'll do all the drawers next. Old batteries and hair bands better watch out. Projects. We will surely be saved!

Be Mine

I have really been married about four times. My first marriage happened mostly in a three floor walk up in Lafayette Park in St Louis. I lived there on Park Ave with my husband and our little boy in a wild and woolly city life. We went to every park with a slide or a pond that the City had on offer. We found ice cream stands in neighborhoods north to south. We ate breakfast at Shoney's where Benjamin brought his little bear and we left more food on the floor than in any body's stomach. We had big parties with Frank on his sax and Lee on the guitar. We met the guys when we were dating during those hot sexy days at the Oyster Bar where we'd gone every Saturday for blues and food from the Bayou. Once we traded them my old flute to play at one of our legendary parties. They were glad for the barter and spent the night and we all became friends who sang Papa's on the Housetop to each other over Saturday's French Toast. We were broke but happy. The three of us that made up our little family could while away a whole Saturday at Union Station on ten bucks. We'd watch the fudge guys sing and dance and put on their fudge show. They gave us enough free samples to make our teethe ache. And we'd play in the train store where one of us dreamed of being a conductor and the other two were along for the ride. It was a short marriage held together with left over flowers from the florist next door and a Panama hat from Marge at the Union Square kiosk.

But it wasn't meant to last. Before long I was ensconced in marriage number two with a sexy guy who got on a bus every morning and left his wife and two kids behind to make bird feeders out of pine cones and peanut butter. We had just one car and even less money than before. We dug around in old purses for change for the dollar movie night and ate casseroles for supper with homemade popsicles for dessert. This old house was in a little town with schools said to be good, and there was a library just a couple of blocks away with free concerts in the summer. Our house was filled with books on homemade shelves and we read and caught fireflies before bed in July. We played at LeCalire Park where we fed the ducks our stale breads and popcorn and ate picnics on the quilt we carried from home. The daddy chased after the big one and coached him and his friends to winning season after winning season in soccer. He carried the little girl always wrapped in every pink ever made in her bike seat all around the county. Our windowsills were lined with pots of seeds and in summer our yard bloomed pink and orange and red and yellow. It was a riot of color haphazardly planted where either the little boy or baby girl picked the place.
We made love in a bed where kids piled on, but we fitted each other in and around. We also had Sophie and Molly and Emma and Henry, cats and dogs who we loved and who always loved us back, smack in the middle of that big bed surrounded with quilts hung like a sultan for a sweet cozy, almost or sometime, privacy.

Stuart came in those years too, and back then was the wild terrier who never saw an open door that didn't entice him to run. That marriage was punctuated by annual vacations where we'd pile into the car with food and clothes and toys and drive 18 hours to their first beach we came to. Our daughter's first word was beach and our little boy looked like a dolphin playing for hours in the surf. We bought groceries and ate yogurt and nuts next to cheese sandwiches, cereal and fruit, grabbing hand fulls of food between trips to the beach. We were sunny and happy and our kids were having childhoods raised on love. Pretty soon we were making better money and the schools stopped looking so good. We commuted with our big kids to St Louis for school and work. We found a hippy little rich kid school and scraped together the money to pay the tuition while we all lived in that cozy two bedroom one bathroom house. It was plenty worth it because our kids had lofts and couches in their classrooms with teachers who aimed for success with love and creativity. If we could have had our childhoods over it would have been there. We were pleased and proud.

Of course everything wasn't always perfect. We could make up problems as well as the next guy, but whatever came along, we solved together. We were always on the same side. We believed in the power of our love and our marriage and saw the rubs that came our way as the blips and the goodness as the real stuff that mattered. 'Over the course of a fifty year marriage this will have been a blip', John said to me one sad day. I have carried that in my hip pocket ever since.

Before long there was a third baby. This little guy barely remembers that time in that loud little house with the sand box and tree house out back. It was our second life on a Park Street, That little baby boy though was already being carted on airplanes and learning about being a baby in offices all over the US. Mommy took him to work, because her old sunny life, with the guy who got on the bus was already fading. Business were bought and grown and sold. The parents were growing up along with the schools and so like the first marriage, this one was not made for life. It lasted ten sweet years before everyone packed up a truck one December and headed out for Marriage Number Three.

This time we all lived in a house on a broad fancy boulevard with a park right smack in the middle. (Apparently our lives were always defined by one park or another.) We had Easter Egg hunts in this one and ate Thai food around the corner and the biggest business we'd owned yet had its warehouse just a few blocks away. We got Eloise and were the only people we knew with a Berner to love. We were back to a city life in an old three story Victorian where jazz bands played at our parties and kids streamed in and out. These years there were more good schools and boards and elaborate vacations that lasted for weeks. We still found beaches, tropical. New England, and even European. Our finances had improved and we were the hip family of five who had Sunday brunch at sidewalk cafes around the city. We spent our evenings at basketball and soccer. And summers were spent by the pool with milkshakes and fries brought to the table by college servers who liked getting tan and diving in on their breaks. We loved these lives. The kids had great schools and the money was good. We had friends who read interesting books and could talk about politics instead of each other. This house was a beauty with walnut and oak. The boxed beams were mahogany and the built in bookshelves were filled with Gilchrist and Geoffery Rush. We read and hopped in our hot tub on cold winter nights and wondered about whatever might just come next. It was only five years though before the trips made us wonder. After every vacation we'd start planning another. The drive from the airport was always sad and depleting. There were Meineke Muffler shops next to the Thai and our kids were becoming mall rats in spite of ourselves. Even the parents were spending on silly Yurman and Ferragamo. This was not the life of the mind and soul we'd intended to teach. Our minds were all right but our souls had gone shopping.

So we began our fourth marriage in the Green Mountains of Vermont. We didn't need a park since we were living in the original. Now instead of Thai or brunch in a cafe, we had croissants with our chickens on our own stone terrace beneath sunny blue skies handmade by God. The house was a restored old farmhouse with four glorious old porches. There was one just for the mom and her teenage girl. They sunned on the balcony with nail polish and magazines and talked about boys and learned about love. There was another made for parties and one night it held a concession stand filled with Dots and Snow Caps while Jurassic Park played on a sheet on the side of the house. Now the kids were almost grown and the talk was of love and careers. Our vacations were quick trips to the city for Christmas movies and ornaments, and longer weeks at the beach now just four hours away. Instead of the mall we walked by waterfalls and raised chickens. There were more good schools and now college was included. There were more Boards and always more books. And the little boy and little girl now all grown up even shared a summer job a a beach. They brought back friends and so did the adults. The youngest boy lived outside like a little Tom Sawyer. He learned the woods instead of the malls. Big friendships were made and the joy just continued. There was a hardship this time. Some worries added up up but the family stuck fast. These people hung together and had Christmas at home. Living in this beautiful place was not always like being on vacation, but even in the hard times it was close enough. The beauty was free and our pleasures piled up.

Six years and counting on this fourth marriage so far. We have sweet middle aged heat and I am still in love with this man I have married four times. Our love has created all this other love which ripples out from the marriage. And isn't that after all the point? Isn't love the reason for this whole other shebang? His are the feet I turn to at night and he is the one I always call when I know something funny. I don't know what will come next, but one thing I know for sure. John is the Valentine I will always think of when hearts show up in the grocery stores and February 14th will always make me glad he is mine....

Two More Reasons To Be Married

Forty-eight degrees. It was a heat wave here in Vermont this weekend. We better not get used to it. March is the second best ski month in Vermont after January. We get the bulk of our snow up here in those two months. And my bloggy friends were talking about flip flops in their part of the world this weekend. We surely weren't doing that. It's hard to justify flip flops no matter how silly you might feel, when there's still three feet of snow outside your window. Melting snow, but snow all the same.

So here was the view on Saturday. The snow was melting on the long lane and driveway around our small holding, Underneath the plowed lane, just under those plowed and packed down three or four inches of snow, was a thick layer of ice. It was perfect sledding. Eli and his friends were out at midnight laughing and whooping it up on the icy path that they thought we'd somehow made just for them. It was warm and slippery and it was all plenty of big fun. Then we had to drive the car.

Now the car was bumped up against the snow drift on the passenger side. I must have pulled it in last, right up to the house, leaving myself a wide path on the driver's side to get to the walk. Thus someone entering the passenger door would have to step into about four feet of snow. John and I were going out and he suggested I drive since the driver's door was so prettily placed.... I backed up and he waded through a little less snow and got in.

Now there is a hill behind our house and the drive winds up that gentle hill and back around down our long wooded lane. Perhaps I didn't have enough speed going up the icy hill. Perhaps speed wasn't exactly the answer anyway. Maybe the hill really should have been sanded, only then we would have ruined the sledding. I climbed the hill, sort of, for a minute anyway, and then the car just slowly began sliding backward down the hill. Braking had no effect. We were in an uncontrollable backward free fall. I was breathing hard and saying "I have no breaks I have no breaks". My stomach dropped.

Then my husband, that calm guy I married, offered this... in the same tone of voice he uses to ask me if I'd like a little more coffee....."Honey we aren't hanging over Niagara Falls. This is our yard. We'll hit one of the snow drifts." Which of course was exactly what happened.

Oh. Not a cliff. Our yard. Oh. Yeah.

We traded places. He spun the thing around and we drove calmly out the same way we came. Will we sand it? Eli and his friends vote no. John adds that spring is surely coming and there is only a month or so of really good sledding left. And so maybe we won't. I'll back out into the turn around and skip the hill and the boys will sled like maniacs into the next snowstorm.

Not Niagra Falls honey. Spring is coming...
Two more reasons....

Leftover Pizza

It is hard to know just where this story begins. Our kids were all home throughout the holidays. Mostly they ate or talked about eating, or cooked, or were underfoot making just a little appetizer while we cooked. College has apparently made them very very hungry. Plus it's been pretty cold so what else is there to do?

Now our Hannah is not a great cook. She is more of a great burner upper. One day Miss Hannah decided to warm up leftover pizza. She pre-heated the oven and placed the pizza on the shelf...... in the cardboard box. Then she promptly forgot all about it.

John thought he smelled smoke. At first he figured Hannah had probably burned something again. By now the kids were outside sledding. But after a while the smell grew stronger. He decided that he'd better investigate. Soon. Right after he finished the chapter he was reading. The smell didn't go away and sure enough when he eventually ambled downstairs it was billowing out of the kitchen. Apparently the kids had left the oven door slightly open. He opened the oven the rest of the way which was an error, Flames and smoke leaped out licking up the wall on the side of the big Viking range. John remembers thinking that this thing sure made a powerful fire. He'd never understood why we needed a commercial oven anyway. It cost too much and now it was probably going to burn the whole house down. "Figures", he thought. John grabbed the box of fire in an oven mitt and decided to throw it out the window.

This was an odd choice, but there was a lot of smoke and so perhaps his oxygen levels were poor and he wasn't able to think clearly. Anyway he aimed for the kitchen window. Now let me tell you about our kitchen window. It is one of those wonderful old June Cleaver affairs with two mullioned doors that open out. These were the only windows in the house we hadn't replaced because I liked the idea of calling the family in for supper after a long summery day of gardening and playing badminton or something. But it is winter and we don't often open the window when it is fifteen below. In fact it is not only closed in the winter, but latched. So, instead of pitching the flaming box out the window, he put his hand threw the glass when he attempted to push it open.

Here I have to tell about John's hand. John only has one hand. His right arm sort of ends at his wrist. There is a small flat part where you can kind of see how a hand would have developed only it hadn't. So I am married to a gorgeous man with one hand. This will become important later, so please remember it.

Now this pushing his hand through the window did in fact allow some of the smoke to escape through the broken glass so that was a slight improvement. But there were still flames coming out of the oven, (We clearly don't clean it often enough based on all the things that managed to burn in there), John's hand, the smallish one without fingers was dripping blood, and the room was full of smoke. John did manage to get the window the rest of the way open and drop the burning box into the snow. So it was also cold, and steam and smoke were the view outside the window.

To this scene I came home after a board meeting walking through the door with my friend John Sobel and our wet cold sledding kids followed. The smoke was thick. Hannah screamed, "Daddy what did you do????"

Oh, and John was barely visible on the floor behind the long wooden antique pharmacist's counter. This was where he'd fallen when he slipped on the wet floor where he had apparently sprayed water with the sink sprayer hoping to douse the thing at some point in the whole adventure. He doesn't clearly remember that part. So he was sitting on a wet floor in a smoky room bleeding. It was quite a scene. We got the dogs upstairs and opened all the doors and windows and turned on the attic fan. Did I mention the part about how it was 15 below outside? That's below zero. Fahrenheit.

We cleaned it all up and headed to the clinic for stitches since his hand was dripping blood like a faucet. I wrapped it with gauze first and...(here is where you need to remember the part about how he has just the one hand, and that it is a smallish sort of end of the wrist affair)

When we got there the nurse almost fainted holding onto the door when we began unrolling the bandage and she began to wobble and say, "oh...oh...oh!" a lot. John looked satisfied that finally someone was appreciating his pain and taking his predicament seriously. He started telling her the whole story in great detail. Then just as she grabbed onto the table for support weaving and wobbling and I was wondering where they'd taught her this unbecoming behavior, I realized what was happening and finally remembered to say "oh he didn't have a hand there in the first place'
She had to sit down. But I think she was actually pretty relieved. They sent us a new nurse though.

The next weekend, we went to our dear friends Jack and Karen's house for dinner. They'd invited a new couple to our regular sixsome. So I was telling everyone this whole episode as funny dinner theater. But the new people were looking on in horror at John's bandaged hand that was causing such hilarity.

(Now here the whole hand thing is coming back around again. Remember that it is smallish and bandaged it must have looked like somebody had just cut off his hand. Got the picture?)

These poor people sort of smiled at the story at first, but they kept looking furtively at John's hand and looking at me wildly gesturing and explaining about the fire, and laughing really hard about him sitting in the puddle amid all the smoke and blood. Pretty soon they stopped even trying to smile. They began to look at me as if maybe I were Mengele's cousin.

Finally I realized why they weren't laughing and so did John and Jack and Karen and our other friends Roger and Ellen. But of course by then we were laughing even harder, as they looked ever more horrified, we were caught up in the snorting choking kind of hysterical laugh, and none of us could manage to get out the fact that he hadn't actually cut off his hand, that it was just a few stitches under there. We all must have looked properly crazed laughing and then trying to explain how he didn't really have a hand anyway, and then laughing like real lunatics over that. We finally did manage to explain, but by then they were pale, and their polite laughter was forced and weird. We found that funny too, and these little inappropriate snickers kept sneaking out. They wound up leaving sort of early. I am guessing we may never see them again.......

The Story of Love

I love Valentine's Day. I always have. It never mattered to me whether I had a beau or not. I especially liked making valentines for all my classmates when I was in elementary school. Even though I was probably the worst crafter in our grade, (well next to Ricky Pulley and Mike Brown. I was always surprised when those tough guys showed up with their little mailboxes decorated with red and pink paper hearts just like the rest of us. I couldn't imagine them living somewhere with a mom who would buy them doilies to decorate their boxes with. I could only ever imagine them taunting smaller boys on the playground and twitching up bigger girls skirts as they got off the bus) I loved making the little mailbox that would hold all those valentines at the party. My mother was a poor crafter too. And after my dad died she worked full time, so making the valentine box always seemed to sneak up on her, because she was frazzled during the week and since she was a lousy crafter she put it off on the weekend. Every year she would say in a really bright voice, like she has maybe had a real inspiration, "Hey honey let's cover a shoe box with foil and you can cut out hearts and glue them on that"

I always acted Ike I too thought this was a novel and exciting approach. And sometimes, (because crummy crafter kids don't need construction paper), when there was nothing but typing paper in the house, she would go up and get me scraps from her fabric box and I would cut hearts our of flowery red fabric or pink flannel from my Christmas nightgown. My mailbox was always a mixture of the glitz of aluminum foil and the more tender homespun from the sewing room.

I didn't care. I couldn't glue or cut worth a shit either and so my hearts were often shaped like eggs with tails and the glue oozed out along the sides, because I believed strongly that if a little were good then a lot would surely be better. This rule was tested year after year when my box had gloppy dried pearls of glue along side Lisa Thompson's box, which like her ponytail was neat and perfect in every way. She had shiny white butcher paper on her box, and lovely doily hearts backed by bigger red and pink ones. Her ponytail next to my mop of wild curly hair was the perfect metaphor for all of our hands-on projects.

No matter I loved the whole shebang, gloppy dried glue and all. And when I had kids of my own we made valentines endlessly for the whole month of February. We ate heart shaped waffles and put red hots on the mashed potatoes. I spent the whole month humming the words to "that's the story of, that's the glory of love" My kids still know the whole thing by heart twenty odd years later. They groan when I start off, but by the finale I am proud to say they are always right there with me.

And over the years, when I bring out the birch vase and fill it with dry branches which we wrap with little pink and red felt kisses for the desk in the library and hang the felt garlands of hearts that are recycled from old sweaters, the conversations often turn to love. "What is the story of love anyway", Hannah asked one year. Other years it was Benjamin or Eli who had questions about love, theirs or someone elses's. And I have always had answers. The words may change from year to year, but the answer is always the same.

There is the perfect duet that happens in our kitchen when John and I hustle around to get a dinner on the table. He may be cooking the pasta while I am making the peanut sauce. He might be cutting up the chicken while I search for the garlic sauce when our hips bump and we both grin and before you know it we have plates of hot steaming Thai food on the table and someone else turns off the TV while we ask about Eli's math test, or hear about the teacher who farted right out loud in class. When I come to bed after John and it is fifteen below outside there will be a warm heating pad on my side of the bed right where my feet go. My car is always miraculously cleaned and warmed before I have to leave for work, and John's grandmother's nut roll appears on every holiday morning just like when he was little, because Grandma taught me before she died, so my John will always have it on every holiday as long as I am around. When the kids came home once and found us painting the kitchen because there had been a little kitchen fire, it didn't matter who did it or what happened. We got out the paint and the brushes, made a whole bunch of nachos and dug into the food and the job. John is the first person I call when I hear something funny and at night we always fall asleep touching. And lately when Eli got into a little spot of trouble for looking on a website for math help, which his parents thought might be cheating, his sister called with the website information and all the notes from the curriculum guide about how important it was for students to use the site for homework help. And last weekend Benjamin and John dug Hannah's new beau's car out of a ditch. Never mind that he is 6'7" or that it was 7 o clock in the morning on a Saturday and everybody was half asleep,. Hannah came back in for a shovel and went back out with two men besides.

A good marriage carries love forward into the world. It expands and touches the people who come near.
And so that's the story of.....that's the glory of...love.