Cottages, Funerals, and Echoes of the Lives We Build and Leave Behind

If blog posts are a slice of life then this post is like an entire pie because I crammed enough stuff into this past week to last a month. If you asked me what kind of pie I'd say it was a fruit pie because my activities were chunky and chewy, not smooth like a cream pie. I'm not really a pie person---I prefer to eat cake instead---but if I have to pick a favorite it would lemon meringue. My mom used to make them from scratched which I suppose was the norm back in the '40s and '50s when I grew up. She made fruit pies in season, too, and we had an unlimited source for wild huckleberries so mom made lots pies and cobblers that were guaranteed to turn our teeth temporarily blue. 

Cottages and Memorial Day go together like peanut butter and jelly. The one I went to over the holidays has been in the family since I was two years old. It's an easy drive straight south of town, no way to get lost which at my age is a dreaded sign no one wants to see. It happened to my dad in the early days of his dementia and it happened to my brother. So far I've only gotten lost once, two years ago but it was in an area of town I never go to so I didn't punch a hole in my Old Person's Card with that incident. It's getting lost when going places you've been to a thousand times before that count. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. 

Opening day at a cottage is when you put the docks in, blow up the water toys, bring out the cushions for the screened-in porch and start restocking the kitchen for a simple meal of hot dogs on the grill, potato salad, chips and dip and this year my niece made chili---I'm guessing because the weatherman whispered in her ear that it would hit the spot on the cooler than normal holiday. Anyway, I brought a store bought apple pie as my contribution. Her family is not big on sweets and I've yet to figure out how to hit a home run with a dessert that pleases them all. I also brought store bought peanut butter cookies for the kids. Recently I dug out my mom's old recipe for peanut butter cookies, thinking I'd like to make them because I remember them as being so much better than store bought. One look at the ingredients and it was easy to figure out why back in the day when no one cared about sugar, fats and carbs, her cookies were a favorite with everyone. They had a cup of shortening, a cup of brown sugar, a cup of white sugar, a cup of peanut butter and three eggs in each batch. Still, it's a goal I set for myself before I die, to make a batch of peanut butter cookies from scratch. I've got a bad habit lately of setting goals to accomplish before I depart this world and I need to take a deep dive into that self destructive behavior one day, but not today.

Also this week I went to a funeral of the daughter of a woman I've known since the day she was born and that's a long time considering she's only a year or two younger than me. Her daughter was only 54 years old, died of cancer but she did more in her short life to add goodness and positivity to humanity than I've done in my 80 plus years. She was a teacher and the service was standing room only. It doesn't seem fair, the way someone with so much to give, dies young and suffers at the end while someone like me who tends to be a tad self-centered keeps on going like the Energizer Bunny. I left the funeral home being proud of my friend for raising such a great daughter but by comparisons feeling like I've wasted too much of my own life. We were summer friends who spent a great deal of time together growing up. Our parents were life-long friends but she took the giving nature of her own mom and passed it on to her daughter while I took the lessons passed down from my folks and kept them mostly to myself. 

At another party this weekend---one given by a great-nephew from my husband's side of the family and where the desserts literally numbered in the double digits---I was sitting next to a niece-in-law who has MS and, like me, never had any children. She's been in a wheelchair since her late 20s and hasn't had the easiest life. She looked around at all her nieces and nephews and out of the blue she said, "I'm glad I never had any kids." Her reason for thinking that is because during the years when her friends were all having babies, she said it was all she could do to go to work each day. She was so tired and didn't think she had anything left over to give. She figured any kids of hers wouldn't have turned out all that great. 

I also wonder from time to time how any kids I might have had would have turned out. Some people will scoff at me for saying this and call it apples and oranges but I was a good mom to my fur babies and I think I would have approached motherhood the same way I approached raising them to be well behaved canine citizens. I would have researched how to do whatever it took to be a mom including I would have even applied myself to the dreaded experience of learning how to cook. But would I have been as devoted to any kids of mine the way my mom was to my brother and me? I can't imagine me being completely void of the self-indulgent person I know I can be. Or did the self-indulgent part develop organically from having more time on my hands than my cottage friend had whose daughter just died?

I ended the week with what they were calling a Spring Fling here on campus, a party that was arranged and paid for by the daughter of a fellow resident. They come from money and spent lavishly on this party. After two glasses of wine I was ready to call it a night and that's when I got a call informing me that the husband of my best friend since kindergarten died. I'm in the season of my life when I buy sympathy cards by the box---and there I go again, making it about me instead of the loss of my friend's soulmate. But she has dementia and her husband was her caregiver and if I think too much about what is ahead for her and her sons my heart will break. At times like this I haul out the Scarlett O'Hara line from Gone With the Wind, "I'll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day." ©

Until next Wednesday.

P.S. The title of this post was generated by Artificial Intelligence. How do you think it did? ChatGpt is fun to play with. Thanks 'Awkward Widow' for introducing it to me.

 

When a Childhood Friend Dies

A guy I’ve known my entire life died. I didn’t know the adult he’d become as well as I knew the childhood we shared in the first seventeen summers of my life. But this will be the first Christmas when we don’t exchange Christmas cards. Neither one of us just send a card from a box with our names scribbled inside. He would fill every blank space on a hand selected Hallmark card with a memory of our years spent playing together at the cottages our folks both built and I would fill up a type-written Christmas letter. The kind some people make fun of getting and others seem to enjoy. 

My brother was a year old than Allen. I was two years younger and his sister is my junior by a year. I don’t remember any of us ever having a fight. We were too busy playing cowboy and Indian, building forts and digging sand pits. We swam, fished and canoed together. We walked nearly ever day a couple of miles either to a grocery store to get ice cream and Orange Crush or we’d packed a lunch and walk around the lake where at the time had no other cottages. Most nights we had a Monopoly or poker game going at his house where they had a huge table with chairs that came out of an old school and the number of players around that table sometimes was as high as ten but never below the four assorted cottage kids. The first 15-16 New Year's Eves and days of my life were spent with a sleepover at one of our parent's winter houses while they partied at the other.

When I got the text message that he had died, I was sitting in the car waiting to go inside to get my hair cut. So I had to buck it up and not let the tear or two flow down my cheek that threaten my composure. Selfish me, I wasn’t so much sad on his or his family's account as I was sad for the loss of a piece of my past. 

His family and mine kept the cottages in the families all these years since 1943 and whenever I visited my niece, who now owns the cottage of my youth, I’d walk down to see the siblings and nine times out of ten Allen would be there and we’d chat a little but as adults we didn’t have a lot in common. In my twenties I dated a friend of his for a year but we never talked about him or the fact that another friend of Allen's was the first boy I ever kissed or that the two of them once flashed their penises at me, his sister and a few other girls when they were 14 or 15. If laughing at a kid's penis could give him complex they would have had them because we girls laughed so hard I'm thinking there was a little pants peeing involved. 

Another great memory we shared involved five or six Holstein cows that got out of their field and I, Allen and our siblings ended up in a tree to get away from them. We were up there so long that Allen had to poop. Yup, he did it, hung his bare butt over the branch of the tree and dropped his "logs” down to the ground to the delight of the cows who all took turns smelling what fell from the sky. I thought we’d die up there in that tree but eventually, as all cows apparently do, they did go home at milking time. 

That tree is still there as well as the dairy farm and the cows. I’m no longer afraid of the cows---consider them my spirit animal--and I often stop when I’m out there to take their photos. They are so curious all you have to do is stand by the fence long enough they’ll come up to visit. I milked my first cow at that farm along side Allen. We shared a lot of firsts together. I saw my very first TV show with Allen and his sister and we learned to pick blueberries together.

One thing we never shared was a coming of age story and I guess I’m grateful for that because most coming of age stories involve a traumatic event like in the movie Stand By Me. Written by Stephen King, directed by Rob Reiner, you probably remember it’s a story of four boys who find a dead body along a railroad track and as in all coming of age stories it marked the lose of their childhood innocence. I was a late bloomer when it came to my own coming of age experience. I was in my mid-twenties and it involved the friend of Allen’s who I dated. It’s not that I hadn’t heard stories of the darker side of life by then, but hearing them and experiencing them first hand are two different balls of wax. 

The obituary for my childhood friend was very long and for the most part I knew everything in it except for one line about him being very happy when Trump beat Hillary. That had me scratching my head, wondering why in our current political climate would anyone put that in an obituary that will follow a person for centuries…assuming the world goes on for centuries and genealogy research is still a thing in the future. My niece thinks he wrote it himself and I'm guessing she's right. All these years we've been cancelling each other out at the polls. I'm not surprised, really. Our parents did as well and they'd managed to stay life-long friends.

Allen's not the first person in my age bracket to die, but we had known each other since my birth and now I'm down to just my brother who I can say that about. That's when you know you're really as old as you feel. ©

The Last Days Before my New Beginning

If you're reading this the day it went live---October second---I'll be out in the garage waiting with baited breath for the son-I-wish-I-had to deliver the twenty-six foot moving van he rented. He and his sons will load that sucker up on Sunday and he is confident all my stuff will fit. I’m not so sure. I’m embarrassed and a little panicked to admit that I ended up with 167 boxes. In my defense a lot of them are small boxes and some of the bigger boxes are full of the smaller boxes that I’ve condensed inside so we can make less trips back and forth to the van. And everything got tagged with a number for the inventory sheet like a jigsaw puzzle roll-up mat and the laundry cart. Fifteen boxes are full of books, ten boxes hold kitchen and laundry room items. I can’t imagine how many I’d have if I hadn’t downsized in those rooms. Two boxes holds all my shoes and boots and the way the weather turned since I packed, I’m going to need my L.L. Bean Rubber Moc boots soon. It was super hot and dry when I packed my clothes and I used my winter sweaters and sweats as packing material. Oops! I’ll freeze my balls off, if I had a pair, before I get totally settled in.

This past week has been the calm before the storm. (Note it took me four proof readings to finally see that I originally wrote “the clam before the storm” and while Google whispered in my ear that strong, storm-driven tidal waves have been known to cause a killing field of razor clams that is not what I meant to say. Damn dyslexia.) Anyway, what I was trying to say is that everything that could be done has been done and I’ve been twiddling my thumbs, hoping I haven’t forgotten anything. To paraphrase Santa, “I made a list and I’ve checked it a million times.” If I forget anything it will be my name because I’m really tired of thinking so much.  

Earlier this week with time on my hands I even obsessed about the idea of switching the location where I’ve been planning to put my media cabinet and my bookshelves which would have meant relabeling a bunch of boxes and making a new floor plan for moving day. It wouldn't be an easy job to switch them once they get loaded up with books, CDs, VCRs, DVDs and photo boxes. After playing around with idea for two days I finally decided that since the whole idea was driven by the desire to make room so my TV could go inside the media cabinet instead of on top of it---for nicer aesthetics in my main space---that a better plan would be to get rid of all my CDs and cassettes and get a radio that I can get an XM Sirius Prime Country subscription. The player and speakers I’m using are such poor quality that I don’t enjoy music in the house like I do when I’m in the car. Who said I couldn't/wouldn’t have new goals after moving? In the meantime I unlabeled the box of packed VCR movies and the player and off to Goodwill they went. I haven't played any of them in a decade so why did I think I'll do it going forward?

Speaking of obsessing, I couldn't stop thinking about that box of glassware and cups the woman I hired packed. I bought three smaller glassware boxes and unpacked what she did. I'm glad I did. She had stacked things three deep that shouldn't have been stacked and that box was so heavy its bottom wouldn't have held up. 

Tuesday I managed to get in a long lunch with two of the ladies from my old Gathering Girls group. It felt good to laugh with them again. The pandemic did a number on our group of six but instead of mourning the way it used to be I'm working on being grateful we were a cohesive group for as long as we were.

Also this week I met an old friend for lunch. He lives north of me and we met in the middle. In all honesty it could be the last time I’ll ever see Gary. I don’t like to drive and he’s getting more physically disabled every time I see him. But he promised to come visit next spring and I promised if I come up to tend my husband’s grave I’ll give him a call to meet for lunch. He was a close friend of my husband’s since their high school days, bonded together by shared good times both before and after I entered the picture and by helping each other out when one or the other went through a rough patch.

In the 52 years I've known Gary he and my husband talked weekly for more years than I can count and there was one question I was dying to ask him---in person, face-to-face. Don’t judge me for this but I wanted to know if Don ever talked about our sex life. “No!" Gray replied, "Never. Not a one word,” I've been curious about that for a while because on talk and TV shows, in books and movies young/er people seem to freely discuss details of their sex lives that I never would have ever shared with friends. I can’t decide if this is a good or bad thing for society. I mean violence, war and murders are okay to depict in vivid detail, but not sex? Doesn't make sense. 

On the other side of bed sheets shouldn't some things between a couple remain private or off limits in this age of documenting our whole existence on social media? And look who is asking this, the woman who spills her guts bi-weekly in her blog. Note I'm being bit hypocritical here, too, because I did write about our sex life once in a post titled The Love and Laughter Memories but I did at least, spare readers the graphic details. So there's that in my defense of adding to the pool of too much information. ---See, I told you I had too much time on my hands this week otherwise my mind wouldn't have wandered this far off from the gigantic task ahead of me. ©

Friends who Read Blogs and the Mom I Still Miss

I have a curious friend who knows I have a blog but she isn’t very computer literate which translates to she can’t find it and she’s tried. Several times when the topic has come up I’ve jokingly said, “If I told you how to find it, I’d have to kill you.” I debate in my head whether or not I should just give her the web address. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people in my off-line life who read my blog and I like it that way because it frees me to write without the temptation to white wash my words to square with the filtered person I frequently show to the world away from my keyboard. I trust these five people to still like me even after reading my deepest thoughts. And more importantly, I trust them not to tattle on me if I write about someone we both know.

The year that Don died, I did put the web address in my Christmas letter but to my knowledge only three out of all the people on my mailing list ever stopped by. I get that. I really do. Mostly, it’s other widows who are interested in how newbie widows are handling that first year. And by the time I turned into a seasoned widow who was no longer fluctuating between crying in my beer and being the brave little trooper I came to appreciate the advantages of keeping my online and offline lives separate. That probably explains why my petty inner child is not keen on inviting my curious friend to my blog. My inner child can be quite bullheaded, a word my mother used often to describe me when I was growing up. Bullheadedness in childhood can turn into a useful tool in adulthood. If Mom were here now I’d point out that being bullheaded/persistent, if channeled in the right direction, gets things done. Sticks and stones can hurt your bones but words can never hurt you---unless it’s your mom drilling them into your head.

I don’t write about my mother often. She was a complicated person and I’m afraid I won’t be able to do her justice. She could be a tough disciplinarian and if I lingered too long on that point you’d get the impression she was a hard woman. For example, if I didn’t do the dishes before rushing out to have fun I’d find them piled in my bed to do before I could go to sleep at night. But if I told you she was affectionate with her family and compassionate with others in bad situations, you’d rightly get the impression she had a warm and loving nature. Case in point: whenever my uncle drank too much and gambled away his paycheck my mom slipped her sister money to help feed their kids. At Mom’s funeral I heard similar stories of her quietly helping others. But if I told you my mother was always squirreling money away for rainy days you’d get the impression she was a miser. When she died we had to check the pockets in all her clothes before donating them.

To understand my mom it helps to know that her own mother died after giving birth to my mom’s sixth sibling. She was ten years old and after that all the kids got shuffled off to live with other families across several counties. Mom, being the second born and deemed old enough to work, was sent off to earn her keep at her grandmother’s boarding house. She would tell a story about how all the tablespoons in the house would disappear when meals were made because her grandmother would taste something on the stove, then drop the spoon into the pot. She’d repeat that over and over again and all the spoons would come clinking out when the food was plated. By her early teens Mom had dropped out of school and was working first as a live-in housekeeper, then as a waitress living on her own in a rented room. Her dad would stop by the restaurant regularly to ask her for money. He drank away his widower’s grief until he drank so much he turned into an alcoholic. 

Mom married my dad when she was twenty-six years old and she didn’t talk much about those years when she was out on her own. But I do know that all that time working as a waitress turned her militantly against the system of tipping in restaurants. She thought if we did away with tipping the restaurants would have to pay fair wages. A woman could work her fingers to the bones taking care of a lot of customers, she said, but it was the flirty waitresses with big breasts who made the most money. A couple of times I saw Mom sneak part of the tip money off the table that my dad would leave behind. Bad service? Flirty waitresses? Rainy day fund running low? Your guess is as good as mine.

Mothers and daughters have unique relationships and I leave it to others who knew us both to decide if I’m anything like my mom. One thing I know for sure is she did her best to see that my brother and I had the opportunity to pursue whatever after school activity that we showed an interest in. She was the leader of my Blue Birds, Camp Fire and Horizon Clubs, she volunteered to help on school field trips and was determined I would get a college education. My mom also knitted and crocheted beautifully and played records when she was home alone. The only “mother thing” she didn’t accomplish was to teach me how to cook and that we can chalk that up to me being too bullheaded to learn. She died on an Easter Day in the early ‘80s and while Easter changes dates every year I associate the holiday with losing and still missing her. And it should be noted here that my brother and I still argue over who Mom loved the best.  © 

Photo at the top: My Mom (age 30) and I (age 2 weeks old) on the day we were released from the hospital, and that's my brother.