Art Shows and Cleaning Girls

I died and went to Cleaning Girl Heaven. The one I had---the girl who gave a baby up in an open adoption and ended up regretting her decision---started taking Fridays off and she wanted me to change my cleaning day to Saturdays. I didn’t want to do that because there are too many art fairs, fall festivals and kids’ birthday parties scheduled on my upcoming Saturdays. After her boss and I tried to work out another day and time when we’d both be free at the same time, we gave up and decided it was time for me to try someone new. I felt bad because my old cleaner is such a sympathetic figure with a basket full of issues, one of which is she’s an OCD cleaning machine who, if she’d been a dog groomer, would have found a way to scrub the spots off a Dalmatian. 

The new girl came this week, a college kid in a grad program down at the art institution. My heart be still! She wants to be an art professor and already she’s got the demeanor and look of a professor. A tall, willow-thin blonde with a wide smile that makes you want to smile back. We talked painting styles, artists and mediums as she worked, and she’s the first cleaning person I’ve had in the five years since I’ve been using the service who actually appreciates my favorite room in the house---the library. She had a reverence for my art, philosophy and women’s history books. I don’t have my cleaners clean in my art room but I showed it to her and she gave me some technical advice with a painting that I’ve been struggling to finish. She said I’m only six brush strokes away from accomplishing what I need to do. That sure made my day because I’ve been weighing the idea of doing the entire face over. Her cleaning job was not as thorough as my other girl's and I probably won’t have her for long because after graduation she’ll be moving on, but in the meantime I’ll have something to look forward to besides having a clean house on the first Friday of every month. By the way, I always buy my house fresh flowers to celebrate the occasion. A clean house and fresh flowers go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Saturday I went to an annual Art in the Park show with one goal in mind: Don’t buy anything. Not even a greeting card which I have a ‘thing’ for doing when I like an artist. You can always find room for another greeting card, right? I rarely send those cards to anyone. I hoard them and enjoy them whenever I’m looking for something to use for the purpose cards were invented. So many charities send me packets of greeting cards that my stash seems to grow like mushrooms in the dark. I have a chest of six drawers (one foot square drawers) where I keep gift wrapping supplies and greeting cards and recently I downsized the cards in that chest to pass on to one of my Gathering Girls pals. She’ll pass them on to another friend of hers who does prison ministry work and that woman hands out packets of pre-stamped greeting cards to the prisoners for them to use. The woman has been visiting prisons for decades and wouldn’t you like to know the back story on how she got started doing that. I wish I was self-less enough to send those prisoners cards from my ‘good’ stash---they might enjoy hanging some beautiful mini-art pieces in their cells---but I’m not there yet. If reincarnation is real, in my next go-around I want to think more like Mother Theresa and less like---well, like me. 

The weather for the art show was perfect. The temperature was in the high 60s and a breeze was coming off the near-by river where ducks and white swans were looking for their lunch and Canadian geese were resting on their way up north. The signs of fall approaching were all around me and the bright sun was doing a great job of showing off the pieces of artists working in stained glass.

I’ve gone completely nuts about wind chimes this summer---Ya, I’m one of those annoying neighbors, some would say, who loves the pinging tones and tinkling sounds of glass, metal and sea shells striking one another in the wind. In my defense my neighbors aren’t close enough to hear them. At the art show, I fell in love with a four foot long copper and stained glass wind chime that was probably too heavy to make a peep unless a hurricane is one the way. I admired the heck out of it, complimented the artist, lied and told her my (non-existent) condo doesn’t allow wind chimes "otherwise I’d adopt that beautiful piece." And then I walked away. Aren’t you proud of me? I am. Well, except for the lying part. Mother Theresa, I doubt, ever lied just to make an excuse for not buying something so beautiful that it takes your breath away. I just wish the artist had sold greeting card depictions of her work. After all, I recently created extra space in my card drawers and it would have been easy to hide the evidence of breaking my goal about not buying anything that day. ©

The True Meaning of our Dreams

Almost every night since Don passed away I’ve been dreaming about him. And in all my dreams he’s like he was before the stroke, walking and talking. Not so surprising considering even my day time memories of him seem to be focusing more on our pre-stroke life together rather than the post-stroke years. In last night’s dream we were at a high school for a fund raiser and I lost Don in the crowd but I found him again by following his deep, rich voice. I’ve always loved his voice. After his stroke I couldn’t bear to part with his telephone with the built-in answering machine because it contained his outgoing message and I couldn’t erase it. I just couldn’t do it so I bought a new phone.

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At one time or another most of us have wondered what, if anything, our dreams mean. Volumes have been written to help us analyze things like the setting, symbolism and actions in our dreams. The school setting, for example, in my latest dream is supposed to represent the dreamer’s feelings of being tested. (Well no shit, Sherlock! Losing a spouse is quite a test of our mettle, and being at a fund raiser isn’t too hard to figure out either, considering Don’s gun collection is now in the hands of an auctioneer and I’m getting ready to sell his beloved sports car.) Anyway, school settings are a common setting in my dreams and have been for as far back as I can remember. I’ve also had many dreams after Don’s stroke where I lost him in random settings but my last dream is the very first dream ever where I’ve found him again. Maybe that’s not such a curious thing considering reincarnation and his ‘ghost games’ round here have been on my daytime mind a lot lately.
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I read an article a year or so back about the brain and how it stores information. The theory is that during sleep is when we shift all the events of the day to a permanent storage place in our brains to retrieve later as a memory. Only the information being stored doesn’t necessarily get stored all in one place. The brain, in theory, works much like a computer breaking up and putting data where ever it can find space on our “hard drives.” The article suggested that our dreams are really just the brain whizzing by old memories, broken up by other memories, and looking for a place to drop off our most recent data for filing. Imagine taking a magazine apart and gluing the pages back together in random, mixed up order. Imagine, then, flipping through that glued-back-together magazine and trying to make sense of what you saw. That’s what dreaming supposedly is like and if true, we can throw out all those books on dream analysis.
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That scientific theory makes senses. It really does. But how does that theory account for the reoccurring dreams and the dream symbolism that more often that not actually seems to fit what is going on in our daytime lives? Nope, I’m kicking that article's theory to the curb and instead I choose to believe my most recent dream does have meaning. And it means some day, some how I will find Don again in the great unknown. Many of us say we have soul mates but we forget that true soul mates have been finding each other since the bottom of time and will continue to do so until the planets collide. I hold on to that thought knowing my soul mate is never far away, even in death. ©

The Proposals

I don't plan to live in the past now that my husband is gone, but I do want to preserve and share some of my best memories from time to time on this blog. For me, it helps to write. It keeps me focused on the important parts of our shared history---and the important parts are NOT the last few days of his death or my pain of having to move on by myself. Don's gone and I can't change that but I can try to live the life he'd want me live while not forgetting our past. So with that in mind, here's a few memories that I treasure......

The Proposals

The first time---or maybe it was the second time---that Don asked me to marry him we were on a playground riding pink elephants mounted on giant springs and not doing a very good job of it since they were designed for children and we were in our late twenties at the time. It was four o’clock in the morning. The moon was full making the trees surrounding the park look like an enchanted forest. But there might have been a little alcohol involved earlier in the evening so it could have been just our imaginations working overtime. It’s enough to say it was a memorable setting to get a marriage proposal.

The last time Don asked me to marry him was in the year after his stroke. We were living in an accessible apartment while I was getting his house ready to sell and I was also in the process of getting an auction organized at a large pole barn that he had rented for years. My house was sitting empty, waiting its turn on the sales block. I’d been fretting about the high cost of my health insurance and we were having major cash flow problems. Don’s language disorders---aphasia and apraxia---at that point in time had his speech limited to a few nouns that often took as long as four hours for him to get out. But he was determined and would keep trying over and over again until others around him understood what he wanted to say. By the time he finally got the word “marry” out, the conversation about the insurance had vanished from my mind, but not his.

“You’re merry?" I asked and with all the stuff going on during that time frame I was stunned that he could feel that way. "You’re happy?” It was a question that, of course, upset him because I misunderstood what he'd worked so hard to get out.

Besides the fact that it took me a while to recognize that single word proposal as a proposal, another thing that was different from the time he proposed while we rode pink elephants in the park was his reasons for asking. This last time, Don was asking because getting married would get me covered by his health insurance and pension plan. I don’t know why he proposed that first time, but my answer was: “Why we hardly know each other!” We’d only been dating a matter of months---and not exclusively at that---and I thought anyone with a lick of sense wouldn’t ask that soon. Strike one against Don.

In the decades in between his first and last proposals when ever people pressed for a reason why we didn’t get married, Don often repeated that line---“Why we hardly know each other!” It was a standing joke and only the two of us knew its true origin. But there was a deeper meaning as well. Over the years Don and I flirted with the idea that reincarnation of souls is real and we figured we had been soul mates since time began. It just took me a while to recognize that when we first met. And that brings us to the true meaning of the words that will be carved on our tombstone… "Happy trails to you, until we meet again." Our time together here was just a drop of water in the flowing river of life and we’ll have until the end of time for our souls to keep on finding each other. ©

Edit to add: I added a link to an article that was published as part of Valentine's Day contest a few years back. The contest was to write about how you met your spouse. Look for that tab/link at the top that will take you to the article.