The Natural Order of Things

For only the second time in my life I got a close up and personal look at a Northern Harrier. It’s a low-flying hawk that is huge---it averages 17 to 24 inches tall with a wing span of 3 ½ to 4 ½ feet. The first time I saw him last week he was sitting on my deck railing not more than ten feet from my window. His back was to me and the first thought that popped into my mind was, how did a rabbit get up there? At first glance, he had a similar sized silhouette as a big buck rabbit sitting up on his hunches. My juggle-gym of a bird feeder was near-by and I think the hawk must have been hunting a chipmunk that feeds underneath with the rabbits. The second time I saw him he was feasting on his prey underneath a pine tree at the back edge of my lot and when he left the ground he came right toward me in his flight. I feel sorry for him. He belongs in counties south of here this time of the year and by a country marsh, not by my puny cattail bog in the city. Mother Nature is doing funny things lately and if she keeps insisting on rearranging the patterns of nature then I’m glad she assigned this hawk to me. If I see him again I’m going to name him Harry and makes sure he knows my dog isn't dinner.

I was reading other widows’ blogs a few days ago and it struck me how many of the themes, analogies and emotions we write about are so similar. It shouldn’t be surprising. From the bottom of time until now I doubt that the seasons of love and grief has changed much. We can read period literature and see that while the verbiage used to express our feelings is different through the centuries the emotions are the same. It’s bred into our DNA to care for one another. And yet…there are always exceptions to the rule. Always a Northern Harrier somewhere in the world that has lost his way or a super-pod of dolphins that no one can explain with 100% certainty. But I like the thought that I’m not alone in the sea; I have a pod of widows swimming along side me in the virtual world who value similar things, feel similar ways and are making similar wakes in the water.

Do you think rudeness is also in our DNA or is it something some people cultivate like a summer garden? Before Don passed away we used to go a VFW once a month but the place wasn’t very wheelchair friendly so I’d just run inside to get their roast beef dinners as take-outs. It's in the country and a popular place for the after church crowd. They serve cafeteria style and one time just as I got up to the food an old lady---80ish---cut in front of me and brought three others with her. She looked at me standing there in my sweats with disapproval in her cold eyes and in a snappish tone she said, "You've been up here before so you can go to the end of the line." Mind you, no one was behind me so their wait wouldn't have been very long even if what she said had been true. Since rudest seemed to be the appetizer of the day I told her it wasn’t my second time in the line, I just got there! She shot back that they were there now so I could wait anyway. (Chick fight---or rather old hens fight at the VFW.) They obviously had just come from church and I was thinking, what in the hell does that woman do when the preacher is talking about love, peace and fellowship? Is she making out a grocery list? Planning her garden? Imagining the guys in choir all standing there naked?

As the fourth person in her party stepped in front of me he apologized for his wife’s behavior. Instantly I felt sorry for the man and wondered if he’d spent their entire marriage doing clean-up duty, trying to balance out his wife’s rudest with his kindness. He was the ebb to her tide, the natural order of things in a microcosm at the VFW. If she was swimming in my pod of widows right now I’d tag her with glow-in-dark paint so the fish canneries could find her easily.

Oh, my, I can’t believe I just said that! Maybe her rudest was something out of the norm, like the Northern Harrier in my back yard. I wish the whole world was forced to keep a blog so we could google what’s going on inside each others heads. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could see if their rudeness is entirely what it seems on the surface? Would I be more forgiving, for example, of the lady at the VFW if I knew she was dying of cancer and only had a few weeks left to live? Maybe. Maybe not and I’d write a catty comment on her post to tell her not to worry about her nice, soft-spoken husband when she’s off battling the angels who guard the Pearly Gates of heaven. See, I can be as priggish as the next person. It’s all part of the natural order of things. Or is it? ©

“Politeness is the art of choosing among one’s real thoughts.”

Abel Stevens - minister/author

Wedding Bands and Borrowed Courage

I finally got it back…my husband’s wedding ring that was incorporated into an opera length necklace. It was made by a woman who does bead work for craft shows and small boutiques. She did a good job but how could I not like it considering I picked out all the beads that she used.

Did you know that in colonial America the Puritans thought adorning your body with a wedding ring was immoral, wasteful? Instead of giving a ring during a wedding ceremony a man would pledge his devotion by giving his bride a thimble engraved with her initials. It was practical and useful in a time when all women had to sew if she didn’t want her family to go to church naked. And they went to church a lot in those days. When I was young and first getting interested in antiques it was a fad to collect initialed thimbles and if you were lucky enough to find one that had the end of the thimble removed you knew it was used as a make-shift ring by a Puritan woman who wasn’t all that keen on following rules and living a moral life. She could switch that thimble back and forth between the tip of her middle finger and up her ring finger when she wanted to add a little sin into her schedule. And don’t we all want that from time to time? When I wear my beaded necklace with Don’s wedding band incorporated I can slip that ring on my finger and I will feel like a double agent with a secret. I can pretend my ring fidgeting is a signal to other fans of Puritan style sinning. Party on, ladies, I’ve got a ring on my finger!

The second photo (below) is of my lion charm necklace which symbolizes my need to have courage throughout 2013. (See my New Year’s Eve post if you want more information on the idea of having a One Word Inspiration to take the place of resolutions.) It’s just a cheap craft store charm and chain but I only wear it when I’m going someplace alone where I need to be reminded to have courage in doing so. I was half of a couple for 42 years and the transition to being single in a couple’s world still feels like I’m walking naked in a dream---and that’s not a pretty visual when you’re my age. I haven’t gone to a restaurant alone yet, for example, still haven’t done many things I’d like to start doing again. So I’m taking my courageous lion with me in the spring to a breakfast-only café and the farmer’s market in a near-by tourist town. I want my summer time Saturday morning routine back! I couldn’t bring myself to go that market last year because I wasn’t ready to face the vendors' questions about why Don wasn’t with me. But life goes on and so shall I with a little borrowed courage from a lion charm or a beaded necklace. ©

“He felt lighter than he had in weeks, and he realized that the monster he had been running from wasn’t really a monster after all. It was simply that place in the heart that holds the measure of your history, the joy and the grief, the laughter and the tears, the magic and the wonder; all the ingredients that add up to the story of a life well lived.”

Lilli Jolgren Day, author of The Wonder of Ordinary Magic

The Widow's Kitchen - Cooking for One

I have bit of a reputation in the cooking department and it’s not a good one. Long story, short all of my opportunities to learn to cook came mostly for family parties where everyone would bring a dish to pass. Let’s just say that after you bring bright pink potatoes salad to a fourth-of-July picnic no one asks you to bring it again. (I was trying out a recipe that combined beets and potatoes but I made a fatal mistake of combining the ingredients too soon.) Early on in our relationship my husband’s family took pity on me and whenever there was a family get-together I’d be asked to bring chips or something that didn’t require a trip into the dark, unused recesses of my kitchen. With my family, I could make a good three bean, marinated salad and they were okay with me bringing that to any and all events. They knew my talents ran in different directions so my lack of culinary skills was never a running joke with them like it was/still is with Don’s family.

Anyway, I have a limited range of things I can make and most of what I can do successfully---like a pot roast dinner or chili---you can’t make for one person living alone. So here I am, a widow with time on her hands and a new plan. I’m going to teach myself how to do things in the kitchen and at least once a week I’m actually going to make a meal using an ingredient or method I’ve never tried before. As my mother used to say, you’re never too old to learn something new. I’m not sure if she was talking about me or the dog but, what the heck, this is my story so I can tell it any way I want. Jeez, now that I think about it what she actually said was, “You can’t learn any younger. Just do it!” I was a stubborn child.

As I mentioned in my 2/15/13 post I went to my first ‘cooking for one’ class at the senior center. But one thing the dietitian teaching the class said won’t leave my thoughts. She said when cooking for one you have to rethink what your conception of what a meal is. A meal, she said, can be something as simple as guacamole on whole wheat crackers with a baked pear for dessert. This was a startling concept for me to wrap my head around, having grown up in an era when a home-cooked dinner always had to have meat, potatoes, vegetables, bread and dessert and later on having hung around Don’s family full of gourmet cooks. But her comment got me wondering if I can actually come up with a month’s worth of recipes to serve one that are easy-to-make dinners.

After class I stopped by the store and bought my second ever avocado to test the dietitian’s premise. When I cut the avocado open the way the she did in class it dawned on me why I had so much trouble opening a mango I tried doing a while back. I was trying to use the same method of cutting all the way around it then twisting the two halves to free it from the pit. But mangoes don’t have a nice round ball-like pit like an avocado and all I did was create a mess. Color me embarrassed. I haven’t tried opening a mango since. Someone should tell the gods of fruit to start growing them all with peels like bananas. I'm sure we'd all eat more fruit if they did.

One thing I’ve already figured out by reading recipes that are supposed to serve just one or two is often times you still have to buy ingredients in larger quantities than you’ll use. What’s a widow living alone supposed to do with a left-over ½ a can of something or seven tortilla shells? Get a deep-freezer the size of Rhode Island? Oh, my God, now I remember one of the reasons why I hate cooking: wastefulness. I need to watch more episodes of the Iron Chef hoping they can brain-wash me into throwing more stuff out. Have you ever noticed how often they discard ingredients that aren’t the perfect size, color or quality? Those people would die of culinary shock at my house where this “cook” has been programmed to eat what I burn because children in China will starve to death if I waste anything. Bottom line: my widow’s kitchen is now open for business so if you have any tips or tricks send them my way. ©

P.S. Here’s my first tip: Don’t order a cooking for one cookbook for your Kindle. Sometimes you actually need real pages to thumb through and an index you can get at easily.