Chris-messy

     

Scenes from a Chris-messy Cleveland in 2022. That's my west coast son Adam in  the middle and my daughter-in-law Booth on the left.

"Tradition!" I can practically hear Tevye shouting from the fiddler’s rooftop as Christmas approaches. Is there any holiday more steeped in tradition? Yet in my big, messy family, each year writes its own script. Strong traditions have eluded us as blended family customs merged, conflicted and evolved along with the demands of running businesses designed to be convenient for customers but not necessarily family.

Yet, most years we celebrated with gusto. Christmas Eve? Christmas Day? Or a few days before or after? It didn’t matter. At my advanced age, the warmth and companionship of so many holidays are like the gentle lapping of water on the shore: advancing and retreating, comforting and joyful.

Yet … yet … there is a reason I titled this "Chris-messy."  There were Decembers that I left my Vermont family to fend for themselves. Both my parents passed away during Christmas week (though many years apart), and the tradition of taking care of family trumped the traditions of Christmas. I know I am not alone in experiencing great sadness at a time renowned for joy.  It did not permanently spoil the holiday, but added an aching dimension.

 One year, there was a road trip to Cleveland to visit extended family including a newly minted nurse grandson. We battled lake effect snowstorms of epic proportions and stayed in an AirBnb where a door fell off the hinges -- literally.  But celebrate we did when east coast and west coast family met in middle America for a memorable, non-traditional gathering. 

And then there was the year my son moved to Los Angeles. His relationship with his now wife was in its fledging stages and a solo holiday for him loomed. He assured his father he would be fine. “I ‘ll just go to a soup kitchen,” he said. The next thing I knew, my husband had put me on a red-eye flight and I arrived in L.A. just in time to take in the procession of Las Posadas in the historic heart of the city and watch as the colorful shops of Olvera Street slammed their shutters and closed their doors to the pregnant Mary until she found shelter a humble barn on the eve of Jesus birth. So different  and poignant!

The next day, we did indeed go to a soup kitchen -- but as volunteers to help serve a holiday meal to the less fortunate.

If you have traditions, hold them close to your heart. Embrace them with all the love you can muster as the Birthday Boy taught us to do.

Yet … if your traditions fall short … well, life is messy and sometimes holidays are too. 

Wishing you all a blessed Christmas.

 Recent posts:

Hoarding Friend(-ship)

Flair, Sass and Familial Respect: Mother's Day 2022

Time Out

Hoarding Friend(-ship)

 

Doug and Dick were friends. No, they were best friends in a relationship that spanned six decades and included their wives and extended to their children, grandchildren and even great grands.

They, as most friends do, shared many core values. They were hard working in their small businesses and believed in participating in making changes instead of just complaining. They loved their families and where tireless ambassadors for the states in which they lived (Dick in Rhode Island and Doug in Vermont). They valued common sense which they often perceived to be short supply. They could be tough task masters but also kind and generous. Their early morning (4 or 5 am) email threads were legendary sessions sharing tidbits about business, politics, finances and family; it was as bracing a start to the day as that first sip of joe. Dick mentored Doug in ham radio and Doug showed Dick how to strip furniture. 

AND they were both borderline hoarders!

No attic, basement, closet or shed was immune from stashes of miscellany that these two thought might be valuable or useful – someday. Dick’s collection of “stuff” was top-heavy with radio paraphernalia of every shape age and size. Doug’s stash included a Home Depot’s worth of hardware, tools, plumbing parts and small motors.

SO, that is the back story. 

Doug passed away in December of 2014. 

We, his family, are still finding odd bits of interesting things in backrooms and cubbies some seven and a half years later. One day I found a small brown plastic radio high up on a shelf. The Bakelite case was cracked and the dial, sporting a graphic of an airplane, was dingy though intact. Perhaps Doug had saved it for his friend. Perhaps Dick could salvage something from this shabby radio remnant? Perhaps. Off to Dick it went.

Yesterday, I was gifted the little brown vintage radio back. In the months it had been with our friend, it had been lovingly restored to working condition using old radio tubes from his “hoarded” stash. It appears to be a somewhat rare -- and maybe valuable -- little 1940-1950s electronic treasure that was used to monitor air traffic. Dick is the one in a million that has/had the parts, the knowledge and the desire to fix up this long-hoarded relic, this bit of history that honored a frugal and saving lifestyle and a four-generation friendship.  

It was a gift touching beyond measure and will have a place of honor. Not to be too maudlin, but if we could hoard friends like these, wouldn’t we?

Recent posts:

Flair, Sass and Familial Respect: Mother's Day 2022

Time Out

A Thanksgiving Carol

Flair, Sass and Familial Respect: Mother's Day 2022

My mother, Maisie Schweitzer

 I wanted to post this on Mother’s Day. But I was too busy watching my great grand-children run and swing and tumble together in the welcome spring sunshine.  I rarely get caught up in -- or bogged down by -- holiday memories of departed loved ones. If a memory creeps across my mind it is usually humorous or has profound significance.

 So it was this Mother’s Day. I obsessively watch “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” because that is my mother’s era and because Mom could be talked into dancing a mean Charleston -- without the benefit of alcohol or weed.  I imagine her flair and sass and clothes to be just like Miss Fisher’s.  I construct this image in my head from partial cues; a slightly bawdy photo, a flapper’s headband in an old trunk, a pair of satin heels. I like to think of her that way but of course that would have been a version of her that existed long before I was born. 

 My actual memories of her are embodied by chocolate chip cookies and gallons of tomato soup with crisp grilled cheese sandwiches. The memories include hours of musical practice on the piano or saxophone, church on Sunday, gymnastics on Tuesdays and Campfire Girl meetings on Fridays. She was a joiner and participant and she expected me to be too.

True confession:  She failed to make me musical. I can barely find middle C on the piano and I have not so much as looked at a saxophone in over 60 years.  I am not a “clubby” woman and mostly avoid anything beyond an occasional book club. Like most mothers and daughters, Mom and I locked horns, butted heads and disagreed on boyfriends, clothes and lifestyle.

What then were the profound lessons that flitted across my mind?

 I learned even from our differences.  Differences do not need to alienate … if you do not let them. Love goes deeper, broader and wider when enhanced by listening and respect. We learned this together --sometimes with tears and sometimes with side-splitting laughter at our absurdities.

She was a fierce advocate of education for women before it was popular and accepted. She was deeply spiritual, turning over to God without reservation the depth of her gratitude and fears and longing.

AND, she was adamant that no one in the family speak ill of anyone else in the family. Like Disney’s Thumper she held to “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”  I am not naïve enough (nor was she) to believe that never happened behind closed doors or in private thoughts. But she set a tone of positivity. She would have positively loved the rough-and-tumble camaraderie of her progeny, generations removed on this Mother’s Day 2022.  She would have giggled and laughed and scolded. And no doubt injected a dose of positivity because she believed in its benefits so wholeheartedly.

Thanks Mom …

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Time Out

The predicted late winter snow storm is ramping up with its companion wind, gusty and brittle.

It is mid-March and Vermont has already had a few days of balmy, faux spring tricking my senses into believing that wintertime has passed. Now, my sense of time is reversed, plunged back to January. 

As if I needed more disorientation, the news reminds me that today is also when we change our clocks, losing  a precious hour of sleep and throwing my circadian rhythm into disarray. I can now put to rest my November procrastination of changing my car clock. How did time go so fast?

I think I have a partial answer. For my great-grandson, Carter who is 10, a year is one tenth of his life, a relatively large fraction and long portion his life. For me, a year is quite a different matter, only a small fraction of my octogenarian life. I blink and a year has gone; the announcement of a pregnancy is now a bouncing baby.  

The time represented by the last couple of years has seen such drastic changes … people moving in and moving out … businesses closing, job concepts altering, politics changing, controversy and conspiracy rampant. Never a fan or believer that the “good old days” were all that good, I am exercising a woman’s prerogative to slightly change direction. I want to blink and again experience a simple, more trustworthy time. But who among us has not occasionally chanted Elizabeth Akers Allen’s poem (even if we did know the source)?

     Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,

    Make me a child again just for tonight!

 But this cannot be. 

Despite the momentary time-warping disorientation, there are orientating markers. The glorious sun rises on another day. The morning coffee brewed and savored and the pesky cat meowing to be fed anchor my morning and defy time and age. There are chores to be done … the fridge needs cleaning and the laundry needs doing. A birthday card needs sending and a child needs hugging before the sun flames below the horizon of another day.

Time to get to it ...

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A Thanksgiving Carol

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A Thanksgiving Carol

In the few days that remain before the most gustatory holiday of the season, not only am I pulling recipes out of my ancient, stained and spattered recipe box, I am pulling memories to the surface.

In a Dickensian vibe a la “A Christmas Carol,” I go to Thanksgivings past. But these memories bring a bubble of laughter. Unlike Scrooge, whose ghost of the past was bitter and sad, my ghost of Thanksgivings past is more Casper-like, flitting merrily across my mind. 

In the early years of our marriage, we were asked to host my hubby’s rather difficult grandmother in our Rhode Island home. With other family too distant to either her or us, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to learn some old holiday cooking tips and bond with this frugal ex-pastor’s wife. Her big tip was to drape a clean, white tea towel like a blanket of fresh snow over the mountaintop crest of the turkey’s gigantic breast. Every 20 or 30 minutes, the gathering juices would be sucked up in a baster and squirted generously over the tea towel to keep the bird moist and succulent. Over the hours of cooking before the great unveiling, both the turkey and the tea towel took on a golden, fragrant hue.

After the meal, with our bellies full of the delicious turkey and all the trimmings, it was time to clean up before the pumpkin pie was served for dessert. All three of us -– husband, wife and grandmother-in-law -- helped to wash and package up the leftovers.  Nana admonished me to wash and save the tea towel for future turkeys. But, for some reason, I could not find that tea towel, crusted as it was with fond and dried brown juices. Finally, my husband pointed to a large pot on the back burner of the stove where he was boiling the juices out of said tea towel enroute to making turkey soup!  I knew I had married into a frugal family, but really! Even his Nana was surprised, and I remember seeing a smile creep across her usually dour face.

A year or two later, I am in the cabin in Sandgate for the holiday (we had not yet made the move to Vermont). The men are out hunting while am preparing a somewhat simplified meal. There was turkey, of course, and pumpkin pie.  I had been to the cabin often so I knew what to bring and what I could source from the cupboards -- or I thought I did. I rolled out a tender crust and fluted it with a pretty, ruffled edge. I combined the other ingredients, carefully carrying the pie to the still-hot oven. Everything would be ready for the returning hunters. But my pride in the meal was dashed the moment the first forkful of pie hit my husband’s mouth. Apparently, I had sweetened my pie with a full cup of salt!  Sugar was the stuff that came in 5-pound bags, right? And salt was always packaged in those deep blue cylindrical boxes with the pop-out metal spouts, right? Lesson learned, I would never again cook operating from such partial cues for, indeed, salt does sometimes come in 5-pound bags that, to the unaware, resemble sacks of sugar. 

The men were convulsed with laughter at my culinary faux pas and claimed they were too full for dessert anyway. Bless them!

Those November holidays stand out like shiny threads in the warp and woof of a fabric that stretches from my childhood to the childhood of my grandchildren and great grandchildren. Some had a shadow of illness and loneliness, some were interrupted by the need to work or by minor strife. Like other days, some Thanksgiving Days were better than others but they were universally filled with abundant food and great gratitude.  

My ghosts of Thanksgiving present and future are more tangled and sparring.

The present (aka pandemic time), found turkey day 2020 re-configured. With gatherings and travel plans cancelled, our family met in the parking lot of our business and exchanged clam-shell takeout containers or Tupperware bowls filled with each family’s specialty dish. Some were relieved at the broken traditions (come on, admit it – you were SO tired of hosting), while others, mourning the loss of tradition, tucked in to watch the Macy’s parade and convince themselves that next year would be better. In the future they will, no doubt, tell tales of the strange and scary Thanksgiving of 2020. But for others, it was an opportunity to make new a new set of memories – some as laugh-out-loud funny and indelible as tea-towel turkey soup and pumpkin salt.

That darn ghost of Thanksgiving future, though, still refuses to fully reveal itself. Dickens’ big-three ghost saga charts a transformation from greedy to generous, from cruel to kind. But transformation can go either way. Perhaps the ghost is waiting to see our collective choice? 

While I wait patiently for the final Thanksgiving ghost to arrive, I will go back to the recipe box and still my thoughts while dreaming of pecan squares and pumpkin pudding, of sage dressing and silky gravy.

May your memories be happy and your choices kind.

Cheers,

Nancy

Most recent posts

I Wrote a Book! Announcing the Arrival of "The Wayside Story - A Look Back at the History of a Vermont Country Store

One Hundred Days

Stayin’ Home / Stayin’ Alive

I Wrote a Book! Announcing the Arrival of "The Wayside Story - A Look Back at the History of a Vermont Country Store"

 

Thirty-seven years ago this week, my husband Doug and I signed on the dotted line and became the owners of the Wayside Country Store in West Arlington, Vermont.

Although I have been working on it -- and talking about it -- for two years, my little book chronicling the history of the store is finally done … just in time to celebrate this anniversary! While it is a slim volume, it manages to cover a good deal of ground and will hopefully shed some light on the families that have kept the doors open over the last century plus.

Who built the store? And why? And when?

This little book is the result of many, many hours spent searching for verifiable information to confirm -or in some cases dispel - my long-held beliefs about the origins of the business. It turns out that, while there is a lot of information out in the world about Arlington proper, West Arlington seems to have been sparsely documented (except for Norman Rockwell’s presence) so my hope is that this book will add to the rich history of our beautiful valley.

The project has been great fun and I am indebted to the many folks who helped bring it to fruition. Chief among them has been graphic artist Dave Van de Water who enhanced the photos and documents that accompany my text and is responsible for the way it is laid on the page. Without his expertise, my book would have been little more than poor-quality photocopies stuck together with a paperclip. Another one of the heavy lifters has been Christine Meyer who kept me from making a fool of myself with poor spelling, punctuation and assorted grammatical missteps. And Debbi Wraga at the Northshire Bookstore deserves a shoutout for her efforts to have the finished, printed book ready for this week’s Wayside milestone. There are many, many more to thank and I thank them all – profoundly.

The Wayside Story - A Look Back at the History of a Vermont Country Store  is available – where else – at the Wayside Country Store. For those far afield, it can also be ordered online directly from the Northshire by clicking here. 

Previous posts:

One Hundred Days

Stayin Home / Stayin' Alive

The Woodpile

One Hundred Days

I stopped short of titling this post “The First One Hundred Days.” Like the rest of the country -- and indeed the world -- I am hoping that there is not another 100 days like the last hundred; an unprecedented (do you hate that word yet?) period marked by the rampant spread of the novel coronavirus, conflicting  “expert” advice and the knowledge that numbers are not static but can be manipulated in startling ways.

I have been self-isolating for 100 days.  It is a milestone.  But, unlike birthdays and anniversaries, Hallmark does not (yet) have a card to pluck from the rack at the local store to commemorate the occasion. There are no pictures of ringing bells, mortarboard hats tossed into the air, explosions of confetti or flaming candles, the traditional congratulatory markers of achievement or longevity. 

The early days of the isolation were characterized by napping, reading and the sorting out of all those weird little drawers, closets and under-bed spots that had been long neglected. It was naively satisfying.  Just as the reality of isolating really started to set in, the seasons cooperated and the sorting gave way to the gardening and the taking in of great, grand gulps of fresh outdoor Vermont air.

Through each day I watched the news (channel-surfing endlessly), read countless Facebook posts (some so long they might qualify as novellas) from friends with wildly disparate views.  And I paid attention to my own emotions -- my joy, my anger, my sadness, my frustration and yes, my gratitude. 

These might not quite be what Hallmark would put on a quarantine-themed card, but what follows below are some brief, random thoughts and observations from the past 100 days -- to commemorate and celebrate the milestone!

• Please do not confuse “fear” with “caution.”  I do not fear death but I am not going to put myself at unnecessary risk. I would not risk walking to the edge of a precipice where signs clearly indicated DANGER unless I was suicidal.

• I miss social contact but have Zoomed into a new social world.  I Zoom church services, Zoom with far-flung relatives and Zoom with family. It helps. (The downside is that I look a lot older in the Zoom grid than I do in my bathroom mirror!)

• Be careful with your words either written or spoken. Regret is a heavy burden and kneejerk remarks can -- and do -- hurt.  Express yourself but be careful and thoughtful when you do so.

• I have never paid much attention to age.  But I cannot deny that I am in the high-risk group based on my age alone.  I have to admit that I am hurt and shocked that we elderly seem to be viewed as no longer useful, that we’re some kind of expendable collateral damage. It makes me angry.

• I am not a one-trick-pony. I do not think you are either. If we have a relationship, it is based on more than whether you wear a mask or not. 

• Like most folks, I love a sunny day. But, I have never been a sun-worshipping, beach-going person. I far prefer fishing or canoeing on a Minnesota lake or tubing down the Batten Kill. Now, for the first time, I find myself basking in the sun on my patio, drinking in the healing medicine of vitamin D, utterly quiet.  I now understand sun-worshippers.

• I am going out a bit more.  Each opportunity is met with “risk assessment.”  I remember that from my youth (when the calculus was: “Will the fun of that party be worth the trouble I might get into?”).  It makes me chuckle to realize that I have been a risk-assessor my entire life.  Nothing new here.

• I had thought of cataloging all the divides but there are now so many things that divide us. You know them already for you post and tweet and film them. We are a culture founded on individual freedoms and that now seems to hamper instead of help the solidification of a common goal based on equality and fairness. We need uniters in politics and I don’t see many.  This is frustrating.  This is heart-breaking.

• My day starts early.  Almost every morning I cry. Not for long but, when I wake up, I mourn for what we have lost, or for the daily complications for which we have had no preparation and over which we have scant control. Then I pray. My mind goes first to Matthew 11:28: “Come unto me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” The burden is in my mind, an effort to understand the chaos of 2020. The tears and prayer have comforted me. I am ready for my cup of coffee. I am ready to face the day with gratitude for my blessing are many and my burdens are relatively few.   

Previous posts:

Stayin' Home / Stayin' Alive 

The Woodpile 

It's Complicated: A Sentimental Journey