Brrrrrrrr.......

Our Yankee friends and relatives make fun of us Southerners, when a winter storm sets in. We scramble to the store when the weather man reports there will be dipping temperatures, particularly when there's also any kind of precipitation. The obligatory bread, milk and eggs leave the shelves within hours. Anyone who is a Mama of children understands this. With those three items, you can always make something that will keep your peoples' stomachs full for a couple of days. We all have peanut butter, syrup and butter stored somewhere. Even if the electricity goes off,  you can muster up a sandwich of sorts. Not that any of us would die, even if we had to fast for a week or two. I dare say, with my metabolism, given the combination of my fat stores and my pantry, I might last until Summer Solstice. When things warm up permanently in the spring, I could plant a garden (newly-nimble with this enforced fitness plan) and we'd have crops before we turned into skeletons. If society made it through, I could write a book and retire on the proceeds. That escalated quickly...

All the neighbors have scattered to the four winds. On one side, my Alaskan friend headed back to her frozen tundra. On the other, the Californians knew to scuttle back to where it never rains (or freezes). This week, our cross-the-street neighbor decided to vacate back to her hometown of Carrollton and sell her sweet little cottage. Need a house? I'm a realtor and we need a new neighbor. We're starting to get paranoid. 

Carrollton Wind Ensemble rehearsals start back tonight, after a long winter's nap. I'm not looking forward to skidding over to the Arts Center in 20-degree weather. I truly have nothing to complain about...I think about my college friend (Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee), Grace, who hailed from Miami with nothing but a sweater. She is a 6' goddess and married a 6'5 Viking preacher from Minot, North Dakota. Their first winter together, she called me from under the permafrost. Back then, we didn't have the internet and barely watched the news. She shocked me with the report of their 52-degrees-below-0 temperature reading that day. Said that the snot was freezing in her nose. It has been 40+ years, three girls later, and she's still with the dude and all that weather. Love is certainly blind.

I guess I'll quit complaining about our 20 degree weather and go find my ole Papa Bear and hibernate with him for a few hours...   

Winter Woes and Wonders

We are past Advent, but the tree is still up in all her glory. Now I've got the flu, so I'll think about it tomorrow... meanwhile it's so pretty, it's making this extended couch visit more tolerable. My poor old fake Christmas trees are truly flagging. The one in the living room is shedding as if it's a live tree, but it's not. I have three more in the barn doing the same thing, and there's still another one that I believe has to go bye-bye as well. It's like 10-feet tall and as big around as a Grizzly, simply gorgeous. It's too bad it takes two people all day just to get it put together, and that's even before the lights go on it. So if you're looking, there will be four or five trees at the curb at Rockmart Road one of these days. Feel free to haul them off at your leisure. 

I thought we were done with house projects for awhile, but then there was a box-and-a-half of flooring left from the last one (the re-do on our rotten nursery floor). If you give a mouse a cookie, she's gonna have to get a glass of milk... While debating when we were going to drive all the way to Newnan to take that stuff back, I thought long and hard about my sweet art studio. It's no bigger than a minute, painted sugary pink and full of art supplies and goodies. Ken fixed that joyous space up for me soon after we moved here. He found old trim in the barn, added some beadboard to it and finished the room. It's the perfect place to draw, paint, dream. It gets cold in there, so there's a little heater he put in there. He also installed an air conditioner for when it heats up in the summer. Each of the grandkids have their own sets of watercolors and I keep scads of pencils and paper just for them. It's a magic place. What it doesn't have is a decent floor. It's just old plywood that I painted over, well, at least some of it. There are patches of bare wood and one of the corners of the room has never been fully trimmed out. 

So instead of driving all the way to Newnan to take flooring back, we drove all the way to Newnan to buy some more, since apparently the room is way bigger than I ever knew. We made a day of it, meeting up with our youth-pastor-son Jesse and his wife and kids. After picking up the flooring, we played pickleball out in the freezing cold, hugged on grandkids and ate hamburgers at Red Robin.  I had no clue I could actually still hit any kind of ball, but maybe we're onto something. It only took me a week to recover...

I dreaded clearing all those supplies out of that room, but we took the weekend to do it. I have no clue what some of this stuff is, but I declare now to the world that half of it is not going back in there. I paid a professional organizer to sort and fix that place up a couple of years ago. We threw about half of it away. She made it so nice and neat, so much so that I couldn't find anything. But now I have to behave like Marie Kondo and get shed of much of that detritus. There's still two truckloads of insanity in there. Yes, I thought I was going to love scrapbooking, that 15 minutes, but alas, it's been mouldering in there for 10 years and I haven't made a thing. And those beautiful stained glass supplies! What are these appendages for? I don't even know where to begin. I painted the wall where it attaches to the house (it was still the original white) and trimmed out the big window. After staring at it for a sick weekend, I believe I have to also trim all the little windows that surround the room, after I rise from the dead. Papa started laying flooring today and will hopefully have it finished soon. 

It might not be the best thing in the world for me to have idle time on my hands. Today, from my sick couch, I stared at our gorgeous wavy-glassed windows in the living room and dreamt about paying some brothers to take the storm windows down and un-stick all my windows, clean them, and re-install the storms. Then when spring finally comes (oh, pray it comes soon), I can open them all up and sing "Oklahoma!" to the top of my lungs. 

There's a reason God invented Christmas in the middle of winter...  

Warm, Inside Thoughts

All the mad holiday rush was over and it was New Year's Day, somewhere around 1993 or 94. The tree was looking shopworn, there were crumbs of various origin all over the house, and bits of wrapping and broken ornaments were scattered to the four corners of the living room. A cold front moved in and suddenly we had snow and ice. The kids went nuts, throwing snowballs and muddying up everything. Then the lights went out and all laundry efforts halted. We munched on cold leftovers for a day or so, then my parents showed up to visit. The lights and warmth came back on as the snow started melting. Our tiny 13-inch black and white TV had little to offer in the way of entertainment (thinking now about how our phones aren't much smaller than that). Someone got to talking about onion rings and chili dogs, and next thing you know, we all bundled up and headed to Atlanta, to the Varsity. At the time, we had a big conversion van. So with the four kids and the grandparents, we slip-slided all the way there. The roads were empty and we sincerely wondered whether the restaurant would be open. But without much else to do, we whooped and hollered, the winter doldrums passing on by. Once we got there, with no lines, we were greeted with the traditional: "What'll ya have?!" Everyone chowed down on all the goodies: chili dogs, onion rings, frosted orange shakes, and the piece de resistance - deep fried peach pies. This was the taste of my childhood, back when Daddy worked downtown at the Post Office. He was the coach of the softball team and many evenings we were treated to grease of the best kind. Not all the Yankees that we have taken there think that it's so wonderful. I don't think much of tenderloin sandwiches either, but my Yankee Mama will drive many miles to get one, since Culver's decided to venture South. That is one big hunk of dry, mealy meat, but she thinks it's the best. Childhood might warp our sense of taste. I mean, baby birds think worms are fantastic. 

This trip to the Varsity became our New Years Day tradition. No sweating over black eyed peas, turnip greens and cornbread. We just laze into the vehicles and head there -- 6:00 p.m. on New Year's Day. At best count, it's been around thirty years of this. Some years we went to the one in Kennesaw -- it's all spiffy and new, with the same menu. But somewhere in there, Jon, our eldest son, put his foot down and said that we have to go to the real one in downtown Atlanta. Covid messed us up a couple of times too. We've invited extended friends and family, often filling up that middle room where the TV is (because there's always a football game on in there too...Papa is pretty sensitive about that). 

Last night, we also had a pre-Varsity party at our eldest son and daughter-in-love's house, since they were sick at Christmas and missed the presents. We snacked, opened gifts, did a craft with the kids (d-i-l Christmas Queen) and then headed to Atlanta. It was surreal and sweet, sitting there once again and seeing all the life busting out everywhere and getting that many grandkid hugs in one night. We are definitely filling up a room these days. 

Today it's January 2. It's cool now to scoff at resolutions, but I think it's healthy to reassess my life, even if it takes an excuse like New Year's Day to do it. We're full up with sugar, grease and some ten extra pounds. To keep on going like we're going would be pretty dumb. I heavily dislike winter, especially when they're cold and wet in Georgia. But God must have reasons for these kinds of seasons: slow down, contemplate the universe, do some inside projects, drink warm beverages, read good books (and the Good one). What'll ya have?   

Best Laid Plans...

Christmas gets more complicated with each passing year. I think back to the fall of 1981, when my sister and I and both our fiances made a day trip up to North Carolina, where her beau's family lived. The four of us squeezed into Ken's red Chevrolet truck and trawled through the mountains, having a rollicking good time laughing and then eating and visiting with his family. We'd have to hire a double-decker bus to haul all of our progeny these days. Add to that my brother, his wife and six kids and we might have to get a Marta train to take all of us. I think we're numbering around a hundred now. Once a year, Christmas Eve, my side of the family gets together. I remember in our early years, we'd all go to lunch after church. There's not even a Golden Corral that could handle us now. As Mama's house has gotten smaller (she now lives alone in a garden-type dwelling, with no parking), she has continued to try to have Christmas Eve there. This year, a persuasive granddaughter convinced her to do it at her house, a much larger venue. We trekked up there last night, with a majority of the family bringing their casseroles, desserts and Christmas joy. 

My kids and grandkids were supposed to come over tomorrow; we were going to break from turkey and ham to have taco night while we opened gifts. Alas, one of the sons' families is suffering from the domino-effects of a stomach virus, so we're still deciding on our strategy. Do we go ahead without them, or wait another week to be all together? Either way, Christmas day feels mighty sad today. The Fear-Of-Missing-Out runs strong in my veins. 

Ken and I have a long-standing Christmas tradition of eating breakfast at the Waffle House. After a leisurely morning of acting like irresponsible newlyweds, we moseyed there to find the parking lot spilling over like so much lava. I said I'll just make pancakes at home, but Papa had the brightest idea: "Let's go over to the RaceTrac. You can get their good coffee, they have hotdogs and Krispy Kremes there -- and we can watch people." So that's exactly what we did. He didn't even bother to park in a proper place -- just pulled up to one of the pumps and left the car while we did our "shopping." We bought hotdogs, snacks, donuts, coffee. He still didn't move the car, and we ate all the junk, every last crumb, while we laughed and watched the parade coming in and out of the doors.  Ken always has hilarious commentary: what people are up to, their clothing and what they might be thinking. I felt transported back to when we were "just friends" and would sit in the church parking lot talking for hours. After awhile, when there was nobody but us (sitting in that sexy red truck), the cops would inevitably pull in and ask me, "M'am, are you okay?" I'd think about the hunky guy next to me and wonder what it might be like to kiss him. Eventually that happened. We blinked and landed in the RaceTrac parking lot today, four kids, four in-laws, twelve grandkids and many, many meals and miles later. Yes, I'd tell the cop. I'm okay.    

The Magi Saw...

Not everyone gets a happy childhood. I view mine through a gauzy scrim -- a secure, sweet, simple upbringing where time seems to stand still. But the unexamined life is not worth living, isn't that what they say? Every family has its skeletons, and all of earth and humanity have its fatal flaws, capable of cracking off and plummeting into the canyons. My family is no exception. There were deep addictions and suppressed traumas on one side, then moral jump-offs and escapades on the other. There's really no telling where following your "heart" can lead, no matter how idyllic that sounds to our Hollywood-sirened-ears. I'm sure Ted Bundy was following his, too. Here it is Christmas, and I'm being morose. But no, I've witnessed miracles in my not-so-short life, beyond all that comes natural to us humans. They do exist, without the benefit of celluloid and soundtracks. If you've heard me tell of my (and my siblings') favorite Christmas story, please indulge me once again. The best stories bear repeating, and often...

Our earliest Christmas memories were happy ones. Mama made it very special for Daddy, who had grown up hungry, cold and poor. She went a little overboard, even with just a single income on a postal worker's salary. The Sears and Roebuck catalog yielded up tinsel, ornaments, a tiny nativity scene and spray snow for the windows. Perry Como crooned from the record player as we danced around the tree. Sugar cookies, fudge, peanut brittle, brazil nuts...need I say more? There was a blight, however, in the background that us little kids did not understand at the time. Our Mama was angry, for what reasons, we did not know. The house we grew up in looked like a hospital -- clean and sanitized daily from top to bottom. The porcelain on the toilets began to be dull from all the scrubbing. There was plenty of crying over spilt milk. Don't spill the milk, because that's when earthquakes occurred. In later years, I learned that in those days our parents were coming to an impasse -- over time, anger makes cracks form in even the strongest foundations. 

The most inexplicable part (though where the roots started) of our Mama's anger was when we visited our Grandma, way up in Illinois. We'd drive for many hours to get there in our tiny car, usually a Volkswagen Beetle. Us kids would sleep in the back, cuddled like so many kittens in a pile. The trip would begin pleasantly, but within a day or two there would always be a fight between Mama and Grandma. It would start small, then escalate to what sounded like two cats killing each other in the kitchen. Everything went sour from there. I didn't understand the dynamics of the hurt, shamed, bitter adults that surrounded me, but I knew that there was nothing good about it. Our simmering, volatile Mama had deep, mysterious wounds. I loved being a kid, but I didn't think that I wanted to be a grownup. 

We grew up in our local church, dutifully sitting in the pews every service. Daddy was head of the boy's group that met each week. We had a form of religion, but there was something missing. Then things began changing in our church. A revival isn't a bunch of scheduled meetings, it's when God starts taking out peoples' hearts of stone and replacing them with hearts of flesh. One of our uncles visited one week and brought shock waves to Mama when he said: "Judy, you go to church all the time and you carry around that big ole Bible with you, but you hate your own Mother." She was struck by the fact that she had been forgiven by God, but had not forgiven her Mother. God instantly gave grace for her to lay down her bitterness, and that was the first miracle. Again, we were kids and not fully cognizant of what was happening, but we noticed that the house started blooming. The cold, sterile walls mushroomed with color. She started painting, wallpapering, sewing beautiful clothes, humming while she was cooking. Daddy and her started sparking, holding hands, giggling. I knew there was a God, when I spilled a big glass of milk one night at supper and she happily jumped up and grabbed a towel to clean it up. No earthquakes. It was in this new environment that our already-sweet Daddy announced one day that he had become a Christian. We thought he already knew Jesus, but apparently he had not. He could be found on his knees in our freezing spare room, his Bible getting lovingly worn out from reading and re-reading the passages. Their marriage was not just repaired, it was ignited, sometimes embarrassingly so. 

That first Christmas, after all that, we took the long trip to Illinois to visit Grandma and our step-Grandpa. We played Carpenters Christmas tapes and sang along as the miles went by. Things had changed drastically in our family. There was love, warmth, peace, but I pondered how it would be, up there with Grandma. As we pulled up to their snow-blanketed townhome, the light spilled out the door as we all hugged and unloaded. Eventually, things calmed down inside and most of us were in the living room except for Grandma and Mama. I leaned up from my chair and looked into the kitchen to see them bear-hugging, something I had never observed in my entire young life. Tears were streaming down their faces, but no words. Grandma lived many more years and our visits became more frequent, but they never fought again. 

"The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death Light has dawned." Matthew 4: 16 

Christmas has come.   

It's Not Paint, It's Insulation

I'm assembling projects for 2024, as if there's not enough to do already. When I still had a thyroid, I never anticipated that just hauling in groceries for two people and fixing my hair would become such chores. I have two buckets of paint staring me in the face, something I should have never bought. I like to purchase those little paint samples at Lowes and Home Depot, slather them onto foam boards and then stare at the ideas until something strikes me. This causes us a lot of problems. 

It started with the fact that I mostly live in our study. It is a gorgeous room, in our old Victorian house. When we first bought this place, in 2012, Ken found a huge, ancient painting in the barn. It's a mystery -- a picture of several old men gathered around a stove at a feed store or something. We stuck it above the mantle in that room, before I decided on colors. Ken decided he wanted everything to match that painting, to feel like a man cave in there -- with textured, suede-colored walls and leather chairs. Clubby, sophisticated. That room was the worst one in the whole house. There was old wallpaper hanging from the ceiling and walls. Liz and I started scraping. We dogged it for a month, making some headway, but that stuff was not yielding much. One morning, I decided to prime everything with B-I-N primer, the Mack-Daddy of primers. It's oil-based, heady stuff. We got up on scaffolding and worked all day, painting and covering up all the nasties that were left from all that scraping. Ken arrived home, hollering something about why didn't we open the house up while we were exposing ourselves to toxic fumes. Liz and I were singing and basically hanging from the rafters, oblivious to the fact that the Elvis who was singing with us was not real. A massive headache took over my brain and I think Liz might have eventually succumbed to the porcelain. I recall doing many such events way back when I was pregnant with my various children. The grandmas would worry about the ladders, the heights, all the drama. I should have listened. One child has Aspergers, one is dyslexic, they all have ADD and one's a firefighter. What was I thinking? 

Either way, eventually I did a gorgeous, velvety suede finish on the walls. Sherwin Williams Portobello. Yep, looks like a mushroom. Ken built a whole wall of beautiful bookcases to house some of my books and I painted them SW Turkish Coffee. The room is warm and enveloping, a place you might go to smoke cigars or swill brandy. But we don't do that in there. It's my office where I work and practice my music. That's all well and good, except for the fact that when winter comes I get really sad about all the darkness. I scoured thrift stores and yard sales, coming up with amazing, Victorian-styled lighting. Lots of it. Doesn't help. The walls are sucking all the light into their vortex. It's a near miracle that this room has stayed the same color for a decade. I'm like the Navy -- if it's sitting still, it's time to paint it. I got on Pinterest and started perusing colors. I laid out a paint fan (I only own four or five of them, having begged them off of gullible people at the paint stores)...and then proceeded to buy about a dozen samples. God really intended me to live in a beach house, He did. When given the chance, I revert to colors that have something to do with water. There's a big blue-green sample that's been floating on my mantle for some time. And one day, at a weak moment in Home Depot, I went ahead and bought two gallons of the goody. If we hadn't had to rip a whole rotten floor out of the nursery and change-up all the holiday magic this year, I'd have had it painted by now. Problem is, I've had too long to stare at it. I think if I go ahead and do it, I'm going to end up re-doing it, another problem that my poor husband has had to contend with these 41+ years. He never yells about it...he really never complains much, just laughs and shakes his head. 

Meanwhile, the Amazon boxes are piling up, Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat. Will I waste two gallons of paint, again? Only the shadow knows for sure...   

You're A Mean One...

I'm trying to figure out what we did before Amazon came along. My sister was the first person that I knew that bought from them, way on back there. I looked at it online and thought, meh, why pay for shipping? Then they figured out that people would still pay for shipping but in a monthly subscription, so they wouldn't notice that they were still paying for shipping. I'm now totally dependent on them for say, that elusive container of mascara that I misplaced, or some delicious, crunchy, non-GMO Amish popcorn that I can't get at the Walmart. Every year, when tax-time rolls around and I have to account for all my spending, I bow my head in shame at the amount of money that passes through my fingers via clicks on that Amazon site. I vow to do better next year. Then I also wonder how they're making money on that shipping part, when I have to make bonfires out of all the boxes that have overrun my house. Apologies to my neighbors, but at least I'm not crowding up the landfill? 

Christmas is upon us, with less than three weeks to go. Once again, I'm late to the party. Thank the Lord for Amazon, however. I've got a massive cold (or something) and can't breathe, so I sat on the porch and ordered most of our grandchildren's gifts within an hour. That should be criminal, but it's not. It's perfectly legal to be that lazy and sit in my rocker and order wonderful things that will be delivered right to our door within a day or two. With all this extra time on my hands, why haven't I put up our tree yet? There've been years that I did it the day after Halloween. There have also been years that I decorated six other peoples' trees as well as my own, while painting a couple of peoples' houses in between Halloween and Christmas.  It's all Amazon's fault. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. My Grandma didn't have Amazon and she just put up one of those little ceramic trees that you plug in. The other Grandma didn't put up anything. I wanna be a Grandma. Oh yeah, I am.

Therefore, I will decorate. I will. And attend all the requisite parties, soirees, concerts and general hoopla that goes along with it. I'll at least show up, if I can find a way to get some oxygen through my nostrils in the next few days. The Grinch will be defeated!