another me

I have the window opened a little more than a crack, and the faint smell of cigarette smoke is snaking its way into the room. I imagine our neighbor next door standing on her deck out back to keep the smell of smoke out of her house and away from her little boy. Growing up, my father smoked like a mad man. There are pictures of him, at thirteen years old, sneaking a smoke in the back of a building somewhere. When we were little, and would go through old photographs, my siblings and I couldn't get over how bad he must have been to be smoking at thirteen. We couldn't even imagine.

Our house smelled like smoke--the curtains, the furniture, our clothes--everything. When my father turned forty, his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer--from being a smoker her entire life. Her ugly, painful death from this disease made my father give up smoking. He simply stopped one day and never smoked again.

Although I've never been a smoker, there are times I get the urge to buy myself a pack of cigarettes. It's the strangest thing. I imagine myself in some secluded spot, sneaking a cigarette or two then coming back to a life where that's not something I would ever do in a million years.

A grateful heart

"Thou hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, - a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise."~George Herbert

I woke up and I lived another day, and everyone that I love lived right along with me in good health and happiness & sometimes I forget how wonderful that is, how lucky we all are, just to be here.

I am trying to start my days reminding myself to appreciate all the small things that sometimes feel so small that I end up wanting more because I think having more will lead to a happiness I feel I might be missing out on. I think if I can remind myself often enough, it will become a habit. I will wake up and I will live and I will think to myself, this is enough. I am positive that repetition is the key to pulling this off.

Something else I am trying to do is actively look for the good in people rather than jump to my own biased conclusions based on nothing but assumptions. I want to learn to look past the surface to see what's real because that's what I expect from others for myself. I don't know when I became the sort of person who sometimes lacks compassion for people I don't understand, but somewhere along the way, that's what I've become. I'm impatient and dismissive and I want to change that about myself.

I found this bag of photographs in my closet today stuffed behind one of those plastic tote containers. If there is one thing I did right while my children were growing up, it was take a lot of pictures of them. I haven't gotten around to putting them all in albums but there's a part of me that thinks that will be a great little pastime when I am old and am looking for something to lift my spirits and help me remember. Every picture tells a story and brings me back. There is no way my mind could ever remember it all and I'm so glad I took hundreds of photographs to help give my past back to me. I wish I felt safe enough here to share that part of my life with you but I don't (with pictures). Maybe I'll post a picture of myself some day if I get brave enough. I am scared to involve my children in something they haven't agreed to participate in, but you should know how hugely I am blessed.

My husband has been home most of the week and whenever that happens, I notice how unstructured my life becomes. Every single plan I have flies out the window in favor of goofing off with him and he encourages this because he's bad like that. I totally did not make my bed today, I ate Chinese food for lunch and insisted we stop at Dairy Queen on the way home under the guise of needing to use the restroom when in fact I just wanted one of those vanilla ice cream cones dipped in chocolate.

and the world spins madly on

"And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?" ~Rainer Maria Rilke


We're going through our garage and trying to do some more organizing and throwing away. Going through the boxes we have stored there, it becomes apparent that I don't like to throw things away. There are so many things I've saved that I forgot I even had. In one of the boxes, I found my high school year book and we've all had a good laugh over my pictures in there. It feels like yesterday. It feels a million years away.

I also found a time capsule that I did with my youngest daughter. It says do not open until 2010. On the outside of the capsule I have written in red permanent marker, "TO BE ALIVE IN SUCH AN AGE ." I'm dying to open it, but it isn't 2010 yet. In the blink of an eye (because that is how time flies here), I know we will be opening it, and that is what keeps me from sneaking a peek now.

I got nosey yesterday evening and googled my oldest brother's name. I haven't spoken to him in 20 years but I found his flickr account filled with pictures of his family, my sister and her family, and my parents. It feels so weird being on the outside like this snooping through those photos, but if he didn't want just anyone to find them, he probably shouldn't have posted them on the worldwide web. I wonder if my sister gave him permission to post photos of her and her children because I know I would be knocking him into next week if he did that to me. I'm also pretty certain that my parents would not be thrilled to know he posted their pictures, but maybe I am wrong.

Going through those pictures leaves me feeling like the wind has been knocked out of me. I try not to think about them on holidays because that's when I feel their loss from my life the most. I feel angry, too, and I don't know why. I guess because I went through the pictures and looked to see if maybe I could tell if they're missing me like I always miss them, but all I see is their happiness in moments I will never share with them. I'm not one of those people who feels resentment when other people are happy. I mean, in general, I'm not. I find happiness in other people's happiness, but it feels painful seeing them happy without me.

It's thundering outside right now. The thunder is vicious sounding, and I can feel the ground beneath me rumble, the walls of my house vibrate. When the lightening strikes are close, that's when I feel it the most. It sounds like rage and sorrow and explosions that threaten to break everything into thousands of little pieces. I've been feeling sort of hateful all day and have had to fight saying mean things and writing mean things. And the mean things I'm tempted to say and write are truths that I am censoring because I cannot go around just saying/writing anything that pops into my head. Well, I could, but then everyone would hate me because none of us can stand to hear ugly truths and so I'll swallow those thoughts down and hope they go away or blow over like the storm outside my house, like the storm inside my head.

Raise your hopeful voice, you have a choice, you've made it now

"It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts." ~K.T. Jong



"I wish we could squeeze in going back to see them," I said to my husband today.

I think about the porch with the rocking chair I always sit in--the one painted bluish gray and hand stenciled by my mother. I think of the window boxes filled with pansies, the pond littered with lily pads, the birdhouses made by my father nailed up high in the trees, the quiet peace I find secluded in the country where cars are not constantly whizzing by--where life takes its time because life will not be rushed there. My life is nothing like theirs and the silence always unnerves me, then eventually soothes me.

I think of my childhood furniture in the room upstairs where we always stay when we visit. I tell my children how I slept in this bed when I was little, and how right beside me, slept my sister, and sometimes I wish so hard that I could go back again because I never appreciated sharing a room with her until I didn't anymore. But mostly I think of the wildflowers because you would not believe how beautiful they are, and how whenever I see wildflowers anywhere, I always think of them.

Summer always makes me want to go back to my other home, to my other family, but this year, we're heading somewhere different. I'll be on vacation for the week.

Until then, think of me.

Endings

There are important events in my life that I do not remember. I do not remember the last time I held each of my children before they were too big to pick up, but there was a day when I no longer could pick each of them up and it seems to me that I should remember this. My world should have halted for a second so that I could savor those moments, but I think what happened was that I picked each one of them up for the very last time and I simply went on with my day not even knowing that something important was ending.

Think of me...

"...there will never be a day when I won't think of you..."-Andrew Lloyd Webber

I haven't seen or spoken to one of my brothers in more than 20 years. The reason why is as big a mystery to me as to anyone who might read this. I think he got furious with me that I upset our parents over something that had nothing whatsoever to do with him, and so he decided not to speak to me ever again. I have three children he has never met. When he had his first child, I decided to offer up an olive branch even though I knew I had done nothing wrong to deserve his treatment of me, and put together a package of things for his new baby daughter and mailed it off to him. I knew how much I had changed just from having my children and thought perhaps his heart might have melted, too. I never heard back from him, not a thank you, nothing.

I have another brother who cut ties with everyone in the family when my parents disapproved of an older woman he was involved with. This was approximately 15 years ago. I had moved away with my own family at the time and so my connection to him was always through them and when he cut them off I guess he threw me in there as well because in my world that's just the way it goes. I guess we're considered a package deal and so we were all severed together.

I spend a lot of time trying not to think about this, and about what it means to me because it's very difficult to accept, at least for me, that I could be so easily erased from the lives of my brothers. I never tell anyone about them either because how do I explain the reasons why when I don't know them myself? It's this secret sorrow of mine that the world knows nothing about, but I might feel better if I write it down, if I try to let it go. I grew up in a family of people who never discussed difficult things, so that was the norm for me. My parents must know how awful I feel knowing that both of my brothers live their lives as though I do not exist and yet they say nothing. It just never gets mentioned because it's the appearance of happiness that's most important in our world. Nobody does surface-level-living like we do.

Here's something you should know about me: I am good at learning to live without people that I love because I think of it in terms of completing a task. I set my emotions aside and do the work involved in meeting the goal. It's only in the quiet of the night or on holidays or when I know it's their birthdays that I allow myself to feel the loss I know I've learned to live with so well. I wonder how they are. I wonder if they ever think of me.

Today I was wasting time on FACEBOOK and decided to type in my brothers names to see if I could find them. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me to do this before, but it hasn't. I could not find the brother who cut ties with everyone, but I did find a picture of my other brother. He looks nothing like I remember and yet I see my mother's face in him. I felt a mean little thought about how time has been kinder to me than it has been to him and then I stopped thinking that because I should know better by now than to be so spiteful.

It does feel better writing this all down. It doesn't change anything, but it does feel freeing to some degree.

Here's something else you should know: My brothers missed out on knowing and loving someone fabulous.

Me.

Scented Memories

I bought a pumpkin scented candle last week and put it in my kitchen. Every time I go in there, I am reminded of the place where I grew up. I start thinking about pumpkin patches and apple cider and leaves so breathtakingly beautiful you have to see them to believe them. I spend a lot of time shoving aside memories that have the potential to leave me feeling sad for all that I am always missing, but I'm starting to believe that I'm shortchanging myself on all the good things, on all the smiles that live beside the memories that sometimes leave me melancholy. I think it'll always be this way, so I might as well face reality and permit myself to remember--allow the memories to come, no matter the baggage that might come along with them. I'm pretty confident that I'll find some way to deal.

Fall has it's own special scent and feeling but I can't seem to find it anywhere in the air where I currently live, so I look for it in other places.

Anyway, I love how a memory can be jogged by a scent, and that was my point in writing this.

So much of life is complicated. It's nice to know that some things come easy.