Taste the Day

It's one of those autumn weeks when the sun is so bright it bleaches the brown fields to honey gold and the wind makes me wish I had a kite to fly everywhere I go.  Inside, daylight flirts with floorboards until the moon's curfew, and roses mellow until my eyes taste sugared melon at a glance.  Weeks like this, we alternate between morning walks along the bay in search of cooper's hawks and evenings holed up with old books.  In between there's work, but that's not what we'll remember when we look back on these days.  No.  Our minds will recall strong tea, warm bread, the favorite threadbare quilt.  Remember, you'll say, how we laughed at those women in line at the mall buying all those scented candles?  Dozens and dozens of them, every one like Christmas shoved into a jar: cranberry, sugar cookie, apple spice.  "Just bake a friggin' pie!" you said,  and then we went home and baked one in their honor, with blueberries and raspberries and ice cream on the side.

I dreamed of this once, that life could be this.  I didn't know then that each day is the past in the making.   Once I finally realized, I tossed all recipes aside and started each day from scratch, measuring minutes and ounces and cups and pounds and kisses and good mornings and goodbyes with my hands and my heart.  Suddenly, no day was ever too bitter that I didn't want a taste, and most days I was scraping the bowl or finishing the crumbs off the plate with my fingertips.  And you were always willing to share.  

And there's us now, tonight, two forks, eating cake straight from the serving plate.  And this is what I'll remember: just how sweet life can taste.           

    

Legacy VII: A Long Line of Love

The Legacy Series continues this week with a post from one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, Relyn Lawson.  If you don't know Relyn (pronounced ruh-Lynn), you'll love getting to know her at Come Sit By My Fire, where she shares family stories, tales about teaching, her beautiful photographs, her passion for lists (which inspires me more than I can say), her LOVE of good books, and so much more.  In her honor, I thought about creating a list of all the reasons why I adore her, but the list began to grow longer than her post itself!  Even though Relyn and I have never met in person, I feel like I already know her, not to mention her wonderful husband Jeffrey and her magical daughter Sloane, who just turned nine yesterday.  I sometimes find myself wishing that I'd had a teacher like Relyn when I was growing up, but then I stop, pinch myself, and realize I am blessed to have a friend and teacher like her right now.

~...~

A long line of love

When Gigi invited me to participate in her Legacy series, I was just delighted.  Excited, too.  As the series went on, I began to feel more and more humble.  What amazing company to be in.  Thank you, dear Gigi, for including me among such a luminous gathering of women.

If you were to look around my home for a tangible legacy, you wouldn’t find much.  Oh, I have my Grandpa Chrisner’s old turkey roaster and a red Prince Albert tobacco can.  I have my Mamaw’s carnival glass serving plate and her collection of now-vintage hankies.  I have copies of my mother-in-law’s recipes with a promise of her recipe tin some day.  I have a quilt my mother made for me when I was a little, little girl.  From my aunt, I have a picture I adore of my parents when they were engaged.  

I don’t have antique quilts or sterling silver passed down through generations.  I don’t have boxes of old photos and yellowing letters.  It seems that my family is not of the magpie variety.  Most of the old and faded in my home comes from the local flea market or used bookstore.  

But, if you were to look closer, to look at me instead of my home… ah.  That’s a different story.  

I have my Grandpa’s love of story.  I have the same devilish twinkle he and my father sometimes get; a twinkle that really should serve as a warning.  I have my Mamaw’s sense of humor and love of laughter.  I have my mother’s love of beauty and home.  I have my mother-in-law’s greatest success – her son.  I have the passionate spirit that my parents always cherished.  I have a deep and abiding love for education that my father modeled with each degree he earned.  

I’ve been thinking, of course, about the legacy I will leave for my own daughter.  Will she learn to love learning as I did?  Will she know, bone deep, that a beautiful, peaceful home is a haven for your family?  Will she laugh at every opportunity?  Oh, I hope so.  

But there is something else, something far more important that I hope to leave with Sloane.  I want her to know how to have a good marriage.  I believe it is the greatest gift this life offers.  My parents, and Jeffrey’s, have shown us just how good life can be.  Together, our parents share 93 years of marriage.  It makes me think of that old country song, I come from a long line of love.  Yes, a long line of love.  

Of course, our parents were given this legacy as their own, too.  My Dad’s mother was paralyzed and completely bed-ridden from her early thirties till the end of her life.  At her funeral over 30 years later, my elderly grandfather stood at the head of her coffin the entire service.  When asked if he would please sit down he said, “Son, I stood by your mother for more than 30 years.  I’ll see it through.”

I’ll see it through.  

Yes.  I come from a long line of love.  

Tracings and Leavings

Today it was rain.  It was fog outside and inside my head.  It was paper cups of Earl Grey until I felt as sloshy as my boots.  It was the turn inward, the curve into my own thoughts, leading in spirals, tracing pencil lines like swirls in the margins of textbook pages.  It was feeling absent from everything that matters, this one truth insistent as the drip, drip, drip of the leaf-clogged gutter beside the porch.  Today it was a radio playing somewhere else, muffled through a wall or a floor or a door--not sure which--but the voices of other lives were there, just beyond reach.  It was stacks and stacks of paper, notecards half-written, thank-you's that trailed off to what if's.  It was the deception of cinnamon-sugar bubbling over in the oven, the burn, the syrupy-sweet.  You may be excused, the clock said, whether I wanted it or not.  And then suddenly there I was far off in the rain like a figure on a road through a fogged windshield.  You can rub and rub but still the fog remains and there she is, small and dark, wearing the wrong coat and those awful boots as she heads off into godknowswhere.