hope
Christmas Eve
No other holiday has a night before the way Christmas does. There’s this quiet that comes on Christmas Eve, if you let it. The more Christmases I celebrate, the more I like Christmas Eve.
Glass bulb, 2012
I try to make a lot of the presents we give instead of buy them. It forces me to plan ahead and, as a result, elevates the entire experience a little.
The kids and I have let some of our traditions evolve, too, so no one goes crazy trying to keep something going. When the kids were little, we made a gingerbread house and took it to preschool for the Christmas party. All the kids had fun picking it apart to take a piece home. When they got older, I made a one-dimensional piece for the mantel one year. Then I just made dough so the kids could make cookies. This year, Paige asked when she got home from the U of Iowa if there was any gingerbread dough in the freezer. There wasn’t, and we didn’t make any.
But on a whim, we stopped at the Russell Stover factory store in Terrell on the way to celebrate the season with Aunt Regina in East Texas. We bought a cardboard gingerbread house filled with peanut brittle.
New to the tree in 2012
We spent some time in downtown Kilgore, ate lunch at Nanny Goat’s Cafe, came back to Regina’s house and sang Christmas carols around the piano in the parlor. We played dominoes, too. We did cast a glance toward SantaLand on the way home (2.5 million lights strung along a driving trail in the East Texas woods), but saw the rush-hour-sized car line and took a pass. It had been a nice day. We didn’t need to spoil it.
Tonight, we are waiting for Sam to come home from work. He will help close the store. I had to work today, too. All that makes it hard to switch gears and make it to a candlelight service, but it doesn’t matter. We know how to do this. The serenity is settling in.
Happy Christmas everyone.
Great Hall, Wolfe House 2012
What little girls are made of (reprise)
The adorable photo of the girl in the jumper comes from the Women and Girls Lead Facebook page and has been pinned around cyberspace. I saw it on the page of a comrade in single motherhood. It made me think back when Paige was in kindergarten and first grade and she went after school to the community dance program at Texas Woman’s University. For a while, she learned ballet, then she tried another dance class that mixed up the styles a little more.
You could see, even then, that she was a talented dancer, but she tired of it. I didn’t make a fuss.
If she thought of dance during the rest of elementary or middle school, I didn’t know it. For all I knew then, dance had only been an early childhood interest. But when the high school marching band added a color guard, she was all in, not just with the flags, but the dancing, too. Such a personality she had during performances!
Sam’s younger years were a gift to his siblings in some ways. We were trying so hard to get Sam to “average,” we didn’t fall into those traps that so many anxious parents fall into with their kids and their extra-curriculars. Michael and Paige tried out lots of different things: music, sports, leadership, theatre, and 4-H.
And that was a beautiful thing. Paige worked hard with her dancing in high school. Yet, because it was never a chore, never something she did to please anyone but herself, dance will be a lifelong love.
It’s a good thing to remember when you’re sinking $200 into gear or lessons. I never let myself think it was an investment in a future, four-year scholarship. It wasn’t something to distinguish my child from their peers. It was something to allow them to stretch and explore and learn and feel and discover who they really are.
Four weddings and a long ago funeral
Tonight was the fourth wedding I’ve attended since Mark died. The first wedding came about eight months after, and I was a wreck.
On your own wedding day, part of your heart opens up and it just gets bigger and bigger until your beloved isn’t there anymore.
Oh, mercy, that expansive, empty space hurts on another couple’s wedding day, no matter how happy you are for them.
When I first saw the date on the invitation, the night before Mark’s birthday, I wondered. But it’s also been nearly five years. Tonight, as we were waiting for the bridal procession, I heard the violinist begin the first few phrases of Ashokan Farewell — one of Mark’s favorites. My eyes couldn’t focus, and I could feel my knees and my heart giving way, but then the string ensemble transitioned to another tune.
Then, I told myself that little bit of music was just Mark’s way of winking and letting us know that they were all there …
Congratulations, Megan and Brandon!
Patron Saint of College Kids
In my faith, if you have a need, we’ve got a saint for that. I’ve got one of those little “guardian angels” hanging from the rear view of the pick-up, but I don’t take much stock in it. Some would say I need a St. Christopher medal, but I got Sam and myself a membership in AAA instead.
If you’ve lost someone close to you, like we have in the Wolfe house, then you probably carry that person with you like a patron saint from time to time.
The year after Mark died, in my own year of magical thinking, I often talked to birds that came close, in case it was him.
Friends would tell me that they would get visits from their loved one. These were the greatest stories, by the way, friends who could see the loved one in a bedroom mirror after dark, or who would see the loved one next to the bed, and carry on a conversation. I was a little jealous. The birds never talked back to me. Once I thought Mark was trying to visit — coming down the hall after all the kids had fallen asleep — but I got so terribly frightened that he never tried again.
Hence the birds.
I digress.
Michael called when I got home from Iowa. He was filled with emotion. He had felt Mark’s presence all through the end of high school and through the first years of college. But now, as he is about to start his senior year, Mark has left his side, Michael says.
“He was trying to get me to be the man he wanted me to be,” Michael said.
Michael realized the message: he was there, the rest was up to him, it was his life to lead now.
Mark’s been gone for nearly five years and he still makes me weak in the knees.
See Sam Run as an e-book
Coming soon. So excited to join the digital revolution.
That is all.
On writing, on reading and The Mayborn
People often ask artists who has influenced their work — musicians, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, writers. It’s a tough question to escape. I’ve asked it, but not too often, because I’ve found that many good artists don’t seem keen on bringing that kind of consciousness to their work.
I write intuitively, too. I try to edit consciously. And editing often seems to be slightly under the influence of whomever I’m reading at the time.
(Except Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and Joan Didion. They are always there.)
This year, Paige has left behind collections from University of Iowa students. Home of Iowa Writers Workshop, there comes from Iowa always something fresh, and often ever-so-slightly unworkable in those pages. I enjoy them. And my friend, RunnerSusan, has loaned me a dozen of her favorite works of fiction that have taken me down unexpected paths.
I took a break from reading the authors scheduled for this weekend’s Mayborn conference to pour over essays for a writer’s workshop. My essay, Carrion (see the pages on the left), has been accepted to the workshop, so I am reading the work of others who will be sequestered with me and our workshop leader. More new voices and ideas.
Like a book club, only on steroids, it’s the eighth Mayborn writer’s conference this weekend. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I threw the manuscript for “See Sam Run” into the workshop to see what would happen. There won’t be anything on that scale for me this weekend, but it will be for someone, and there is all that other talk of writing and reading and writing that is so inspiring to us all. I can’t wait to see what this weekend will bring.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #161
Sam (watching Wheel of Fortune): The Talented Cast of Glee!
Don’t Spare the Horses.
When Michael was home visiting for the holidays, we had a shared moment for which the details completely escape me now, but after which my son said, “Wow, Mom. Don’t spare the horses.”
I’d never heard that before. But I liked it. I liked it so much I wondered whether it would make a good New Year’s resolution. One I could actually keep.
In a word, yes.
I logged my 500th mile in in training this month and other things in my life are proceeding at that dogged pace.
Last night, I dreamt something was outside my front door. Unlike all the other dreams of monsters and tornadoes and machines and floods and fire and being forced to get control of a runaway vehicle from the backseat of the car, I didn’t hesitate.
Texas has a castle law, you know.
Chisholm Challenge
Before the bull and bronc riders, before the rodeo show and the barrel racers at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, you can see some terrific horsemanship at the Chisholm Challenge for Special Riders.
Thanks to all the volunteers and staff, and sponsors, of the area stables that continue to serve the community in a way no other recreational outlet can.
If you check it out, you’ll never see horses and riders in quite the same way again.
It Takes a Village
The summer we stayed in Colorado, Sam took swimming lessons. He was 4 1/2 years old. He enjoyed the water very much, but he didn’t learn to swim.
After we moved to Texas, my neighbor, Karol Smith, took all three of my kids into her backyard pool and taught them to swim in a week. She said she’d taught dozens of kids to swim by condensing the way most parks and rec programs did it — sometimes over several years of summers. She guaranteed she’d get it done.
It was the summer Paige turned 6, so Michael would have been 8, and Sam, 11. I was certain she’d have Michael and Paige swimming, but told her Sam might take a little longer.
It didn’t. And, Karol turned Sam into the biggest fish of them all.