Scattering of Thoughts

It is 49 degrees on a Saturday morning.  I love that first morning where it really feels like fall.  Cool enough for pants and sweatshirt.  Cool enough to cradle the warm cup of coffee in your hand and smile.  Cool enough and warm enough to have neither the heat or AC is on.  Cool enough to shake off the busy-back-to-school mode I have been in and find myself with words to share.  I have not written in awhile and while I don't have one big topic to focus on, I do have a scattering of thoughts that need addressing.  Scattering of thoughts, scattering of leaves, my God, I love fall!

1.  Little House on the Prairie, Netflix series.  I cannot believe I did not write an immediate review of this in July when I binged all eight episodes in three days.  I liked it.  I really liked it. Is it like the books?  Kind of?  Is it like the old TV series?  Maybe?  Is is its own retelling of a story and a girl that I have been semi-obsessed with most of my life?  It is!!

    They did an amazing job of showing what a reckless fool Charles Ingalls was by going cross-country with his family by themselves.  They both point it out in dialogue and various scenes through the episodes.  That fording the flooded river scene takes on a higher level of panic when you watch it rather than read it.  They show many things from Caroline's perspective, which is not one that is considered in the book, and one I did not give a lot of thought to prior to this.  They were also very smart and cast a hot actor in the role of Pa so not only do you forgive him for endangering his family, you start to think you'd get in a covered wagon with that guy too.  It also makes  you wonder if pioneer life was so very busy that both Pa and the new, leaner, dare I say, hotter Mr. Edwards just didn't have time to ever button up their shirts.  They also included a nod to the infamous Bender family murderers in the first episode.  If you have a slight obsession with the LIW as I have, you know that Laura remembered later in life that Pa stopped to water the horses at the Benders but they didn't go in and therefore weren't murdered.  Did that happen? I don't know.  Did I know about it because I have read all the things about LIW and then feel so proud of myself because I knew instantly who that creepy family in the episode was supposed to be?  100%!!!

    There were things that were definitely a stretch.  They made Mary years and years older than Laura and gave her an immediate love interest.  Mary was maybe all of 8 when they made the trek into Kansas.  The most glaring thing was how accepting and loving Laura and her entire family were of the Native American population they were trespassing on.  Laura Ingalls Wilder was many things, but she was not a friend of Native Americans.  The series gives her a best friend who is Native American and shows the two families getting along, supporting one another, and surviving a rough frontier due to their combined forces.  It's lovely but very untrue.  

    Overall, I liked it and will watch Season 2 when it comes out.  It is a pleasant little escape and provides a bridge to things that gave me joy when I was a child.

2.  Graduate School.  This fall, I am on my 5th and 6th class of working towards my Masters in Teacher Leadership.  This means that I am on my 5th and 6th time of thinking why are there no tests?  Why is everything a paper or, worse, a group project?  Why can't I just study for a test, regurgitate the information back, and everyone leave feeling happy and accomplished?  And if you are wondering if I am older than all my classmates, I am!  And sometimes, even the professors!  Is this humbling or invigorating?  Both?  I elected to take in-person classes because I do not learn from a screen and I know this.  This does make for some long days and I am tired in class. I do not really want to turn and talk to anyone about the topic at hand.  I want to sit, take notes, and dream about going to bed when I get home. I usually let the youths around me go first and talk away with their enthusiasm and shiny, new knowledge.  I say things like "I heard you say..." or "I can connect with..." and we smile awkwardly and try to fast-forward time with our minds.  

3.  Wedding. OH MY GOD!  I am getting married in less than a month and there are a million things to do.  Even a small wedding has a lot of small details to attend to.  We picked fall because it is so pretty up here and wanted the colorful leaves and beautiful weather.  It will be small, with just family, and in our house.  (Not having furniture in our front room yet is really working out for us!)  I struggled to find a dress but have found one and in less than one month, I will wear it and stand with my person in front of our families and say all the words that swim around in my heart every day.   I can't wait! 

I am off to sip warm coffee out of a mug on the porch, surrounded by an impressive vine of morning glories that have finally started flowering.  I'll listen to the birds and notice which trees around me are starting to change and simply breathe in that crisp air and smile.

Our House

 Back in April, my person and I bought a house!  It is a 97 year-old bungalow beauty in a gem of a neighborhood and I can't believe I haven't written about it yet.  Well, I can.  We have been busy since we moved in and just now, there is a sweet settling into summer that gives me time to water flowers, read many books, and think of words.

Prior to buying this house, I believe I looked inside every single house posted on Zillow in the greater Chicagoland area.  This proved to be both daunting and depressing; we would never be able to afford a house, we could only afford a tiny house that needed too much work, we would have to live in our current apartment until we died.  Real estate can be real defeating. Until one day, this house popped up.  And I loved it.  And I sent it to my person who also loved it and we got a realtor and were inside it to look at it the next day.  My person said he took one look at my face as we walked through it and knew it was over; we would have to get this house. I think I was pretty stoic throughout the tour but then again, I have never been known for my poker face.  I do think I held off cooing until I saw the built-in closet with the laundry chute.  THE LAUNDRY CHUTE!!  I was immediately transported to the house of my childhood with a laundry chute.  That chute had a hard angle and towels were forever getting stuck in it.  We were lazy, yet ingenious, and would take whatever was close by and launch it down the chute to dislodge the stuck towels: bottles of shampoo, conditioner, heavy things to ensure success and concussion to anyone who happened to be at the other end of the chute at the time. The house was amazing, but that laundry chute sold me.

What really sold me.

I love this house. I love that the stairs creak and that the bedroom floor sort of slopes from one side to the next.  The ceilings also slope and while dangerous to my tall person, I fit under them easily. I love that there is a sunroom and in that sunroom, all of my plants grow and thrive because there is also a door that keeps all animals out. I love that in the fifties, someone redid the downstairs bathroom in an explosion of aqua and peach.  I also really love that the people who lived here before us loved this house and replaced the old windows, modernized the upstairs bathroom, and redid boring things like fuses and pipes.  I love the windows on every single side of this house. I love the light and sounds of birds that pour in.  After apartment living with just one window, this abundant light fills me with abundant joy.  

I love the basement!  How have I lived this long without a basement?  An entire area to house the washer and dryer, Costco excess, and the litter box. It is unfinished and that is fine.  We can still see the pipe where oil was delivered and the room that coal was shoveled into back when coal and oil were needed for heating.  And it doesn't feel scary or root-cellar-like or haunted.  Just a little damp and roomy.  Oh!  And attics!  We have three attic entrances and one little weird door in my person's small person's room.  I am determined some sort of treasure awaits in the larger attic.  We also have a very old garage that we are afraid to park in, but I still like it because someone took the time to build a cabinet in it.  My person says he hates the smell in it.  I will admit it smells a bit like dust and decay while I tell you what I tell him: it smells like history.

The yard is small and green and mostly weeds.  I love the weeds!  Dandelions, violets, and recently discovered, wild strawberries!  I don't think I could grow strawberries on my own and there they are, just wild and popping up all over.  In the back, we have tall weeds that flower and I am learning the names of: Dame Rockets, Creeping Bell Something, Daisy Flea Bane.  Lots of purple flowers on tall stalks and I refer to this area as our butterfly garden.  I am a real optimist in this house!

Butterfly Garden

The hardships of homeownership have already popped up and we had to replace the AC and furnace.  We also had a HUGE limb fall from the tree out front.  We somehow missed the fact that the dishwasher is super tiny and neither one of us would have picked out the blue countertops.  And the upstairs gets really, really warm.  Even with the new AC.  So, it's not perfect, this house.  It will bend and break and require us to fix and mend and spend.  But it is perfect because it is ours. Our house that we love to be in.  Our house that is finally enough room for all of the animals we own.  Our house, where William came to live with us too.  Where in the back hall for the first time, he smiled and said "Oh, it reminds me of Grammie's house". Our house, where we have a giant room in the front that needs furniture. Our house, with the side porch that definitely needs some paint and might sway a bit when you walk over it. Our house, where in the front yard, we feed four naughty squirrels, an adorable chipmunk, and all the boring birds of IL.  

We noticed on our many walks of the neighborhood that there are so many fairy houses under the trees.  I get it now because two months in, I realize this place is enchanted.  That huge branch that came crashing down missed my car by inches.  This is a place where neighbors come running out to meet you.  A place where children run back and forth to play.  A place you can hear church bells ring each hour.  A place, that after moving and moving and moving, is ours.  And this house that is filled with windows and light is also filled with laughter and love.  Enchanted.

Wild, tiny, baby strawberries? Enchantment.

Kick-Ass Warrior of Womanhood

 As it is May, and tomorrow is Mother's Day, I have been giving a lot of thought about mothers.  My own mother, myself as a mother, mothers in general. Tomorrow, many of us will gets cards that proclaim we are kind, nurturing, patient, loving, or supportive.  Nice words, nice cards.  Moms are generally all of those things.  But the words I think best describes moms is brave.

It is brave to grow another human inside your body.  Weird, weird things happen and you have to be brave to get up each day as your body changes and protests and grows.  There is bravery in being nauseous and functional, in stretch marks and varicose veins, swollen ankles, etc.  It is brave to eat the right foods and give up wine in order to grow this other human.  And it is really, really brave to take those disgusting prenatal vitamins.  

It is beyond brave to expel another human from your body in front of strangers who are all crouched down around your lower half and watching.  It is violent.  It is bloody. It is beautiful.  And it is so, so brave.  

It is brave to be handed a tiny newborn life to take care of while your own body is sore and beaten from the battle of birth.  It is humbling to hold this precious thing that you have grown and know you have never loved like this before.  It is then you realize that you will do absolutely anything and everything to make the world better for this tiny human.

It is absolute bravery to send this small person to school.  You pin your heart to your sleeve and pray the kids, the adults, the people at this school see how amazing your small person is.  You have to be brave to hear that someone made your child sad or doesn't like them.  You bravely tell them how amazing they are while your own heart aches and you don't cry until later.

As they get older, it is brave to say no, brave to say yes, brave to say "Let me think about it".  It takes battle-strength armor to face the anger of a sullen teen and it takes heroic levels of patience and fortitude to teach this same person to drive.  It takes all  you have to not lay down in the fetal position and sob when they walk the stage at graduation.  The day they leave for college or the world, your heart shatters into a million pieces while you smile and tell them they they have this, that they can do all things, that they are never mediocre.  You face life without them there every day and it is quiet and it is weird and it can be lonely and you face it, bravely.

It takes bravery to let your relationship with your child grow to where you learn things from them and are not the teacher.  It takes bravery to watch them date, and drive, and live apart.  It takes giant understanding and love to watch them live their lives without you at the center of it anymore.  All this while you work your job, love your partner, remain a good friend, maintain your home, take care of your own parents; exhausting and still so brave.

I think it takes supreme bravery to want children and not be able to have them and go out into the world full of children each day.  Brave to have had a child, and lost a child, and go out into that world of children.  Brave to be frustrated by babies and small children, or teens and adult children, but to still be there for them.  So while we are kind and loving and patient and nurturing and present, we are, I think, above all, brave.  And I hope just one of us gets a card that thanks us for being a kick-ass warrior of womanhood in someone's life.

No Time to be Sad

 When I was a child in the 80's, people didn't have sadness or depression.  Or at least not in the house I grew up in.  Sad?  What's there to be sad about?  So-and-so doesn't have an arm or a leg and they are still out there doing things.  It's funny now as I write this that I just do not recall a large number of amputees in my hometown, but apparently my parents knew tons of them.  I laugh-cried when I heard my mom, two days after losing her husband of 58 years, mutter to herself in the other room "C'mon, Mary, pull it together, it's not like you lost an arm or leg."

Pull it together. Move on. Look for the good. We don't live in a society that gives people adequate time to grieve.  Three days bereavement for most of us and then we are expected to go back to work, to life, to school, to our new normal.  I zombie-walked through that first week back to work.  I felt like a had a weighted blanket wrapped around me and every movement had to be thought out or took forever.  I was also very short-tempered.  Everything is annoying when you are sad and can't just wrap up in a real weighted blanket and just be sad.

We are all familiar with the many stages of grief, but I am not sure anyone really tells us how to move through the stages while also moving through life.  It is a lot.  I am relieved to say that the weighted-blanket heaviness has dissipated.  Now, it's more like I am a black and white TV with bunny ears in a world full of HDTV and color on full-volume.  Too loud!  Too colorful!  Too energetic!  My eyes! My eyes!

Me.

My siblings and I all agree that we have had very little time to just be sad about our dad because we are worried and concerned about our mom.  What is she going to do?  What are we going to do with her?  Can she live on her own?  All this while actually dealing with our mom who is convinced she has to move out in the next week (she does not), and is working through her own grief by "organizing things."  This is code-word in our family for throwing things out that are currently annoying us and this is not something someone with Alzheimer's needs to be doing on her own.  So there is all that too.  How do we give enough time to think about this while teaching, while running a kitchen, while running meetings and financials, while still just being sad about our dad?

My therapist (because I do believe in sadness, depression, and mostly serotonin-boosting meds) says that I am just supposed to be whatever it is I am feeling. I am trying, but I am feeling a lot of things. I am feeling grateful to my person who drove around two great lakes in the middle of winter to be with me and continues to be with me. I am feeling sad and scared and stressed for my mom. I am feeling guilty that my dad's last few months were probably so exhausting and hard.  I am feeling comforted by the outpouring of support for myself and my siblings and my mom.  I am feeling angry my parents didn't make better financial choices.  I am feeling busy having started grad school amidst all this.  I am feeling that I miss my sweet kids more than ever.  Boy, am I feeling.

We just feel all the things and keep moving through life, just like a million other grieving people do, but what a crap deal.  Remember the book The Red Tent? Where all the menstruating women and women with small children were put to the side, in the red tent, to do their woman things? Society needs a sad tent.  Where you sit and just be sad and talk about sad things without worrying you are talking too much about sad things.  Where you could alternately weep and laugh with others feeling the same way.  There would be time to sit and think and just be.  I picture this tent in mostly navy and greys and perhaps a section as a rage room for when the anger peaks.  And only when you have had time to sit and be sad and just be, only then do you leave the tent and carry a smaller, more manageable grief into the world with you.

Peter Arena

 Normally, when I write here, I write to share some thoughts or feelings or something that has happened.  I write in a way that is public and shared and in a way that is enjoy this, but also, look at my words.  Today, as I write, I am writing in a way to be public, but not for credit or accolades or likes.  I am writing because before I left Buffalo, my aunt and others asked me to please post my dad's eulogy here.  And I don't know if it is crass?  Or in bad taste?  

I am still not sure, but after a harrowing week, I do know that death is inconvenient.  My dad died the day before a major snow and ice storm hit the southern part of the US.  (the northern part just got subzero temps and more snow).  This made travel a nightmare for people who wanted to come but couldn't get out.  It made travel difficult for those who did find a way to come.  It was quick and air travel a fortune, so I post for those who wanted to be there but couldn't.

I have also come to realize that death is communal. You are never alone in your grief.  From the hospital room to the funeral home to the places stopped in between; grief is never just yours.  It is shared.  It is shown, and that helps. I have lived far from home a good portion of my life and I have missed many funerals and will miss more.  It is hard to be sad alone.  Perhaps this will make someone feel not as far away.

Writing my dad's eulogy was easy.  Giving it was terrible.  I, who always speak loudly, found myself unable to speak.  I briefly glanced up and look at my mother, smiling through her tears, my son and nephews who had delivered their Papa's casket through the church, and the people in the pews there to honor my dad, and I took a deep breath, and one more, and these are the words I had to say. And if you read them, I hope they give you a sense of community, of comfort, and one more smile about my dad.

I think that when you have a parent, you only see them as your mom or dad, and not always as the entire person that they are.  Over this past week, I’ve been reminded again and again that my dad, our dad, was so much more.  He was a husband of 58 years.  A brother. An uncle. A Papa. A friend. A coworker.  A proud veteran.  Peter Arena was so many things.

Our dad was a good man.  He was also selfish.  Opinionated.  Stubborn.  And like any true Sicilian, he could hold and nurture a grudge with true craftsmanship.  You knew if you got the quiet frown, you were in trouble.  If you got the quiet frown and the intricate hand twist?  Pack your bags; he wasn’t talking for weeks.

Our dad loved a good story.  He loved to tell them, to hear them, and to tell them again.  These stories were a solid 40% truth and 60% embellishment.  He also loved telling a joke.  He loved telling them so much he would be laughing too hard to do more than wheeze out the punchline.

When I look at our dad’s life, two words that come out to me again and again are service and love.

Dad served 4 years in the US Navy as a medic.  He spoke of that time as a great adventure. He was proud to serve and of his service.

He was part of the Lancaster Police Department for over 20 years.  Being a police officer and a detective defined him.  He loved it.  He loved the weird hours, the camaraderie, helping people in need, arresting bad guys, and endless cups of coffee in a world before Tim Horton’s.

He missed being a police man from the minute he retired and put that need into serving his town.  He ran for judge.  He became a very active member of the Lancaster Lions Club. He kept on serving.

The other word that defines our dad’s life is love.  Peter Arena loved and he loved hard.  He loved his wife, his kids, and his grandkids.  And if you’re associated with any of these people, he loved you too.  He loved his family, his friends, his community, and his country.

Peter presented a tough, grizzled exterior but everyone in this room and beyond knew that underneath that front was one of the most sensitive, faithful, loving men around.  He was no saint, but by God, he loved.

Our dad loved life. He loves the parties and holidays. He loved traditions.  He lived in the moment.  So much so that when we were younger, my mother referred to him as Peter Pan.  Sometimes, this was in a loving way as in “Peter, you charmer” and sometimes in a frustrated way of “Dammit, Peter”.

I hope that we remember the service and the love our dad gave to this world.  I hope we remember the good and the bad.  I hope that we remember the frail old man and the lithe, younger Pete who could find his sister across a crowded party and clear the dance floor with their polka.  And, I really hope that our dad remembers that it is the second star to the right and straight on til morning.