Mockingbird Hill Cottage

Everything else that thrived in the gardens is dying or dead, but the pansies are thriving. They love the cold weather. They really bookend my season of gardening –  they’re the first plants I potted in early spring and the last plants standing. (The porch plants are kind of hanging in there, but we’re due for some cold nights. At some point, I’ll have to let them go.)

I have to take a day away from the news today. I can feel my anger boiling just beneath the surface and I want and need calm and peace. I also feel like I’m entering a “hard to concentrate on reading” period. I have the new mystery from Elizabeth George on loan from the library. I just can’t get into it. I pulled out a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude  that I had on my shelves (I’ve never read it) and I’m hoping I can lose myself it. I do have the newest Louise Penny but I always, always hold off on reading it. I suspect I’ll crack it open in January.

The skies are gray, it’s raining off and on. Most of the trees have lost their leaves, save for the oaks and the crabapples. It looks bleak out there. This is the time – from here on through the winter – when I have to be on guard. I don’t want to sink into a mild depression. Thanksgiving and my birthday and Christmas will get me through the next couple of months, but what follows will be the hard part. I did play some Christmas music the other day. Don was out and about and I thought “Darn it! I’m going to listen to some Christmas music! I don’t care if it’s early November.”  I’m aching to decorate but it’s too early.

We almost decided to buy a faux Christmas tree this year. Surprisingly, I was the one pushing it. I felt we would save money in the long run (and we would.) We could set it up earlier and keep it up longer. Don was just about to go along with it when he said “That isn’t who we are. We love picking out a tree and bringing it home. We love the fact that every year the tree we choose is unique. What are we thinking??”

He’s right. We don’t really exchange gifts anymore – the tree is our joint gift.

So for now, we’ll get another real tree. I suppose we’ll keep on doing that until it becomes harder to deal with it all.

That means no tree until the first week of December, which really isn’t all that far off.

I’ll set up my little white tree at some point in November. Maybe on my birthday? That would be nice present to myself!

Stay safe.

Happy Monday.

Okay. I don’t feel well this morning. I can’t tell whether it’s a cold or just pesky sinus problems. I was going to simply say that I was sick and that would be the post, but a couple of things happened this morning that I want to share.

Don had a gig last night and this morning he told me that he sang the song he wrote about my parents years ago. He sang some of the lyrics to me and I started crying. He wrote it after my mom was about to have hip replacement surgery and we learned that the night before the surgery, my dad had stayed awake all night long in order to hold her because she was so scared. His lyrics are so beautiful. He told me he sobbed when he was writing it. We miss my parents.

Then, I was on Facebook and I saw a post from my cousin, Gordy (named after my dad.)

Just a simple post: “I was a helicopter pilot.”

Gordy is older than me and he suffers from the same thing his mother did – Parkinson’s Disease. He lives in Florida but he has a cottage on an island in northern Michigan. He spends every summer there, except for this one. His Parkinson’s has progressed to a point where his doctor was worried about him being able to safely get around in that rather remote location.  That simple declaration was so moving. I found myself crying again.

Don’t we all know what that feels like? To be older after a lifetime of working and perhaps retired and/or unable to do what used to come so easily? A loss of identity. A loss of something in which you excelled. Gordy was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and a rescue pilot after he came home. I remember him giving me some wings in the form of a small pin. He was handsome and dashing and we worried about him over there in Vietnam. Thankfully, he came home safely. But now he has to face a body that betrays him, that he can’t control, all the while remembering what he used to be able to do.

The comments were lovely, everyone assuring him he was a great helicopter pilot, that he was still a pilot.

When I was young, I used to look at older people with an assumption about them based on nothing except that they were old. It wasn’t unkind or anything like that, rather, a sort of ‘Aren’t they sweet?’ kind of thing. I had no idea what their lives had been like before that moment in time; what their profession had been, who they really were. And because I was young, I was never really curious about that.

Now that I’m older, I have the same feeling that Gordy has. When I walk into a room full of young actors, directors, staff members and I’m the oldest person in the room, I know they are seeing gray hair and wrinkles, just like I saw gray hair and wrinkles and nothing beyond that. In my current situation, I am able to coach the actors and get to know them and that helps. I become defined. But everyone has an interior voice that cries out “You should have seen me when I did this or that!”

Anyway, I am rambling a bit here. I’ll just leave it at that. It’s sort of a weepy morning and that’s okay.

By the way, I received an Islamaphobic comment this morning, obviously in reference to my happiness about the election results. I deleted it, of course, and will block that person. It’s someone who has never commented before, so it might well be a troll. Still, I’m always shocked by that level of ignorance. Begone!

Stay safe.

Happy Saturday.