The Dogwoods Will Bloom

I love spring. Everything about it is intoxicating and wonderful, even with one of your eyelids glued shut and your sinuses caked thick with a layer of pollen. It’s like passing “Go” on the Monopoly board of life. You don’t automatically collect a hundred bucks, but you feel like it, knowing you get to leave a lot of hardships from winter behind and start all over in a season where beauty abounds and life is how it should be: reborn, fresh, and new.

Another one of my favorite things about spring is weddings. They just seem to go together like Sonny and Cher, peanut butter dipped in chocolate, and sea salt with tequila on a sunny day.
This particular spring seems to be different, though, as if I have passed “Go” so many times in a row without keeping track that I’ve forgotten just how many times I’ve been around the board. That was until I opened up our first wedding invitation of the spring.

“What’s wrong? You look pale,” my husband looks up from his cell, a hint of panic rippling across his forehead as he wrinkles his nose. “Don’t tell me your old college roommate decided to marry that 25 year-old surfer from Ecuador with dreadlocks and a portable herb garden? I give it three months; six months tops.”

“No, it’s worse,” I tell him, though I do admire his optimism. “We‘re invited to a friend’s wedding, but instead of guests of the groom, we are now guests of the groom’s parents.”
“It’s official.” He looks at me with such despair, I’m afraid he might faint, or worse, drop his cell phone into my spaghetti sauce and that’s all we have for dinner.
“I know, hon.” I try to comfort him as best as I can while moving my saucepan to the back burner.

“We’re old.”

I’m not sure how we missed it. Along the way of paying mortgages, utilities, mowing lawns, changing diapers, MacGyver-ing science projects, and attending parent/teacher conferences we became bona fide grownup . . . or old fogies, as we used to call them.
One would think we should have figured all this out much earlier, but who has time to stop and think about such things while you’re right smack in the muck of it all? I will concede we should have caught on when we started to hold menus and price tags two or more feet from our face in order to read them. Not to mention the cacophony of sounds orchestrated by the creaks of our bones and the wheezes from our deviated septa as we toss and turn in bed at night that also might have clued us in. We just aren’t spring chickens anymore.

I was thinking about the stark contrast of the grown up world compared to a child’s world the other day while watching my daughters swim in the pool. It was quite a beautiful sight: the way their arms and legs and strands of long hair seemed to move like silk in between what looked like, from the surface, layers of pale blue water. They appeared as if two ethereal beings, not young, not old, not really of this world, but of a middle place. A place where there is great lightness and buoyancy and beauty; a place totally unaffected by the weight of the water from above or the crushing enormity of the worries of the world resting just above the surface.
Ripples of water slid silently above their submerged bodies. A storm would soon be coming in from the ocean, but in that moment, they didn’t have a care in the world. Why would they? They were completely unaware of everything around them because they were deeply and completely immersed in that moment.

It’s hard to remember how that feels sometimes. The older we get, the more burdens we carry and the more darkness we see where there used to be light. Every day, we see neighbors we love, loved ones we cherish, and people we have never met or had a chance to know suffer from a long list of things beyond their control and we feel helpless about how to make it better.
How can everything around us be so sunny and green and new, when there is hurt and grief and loss just beneath it all?

My dad is a surgeon who has spent four decades face to face with both life and death. He is also the epitome of a modern day Renaissance man and said it best in a poem about spring he wrote many, many years ago and shared with me when I was eighteen. I have carried it with me ever since and whenever I feel weighed down I read it. Here is how it ends:
“And as I survey this world around me, my senses are overwhelmed. But deep in my heart the snow is still deep, the winds blow cold, and the boughs of the Dogwoods hang heavy with ice. Why such contrast, such disharmony? It’s as if my heart lies waiting, still asleep, still dormant but safely tucked away from the elements, but I am forever secure in the knowledge that this too will pass for just as ceaselessly as the seasons change, so too will the Dogwoods and Azaleas bloom for me.”

I’m reminded of my spicy Columbian friend Bert Snyder who has been bravely battling stomach cancer. I wish everyone knew Bert. Many of you do. She has filled up every ounce of her small frame with humor, grace, dignity, and a resilience of spirit. When the doctors recommended another bout of chemo, she said no. For her, it’s about the quality of our time, not the quantity of it, that defines a life lived well.

She told me, “I choose life.” Bien hecho, Bertica. Life it is.

Money for Nothing

It finally happened. I knew it would. It was only a matter of when, not if, the chips would fall and the payment would be due. Only I had no idea that the cost would be so high or the consequences of my actions so steep.

Therefore, I guess I’ll just go ahead and ‘fess up. But try not to judge me too badly; sometimes a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.

“I want an iPad,” my ten year old told me the other day. I should have known right then by the tone of her voice that I was in big trouble, but we all know that denial does funny things to people.

“Me, too,” chimed in my eight year old.

“What in the world are the two of you going to do with a couple of iPads?” I asked nervously. The little hairs on my arms stood up. Something about their eyes was unsettling. “Face Time the dog? Read Tolstoy? Balance the household budget? Play online poker? I mean, aren’t y’all a little bit too young to interface with the big, bad time suck of the ever changing and often volatile void of cyberspace? Besides, aren’t they like 900 dollars apiece or something?”

A look passed between them that made my stomach churn and my skin go cold. I tried to swallow, but couldn’t.

“Actually,” they pulled out a giant glossy white piece of poster board from behind the couch. “We’ve been meaning to talk to you about all that.”

There it all was, laid out in crayons, scented markers and Littlest Pet Shop stickers. It had finally caught up to me and I had no choice but to pay the price. Talk about needing a debt ceiling. According to the girls’ calculations, I might have one-upped Washington.

As the dollars signs began to blur before me, my life up to that point started to flash before my eyes:

“The first person to find my sunglasses gets five dollars, so get moving, we’re late,” I told the girls as they stood by the front door.

“They’re on top of your head,” one of them pointed out, extending out her little hand.

“Can you break a $20?” I asked.

“No. What am I, a bank?” She replied.

“I’ll get you back later, then.” This is where my trouble began.

The same thing has happened many times with my keys, purse, phone, pen, dog leash, checkbook, wallet, iPod, journal and daybook. The typical exchange:

“Five bucks for whoever can find my (insert any above item here), we’re late.”

“It’s in your hand.”

“All I have is a fifty.”

“I know, I know. You’ll get me back later.”

It is true that the bulk of my debt goes towards lost items but a lot of it goes towards absolute, pure laziness.

“Can you take your sister to the bathroom again?” I ask my oldest, through a mouth full of food.

“Two dollars,” she says back, somehow sensing I haven’t eaten all day and that her younger sibling can’t hold it in her Elmo pull up training pants any longer.

“A dollar,” I barter back.

“Buck fifty.”

“Sold.”

And then there’s this costly one, seeing as it happens every Saturday:

“Ten more minutes,” I mumble, pulling my duvet back up over my head. It’s always a little unnerving to wake up to four little bleary eyes mere inches from the two of mine, staring directly into them.

“But we haven’t eaten breakfast yet,” they cry in unison.

“What time is it anyway,” I ask, sitting up in bed grabbing my phone. “How come I have to drag y’all out of bed in the morning all week long to go to school and make a nutritious breakfast that all you do is stare at, but on Saturday morning you are up at 5:45 am, claiming you might quite possibly be starving to death?”

Silence.

“All right then. Three dollars?” I offer.

“Five.”

“Done. Can you close the door on your way out?”

When I come out of my trance and look into my daughters’ sweet but determined faces and then at their homemade charts and graphs made from glitter and glue and my own doing. It really is like Kenny sang, sometimes “you gotta know how to fold ‘em.”

Two brand new generation 2 iPads should be arriving here via UPS any day now. Good thing we bought that Apple stock not too long ago. The only question now is if they will let me use them. I can’t take my dog with me some places. It sure would be nice to Face Time with him.

Writers Note:

Obviously, this article is completely embellished. No, my girls don’t have iPads, and I don’t pay them to let me sleep in on Saturdays (seeing as I just do that on my own anyway). They’re smart, they’re tall, and they know where the cereal is. But seriously y’all, what mother hasn’t paid her child a buck to take their little brother to the potty so you won’t miss the end of Regis and Kelly? Just sayin’.

Oh, yeah. Here’s an interesting tidbit. My financial whiz friend, George, just told me that, as of the last week of July, Apple now has more available cash than the US Government.

A Nose Knows

If you have a minute, I want to tell you a story. It’s a story I’m quite certain you’ve never heard. It’s also one of those stories you can’t make up. It’s a story about a girl, a skunk, and a cell phone. To get started, we have to go back to the very beginning on a small highway in the rolling hills of Vermont.

“What was that?” I asked my husband when I was startled out of a deep sleep by a sound similar in decibels to a sonic boom or Fran Dresher’s voice – I couldn’t tell which. It was midnight after all and we’d been driving since 8:00 a.m..

“It was nothing, just a bump in the road,” he quickly replied, as his eyes darted back and forth across the hood.

“A bump?” I couldn’t help but stare at him, mouth open. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I think whatever it was just cracked my back molar. See?”

“Shhhhhhh,” he quieted me. “You’ll wake up the kids.”

“Me? Are you serious? I think your bump (this is where I mimed quotations marks in the air with my fingers) took care of that. Or are you sure it wasn’t a turkey or a moose, a deer, maybe an intoxicated wandering pedestrian or something?” I just couldn’t help it, I ramble when I’m nervous. “Maybe it was a…….”

“EWHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” the kids yelled in unison from the backseat while making loud gasping, gagging sounds in between breaths. Meanwhile, I was frantically pressing the switch that rolls down the window like it was the emergency blow up button on an inflatable dingy attached to the side of a sinking ship. “What is that awful smell? Gross!”

Yep, they were up now.

“I’m sorry, alright?” my husband shouted before turning the car into a parking lot of an old, abandoned gas station. “The skunk ran right out in front of me. What was I supposed to do? Swerve and kill us all?”

“Aren’t you being a bit dramatic?” I shouted back as we all tore out of the car as fast as a silver bullet or a train or a Coors Light can or whatever it is that describes how Superman exited small, enclosed phone booths, I can’t really remember. Now, maybe it seems like my actions were a little bit dramatic, but we needed fresh air. Stat.

“Daddy,” our ten year old cried, her lower lip trembling. “Are you sure it’s dead? Shouldn’t we go back and see? What if she had babies somewhere that needed her?”

The eight year old chimed in to ask, “Does this mean we have to wash the car in tomato juice? ‘Cause I hate to break it to you, Dad, but this convenient store looks like it hasn’t been open since the Bush Administration.”

Unbeknownst to us, as my husband checked under the hood and in the grill for body parts with a broken Wizards of Waverly Place pencil, a book light he swiped off my Kindle, and an “I heart Spaghetti O’s” vintage T-Shirt he pilfered from the traveling dirty clothes bag to tie around the bottom part of his face, a similar situation was unfolding one state over on a small gravel road next to Lake Winnipesaukee in Meredith, New Hampshire. A place which, believe it or not, would be our final destination the very, next day.

When we finally did arrive there the next day, I couldn’t hide my excitement. “Oh my Gosh, you guys! You’re all grown up!” Well, the excitement might really have been over getting out of the car after two long days and realizing my two legs really did still work, but it was also about getting to see our extended family. This is definitely the highlight of our annual lake vacation: seeing our nieces and nephew, cousins and friends for the first time in a year.

“Oh no, it can’t be” said my husband, skipping all pleasantries and breaking up the circle of hugs with his elbow and a bottle of Febreze he must have found under the passenger seat. “It must be following us.”

“What’s following you, Uncle Charlie?” asked our sweet 14-year old niece, Jodi.

“The smell of the skunk we ran over in Vermont last night,” he told her while he sniffed our girls’ hair, and (I’m not really sure why) under their arms. “We can’t get rid of it.”

“Oh no, that’s just Couch Potato and Oreo,” she said, gesturing over to a blue laundry basket sitting in the shade on the beach. “The neighbors told us their mom was run over last night, right up there, across the street.”

Not being able to help ourselves, even after our late night escapade of the night before, we cautiously peered into the basket. And there they were: two of the most adorable teeny, tiny baby skunks I have ever seen. Well, actually, the only two baby skunks I’d ever seen, but who’s counting, especially while you’re trying to hold your breath.

“Aren’t they cute?” Jodi leaned over, reading my mind. “But my mom won’t let me keep them.”

That’s what I love about Nan. She’s a lot of fun, and she’s really, really smart.

“It’s okay,” Jodi shrugged. “They don’t allow you to remove the scent glands in the state of New Hampshire, anyways.”

“How do you know that,” I asked.

“I looked it up on my Droid, of course.” She held up the phone in its hot pink case just as it started to ring. “That’s probably the Wild Life Department now, calling about the babies. I gotta take this.”

While Jodi was on the phone, we all stood staring at the basket in silence, admiring little Oreo and Couch Potato . . . not to mention the girl who was resolved to save them. No one spoke -- probably because we are all still using our mouths to breathe in and out.

“Guess what, guys,” she said, waving her cell phone excitedly. “The Wildlife Center in Holderness will take them, but only if we get them there ASAP.”

“Alright, fine.” Gramma Flo pulled herself up out of her beach chair and grabbed her keys. “I’ll take them. Only they’re not riding shotgun, I’ll tell you that right now!”

So off they went. Two baby skunks, one cool, red mini-van driving grandma and a redheaded 14 year-old beauty with a heart of gold.

We found out later that Couch Potato didn’t make it. They tried everything they could, including hooking him up to the IV machine, but he was too dehydrated without his mom to make it. But thanks to Jodi, his sister is doing great. If you ever get up to Lake Winnipesaukee, you can even go visit Oreo in her new home in the wildlife center in Holderness. You might even run into Jodi and her friends checking up on her there.

I’ve thought a lot about the crazy parallels of the universe since then: how two things can be the same or happen at the same time but have totally different outcomes. The only thing I do know for sure is that life happens. It’s what you do in its aftermath that counts. I even got to witness for myself how – thanks to the power of a Droid and the love and determination of a teenaged girl who knew how to use it -- one person can change the fate of another living, breathing, and, yes, stinking thing.