Monthly Archives: May 2008

I’m busy today…not surprisingly, I was busy yesterday. Life, it turns out is quite busy. I was waiting to meet with a client yesterday and was reading an old back issue of some fashion magazine and the article centered around a new diagnosis (catered to women, of course) for a Stress Disorder. The article focused largely on women with children, and one woman who was a young professional, a stressed out young professional. Obviously I don’t have children (much as I would like to count Grace and Mabel into the fold, I do realize that they don’t require day care, have never to date thrown up on me, and are very dedicated to putting themselves down for naps, among many other things.) and I do have a career–but as I was reading, I realized the difference between being busy and being stressed out. I have a lot that I can think to do all day long and often feel more hours in the day would not be a terrible crime, but I rarely feel like I can’t make my life stop for a minute if I need to so that I can have a moment to catch my breath. Those breaths make it work. Those breaths are things like not blogging, not vacuuming maniacally, not worrying about getting it done in one day. I’m learning to take breaths like that, because anyone that knows me, knows that I am more likely to overbook than underplan. Anyway, all of this is to say, today I ran out of my office with my head swimming thinking about all of the things that I need to accomplish before stepping on a plane tomorrow afternoon to fly to Baton Rouge (yeah!!). The lunch line took 20 (!) minutes, the girl behind the counter copped a battitude with me and I was thinking, doesn’t anyone know that I have things to do? For some reason I bought an iced tea in a bottle–something I rarely, if ever do–and while I was waiting (!) for my lunch I opened the drink and took a sip. In the bottle cap, there was a little Leonard Bernstein quote that read, “To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time”. It actually made me laugh in the line, and then I calmed down. I don’t want to have a Stress Disorder, I want to have a cocktail and an appreciation for this glorious day, and a telegramming monkey. Haha, ok, ok, I’ll settle for a calendar. Here’s to breathing.

My family is really good at telling stories. We like to laugh, we embellish just enough, and most importantly, all of those folks that are, in fact, my elders, have lived lives that are worth hearing about. In sharing terrifically embarrassing stories with my family, I’ve learned to laugh with them at the small things, a little humility, and the lesson of not seeking insanity by continually making the same mistake in the vain hope of different results. When the laughter quiets down and the dishes are on the way to the sink, something I have always always loved is the stories about their childhoods, and particularly about young married life, being that I’m leading something of a young married life myself. Last summer when Drew and I were at the beach with his family, we drove to Pensacola and found the first house that Jo Ellen lived in after getting married. She hadn’t been on the street since they had moved nearly 26 or 27 years ago and from her seat talked about being a young mother with baby Ashley strapped into the back of her bike and just riding all over the area every day because she and Drew’s father only had one car. Similarly, my Mom shared a story with me recently of being a 25 year old with my brother as a baby and riding her bike over to her mother’s house for lunch on a regular basis in 1973. These are both simple memories, but when I hear them, I am overcome thinking, in this instance, of these two young women with their lives happening around them and realizing that someday I too will be reminiscing about those early years when Drew was in school I worked for a newspaper. We lived on a shady street and planted a teeny tiny garden and went to concerts in the rain and drove out on the weekends to eat with my parents and watched Little League games on our walks with Grace, our first dog. We learned about baby bokchoy and lived in a house next to a stream with a dying black walnut shading our house and mice living behind the stove. We moved with a horse trailer and picked up a couch from one of Drew’s professors in the rain. There are big stories, but the kind I like hearing about best are the ones that just kind of happened, because silly as it sounds, it makes the possibility that my parents and aunts and uncles etc were actually there, breathing in their lives, not just stuck in a picture album in funny clothes (sorry guys).

In our wedding vows, we were asked a series of questions–will you make him/her angry/happy…is that your intention etc. I love that from the beginning we have been honest with each other about the work that is all of this memory making, and I love that the memories already seem like a good little story, at least to me.

Well, after all of my rambling, I’m going to let the photos do most of the talking this time. Here are some pictures from our first dinner outside in the space that Drew built. And, of course, a few pictures of the sprouting garden.

We had a little stirfry…

And some wine…

and it was supper time!

Grace never misses a meal…

mostly because she likes to look for squirrels in the trees…

And then we took a lot of silly pictures of each other

Then, as days tend to do, it got dark and we headed in.

Well, unlike before, typepad has been working just fine, and so have I…just not in front of the computer! We have been busy for the last week, starting off with the visit from Coop and Meg and baby Jack (pictures above) a long weekend during the middle of the week in Raleigh with Mom and friends, putting in our garden (!) and finally, driving to DC to see Radiohead in something resembling a hurricane on Sunday evening. Between being out of town and fitfully playing catch up in the following days, I don’t think that I was home for a full evening for over a week. This week, on the other hand, is moving at a delightfully slow and cool pace.

On our walk this past Saturday, Mom and I were both wearing long sleeves and taking pleasure in the leisurely Spring that we’ve had this year. It’s been all of the things that Spring should be–pops of hot days, lots and lots of rain, a slow and steady bloom of all things green and colorful and cool nights and mornings. There have been the occasional 80 degree days here and there, but I like to think of those days as reinforcing the optimistic nature of Spring and preparing us for the days to come. (As an aside, I remember a friend of Mom’s who was more likely to don a fur than find herself out of air conditioning visiting Virginia and stepping in from outside exclaiming, “It’s hotter’n the hinges of hell out there!”. I was about 8 or 9 at the time and just loved that expression–I knew that it was slightly inappropriate, but just safe enough to get away with saying at my young age. Now all I can think about is the vision of my eight-year-old self trying that expression out on my friends and waving my hands around as if there were fake red nails dangling from them and a live oak in the front yard. Clearly All Grown Up.) While I’m sure that Summer must just be around the corner, I could stay in this lovely limbo for many months to come.

Drew has built us the most wonderful “patio” area in our back yard–the yard is filled with two big maples (a silver and a sugar, I believe, though don’t hold me to it) and so we are relishing the cool place to sit in the afternoons, and once the chill is out of the air, in the mornings too. The yard is on a slope, so Drew cut out and built up and great level area for a table and four chairs and then Mom and I popped in all of the shade-happy plants to fill in his frame work. We also dug a bunch of ferns from Nelson County this past weekend, and the old green-thumb himself planted them while I was at work on Monday.

Our garden? Our garden is really a lot like Grace. Adorable, oddly shaped, rife with personality and quickly coming to be our third baby. Every morning and night we run out to see what’s been growing (the zucchini has doubled! The onions are sprouting! One of the tomatoes grew an inch!) and to talk very seriously about progress. Our garden is a perfect square (8′ x 8′) and we have packed it chock full–we will have to start eating collards ASAP to make sure that the tomatoes are happy as everything grows in, but I think that we’ll be able to manage it. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I aspire towards a lilly and tomato garden one day, and so we have four varieties (1 each, big time.) of heirloom tomatoes, and while the lillies won’t make it in the garden space, they are going on the side of the house, so I’m on my way. Seasoned gardeners would stand back and shake their heads at the silly kids, but I can’t be bothered with worrying about being cool, I’ve got dirt to get out from under my fingernails, and dill seeds to will into sprouting!

When I spoke with my stepmother Ruth on Sunday (Happy Mother’s Day, Moms!) she mentioned that it seems that a lot more people are putting in their very first vegetable garden this year, judging by the traffic at the cool garden center where she works. While I’m hardly a fatalist, I can’t help but think that people are thinking in the back of their minds about all of the what-ifs that an oil crisis can bring up, and having a little plot that one can confidently grow is no small thing. I think too that the Baby Boomers are hitting retirement and their yards, so there’s probably some kind of mix there, but it’s an interesting phenomenon nonetheless. For me personally, I have always been surrounded by things that grow and the people that make growing them appear effortless, and so finally being able to weave my own plot feels like yet another right of passage. Look Mom, I’m growing vegetables! For someone like my dad who has harvested thousands of vegetables, and probably helped to feed almost as many people, Drew and I are still in our playpen, so to speak, but every beginning is just as essential and sweet as whatever it may come to be, if not as fruitful, so I am just thrilled.

Guess what? I imagine that you will hear about this more than once in the coming weeks! What can I say? I’m like a new Mom assuming that no one before me has ever experienced the joy that is playing with my new baby.
Cheers!

I was lucky enough to be able to see a screening of To Kill a Mockingbird at Charlottesville’s Historic Paramount Theater last night. As in the past, I was struck by the ease and closeness of Jem and Scout, the young siblings Harper Lee’s infamous novel. While To Kill a Mockingbird is most readily associated with its analysis of race relations in the south, I still always think first of Scout and Jem and the way that the two children fit together so seamlessly.

Perhaps it’s the timing of having seen the movie last night, and the thought that Drew (my brother, not my husband) et al are on the highway on their way here now, but I can’t help but think of my own luck in the sibling department, across the board, but since it was just Drew and me in those early years, I see Jem in him. With the 10 years that separate us, we have gone through a number of stages, and I cannot even begin to describe stage one other than to loosely title it, Unfettered Adulation (well, on my side…his title of those years might hum a slightly different tune!). Drew was a saint of a big brother to his mousy, very talkative and much younger little sister. I remember little pieces of the time before he went to college and really do melt some. Just the other day I slipped and banged my knee really hard, but in my head thought, “mah, it’s just a 2″ and smiled a little–while rubbing my sore knee. The rating system was one of Drew’s genius–being something of a lifelong klutz, I have always been prone to accidents, and as a child I would fall and look to Drew to see if it rated high enough on the scale to get upset. “Amelia, you’re barely even bleeding! That’s not even a 5. You’re fine.” I believed him every time. He used it with integrity too–one time I fell on my aunt and uncles steep driveway and embedded a fair amount of gravel in my knee. I was, predictably, crying my eyes out by the time I got down to our house, and Coop took one look and said, “Great work! That’s an 8 for sure!” I remember sniffing and wiping my eyes and proudly saying something to the tune of, “You really think so? An 8? That’s pretty good huh? This is a good one!” as he started to pull the rocks out my knee. I still have the evidence of that fall on the face of my adult knee, and not to be terribly sappy, but there’s that typical childhood bittersweetness that comes with scars because they inevitably produce a story; this one tells of this big kid, the one I knew was a hero.

Seeing Drew Cooper now, in his dual roles as husband and father, I can’t help but feel a little bit like his baby sister again because his familiarity with his son comes so naturally, and in that ease, I remember the adoration that I had for him as something of a little squirt myself. Drew Walton and I talk about our future plans for children and Drew W, of course, always says that it’s better for boys to have big sisters, thinking of his own love for Ashley, but I can’t help countering with how perfect it is to be a little girl with a big brother to “beat you up” (never really happened, though pillow fighting was something of a nightly routine) and then save the day all at once. In the end, sometimes it’s just good to be second in line, because the one leading the way does all of the hard work, and the one trailing behind never really knows just how good she or he has it.

Hi All! For those of you that might have noticed (consider yourselves to be members of a small and very elite club!) I haven’t been posting because typepad was giving me a little computer grief. After a serious conversation with the computer, I think that the glitch is resolved (we’ll see if this post makes it online!) and so, with those ever infamous words…I’m baaaaaaaaack!

Where to even begin? I will start shoveling pictures up here as soon as possible. In the last weeks, we’ve had Drew’s marathon (he placed 40 something in his age group, and ran just under an 8 minute mile the whole time–really awesome!) we’ve had many inches of rain, been to some horse races, saw the Cubs loose to the Nationals, and started gearing up for our coming trip to Louisiana for Drew’s 10th High School reunion.

Around the house we are watching the sun every day to choose our best spot for a garden–we are lucky to have a number of HUGE maple trees surrounding our house, which are ideal for cooling off after work, but a little tricky when it comes to growing our modest garden. Drew has a couple of weeks between sessions, so he’s pulling his tools out and taking some time to be able to stop thinking about patients and do some work on and around the house, which makes both of us happy!

My brother Drew and his wife and son are coming for a visit this weekend (yeah!!!) so I will finally be able to see baby Jack teetering around on his on two legs walking here and there. Drew and I take our Aunt and Uncle rolls very seriously (lots of laughing, running around and ridiculous faces and noises, it’s all very humbling) so I am truly just as excited to see baby Jack as I am to see the rest of the family.

So that’s the news in brief–let’s see if this makes it online, and as I said, I’ll have pictures up as soon as possible, thanks for bearing with me!