That's the way it was, and we liked it!

Now that Halloween has passed, I'm ready to consider Thanksgiving. 

   Fried turkey and southern green beans. 

   Sweet potatoes and yeast rolls. 

   Chocolate anything. 

   A comatose nap to digest it all.

I do not expect talk of the trappings of Christmas till I wake up on Black Friday. That's my decoration day. (Most certainly, not a time to shop.) But already, with my Halloween decorations still settling in their bin up in the attic, I'm hearing Christmas carols at Kroger, seeing Santa commercials on TV, and recycling the Target Toy Book from last Sunday's newspaper. It's still 70 degrees outside and we're already leap-frogging to Dec. 25?

Whatever happened to waiting? When I was a kid the Christmas season didn't even start till the tail end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. This was back in the day when the three networks on our get-up-and-change-the-channel-yourself TV aired the actual people and floats marching in the parade. As expected, Santa appeared every year at the end, marking the official beginning of the Christmas season. 

See, back then, it was the Thanksgiving St. Nick who heralded the call to Christmas. And we had plenty of time with only a mere month to prepare. Folks still managed to light up their house tops, chop down a tree to decorate, shop for presents, bake trays of sweets, and prepare hand-signed cards. All pretty much the things we do now, only we had 30 less days to stress about it all. That's the way it was, and we liked it.

Woodboogers Eat Doughnuts

My kids like to watch this show on Netflix -- Finding Bigfoot. I think it's utterly ridiculous. A bunch of crock. A noisy little bit of fiction that makes me cringe. People really believe this? (My faith in American TV viewers is at an all-time low since learning this summer that there is an actual television show that comes on actual television called Naked and Afraid. I'm not even gonna link it here. You are way too intelligent to check it out.)

So, my boys tune into this Bigfoot search periodically and I'm left to my own business of dusting furniture or grading papers or trying to read the Rick Bragg column in the back of Southern Living as a Chewbacca soundtrack plays in the background. Over and over and over and over again. Bigfoot and Chewbacca are apparently close cousins.

So, yeah, it's annoying on many levels. 

But then we went home to Norton, Virginia, last fall to bury my mom. And for once in a million moons, I was there when the Home Hardware was open.

(They used to be open on Saturdays. When they decided to close years ago, they warned my Uncle Mitchell, a Home Hardware regular, that they'd be closed that Saturday morning. He showed up with homemade biscuits and gravy for his friends anyway. They didn't get any. They were closed of course. Rocked his world, I tell you.) 

Home Hardware is more than just a hardware store. It's more like a department store that's a bit rough around the edges. From the porch rockers and chain saw carvings to the rotating bins of nails, screws, fasteners, and the sort, to the Red Rider wagons parked right beside about 20 crocks in various sizes in the front window festooned with Hokie flags and UT flags and Kentucky somewhere flags, it's a little something for everyone. I myself like to sniff the candles and check out the heft of the cast iron skillet collection. I also enjoy staring up at the tin ceiling. 

But the real draw for me was the Woodbooger tee shirt collection. Piles and piles of tee shirts. Long sleeves. Short sleeves. Colors galore. Hoodies even! Squatch Watch shirts for everyone! One of the men working there struck up a conversation with me as I fondled the shirts. He told me how the Bigfoot people had come to town a couple of years back searching for, um, Bigfoot. The Woodbooger, he's called around these parts. They combed High Knob looking for the Woodbooger but never did find him. They even tried to lure him out of the woods with doughnuts. I think he said they had sprinkles.  (If only they'd had Cab's doughnuts. They'd have found him for sure.)

He also told me that they'd ordered about 60 shirts initially, figuring they might sell them and make a little money. They sold out quickly, so Home Hardware ordered more. They even opened on a Saturday to sell them! Since that initial rush, they've topped 3,000 and they're still selling. (This was a year ago. I bet they're way over that amount now.) We bought one for each of us and a couple for our friends who loaned us their truck for the weekend. Currently, I'm thinking Christmas presents for everyone on my list!

And now I have to confess that I'm almost a believer. Well, a believer in the Woodbooger. Bigfoot? Never. But this Woodbooger? Well, the proof is right on Home Hardware's Facebook page. Wouldn't you believe? 

Sparkly Providence

Behold, the boiler.

She's a beauty, huh? All curvy and strong and complex with just the right amount of coppery shine tossed in. She sparkles. She actually sparkles! 

We cranked her up last weekend when the outside temps dipped into the 40s and I felt in my very bones the single degree drop from 67 to 66. With a couple of button pushes on the thermostat, clink, she was ON.

You just wouldn't believe the racket we heard one floor up.  
Bam! went one radiator
Hissss! went another
POP! 
POP POP POP!!! 
Clang! Bang!  Radiators all over the house are waking up from a summer hibernation.
Thunk! 
POP!!! POP!!! POP!!!  HISSSSSSS! All radiators fully operational

And then, WOOOOOOOOSH!

That one concerned us, so Curt ventured to the basement while I cheered him on from the safety of the couch. When he emerged, soot-less and fancy-free, it was to announce that the boiler had successfully filled itself with water. 

This might seem like a no-brainer, but in our experience, steam heat boilers don't necessarily do this on their own. Take last winter when we had to stomp down to the basement, rotate the water-fill valve on the old boiler (who was definitely not shiny), and wait till the clear beaker-looking pipe filled to the black Sharpie line with heat-producing water. Only then would the old boiler clunk on and fire up. 

We did this every six hours. 
All North Polar Vortex winter long. 
If you missed the 6-hour refill mark, you were cut off. 

This reminds me of the time Mom and Dad came to visit us back in the early '90s up on King George Avenue. Curt was at work on this freezing weekday morning, perhaps a snow day since I was at home. It felt chilly in our old house when I woke up. I wrapped my robe around me and went searching for Mom and Dad. They weren't upstairs in the guest room or bathroom. Not downstairs in the kitchen or living room. Certainly not outside. They were missing. I finally found them in the basement huddled by the furnace trying to get warm. Turns out, the thermostat was set to cool down during the day and heat up in the evenings when we were home, and I could not figure out how to reset it to make the furnace turn back on. We had to call Curt at work to come rescue us. Dad declared every house we ever lived in after that was too cold.  

And there's the other spot of glory in this boiler, besides its self-filling water feature. This is a surprise birthday gift to my family from my mom. 

Impossible, you say? She did pass away a year ago last Friday. Last year for my 45th birthday, she gave me an unconscious reflexive grin from the cardiac ICU, four days before she would be reunited with Dad and Michelle and in the presence of Jesus.  But this year there was no promise of a card or phone call or surprise package. Until the day a letter came from MetLife to me, her beneficiary, seeking to close her account. After sending the appropriate forms and a copy of the death certificate, we got a check for 10 times what we figured. Enough for a new steam heat boiler. Enough to keep us from huddling by the old one in the basement on cold winter days. Or even fuming down the steps to refill it every six hours. Enough to keep us warm for decades to come. How providential. 

Thanks, Mom. 

22 years ago I was a 23-year-old PMSing dreamer marrying my OneAndOnly. It was, except for the drippy hotness of a typical late summer afternoon, a perfect day for a wedding.(My only regret is that I didn't bring Ellie Dog - the perfect black lab mutt - to the celebration.)

Daddy was there, guiding me by the arm. "Do you know Curt is wearing, um, cowboy boots? You can back out now if you want to." 

Mom was there. "I'm so sorry. I thought I knew where the cake topper was!" The cake topper she used in her wedding was missing. We split-second subbed some daisies in its place.  

Michelle was there. All happy and in her element with her then-Secret Service Agent boyfriend. Oh yeah, we had security detail at our wedding. 

Both grandmothers were there. Simply beautiful in their experience and love.

Today we are 45 years old. 

And we are still married.

That's 22 years, for those who are counting. 

We have made it this far, thanks to God's patient guidance and blessing.

By today's standards, we've made it. 

By my standards, we're only part-way there.

We have a lifetime left. I can't wait to get started.  

Neon-y Memories

 We've been home a bit more than a year, long enough to feel like we've been here forever. In a way we have, except for that decade between 2003 and 2013. 

Forever is more of a feeling, anyway, than an actual stretch of time. 

It's that star, that very same "world's largest freestanding illuminated man-made star", that lit up the night when I first moved here in 1990, fresh out of Clinch Valley College with nothing more than a diploma, a rust-colored Toyota Tercel named Barney, and big, big hair. That star watched me start my first job in the city, a $14,500/year receptionist at CorEast Savings Bank in downtown. Downtown!!! 

It's driving by where Sonic used to be and seeing myself parked there with Mom, ordering large Diet Cokes while David Gray pumped through my speakers. Mom didn't particularly care for David Gray, but she did love a good Diet Coke.
  
It's picking up where you left off with the same friends you started teaching with in the trailer at Fallon Park. That trailer is still there, and it still smells the same. I'm told there are still Peppermint Patties in the fridge. 

It's driving through Old Southwest's Highland Park, where we got married, where we served hotdogs to our guests on a humid Labor Day weekend. And then, driving out of the park, on the dead-end of Walnut Avenue, it's seeing our first home, a 5-apartment 1926 home we rehabbed to its single-family days. We brought baby Camden and Baby Benjy home from the hospital to this house. I can still see Mom and Dad and my little sister Michelle swinging on the porch, rocking my babies. 

It's eating dinner at Curt's mom and dad's house, right next door to the 1906 house we are rehabbing now. Sitting at the dinner table piled high with honey ham and sweet potato soufflé, we listen to the same stories of Curt's childhood I've heard before, this time punctuated by the laughter of no-longer-babies Camden and Benjy. 

It seems so much of being back home has been simply remembering. That decade away did nothing to dim my recollections and everything to make me appreciate them. I can see how that man-made star illuminates my past in neon-y Kodachrome colors and Instagram filters and gives meaning and weight to the memories my family and I create today. 

Iris Love

For the life of me, I can't remember where I was when I fell in love with irises. 

Could've been Jean and Grover's house down the corner from mine. Jean used one of those old timey washing machines with the wringer instead of a spinner. You could see it on her back patio, and it seemed a little medieval even in the '70s. But there might've been some irises growing nearby. 

Or maybe it was at Mrs. Hart's house down the hill where we'd all four of us girlfriends beg for some sweetener to go with the grapes (her grapes) we'd just squeezed into a couple of Dixie cups.

It might even have been at my very home on Poplar Street, but I swear, I just can't see the place. 

I can only smell it.  And feel the sweet slightly dewy blossoms between my fingers.

It's that smell that takes me back to pig-tailed days running between our friends Kim and Karen's and the woods and, well, Mrs. Hart's. Somewhere in that mix are purple irises tall and fragrant and buzzing with bees. Not scary bees, but the big fat happy ones that seem too heavy to bother with us. The blossoms are springtime fresh and so big-scented. You can't run by them without getting a noseful of their fragrance. You can't jump rope without sniffing them out before you run through school to 12th grade. You can't even decide who goes first on the swing without taking in a big whiff of sweet iris.

Mom grew some some flowers, but they were mostly the kind you bought at the local nursery and put up in pots or window boxes. Impatiens, petunias, geraniums. The only thing I remember coming back year-round was the little cactus with yellow blooms that Dad saved from the trash somewhere in Coeburn. The irises of my childhood are hidden from me, but not that smell.

When I saw these irises blooming in front of the house this week, I grabbed my kitchen shears and marched down the steps to cut a few stems. Only a few though. I have to ensure that there are plenty of blooms left to fill the air with their sweet scent. And then I can sit on my front porch and remember the days when hidden irises were the star of my spring play. 

There is a time to live...

There’s a time to live

And a time to die

There’s a time to laugh

And a time to cry

There’s a time for war

And a time for peace

There’s a hand to hold

In the worst of these

Mom's been gone for more than six months now. And still, all it takes is a snippet of a song, a flash of highway, a chance view of her name on my Favorites list to send me careening back to Nashville to the Cardiac ICU and her bedside.

There’s a time for yes

And a time for no

There’s a time to be angry

And a time to let it go

There is a time to run

And a time to face it

There is love to see you

Through all of this

This morning is was Mandisa on the local Spirit FM. 

He is with you in the ICU

When the doctors don’t know what to do

And it scares you to the core

He is with you

This song was hot back in October. I heard it every day on Fish FM, the Nashville Christian radio station. I'd bet that each day, as I anxiously followed my GPS to Vanderbilt University Medical Center and tiredly drove back to the hotel at night, I heard it. I heard it so often that I'd begun to think it was written for me. 

We may weep for a time

But joy will come in the morning

The morning light

And this morning, a happen-stance hearing on my 10 minute drive to school, tears threatened to spill. If I'd had a good half hour to cry, I might have let them. 

When nothing else is left

And you take your final breath

He is with you

I pulled into the school lot, parked my car - the one Mom had given me a couple of years ago, and said a quick arrow prayer. Father God, thank you. Thank you that Mom is with you. Thank you that you are with me. Amen.