take me home, country road

i set out at dawn, driving down the country road away from the home i have known for  50 years.

the fog lay low against the cotton fields, stretched out like a soft blanket over a child almost ready to wake up. that's what i wish it was, that fog, my own baby blanket draping right around me, whispering to me that it's not really wakeup time yet, that what i know to be true is not. 

what beauty. the vast fields of cotton and soybeans —  even tobacco — shrouded in a white pall that bore no sense of foreboding. just dawn about to happen. hope. 

a mile on, and the sun spilled over the fields onto the side of a barn. how must it feel, to stand at the edge of a field and watch the whole world that belonged to you wake up, the sun's first color shining red on your barn, knowing that your work ahead in that day mattered, was about more than what you had already put on that acre?

you know those moments, don't you, when you sense that your world will never pass quite this same way again? 

this morning a few weeks ago was that. it felt like i was taking in everything. every. thing. the boy waiting by the side of the road for his school bus, checking his iPhone. the hawk perched on the wire looking down on the peanut field, right where i have seen him almost every time i have come this way in the last year or so. the fog. the flat fields sliding past by me one by one — soybeans, peanuts, tobacco, cotton, right ready to be picked. 

i have been trying to write it all down for a month, each day sitting down in front of the blank page thinking: i must do this now. and then i don't. maybe i've been thinking that if i don't put it down it just wont happen. 

and yet, come monday, we will be well into what has until six months ago seemed an impossible thing. 

we are leaving my childhood home. 

moving its contents part and parcel to a new house that has been finely painted and polished, one that will take my mother closer to where she needs to be. one that my father never knew about. had never seen. in these few weeks we have gathered to pack and to ponder. 

what looms, seems soon to me — not yet six months since Daddy died — is necessary. just because i am not yet ready to let loose of the walls that raised me up doesn't mean it's not the right thing. what matters is that Mama will be close to family, safe, where she can savor all the years that have rolled out before her like the fog over the fields did for me on that day a month ago now. yes. safe. but sad.

i remember when i first went to college, i was so bent on being away and not looking back on the road that had brought me to the city. but come fall break, i caught a ride with a friend and when we turned at the crossroad toward home, the twilight set in, and i rolled down the window, sticking my face into the country smells, all the peanut hay and the scent of newly-picked tobacco, the cotton bolls ripening and well, i couldn't wait to get there. home. 

for years after i was married and living far away, whenever my husband and i drove out the driveway, i waved to my parents on their back porch perch and cried for 30 miles down the road. (and now, every single time i leave, just thinking about that memory.) 

every single time i walk in the back door, i see the soft lights of the kitchen, and i feel myself settling in. home. 

i can not imagine not knowing that anymore.

it was not supposed to be this way. my parents were going to live out their lives in this house, in this place — Daddy fairly well did — but things we had counted on just didn't come to be. 

the night before i drove away from home a month ago, i slept in my old room, tossing, waking often, trying to remember the hundreds of childhood nights and days i spent there, becoming me. our winter-weighted coverlets came from Sears, and we loved them. in summer, Mama would rearrange the furniture and drape our beds with paper-thin covers — white, with blue ruffles and tiny blue flowers all over — and we would sleep with our heads at the foot of the bed just to put a new slant on things. 

we found our baby clothes in an old attic trunk and dressed our dolls in them. i played 'school' behind the closed doors, with the chalkboard on the wall. barbies. spend-the-nights. tears. (a lot of those, my siblings would say.) winter nights after lights out, listening to cousin brucie on the transistor, memorizing the words to songs that would define my adolescence — jim croce. james taylor. gladys knight and her pips. the beatles.

Memories that come at night
Take me to another time
Back to a happier day....

i remember the day we moved in. i was 5, and i went home from kindergarten with ralph, our next-door-neighbor in our old house. we had hot dogs for lunch, the ones that swelled when you boiled them, not the red kind my mother cooked, and i couldn't eat them. later, my mother showed me my new room, one i would share with my sister til she was a teenager, with our matching closets and desks that Daddy built that looked like ladders on the sides. somewhere i have pictures. 

ours is a story house, full of sounds and smells. the saturday nights when we'd sit at the foot of my mother's bed and watch her smooth her nylons over her legs, attach her pearl earrings to her ears for an evening out with Daddy. the phone ringing at all hours. days when we would climb the ladder to the attic, playing on rainy days when we couldn't go outside. sitting at the kitchen table as teenagers sharing a dinner of steak fondue. or in the living room, on the sofa with Daddy and his banjo, wanting bill bailey, whoever he was, to please come home. listening to my sister play Climb Every Mountain when she had hit a sour note on some other song. the time Daddy gave me honey and whiskey to cure my cough. or the day i was making potato stamps and sliced the tip of my finger nearly off. (you can still see the scar.) the soft click of the pulls on my parent's dresser drawer when we looked inside to marvel at our mother's jewelry. the crinkle of the newspaper as Daddy shined his shoes. it is both present and past tense, will always be that in memory.

the living room chimney Santa came down that never once held a fire. the family room window the tree fell through when the first tornado hit. (there were two, years apart) the dining room window where just last year the squirrel hid in the drapes after chewing out the mullions. the sand pile where the dogs are buried. the front porch where we take our family pictures. the incinerator, where we burned our Christmas wrapping paper and set the yard on fire. 

opening the front door for my sister's first date with the man who would become my brother-in-law. closing it on the boy i would not marry. 

these are just my stories. my brother and sister have their own. my mother has hers, too. some we have shared, some are private, some only the house holds close.

stories: the bricks and mortar of any family's life, much more, i hope we learn, than the underpinnings of the building we have called home for 50 years. 

in an hour or so, my sister and i will set out down the road again toward home. we have business to discuss, lists to make to help this move be as easy on our mother as it can. but in the silence between our chatter lay all those stories, wrapping us up like a soft blanket in the early morning, warming us as we wait to breathe this new day in.



writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Read More

Friday with Daddy

daddy never went through the front door of our house.

always through the back, by the carport and into the utility room where he might scale a fish (much to my mother's chagrin) where the dog sat and scratched at the door during our supper, where he stitched up a rabbit my sister found injured in the yard. where one morning when he was in his 40s he collapsed into my mother, sobbing because his friend had died at home while reading the paper in his wing chair and daddy had to pronounce him dead.

the front door was reserved for prom dates and the rare trick-or-treater, for strangers stopping by. but when daddy came home on last friday — april 19 — they brought him through the front door. 

he came home the same way he left town way back in february, in a giant transport filled with fancy machines, a blue tulip-like flower emblazoned on the side. 

we had made the decision to bring him home two days before, my family and his hospital team crowded around his bed. he'd been asking to go home for more than a month, to leave behind the machines and tubes and take his rest in his bed at home. pat, my father's pa, carefully listed off the options for a man who could no longer breathe completely on his own. a long-term care hospital. palliative care or Hospice. 

when i heard the word 'home' i looked to my mother, praying she would choose that option. in a wheelchair herself, she would be going home herself the next day, to 24-hour caregivers my sister would meet later in the day. my brother leaned into mama, asking quietly: what do you want to do?

'home,' she said. 'let's take him home.'

a week ago now, the transport team pulled up in front of our house drew him out into the crisp spring air. and i was waiting.

'you're home daddy!' i shouted, and he looked around. home, his wish finally granted. i stood there— my family waiting just inside the front door — watching him look around at the sky. they wheeled him into our front hall where the Christmas tree stood in december, down the hall he had walked so many times in the middle of the night in his pajamas toward the back door and a patient waiting. down the hall, toward the linen closet, that when i was five i was convinced held a witch. they wheeled him to his room, to a bed he had last slept in on february 5, the room he had shared with my mother for 50 years. 

it felt like a long ride to me, down our hall. across the creaky floorboard that gave my brother's Christmas morning crawl away. past my childhood room. a mile it seemed, as they shifted the gurney to make room for this 6-foot-two man, squeezing him through the door into a room softened by carpet and soothing blue.

daddy brought with him a host of people. the Hospice doctor and two nurses. a respiratory therapist, Pat, who had been caring for him all these weeks. a priest who's liberal views challenged daddy's conservative ones, but in his years as their minister, the two had become good friends. 

the team to settled him, and my mother's caregivers helped her into place beside him. it was mid-afternoon.

by the time we gathered next to him, daddy wore his familiar pajamas, sat propped against his favorite pillow, talked to us. i took hold of his hand, and he said something i couldn't grasp... what, daddy?

he looked straight at me and said: your hands are COLD! he wanted chocolate milk, but we had only vanilla ice cream.  i spooned it carefully into his mouth, he swallowed, not seeming to care that we could not grant his original wish.

the day before he came home, daddy talked to all of his grandchildren on the phone. somehow, after all these weeks of quiet, he had much to say. it was a miracle, really. i talked to him, too, as did my mother and sister, all of us overjoyed at hearing his voice again. 

last thursday was her first day home as well, after her fall. we had fixed her crab cakes — the best meal she had ever eaten! — and watched as she pulled herself up on her bed, straighten out that broken leg, beginning the first steps toward her recovery.  

+++

when we gathered everybody around in the room, daddy said: we didn't plan for all these people.' for daddy, it has always been about the plan. each day i visited him in the hospital, he would ask: plan. toward the end, when we had no idea, i'd shrug my shoulders — one of his exercises — and say, 'who knows? that's the plan.' which seemed to satisfy him.

this time we had one. we all joined the priest for last rites from the good ol' Book of Common Prayer. and then daddy thanked everyone for coming. thanked them, which is so what my father would do. later on, he FaceTimed with my daughter and my niece. strange, that, this 84-year-old dying man saying when asked by his granddaughters how he felt, he said:'pretty good.'

++++ 

i will tell you that it's something, when your siblings gather round your dying father. 

my brother, a physician, is good with those who are critically ill. i have watched him with my father all these weeks. he leans in, speaks softly, but loud enough to jostle daddy awake when need be. this day was no different. i can't imagine how hard it is to be doctor, lawyer, indian chief, son, for he has been all these things since february, and again on this afternoon, our last friday with daddy. 

my sister brought the dog in, picked her up and put her on the bed with daddy, knowing just how long he had waited to touch her head.

we spent the afternoon and evening gathered around my parents, telling stories and praying and singing. After supper, i sat with him and read him the story of his life. 

we kissed him goodnight, leaving he and my mother alone in the room. she lay by his side the whole night, and ruby did for most of it. 

and then, a call, footsteps in the hall, my sister running toward the room where i had tried to sleep a little. 

it was over. 

we surrounded his body, talking and crying, naming all the dogs he was now getting to see. our grandparents. his friends. so many who have made this journey before him. 

and then we left the room, all of us, to wait for the next step.

in the wee hours, as we sat up and waited for the Hospice nurse and the funeral director to arrive in the pouring rain, we listened as mama told stories about him and their life together, their early years. Despite all the uncertainty and the trauma we've experienced these many weeks, what a treasure my father's last hours were to all of us.

dawn came, and we called all the children, made arrangements for them to join us in this new life without their Pop B. not one of us has wanted to go there, but at least we will travel together, his legacy to us that he was the magnet that drew us together, keeps drawing, even in his absence.

in the days since daddy died, we have heard a hundred stories from his patients and friends, many reflecting his wry humor, others his humble, caring nature. 

'he was quiet, but he was powerful,' the man, a patient, who has kept up our lawn when daddy no longer could told me yesterday. yes he was. 

my father was a great man, so many have said to us in the past week. but aren't all our father's that? 

"so with the sleight of his magician's hand, he will end the show,' i wrote back in 1997. and i don't know who will miss him more — his patients, or the doctor himself..."  those very words caught in my throat as i read them to him one last time just a few hours before he died.  words appropriate for retirement so many years ago, and, it turns out, for his last friday with us. 

i can't imagine now  how much i'll miss him. it still isn't real to me yet. but i am not alone, because i have a full family and a whole town gathered around me, and we are all holding each other up.

 bye daddy. guess it was finally your time to hit the road. be careful. and have a safe and happy trip. sbr

ps: thank you to all who have called and visited, who have sent food, cards and facebook messages, who had loved my daddy at times it seems as much as i did. your generosity toward my family is overwhelming. maybe now daddy understands just how much he meant to all who knew him. susan

read more about him here


writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Read More

coming around again

i don't remember what year i first saw the movie Heartburn, but i know Meryl Streep singing itsy-bitsy spider to her little boy and the baby she held in the carrier at her chest spoke to me. and Carly Simon singing the words: ... pay the grocer/ Fix the toaster/Kiss the host good-bye/then you break a window/burn the souffle/scream the lullaby... well, that was right where i was at that minute in my life. 


small babies. husband who worked all the time and came home a bit rattled from the traffic outside and all the baby noises inside and i was just tired, all the time and if i am honest just a little bit angry that i wasn't writing and i wanted to throw something at somebody, maybe even a pie like Meryl eventually did but that would not have been ladylike. and i didn't happen to make pies very often in those days.


and though i knew my husband was not carrying on like Jack Nicholson (he was just trying to pay the bills), he had been a pretty good reporter like Carl Bernstein and that fact was one of the reasons i had fallen in love with him in the first place. and we were both writers as Carl and Nora Ephron were and so there was that, too. i just identified with Meryl's and just watching the film somehow i knew deep where it matters that there would be a good day or two ahead of me even though i was spending more than a few of my current days crying on the back porch because the baby inside the house wouldn't stop. crying. either of us.


i know more than anything that i wanted to write a story like that one day, one that would be funny and sad at the same time and real, about the things that go on every day but you are too busy to miss their meaning.


like what makes you go out and cry on the back porch on a sweltering Georgia afternoon feeling quite sorry for yourself and homesick and then looking up at the wisteria growing over the top of porch then thinking you really need to get the hedge clippers out and trim it, not knowing one thing about wisteria except that it seemed to be wrapping your house with itself. and that thought leads to the fact that you didn't really like the house nor the 18 percent interest rate or the fact that it faced North Decatur Road and that leads to realizing that Scarlett O'Hara's mill was on N Decatur Rd and you are sure Scarlett didn't have to deal with all the traffic that you do just walking to the mailbox. and then you have to laugh at the absurdity of that picture, Scarlett walking to your mailbox in her pretty white taffeta with the green trim and asking the kind gentlemen in the buggy blocking your driveway to please step aside because she is late to lunch at Tara and so you pick yourself up and go back into the house and take the crying baby into your lap and rock yourselves into feeling better.

like the time tornadoes swept through downtown Atlanta (no, i'll not say like Sherman) and my husband worked for the power company (he was no lineman for the county, but a pr flack) and having been through a tornado myself before i got the baby and the dog in our little hallway and put our tiny tv on a kitchen chair so i could watch the weather. and when the lights went out and the sump pump stopped working and the basement thought about flooding and my husband didn't come home i put the baby to bed and somehow had the best night's sleep i had had in a year. things like that.

Nora Ephron had done that, taken a magnifying glass to her own life, poking around long enough to find the funny in the middle of all the pain.


then there was When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail — which I didn't love at first but can't stop watching whenever it comes on tv now — and i thought every single time, well, she has done it again, that Nora, lived right inside my head and put what i was thinking down on paper. who is brave enough to do that? go inside a woman's head and reveal what she is making those around her think she thinks, and then say, too, what she is really thinking?


certainly not me. i was too busy raising my kids and trying to write sweet about it at the same time and hiding what i was really feeling from pretty much everybody around.


because that was more ladylike than the alternative.


in the days since Nora died i have read a dozen articles about her, how she basically was the funniest friend you'd ever want to have, and that she was a real champion for women writers trying to make a go of it. to write the funny, sad truth about life. 


there is that line in Sleepless in Seattle, when Rosie O'Donnell's character is talking to Meg Ryan and she says: you don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie. don't we all? with the nice lighting and just the right soundtrack and the overstuffed sofas and the bookcases to the ceiling and the apartment that looks out over the streets of NYC but you don't hear any of the noise? who doesn't want to be in love like that, even at my age? 


and the scene where Meg is standing on the side of the road watching at Tom Hanks greets his real life wife (who is not his wife in film) and Meg later says to Rosie that she looked like somebody they would want to be friends with. not that i ever could have been but watching her movies made me feel like Nora was someone i wish i had as a friend. because she was writing so much of what i was feeling, that somehow in the middle of a sweltering friday afternoon in the middle of the summer you could still believe you could fall the tiniest bit in love with your husband again even though the baby wouldn't stop crying and there were toys all over the floor.


maybe that's just me. but i know when i was that young mother, and as i got a little older, too, i remembered because Nora's words told me, how it felt to know something important about someone just by the way their hand felt holding yours. because of her i imagined how it would feel to every now and then to be that... in love in a movie. or to have someone describe you to someone else like Tom Hanks described his movie wife in Sleepless. just watching her peel an apple was enough for him. 


truth be known, i have more than once daydreamed that once i finally finish my novel that dear Nora would read it and want to make a movie starring Meryl and Sissy Spacek and Holly Hunter with Tom Hanks as the aging love interest because i can so see them in it.


ok, so that's a pretty big daydream. besides, Tom and Meryl will likely be in a retirement home by the time i finish it. 


but every single time i watch Julie & Julia and Julie falls exhausted on her bed after she punches the answering machine button and call after call is from agents and publishers all because she has a BLOG, well, i cry every time, buckets, because that is my 
dream right there in living color.


never mind that i have absolutely nothing in common with Nora. raised in a jewish family in nyc and the daughter of screenwriters, she could not have lived a more different life than this little eastern nc episcopalian. but knowing that just shows me that when you get right down to it, we are all pretty much the same, at least on the inside.

i guess what i have been trying to say in all of this is thank you to Nora, for showing me that even in the middle of living your life with all its bewildering twists and turns there is usually a pretty good story in there somewhere, a story with deep truths about human connection. and even in the sad parts there is always room to laugh at yourself. so thank you. for showing me that there is story in everything. it's just a matter of how close you look. and if you miss it the first time, it will be coming around again soon. 



writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Read More

ide-a-s of march

Reverb 11: If March 2011 was your last month to live, how would you live it?

Read More

this one's for the birds

Ordinary joy. Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

Every morning as I make my coffee I look out at the birds. My mother taught me years ago how to know a common house wren from one called Carolina, a thrush from robin, catbird from mockingbird, junco from chickadee. I watch the towhee scratch for food on the ground, the nuthatch descending the tree head-down, and I thank my mother for one of the many simple joys of daily life she shares with me.

Bigdaddy & great-grandson, John, ca:1988

For bluebirds, I thank my grandfather. He used to raise them, if you can do such a thing, fashioning nesting boxes out of old pine, hanging them on the north side of the house, one in the small pine grove he planted when I was a child, just steps away from his front porch. On summer afternoons as we sat on the porch, splashes of blue flittered around the yard, father birds in and out of the boxes, feeding nesting mothers and later, growing broods.

When my husband and I bought a house in Atlanta, Bigdaddy brought me a handmade box, and we hung it on a tree in the back yard and waited. No bluebirds. We moved, taking the box along with us, rehung it, but nary a bluebird did we see. In 1989 we moved again, and once again I hung the box. No bird darkened the door for a year. One day before we had lived in the house for a year, Bigdaddy died. And on that morning as I was looking out my kitchen window, a flash of brilliant blue flittered through the yard. And landed on the door to the house. (I am NOT lying here.)

Sadly, he didn't stay, but I was hopeful. When the homemade box — not one of the fancy new ones — rotted, I reluctantly replaced it with a new one, moved the box a little more to the north side of our yard. Birds flittered through but never stayed. I put out meal worms, just like Bigdaddy did, and when a clutch took up in the plastic decorative box in my neighbor's back yard, they came to my house to feed. To bathe in the birdbath. Sort of like college students... it would be only a matter of time before they came home to stay. At least I hoped.

Eastern Bluebird, female —rountreemediaphotography

One morning earlier this year I scuffed into the kitchen, filled the coffee pot and looked outside. Blue, dancing through the yard caught my eye. A daddy bluebird was on the box. I watched, as he stood first at the door, then hopped in, his beak peeking out, then quickly, flew to stand on the box's top. I grabbed my binoculars, searched a nearby tree for Mama Blue, whom I knew was close at hand. And there she was, first on the top, then slipping so quickly inside I almost missed her. Back on the top, and the two danced a little jig, then flew away. Every morning after I kept watch, hating to leave for work for fear I would miss them if they returned. And then one day, in a flurry of wings and straw, they built a nest.

Years ago I bought a book on bluebirds, since my grandfather could no longer tell me how to raise them up. I knew now to knock before I opened the front door, but that it was ok to visit, to count. Each day I knocked, and each day I opened the door, first to find it empty. And then, joy! Two sky blue eggs. Then three. Then four. But Mama won't nowhere to be found.

Joy came again when I saw her on the top of the box. She flew inside. And stayed. Daddy flew in and out, keeping her sated. I brought more worms, and in the mornings, I knocked first, then sprinkled them on the top. Mama usually flew in from high up in the trees, out for her morning swirl, and watched. And before I was even steps away, she and Daddy stood there on the top, feeding.

Joy, again, when one day as I approached the box with my worms, I heard the tiniest chirps. Babies! I counted the days on my calendar, estimating when they might fledge, (16-21 days) worried I would miss it while I was at work.

But Mama bluebird was good to me. She waited to push those babies out of the nest on a day I was home and could watch. She sat in the dogwood, coaxing in a gentle voice, until one by one, they each took that first baby flight toward her, their soft freckled down fluttering. It seemed to take hours. And then suddenly, they were gone.

I kept feeding the worms. And my bluebird parents came back each morning for the feast.  At least for awhile. By midsummer, there was no sign of them, until one day, my father was visiting, and we noticed twigs coming out of the sides of the box. We opened the box to find not pine needles and straw but the makings of a nuthatch nest, which he advised me to remove, as there were no eggs inside. Within the week, my bluebird couple was back, and four more eggs took up residence. And I bought more worms.

This time I wasn't home when the babies fledged, but some weeks later when I looked out in the yard, four fat brown speckled birds, their feathers tinged with blue, slurped at the bird bath. 

And what do you know? Just now as I let the dogs outside, I see Mama Bluebird again, her head peering quickly into the box.


Joy abounds. Yes I can do just such a thing.

Read More

I ought to be in pictures: Ok, so I cheated just a bit

Photo - a present to yourself. Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.

Amateur photog that I am, I have taking well over a thousand photos this year, 999+ of them of other people. And of the two or three of me taken, they all seem to say: tired, old, fat, and tired again. Now, if this was last year, it would be easy. Despite 9 months of lost sleep and fretting, I looked pretty damn good on my daughter's wedding day, if I say so myself. What a happy day that was, for all of us. (Thanks, Joey/Jessica, and Linda, and Eric.)


But in 2010? Not so much.

Oct. 10, 1982

My husband and I have a tradition, though. Since Oct. 10, 1982, we have kept a photo record of our anniversaries. The idea came from the wedding gift of a dime store photo album from one of my mother's cousins, who gave us instructions to fill the album of photos taken on our wedding anniversaries, and looking back, we would be surprised at the stories the photos tell. That first picture was captured on a humid Georgia Sunday, and we dressed up in our rehearsal dinner clothes. I have written before that it looks to me like we are a couple a little unsure of the road we are traveling together. He holds me as if he will never let me go. I look like I could use a few pounds. What the picture doesn't show is the gnats flying around our faces, and the sadness we both felt, because my husband's father had had surgery to remove a necrotic brain tumor the day before.


Not all the Oct. 10ths between then and now have been quite so awful for our family, though one or two have been marked by loss. We've celebrated pregnancies, moves, new houses, even something as seemingly inconsequential as yet another year together, just muddling through. I often give photo albums as wedding gifts, being careful to choose ones that have at least 50 pages. A few years ago, I had to buy a new album, because our old one was filling up.

Oct. 10, 2010

On Oct. 10, 2010, a Sunday, we got up early and took our dog to church. Now smart as he is, Reagan is not quite up to all the bowing and posturing and kneeling we Episcopalians are known for, and as far as I know he couldn't tell a credence table from a lavabo bowl. But the date of our 29th wedding anniversary happened to be on the Feast of St. Frances, when everybody brings an animal to church for a blessing.


The photo is taken by our friend Claire, just a quick snap so we could have it for the album. When I look at it now, I search for traces of the skinny girl in the Princess-Di-style dress who wasn't so sure about marriage at the end of that first year. Now, this woman seems to understand much more (though there are still some things she has yet to learn), and her groom has loosened his grip a bit, sure now, that she is not going anywhere. She's put on a few more pounds than she needed back in 1982, but she's added some laugh lines, too, and I'd like to think those lines show that today she can giggle a little more freely than she did that first year.


The picture may not be worth a thousand words, but it is worth more than the 10,585 days together that it represents. We have grown up and older, loosened our grip of each other enough to grow into ourselves. And I hope that keeps on happening, as we move toward 7,665 more October 10ths, to 50 years, and beyond. 


And what I said before about another year together seeming inconsequential, that is not true, not true at all. Even though on some of those days we have lost time arguing at stoplights, have forgotten to give each other a kiss goodbye, just have nothing new to give each other at the end of the day except a burden, on other days we have watched our children tickle toes with the ocean, take hold of a new family, find their gifts. We have watched each other grow businesses, write books, fail, then try again. 


Though on some days we have buried our parents and dogs, on others we get to take our dog to church, or like today, watch him playing with our granddog in a new snow fall. And though we may end this day, both of us snoring side-by-side (as the dog snores on the floor next to us), every single one of our days is a prize. 

Read More

I have been waiting all year

creativeisaverb@pattidigh

Prompt: 5 minutes. Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010.

cloos' club lunches writing cloo's club the novel wicked full frame snow days with the dog  june in nyc (with the princess and her pea) graham's new job suppertime in winter will berry's almost snowed-out wedding writing in response to scripture sailing holy grounds easter vigil phone calls from my sister and barbara organizing the gathering finding patti digh arranging altar flowers friday walks with reagan bobby sherman meredith's visits home staff retreat conversations in the purple room friends of the friendless taking pictures any day playing memory with cole hearing angels singing at bess's wedding Sunday naps  anna's shower and wedding suppers with emily august in nyc wicked, again (with M) diana gabaldon finding sandra finding kay lunch with graham lunch with rick  sunsets at the sound staff lunches talking it out haircuts with eric writing retreat hearing the world richmond marathon my birthday glee! raising hope

One note: You can hear Patti Digh (twice) at The Gathering, a women's event, at St. Michael's Episcopal Church, Fri/Sat, Feb. 25 & 26. Find out more and register. Learn how to live your life as a poem.

Read More