“Good night, I love you.  God Bless You.”

A kiss on the forehead, a caress on the cheek.  Tuck the covers up over her shoulder and around down, under her chin.

She has her flashlight, the closet door is closed.  

One last look around the room…  “I love you.”   Then I shut the door.

But not all the way, of course.

How many times did I go through this routine?  

I was always too tired to appreciate it.  Exhausted and weary…
I didn’t really comprehend that one night was going to be the last night.

But it was.

One night, I tucked her in, she smiled up at me with dreamy eyes, half mast.

Then I watched the glowing sun, sinking so slowly on the horizon, the colors were spectacular and vivid and I thought it just couldn’t get any more beautiful and precious.   

It seemed only a few moments.

The stars appeared in the darkness, and I felt an ache in my heart and a lump in my throat as a premonition, warning me of change.

“They grow up fast,” the old ladies warned, when they had arrived with baby presents.  “Cherish every moment,” they had chided when she was noisy at church.  “It can’t last forever,” they had smiled through gritted teeth, waiting to pick up their own kid from driver’s ed.

They were right.  

When the sun rose the next morning, the birds sand a joyful song and the world awoke to a brand new day.

And she was all grown up.

I haven't posted any flowers in a long while.  Here is one of my favorites.
This was my dad's Crown of Thorns plant.  It covered his desk, sprawling over his workspace,  soaking up the sunlight on the south side of his office, where the sun shone most brightly.  

Under this plant's ferocious gaze, Dad chatted on the phone, buying used hospital equipment like X-ray machines, Geiger meters and pancake probes and ultrasound machines.   He would load the heavy machinery up from metro hospitals, clean, repair, refurbish, and resell.   He loved that job.   It somehow gave him so much joy to take what someone considered "junk" machinery, and to work with it and recondition it and make it something valuable.   He frequently sold to hospitals in impoverished areas, or to countries that otherwise would never be able to afford something as expensive as an ultrasound machine.  He followed up with service plans, because he knew each machine so well, and kept them in good working order.  He took "junk" and helped save lives with it. 

When Dad passed away, I took his thorny plant home.  
It's in my studio now, and still sprawling, covering the desktop, producing thousands of thorns and occasional tiny red drops of flowers.

I like this plant's daily reminder that somehow, God does the same kind of job that my dad did so well.  God takes the thorns and the garbage and "junk" of my life, and with his tender care, he makes it into something worthwhile.  He knows my faults, he can correct them.  He knows my brokenness, and somehow, he can find a place for me anyway.  He knows that someone, somewhere needs me...
And so he turns me into something valuable.  
Thorns and all. 

  

“I’m ashamed of you, Mom,” he teased.  

He looked down on me, patted my head like he would the dog, and smiled.  “How could you forget that Fionn mac Cumhaill had a dog named Bran?”

This, from the sixth grader.  

Oi.

When did the boy become smarter than I am?

It must have happened overnight.  That’s it.

One evening, I tucked him in, kissed him goodnight and made sure his baby tooth was safely under the pillow so the blasted tooth fairy could find it in the frantic moments before breakfast. 

The next thing I knew, he had all his adult teeth, a slightly shady top lip, and was spouting off Gaelic history, chuckling at my forgetfulness.

“I thought you said you went to college, Mom.  What happened?”

What happened, indeed.

I am getting old-ish.

I don’t remember the quadratic equation, nor why it is important.  
I can no longer recite the Gettysburg Address.  
I don’t “get” any references to pop culture, unless my kids explain them.   

My hair is greying, my hips are widening, and my eyes require cheap plastic magnifiers to read.

Is it true that nostrils really keep growing?  

Because I remember being a child, and looking up into my grandmother’s loving face.  Her hair was grey and wiry, her girth enabled her to handle two kids on her lap at once for admiring agates and other treasures.  Her face was brown with creases and wrinkles and little spots on it and we loved her dearly.  I admired every bit of her as she taught me to make her homemade cinnamon rolls (“Stop beating up the dough!  If you want tender rolls you have to handle it more gently!”)  She is the one who inspired my love of Irish history, we spent hours together, poring over her expired subscriptions of Irish magazines.   

These days, I look into the mirror, and I see that my face is turning into hers.  

The first thing that comes to mind is,  “Oh, my, Grandmother, what big nostrils you have.”

I never noticed her nostrils when she was alive.  I noticed the love between her and her sisters, her devotion to my grandpa, the way she always baked delicious things when we came to visit.  I noticed her spunk and her sass in responding to the jokes of my numerous uncles.  And being one of the younger cousins, I noticed how she often put her arm around the teenage girl cousins, hugging them close as they talked about “things” in the kitchen together.  I noticed that she always had an extra sparkle in her eye when she smiled at Jeff and the boys, who made us laugh with their antics, like hiding my uncle’s cigarettes up a tall tree.  I can see her now, swatting away at those teasing faces with her hands, laughing at their torments as they wheedled for more cookies.

I saw a lot of love and devotion and laughter.  I saw her as the heart of her huge, happy family.

I never saw big nostrils.  Or wrinkles, or grey hair.  I only saw Grandma, who loved us.
Was she smart?  Did she know the quadratic equation?  
I don’t know.
Who cared?

She was a grandma, a mother, a sister, a friend.  

She was loved.

I’d like to remind everyone that to be loved IS to be beautiful.  

When they pat your head and smile, they are telling you that they love you.  
When they pull you close and hug you,  they are not counting your grey hairs, and they are not measuring your nostrils. 

They love you.

So in my grandmother’s words, “stop beating up the dough,” and be a little more gentle with yourself, please.

You are loved.

More signs of spring!  Hope you enjoyed the sunrise, too.

What do you see when you look out at the world?  Do you see a big mess of darkness? Tangles of trouble, insurmountable pain and fear? Hatred and despair?  

All those things are there, I know.  
The world can be a tough place.   

Just reading the news headlines is enough to scare me.  Add my own personal troubles, and I could be overwhelmed, buried in negativity.

I could be jaded.
I was jaded.

But I have found a secret weapon that melts away all my fears.  
I have discovered that even in the forest of fear and doom, beautiful things grow.  

Little things.

You have to search for them.  

Once you learn how to find the little things, you will find hope and joy everywhere.
Because hope and joy are everywhere. 

Here is what I found in the middle of that dismal looking forest this morning…
I hope you can find some wonderful small things today, too.  
The small things make all the difference.

It's World Down Syndrome Day, 3 - 21.  Love, joy, and peace to you!

What are little girls made of?  

Sugar and spice and….a hyperdrive.

This is the scene I encountered today in my kitchen.  

Small One had pulled the kitchen bench out from under the table, and was using it as a mechanic’s car creeper thing.  Since she has never, to my knowledge, ever seen anyone work on a car, I’m not sure how she knew this.  I myself had to google “auto mechanic’s tools” just to learn what a car creeper thing is called.  You know what I’m talking about; the little flatbed on wheels that mechanics use to move around under cars while they are being repaired.  How did my five year old know about this?

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m in the army.  I fix cars and machines.”

Way to go, Rosie the Riveter. 

I admire her industrious ways.  She tinkers away with scissors and tape and a paper wrench that she has made by herself, tapping on and taping the underside of the kitchen table. 

“What are you actually doing to the table?”  I ask.

“Silly Mom,” she says, laughing at my naiveté while she switches tools.  “This is a space car and I’m installing a hyperdrive.”  

Oh, is that all.  How did I not know this?

“What’s a hyperdrive, Dear?”

“It’s from Star Wars.  It makes spaceships go fast.” she said. “Wanna watch me?  Then we can have cookies that I made for a tea party.”

So we chatted together while she worked, and I listened to her intergalactic travel plans for after the hyperdrive was installed.  When she finished, we used toothpaste to polish an antique silver tray she liked, and she loaded up her homemade paper cookies.  They were delightful cookies, with glued-on ribbons and yarn pom pom sprinkles.

Then, like many generations of mothers and daughters throughout history, we had a lovely tea party together. 

Today proves to me that she really is made of sugar and spice and everything nice… 

And hyperdrives are very nice.

Years ago, the Irish dance group Riverdance made an appearance in our city.  Their thunderous shoe stomping, jumping, frenetic tapping and leaping lit up imaginations, made a generation of Americans fall in love with the Irish, and changed my kids’ childhoods forever.  It was a crazed phase, really.  Irish dance schools popped up all over the U.S. in response to clamoring parents, willing to plunk down hundreds of dollars for imported hard shoes and curly wigs.  The universal story of oppression and rebellion and heartache and finally, freedom, told by glamorous athletes in tap shoes was powerful enough to make most hearts pump green blood.  It made us all feel Irish, deep down.  I ordered three pairs of little hard shoes for my daughters within a week of the show.

But no one wanted to open an Irish Dance school way out in the sticks.  So down to the city I went, and I found myself a teacher who would travel to the edge of civilization once a week.

God gave us the luck of the Irish when he sent that teacher to us.  This dancing Irishwoman took my impetuous ideas and impulse purchases and gently turned our  country kids into Irish Step Dancers.  

“Riverdance is great,” she used to say.  “But there are centuries of Irish dance and rich cultural traditions that your kids would appreciate more.”  For the next nine years, she patiently taught our growing group of kids dances from Irish history, set dances from the Irish countryside, dance steps normally done at parties on propped-sideways doors and kitchen tables, and even one that she learned from an Irish garbage man. 

She was brilliant.

“They can share joy through dance,” she explained.  “It is not just about performance and competition.  With music and dance, they can bring happiness to so many.”  With that aim in mind, she led them from nursing home to nursing home, across our metro area.  Instead of competing for trophies, they danced for the elderly.  

And the elderly responded, loud and clear.

They sang along.  They clapped their hands, tapped their velcro geriatric shoes, and pounded their canes to the beat of the kids’ shoes.  They smiled at the children, cheering them on with each jig and reel.  Inevitably, the strains of “Oh Danny Boy” drew tears from the nursing home residents.  Wispy voices joined in, crackling on the high notes.

Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling,
'Tis you, 'Tis you must go and I must bide.

Once, some of the moms found a treasure trove of cast-off dance costumes at a thrift store. The day we tried them out for the first time, a white haired man from the fifth row raised his cane, shaking it.

“Does your Mammy know you’re out dancing in that red dress?”  He scolded the girls.

We put the kids back in pleated plaid skirts.  Good to know your audience.

One performance, something happened that I will never forget.  It was around St. Patrick’s Day.  The kids put on a show in a Memory Care Facility.  This wasn’t the first time they’d danced for people with Alzheimer’s.  They didn’t expect much of a response here.  They were veteran dancers, after all, who showed up with gifts of cookies.  Just a bit of joy for the elderly, who seemed to need it.  

It happened to be a Sunday, and many residents had families visiting.  We wheeled residents out to the sunroom, set out the platters of cookies, musical instruments, and plugged in our speakers.  Silence fell in the room, and the first dancer took the floor.  The ten year old girl began her traditional Irish jig, hard shoes banging and rapping away at the floor.  That’s when it happened.

A frail man, who had been quietly sitting to one side staring vacantly into space, suddenly pushed away his walker and stood up.  His flaccid, sad face broke out in a huge grin.  

“That’s my song!”  He yelled.  “I know this one!”

He gleefully bounced to the front of the room, took the girl by her small hands, and proceeded to dance all about the room, jigging his heart out.  He leaped and turned, kicked and twirled with the girl, as well as any ninety year old man could.  The lilt of the music kept him aloft, and it was as if eighty decades of age melted away and the two dancers became one with the music, dancing their jig.  

As the song ended, the girl guided him back to his chair, and he eased down, still smiling.  His family was shocked, his daughter openly sobbing.  

“That’s my song!” He said again, before falling silent, back into the shadows of Alzheimer’s.  “That’s my song...”

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow,
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow,
'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow,--
Oh, Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so!

Spring Break!

Woop! Woop!  Excitement is high this week.

“Where are you going for Spring Break?”  Another Mom asked me.  I knew she was going to Florida, taking her kiddos to Disneyworld.  And I am sure, knowing this mom, that her vacation was planned to the detail, and the whole week would be thoroughly enjoyed by the polite and happy Someone Else’s Kids.  

And I was not jealous.  Really.  Of course I would love to take kids to Florida for Spring Break, but it would have to be Someone Else’s Kids. 

Not mine.  

Definitely not mine.  

“So what are you doing for Spring Break?” she asked again, jolting me from my reverie.

“I am staying home and breathing!”  I smile.  This is the truth.  And I will enjoy this.

Because staying at home with nine people and pets and friends and drop ins is going to take a lot of calculated deep breathing.  I may hide in a closet, too.  That will be the only quiet place, I am certain. 

On Monday of Spring Break, I bought six pairs of tall rubber boots and six sets of watercolor paints. The kids and their pals are going to have a magnificent week of stomping in puddles and watercolor painting.  I am sure it will be a great week.  I scrub all floors, and am certain that the white tile will remain clean for many days, with those wonderful boots keeping the mud outside.  I am so pleased.  I will probably get to think and write and paint, while they are so busy and happy.

On Tuesday of Spring Break, I admired the copious spread of landscape paintings in the quiet of my kitchen.  They seem to have gone through half a ream of paper.  It was still early when I discovered that the “quiet” kids had created a huge mudslide in the back yard, which they were sailing down, standing up, like barefoot water skiers.  There was still no mud in my home, but the backyard looks like Southern Californian mudslides.  They are banished from the backyard.  After lunch, Little Guy had set up a winter sled in the widest puddle, a small lake, really.  

“Watch me, Mom!”  

He took a running leap, soared in the air, landed with a thump on the sled.  The sled galumphed and sloshed, propelled forward, while Little Guy flopped backward, sitting down right into aforementioned mud lake.  While he was inside, getting clean, dry clothes, two little girls came squishing in.  It seems the depth of their puddle exceeded the height of their boots, and their little toes were swimming in muddy ice water.  And one had fallen in, and scraped her hand on an icy stick.  There was blood in the mud.  

My gosh.  I have flashbacks back to my first son, who made mud pies in the rain with a cut on his foot.  It was a teeny tiny cut, but he chose to make mud pies in a corner where the dog had gone to the, um, baño.  Yes, indeed.  That ended with a few days’ stay in Children’s Hospital with a staph infection.  With visions, no, nightmares of the blue line of infection that ran up that child’s leg, I gasped and hauled today’s kid right into the sink, and slathered her with soapy water.  Antibacterial ointment and bandages followed.  Before I even wiped up the mud from their socks and feet, Another Boy came slumping in the bathroom, pale faced and ghostly.  White lips.  Bloody knuckles.  His freckles stood out on his nose and cheeks like dark sentinels of approaching doom.  What happened?!

“I - I - I slammed my fingers in the dooooooor!”  He sat down on the white tile floor in his very muddy jeans and very muddy socks and held up his very muddy and bleeding knuckles.  I think he was going into shock.  

“Into the sink!”  I shouted.  “Hey, You in the Sink, move over!”  I saw another vision of blue lines of infection slinking up this kid’s veins, and pull out the antibacterial soap and antibacterial ointment and bandages again.  

There are now four muddy kids on the white tile.  They are adorned with muddy socks, muddy jeans, muddy shirts, muddy lips and muddy hair.  Even though some of them are bandaged up, they are all magnificently happy.  I am shown the muddy sinkhole of their creation.  The five foot wide hole of what they call “Sopa di Baño” that is now in the ground where there used to be grass.  They are proud as punch of all the mud pies lined up on the front porch.  

I make them change clothes, and start the laundry.  And they are all banished to the kitchen table to paint.  

By Wednesday of Spring Break,  the mud is disappearing, mostly dried up in the yard.  But I am noticing a trend in the paintings.  One kid has taken blue painter’s tape, and their creations now decorate his bedroom wall.  

“Look, Mom!  A cyclops!  And Medusa! and this guy’s a troll.  Every time someone hits him with an axe, smaller trolls break off him and see?  They’re everywhere.” 

Indeed.  Even the Kraken’s tentacles are climbing on his wall, right next to the Hydra with the four heads.  

Pinterest would be appalled.  I am reminded of the cute boys’ bedrooms posted on Pinterest, a website that brings together decorating ideas and moms with free time.  Pinterest shows me bedrooms for boys:  happy tree houses painted on walls, red, white and blue ships and boats and plaid and dolphins…  On Pinterest, everyone has clean tile floors, and there is no mud.  

On Pinterest, there is no Kraken slithering up a child’s wall. 

By Wednesday of Spring Break, I told them it was video game day.  

I am hiding in the closet.

And I am eating chocolate while sitting on the very clean closet floor.  I think that I realize, for the first time, that a mud puddle to a quiet, thoughtful artist mom is a very different thing that a mud puddle to a group of loud, adventuresome, energetic kids. 

I also think the closet is really nice this time of year. 
Let me know when Spring Break is over. 

I have been too preoccupied and excited to write much lately.  The ice is finally melting!  

The caverns of ice and the dark places of the earth are disappearing, washing away downstream.  What began as a single trickle now melts even the thickest ice, the coldest corners.  Nothing can stop the sun and the light and the warm breath of spring.  May your heart feel the hope of Spring today...  

It is here!

Little Fugue in G Minor by Bach is softly echoing through my living room.

I love this song.  Especially when it’s played by my kid.

Gentle, lilting, then intense, the notes tumble over each other like a waterfall, and I am carried away.   It is such an emotionally charged piece, and of course, I get choked up watching her play, imagining her in the very distant future, dressed in a floor length gown, performing Rachmaninoff on a stage. 

She’s just a little kid and she halts on some of the notes.  Determination is written on her face, and at the difficult passages, her small fingers pick out the notes timidly and delicately.  She looks over at me.

“Hey Mom,” she sighs and stops playing.  “Can I play a kid one now?  I like Chopsticks better.”

Reality check.  

The truth is, the Bach I so enjoy comes from my kid playing a magic piano app on someone’s Ipad.  

It’s not the real thing, it’s just an app.  Pathetic, right?  But I’ll take whatever music I can get.

I did buy an old piano, almost twenty years ago.  

I bought it used, and now it is unused.  

It has been moved three times.  In those twenty years, I have paid for three kids’ piano lessons.  I idealized the thought of piano playing kids like our former Perfect Neighbor Kids, who learned from their grandmother and could play anything, sensitively and beautifully.  Collectively, my kids know exactly one song on the real piano.  Just one, rollicking, pounding jazzy creation of their dad, who likes to tinker in music.  

No one can really play the piano.

The last time I had our real piano tuned, about twelve years ago, the guy was quite taken aback.  

“You say some of the notes won’t play,”  he began. 

“Yeah, it’s a pretty old instrument.”

“That’s not the problem.”  He sternly looked at me.  “Do you know what I found in this piano?”


Did I want to know?  Because that sounded like a loaded question to me.  What was it?  Was there money?  A treasure map to a lost civilization?  Or something hideous?  I looked at him nervously.  Was it terrible?

“What?”

He made a flourish with his hand, displaying the hidden contents of our piano.  Stickers.  A postage stamp.  More stickers.  Twelve small paper dolls.  A family photo.  And 89 cents in coins.

Hmm…

“How would you expect this piano to function properly when it is being used as a safe deposit box by your children?”  He humphed.  

That was the last time I had it tuned.  

And that is why the only piano music around here comes from an app.  

Until recently.  

Someone Else’s Kid was visiting our house, and sat down at our neglected, old treasure receptacle of a piano.  The notes reached my ears while I was making supper in the kitchen.  I stopped everything to listen.  It enchanted me.  I crept to the edge of the wall, and peered around the corner so as not to disturb whoever was playing.  Someone Else’s Kid continued, intense and smiling.  Eagerly, his fingers fluid like water, he poured out song after song…Joplin, Bach, Mozart, Schumann, and more.  I didn’t know my piano could sound like that!  He had a look on his face that was priceless.  I think it was love.  He loved playing the piano.  Every note was joy.  I leaned against the kitchen wall and a tear rolled down my cheek.  It was beautiful, because he loved it.  

After a while, Someone Else’s Kid got up, and ambled away to another adventure with the boys.  

But his music stayed with me.  

It certainly was not my piano that was worthy or beautiful.

It was the child’s Love, shining through the piano.  Through that wretched piano.  

Love changed it, and enabled it to make beautiful music.

Isn’t that what God does for us?   

We may be old and broken, beat up by the world.  People may think we are useless.  We collect junk on the outside and we often come with hidden baggage on the inside.

But the truth is, when God loves us, our real worth shows.  Love makes us be beautiful.

And God always loves us.  

I should have been doing the laundry.

I should have been making breakfast.

God knows I should have been cleaning the floors, or scrubbing the bathroom, or wiping the 3,000 fingerprints off the windows.

But something magical happened in the forest this week.

Usually, the forest is dark, dormant and barren in winter.  Cruelly abandoned, really.  The leaves are gone, the butterflies and flowers are gone.  The songbirds bailed a long time ago.  They’re somewhere South, sipping margaritas on a sandy beach, posting colorful selfies on instagram to those of us who are jealous and cold and left behind.

Left behind, we feverishly clean our cabins and long for spring.  Because it gets claustrophobic and messy, living in a box in the snow for six months out of the year.  I miss the sunshine.  It’s dark in the box.  

But, for one glorious morning hour this week, all that darkness was transformed.  

Who knows what all was involved…humidity, temperature, the angle of the lights, the alignment of the planets…  Whatever it was, it was perfect.  Every stick, every twig and every branch in the woods was covered in ice.  Illuminated with icy, heavenly light, the forest sparkled.  It glowed.  It refracted rainbow spectrums and ignited the woods with joy. 

I left the housecleaning in a heartbeat, and coaxed Small One out the door.

This was one of those moments.  One of those experiences that stay with you forever, able to  warm your heart on the coldest of future days.

Small One and I walked through the diamond forest together. 

An hour later, the sun had weakly risen in the sky, the ice had melted, and not one glittering crystal remained on any branch.   It was back to darkness again.  Normal.  As if nothing remarkable had ever happened.

We returned home, back to the laundry pile of doom and the drudgery of cleaning…

Later that afternoon, as I burned dinner yet another time,  Small One smiled at me.

“Remember the diamonds, Mom?”  

“Yes, Small One.”

“We walked right in the middle, didn’t we?”

Yes, Small One.  

I smiled back at her, and felt the joy return.

"The secret to everything is good compost," my grandfather used to say, as he crushed up old eggshells into the soil around his roses.  

Good Compost. 

Sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Who likes compost?  Isn't that just all the garbage and refuse that nobody else wants?
Banana peels, used coffee grounds, potato peelings and grass clippings?
Good for nothing, if you ask me.

And I don't want any of that compost stuff in my life, either, thank you very much.  Emotional garbage and hurts and sorrows...uh, uh.  That's garbage on a real-life level. Leave me out of it, I say. 

But what if I am wrong?

This Lenten Rose pushed itself up out of the thick leaves several years ago.  It seemed to come out of nowhere.  No one remembered planting it.  And yet, there it was, in the middle of all the rotten leaves... it was delicate and beautiful.  I read that it will only grow in soil that is rich in composty-garbage.  Like the almost forgotten edge of the leaf pile.

What if life is like this Lenten Rose?  What if the aches and garbage of this world are actually gifts, given to us to make us gentle and delicate and truly beautiful?  What if the very best and sweetest parts of us are born from pain and sorrow and broken hearts?    That would make our suffering the compost of this world.

My grandfather could be right...

Maybe the secret to everything really is good compost.