Yesterday, I knelt on my grandmother’s bedroom floor, tucking a pile of her belongings into boxes. I only pilfered a few things, like an old umbrella that has survived decades, from the looks of it, and four marble eggs made in Italy. While I folded her coats and stuffed scarves into the cardboard boxes, my sister proclaimed, “I am going straight home and cleaning out my closets!” And I said, “Yes, because this is what it comes down to. People rifling through your things and wondering why you kept them.”

My grandma kept old calendars. I don’t know why, since they had no notes written in them. Probably for the pictures.

I keep old calendars because I like to go back and read the notes. When my twins were young, I’d scrawl down funny things they’d said so I could remember.

My grandma kept old keys. My mother gave me a skeleton key she found in a drawer at Grandma’s, thinking it might be to the old Singer sewing machine that Grandma gave me. (It wasn’t.)

I keep old keys. It just seems wrong to throw them away, even when they’re from the front door of the house we no longer own in Marysville.

She’s only been gone a few weeks, but already we are moving along, moving the remnants of her out of that house as quickly as possible so the house can be sold.

I think of the top drawer of my white dresser, the one I bought for $15.00 at a garage sale. I spent weeks stripping paint, sanding, priming and painting that dresser. The materials cost $75.00.

The top drawer is jammed packed with weird stuff that has no other home and sentimental things like cards. There might even be a dried-up umbilical cord stump in there, nestled next to a collection of foreign coins. And speaking of coins, whatever happened to silver dollars? My dad used to have a silver dollar or a fifty cents piece jangling in his pocket from time to time.

My storage room is piled with crazy stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else. If I had a spare day, I could deal with the mess. I actually like sorting, purging and organizing . . . but I don’t have time. And my daughter, who comes by her packrat tendences honestly, will want to keep everything she sees, even the plastic baby toys hidden in large tubs.

Packing away a dead person’s belongings puts life into perspective. You really can’t take any of it with you–no would you want to, I’d think, if given a choice.

Today, I spent the afternoon digging in my front yard, trimming branches off hedges in the side yard, washing the patio with the hose in the back yard. The temperature reached 80 degrees and my daughter appeared in her Dora the Explorer swimsuit. My husband cooked dinner using his George Foreman grill. My teenagers used sharp implements to cut branches and hedges and I ended up being the only one with a cut (on my pinkie, from trying to catch the saw when I lost my grip).

The tulips prepare to bloom. The wasps buzz in and out of a hole near the front door. The leaves unfold like tiny green fans. And the stenciled walls at my grandmother’s house are hidden underneath a coat of fresh, white paint.

My grandmother died last night. She was 102 years old. My telephone rang this morning and when I saw my mother’s cell phone number I knew this was The Call. Just last night, my mom had stopped by to deliver my birthday gift (from January).

My daughter sat on my bed in front of me while I answered the phone. I was in the middle of combing out her blond ringlets. My mother told me directly, “Last night Mother died.” At least I think that’s what she said. At these life-altering moments, I seldom remember the exact words.

I hung up the phone and said to my 5-year old, “Great-grandma died last night.”

“Oh,” my daughter said, “She’s going to miss me.”

We’re talked about heaven all day. I can picture my grandma falling into the arms of my grandpa. They were married 61 years when he died on their anniversary nineteen years ago. She has missed him so much. I am so happy that she has finally crossed the threshold into eternity.

I was dry-eyed, curiously unemotional today, though as I bought new flowers and pots for my yard, I couldn’t help but think about my grandmother and her lifelong love of flowers. Rhododenrons remind me of her–she had two giant bushes outside of her back door and my siblings and I lost many bouncing balls inside those shadowy branches. Calla lilies and gooseberries make me think of her, too. As does laundry hung out to dry.

I remember how she sewed me clothes when I was a child. (Always orange and rust-colored, to complement my brown eyes, I guess.) A few years ago, she gave me her treadle sewing machine. I cherish it, even though I’ve never threaded it.

I remember with some lingering mortification, how she taped closed the M&M jar when I wouldn’t stop pilfering those candy-coated chocolates during a childhood stay at her humble home.

I remember her brushing my hair with a stiff hairbrush under a running faucet in the summertime heat. I remember the yeasty rolls she baked and the step-stool she kept in her kitchen where I perched to watch her work. I remember the way she washed dishes–she filled one side with soapy water and the other with steaming hot water. The washed dishes were submerged to rinse in the hot water. Then, always, always, wiped dry with a cotton dish towel.

She never wore a pair of pants in her life, always a dress. If you stopped by during mealtime, she’d have on an apron. I only saw her feet bare once in my whole life and that was when I spent the night with her. Until she was very old, she’d never cut her hair, but wore it twisted up in a bun. She sold Avon when she was younger. Her house always smelled like roses.

I cannot imagine a world where my grandma does not live in her tidy house with her organized drawers and labeled boxes in every closet. I cannot imagine living in a world where my grandmother doesn’t mention my name in her prayers every day. She held my hand to her heart only eleven days ago. I hold her in my heart forever.

Good-bye, Grandma. I’ll see you in heaven. Tell my dad I miss him.

We miss you already.

Madeleine L’Engle died last Thursday. She was eighty-eight. One of my favorite books of all time is her Circle of Quiet, a book I found in a book warehouse sale when we lived in Connecticut from 1987 to 1989. That book is one of the first books I ever read with a pencil in hand, underlining sentences and paragraphs, making little arrows and asterisks in the margins.

Madeleine L’Engle’s books, particularly her non-fiction books, made me feel less alone in the world.

She was a bright light, now shining in another place.

Rest in peace.

The past week has left me weary with the sort of fatigue that even a good night’s sleep fails to solve. We drove up last weekend to spend time with some friends from college, but my husband had to drive back through notorious Seattle traffic that night because he had a funeral to do the next morning. After the funeral, he again navigated the Seattle traffic and arrived in Bellingham at about dinner-time. All told, he spent about fifteen hours driving back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

When we returned home the next afternoon, the red light was blinking on our answering machine. A friend from our church was in critical condition at the hospital. My worn-out husband responded with, “I have to sleep for an hour,” and did so. Before his nap was over, another phone call came, reiterating the message about our friend in the hospital. And so, with meetings and church business sandwiched in between, my husband began sitting vigil at the church with the man’s family.

Here’s the story as I know it. I think the details are accurate.

Our friend, Jeff, went outside last Saturday to do yard work. He came in after fifteen minutes, complaining of exhaustion. He’d suffered from shortness of breath all week. His wife took him to the doctor because something just seemed off. The doctor x-rayed his chest and said, “Friend, you have pneumonia. You’ll have to stay in the hospital a few days until you feel better.”

The night, his wife kissed him good-bye and said she’d be back after church Sunday. But Sunday morning she called the church music director and told him that she couldn’t sing the solo as scheduled. “I feel like I need to go back to the hospital,” she said.

When she arrived, a nurse blocked her way from Jeff’s room. And then the nightmare began. Sometime between her departure from the hospital and her arrival that morning, Jeff’s body crashed. The medical team revived him, but his heart was beating dimly. He’d been intubated. He was no longer conscious.

And so Jeff lingered between life and death for four more nights and three days. My husband spent every available minute the hospital, buying food and offering comfort, until Jeff’s kidneys shut down and his heart beat its last beat. He was 62, I think.

He left a wife, grown children, some grandchildren and a giant circle of friends and acquaintances.

Last Saturday, he went out to do some yard work. Today, I believe he’s running in heavenly fields, basking in eternal daylight. I will never cease to be shocked by the sudden ending of life. At least with birth, you get months to get used to the idea of someone new. Even with some warning, I never get used to the finality of death and the loss of someone dear. We spend most of the days of our lives living as if we have an infinite number of days to frolic and work and squander time. And then the days run out for someone–what? so soon?–and we stop for a moment, until we forget again that our days are limited. Each time someone dies, it’s a stunning shock all over again that life on earth is limited.

On Sunday mornings, I hurry into church without my lipstick on, cringing as I’ve just noticed that my children have chosen pants too short, shirts too shabby and shoes that don’t match anything. Always, as I pull open the heavy wooden doors with stained windows and rush inside a minute or two behind schedule to teach my Sunday School class, Jeff scans me and my unkempt kids and even though I try to be invisible most Sunday mornings, he says from his seat in the entry-way, “Good morning, Mother,” in a voice brimming with wry amusement. He never let me slip past without this greeting.

But now he’ll never say it again and I can’t tell you just how much I’m going to miss him.

You know what I miss? My pillow. Oh, pillow, where art thou, pillow?

It occurs to me that I failed to mention a writing contest I entered and won. You can go here to read my article.

I find it distressing that school starts in a little more than a month. (August 30 around these parts.) I did have a random moment of longing for pumpkin patches and falling colored leaves, but the sane portion of my personality digs in her heels, resenting being dragged headlong into the future at such an alarming rate.

I’m not ready. And I have too much work to do. Didn’t summer just start twenty minutes ago?

Exhaustion.

This afternoon, I fell into the past.  My grandmother’s birthday sparked questions in my mind.  Where, exactly, did her parents come from?  I know my grandfather’s came from Sweden, but I didn’t know about her relatives.  I asked my grandmother herself, but she was a little mixed up and so then I asked my mother.  A few years back, she typed up some family history and gave us all copies, but I couldn’t locate mine.

Until today.  My mom emailed me back which prompted me to go get the box labeled “Family Tree.”  When my dad died in 1989, I gathered all his research into a single box.  I’ve hardly looked at it since.  But today, I sorted through and found immigration documents and baptism certificates and deeds to land and military discharge papers in addition to his handwritten notes about our ancestry.  I found the information my mother gave me in the same box.  (Occasionally, there is a method to my organizational madness.)

I found Ancestry.com and loaded the information I already have into a family tree.  I’m still trying to pinpoint when certain ancestors came to this country–one ancestor was a native American, but the rest came from various parts of Europe, but in the early 1800s or maybe even earlier.  I don’t know yet, but I hope to find out.

My husband came home with frozen pizzas tonight and suggested I go out for a walk in the early-evening sunshine and so I did.  The happy daffodils are blooming everywhere.  The trees are suddenly covered with fuzzy, pastel pink blossoms.  I spotted some lilac embryos when I got close to the Puget Sound.  I thought how temporary all this is–from the weather to the buds on the trees to the houses perched with their views of the Puget Sound.  My relatives lived full lives, experienced heartache and triumph, lived through wars and death, weddings and holidays.  My grandfather missed World War I because of a cataract on one eye.  My other grandfather fought in World War II, though he never told us a thing about it.  Their wives had babies, raised toddlers, fussed over schoolchildren, worried over teenagers, cried over their young adults, rejoiced over grandchildren. 

I wonder about those women in those decades so long ago.  Did they fret over their kitchen floors and yell at the children to wipe their muddy feet?  Did they recognize their individual lives were like drops of water?  Or did they see their lives as rolling waves of ocean, stretching as far as the eye can see?  All their worries are gone with them, evaporated.  My worries seem momentary when I realize that spring will transform into summer and summer will fade into fall and then winter will creep into our bones again . . . and time rolls downhill faster and faster like a snowball gaining speed on the mountain.

And yet.  The days have grown longer since Daylight Savings time started.  Now, the children are still outside at 7:00 p.m. playing makeshift games of baseball in the front yard (today with a tennis ball and a stick).  And while I’m thrilled to see my children playing childhood games with neighborhood children, I want the days to end sooner rather than later.  The children have no concept of “dinner-time” and “night-time” and “time-to-go-home-time” while the sun still shines until 7:00 p.m.  (And it will only get worse as summer approaches.)

Time flows, trickles, sometimes seems to go back uphill until suddenly, it rushes so fast it knocks you off your feet.  All you can do is swim with the current and enjoy the view as you float past.

Her grandmother served as midwife when she was born in 1906.  Yesterday, she turned a hundred and one years old, so I baked up forty-eight cupcakes, loaded my daughter into the van and headed over for a celebratory Open House.  I left my boys at home with my husband because this has been a week full of mysterious illnesses and I didn’t want to take a chance of contaminating my grandmother with germs that might ultimately kill her. 

(Last year, I had to leave behind my two youngest children when I went to her 100th birthday party because they had the flu.  March 10th is apparently not a healthy day for my children.)

I intended to stop in with my daughter and leave after, oh, say fifteen minutes because I figured that would be all she could manage before the urge to redecorate Grandma’s house or pound on Grandma’s piano would hit.  As it turned out, a 5-year old boy was already there and the two of them headed off to the back yard to play (in the mud).  Hey, it was only raining a tiny bit and we’re not made of brown sugar!  We won’t melt!

A neighbor boy on the other side of the fence chatted to the two of them and they came in to ask if he could climb the fence and play.

My grandmother is a woman of obsessive order and inflexibility.  These traits have served her well and so the thought of a neighbor boy climbing her chain-link fence would mortify her.  I said, “No, just talk to him through the fence.”

A bit later, a knock at the door.  I rose to answer it and there stood a woman lingering on the sidewalk and a boy on the front step.  One of them said, “The children wanted him to come over and play.”  And I, being taken by surprise and yet being unable to be rude, said, “Oh.  Okay.”  I said to the mother, “What is his name?” and that’s about the time I realized she didn’t actually speak English.  I don’t speak Spanish, so we nodded and smiled at each other.  And I let him walk through my grandmother’s pristine house and onto her back deck.  He carried a little Rubbermaid-type container full of sticks, rocks and “potato bugs.”  (That’s what we call them.  To you, they might be roly-polies?)  “Oh,” I said, “Potato bugs!” and then I told them to have fun.

You should know that my grandmother is essentially blind, otherwise I would never have dared to sneak a stranger through her house.  She is private and guarded.  But what she couldn’t see couldn’t hurt her.  And Armando seemed like a very nice eight-year old.  

Awhile later (after digging in the muddy side yard, I think), they decided to come inside . . . they all took off their shoes, including Armando, and I said brightly, “Well, let’s wash our hands!” and that’s about the time my cousin said, “Um, I think Grandmother might be okay with him in the backyard, but, um, since we have no toys and we don’t really know him, probably not in the house.”  And I agreed and so I sent him off with a cupcake and a cheery “good-bye!”

A bit later, I found my daughter and her cousins (ages 5 and 3) jumping on my grandmother’s bed.  My grandmother never even sat on the edge of her bed because she believed that doing so would ruin the mattress.  My grandmother folded her underwear into tidy squares her whole life.  She keeps her folding table in its original box.  She has curtains in her garage, separating her storage items from the rest of the garage . . . which features a large square of carpet.  I’ve never in my lifetime seen my grandmother wearing anything but a dress with nylons and shoes.  (Oh wait, once when I spent the night, I saw her bare feet because she was wearing a nightgown.)

My grandmother is a little obsessive about her belongings, which is what you’d expect from someone her age who lived through the tumultuous century from 1906 until now.

We didn’t tell her that the children were jumping on her bed, but I somehow think she might know, even though she is blind and moves in ultra-slow motion as she inches across her house, clutching her walker.

My daughter and I ended up staying until all the other relatives left . . . after her first playmate disappeared, two other cousins (the bed-jumpers) arrived, so she stayed busy running through the house, hiding under Grandma’s desk, and licking cupcakes.  We had arrived at 12:30 p.m. and left at nearly 5 p.m.  I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a variety of my cousins and uncles and an aunt (some of who are now aware of this blog:  “hello! Natalie and Dan!”) . . . but that was one long afternoon in my grandmother’s well-heated house.  (She is frail and has thin skin and no longer retains heat whatsoever, so she is always about twenty degrees colder than the rest of us, so we all sweat while we visit her.)

I had hoped to create a sweet, meaningful post that would make me cry, but instead, this is all I’ve got. 

So, happy birthday, Grandma!  Sorry I let a stranger track mud through your house and that I only laughed when I saw the little kids jumping on your blue-flowered bedspread.  But thanks for answering my questions–how did I only now realize that your mother arrived here directly from Ireland?  (I say all this as if my grandmother will read this, but if she were to read this, I would never have admitted the whole bed-jumping fiasco.)

When I was ten years old, my mother took me to a jewelery store on Colby Avenue in Everett to have my ears pierced.  Ever since all the cool girls in fourth grade had their ears pierced, I dreamed of wearing dangling earrings.  Who wouldn’t after seeing Ginger Herring wearing that pair of earrings that were tiny bottles containing little dried flowers?

I can’t remember the sting of the actual piercing, nor can I tell you much about the earrings I wore until college when I seemed to have a colorful pair of earrings to match each pair of socks which matched each shirt I owned.  (What?  You didn’t match your socks to every shirt you owned in the 80s?) 

As time went on, I realized I was not much good at accessorizing.  When I was newly married, I met a young woman at church named Anne who was the Queen of Accessories.  She had beautiful necklaces, carefully chosen earrings, pretty bracelets.  I admired her style, but always felt like a child playing with her mother’s jewelry box whenever I added a necklace to my outfit.  I generally wore only my wedding band and my engagement ring. 

The last four months of my dad’s life, my husband and I lived with him.  We’d intended to share housing, never dreaming that my dad would be diagnosed with fatal cancer right before we moved in.  Sometimes my dad would receive phone calls at 10:00 p.m. and leave quietly, returning after midnight.  I never knew who called or where he went, but he had no curfew and he was an adult, so I pretended not to notice.  I always wondered, though.  

One of his friends was a gray-haired woman named Helen.  I’m not sure how they became friends, but I think he was like a son to her.  He told me about the hot-fudge sundaes Helen served him and sometimes, he brought home leftovers.  I met her a time or two, but knew virtually nothing about her or about any of my dad’s friends.  

He died a few weeks after he turned 47.  Soon after his death, a card arrived for me from Helen.  In it, she enclosed a hundred dollar bill with instructions that I spend it on myself in memory of my dad.

I kept that money for a long time, pondering what a hundred dollars would buy, should buy.  I thought that clothes would fade.  I didn’t want to buy something mundane.  Flowers die.  Plants wither.  What should I buy?

I was at a department store when I saw that gold jewelry was fifty percent off. 

I spent my hundred dollars on a pair of gold hoop earrings.  They are almost an inch in diameter and they’ve been in my earlobes ever since, minus a fancy occasion from time to time when I’d match earrings to an outfit.

When I take the earrings off, I notice how often I reach up and finger those gold hoops.  That habitual gesture–touching the earrings, feeling the earrings, twisting them back into place–reminds me of my dad and his friend.  I wear them in memory of him.  My fingers reach for them without permission or knowledge of my brain. 

Fashion trends come and go, but I wear my gold earrings much as I wear my wedding rings.  They are a symbol to me of love and honor and remembrance.  Even when I don’t consciously think of what they mean to me–the rings or the earrings–they are a physical reminder of commitment and memory.

When I put on a necklace, I usually say “Oh, too much,” and then take it right back off.  But the gold hoop earrings?  They’re here to stay.    

I woke up at 6:30 a.m., annoyed to be awake.  I don’t have to be awake until 7:30 a.m. and yet I opened my eyes and was awake.  So, I did what any self-respecting sloth would do.  I got up, peed, and went back to bed where I fell into a confusing dream and woke up exhausted forty-five minutes later.

I have not adjusted to the time change.

Empty candy wrappers appear on the floor, like magic.  I tend to think it’s better to let the children gorge themselves and then we can be done with it.  I’m going to sort and purge the candy stash tonight when everyone’s gone to bed . . . I can get rid of the sticky, hard candies no one likes and hide some of the chocolates away for Christmas stockings.  (I just read that tip in Rocks in My Dryer.)

I’m minus one extra kid today which makes today seem like a holiday.  No negotiating truces between four-year olds, no insisting that they be nice and stop screaming.  It’s funny how the addition or subtraction of one child can change the dynamic of a group–and it hardly even matters which kid it is.

November 1.  Happy birthday to my long-time friend Lisa, who doesn’t have a blog even though she is one of the most insightful and hilarious women I know.  (I ought to collect her emails into an anthology, publish it and get rich, rich, rich!)  I met Lisa when I was nineteen and in college, though we didn’t become friends right away as we were busy pining over the same boy who ended up being a waste of our time.  (But was so cute.  And tall.  And did I mention he was a drummer?)

Lisa and I were roommates the summer of 1985 when we both worked for Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Lisa did her best to transform our dorm room (a converted Motel 6, complete with aqua shag carpet) into a cozy place.  Her secret?  Lots of low-wattage lamps.  She has a flair for decorating. 

She has far better hair than I ever will and is willing to devote enough time to making it look perfect.  (I am lazy when it comes to my hair.)  She was the Queen of Hot Rollers back in college.  Such springy, bouncy hair she had!

Lisa is vivacious, energetic, passionate and hard-working.  She has three boys, roughly the age of my own boys, and meets the challenge of parenting with humor and persistence.  She juggles working and parenting and ministering with grace and skill.

One spring night in 1986, we borrowed a car from our friend, Diane, and went out for pizza.  While chatting and picking at the cheese, one of us suggested that we ought to drive to Tulsa from Springfield.  This was a three-hour drive and we had a curfew, yet we proclaimed it a brilliant plan!  We’d surprise the college men we knew who lived in Tulsa once we got there!  What fun, right?  (We didn’t even ask Diane if we could take her car three hours away.)

We arrived late, ten, I suppose, maybe later.  I called my now-husband and announced my arrival.  He told me later that he’d just returned home from a date (with another girl!).  He agreed to meet me at Denny’s.  Then I called Lisa’s now-husband, but not-yet-boyfriend, John, and asked him to meet me at Denny’s to discuss Lisa.  I told him I was very worried about her.  (A bold-faced lie!)

He met us there, too.  Surprise!  Surprise!  Lisa and I found our spontaneous appearance in Tulsa hilarious.  The boys?  Not quite so much.  But I did wrangle an agreement out of my now-husband that we’d date that upcoming summer.  (Oh, boy, long story there that I probably never told you and it’s probably too long to go into . . . . but let’s just skip to the summer of 1987 and say we lived happily ever after.  And Lisa and John were married the summer of 1988.)

(And yes, we totally missed our curfew–I think we simply stayed out all night and sneaked back in when the dorm opened at 6:00 a.m.)

Anyway, it’s Lisa’s birthday and I’m thinking about her today.  Her husband took her away to a spa until tomorrow so she can turn forty-five in peace and luxury.

Meanwhile, I’m also thinking about a nap.  These jaunts down memory lane are exhausting.