Category Archives: family

TG day 2025

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Once I started seeing this small vertical quilt as a landscape, the chartreuse bar (midsection) needed interrupting. I used floral patterning from a rayon shirt.

The design came together after I went down to the cellar to get something and came up almost two hours later without it.

This is the front of our basement fridge. It was probably something in there that I needed?

This WIP is right next to the fridge. An old strip of houses lies atop a beige brocade with swirly floral shapes and above one of Deb’s amazing splatter cloths.

I’ve been baking up a storm for today but thankfully not hosting. Turkey dinner with all the fixings is one of my least favorite meals to serve company!

I placed a Ukrainian soldier next to a close up of Lady Liberty in one of my collages this week. It’s one of those times that if I could identify the photographer or publication, I would make an attribution. My storage methods (top left), pretty much make that impossible.

It occurs to me that though glued down this one is not done yet.

I hope one and all of you have a happy thanksgiving!

One of my big blessings is that I will be dining with like-minded family. In other words, there will be no bracing myself for the fox sound bites and no prepping snappy, informative but somehow non-offensive rejoinders. Phew!

What are you thankful for today?

11/11 Ramble

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11/11 is the day he died. They were in Fort Lauderdale, my parents. He asked for a seltzer. Then his heart seized — gone. He was gone long before the ambulance siren could be heard be bee-bawing down Route One.

My mother called. I lived alone. “You’re the only one who cried,” she told me.

The circuitry-skips are evidence of trauma. The way I can never remember if I was 24 or 26 when he died. I have to do the math, even now, even today – 42 years later. I just stacked the dates and subtracted to get 42.

I have never been to his grave. Somewhere in Schenectady. My mother lies in a neighboring state, a ratty little cemetery in Essex. I have photos of her two grandsons tending the plot with me, one holding a little red plastic watering can. One met her, one was born four weeks after she died.

That collision of death and life means I always know how long she’s been gone. However old my younger boy is – now 29 – offers the accurate tally. She’s been gone 29 years.

“An accurate tally” is a weird way to describe an absence that even now can feel like an open wound.

“You’re the only one who cried.“

I couldn’t offer perfection, none of us can, but the ichor that seeps is clear and somehow pure.

My mother struggled with numbers as much as she excelled with pattern and color. “How old are you now?” she would ask at every birthday after I left home.

I’m not there yet, but expect to be. It happens. It happens whether I avoid cooking in aluminum pots or am religious in taking turmeric.

The loss of faculty. The coins clattering to the floor.

Season offers its consolations. How perfect to lose a parent in the grim graying of November or the tiresome bleakness of February.

Both my boys were born in almost-spring-time. Three days apart, 17 minutes apart, within a few ounces of each other. The midwife was impressed, as if I had anything to do with it.

I read Saeed Jones on the toilet this morning. Yes, that is a thing I wrote. I do not offer perfection.

His entire volume speaks to the loss of his mother. His bag of tricks is bigger than my bag of tricks, and I’m grateful for his capacity to put himself first here, then there, around grief. Grief is grief, one way or the other and also from the side. He shows me that. The book is warped from living in the room where we take showers.

That’s a lesson I took from my mother. “In this house, we use books.” As in devour, as in tear up, repurpose, underline, dog ear, keep out and available no matter the weather.

My father was a whistler. Not surprisingly but still how weird, so is my husband. Trills and melodies that put an Irish busker to shame. Both of them.

Summertime in the neighborhood, the call home was a piercing two-tone whistle made by placing two pinkies in his mouth and pressing, pressing — what? What? I no more understand the mechanics of my father making that shrill call than I understand how the hawk that circles my neighborhood produces her cries.

We know them now, the hawk cries. We hear one often when we’re out with the dog and always we tilt heads back to spot the elegant thing, often riding a thermal clime well above the canopy, sometimes alone, sometimes pestered by one or more smaller birds.

First, the black walnuts fall in all their pelting urgency. Now come the layers and layers of butterscotch–gold maple leaves. They swish when we walk through them when we’re out with the dog. A nostalgic sound. A New England sound.

Across the fence, two oaks hold onto their leaves. There is so much about the world I do not understand. Pattern and color, coins, the body becoming a husk, our own silent desperation.

Pregnant with D. At a wedding.

What’s that? Hope, you say

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What a night! What a beautiful night! Woke up this morning and did some Joy Scrolling (as opposed to Doom Scrolling). Everywhere you looked — and I mean everywhere — there were great results, often with sizable margins.

Georgia, Detroit, Mississippi, California, New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York City, Mass., New Jersey, and so many more. From gubernatorial seats to school boards, the message is clear: the American people don’t like Trump or his authoritarian agenda.

In other news, Ken and I celebrated our 35th anniversary last night at a small restaurant in Newton Center. I never comment much about these occasions, but I will say this: there is something very sane and relaxing about being past fanfare. I got him some special chocolates and he fixed the closet light I’ve been missing (and bitching about missing) for more than ten years. Dinner was tasty!

PS based on research, it’s clear my blog is being scraped by AI bots for data. I will install some sort of filter if I can figure out how to do it, but in the meantime since it’s not mucking up the works, I’ve decided not to worry about it.

PPS I now see calls for apps to offer AI blocking functions. Pinterest just added such an option, to much approval.

Also, I’ve recently learned that adding the word “fuck” to a google search blocks an AI response (except when it doesn’t and then ooh boy watch out). It may seem silly but typing a four letter word is easier than inserting a minus sign followed by “AI.”

From our dog walk this morning.

Read the Yard like a Book

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Even though I’ve gardened this 1/4 acre since 1993, it still surprises me.

In 2019, it was the jack-in-the-pulpit that I feared might have given up the ghost — only to find a hearty specimen over by the basement windows. Where or whether the plant will pop up each spring is a mystery — one that has yet to disappoint. This year the biggest jack-in-the-pulpit I’ve ever seen rose up on the east side of our shed. It was easily three feet tall with massive leaves the size of our catalpa’s. Just astonishing.

In 2024, a beautiful cloud of rudbeckia appeared under the black walnut out front. This was surprising for two reasons. One, I hadn’t planted them there and two, the black walnut roots have a toxin that has a way of killing plants growing nearby. The next summer, this summer, they didn’t come back. Poof! Not a one. That was a third surprise.

(A neighbor told me she has a similar growth and disappearance, so I don’t think it was the black walnuts).

Same with a vigorous and glorious crop of echinacea near the house. Go figure.

Not a single iris or yellow primrose bloomed this year. I have no idea why.

Weeds have a way of changing. This year it was some serrated-edged leafy thing as well as shallow-rooted, thin-leafed umbrella-like plants (Threeseed Mercury?) Both were absolutely everywhere. Neither had ever been an issue before.

One year I planted a chocolate Joe Pye Weed (It’s native! Blooms in the fall!) only to discover 3 to 4 years later that it was massively aggressive. One clump turned into three clumps on the side yard. Then they jumped the house and started populating the backyard. So many clumps! For several summers I dedicated myself to getting rid of them and mostly did but they’re sneaky, so every year I have to keep an eye out for a stealthy rogue. There are usually a couple. Sometimes, if hidden near the chimney say, they might attain a height of 12 to 14 inches before I discover them (always with a loud AHA!). This year, though, a regular colony took up residence under the Jack Pine. They were hidden by the ostrich ferns. Quite the incursion.

I think of these plants as nasty and it’s all I can do not to pull them out of neighbors’ yards when out and about walking Finn. Sometimes I even wonder (no matter the distance from our house) if my plants were the progenitors.

When we first moved here in the early 90s, there were no chipmunks and there were no rabbits. Now we have lots of chipmunks and lots of rabbits. At first, I didn’t mind the rabbits so much. They’d pick one or two thin-leafed hosta each season, eat them to the ground and leave the rest alone. Lately though they are voracious and I hate them. This summer they destroyed an entire hosta bed near the back patio, all plants lovingly positioned there from divisions, by the way. Worse, lately they don’t even eat all the leaves, instead strewing them about — evidence of such violence that I’ve taken to calling them murder scenes.

Over by the shed sits the stump of the pin cherry that fell in a wind storm in 2018. I happened to be looking out back when it went down. A few branches landed on the roof, but the bulk of the tree missed the house by inches. Naturally Ken was abroad, as he was when the pipes froze one year and that time the basement flooded. It barely missed Finn too. I had taken a picture of the dog in the exact spot where the trunk landed on the deck just ten minutes prior. Two blessed near misses!

There are two rhodies that were rescued from the adjacent schoolyard during the years I acted as landscape volunteer for the PTA. I’ve mentioned them already this summer. They thrived like crazy for years until this spring when the leaves turned rust-colored and curled in sorry defeat. I thought they were dead. I cut everything back but didn’t pull out the stumps. Then they came back. A lesson in maybe taking a beat. Evidence of a glorious refusal to give up.

We have liriope and zebra grass from Cathryn, whom I don’t see anymore, and a towering lilac from Reba, with whom I’ve also lost touch. The prodigious comfrey, a massive sprawling plant that I’ve split and split again, came from Barbara, who has since moved to California and we do stay in touch.

Ironically, the forget-me-nots given to me by my mother only lasted two seasons.

The shed stands as testament to the fact that we have too much stuff. It reflects a recent history of kids heading west with duffel bags only, a sister dying, and my husband’s parents downsizing. From Ken’s father we ended up with extra socket wrench sets (what are we up to — four? five?), antique edgers, hoes, and shovels, as well as grape-stomping boots from his Slovenian grandfather that I can’t quite see clear to giving away.

Under the shed lie three cat graves: Calypso, Tyler, and PeePee. Calypso, a spunky, ace-hunting calico, died first. It was the summer after D was born, which was also the summer after my mother died. I cried and cried picking up her limp body at the base of the tree a neighbor reported seeing her climb after having been hit by a car. Full-chested sobbing. It was a time to notice how pure the grief for an animal is, as opposed to the more measured grief for a loved person. I did not cry nearly as much when my mother passed. But of course nothing is so reductive for in crying for Calypso, I was also crying for my mother.

It was a mixed loss, Calypso’s death, because she was a bit of a nudge and had been known to try and sleep on C’s neck in the cradle. In the bleary exhaustion of life with a baby and a toddler, she would not have been well tolerated.

Tyler, on the other hand, was perfect. An orange medium-hair with a dash of coon cat, he regaled us with his LOUD motoring purr and never before or since have I stroked fur as soft as his. Add to that a dignified and affectionate disposition. He was perfect. Did I already say? We could never bring ourselves to replace him.

PeePee was an orange, short hair that belonged to my sister. She was almost round at death.

We buried Jack over by the western lot line.

Hosta and lily of the valley grow where the mini-ramp used to be, which is also where the swing set and slide used to be. The summer of Covid, we had a patio built — a testament to the empty nest as well as the pandemic need to entertain outside. With an umbrella on wheels and a birdfeeder, we thoroughly enjoy sitting out there on the rare quiet day.

I may have come to the end of finding little bits of boyhood in the soil. I knew the day would come. For years, Lego bricks, hatless Playmobile figures, glass stones, and plastic army men revealed themselves as I gardened. They showed up like treasures. Remember, they said. The plastic litter was dense near the site of the old clubhouse, but there was also what could be called a debris field below D’s second story window. Who knew? Clearly, he routinely launched shit out of his bedroom. With what mood — glee? rebellious anger? — I can only guess. There is so much we don’t know about our children.

And now I close by thanking you for reading. Any gardener knows there is a ton more that could be said, but this is already too long.

Sunset clouds and a recollection

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Thunderstorms threatened all afternoon but never materialized, a disappointing pattern probably related to climate change. It happens all the time.

As the sun started sinking, it inflamed the clouds into such gorgeous colors that a bunch of us found ourselves on the sidewalk taking pictures. Thunder rumbled now and again and occasional flashes of lightning appeared to the west. Pure magic.

It was a communal moment that made me laugh. iPhones held up to the sky.

My corner-house neighbors and I chatted a bit. We moved in to our houses on the same weekend in May 1993 — she with her three sons, me weeks from getting pregnant with my first.

One of her sons, also taking pictures, shared that he turns 50 this weekend. I almost fell over.

Then he shared a funny story about my first born, who I have to tell you talked early and in full paragraphs. People were often stunned. He was intelligible even with the ever-present binky in his mouth. (He would slide it to one side and talk through it, not unlike an old man with a cigar).

Anyway, he might’ve been three when this happened. A dragonfly flitted near the lot line and he pointed to it and said to my neighbor, “Look! It’s iridescent!”