Valentines Day

To my skeptical and somewhat cynical way of thinking, Valentines Day is much like Halloween--a ripoff driven by emotional blackmail--and I'm realistic enough to refuse to be manipulated. It's all about marketing and consumerism.


Valentines Day is apparently supposed to be a day when you express the depths of your love to your sweetie. That often comes in the form of flowers that are going to die in a few days, candy you're better off not consuming, and a greeting card that says what the greeting card designer wrote.


Don't get me wrong. I'm a hopeless romantic. I like the overt tokens of affection just as much as the next person, but expressions of real love in a real marriage are usually not accompanied by violins and moonlight. Sometimes it's a "How 'bout I scramble some eggs for breakfast?" or a "Come on, let's go to the fitness center."


It leaves me wondering why merchandisers think we're so short-sighted as to limit expressions of love to one day a year. Where do they think we've been the other 364 days of the year? Do they really think you take your sweetie for granted and then on February 14 erase it all with a few trinkets that say, "You know what I mean"?


My sweetie landed in the hospital Sunday morning with a kidney stone--now that's really romantic--and I sat with him all day as he went through pain and procedure and even delirium coming out of anesthesia. It wasn't fun, especially for him, when the plans for the day had to be abandoned to take care of a problem that wasn't going away on its own. It wasn't life-threatening; nevertheless, we realized it could have been much worse. Still, I thought of my mother watching my father die of an incurable disease--mesothelioma--and my grandmother calling the ambulance that February day in 1961 when my grandfather had a sudden and eventually fatal heart attack. These were life-altering moments for those women who had to go on alone.


No, flowers and candy and cards are not enough. Decide now to regret nothing. Time doesn't wait for you to get around to making a grand gesture that may ultimately be misunderstood. Say now all the things you mean to say, and put it in your own unique words. Here's what I've said to my sweetie:

Drive-by Kisses

You’re gone before I even realize

you were there. Softly, the gossamer touch

of your lips tells me so, but hit-and-run

kisses are only the lazy flap of

butterfly wings--I might forget before

our mouths can be together again. Give

me something genuine, sincere, a real

smackeroo, firmly planted, that leaves me

with the familiarity of you,

and the security of us. Don’t tease

my appetite for you, and then leave me

ravenous, wishing you would stay for just

one more sweet reminder of who we are.

Make me remember every time that

you, my best love, my only love, kissed me.

Talking in Your Sleep 

We sleep so differently, You and I--

      You with your right hand up to your face,

      I with my left hand a fist under my chin,

      You with your fidgeting feet,

      I with my tickling nose when pollen swoops in the open window,

      You with your indigo dreams of flying,

      I with my crimson dreams of climbing too high and falling, gravity’s victim again,

      You with your instant unconsciousness,

      I with my constant wakefulness,

      You with your no-nonsense morning routine,

      I with no place to go, lying there listening to you shave.

We sleep so differently, You and I, but we are for each other.

      Awake with different eyes we see alike the same way through.

If I Could Only Hold You Closer

Sometimes when we’re together

and I’m watching your face

and loving you beyond love

I marvel at how the years have

bonded us. We know without speaking

what half a smile

or a raised eyebrow means.

And yet holding hands, arm in arm,

cheek to cheek, even lips to lips

are fully insufficient.

Not even flesh to flesh entwined like vines

can bring us as close as I want to be

to you.

Berry Memories

Costco always has raspberries, and I always get some when I shop there, not usually  to use in recipes, although I have discovered the joys of freezer jam, but to munch down by the handful, to pig out, to indulge shamelessly. It is my definition of heaven on earth.

Whenever I eat a luscious raspberry I am transported back to my grandmother’s garden just outside of Portland, Oregon. I am nine years old again, and I am picking raspberries and eating them indiscriminately, wantonly, not knowing that I will never again have such a close relationship with this exquisite fruit.

Being raised in Western Oregon is at the same time a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because of the temperate climate, the definite identifiable seasons that don’t pass too quickly, the trees and flowers, the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, the nearness both to mountains and shore. It is a curse because with all of that perfection, you get spoiled, and no other place you live will ever measure up.

Nothing assails the senses like a trip to a farmer’s market where all this bounty is available. As a teen, I picked strawberries and green beans every summer to earn money for school clothes, and went in the fall with my mother and grandmother to harvest pears, apples, nuts and other tree fruits to fill the larder. I have joked with friends that I was raised in Oregon on nuts and berries, which explains why I like to hibernate in the winter like the bears.

One of the reasons I appreciate raspberries is that I know how hard it is to retrieve them. Thorny bushes can be intimidating, and the berries hide demurely behind leaves so the picker has to risk the thorns to find the treasure--life's like that sometimes. Like many other fruits, berries have to be picked at just the right moment. If too ripe they don’t keep very long, but if not ripe enough they’re too tart.

Mother used to can raspberries by the quart, back in the days before we had a freezer, and when it came to making punch for a party, she conjured up a magnificent nectar with a quart of those berries, some raspberry sherbet, some lemon-lime soda and other magical ingredients. We had fresh raspberry shortcake in season, but never enough, and in the winter we had raspberry jam, raspberry jello, and whatever delicious raspberry concoctions her creative mind could imagine. Since leaving home, I have paid the same kind of homage to the genius who first paired raspberries with chocolate.

Some people don’t like raspberries because of the seeds, but they just don’t know how to eat them. I learned in my grandmother’s raspberry patch that you put the tasty little red gems on your tongue, then press against the roof of your mouth to crush the berry, coaxing the sweet juice to dance joyfully with your taste buds. That way the seeds don’t have a chance to get stuck in your teeth. If you must chew, just don’t bite down all the way.

As I remember them, of course, Oregon raspberries were as big as thimbles and loaded with juice and flavor. I’ve been accused of exaggerating the big-ness and best-ness of everything western Oregon has to offer, and though I may be guilty of bragging, I’m not wrong.

So every time I go to Costco when it's not berry season where I now live, I grab a package of raspberries and I am immediately transported for a delicious moment back to my grandmother’s garden when I was nine years old and nothing mattered except finding the next thimble-sized, perfectly sweet ripe raspberry.

A New Perspective on…

vomit

verb

1 be sick, spew, heave, retch, gag, get sick; informal: throw up, puke, purge, hurl, barf, upchuck, ralph.

2 regurgitate, bring up, spew up, cough up, lose; informal throw up, puke, spit up.

noun informal: puke, spew, barf.

AH (adorable hubby) doesn't often get sick to the point of losing his lunch, but one day this week he had a touch of flu and his lunch came up for consideration. He's over it now and we're all glad.

This isn't a frequent topic of conversation in our family, except when we go to dinner with AH's siblings, and one brother-in-law is inclined to choose as our destination Chuck-a-Rama, the popular buffet restaurant in Utah, which he usually refers to as "Upchuck." Maybe the first time you hear that it might be mildly amusing, but not the 101st. We're all willing to go there anyway when it's his turn to choose because they have favorites we don't make at home. I'm partial to the variety of salads, scones with honey butter, and bread pudding--which I take to the ice cream bar and squirt caramel sauce on.

Nevertheless, we've been talking about barf a lot lately. And cheering.

Yes--IVF worked, and our son and his wife are pregnant. Now she has morning sickness. I told him that if he wanted a full-spectrum experience, he could at least manage to throw in with her by throwing up with her a few times. He's thinking about it.

They've been married ten years and this is the first time they've been pregnant. We're so thankful for so many factors and medical miracles that have aligned to make this happen for them.

Ethan, our fifth grandbaby, will be eight years old in May so we've been baby-hungry for a while. Now we're all looking forward to August when this long-anticipated, much loved little person will arrive. And very happy at this point about the barfing.

Putting Christmas away

It seems an ironic way to say it--"putting Christmas away"--and I'm feeling a little melancholy, but it's more than just wrapping up all the decor and ornaments and stashing them in the garage for eleven more months.


I always loved the symbolism of an evergreen tree. It's alive all year round, doesn't lose its leaves or go dormant for a season, and it represents the eternal life that Christ offers. Having grown up among trees, I'm especially fond of all things "greenly leaping" as ee cummings has described them.


Our new house doesn't really have space for a big green live Christmas tree. Instead, we use a wrought iron tree especially for ornament display--no lights, no tinsel or garlands, no star at the top. I used to have Christmas music as the theme of the tree, with angels and musical notes and little parchment sheet music. Now the theme is "Let Heaven and Nature Sing," so I still have angels and music, but I also use birds and butterflies, pinecones and stars. It's all organic, too, with wood, clay, seashells, glass and metal.


It's not big or ornate or flashy, but our bare essentials tree represents the most important event since the creation, the event we celebrate in the winter even though it happened in the spring. There's no need to banish reminders of Christ just because it's not December anymore. So why should I put everything away? I want to keep visible in my home year-round reminders of what the birth of Christ represents; although the ornaments may go back in the storage boxes, my heart is still full of what the celebration really means. We have Christmas so we can have Easter. 

Career Advice

We live on a main street through our normally quiet west Provo neighborhood, far enough from the railroad tracks that we can hear the whistle wail in the distance. In the middle of the night, it has a certain romantic charm because it evokes memories of the great train trips I've had. It's Americana. It's exciting. It's pleasant.


On the other hand, because we live on a main street through our normally quiet west Provo neighborhood, we also hear every juvenile hotshot in a pimped-out ride who thinks the whole world also wants to hear his stereo played at the "deafening" decibel level. We can feel the bass beat while the vehicle is still several blocks down the street, and as it nears the house, we can hear the sound loud enough to cause pain and drown out our own music. I can't imagine what it's like inside that truck.


Being a fairly new resident of Provo, I don't know if there are anti-noise ordinances in town, but if so, they are among the most violated civil laws. I'm sure those drivers just want to share their music with me, but I have a right to refuse to listen to sounds so loud my ears bleed. People with an ounce of sensitivity ought to establish a personal anti-noise ordinance. Unfortunately, respecting air space is not considered by some to be an inalienable right for other people.


Noise is sort of like cigarette smoke. I don't want to breathe it because it nauseates me, and I don't want to hear the booming bass because it not only offends my ears, it's very possible that the decibel level can do actual damage to my eardrums as I hear it passing by. No thanks; old age is doing its own number on my hearing levels without the help of inconsiderate strangers.


So my advice is this: Anyone seeking a career that will never be modernized out of existence should seriously consider audiology—hearing aids, sign language education, that sort of thing. Listening to that high decibel bass long enough in that enclosed environment will make a lot of people deaf who just thought they were being cool. Whether they like it or not, they're going to need medical care in the future for deafness they've inflicted on themselves, and it'll happen much sooner than they think.

Christmases I Have Known

In 1995, we had no Christmas tree. It wasn't the first time we'd gone without, nor the last, and it wasn’t because the Grinch sneaked in and stole our holiday. Rather, it sneaked up on us when other things got a higher place on the priority list as the year came to a close. Dau # 2 married in September and moved to Logan, and Dau # 1 returned from her LDS mission in October and got married in December. It wasn't a surprise. It had been on the radar screen for several years, but she wasn't making very many decisions about it until she got home, and then everything happened fast. By the time we went out looking for a tree on Christmas Eve that year, there weren’t any. 

Lately I have been reviewing other Christmases I have known.

Guam, an island in the western Pacific, was the scene of our first two Christmases as a married couple. Like Utah, Guam has two seasons. In Utah, it’s freezing cold winter and burning hot summer. On Guam, it’s wet and wetter. Without snow or even a chill in the air, getting in the mood for Christmas in our island apartment was difficult. Real evergreens were simply too expensive, but we had some other representations and substitutes. We went caroling in the hospital with our church group, but not even singing "Jungle Bells," the island version of the old song, could make us feel the holiday mood. Our second Christmas was a different story. We had a six-week-old baby, and our gift to each other, and her, was a new rocking chair, delivered in Santa-like fashion on Christmas Eve.

Possibly the most unusual Christmases we’ve had were the two we spent in Iran, a long time ago, before the revolution. Dau # 1 was about a year old. Our landlord and his family had rented to American Christians before, and were sensitive to our homesickness at that season of the year. We socialized with our Christian friends, but it didn’t ease our heavy-hearted feelings. In a Moslem country, of course, little attention is paid to the celebrations of infidel religions. As we sat there on Christmas Eve, trying not to think about what would be happening back home that night, we heard some noise and giggling at the door, then a knock. I went to see what was going on, and there were the landlord’s children, tugging at a potted pine tree to get it through the door. It was decorated with colorful paper chains and handfuls of cotton. We were so touched that a Jewish family prepared this meaningful gift for their foreign Christian friends. More than a tree, or what it symbolizes, we needed to feel kindness and love, and they certainly gave us that.

Over the years we've tried some other traditions. One year we went out in the hills and cut our own Christmas tree (bad idea unless you don't mind pitch dripping on the carpet) and another year I got my husband a surprise gift  he didn't like because I hadn't cleared it with him ahead of time. (Yeah, that's how he thinks.) But we recovered and forged on. For a few years I experimented with fruitcake recipes to find the most amenable, for a while went through a chocolate dipping phase. Then there is the Christmas bear collection. I don't know when that started, but we now have a stuffed bear for every member of the family. I've tried to get the kids to choose one and take it home, but nobody wants to break up the set. For a few years, my sister and I would make and exchange ornaments, until we both got too busy.

However, the tradition that has stayed with us is the pudding prize. Danish Rice Pudding, an exquisite blend of rice and cream and transcendent bliss, is a tradition of my great- grandfather's homeland. You put one whole almond in the pudding, and whoever gets the almond in his/her serving gets a prize. We've enjoyed that, and the tradition has gone with the kids when they left home.

When the girls left home, our Christmas began to take on a different form of celebration, and if it weren't for our son, we wouldn't have had much at all. When we're not going to be together it's hard to keep up the traditions as enthusiastically as we would if we were going to share them. Son is best described as the Christmas Kid, and his philosophy is, "We need a little Christmas NOW." He'd get out some lights to put on the bushes in front of the house, and decorate the tree, and pretty soon I'd feel like making holiday goodies. Then he left home, too, and some years we didn't get out many decorations at all.

Now we are in transition again, having moved to a new house. I highly recommend downsizing. It's liberating. One good thing about a smaller house is that there's no place for a lot of extra stuff, like holiday decorations. After our first year here, I eliminated half of what I had, and we haven't missed it. So I got a wrought iron tree, about four feet tall, that's strictly for ornament display, and there's space for that in the corner of the living room--no lights, but it works for us. We have an olive wood nativity set and a couple of smaller ones to put on the piano, and the bears sit in the entry.

Through all of that, the ongoing question was "Why are we doing this?" Christmas got better when we released Santa with a vote of thanks and focused on the Savior. Each year it's a challenge to pay attention for opportunities to serve and help others, and we are reassured by the knowledge that, as the Grinch learned, Christmas doesn't come from a store. If Christ isn't already there, no amount of trappings will bring Christmas into our hearts. Over the years we have begun to understand more keenly what Charles Dickens meant when he says through his changed character, Ebenezer Scrooge, “I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all year."

December Bride... And Groom

It’s been 42 years since my husband and I were married, and having had a December wedding, and three children in the next nine years, the focus changed for a while to them instead of us. We never really sat down and talked about how we would celebrate Christmas, but as time passed we experimented to discover for ourselves what traditions offered by our culture would best fit our family. Some years the holiday came, and there were numerous family obligations and visits as we had time off from school, during which “our” day came and we nodded and smiled and said, “Yep, this was the day,” and went on with whatever we were doing. Some years we had time to celebrate by going to dinner, and after our nest emptied out, we even had brief getaway vacations when our schedule allowed. We always celebrated Christmas, but our anniversary received attention only if we got around to it.

This evolution of celebration has made me think back to that first Christmas Roger and I spent together. Actually, Christmas that year was five days before our wedding, and he went home to Portland with me to meet my parents for the first time. I knew I had made the right choice when I saw what a good sport he was. A photographer friend of my parents did our wedding portrait, and my mother held an open house for us. She was always a gracious hostess and a generous person. She loved to celebrate, and having a new son-in-law was her favorite Christmas present that year. We were 26 at the time, and I’m sure there were times she had despaired and wondered if I’d ever find someone to put up with me. Nevertheless, the first meeting with my parents was nothing if not memorable for Roger.

On Christmas morning, as we gathered for our gift exchange, Mother somehow lost her balance as she bent over to plug in the tree lights, and fell into the tree. It remained standing, even if she didn’t, and as my brothers helped her up, she laughed along with the rest of us at what a Laurel and Hardy thing she had done.

Mother always liked to have a special breakfast on Christmas, and this year it would be extra-special because Roger was there. We all took our places around the kitchen table, and as she hurried over from the stove with a pitcher of syrup she had just heated, the bottom dropped out of it. Our food got cold in the time it took us to clean up the mess. Permanent syrup stains on Roger’s slippers became a cosmic admonition for us to keep our sense of humor, no matter what we fell into, no matter what splashed on us.

We spent the following two Christmases on Guam, an island in the western Pacific. My mother sent us a box of Oregon holly to make a wreath, and some gold satin ornaments, which I piled up in the shape of a Christmas tree. Real trees were simply too expensive on our beginning teacher’s salary, and it's hard to celebrate Christmas in perpetual summer weather. For two years after that, we were in Iran, with a Jewish landlord who understood our Christian customs and kindly provided us with a living tree that we later planted in their garden.

We’ve had more ordinary celebrations since we settled down, and our children have enjoyed establishing and following the traditions we have had together. We all love following the tradition of our Danish ancestry with rice pudding on Christmas Eve--whoever gets the whole almond in their serving gets the pudding prize. It took the kids years to figure out that I manipulated the servings so the same person didn’t win the pudding prize two years in a row. As our children have left home, they’ve each had the collection of tree ornaments I started for them when they were very young. Now they do the same thing for their own children.

When the three of them got old enough to govern themselves, we'd go away for a couple of days and leave them home alone. Our rationale was this: "Before there was you, there was us. Some day you'll leave and it'll just be us again. We don't want to come to that place having forgotten what it's like to be us. So we go away to focus on each other and remind ourselves who we are."

Both of our daughters were married in the year we celebrated our 25^th anniversary. When they celebrate their 25^th, we’ll celebrate our 50^th, and we have decided to get together and have a big party that year. For 15 years, we arranged and juggled Christmas visits between Vancouver WA and Decatur IL which took our minds off the subject of anniversaries. Besides, grandchildren are so charming, so delightfully distracting. Now two of our kids live in Utah and one lives in New York.

Through the years, we’ve seen Christmas and our anniversary take on different forms of celebration, and looking back over the mellowing process of time, I appreciate more and more the celebration of the birth of Christ, who did for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and who is the holder of the seal that binds our family together. To focus on his birth and his gifts helps us remember that he has always been a part of our lives and our marriage, that he is the ultimate marriage counselor, and that it matters to him that we have been true and faithful not only to each other, but also to him.