A Speckled Trout

My mom doesn’t like water.  As a kid I have no memory of her getting into a pool or lake with us.  Sweating and miserable in the blistering heat of her least favorite season, she would sit on the edge of the neighbor’s pool and put no more than her feet in to cool off.  Her showers are legendary in their briefness. “I only let the water splash my face,” she says as if we all wanted tips on ways to make a shower last no longer than five minutes.

What is also legendary about her aquatic history is how she got up on water skis the very first time, went around the circumference of a lake and never fell in.

Whenever the story comes up we are all amazed.  “Mom, do you have any idea how hard it is to get up on skis the first time?  It’s almost impossible,” we always tell her.

“What can I say,” she says as nonchalantly as what Esther Williams might have said about synchronizing her way around a pool with a fruit bowl on her head.  “I didn’t know how to swim.  I wasn’t about to fall into that lake.”

*****

In the throes of a nasty political season that has a year to go, and the waning days of The Dismal Season, it seems like everyone I know is either depressed, tired, frustrated, sick, or utterly bored.  Even the Super Bowl isn’t generating much enthusiasm. 

Coldplay?  Okay, I guess…… but then what?

Valentine’s Day?  The new year awkwardly lurches from dismal to rosy disappointment, and without more than a dusting of snow around here there isn’t even a blanket to cover up the gray.  Bare trees, bare, grass, bare gardens.  If it were possible to buy my way out of this grayness I would but that requires effort and that’s as well hidden as the sun. 

What would I buy anyhow? 

I bought some fabric.  2.5 yards which is probably 1.5 more than I need but I didn’t want to be short and have to go out in the cold again.  I’m going to recover the seat of the wicker bench that’s on the back porch.  It will be navy this year and I may sew some new pillows.  Lots of color is about to go out there.  Vibrant, in-your-face color.  Our dinners will be on the little bistro set and when it gets dark I’ll turn on the garden lights tucked into the eaves.  The crab sign will remind us of Maryland and Mark and I will talk for the thousandth time about The Crab Shack – the hole in the wall restaurant we could walk to from our townhouse.  We will pine for brown paper tablecloths, little mallets and salty air. 

Until then my twelve dollar purchase and a new project is the reward for keeping my rope taut for awhile longer.   I don’t know how to swim in the waning days of winter and I don’t care to learn.  

And falling in isn’t an option.

When we were younger my mom had a plant that was her pride and joy.  I don’t know who bequeathed it to her but it started out as a log a couple of inches long.  It seemed like forever before a little sprout emerged and when it did Mom made us all look at it. 

She took care of that thing like it was her 7th child.

It would take years until it looked like an actual plant, and if company came over and remarked about the small tree in the corner, Mom would spread her thumb and finger an inch apart and say, “I’m telling you it was no bigger than this when it started out.  Isn’t that right, kids”?  And we would nod and agree for we daily observed its emergence and growth.  Our Mom was the plant log doula.

My brothers liked to play hockey in the family room.  They’d cut their sticks down and wrap the ends in tape, kneel on the floor and then whack a tennis ball back and forth between some nets that they had fashioned.

Mom and Dad weren’t fond of this activity because it left black marks all over the tile from the taped-up sticks.  They also weren’t fond of their kids nagging them to eat dinner so when Dad got home and was enjoying the paper and a glass of wine with Mom in the front of the house, the boys grabbed their sawed off sticks and started playing hockey in the back of the house until it was time to eat.

One day they had a wild game going when one of them whacked the tennis ball and it sailed right into Mom’s plant and broke it.  A sickening hush fell over the family room. We all stared at Mom’s plant broken in half like it had just been assassinated.

“Why didn’t you stop it???!!!” Terry yelled at Jim.

“Why did you hit it so hard??!!!” Jim yelled at Terry.

“You guys are in so much trouble,” I said with glee.

There was some debating and propping and trying to make it look better but there was nothing that could be done.  The plant that had started years ago as a tiny log was kaput.

The boys went into the living room to tell Mom.  I went along to see the show and to be the witness to the day that they were given up for adoption.  Dad’s face turned red which was never a good sign.  He and Mom got up to look, the boys following with their heads down like some two-bit crooks busted for knocking over little, old ladies to steal their purses. I imagined how sweet my life was about to be in the big bedroom once the brothers were finally sent off to a new family. 

When Mom could talk (and it was a scary long while before she could) she said the thing that millions of moms have said millions of time, “I guess we just can’t have anything nice around here.”

*****

We replaced our couch a couple of weeks ago.  Nice things and brothers do not go together.

I was #4 in a family of six kids – the first girl after three boys born thirteen months apart. A sister would follow me thirteen months later and then another nine years after that. Our house was small.  A slab home on the outskirts of Chicago, it had a bath and a half and three bedrooms. Eventually my dad added on a kitchen (turning the old one into our dining room), a family room, and another bedroom in the back of the house for the boys.

There was no basement and there wasn’t an upstairs.  There was no escaping all those people in that small house except to go outside which is where we kids spent most of our time.  Even in the frigid winter temps of Chicago, we would go to the outdoor ice rink six blocks away.  There were two rinks that the fire department would flood in the park every season – one for the hockey players and the other for the recreational skaters.  We would come home from school, get something to eat, change into our layers, grab our skates and head to the ice rink.  We would usually skate until dark, and with frozen feet stuffed into our boots, take shuffling, painful steps all the way home and devour dinner. This was our routine nearly every day in the winter.

The boys often stayed later than us.  With all their gear on and working up a sweat playing hockey, the cold didn’t bother them as much as it did my sister and me.  As was typical of that time, kids wandering home in the dark by themselves didn’t seem to cause any alarm.  Not for my sister and I and our friends whose ice cubed feet couldn’t run from a kidnapper if we tried, not the boys who felt no inclination to leave their game early to protect us from the Boogie Man lurking about, or our mother who loved nothing more than to make dinner in peace and quiet and have it ready by the time we walked in the door.

One year during an unseasonably warm stretch of winter weather with heavy downpours, our backyard along with all of our surrounding neighbors, flooded.  This caused Dad all kinds of worry, mostly because he foresaw a mud pit come spring instead of a sprouting green lawn.  But as the luck of the Chicago Irish would have it, the temps plunged and our flooded backyard became a sheet of ice.

A sheet of skating ice.

Now instead of trekking back and forth to the park with our skates in tow, we need only walk out the back door to the most glorious thing that could have ever happened to us – our very own ice rink. Dad didn’t seem to be a fan of this skating rink that Mother Nature had created, and, Mom, well Mom wanted her brood outside, and even if it wasn’t as far away as she would have liked at least it was guaranteed to wear us out.

The boys rigged up some hockey nets and did their usual reenactments of a Black Hawks game. My sister and I swirled around the brick bird bath, the swing set and every tree in the yard.  It wasn’t the best rink we’d ever skated on – you had to watch for frozen sticks jutting out and uneven ice – but it sure beat hobbling six blocks home in the dark.

One afternoon my sister and I were in the backyard skating by ourselves as the sun was setting when some kid showed up and started skating on our rink.  My sister told him to get lost.  He told her to get lost. This went back and forth for a few minutes until he said, “I don’t have to you little bitch,” and picked up a stick and threw it at her.  It hit her in face and cut her cheekbone.  She started wailing, the kid took off like a speed skater in the Olympics, and I went running into the house, skates and all, to report the crime to my mom.

“Who was it???” she yelled.  “Who did this to her???!!”

I had no idea.  I’d never seen the kid before.  All I knew was that my sister was bleeding and had just been called a bitch.  Whatever that was….

My brother, Tom, laced up his hockey skates and went flying down the icy backyards, chasing the perp through the frozen tundra until he ran out of icy yards to skate through.  Out in the dark it seemed like he was gone forever and we started to worry that this hooligan, intruding skater had done something to him too. When he finally returned he did a sharp hockey stop causing ice to spray up from his skates.

“Did you get him, Tom?  Did you beat him up, Tom, and make him pay for what he did to Jean?”

“I took care of it,” was all he said and I didn’t see much cause to worry about a Boogie Man after that.

My two-job gig is winding down and I have some mixed emotions about that.  I have loved working at the store but it is grueling for my 50+ legs and the pay is one grade above crappy.  Through these last few months, though, I have met some lovely people and I will miss them a lot.

All of us working there are so tired.  The pace has been relentless and while that is fabulous for business it feels like Groundhog Day every single morning.  The vacuum comes out, the candles get lit, the Christmas music comes on, the glass is cleaned, the bags and tissue get restocked, the door gets unlocked, and then jingle jangles open a hundred times an hour.  Every single day.

This morning before the day started the manager gave me a card and note and I got a little weepy and then she got a little weepy.  I adore her.  She is the ying to the owner’s yang.  She is steady and funny and thoughtful.  She is kind.

“I cry all the time lately,” she said.

“Me too,” I said.  “Yesterday we were opening gifts before Maggie and Nate left town and I could barely talk.  Then Will said that next year they’ll be a baby in the house and he started crying and Maggie started crying.”

And I started crying when I was telling her the story.

“What is wrong with us?”

“It’s all so fragile,” I said.  “We all know that especially this time of the year, and yet the background noise of our times is meanness.  It’s wearing me down.”

“I watched my nephew this weekend,” she said.  “I was so tired that as soon as we got on the couch to watch a movie I started to fall asleep.  I had all these fun things planned and I kept dozing off.  When I laid down with him at bedtime to read him a story I told him I was sorry that I fell asleep.”

“That’s okay, he said to me.  You didn’t do anything wrong.”

She cried.  I cried.  Then we finished our vacuuming.  Another day of selling was minutes away and there were a few things left to do.

Rest will come soon and I will take the word of a little boy that it is okay.

Last Saturday I attended a memorial service for the spouse of a retired colleague of Mark’s.  They were favorites of ours and at every social event within the department and med center we would sit with them.  They were both avid cyclists as well as avid believers in doing their part in the name of social justice – touring the world by bike or working for Habitat for Humanity.

Caroline came home from a meeting on the East Coast this summer where she got to bike for days – the last 200 hundred miles by herself.  Upon her return she went to the doctor for stomach pain and was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.  Mark first heard via email and then she began a Caring Bridge page that she updated occasionally.  There weren’t very many entries of hers before her husband took over and three months later she died.

We live on a corner house that is the route for many biking groups in town and they would often ride past our house. If we were out in the yard they would stop and talk before making their way home. This sudden illness of Caroline’s and seemingly quick death left us stunned.  It is hard to imagine any healthier, more vibrant people than the two of them.

Mark had an all-day conference that day and couldn’t attend the service.  I had to work as well but negotiated my hours so I could come in a little later.  I sat with another faculty spouse in that packed church and wondered if Caroline had any idea how many people she touched.  I wondered if any of us know that when we go about our life.

Like everything these days, even my attempt at paying my respects was half-ass.  I couldn’t stay until the end as I was already an hour late to being an hour late to work.  I couldn’t talk to George, couldn’t meet the grown kids I’d heard them talk about for more than twenty years, couldn’t meet the sister from Indiana or the middle-school geography teachers that Caroline worked with for decades.  Before this final send-off for Caroline I had to get up and leave.

As soon as I walked out of the church I started crying.  For Caroline, for George, for their kids, for work commitments that were getting in the way of something more important.

For Paris.

I drove to work, clocked in, and waited on customers in my standard funeral dress – quite overdressed for the rest of my day.  Melancholy seemed to seep out of me even though the store was so packed I barely had a minute to think about anything but the next person in line.

One after another I wrote up tickets and sent people on their way with ornaments and garland and reindeer pillows and candles that smell like Christmas.  As I was writing up a ticket for one woman she asked me if I was okay.

“Yes, I’m fine.  Just a little overwhelmed at the moment.”

“I can see why.  It’s so busy here today but I do hope you’ve checked on your suppliers to see if they are okay.”

“Our suppliers?”

“Yes, your suppliers in France.  Has somebody checked on them to make sure they’re okay after last night?”

“I don’t know.  I think so,” I said – not having the heart to say that the store she was in with the very French name on the outside gets nearly everything from China.

“It’s so terrible, isn’t it?  I can’t imagine….,” she said and my eyes welled up with tears for a place that is an unchecked dream on my bucket list.

I wrapped her ornaments and handed her bag to her.

She patted my hand.

“We’ll be okay,” she whispered and that was the first thing I believed all day.

I started two blog posts and ended up deleting them.  They both had something in common.

They sucked.

One of them was done and after lots of editing I still didn’t know what the point was that I was trying to make except that Christie Brinkley only looks good at sixty because she’s had *work* done. And besides being bitchy it was uninteresting.

So this post is going to be shortish and newsy.

*I finally landed a job.  Thank you Universe.  That last interview was the one that finally clicked and I will be working with college students and finances for their organizations.  It was the third time I tried to get a job in this school and I think I landed in a good department.  The interview wasn’t easy but I had the overwhelming feeling throughout it that they were pulling for me which I took as a sign that it was the right place for me.

*But I already had a job.  I started working in a home decor store in September that I have shopped at for years.  It is all kinds of inspiring and a fantastic creative outlet for me as they let me do a lot of display work.  Each job knows about the other and they have both been accommodating.  However, from now until the end of the year I will be working six days a week.  Not sure how that’s going to look as I’m just now in week one but I’ve managed to make the bed before I go and dinner when I’ve gotten home.  That. Will. Not. Last.

*I will be a producer for the Listen To Your Mother show in Kansas City in 2016.  LTYM is so near and dear to my heart that when the opportunity came up I thought about it for all of five minutes and said “yes”.  It is such a leap from my comfort zone that thinking about it for any length of time gives me the vapors.  The chance to be the sherpa for the stories of mothers/mothering/motherhood for others, though, was too good of an opportunity to pass up and so I’ll carry a paper bag with me to breathe into and bring this to fruition with my partner.

*My blog reached 100,000 hits.  This took nearly five years which was not in the original plan.  By now I should have been a household name in blogland but instead I am more like the little engine that could. What was the purpose and always in the plan was to become a better writer and I can look back at those early postings and see how far I’ve come.  For awhile there were soaring numbers on the weekends and I was elated. That only lasted until I realized that all those hits came from Russia, so without the attempted hackers I’m probably more at 85K.

*A couple of months ago Maggie and Nate came over with some seed packets that they picked up at a nursery. How nice, I thought and wondered where I would put them until the spring when they could be planted.  “Look them over,” she said while Nate decided to record us and it was all so odd. “Really look at them,” she said and God help Mark and I we can be so clueless.  We are going to be grandparents this spring.  I started crying when we finally figured it out.  Mark sat in the dining room chair with the biggest smile on his face and tears in his eyes.  A few weeks ago I went with Mags to look at maternity clothes and we wandered over to the baby section.  I think my life and hers in me flashed by in a second when I held up the teeniest little onesie.

I cannot promise this little blog will get much of my attention in the next few weeks (Mark and I were in bed at 9:15 on Saturday night) but good stories have a way of finding an outlet.  I hope to never be too busy to recognize one when it shows up.

Thank you for reading A Speckled Trout.  My cup runneth over.

My neighbor is a woodworker.  What started as a hobby has turned into a business and for the crafters/garbage pickers/yard salers around here he is a dream come true.  Whatever you haul down to him he can fix, replicate or repair.

He now has a store and a partner, making, selling and repairing musical instruments.  Since it opened I don’t like to bother him with my lame craft projects like I used to.  He’s a legit business owner.  Sometimes I’m just bored.

A few years ago I bought a print from the thrift store just for the frame and recently decided to turn it into a chalkboard.  Before I would have run down to Mark’s house with baked goods and a sad face and he would have picked up on my not so subtle hint that I needed some wood cut for it.  This time, though, I decided to leave him out of my project and headed to Lowe’s with my measurements.

I got the piece of wood I needed and took it to the saw to be cut.  I gave the employee the dimensions, he lined up my wood and then nicked his finger on the saw blade before he even started.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

It bled profusely and he apologized and said, “I’m on Coumadin. Do you know what that is?  It’s a blood thinner. Makes me bleed a lot.”

“Aren’t you kind of young to be on Coumadin?” I asked.

And that question opened the door to his story.  He pulled down the neck of his tshirt to show me the scar on his chest.

“I grew up in a little town in central Illinois that nobody has ever heard of.  I went to college in Bloomington and got a chance to play on the football team.  I loved it but I was kind of small.  After a year or so of being there I found out that some scouts were coming to the area to look for prospects for the NFL and I decided I was going to bulk up so I’d have a better chance.  The NFL.  I could already see me there.  I started taking steroids. Don’t say it. I know what you’re thinking. Anyhow, I bulked up pretty quick once I started doing that and it was great.  Lost a little speed but made up for it in tackles. I didn’t even look like the same person with all those steroids.  Completely changed my body.  I kept taking more and more but it eventually caught up with me and I got sick. Really, really sick all of a sudden.  My parents came to town to check on me because I wasn’t answering my phone.  Sometimes I would hear it ring and want to answer it but I couldn’t get up.  I couldn’t even lift my head up off the pillow.  I don’t remember much once my parents got there but I do remember my mom crying.  They took me to the local hospital and they said I needed a specialist so they loaded me in an ambulance and drove me to this hospital in Champaign, Illinois.

“Was it Carle Clinic?” I asked.

“Yeah.  How would you even know that?”

“I lived in Champaign for four years.  My daughter was born there.”

“That’s kind of crazy to me that you know that. Who would have thought?  Well, I get to Carle Clinic and I need emergency heart surgery. Let me tell you it was a long road back and many times I didn’t think I was going to make it but here I am.  You see where I’m at, right?  From football to steroids to this scar to being on Coumadin the rest of my life.  Never finished college even though both my parents have a PhD.”

“I didn’t finish college either and married someone with a PhD. so maybe both of us ended up in the right place after all.”

“Maybe.  I’d sure go back and change things if I could, but heck, who else in Kansas City has ever been in Carle Clinic besides you and me?  For all we know we could have been there at the same time. You having a baby and me trying not to die.”

The piece of wood he cut was off by 1/4″.  I’m not sure if it was my mistake at measuring or his at cutting and I ended up taking it to my neighbor to get it trimmed.

My project got delayed by a day but I didn’t even care. 

It’s not often that a small world and a big story collide.

Since leaving my job in April I have gone on twelve (that is 12) interviews and that doesn’t even include the phone ones.  Here’s the highlight reel of rolling the please-hire-me job dice:

*The first interview was at a private, expensive school.  I was grilled for an hour and I do mean grilled.  I was so exhausted by the end of it I didn’t think I could walk to my car on my own accord.  I sent a follow-up email thanking them and said, “By the way you are not the CIA and I am not Edward Snowden.”  Not really.  I said I was “seeking other opportunities” and by other opportunities I meant some Xanax.

*I went on an interview a week after I broke my foot.  The parking lot was closed so I hobbled across the campus in 90+ temps with my ortho shoe.  I arrived sweaty and exhausted.  My interviewers arrived bored and with fifteen minutes to spare even though the entire place was void of any activity. Or energy.  I thanked them in an email the next day and said “Have you ever heard of providing reasonable parking options when you close the only lot to your school?” Not really.  I said I was “seeking other opportunities” and by other opportunities I meant handicapped parking.

*I interviewed with the owner of a jewelry store for an accounting position.  I waited forty minutes to talk to her while the head of one of the German Shepherd guard dogs rested on the knee of my black pants. She told me she’s not the least bit afraid to sue people (three currently pending) and that there were five more dogs in the back.  I looked at my hairy pants and wondered if all the dogs there shed or just the German Shepherds. I sent a thank you email the next day saying “I’d consider working here but between the dogs, the lawsuits and the fake Christmas tree by the register in July I don’t think we’re really in synch.” Not really.  I never even sent a thank you email for that one but they still called me to come back for another interview.  Declined.

*I interviewed for another part-time accounting position and at the end was asked about my HR skills? HR? Who the heck said anything about HR?  Not them in the job description but they tacked on that little something something as a special surprise for the interview.  I followed up the next day with a thank you email that said, “I will not be that person that has to tell the tech support guy that his B.O. is offensive to other employees and that he needs to shower more often.”  Not really.  I said I was going into the soap making business to save the world from tech support guys with B.O.

*I interviewed twice at a job in the hinterlands.  It was a done deal until they gave me the weekend to think it over and the more I thought about driving to Hinterland every day (a pain in good weather and misery in bad) the more it seemed this job wasn’t for me.  I sent them a thank you email and said “Good luck in your search for a candidate as AWESOME as me.”  Not really.  Well, maybe on that one I did.

I’ve smiled and laughed at dumb jokes and awkward silences.  I’ve picked my outfit to match the job. Conservative? Check.  Bohemian?  Check check check.  The fake diamond earrings that go with me everywhere?  Out out out.  I need to look like I have to make money ASAP.

I’ve blathered on about my good traits (think Girl Scouts) and my weaknesses (applying for jobs that I’m never going to get because I’m 58 so I might as well be dead).  Diversity, a bad boss, annoying coworkers, stressful situations. Are you organized?  Is that some kind of work thing? You name the scenario and I can guarantee you it’s been asked of me. I have flatly stated the amount of hours I am able to work and the pay I want without even a hint of hedging or backpedaling, which might mean I’m growing up to be a real working girl who knows her worth.

Which so far hovers around zero.

I have had a filler job for the last six weeks but out of nowhere I got an email for a job I applied for months ago.  One more time I did the interview tango – this time with a Zyrtec chaser that made me want to do an antihistamine face plant on the desk.

Did it go well?

I’m no judge of that.

This is a post about the women I encountered over the course of a week.  Some I knew, some that were new to me.  I have been changed by all of them.

The first week of work at my last job I bonded with the HR manager.  I have written about her before – we did Listen To Your Mother together.  She left a few months after I started which left me twisting a wee bit in a fierce wind. Luckily the bond held after she left the job and then eventually me, and we keep in touch on a regular basis.

A few weeks ago she texted me to see if I wanted to see Kristin Chenoweth.  The non-profit where she is currently working was doing a fundraiser at the performing arts center and she had free tickets. FREE??!  Kristin Chenoweth!!!!  Darling, funny, talented Kristin Chenoweth???  Yes please.

We donned our night-on-the-town finest and headed off.  We were supposed to do some volunteering prior to the event but since that was under control we went upstairs, had a glass of wine and admired the beautiful Kansas City skyline that is so prominent from the performing arts center.  Making our way into the theater Amy said, “I’m so glad to get out for a night.  I don’t even know who this person is.”

“What????  She was in Wicked on Broadway.  Glinda?  You know Wicked, right?  Popular?  I want to be Popular?  No?  Well, she’s fabulous.  We’re going to have a great time.”

We checked our tickets with an usher – the loveliest woman who told us it was a sold-out event and that the ushers were put in a lottery to see who would work as everybody wanted to see this concert. She pointed us in the direction of the section we would be sitting and said as we left, “You two have a great time. It’s going to be an amazing concert!!”  She was so gracious and good at her job that of course she should be a winner in the usher lottery.

Kristin Chenoweth came out in confident, sparkling glory and started off with Que Sera.  Amy leaned over and said, “Do you ever feel like the universe is talking right to you?”

******

In Wicked there is a duet between Glinda and Elphaba called For Good.  It is one of my favorite songs.  Kristin introduced the song and the lights went up while she interviewed two women in the front row to sing the part of Elphaba.  A young music student from the conservatory got the honors and went up on stage.

If ever there was a person that the crowd was rooting for it was this girl.  Nervous and clutching the bottom of her dress she did her best.  Kristin coached her with the words to her part and she did her best in what was surely an out-of-body experience.

When the song ended the girl apologized for not knowing the words.  Kristin looked at her and said, “That’s okay because you know what we just had?  We had an experience.  You and me, didn’t we? That’s all you need to remember.”

*****

My writers group meets early at Panera on an overcast Friday morning.  We usually meet on Saturday mornings at a different Panera.  The summer had gotten away from us, though, and even stealing these few hours was difficult to pull together with everyone’s schedule.

I bring the drawing of the main character for the children’s book my niece and I are plotting.  “I’m stuck,” I say to them.

Stuck is an understatement.  I have a beginning that is utter crap, an end I can see perfectly and the entire middle that sucks wind.  I didn’t think this was going to be so hard but so far it has been. 

They look her over and listen to my problems.  They offer advice, good, solid advice and suggest names for her – one that I love.  I drive home thinking I might be capable of pulling this off.  The imaginary Fiona agrees.

***** 

She waved me down on a Sunday afternoon as I was pulling out of our street to go to the grocery store.  “The flowers,” she yelled.

I had met her a couple of weeks prior when I was working outside and she was walking her dog.  We had briefly been introduced once before through a mutual friend.  A fellow gardener, her charming house and yard look like a page right out of a fairy tale.  She asked me what kind of hydrangeas I had in the front of my house and we talked for a long time.  When we started talking about traveling I said we had just come back from a trip to New York City and loved it. She told me that they had just moved their son from there. “It’s not the best place for him now.”

She teared up and told me he wasn’t doing well but that she thought he had turned a corner in the last two days.  I could feel her heart.  Her heavy, breaking heart.

While talking about my flowers I offered to cut some for her and bring them by her house.  “Oh no, you don’t have to do that.  I just wondered what kind they were so I can plant them next year.”

“Well I have a few to spare,” I said as we looked at these heavy-headed flowers drooping from their own weight.  “I’ll drop them by your house one of these days.”

I often get asked by passerbys about my hydrangeas – what kind they are and how I got them to grow so big.  Sometimes I offer cuts of them when they have started to dry but rarely do I follow through.  This time, though, I was not going to let time and laziness win.  I went onto the screened porch and found a basket that I loved but had never used – oblong with bark on the outside, it feels natural and connected to the earth.  I held it up and debated.  This one or another?  Maybe I hadn’t used it yet but one of these days……. and I decided not to overthink it for once and let it go.

I crammed as many flowers as I could into that basket – it was a showy display of gardening goodness, and a few weeks after our initial conversation I drove them over to her house.  I tucked a note inside that said:  Here are your promised hydrangeas.  I hope things have changed for the better for you and your family.  I’ll see you in the neighborhood.

She wasn’t there when I went by but the dog sitter was and I left them with her.

There on my street corner on that Sunday afternoon she said, “I can’t tell you what it was like for me to walk in after what I’ve been through to see that basket of flowers and note.  It meant someone cared and I really needed it then.  You have no idea.”

We talked for a long time.  Her heart remains heavy – maybe even heavier if that’s possible.  Waving cars around us we exchanged phone numbers with plans for coffee. Her challenges and those of her son weigh heavily on me – so heavy at times that it feels like I’ve been asked to take my turn wearing a backpack of worry all day.

And if it feels like that for me what must it be like to be her?

Her phone rang.  It was her son and she had to go.  I watched her as she and her dog walked away, my heart full and sad and confused about how I happened to be outside on that September morning when she stopped by to ask about some flowers.

“One other thing,” she said.  “You could not have picked a better basket to put those flowers in.  It’s so me but it’s too nice to keep.  I’m going to give it back to you.”

“Keep it.  I think it was meant for you.”

*****

 I’ve heard it said
That people come into our lives for a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led
To those who help us most grow
If we let them
And we help them in return
Well, I don’t if I believe that’s true
But I know I’m who I am today
Because I knew you