Homefulness

Nothing brings to mind homefulness quite as much as being a welcome visitor in the homes of people we love. 

  

I could name everyone reading this  right now (those of you who have invited me into your house for beans and cornbread, or elaborate recipes that take all day to make, or a half-glass of wine on the porch.) The flavors inside someone else's kitchen, the welcoming smells of soup and bread: is that Heaven or what?

I rarely need to sleep in anyone's guest room in San Antonio, having a bed of my own there, but when traveling or visiting a friend, it's a treat to sleep in guest rooms, unencumbered by the weight of to-do's at home. Waking up to the sounds of people stirring in the kitchen, the indecipherable words downstairs that sound like sleepy hums announcing the new day is waking up? Conversations about the art other people choose, a framed portrait of a grandmother, the plants in the yard, the various pets--all the conversations that take more time than those in coffee shops, sometimes late into the night. 

If I were to name names, I might err on the side of making this post too long--because everyone reading this has been a sister-traveler or a giver of hospitality.  But I could name names. 

I could tell you about a visit in a friend's second home in Connecticut, walks on the beach, sleeping in a bedroom bigger than my whole house, and feeling so cozily at home.  I could tell you about my Cape Cod friend who has  invited friends over to celebrate my visit, and best of all, gives her so-fortunate guests wonderful candle-lit massages in a blue upstairs guest room. 

When I recently complained to a friend back home--that I need extensive dental surgery but left my house in mid-remodeling stage because I thought I'd be back in a couple of weeks--she said, "You can stay at my house!  If my grandson is in the guest room, we can kick him out!" Another friend, heading soon to Vermont for two months, offered me her whole house!

My remodeling man meant well; he promised that when I come home, it would be like one of those programs on HGTV (when the homeowner leaves for a week and comes back to a total gasp-worthy transformation) 

But he got sick and was unable to finish.  Right now, my home is just sitting there with a bunch of new windows, the furniture still covered in protective sheets to keep everything clean during the messy finishing up. Right now, I'm more worried about his health than the house.  

Then a casual dental appointment revealed the need for shock-worthy dental work.  My remodeling friend and I have been texting back and forth about his illness and my teeth, and there's nothing to be done about either right this minute.  

I'm lucky in that I have a back up house, the casita, for sleeping and recovering, if I have the surgery at home.  I'm so fortunate to have this spacious house and yard (Carlene calls it "our house") to relax in for as long as I need it if I have the surgery here.  

I feel rich in friends and family who could and would take me in if needed--just as my casita would be there for them if the tables were turned. I've already had my new next door neighbor--a Palestinian woman who owns a restaurant--offer to make me soup and soft foods.  

Homefulness (a word I just coined that auto-correct wants to change to "hopefulness") is the best possible way to feel when your body or soul or mind is vulnerable.  To feel welcome to share another's house--an extension of that person--is, in my opinion, better than any medicine.

Or, as Frost wrote in his poem, "The Death of the Hired Man"---

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in....

I'm likely to stay here--not the house filled with childhood history as the Cochran house was, but overflowing with memories of all the decades between my first leavings (for college, then a year later for Texas) and now.  I know where all the light switches are, I can still play the piano they bought when I was in third grade, and Luci loves tracking critters in the big yard. In my memory, all of us, all our younger selves, are still present around the big round table. 

This is where all the babies and then children and then grown-up children remember so many Christmases and summer vacations.  It's where my dad napped in this blue lounge chair I'm sitting in now.  It's where bad news bruised us to the core and good news was doubled and tripled and more--by sharing. 

At this moment, awake and writing in the middle of the night, I feel settled in here, yet also so connected to my friends back home.  

I'm also resolved, when I go back to my own house, to start making soup and cornbread and inviting friends over.  I don't have to do gourmet.  The house doesn't have to be perfect (it can be like me--messy and incomplete).  

This is my homage to homefulness and my gratitude for all the hospitality and love I've felt from each of you!

International "Travel"

Today I got a facial from a lovely Israeli woman who has also lived in Kuwait and Jordon.  

Moon and her sister Moony (new window friends at McDonalds) are from Bangladesh; one wears an orange head scarf the other a green one.  

My next door neighbors are Noreen and Martin, she from Palestine.  First thing every morning and last thing at night, I get a text from her with lots of hearts. On Monday, we're hoping to have a playdate for Tessi and Luci. 

Last week, Bob and Jocelyn enjoyed a good Greek dinner at Noreen's restaurant, Real Olive.  The hummus and baklava were the best I've ever had. 

Shopping for sunglasses, I met Tanja, a woman who moved here from Germany twenty years ago and taught herself English. We bonded--as happens at least once a day--over our shared love of little dogs. 

Will, Bonnie, Nathan and Elena just got back from a three week trip to Spain, Portugal and Morocco, so I'm just trying to do a bit of humble traveling in Gwinnett County.  

I know, I know, it's not the same, but it's wonderful to explore my old hometown much changed. When I left Lawrenceville in 1967, it was a pretty. homogenous town. Now it's a mini United Nations. 

One advantage of living in someone else's house is detaching from my obsessions--changing decor or colors or even simple switcheroos of chairs.  

Living in someone else's house is also a study in the art of differences.  It's a pleasure to visit or sleepover in a house very unlike one's own, but it's a whole other thing to actually take up residence, meet the neighbors, and get to know the town a little better. 

Carlene keeps everything.  Furniture stays put.  She files operating instruction and keeps the boxes. In my house,  I couldn't lay my hands on either as they have long since gone into recycling.  

If I stacked all the greeting cards Carlene has kept, it would be floor to ceiling several times over.  Same with  photos.  

She gave me carte blanche to organize, and that's my jam!  I sat on the floor for hours reading cards, many of which my children and I sent to "Nana and Granddaddy."   I see Mimi's  (her mother's) handwriting, so tiny I can barely decipher it. 

One day, I chose a few cards and bundled them to take to Carlene's apartment and she loved the short visits from the past as much as I had.  I've found packets from old film stores I mailed her decades ago  (Remember Foto-mat?) and wondered why I had needed to capture every expression on my baby Day's face--the way we do with first babies. 

I don't make huge changes. Mostly I just re-stack and re-sort, kind of like editing a piece of writing.   

This morning she was reading her college magazine and she saw that her college roommate had died.  Her name was Helen, but she went by her nickname, Illy--because, Illy said, she was "illegitimate." 

A name from the past, it made us laugh.  A word, a line of a letter--it's like a needle that pulls up threads from all over the place. 

Another fun bit about living in someone else's house is that when you go out, you hear the words and expressions you don't hear at your other home.  "Can I get you a buggy?" a clerk asks in a store.  Not a shopping cart, a buggy.  

I'm not a party person, neither is Bob.  Carlene is the most extroverted one in our original family of four.  Her door is always open.  People can stop by without calling first, just open the door and call out, "Hey!"  She's a good listener and her visitors love that.  Everyone wants to be listened to. 

She's made her new apartment home and every night she tells me about conversations with people at lunch or breakfast. Her new friend whose surname is also Harris is blind from glaucoma, and Carlene enjoys pushing her back to her room and getting to know her better.  She likes listening to their stories, just as she's done for decades at this home.  

Good Morning, Moon!

I always start my day with my equivalent of your morning coffee, a senior Diet Coke from McDonalds. I drink about half of it, but it gets my engine running.  "Forty seven cents at the first window," the speaker says. 

Here in Lawrenceville, the second window (the pick up window) frames the face of a young woman wearing an orange scarf and smiling.  She is Bangladeshi.  

In the beginning Carlene was always with me, so she always asks about "your mama."  When she hands me my drink, she reaches out to shake my hand.

One day, I asked her how she spelled her name, Moon.  I had assumed, with her accent, her name might be spelled differently.  

She smiled and spelled it out M-O-O-N.

In the last week, she has started saying "I love you" to me.  And adding "Say also to your mama when you go there." 

This morning I asked her, "Have you ever heard of the book Goodnight Moon?"

She nodded yes, but I'm not entirely sure she understood me. I will order a copy of the book for her. But in the meanwhile, I will see her every morning and often my first words of the day--unless I'm on the phone with my mama--are, "I love you."

After she reaches out to shake my hand, she blows me a kiss and I start to drive away.  I say, "Love you too" and "See you tomorrow." 

"Not tomorrow," she says, "Is my day off."  Then she hands me an extra drink, for free, to cover Monday Missing Moon.

Wednesday on Craig Drive

I am temporarily living in the house I came home to from college and Texas.  We'd just moved to Lawrenceville from Cochran the year before, and my 1966 high school graduation coincided with. moving in here.

At the time, soon-to-be-husband was completing his master's degree in Athens, and I moved there for the first half of my freshman year at the University of Georgia.  Then he moved to San Antonio to start his four years in the Air Force before getting drafted. 

On the night before my wedding the following summer, three of us (bride and bridesmaids) slept in my full-sized bed, two in Bob's bed. The next day, we drove our new Volkswagen to Texas, planning to move back to Georgia when he'd finished his Air Force stint. Obviously, we never moved back. 

So now with Bob, Jocelyn, and Carlene in Athens, I'm living in this house with a great big yard and a magnificent little dog who loves it rolling in the grass and listening to birds.

Luci has been scratching fiercely since we got here, so I took her to a nearby vet, a young woman named Rain.  She advised me to stop "open feeding" and to feed her only twice a day.  And to stop feeding her people food!  

To that her nurse said, "Miss Luci is about to have an existential crisis!"

A lot of things have happened in the lives of some of my friends and family and me, some tragic, some unsettling and scary.  I am both here and there, all the Theres where people are suffering.

I've made friends with a young woman in the neighborhood whose mother died a month ago and who likes to spend time with me because I remind her of her mother and have "such mama vibes." Today she texted me that she thinks her "mom sent me to her." 

My medicine for the hard things today was reading lots of doses of Anne Lamott.

The house was cleaned yesterday for the visit from Carlene and Jocelyn and Bob--who went to her appointment with the pace maker doctor.  He gave her a promise that her pacemaker would last for seven more years!  

After our visit, she was happy to go "home"--where she's made new friends among the staff and other residents and is kept busy every day with activities and meals she enjoys.  

"I've gained five pounds, though," she said.

Jocelyn said it's because she's getting three good meals a day, and we all agree she looks so relaxed and happy! 

Strawberry Everything

Lily Gladstone (Academy Award winner, Killers of the Flower Moon) stars in another powerful story, Fancy Dance, 2024, playing the part of a Native American woman whose sister has disappeared.

Without spoilers, I just want to focus on one scene that was so impactful I had to scroll back and watch it again.

When her niece starts her first period, she wakes her up to tell her.  "Auntie, I got my moon."

"The first one?"

"Yeah."

Long pause....."okay."

After a small ceremonial bonfire and washing her hands with ash, she takes her niece to a diner and tells her to order everything she wants.

"Really?"

"Okay, I'll take the strawberry pancakes, the strawberry waffles, the strawberry blintzes, and whatever that one is."

"Crepes?"

"Yeah, crepes.  And oh, do you have anything like cake or pie or dessert for like when you're celebrating a big event?"

The waitress asks, "Oh is it for your birthday?"

"No," she says, smiling, "It's for my period."

The waitress says, "Oh, I ain't never celebrated that a day in my life but I'll see what I can do."

Watching that scene, while girls and women I know are passing through puberty and pregnancy and menopause, I couldn't help thinking how good it would be if these rites of passage were celebrated like this with the help of women who have been there! 

 

Sunday in Athens

Yesterday, Luci and I visited Carlene in her new apartment.  We shared a lunch in the dining room and walked outside in the courtyard and sat by the fountain for as long as we could stand the heat.

I met one of her favorite nurses, Pennie.  They share the same August 24th birthday, but 60 years apart. 

"We're twins!" Pennie said. 

Like all the staff-members I've met (director, food servers, nurses, chaplain, servers of meals) Pennie treats the residents with so much respect and affection. 

At lunch, I enjoyed meeting some of th 31 residents in ASU--"All Seniors University," to use Carlene's college analogy.   Roberta, who's been there the longest, three years, knows everyone and can tell stories about all of them.  The man I sat beside is a champion ping pong player and former golfer.  Ray, the second oldest person there (Carlene beating him by a year) is a retired Louisiana history professor.  

The woman at the end of the table, was living in a mountain town and her husband "up and died" so she decided to move to a senior community. Another is blind with glaucoma, but Carlene tells me she has a wicked sense of humor. 

"Who misses cooking?" I ask everyone at the table.

"Not me!" they answer in unison.  "Or grocery shopping!" another answers. 

 

   

Sloping Floors

     Day was horrified when she finally got to see the house Marcus and his friends were "SO excited about" renting for sophomore year. "It's beyond awful," she said, "Over a hundred years old, the shabbiest house in the neighborhood.  There are no countertops in the tiny kitchen.  And the floors slope at least six inches from one side to the other!" 

     "Why would three 19-year- old boys choose it?  Why am I the only parent of said 19-year-olds who's scared it's going to burn down?  Even Tom says it's going to be fine."

      "You've just described exactly the house I lived in when I was nineteen," I said.  Newlyweds, we rented a shabby little house on Mistletoe for $75 a month.  It holds so many good memories!" 

     I didn't know how to mop back then,  One day I poured water onto the kitchen floor and it ran all the way to the other side of the house.  The floors sloped wat least six inches.  I mopped up the puddle with towels, then walked to a pay phone to call my mama and daddy (collect, as always) for a mopping tutorial.

     I improvised fruit crates to serve as a pantry, filled mostly with boxes of Chef Boyardee Pizza--since I hadn't yet learned to cook anything but brownies and pound cakes. For a countertop, I bought a little table.  We left the doors unlocked.  When brownies were cooking, neighbor kids would come in and ask for some. 

     "They are just kids," I said,  "They don't care about sloping floors or kitchen counters. This will be part of their education."

     "That's pretty much what Tom said," she said, disappointed that I didn't share her horror.

     When I drive past the Mistletoe house now, a flood of happy memories whooshes in: 

     *The neighbor kids returning to get another brownie "for Grandma." 

     *Mark refusing money from my parents (who were probably horrified that I was living in such a terrible place) just before the dilapidated chair he was sitting in collapsed to the floor with him in it--all four of us laughing at the irony.  

     *Having friends over for pizza, beer, and pound cake and eating on the blue rug--the only furnishings a stereo and a curbside-find coffee table holding a vase colorful Mexican paper flowers.  

    *Listening to our three albums: Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Miles Davis.  

    *Selling some wedding silver to buy a spirited German Shepherd puppy ($65 from a breeder!) whose value to us was beyond words! 

    *Rewiring a cage from the Mexican Market to hold two finches.

     *Learning to mop and clean up puppy poo on the blue rug.

     *Making a hanging light with papier mache on a big balloon. 

         At nineteen, I didn't care what we didn't have. Sloping floors were immaterial.  What we did have (like still loving each other and having a dog and music) seemed like wealth. We only lived in that house for 3 months.  How could one little decrepit house hold so many good memories, so many life lessons? 

     And so it goes.  The circle of life. 

     Carlene moving into a luxurious apartment with all the amenities she could ever want,  

     Jackson and his girlfriend and another friend moving into a very nice Richmond apartment for his first year of graduate school. 

     Marcus moving into his first house just a few blocks from his brother.  

     And me--playing house in Carlene's for the summer.  

Jackson and Tom in Jackson's new Richmond apartment

Marcus and his two roommates, both named Ben

What She Forgot

My mother, 99 in August is remarkable!  She's waited for almost a year for her slightly-assisted living apartment in Athens, and Monday was move-in day.  

She's meticulously planned: where the furniture will go, not to take her television or computer, which CDs (piano hymns) to take.  While I was at the lake in Virgina, Bob and Jocelyn moved and unloaded furniture, pictures and linens, so that when we walked in and she saw it, we were all teary with delight. Her apartment is beautiful! With two large rooms and a bathroom, it's colorful, uncluttered and homey. Four of the many stained glass pieces she's made were hanging in the windows, and Jocelyn had made her a welcome cake.

I'm staying at her house and using her car,  and we talk a few times a day.  She is SO happy, going to activities and meals with a notebook to help her remember the names of staff and residents. 

As for me, I'm organizing the house with fewer pieces of furniture, getting it ready for the cleaners to do the heavy cleaning. I love organizing,so it's like playing house. I even have art supplies on the back porch so that I can do gel prints and collages. 

First Look

She didn't forget her night-gown, toothpaste, or positivity.  She didn't forget her enthusiasm, her cane, or a few books and jewelry.  Her paperwork was organized in neat folders.   

In this last picture, we were just leaving the house she's lived in for sixty years.  

As we were driving out of her neighborhood, she said, 

"Oh, I forgot to cry!"