~:: Bits of Eden ::~

My father just turned 88.  He outdid his own father’s life by almost 30 years.  I’m not that ambitious, myself.  Happy birthday, Daddy.

The perfect, perfect, perfect day:

Saturday after Thanksgiving, the great feast eaten.

Two days spent setting the stage for the next celebration, the children here to help.  The weather, cold enough to make the fireside a cave of warmth and safety, but not cold enough to be worrisome.  Horses fed.  Dogs asleep at our feet.  Turkey leftovers in the refrigerator.  The Big Game on at one-thirty. M and Chaz with us.  And Luke, who took care of the house and dogs while we were gone, comes too.  For the moment, rushing life settles drowsily in an over-stuffed chair.  For this moment, there is content.

We lost the game.  It was a bummer – by one point in the last four seconds, after a really, really controversial, lousy call.  To our way long-time rivals.  But yelling together is its own reward.

I settled into the feeling of the day the way an aching body sinks into a really good mattress.

We had Santa Sandwiches.  Chaz and I and Johanne discovered these in Sisters, Oregon at the quilt show some years ago.  G made them for us today.  I share the secret with you:

Very good bread – homemade if possible, whole grain, flavorful.  Rye, is what I recall the funky little sandwich shop using.

You can use mayonnaise, which I do.  But on top of that, you lay a nice, fat foundation of cream cheese, and then you crown that with just as healthy a layer of cranberry sauce.  This year, we used a wonderful cranberry-orange relish (NOT made by me).  Then the turkey.  And finally, crisp lettuce. A fine sandwich.

A noble sandwich. I’d love to have you all over and I’d give you one – if I could hire a sandwich maker for the day.  G is the resident one, but I don’t want to wear him out.  Especially after his stroke of genius yesterday, when—in a moment of pure inspiration—he added a thin layer of the left-over twice baked sweet potatoes.  I don’t throw the word “bliss” around lightly.

This morning (morning after) has been odd.  It was in late May that all the children (except M, who was still in Argentina) finally all had their own real houses.  M came home in late June.  On the day he signed a lease on a college apartment and moved himself over there, the nest cracked wide open. Empty—all the birds flown.  Since then, I’ve had one rushing deadline after another – and the trips, the babies, the holidays.

Until this morning.  We’ve had M for Thanksgiving weekend, and Chaz has been hanging out with us, free till her teaching position claims her tomorrow.  But they are gone now, and this Sabbath morning, just before church, G and I are blinking in the silence.

This morning I realized: the thing you get back when the kids grow up and plant themselves in their own places?  Control over your focus.  Your attention is yours again – no one grabbing your face and turning it for you, which is a mother’s life.  This possibility had occurred to me before it became a reality, and with it came the fear that I’d be dead bored.  Or just sort of aimless.  But it didn’t turn out to be so.  I do like being in charge of the direction in which my eyes are looking.

Still, having my kids back, even for a few days – maybe especially for a few days – is sweet, and energizing.  Much laughter.  New perspectives.  Fun.  When they are here, they wear me out.  When they leave, the house is flat with the silence.