Small Joys

After three years of pleading with anyone and everyone I could think of in the provincial government hierarchy,  I was finally successful in securing a place for my eldest sister in a nursing home where she can get the care she desperately needs and I can reclaim my own life.  Her admission to the facility capped some of the most difficult months of my life.  My health was declining, I hadn't slept through the night in months, every part of my body hurt and I burned through the battery in my pacemaker at an alarming rate.  In the end it came down to a threatened negligence lawsuit and a talk with the press which the placement officer clearly understood not to be an idle threat.  Suddenly, a spot opened up and I was given forty-eight hours to move my sister into the facility.  The timing of it also meant that I had one week to get her settled in before I left for a long-planned family trip to the UK.  

 

In the week before we left, I spent every day helping Nancy get settled into the nursing home.  I filled out reams of forms, gave 60 days notice to her landlord, cancelled her phone and cable services and on and on.  By the time I left for our trip, I was exhausted.  I stopped waking up in a panic worrying whether or not she was safe.  I know she is safe in the nursing home but my nighttime worries turned instead into how I was going to clear out her apartment in the six weeks I had remaining before the lease expired.  Nan's apartment was huge - bigger than my first house, and her inclination to be a collector had turned into full-blown hoarding when her cognitive skills went into decline more than a decade ago.  There wasn't a surface in the apartment that wasn't covered in stuff.  I worked in the apartment every day for six weeks.  My friends, Julie and Geraldine often worked with me.  My husband diligently did the heavy lifting and my son and his partner worked beside me whenever they could.  Every cabinet, every tiny box, bin, chest, cupboard, vase, dish or bowl had to be gone through thoroughly.  I found a gold earring in a box of paperclips, thousands of envelopes, close to a hundred unused notebooks and journals, twenty identical pairs of earmuffs, all unused and at least a hundred nail clippers.  There were four working sewing machines, boxes and boxes of ribbons and sewing notions and more fabric than you may reasonably find in a fabric store.  And that was the tip of the iceberg.  Three or four hundred cookbooks, more than 20 of them chocolate cookbooks were rounded out by cocktail and bartending recipe books, an interesting collection for a woman who didn't drink alcohol.  And then there were the dishes and tea cups and saucers, collections of lovely bar glasses that still had the price stickers on them, hundreds of magazines and enough art supplies to stock an art school for a year, thousands of family photos and prayer cards (though she claimed to be an atheist) and funeral registers and receipts dating back to the death of my grandfather in 1935.  

 

Sifting, sorting, packing and moving treasures into storage used every day of the first five weeks.  For the sixth week, I hired a company to take out everything for disposal or donation that wasn't going to make it to the rented storage unit or into the home of a family member or friend.  On the final day before the company came, Jacob joined me at the apartment to sort through the kitchen cupboards.  They were so far above my head that I couldn't even see what was in them.  Jacob pulled things from the cupboard above the fridge - an ice cream maker, empty jars, more dishes and baking tools and then I saw it - the canning pot.  Nan hasn't used the canning pot in more than thirty years.  It belonged to my mother before her and to my grandmother before that.  I have long wanted the pot, but Nan didn't know where it was and we assumed it was lost.  I brought it home.  

 

As the growing season is coming to its conclusion for this year, I am coming to the end of my canning season.  My generous friends have been sharing the bounty of their gardens and I have been making the jams and relishes that my grandmother made and I enjoyed in childhood.  Today I made rhubarb jam and green tomato relish that we will enjoy with our tourtiere on Christmas Eve.  I used my Mimi's canning pot.  It felt like magic.  Small joys. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

70 Years of Lessons

 

 

Tomorrow is my 70^th birthday.  As I always do in the week before my birthday, I have spent the last few days reflecting on the past year and thinking about what I will strive for in the next.  As this is a milestone birthday, I’ve broadened my reflective lens this year.  Seventy is a birthday I didn’t always expect to reach but here I am, grateful, thrilled and amazed that even after seventy years of life, I am still a work in progress.

I’ve been thinking about the lessons I’ve learned in seven decades of treading an often uneven and at times, difficult path.  There have been many lessons learned the hard way.  Perhaps I am a slow learner, but here are some of the most important I have learned.

 

1.     Kindness is always the right choice.  It costs nothing to lead with kindness but a great deal not to.  Responding to the unkind actions of others by being unkind in return does not make anything better. It just makes you feel bad about being unkind.  It’s best to lead with kindness because of who you are rather than who they are.

2.     There is a middle ground between being selfish and being selfless.  They are not the only two options you have.  Finding the middle ground is key to having a happy life.

3.      Every problem comes with a gift in its hand.  Hard times are more easily navigated if you can look for the gifts which inevitably come with them.  Some days, it’s harder to find them than on others but I guarantee they are there if you look hard enough.

4.      Except for love, nothing is permanent.  Pain is transitory.  Fear is transitory.  Youth is transitory.  Ownership is transitory.  At the end, all that is left is love and the more of it you give away, the more of it you have.

5.      A mother’s love is unlike any other.  We generally don’t know how much our mothers loved us until we become mothers ourselves. 

6.     Creating art is an essential piece of living a full life.  It doesn’t matter what form that creating takes or how good at it you are.  Write or paint, cook or bake, build or garden, sew or knit, dance or act.  Just let yourself do whatever it is that is in you.  Create for the joy not for the evaluation of the end result.  Pay no attention to critics.  No statue was ever erected to a critic.

7.      Always be learning.  The world is rapidly evolving, and it takes an active effort to keep up.  Read.  Take classes.  Travel. There are so many wonders to see and learn about but if you stay still, you will miss them all.

8.      Old age is a gift to be treasured and enjoyed.  Though it comes with its own set of challenges, it beats the alternative.  Too many people don’t get the gift of old age. Every day is a gift.

9.      It’s okay to rest.  There is no shame in taking idle hours.  You won’t get a medal for filling every minute of every day with non-stop activity.  Allow yourself the joy of daydreaming and thinking time.  Read a good story or watch a sappy movie if that’s what you want to do.  The vacuuming can wait a few hours.

10  The world is a beautiful place.  No matter what else is going on, the sun comes up in the morning and the moon shines at night.  Nature is a balm for our souls that is accessible to everyone.  Pay attention.