Poetry Friday: Re-creating My Grandparents

Happy Poetry Friday, everyone!

Today's poem is all about my maternal grandparents: Grandpa Mac and Grandma Sallie. I am one of those past-pickers who loves to marinate in the stories, details and even dates of my ancestors. I have drawn up family trees and dug around in the great, stale stores of The Internet for immigration records and am always pressing relatives for little stories and anecdotes. I think one of the key reasons why I am so fixated is because I long for a sense of connection of human understanding, of familial community that stretches deeper and farther than my varied cousins and my several aunts. I want to know what "we" as a clan were like in the Great Depression, how we cook, how we were in The Old Country, how we hold our liquor, how we walk, how we all tell jokes and what kinds of things we do in times of stress. I wish I could interview all my ancestors but instead I am writing a poem for them and for myself. 

My grandpa, the year the stock market crashed, 1929.

My grandma as a young woman with her first child, my aunt Nancy.

My Roots Are Showing

Odd how I run my fingers over and over
The many strands of my family roots,
Harping, my husband calls it when I go on.
I especially think about my grandparents:
I know I am lucky to have hugged them,
Had their wrinkled hands stroke mine
And to have felt their hair with sleepy fingers
But I know my versions of them are pale
Flickering, silhouettes sketches of people.
I remember old snatches of my grandpa:
Rag wool sweaters, pipe tobacco and his back
Bent in the sun over the stone garden wall.
Grandma is the scent of geraniums, solitaire
And glasses of water with crossword puzzles, 
A chic tip to her head, her feet curved and shuffling
I have these little torn, scavenged memories
And I have fashioned them into frozen collages
The two of them, stiff and quirky: static human art.
I know they gasped along like I do, their lives
As thumping and real as mine and my husband's
But sometimes I have to write to really feel them,
Cracking open the trunk of words in my mind
To enliven them, breathing in their realities
How it truly felt...in the bones, to have:
A cascade of preemie daughters, a house-fire,
A war hero ghost for a brother, an ex-wife,
An explosive temper, a yen for pink pistachios,
A college crush, a wry joke over gin,  a first art sale,
A master's degree, a quiet breakfast in Paris,
A job in another state, an absent spouse, a broken nose,
An alcoholic father, a museum you helped found,
A fear of gaining weight, A obsession with saving bags,
Or a commitment that sticks there through it all
Stubborn and eternal and lumpy like all real things.

My grandparents are the elegant couple on the left, my aunt and uncle on the right.

 You can go browse the other submissions for Poetry Friday tonight as a celebration of the weekend or tomorrow morning (like I will) with a mug of tea in hand. There is always a huge buffet of delicious offerings to pick through. Trudy is hosting this week over at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Happy Weekend!
xoxo

The Year of Self-Inflicted Terror

I have never been super good at facing difficulty and ponying up to failures or possible failures. Man, I'd like to kick that one! This year I am planning to expose myself to lots of things that scare me, work hard on things that seem insurmountable, chip away at jobs that take a looooooong time and seem like they will never end and learn to hear and handle and use criticism.

Whew. Its a big year. 

 My focus word for the year is "Grit." It feels really good and I have lot of ideas for making it happen.

One thing I am doing, for instance is planning to take surfing lessons. I love the ocean and I really like to swim (although, I am not any kind of proficient) but surfing looks terrifying. The major deep water, the being out so far away from any help or land, the giant board that could clobber you silly, the Godzilla strength surf, not to mention the social intimidation of trying to hang with the tanned and the muscled. Long Island has a surfing school and I am plan to enroll. Lucy tells me she will come too and I plan to push through the shakes and the hesitation and learn to surf. This is the year. I  will do tough things.

I also plan to organize, purge completely and beautify our hoarders stash of a basement. I am telling you guys this so that I will have public accountability and will feel like I have called myself out. I'm gonna sort through all the boxes of junk and random papers and old photos stuck together. I'm gonna take load after load to Goodwill and the dump and jam things into our recycling bin until they won't fit anymore. I will have systems and know them. I will look all my ridiculous mess in the eye and I will stop doing it. When company comes I will not run madly around shoving everything into a box or a bag and then throw it on the scary heap in the basement. I am done. This is the year.

Its gonna be a good year. I'm excited. 

Also, I am heading off on these challenging, scary adventures with so much in my corner. I have good books, pretty spaces, certainty that I can do it and an adorable baby with the cutest static halo around.

 

Shredded Underwear + Inner Strength

Something is crazily shredding all of my underwear. Weird, right? I think I am down to a handful of pairs now because they keep coming out of the dryer with strange marble sized holes in them. I can't figure it out. There's no way that our washing machine is selectively gnawing only my underwear. How can that be? Did I tick it off? If it was all whites I'd think I'd put in too much bleach but I like my colored undies...so that's not the issue. Mysteries.

We are still hibernating in between bouts of skateboarding classes. Lucy and I are watching our way through the first season of Sex and the City which is hilarious good fun. I am fleshing out my resolutions and my ideas for the coming year. I've been tucking away this and that scrap of inspiration and this week I pulled together a Pinterest board and a paste and scissors mood-board. So excited about having so much to draw on in a ready place.

The citrus season is in full-flush and we are galloping through boxes of clementines and having big, sunny orange slices at breakfast. I have to make a note to save some orange peels to toss in the fire some evening when we have the fireplace cranked up. I am also having a yen for Meyer lemons. Every day at naptime Nib is asking to read Amelia Bedelia and then as I tuck him in he looks at my with his big brown eyes over the edge of his quilt and begs me to make him a lemon meringue pie: justification for Meyer lemons commence! We might need a batch of lemon curd to go with it for special breakfast. I also have to remember to get a bunch of coral grapefruits and serve them cut with honey some morning.

Prunings from the fruit trees, about to leaf out in a vase on the bookcase.

Its easy to forget the happy little parts of winter when you are longing for hyacinths and lilacs but I am determined to be in now and appreciate whatever I can right in this spot. I will not succumb to avoidance and wishful thinking and wistfully imagine away what really is. Learning to be optimistic in a wholehearted way this year and also to dive in wherever things are hard and find the value in the struggle and the overcoming. Will become a strong woman this year, walking through fear and the slightly icky into adventure and resilience

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