Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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Twenty Nine Years Ago Yesterday: Genevieve

   When I was not quite nine years old, Mom was El Preggo with the third of my four younger siblings. It had been a cold, happy winter of family gatherings and more than the normal amount of living room furniture rearranging. A person could reasonably attribute most of this to Mom’s strong nesting instincts.
   As I recall, Mom had been displaying signs of labor for most of the Christmas season, and by this week in January 1983 the family’s excitement level was not low. We were on happy little pins and needles. I was almost nine, so my sister Angela would have been four and a half and our little brother Joey not quite two. Philip would be born in another three years.

   For some wonderful reason my parents decided to invite me to be part of the birth when it finally happened. Grandma Stubbs, who lived nearby, was all set to watch over the little ones and my parents’ friend Debbie and I were to be included in the hospital business. I was extremely happy about this plan, you guys. Anything to make me feel like one of the adults, you know?

   I was asleep when Dad came in to rouse me, whispering excitedly, “Reezie, let’s go. Wake up. Your Mom’s having the baby.”
   
   I could barely hear my Mom’s voice across the bare wood hallway and was listening acutely to my young parents shuffle quietly through the upstairs, not wanting to wake the little ones. I think Grandma had already made it to the house. I remember smelling her perfume when we walked downstairs. 
   Debbie was already there, too. She was a mid wife, but we were still headed to the hospital. We all found the bags that had been packed for a while. Dad helped Mom into the back seat of our cute little white Subaru wagon. She is petite and so she fit perfectly on the narrow bench seat. I sat on Debbie’s lap in the front passenger seat. Dad drove. Dad drove like I had never seen him drive before, nor have I since.
   Now, listen. I know I am not the only person in the world
whose Dad is rarely nervous or emotional. but allow me to interject here 
that this particular January night was one of the few times in life 
when I have ever seen this man quite like this. Okay? Okay.
   We lived no more than ten minutes from Baptist hospital in Oklahoma City, and with the absence of traffic in the wee hours of the morning, one might think it would be a breeze to get there in time.

   One might think.

   We drove north west on the Expressway, zooming through nonexistent traffic and slicing the dark with our happy little emergency. I sat on Debbie’s lap and did not say a word. In my mind I can remember her smell, too, and feel her long braid against my shoulder. Her lavender vinyl backpack was at our feet. Back then I thought Debbie was a wizened creature of the universe, older than I would ever be, but in truth she was just out of high school, not yet off to college in Vermont. She was wise then but very young. Perspective is a funny thing.
   We all sat stiffly in our seats because of the cold and trembled from the adrenaline. I remember giggling with Debbie and feeling so grown up and special to be allowed this chance to welcome our new family member into the world. Seeing a sibling born is something that just cannot be duplicated.
   “Joe, it’s time! It’s really, really time!” Mom was nearly shrieking. Now, in Dad’s defense, there had already been a few false starts that holiday season. Hard contractions were a fact of daily life since Christmas, so he knew it could be another false alarm. And besides, we lived minutes away from the hospital and he was already driving like a Duke boy.

   Now, in Mom’s defense, she had already given birth naturally three times in her young life. She knew what she was talking about. From my front seat perspective that night, my money was on Mom. 
   “I know, we’re almost there! Hang on!” Dad was focused on the traffic lights, the stick shift, and his wife in the back seat. I cannot tell you with certainty that he was breathing.
   “No, I’m not kidding! It’s really time, NOW!!!”
  “Almost there, honey!”
   “Joe, NOW! RIGHT NOW!! I mean it!”
   Dad pulled off to the center median just shy of north May avenue and hurriedly parked the Subaru. He raced around the front of the car and to the passenger side and pulled open the back door. He arrived just in time to catch his baby as Mom pushed. 
   Just in time.

   I will never for as long as I live forget the moment that Mom’s guttural yelling changed over to laughter. Have you ever heard this split second syllable before? Whatever pain and panic she was feeling as we drove was instantly and permanently forgotten, as labor pain often is. Her voice was suddenly all joy and love and peace, elation and celebration in the cold cargo light of the Subaru back seat!
   Then we all started laughing, and Debbie and I hugged in the front seat. I remember staring at my beautiful Momma while twisted around, white chenille blanket slightly bloodied, tiny, messy screaming bundle on her hips. She was curling up to find her baby’s face and offered the most beautiful, most consuming smile I had ever seen.

   “It’s a girl!!!” Dad said shakily.

   Then I got a glimpse of the gross umbilical cord and turned back to face front.

   I remember very little after that except arriving at the emergency room drive up doors. Dad escorted Mom with the baby and nurses into the cavernous mouth of the hospital, and Debbie and I were on our own for a while.   I was only nine, after all, and very sleepy.
   Being one of the first people to see my beautiful little sister Genevieve Michelle sort of gave me the idea that she was partly mine. Helping to cuddle, change diapers, and entertain tiny siblings is one thing; witnessing that first moment of air-sucking emergence into the world is quite another. It doesn’t hurt that she is perfectly adorable and loving in every way.

When I eventually returned to school 
to share the good news, 
I could not pronounce her name correctly.
So for a while my friends and teachers thought
she was named Guinevere.
Here’s Guinevere a few years later
on our back yard play set. 
For many years the whole family 
called her Viva Michelle, and Mom still does.
Here’s Viva Michelle holding my first born, 
Jocelyn Marie, circa 1996.
I’ve always thought they look a lot alike, especially as babies.
They are chatting with our great grandfather Papa Joe,
who was among other things a beekeeper.
His wife was a writer.
I should tell you their story sometime.
Gen this Christmas, all grown up and beautiful.
She is a Derby Doll in Los Angeles,
so how perfect that Mom & Dad gave her this fishnet leg lamp!!
The whole room was laughing so hard!!
   Yesterday was Viva Guinevere’s first twenty-ninth birthday, and as fate would have it her lifelong best girlfriend Erin delivered a healthy little baby girl right on time, though not in the back seat of a car. What a birthday gift! What a lovely full circle life draws sometimes. Erin & Darryl, we wish you many healthy, happy years with your daughter! Gen, I love you. I always have and I always will.
   I believe deeply in the power of silent wishes and prayers, in specific blessings being honored because we speak them and ask them of the Right Source. Will you please join me in showering my little baby sister in whatever wonderful, specific little blessing you would like to see manifest in her life this year?

Sisters are Cute.
Umbilical Cords are Grody.
Happy Birthday Gen!!
xoxoxoxo

   

Eyewitness of His Majesty (Small Stone January 22)

   Sitting on a hard pew, sliding around on the polished wooden planks because of my polyester dress and winter tights, shivering from the cold air, I look forward and blink. I am listening to the scriptures passively at first, gliding thoughtlessly through our Sunday morning routine with little effort. 
   Until the speaker’s eyes change. His brow furrows and his voice follows suit, revealing light that is about to break through. And then it does.
   Long wrestled questions are calmly and brightly put to bed in my heart with a great, silent swoop. 

“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables,
when we made known unto you 
the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”
~II Peter 1:16

   I have myself been an eyewitness to the physical healing of my own children and in this moment am recharged to believe again in the promise of new miracles.
   How could I have grown so comfortable in my lack of vision?

Most Serious Small Stone Ever

   I drop in the peeled chunks of orange, fibrous and glistening, along with the firm, fragrant pieces of banana. Spooning in a tub of plain Greek yogurt and then drizzling over that some local honey, I suddenly feel so thankful for these fresh ingredients. So ready for the burst of energy they’ll provide. 
   After two months of over indulgence and relative inactivity, this moment at the kitchen blender is a turning point. I lay my hand on top and press a button at the base. The motor whirs to life, and reflexively my mind counts off the days to bikini season. 

Espionage and the Ballerina*

   This afternoon, in the bright January sun and with that great emotional conflict I always feel at the end of a really special read,  I finished one of the richest and most view-widening books I have ever had the pleasure of opening. 



   The True Memoirs of Little K penned by Adrienne Sharp is a glimmering piece of historical fiction set during pre-Soviet Russia and told from the perspective of, as a narration by, in fact, a Prima ballerina named Mathilde Kschessinska.
Holy smokes, you guys, this was a wonderful book!
Read this book. Read it in a cold month,
when you can brew yourself many pots of tea.
And read it while wearing as much perfume
and as many strands of pearls as you wish.
Do you own a fur jacket?
Wear that too.

Okay, back to a proper review…

   I was gifted this novel again by our beloved Julia, and I have once again discovered an author worth following. Ms. Sharp can count on future purchases from me.

Isn’t she beautiful? 
In addition to being a novelist of this and other books including 
White Swan, Black Swan, Adrienne Sharp  is also a ballerina herself.
And no, the Natalie Portman movie is not connected.

   The story is told as a first person narrative by an aged woman, a woman whose life is not only a fascinating story unto itself; but it runs parallel to a truly remarkable chapter in world history. Kschessinska was a native of Russia during the rule of the Romanov Empire, a child of the ballet, a product and purveyor of passion, and ultimately a victim of the greater picture, though I doubt she would ever use the word victim to describe herself. Her view of events from the most mundane to the vast and global is both maddening and enchanting. 
   Here, I have to admit a great deal of ignorance. Maybe it is my Americanized perspective. Maybe it is the fact that my childhood was back-lit by that unforgettable Reagan-Gorbachev feud. The Iron Curtain of the twentieth century was seemingly effective in closing off my knowledge that anything interesting happened on that continent before Ronald Reagan stopped acting. Yes. Let’s just say that.

   Remarking on the reading experience itself, allow me to say that the first little section of the book establishes the speaker’s voice which proves to be very natural if a bit long winded. Page after page of compound sentences and unfamiliar (Russian) names and cities was a little daunting, but that first impression quickly evaporates in the warmth of the woman’s true voice. Mathilde has all the depth and elegance and color that young women crave but will never attain until their own old age, when they have amassed their own collections of stories and scandals. On a personal note, I imagined Mathilde wore my grandmother’s perfume, Youth Dew by Este`e Lauder.

   Beyond style and implication, though, Sharp lays out almost Shakespearean patterns of love, lust, ambition, and politics. How she managed to excavate so much Russian and world history and then distill it into 400 pages of beautifully written prose is far beyond me. Between the love stories and the descriptions of families, wars, and ballets, the reader is teased with mention of names like Rasputin, Lenin, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, and of course Czar Nicholas. I think maybe a person’s career could be based on the body of knowledge Sharp has managed to weave into the tapestry that became this novel.

   So which imitates which; art to life or life to art? Do we have this answer yet?

   This is a thorough pleasure to read. When Sharp spoke of Siberia, I was chilled to the bone. When she described the great imperial palaces I could hear imaginary echoes against clean marble. When she took me to the ballet, I could almost touch the velvet drapes. And the parental struggles of a mother giving birth to a child who was destined to leave her side, well… that hit so close to home that I read through tears and felt real compassion for this old woman I will never meet.

   The book’s emotional scope is great, and its educating potential is impressive. By the way, I did notice some interesting common ground between the life of our ballerina and that of Nitta Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha. Both women were entertainers. Both were bound by custom but complicated by love. Both, with their beauty and charm, held unnerving power over important men and were hated by more proper women. To make that discovery even more intriguing, we learn in this memoir that these two great nations, Russia and Japan, were at war during the time frame in which both fictional women would have lived.

   How’s that for exploring an alternate universe?? How I would love to be at the cafe table where Adrienne Sharp and Arthur Golden chat over a cup of coffee, comparing notes and dreaming up new stories.

   Okay, you guys, if I continue writing I will soon be describing and summarizing every single delicious chapter of this book. Please find time to read it for yourself. Borrow mine if you like, remembering that my only condition for sharing books is that you write your name and a brief review on the inside cover.

Record Your Own History.
Learn About Someone Else’s.
xoxoxoxo

* P.S.  I borrowed the title for this post from a line in Sharp’s novel, which suggested the title for a scandalous book written then about our main character. I hope neither our ballerina nor our author mind. Imitation, after all, is at its root flattery.. xoxo

Raised Beds: Foundation Day

   A scientist is in Heaven. He walks up to God and claims to have cracked the code for creating life, that he knows how to manipulate small amounts of common soil to become a living, breathing organism.

   The Lord smiled patiently and said, “Okay.”

   “I’m serious.”

   “I can see that, my child, so let’s go to My Laboratory and you can show me what you can do.” So God leads the scientist to His Laboratory and welcomes him inside.

   “Okay,” says the scientist eagerly, “all I need is some dirt.”

   “Uh-uh, sorry,” the Lord replies laughingly, “get your own dirt.”

********************

   So I’m making my own dirt. Not to blasphemously create life, just to grow some delicious fruits and veggies. Today Mia the Gander helped me fill the first three beds. It was a luscious way to spend another unseasonably warm January afternoon, with photos to prove it this time. I am feeling really optimistic about the garden this year, you guys. 
First, we have some scrap cardboard cut to lay flat on the ground.
This is eventually decompose, but in the mean time 
it should block the worst weeds.
Yay for no plastic!!
The whole cardboard cutting event was highly fascinating to Mia.
Can you blame him?
Then I layered on a few inches of dried leaves.
Just for fun, take note of the X shaped shadow up on the wall.
Over the dried leaves went a lot of manure.
A little manure scooping advice:
Whenever possible, scoop uphill
Let gravity be your friend.
Oh, and speaking of fascinated animals, as I scooped manure
our two geldings could not be more enrapt.
At one point Dusty nosed my very full wheelbarrow
and I had to urge him NOT to eat it.
He asked me why, pointing out the obvious fact 
that his manure is little more than compressed grass, hay, and excess grain.
Which is exactly his daily diet.
He had a legitimate question: at what point does food cease to be food?
That raised questions of cannibalism, etc, for which I had precious few answers.
Things got very philosophical in the middle field today.
The last ingredient was slightly moist, matted together shred.
Hey, did you notice the X shadow move? 
The sun was receding as I worked.
But Mia never left my side.
He nibbled winter greens 
and supervised my activities tirelessly.
He is the world’s most faithful, 
most affectionate, most curious gander.
Amend Your Soil!
Get a Head Start!
xoxoxo