Lazy W Marie

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

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to Judy at her baby’s milestone birthday

August 26, 2025

Dear Judy,

Fifty years ago you were likely preparing for the hospital, anxiously awaiting your much loved and much planned love child with Harvey. Actually, knowing your nature, you had been ready for a while! Your suitcase was probably already packed, and you had long since made plans for the older kids to be at Grandma Goldie’s house. I wonder if you had Mexican food one more time before going into labor. Did you know you were having a son, or was that a surprise? I don’t know if I ever heard that detail.

What I do know without a shadow of a doubt is that you loved being his Mom. I think possibly, of all the passions God gave you in this earthly life, you loved nothing more. And he has flourished because of it. He flourishes still, drawing constantly on your love, your belief in him, your character shaping, and the hope that your prayers “hang in the air around him,” as the saying goes.

We would love to be partying with you this year. This milestone. This week to celebrate so much, not just the passage of a truly stunning volume of time but also the achievement of deep and hard earned peace. You might not agree with every single choice he has made in recent years, particularly this tattoo that’s about to happen, but most of those would just earn some smirks and jokes and a prized onery look of mock judgement over your eyeglasses, after which you would probably smile again and ask him, “Well, have you ate?” And even if he had eaten, he would say no and choose between a few favorite restaurants.

You would be proud, though, deeply proud, of so much. I hope you can see the best highlights from wherever you are, because he is carrying the mantle for you in ways we could not have dreamed of before you left. You should see what he has accomplished at the Commission. The storms he has navigated, the spiritual infrastructure he has built. Not aligned with any political party, but aligned with doing the right thing, he frequently invokes stories about you and your party-indifferent love for people and getting things done efficiently and transparently. He is the manager you always declared he would be, just on a much larger scale. We still have that concrete planter you gifted him to celebrate his first bank branch manager job on May Avenue in Oklahoma City. Every time I see it I think of you and how firmly you saw his future, decades ahead of time. People commonly talk about a mother’s love, and that’s good and true; but you also demonstrated the power of a mother’s vision. Thank you for that. Thank you for holding it for him, and thank you for showing both of us how vital it is to see through the storm into a beautiful future, an unclouded day.

He is an excellent father in law, as you were an excellent mother in law. His instincts and affection are so genuine and tender, it makes me fall more deeply in love with him every time I watch him with Alex. And if the kids’ wishes come true, he will be an excellent Grandpa, too. He’ll spoil those babies rotten and never apologize for it. We already have so much energy built up here at the farm for future grandbabies, and I know you would be happy to watch it all unfold, so long as we don’t let them have three wheelers.

Sometimes he laughs in a way that makes it feel like you are in the room with us. Sometimes he looks at me over his glasses in the exact way you would. And did you know we have a dear friend now, named Cathy, who has about a hundred uncanny traits similar to yours? When we finally acknowledged it to each other, it was such a comfort. I think her likenesses to you draw him in for weekend touchpoints. A sacred rhythm.

He is still finding ways to “Take care of the children,” as you implored him to do. The opportunities and inspirations change seasonally, but it’s always a natural fit when it happens. I wish you could share in some of it. The Batmobile in particular is a project I wish you could touch and hear and experience, bodily. There is no doubt you are woven into it.

He still loves your chocolate fudge cake and lemon ice box pie more than any other holiday dessert. He still has the same, soft old Snoopy you gave him. He still holds every good thing about childhood up to the high standard you provided. He still tells all his stories to anyone who will listen. You are here with us, is what I’m saying. We miss you terribly, but you are still here. You are very much alive in his personality, and I hope you feel it.

Thank you for loving him so well for the thirty eight years he had you that he still feels it. Thank you for raising a boy who could become the man that he is, the kind of man this world desperately needs. Disciplined, in control of himself, ambitious, protective, fiercely loyal, fun loving, and God fearing. Thank you for managing to establish so many traditions and cravings in him that endure to this day. Our life is so rich because of that. Your vacation-loving, Batman-crazed, video game-playing baby boy is all of that still and much more.

Fifty years old this week, more handsome than ever, and healthier than ever, too. Your son is doing great. Your motherhood continues. I just wanted you to know.

We love you, we miss you,
and we wish you could be here for his birthday.
xoxo
Marie

Friday 5 at the Farm, Gifts of Staycation

Our 24th anniversary staycation has been wonderful. A long summertime spell. All of it together has been just what we both needed, which is simply lots and lots of uninterrupted normal life, mostly alone. We feel so lucky! Including today we still have four days to redeem, and every timeif I occassionally feel myself dipping into sadness about Handsome returning to the office soon, I have to laugh. We still live together, ha! And that work-life balance has improved so much that it’s less of a thing to dread than before. But we do treasure this set-aside time.

Since today is Friday, I wrangled my thoughts into a Friday 5 at the Farm style post to mark the week. Hope you enjoy it!

5 Gifts of Staycation!

ONE: Time and Freedom. We consciously chose not to schedule much this week and to take our days, even the segments within each day, as they came, just following our energy levels and appetites. We had a vivid need to not be over committed and splintered among several obligations or outside time frames, and abiding by that agreement to each other has yielded such a fresh and healing sense of deep relaxation. We have felt safe and free for the first time in a long time. Some days we used that freedom to go on spontaneous dates; sometimes we used that freedom to take midday swims and naps and watch movies under fuzzy blankets We also used the time and freedom to work around the farm, but it was always because we wanted to, not because we were responding to an emergency or balancing someone else’s time frame. It feels completely different, as I’m sure you know. We got admirably good this week at being honest with each other about what we actually wanted to do every day, ha! And I am proud of us for sticking to this simple plan.

TWO: Laughter and Romance. Time alone and freedom of movement have a magical effect on connection. They foster and deepen it. We are always pretty great at grabbing fun and romance in small doses all throughout normal life, but man. Once in a while it sure is nice to absolutely simmer in each other. Choosing to stay home instead of travel was easier on Klaus, too. He spent most of every day with us, of course, and was one happy boy.

THREE: Food! We are eating well, friends. ha! Don’t you worry about us. All week we have enjoyed a nice mix of restaurant indulgences and home cooked meals, and it’s been fun. One standout for me was a spontaneous stop at a Greek place in north OKC. I could eat that exact plate of food once a week and never get tired of it. I think he was especially happy we remembered how to make beef enchiladas with red sauce, which was dinner yesterday. Lots of yummy small bites here and there, including Baskin Robbins ice cream and a huge watermelon chopped up and waiting in the fridge at all hours.

((loaded with kalmatta olives, peppers, feta, and everything))

FOUR: Farm Improvements and Hobbies. We are soon adding a new building to the upper east and south side of the farm, and to prepare for that Handsome has been leveling the sandy ground there and spreading rocks and rocks and more rocks with his tractor. That’s largely what he did most mornings when I went for a run. We (the Victorian we, if you’re keeping score) also began the process of installing a split unit air conditioner to our upstairs bedroom. I did some fun sewing one day (not a farm project exactly, but a timely one, that helped me feel caught up). The gardens are looking great! Weeds pulled and grooming and watering caught up, compost distributed, all of it just getting massaged and loved on daily. What a gift to have time to spend outside and still be with my boy. We’ve been reading (I finished 3 books!) and watching movies and everything we enjoy doing, in big gulps, not nibbles. It’s the best.

FIVE: Commemoration. One of our creative projects this week was a private painting night, which I will not be sharing here but which is worth mentioning for posterity. The End.

Happy Anniversary to the love of my life and my favorite person to spend time with, especially at our beautiful farm, especially in summer. I am so thankful that this normal life we have built is exactly the indulgence we both craved this week.

“Some will fall in love with life
and drink it from a fountain
That is pouring like an avalanche
Comin’ down the mountain.”
~Pepper, 1996
XOXO

her second mother’s day

The moment she announced her growing family, we all shrieked with joy. And I mean SHRIEKED. No one was expecting it. We were all just so happy to be together. About 25 family members were holding hands in our living room, saying grace over the fragrant and long awaited Thanksgiving feast. She was the last person in the family to speak her gratitude (her fiancé was the first. He must have seen the opportunity and stealthily guided the group’s clockwise sequence), and she did so with her standard calm, quiet reserve. It took exactly half of one second for the news to cross the air between her pretty mouth to all of our ears, and it created such a stir of energy, such a wave of joy and chaos, that I think no one will ever forget that moment. We caught most of the family response on security camera. There was much jumping and hugging and a little crying.

This is actually her second Mother’s Day weekend. Her first was spent in the hospital welcoming that peach fuzz baby boy we have all become obsessed with and who we each believe regards us, one at a time, as his favorite uncle or auntie or cousin. Grandma and Grandpa have zero competition from us.  

Her craving for motherhood was kept mostly quiet over the years, but her talent for it has been obvious, displayed in the myriad ways she lives and loves. She has always exuded compassion, concern, stability, wisdom and a kind of softness that is matched only by her strength. She is both disciplined and playful, able to hold it all at once. She has spent more than two decades, it turns out, building an emotional and practical nest for her baby bird that is so strong, so comfortable, so safe, and so nourishing that now, at this moment, we see she is not only the mother he needs, the mother he chose from Baby Heaven and came to Earth to find; she is in many ways the mother we all wish to be.

Last November I was lucky enough to spend about a week with my baby sister and her baby boy in their nest. I got to see firsthand her tenderness, the way her lean arms scooped him up, tiny as he was then, into his favorite embrace. The way she fed him and bathed him. I got to watch both of their faces light up when they made eye contact. I heard her voice, which has in our adulthood issued some of my most treasured deep and serious conversations, collapse gently into songs like The Itsy Bitsy Spider and Frère Jacques. I got to see her weep when he was briefly inconsolable during a long car ride. She felt his pain, and she always will. I remember silently hoping she was ready for that part.

I went to California thinking maybe I could impart a smidgen or two of motherly guidance, ha! But no. She was already overflowing with instinct and goodness. She was a steady, shining conduit for every single thing he needed, right when he needed it. And that is exactly how it will always be. In the months since, she and her husband, our new brother we love so much, have shared hundreds of photos showing this peach fuzz baby boy’s growth and vibrating happiness. It is bizarre to think back to that Thanksgiving, to that moment right before she announced her pregnancy, back to the reality where we did not yet know this whole new person.

They say that when a baby is born, a mother is also born. I love that. I think it is true for many women, but in my baby sister’s case, I think she just finally emerged. She had already been a mother for a long time, growing herself behind the scenes and waiting for ripeness and good partnership, a gift every baby deserves. She is one of the most luminous mothers I have ever witnessed, and I am so thankful she has added a nephew and a brother to our big family for us to love, too.

Happy Second Mother’s Day, Gen.
LYLAS
xoxoxo

hold what ya got

My husband says something that drives me crazy.

Not the… please shut the cabinet door or would you please put your dirty socks away kind of crazy.

(Not that he does those things.)

(I’m just giving you examples.)

More of the… Sleeveless tshirt, backwards ballcap, and stern business voice on work calls kind of crazy.

That kind of crazy that gives me shivvers.

Handsome behind the wheel on a country drive…xoxo

At various crucial times around the farm, he says to me in his deepest, most controlled, most deliciously mellow voice, “Hold what ya got.”

And I almost can’t focus. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I love it, ha!

This past week he said it to me while we wrangled Scarletta Jones into our makeshift squeeze shoot to administer antibiotics. My job was to hold the rope against her strenuous objections and then apply whatever full body tension I could muster onto the steel gates to keep her still. Hold what ya got. He just utters the phrase calmly under his breath, without making eye contact, focused on his side of the task.

Earlier in the week and again yesterday, he said it to me many times while we worked together on our little greenhouse build. He has designed and purchased and organized all of it. Planned every step. He gives me useful-feeling tasks along the way, often amounting to lifting lumber to the sky while he measures some mysterious distance or holding two pieces together while me makes an angle just perfect.

Hold what ya got.

Then inwardly, to myself, Focus, girl!

There are innumerable examples of him casting this atomic spell on me. He’s been saying it for years, and I only recently intimated how it affects me. He doesn’t get it. But that makes it worse. Or better.

I suppose he’ll keep saying it forever. I hope he does.

And I absolutely will.
XOXOXO

a charlie and rhett story

Read this short story in your best Rod Serling voice:

Imagine if you will, a ten degree morning on an ice covered farm. The sun is brilliant, bouncing wide, metallic sheets of light off of every surface. The wind is mercifully nonexistent.

Everywhere you look is a snow dusted pine tree or a pile of oak leaves, crunchy and frosted and as still as a sculpture. Chickens are clucking, a goose is skronking, and horses are whinnying their demands for breakfast.

Now you see a happy and energetic Puppy following his giant best friend German Shepherd during morning chores. They are flipping like fish and bounding across the weather stiffened tundra. Their claws mostly grip the ice, but not always. Still, they run and chase and beg the Lady to play fetch and keepaway with a frozen softball. When the Lady throws it, the puppy runs with absolute abandon, no thought given to its trajectory or obstacles or ice or anything.

The Lady is not great at throwing. The Puppy has not learned this yet.

The softball lands on this side of a wire fence, in the vicinity of a young steer, his face buried in a pile of soft hay. The puppy is exactly one second behind the ball. He hits his brakes. His claws fail. He skids on his bottom, pliable young puppy legs splayed, toward the ice dusted Thing With Horns. Thankfully, the fence is between them, but still they bump, giant face to small body, and the Thing With Horns emits the deepest, most baritone objection the puppy has ever heard. A rare sound, it startles the Lady too.

The Puppy regroups, retreats to the Lady without the prize, and checks over his shoulder to see that the fence is still in place. Fetch and Keepaway continue but not without some anxiety.

The End.