This year our family 4th of July get-together today takes on new meaning because next week my nephew is going to Iraq. That’s Charlie the Marine in the photo with my dad, who is a proud Air Force veteran. I’ve always loved this holiday weekend because it really makes me stop and think about what an extraordinary country we live in. We proudly fly our American flag every day, not only to honor our country, but also to remember the men and women who have served in military conflicts. Lee Greenwood’s song, God Bless the USA, is a classic that still brings a tear to my eyes…Happy 4th everyone!
Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle. ~Thich Nhat Hanh
Teaser Tuesday asks you to : Grab your current read, Open to a random page, Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. Since I’m too lazy to go upstairs and get one of the books on my nightstand, I grabbed The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver from the shelf above my desk. It’s about a woman who is given a toddler outside a bar and the emotional journey of abandonment and belonging that follows. I’ve enjoyed reading everything Ms. Kingsolver has written over the years, but this was one of my favorites. On page 17, as the main character first meets the child, she writes…She wrapped her blanket around and around it until it became a round bundle with a head. Then she set this bundle down on the seat of my car. A good read. Still no baby news here. After losing her first baby girl at five months gestation last April, Meagan feels like she’s been pregnant and waiting for over a year for this baby, which is true. That’s my niece’s little daughter, Aryielle, in the photo. I took her outside for pictures the other day and she immediately pulled a bloom off one of great-grandpa’s flowers so she could smell it. I then proceeded to chase her and her flower around for over thirty minutes, taking a two year old’s picture is not easy! I did get a few good ones though that I might post tomorrow for Wordless Wednesday:)
We had a wonderful dinner with the kids last night with some great conversation, a little reminiscing and a few laughs, and then we dragged our poor daughter over to the little historical village where we were married thirty years ago and she took some anniversary pictures for us. It was the perfect evening (although it would have been even better if our daughter-in-law had made us grandparents!). We appreciate you hanging with your old parents last night Andy, Meagan, and Lizzi, you guys are the best and brightest accomplishments of our marriage, and thanks again for putting up with the hot humid night and following us around to take the pics last night Liz, they came out great! (click on the collage to see it larger)
A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year. ~Paul Sweeney
That’s a photo from my wedding day, thirty years ago today. I pulled it out of an album, scanned it, and then adjusted the color, taking out the yellowed tone of the old paper with a simple click of my mouse button. I still have my wedding dress, I don’t know why, it was certainly nothing fancy. I bought it off the rack, I couldn’t see spending a lot of money for a dress I’d wear for only one afternoon. I’ve moved it many times over the years, from house to house and closet to closet. Like the photos from our wedding day, it’s yellowed and a bit faded and I don’t know how many times I’ve picked it up and began to stuff it in a bag for donation, but I could never quite bring myself to do it. My mother saved the dress she wore that day too, she loved that dress. Near the end of her life, after illness caused her to lose enough weight so she could fit into it once more, she asked me to find it just in case an occasion came up for her to wear it again.
I’ve been married for thirty years, in a matter of days I’ll become a first time grandmother, in September I’ll celebrate my fiftieth birthday. Looking down at my hands as I type this post I see my mother’s hands. The skin is beginning to get that crepey loose look to it and the truth is it surprises me to think that those hands are attached to my body. I suppose if I could I wouldn’t mind clicking my mouse button and tightening up a few things, perhaps doing away with some wrinkles here and there while I’m at it. But you know, there’s not one day from the past ten thousand days with my husband that I would change. The good days, and even the not so good days, are strung out behind us like the tail of a kite, steadying our marriage and keeping us on course. I guess that’s why I hang on to my little yellowed wedding dress, and why my mother kept her favorite dress stashed in the back of her closet for so many years. They carry the footprints of our memories, a diary of new beginnings and of slim healthy young bodies, of ten thousand more days stretched out in front of us like so many promises.
Happy Anniversary Mr. bookbabie, there’s no one else I’d rather crawl in bed with at the end of a long, tiring day…See other Wordless (and not so wordless!) Wednesday participants here.
Last year we spent Father’s Day at my sister’s house. My mom was still here, very ill and struggling, still hoping that her battle with lung disease would have a happy ending. My son and daughter-in-law were reeling after losing their first unborn daughter to kidney disease, and my one year old niece Aryielle was just home from the hospital after becoming critically ill and having been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. A year later we are going to brunch with Andy and Meagan, the onesie in the photo is for our son who is expecting a daughter any day now. This afternoon we’ll go to my dad’s house, barbecue some chicken, and watch two year old Aryielle run around the backyard, healthy now but forever dependant on finger pricks and insulin to remain so. It seems that time really does fly, whether you’re having fun or not. Happy Father’s Day:)
This is the creamy white clematis, Henryi. I moved him last fall from the back of the yard to an arbor that gets more sun up by the deck. So far he seems much happier in his new home, not only does he get more light, but he’s also protected from the harsh winds that can blow through my yard. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about gardening over the years, it’s that you have to be willing to be flexible and change your plans, things don’t always work out quite the way you want them to in a garden.
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. ~ May Sarton
At Thursday Challenge a theme is announced each week. You may either take a new photograph related in some way to the theme, or select one that you have taken previously. This week the theme is sweet. I thought about using one of my iStock pics of strawberries, but decided to go back in time and post a photo of my kids when they were little and oh so sweet! This is one of my favorite pics of them. They were playing in the backyard on a hot summer day, naked as can be, filling buckets with water and turning their sandbox into a lake. I suppose I have babies on the brain lately. Meagan is doing well and due in just two weeks. I bought a really cool little stroller to keep here at the house yesterday and the Fed Ex guy brought the Noah’s Ark toy box I ordered (which came in a million pieces so Mr. bookbabie will have to put it together this weekend!). I know Meagan is ready over at her house and the two grandmas-to-be are definitely ready too…now we just need us a baby to spoil:)
Sweet memories remind us of the roads we have traveled and the people we have loved.~Flavia
Teaser Tuesday asks you to : Grab your current read, Open to a random page, Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. I’m reading The Laws of Harmony by Judith Ryan Hendricks. I won the book at a giveaway from the book blog Reading with Ti as well as a pretty shawl like the one on the book cover, thanks again Ti! It’s about a woman whose life is turned upside down when her boyfriend dies in a mysterious accident. She takes off in an attempt to reinvent herself and begin a new life. My book club just finished Paul Auster’s, The Book of Illusions, which is a much darker take on the same theme. A character leaving a life of sorrow behind, isolating themselves from their grief and from other people. We had an interesting discussion in book club about this, about how we deal with what life throws at us and about identity, who we would be if you took away our families, jobs, and friends. My two sentences from this book are from page 282, I feel disorientated, one foot in Aromina, the other in Harmony. And the memories will be back soon enough. I did the photo-mainpluation a while ago and thought it illustrated this idea perfectly!
This is the group shot from my mom and dad’s 5oth Wedding Anniversary party in June 2006. It was the kind of day I knew that I needed to savor, to lock away in my memory forever because things were about to change for my family. I don’t know how I knew this, I suppose as we get older and our parents age it’s a given. Yet, it was more than that. I remember that the air itself had a golden glow that afternoon. My parent’s four children were together as we rarely are, most of their grandchildren too. But as great as the day was, there was also something very fragile about it. It felt like we were on top of a hill looking back at our life as a family, ending a chapter and about to turn the page. I wanted it to be the perfect day for my parents because deep down in my heart I knew as if someone had whispered it in my ear, that their perfect days together were quickly winding down. The following winter my mother’s health began to noticeably decline, and by May we began the rounds of doctor appointments and hospital stays that marked the last difficult fifteen months of her life. Memory can be a wonderful thing, binding us to our past, but only if we lock in those pages filled with joy and let the sorrows go.
Did some more baby bump portraits this weekend of Meagan. She’s feeling good but getting to the point where you start to get uncomfortable and wonder just how big the baby is going to get before it comes out! We tried using a window as our backdrop on some of the pics and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. Still learning the ropes with my camera though, and now I have a new flash too, I do wish I was a bit more technically proficient sometimes:)
I took the photo above on the patio this morning. We’re in store for another beautiful spring day around here. Yesterday, Meagan and I had fun shopping at garage sales and a resale shop for Brooklyn. I must say, that’s the way to go, especially for toys and clothes that they grow out of so quickly. It’s starting to seem real for all of us, that this new little soul is going to come into our lives very soon. And yet we often seem to add, “if everything goes all right” at the end of a sentence when talking about the baby and the future. We’ve tried to stop feeling that way, tried to assume that everything will be fine this time, but I think the truth is we are all balancing precariously on our own individual emotional tightropes. Going through each day eating, talking, working, pretending everything is okay all the while afraid deep down that one more heartbreak may be one more too many. Sometimes I worry that we need this little girl too much, is it really fair to expect one small baby to heal so many bruised and battered grownup hearts? Then again, maybe we’re already falling. Maybe we’ve been falling since we lost my mom and baby Kiley, maybe the moment we hold Brooklyn for the first time each of us will finally find that soft place to land.
Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Photovisi is a free online collage maker. You can download your collage after you create it in various sizes and use it for your desktop wallpaper. As you can see, I’ve been busy taking photos of herbs for my iStock account! See other Wordless Wednesday participants here.
That’s a photo from my wedding day, thirty years ago today. I pulled it out of an album, scanned it, and then adjusted the color, taking out the yellowed tone of the old paper with a simple click of my mouse button. I still have my wedding dress, I don’t know why, it was certainly nothing fancy. I bought it off the rack, I couldn’t see spending a lot of money for a dress I’d wear for only one afternoon. I’ve moved it many times over the years, from house to house and closet to closet. Like the photos from our wedding day, it’s yellowed and a bit faded and I don’t know how many times I’ve picked it up and began to stuff it in a bag for donation, but I could never quite bring myself to do it. My mother saved the dress she wore that day too, she loved that dress. Near the end of her life, after illness caused her to lose enough weight so she could fit into it once more, she asked me to find it just in case an occasion came up for her to wear it again.
At 
Teaser Tuesday
This is the group shot from my mom and dad’s 5oth Wedding Anniversary party in June 2006. It was the kind of day I knew that I needed to savor, to lock away in my memory forever because things were about to change for my family. I don’t know how I knew this, I suppose as we get older and our parents age it’s a given. Yet, it was more than that. I remember that the air itself had a golden glow that afternoon. My parent’s four children were together as we rarely are, most of their grandchildren too. But as great as the day was, there was also something very fragile about it. It felt like we were on top of a hill looking back at our life as a family, ending a chapter and about to turn the page. I wanted it to be the perfect day for my parents because deep down in my heart I knew as if someone had whispered it in my ear, that their perfect days together were quickly winding down. The following winter my mother’s health began to noticeably decline, and by May we began the rounds of doctor appointments and hospital stays that marked the last difficult fifteen months of her life. Memory can be a wonderful thing, binding us to our past, but only if we lock in those pages filled with joy and let the sorrows go.
Did some more baby bump portraits this weekend of Meagan. She’s feeling good but getting to the point where you start to get uncomfortable and wonder just how big the baby is going to get before it comes out! We tried using a window as our backdrop on some of the pics and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. Still learning the ropes with my camera though, and now I have a new flash too, I do wish I was a bit more technically proficient sometimes:)
