A Mother’s Journal

As fate would have it, I lost my other grandmother on Friday night, 2/1/2008.  I devoted yesterday to attending her funeral.  If you remember, my mother’s mother died on Thanksgiving Day.  The grandmother who died Friday, of course, was my father’s mother.  I was not as close to her, but it was no one’s fault.  It was due to divorce, and maybe personalities.  I’m not sure.  Whatever the reason, my honor towards her was not diminished.  She gave me my dad.  What are the things I can tell you about her?

• She was beautiful.  She had naturally wavy, auburn hair and fair skin.
• She was smart.  And witty.
• She was a private person. 
• She had a mind of her own and had the guts to wear whatever she wanted.  She always looked good in whatever she wore.
• She lived to be 92, was a homemaker and had five children.
• She loved to garden and she loved the beach.  She had a big collection of seashells.
• She loved hats, almost always had one on, and looked stunning in them!

I’ll decline to put a picture of her here.  She was such a private person, I feel that even now I should respect that.

So another funeral, and I’ve lost both grandmothers within a couple of months of each other.

I’ve really been doing a lot of thinking about how quickly life passes and how busy a person can be all the time.  There are constant distractions, including my computer and the internet.  I have set time limits.   

I have a lot of playing dolls to do this year, after all! 

I want to relax more.  I want to just sit and be.  I want to look at a book from cover to cover without feeling like I need to be up doing something.  Why is it so hard to do anything like that anymore?  Is it that way for you?

I drove about 45 minutes today to meet my mother halfway between our two homes.  We met in a Goodwill parking lot.  Ha ha.  You know what we did, right?  I’ll get to that later.  

We sat in her car and looked at the 70-some old pictures I recently received from my cousin.  Then we looked at my mother’s dozens and dozens of photographs that have surfaced since her own mother’s death.  I want to do more things like sit and look at pictures. 

Over the next few days, I’ll try and share some of the wonderful things I found today at the thrift store.  Oooooooooh, I found some great stuff.  But more about relaxing and just being.

I found a book today about something I’ve been thinking on.

It’s a book on water gardens called… Water Gardens!  Yes, I want to entirely re-landscape the bed around my goldfish pond.  I think I’ve mentioned before that my garden has great bones.  It’s due to the yard layout, the way I put my paths and arbors in, and my husband’s hard work in putting in some short walls to terrace our sloping yard.  Yes, I want to do yard work (was I just talking about relaxing?), but I want to enjoy it.  (Actually, I love gardening.  It’s my thinking that gets me in trouble!)  I want every task to be done in its time and not lose my mind over it.

The bed I want to redo is nice.  About 12 feet x 16 feet.  I am totally pulling out the nandinas.  They are invasive and I already have a nice specimen-size nandina elsewhere in the yard.  The zebra grass is coming out too.  It’s too large and falls over on top of the goldfish pond.  It’s well beyond being on my last nerve!

I sat poring over garden books this evening.  Tasha Tudor’s Garden is one of my favorite books.  I love her gardens. 

I also looked at Martha Stewart’s Gardening: Month by Month.  (She’s so organized!) 

I was thinking tonight about something a very dear, very elderly, very-close-to-me, sweet lady said to me. “It wouldn’t hurt you to slow down.”

If I am lucky enough to live as long as my grandmothers did, my life is half over. From here on out, I am on the downside of the mountain. But my dad’s dad died at 53. My own dad died at 70. Two of my uncles — oddly enough — died unexpectly from illness, each at 49. I could have 4 years left. I could have 8 years left. I could have 35 years left. I could have one day left.

I have spent the first 45 years of my life in very high gear.  I have always had an agenda, always had so many things I wanted to accomplish, always put stress on myself to get too much done. I want to enjoy the time I have left.

Yeah, I have to work, but I do happen to love my job.  (Thank goodness for little miracles.)  We have homeschooling to do, but I refuse to get so pressured that it’s not fun. I know for sure my cleaning schedule is not going to get even one little bit bigger than it is.

I am clinging tighter to my goals for 2008. I want to sink deeper into Proverbs, play dolls, garden (leisurely), and soak up all the joys that come from life.

As someone told me recently, it wouldn’t hurt me to slow down.

Lynn