daily life

The epigraph to Kathleen Norris's The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and "Women's Work":

Let us remember that the life in which we ought to be interested is "daily" life. We can, each of us, only call the present time our own....Our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so he prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow. It is as if [God] were to say to us: "[It is I] who gives you this day [and] will also give you what you need for this day. [It is I] who makes the sun to rise. [It is I] who scatters the darkness of night and reveals to you the rays of the sun."
(Gregory of Nyssa, On the Lord's Prayer)

thankful for:

- emails from delightful friends
- huge cappuccino cups full to the brim
- adding a fourth layer of notations to my Freud reader, bought used with three colors of notes in its margins
- my crock pot and astonishingly wonderful leftovers

the building engineer is chopping at ice in the alley

The semester is accelerating at an alarming speed, but as the craziness picks up steam, I've been enjoying the following things:

Tim Tams. Brandi and Matt found some at the Pepperidge Farm outlet and gave them to us for Christmas. Apparently, these cookies are available for the next few months at Target. The loveliest part of the cookies is biting off opposite corners and using them to suck up tea or coffee, which melts the inside of the cookie into a mass of warm chocolatey silk that one must immediately gobble up. (You can even find Wikipedia articles on this and YouTube videos of the process.)

Stash's Chai Spice Black Tea. I'm not sure why, but the assertive presence of the black tea and the spicy-rather-than-sweet emphasis in the spice blend are really perking me up just now. The winter is fully upon us here in the city, so piping hot tea with milk and sugar really helps.

The Chronicles of Narnia. Many evenings, Josh and I will pause our work around 9:00, and I'll pick up some form of sewing, and he'll read to me. He does all the voices. We're near the beginning of The Silver Chair now, but I love the cover of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Its enough to keep me daydreaming through my many Freud readings. Speaking of which...

a good kind of day

I'm sitting on the living room floor next to the radiator feeling my hair dry and keep falling over my face as it does so. It's that kind of morning -- a catching up with emails, getting back into work responsibilities, jotting lots of notes in my planner morning. And I'm loving it.

This has been a week of domestic achievements: four loads of laundry, baking soda/vinegar/boiling water bathtub drain fixing, cleaning out yet another closet, catching up on holiday cards, drinking dozens of cups of tea, and having meals with friends. Plus reading. I'm reading Toni Morrison's newest novel, A Mercy, and Madeleine L'Engle's The Irrational Season, and some N.T. Wright, plus starting research for an independent study on women writers and Christianity. The notebooks are fresh, the pencils are sharpened, and the snow reflects sunlight like nothing else.

interpret my silence as grieving, not as a lack of love for you all

Near the beginning of December, we got the news that my grandma had fewer than six months left to live. Her tumor was growing again, and her 71-year-old body could sustain no more caustic chemo attacks, so that was that. I was writing final papers, helping with Advent services, trying to keep things together, and so this did not seem entirely real to me.

We drove up to Michigan on Christmas Eve and headed straight for Grandma and Grandpa's, picking up Burger King on the way (Grandma hadn't been eating; I ordered her a Whopper with extra onions, which was one of her classic favorites). The hospital bed in their living room was a new addition, as were the massive oxygen tanks casting shadows on knicknacks framed photographs of grandchildren.

I did not know on Christmas Eve that the morning after Christmas she would stop breathing. What I knew on Christmas Eve was that I loved her, and that her steel-gray was finally growing back baby-soft yet thick, and that she smelled of floral musk lotion, and that her fingernails had been trimmed (she did it herself, Grandpa told me later, and he let me have the nail file). She said over and over, "I love you. I love you so much."

She was relatively docile, but she was still herself. At one point she pulled down the blanket to show that she was wearing a crimson satin nightgown--exactly the kind she liked. Her head rested on a leopard-print pillowcase. She wanted a cigarette (despite the oxygen), and laughingly batted away my hand when I offered her my finger to smoke. I fed her bits of strawberries and bananas, spooned butterscotch pudding into her mouth. And that was the last she ate.

"Promise to come back?" she said when I left, and I promised. She didn't wake up again after that.

No one person in my life, I think, has declared love for me so many times as did my Grandma. She told me time and again that she loved me; she mailed me cards and letters with the word love underlined (sometimes with five lines), exclamation-pointed, highlighted in different colors. Her angular script is, I think, the font in which I most know love.

And she is gone. And my own babies, should they one day come, will never know, as I know, the mark of her lipstick on a coffee cup's rim, or the elegant bend of her tobacco-yellowed fingers, or the shaking shoulders of her laughter. They will not know the overflow of her generosity, the gift-giving and feeding and slow, warm smile. To my own babies, Grandma (to them, Great-Grandma) will be a larger-than-life legend whose tastes tended toward the epic, despite the diminutive frame they'll see in the photographs--heaping dinner plates, closets full of clothes, humongous gardens, arms open as wide as they could go. These stories and photos will be good, but they will never be quite enough.

So I am learning to grieve. Wearing one of her old watches, washing with a half-empty bottle of her shower gel, hanging a familiar copper jello mold on my kitchen wall, I am learning to imagine a world without Grandma in it. But I am learning slowly. I will have to take my time.