I’ve been reading a lot about being minimal; in diet, possessions, technology,  mind set.  What do I really want, really need that adds the most value to my life?   It’s quite personal, the answers to those.  My body, my thoughts, my emotions nudge me to pay close attention these days.  The future doesn’t seem endless like it used to.  I’ve gone past my “hunting and gathering” days and I find myself shedding what has hung off like barnacles.  I wonder how I’d have chosen differently, had I thought to ask this question more urgently in my younger years.  I throw even that  off, though, and walk on.  I don’t have time to harness myself.

I live in a 150+ year old house, the rooms built all in a row.  I’ve created sort of a first floor “attic” in my living room, where the shedding has begun.  I’ve piles of books, trinkets, and furniture that seemed like a good idea at the time.  They’re in there together now, mingling  like a roomful of old men smoking cigars and slapping each other’s backs, reminiscing.  I’ll wait for spring to set them out on my front lawn and invite others to peruse.  I’ve pushed and scraped things into place, emptied out shelves and drawers.  I start to feel differently.  The tether to things is loosening.  It is easier to let go than I thought.

I got up this morning, and sat in company with my coffee.  I have right now.  What shall I do with it?   It’s these thoughts that often bind me up.  I can’t think of anything that seems important enough, big enough to matter.  I’m reading The Oregon Trail, A New American Journey by Rinker Buck.  A desire bigger than a dream pushed him into action and he and his brother recreated the trek that so many other brave and deliciously reckless souls before us saddled up for.  I picture them in my mind; nameless, faceless, lost to anyone’s history, doing every day chores, thinking every day thoughts.  And one choice at a time formed a life lived.  Whether I know about it, whether anyone remembers?  It mattered then.  It matters now.  And I decide to lay my fretful notions of grandiose in the same room with the old men relics.

I decide to decide, one choice at a time.  I grab my camera and go for a walk.  Outside fills my lungs and my mind with oxygen.  My world becomes bigger, bigger than me, and there’s room for joy and bird songs and the beautiful in the every day and I take notice and snap it quick so I can remind myself.  I wonder what the Oregon Trail “ghost” people would have left behind, had they had cameras.  I wonder if they would have thought we’d have cared.

I pay attention to the colors and sounds around me, I notice the smallness and the big, in equal measure.  It all weaves together, color blocks, life quilt.  I take my fullness home and make more choices, small decisions.  I read to my girl and stop to look up things we wonder about to find answers.  We gather up Christmas gift cards and go to hunt some tennis shoes for walking, shoes I could not afford, save the blessing from a friend.  I need these shoes.  My feet are beginning to feel age and wear that younger years betrayed me into thinking would never happen to me.  The pain, though, reminds me.  Nothing taken for granted, nothing too small to be grateful for.  I slip into my new kicks and wear them the rest of the day, floating on a cloud of relief.  It is good to be loved, to receive, to feel the ripple of kindness with each step I take.

The girl and I make lunch together, all chopped onions and spices and we pile our plates high and look across the table from one another.  Time spent eating, simple acts.  “I love this day, mama.”   My heart warms to her words.  We’ll forget this particular lunch, this particular moment.  There will be more of them.  But this choice to sit and savor?  A good one.  I wash up the dishes clean and leave them to dry.  We walk to the feed store down the street, the Mayberry flavor that makes you look to see if Aunt Bea or Sheriff Taylor is just behind you.  We gather up suet cakes and cages to go with them and take them back home to hang on our Christmas tree, now relocated to the back yard, to give it new purpose, a new kind of living.

The day is ending now, the “doing things” part of it, and I find myself feeling on purpose.  Intentional.  And I decide I’ve found my word for the rest of this year.  I will look for the value in what I am doing, saying, thinking, reading, eating……how I consume the currency of my time.  I will live on purpose, content with the lack of grandiose, and take the next step.  I will decide to live to enrich and be enriched.

I will walk without barnacles.

I never get tired of it; the mornings when I can savor quiet and move slower, when the calendar and the clock aren’t my dictators.   I take the time to make my scrambled eggs fluffier and more flavorfully complicated, all spices and Tofutti.  I pour myself a fancy glass, not the everyday mason jars, with organic juice I found marked down enough so I can have it and still pay my light bill.  The ingredient list has beets and pineapple and carrots and turmeric and I feel very grown up and I light my candle and sit down at my speckled kitchen table.  That’s when my dad always shows up.

He loves making breakfast on Saturday mornings.  He has on a white undershirt,  gray sweatpants, brown house shoes;  stirring and scrambling and frying.  The bacon sizzle competes with his whistling.  My eyes gaze down at my breakfast and I realize I’m daydreaming.  Dad’s in heaven two years now.  But he’d have loved this cold, blustery Saturday.  I think to take a picture and look at it closely.  There’s lessons there.  Dad was vibrant and happy and made friends wherever he went.  He loved coffee and crossword puzzles and would find new places to go and sit and do both….and talk to people he’d never met.  He loved kids and would never fail to bend down and look them right in the eye when he was talking to them.  For some odd reason, he loved to look for four leaf clovers.  I can still see him now, out in my yard, looking down and walking slowly.  He’d come in the front door, my kids swarming all around him and hand me his discovery with a smile on his face.  He’d done it again.

Dad loved to challenge himself and learn something new.  He read voraciously and would send letters to the authors and let them know he enjoyed their book, many times receiving answers from them.  He wanted to learn to fly so he did and then bought himself a small plane and took me flying.   He was fueled by current events and loved politics.  So he entered the ring; sometimes he lost and sometimes he won.  He brought me along to campaign with him and meet others campaigning.  He’d always wanted to see the ball drop on Times Square so one New Year’s Eve he bought a ticket and flew to NYC.  He made his “always wanted to” happen.

My dad was life brimming over.  He’s the last person you’d expect Alzheimer’s to invade.  But it did; brutally, quickly, mercilessly.  It robbed him blind this side of heaven.   I sit looking at this breakfast and I take it all in, one bite at a time.  I don’t forget to remember that my legs walked me into the kitchen with no help from anyone else.  I know where things are; the pepper sits king  in it’s place in the cupboard, my favorite white plate perched on top of the pile at the ready;  waiting to be chosen.  I scramble and chop and mix.  I know how to.  Except whistle.  I can’t whistle.   It’s all familiar.   My home is not  a stranger to me.  I pick up my fork and I know what it is;  put it to my mouth and notice that I can, all by myself.  The tart of raspberries and hot of coffee taste just the same as they always have and they comfort me.

My father taught me that things that you think will always remain….don’t.  You can forget how, forget who, forget why, forget what.  You can stop knowing, stop tasting, stop seeing, stop hearing.  He taught me to grab hold hard and wring it out dry.  He taught me how to live.  He made breakfast mean something.

#alzheimers #lifelessons #joy #fathers

I love iced tea.  Straight up, no sugar, no lemon black iced tea; strong enough to make you sit up straighter.  I have a favorite place to get it, not far from where I live.  It’s worth it toget up off the couch and grab my keys and go through the drive through where I’ve been so often, I sometimes see a hand holding a giant cup out of the window, waiting for me to pull up.

My kids and I have this thing we do.  The day they get their license and we pull into the driveway, I get out and hand them the keys.  They grin at me proud.  It’s their first official voyage and they know just what to do.  It’s a short trip, one I can handle, and I act like I’m going in the house. But really?  I turn back and watch them drive away without me.   And they look forward, wearing freedom.  They’re soon back with tea I didn’t have to go get myself.   And they twirl the keys around their finger before they drop them in the dish by the door.   There’s always a swagger to their walk that wasn’t there when they left.  I take notice as they head up the stairs to their room a smile through a strange pang in my gut.

I’ve gone through this five other times so yesterday was familiar territory.  The girl passed nervous, having tried twice before.  She wanted me to drive home and talked all the way.  She could drop me off at work this summer instead of the other way around, she said.  I’d be the one waiting on the curb to be picked up at the end of the day.

We pulled into the drive way and I looked at her.                                                                                                                                                                “You know what this means.”                                                                                                                                                                                                           She smiled and I handed her the keys as I got out and started walking to the house.  That’s when it struck me.  I’d never have this first again. She was my youngest. “Wait!”, I called out to her.  I grabbed my phone and took a picture.  She drove off looking forward, wearing her freedom.  I leaned against the porch and swallowed hard.  It was the last first goodbye of it’s kind.