Tag: love

an update and a plan

I have been posting less than usual over the last couple of months as we have been dealing with health difficulties with my father, known here as Paco. He had a couple of falls in June, resulting in some cracked bones, which have been healing well while he has been in a rehab program. Unfortunately, he also suffers from dementia, which has worsened, and from a number of other health conditions, which are not unexpected in a 96-year-old but which have necessitated remaining in a nursing home rather than being able to move back to the assisted living floor where he lived previously.

It has taken a lot of time with in-person visiting and inordinate amounts of time dealing with paperwork and red tape. My sisters have been coming into town to help, but I am still not finding time to write as much as I would like.

On Monday, I’m happy to report that the UK contingent of our family – our daughter E, her spouse L, and their two children 4-year-old ABC and just turned 1-year-old JG – arrived from London for a two week visit. It is our first opportunity to meet JG in person. She is adjusting to our actually being flesh-and-blood people rather than images on a screen. It’s amazing that she is able to deal with being a different place with different people after being in lockdown so much of her life, especially when you consider it took two large airports, a plane, and the longest car ride of her life to get here. Also, five hours worth of jetlag. It’s also amazing how much ABC remembers from when she lived with us, given that this is her first time back here since she moved to the UK in October 2019.

Because of the delta variant’s prevalence, we haven’t ventured much from the house over these last days and probably won’t be taking the children to many indoor spaces, given that they are too young to have been vaccinated. We do plan a visit to Paco later this week. When the weather is better, we will also be able to go to the parks and take rides on the carousels for which Broome County is known.

My younger sister is here visiting and helping with Paco and my older sister and her spouse will arrive next week for a few days. My plan is to carve out a bit of time for some posts which will update topics about which I frequently post; I’m hoping to be brief, which is always a challenge for me!

Let’s see if I manage to follow through with this plan…

One-Liner Wednesday: power

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2021/08/18/one-liner-wednesday-cinnamon/

SoCS: a week

What a topsy-turvy week it has been with my dad!

I can’t bear to go through the details but I will say that things appear to be on an upswing at the moment with some hope for stability on the horizon.

There will be a rare event to end the week, though, as B and I will be attending the wedding of two of my poet-friends this afternoon.

Best wishes to the happy couple!

*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “wee”. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2021/08/06/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-aug-7-2021/

so many roses!

rose

The above inadvertently artsy shot with sunbeams is of roses growing in our back yard. This rose is a daughter of a rosebush that grew near my mother’s childhood home in Hoosac Tunnel, Massachsuetts. You can read more of the backstory in this post which itself includes a personal essay from before I started blogging.

This rosebush is the subject of the one poem that appears in both my chapbook and collection manuscripts, which I can’t share here because it is currently unpublished. It tells the story of the revival of this daughter bush from near death and ends during my mother’s final illness.

We have just passed the second anniversary of her death. The rose bush apparently liked the snowy winter and slowly unfolding spring this year and has more blossoms than I have ever seen. It has also grown very tall, as you can see in the photo below. For reference, I’m 5′ 1.5″ (1.56 meters), so the rose bush is probably close to seven feet (2.1 meters) high.

with

Because this is an heirloom close-to-wild rose rather than a hybrid, it has a very strong scent. With so many blossoms this year, the smell is heavenly.

Nana would have loved it.

Granddaughter congratulations

Congratulations to granddaughter ABC who is turning four years old! She is a few weeks away from completing nursery school and will be entering Reception, the UK equivalent of US kindergarten, in September. She is reveling in the return to full-time in-person school, loves the parks and the garden, is learning to read, has a vivid imagination, inherited her parents’ musicality, and loves being a big sister, at least most of the time.

Congratulations also to granddaughter JG, who at not quite ten months old, is walking on her own. Watching the videos of her toddling reminds me of her mother, my firstborn E, who also stuck her tongue out when she was first walking on her own. I’m not sure if it is a sign of concentration or if it somehow helps with balance, but it certainly seems to be an inherited inclination. Also, adorable.

When we visited London in December 2019, we had planned to return in the spring, perhaps for Easter, and then for ABC’s third birthday, and in late summer for the birth of the new baby. E and her family planned to come visit us in the US for Christmas.

Due to the pandemic, none of that happened.

So, here we are, all fully vaccinated in upstate New York, but still not cleared for travel to the UK, missing another birthday. We’ve missed the entirety of JG’s babe-in-arms phase as she is now officially a toddler. And we still don’t know when we will be able to travel to the UK. They have been planning another easing of restrictions in mid-June, but now the even more virulent strain from India is spreading in the UK, so…

We don’t know about travel in person.

We do know that our love reaches them, even if our arms cannot.

One-Liner Wednesday: hope

Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope.

Krista Tippett, from Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, p. 236

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2021/04/21/one-liner-wednesday-random/

Review: A Secret Love

I grew up in a rural area where television was purely by antenna, although we received NBC, ABC, and CBS, the three major networks at the time, which was a luxury. I’ve never been able to keep up with the increasingly complicated media landscape of cable, premium channels, satellite, and streaming options. I’ve gotten used to reading lists of Emmy nominees of shows I have never seen and to which I don’t have access. I usually can’t even keep track of what show or movie is being offered on which platform.

I do occasionally happen upon a recommendation that I can follow through on viewing. I was reading a list of awards geared for older adults from AARP which included the 2020 documentary A Secret Love. It is available through Netflix, the one streaming service to which we are currently subscribed, so spouse B, daughter T, and I settled in one evening to watch it.

A Secret Love is the story of Pat Henschel and Terry Donohue, two Canadian women who fell in love and made a life together in the United States where Terry had played baseball with the Peoria Redwings of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. While family back in Canada knew the two were close friends who shared a home, they did not know that they were life partners for many decades. While the film does give us their remarkable personal history, the documentary concentrates on their later years, as they face Pat’s illness and decisions about where to live.

Having dealt with the issues of serious illness, financial and legal complications, and housing decisions with B and my parents, I found much of what Pat and Terry were facing relatable. The complexity of the family dynamic, the cross-border legal issues, and the fact that, while Pat and Terry had been a couple since 1947, they did not have the protection of marriage when it came to things like hospital visitation added even more poignancy to an already daunting situation.

What comes through most clearly, though, is the depth of their love for one another. I am always moved by couples whose bond is so strong that it weathers decades of life together and Pat and Terry’s story is such a beautiful example of that. I will warn you that if you, like me, are inclined to teariness, you may want to have your handkerchief handy.

I will also say that, while the story is about elders, it also holds meaning for younger adults. T loved the film as much as I.

One-Liner Wednesday: Happy 96th!

banner with two hearts saying 96 YEARS LOVED

A gift from my sister to honor our dad, known here as Paco, on his 96th birthday last week. ❤

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2021/03/31/one-liner-wednesday-had-to-run/

Valentine’s Day

The usual greeting for today would be “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

Not this year.

I’m having a difficult time using “happy” as an adjective after the last week.

My family has been struggling with caretaking issues for Paco, complicated by the pandemic. I’ve spent this weekend feeling as though I want to cry, but not quite being able to let myself do it.

It’s the opposite of “happy.”

The United States is also dealing with the first day after the second impeachment trial of our former president. The trial was sobering, as it drove home the extent of death, injury, and damage done during the insurrection and how very close the vice president and members of Congress came to being injured or killed. Somehow, even though more than 67 senators said that DT was responsible for inciting insurrection, only 57 voted to convict falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for conviction. There are likely to be legal repercussions for the former president coming through the judicial system, possibly both federal and state. Meanwhile, he is likely to seek revenge against those Republican members of Congress who voted for impeachment or conviction by advocating that their state parties censure them, by advertising against them, and by funding primary opponents.

Let me be clear that even if DT had been found guilty in the Senate trial, it would not have been an occasion of happiness. It is impossible to feel happy in the face of so much suffering, pain, and fear.

I am trying to find comfort in the message of Valentine’s Day that love is strong, enduring, and the most important aspect of our lives.

May it be so.

May it overcome our present situation.

another day

So, as I write this, it is December 25th which we celebrate as Christmas, but 2020 is very different.

I haven’t been able to post much this month, in large part because we have been dealing with some health difficulties with my father, known here as Paco. He spent five days in the hospital and, earlier this week, was admitted to the skilled nursing and rehabilitation unit in the senior community where he lives.

Because of COVID restrictions, no visitors are allowed but we have been in touch by phone. Before he went to rehab, we did have a family early-Christmas celebration, but we sent a couple of small gifts to his room so he would have something to open today.

We hope to videochat with daughter E and family in London UK this afternoon, which will be evening there. They have already posted photos of granddaughters ABC and JG in their holiday attire. Last night, we were able to watch the Christmas Eve mass from their church. While it is sad that we were not able to see them at all in 2020, technology does help.

Spouse B, daughter T, and I are spending the day at home with scaled-back gift exchange and lots of our family favorite foods, fresh-baked date nut and cranberry breads for breakfast and lasagna from Nana’s recipe with homemade braided herb bread for dinner and apple-blackberry and an outrageously good brown-sugar and maple pecan pie for dessert. B enjoys cooking and baking special meals, so he is taking the lead with all this while I act assitant. It’s nice to have familiar things in such a topsy-turvy year.

Unfortunately, the huge snowstorm we had last week that dropped forty inches (one meter) of snow on us has set us up for flood warnings today. We got about three inches (8 cm) of rain yesterday and overnight, which, coupled with at least another couple of inches from snowmelt, has led to flooding. The Susquehanna is expected to crest tonight at major flood stage level in our town. While our home should be okay, we are concerned for our neighbors who live closer to the river.

I know for many Christians around the world, this Christmas is very different than the usual celebrations, but the underlying message of peace and good will to all is still there to bring comfort to us in these troubled times. I share wishes for peace and good will, for good health and love with all of you; whatever your personal faith or philosophy might be, these gifts are universal.