Spring inside and out

 Josh with John's design

 

Early spring

  Judy has recovered from the flu without developing pneumonia, thanks in large part to her determination.  She forced herself to sit in her recliner for a short time on the third day of her illness, then for longer on the fourth day, etc.  The doctors are still monitoring her, but she has declared herself out of the woods.  Not only that, but she believes that she has not slid any further down the pulmonary fibrosis progression than where she had been before she got the flu. It feels like spring in our house, to go along with the  blooming daffodils and primroses in the yard.

Judy at the dunes

   Our friends and neighbors took good care of us.  Betsy and Les made an emergency delivery of brisket and kugel, carefully leaving it outside our self-imposed quarantine house  Sheila came with walk-around tacos for us to eat while watching the Superbowl.  Janet is still sharing meals with us; last night it was spaghetti Alfredo.
   Judy had almost gotten strong enough for us to join John and Rose in Manzanita in the second week of February. It was not a good idea for her to pack her clothes and ride for two hours in the car all in the same day.  Even though, at the rest stop, I drove up onto the sidewalk to place her as close as
possible to the women's room, by the time we got to the vacation house Judy was desperately worn out. I have felt, during Judy's long struggle with the flu, that I was always arranging things in a way that would have been appropriate the week before or after. The next few days were a tonic for her, though, with great company and a window seat overlooking the dunes.

John sets off to work

     John was plotting large geometric designs, which he drew on the sand with
special tools that his brother Chas made for the task.  John would bend over his graph paper and compass at night, saying something incomprehensibly numeric to Rose who would reply, "So then pi would be 3."  In the morning he'd set off over the dunes with his tools on his shoulder to  work on the fabulous designs.

Search committee

    When we returned from the coast, I slid right back into total immersion in the work of the ministerial search committee.  We got twenty applications at the beginning of January, and have been narrowing the field and doing interviews.  When I come wide awake and alert at 3 in the morning, I fret about the search.  However, my respect for and confidence in the committee just grows and grows, and I take reassurance in that.  Even though we are at the point in the search when we will probably begin to disagree, I feel less worried when I am with them and we are working together.
   The other morning I woke up remembering being around 10 years old, and how it felt to turn cartwheels on the front lawn with my sisters.

Influenza

Les and Betsy's chicken soup

 Judy ached all over, and her prolonged coughing fits made her feel like she was drowning.  I could see the fear in her eyes. She even asked timidly if I would drive her to the doctor's. (I always go with her to the pulmonologist's, but never to her primary care doc's.  Sara and Judy worked together at the Old Town Clinic, and I don't hover over those appointments. ) A swab test confirmed that Judy had the flu. Sara made her lie still for quite a while in a darkened room until her heart rate slowed.  Then she considered whether to send Judy to the hospital.  "There's a 50- 50 chance you will end up there"  Sara said, but she ultimately decided that Judy was experienced enough to spot danger signals early.  She talked to me about ambulances and which hospital to head for.  She sent Judy out to the car in a wheelchair, and questioned me carefully about how far it would be from the car to the bed once we got home.
    Sara prescribed Tamiflu, an antiviral, for both of us. She described the cough medicine she prescribed as "the real deal," containing something to calm Judy and subdue the hacking.  It worked well; Judy spent the next two days sleeping. On the third day she sat for a few hours in her recliner, and then spent a little more time upright each day. She can't speak much without coughing, and doesn't have the attention span to watch movies. Short animal videos on Facebook make her smile. She mostly reads and pets Mutt Leigh. Today, the twelfth day since she came down with the flu, is the first time she has ventured out of the house.  Her ukulele/lunch buddies were thrilled to see her this morning.  Judy is a long way from her pre-flu strength, and we have to be on guard against pneumonia, but she is coming back. She has just today begun to give me some lip about the liquids I push.

Sally's portrait of Mutt Leigh

     Family and friends have been wonderful.   Frequent phone calls sustained me and reassured me.  I had a milder false of the flu, and I worried that if it got worse I wouldn't be able to take care of Judy.  Two minutes after I sent out an e-mail red alert to family, Tina called and offered to come from Chicago to help.  Betsy and Les made chicken soup with matzo balls and special powers, and drove out from the city to leave it on our doorstep.  Sally delivered a portrait of Mutt Leigh that captures her quirkiness and makes us laugh.  Midori called from Arizona to play a song for Judy on the flute.
    Thanks to all of you who have been holding us up in this hard time.

Hallelujah, Part 2

Happy

    Maxine and Simone and their parents came to stay with us after Christmas.  I was happily busy for weeks getting ready: shopping for toys and crafts and clothes from the resale store, making up princess beds, and collecting  lots of picture books.  On Sunday morning I waited eagerly for the sound of their voices in the driveway.  Courtney arrived with the girls after a week with her family in Los Angeles.  David came in later that day from Austin.

Courtney meets Mutt Leigh

Three nappers

     We had only a short time with Courtney; she left that evening for her flight back to Texas.  She and Judy caught up, we opened presents, and her friend Christopher came for dinner.     Meanwhile, Simone discovered the basket full of rhythm shakers and Maxine organized a rehearsal for the first of many shows.  "After I say bop bop you say bop bop,"  she directed.  Simone reminded me "Where's your instrument?"  Simone kept the beat and contributed her bop bops while Maxine sang and danced all over the kitchen.

At the playground

Quiet times

      Simone loves to sing.  She will do it for an audience, singing ABCD or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.  She also sings to herself,  fa la la la la, or away in a manger . When she sees someone noticing her, she checks out the observers' face to see  whether she should perform or continue unselfconsciously. When Judy was a playing a video of her friend Holly singing, Simone scurried to put on her "pretty dress" (a ballerina outfit) so that she could dance and hum along with the music.
     On Monday we went to the local aquarium, where we were able to touch  sharks and manta rays.  Simone, age 2 and half, was impressed with the octopus: "Octopus turned into a rock," she reported to David's friend Mary Szybist, who presented us with broadsides of her poem about an octopus, The Lushness of It.

Texans in an Oregon cold snap

    We had saved the big box that our new washing machine came in, and that  become the girls' house.  We put a light and a mirror in it, and they stuffed the box with the two large shopping bags of  of  Christmas loot they'd brought from California. They played there for hours. Like true Americans, they had to make  auxiliary storage units for their stuff so that Maxine could sleep in the box one night.

Simone rings the dinner bell

Can I really touch a shark?

With Grandma Judy

      It was too cold to spend much time outdoors, but we did manage a short stint at a playground and a trip to the sock store.  Maxine chose purple  socks with guitars on them, and Simone chose red ones with sock monkeys.  I was surprised at David's choices of colorful striped socks.  He showed me the orange printed ones he was wearing.  Who could have guessed  that loud socks were the fashion among the avant-garde?
     Maxine planned a New Year's Eve party. She made a paper chain for the fireplace wall and turned plain brown lunch bags into elegant gift bags.  Our gift bags contained chocolate and Christmas crackers.  Daddy got a Christmas tie.  At our midnight (9 pm) we broke the crackers, put on our crowns, and banged pots and pans on the deck.  Simone was mesmerized by the music of Norwegian soprano Sissel singing Auld Lang Syne.
    At 3 AM the next morning David woke the girls.  Ever so gently and patiently he moved  them into the car and off to the airport.  I was filled with the lushness of it, but wish I had eight arms to draw them all back.

Another Silent Hallelujah, Part 1

Mary

Couldn't even hum along

   What is it about Handel's Messiah that renders me speechless?  A year and a half ago I was rehearsing for the church's Hallelujah Chorus when I came down with a case of  laryngitis that lasted for 6 weeks.  This fall, when the North Clackamas Community Chorus prepared to present a sing-your-own Messiah,  I got laryngitis again.  I sat silent in the audience, watching my friends Lois and Mary Jean working through  the alto part, and thrilling to the father and son standing behind me who sang every note.  I was not able to speak, much less sing.
     When our friend Mary had a holiday supper and sing-along, I could barely converse, much less join in the carols.  When Janet and Robert came over with Christmas cookies and the latest pre-natal grandchild report,  I couldn't ask all the obstetrical questions I wanted to.

Robert

     Judy by then had had a 4-week respite from conversation with me.  "Don't talk! Don't whisper!" she'd say, "You could damage your vocal chords." I have to be careful, in any case, when I talk to Judy. It takes her a few minutes now to regain her breath after walking from the car to her easy chair or walking from the bedroom to the kitchen. I wait to speak to her until she has enough breath to reply.
      Judy has new medicine to help suppress the cough that takes her breath away and makes her oxygen- saturation levels plummet. When I tell people that she has an (awful) new normal, she reminds me, "Always add that I hate it."

Merry Brucemas

      Lois and Chuck appeared with brunch on Christmas day.  They brought along their banjo and accordion and the words to Lois's Brucemas Carols, lyrics of traditional carols changed in honor of Lois's  first cat. ("We wish you a merry Brucemas" etc.)  Could I sing along?  Oh, no. But by Christmas  I could talk.

Chuck and Lois cook

     Lois, who is Jewish, pointed out that her people don't usually sing the Messiah.  "Neither do yours," she said. "It's a Protestant thing."  She's right. I used to think that only those who belonged to churches with handbell choirs and adult Sunday schools could master those notes.  Those people who, like the character in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping," conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.” A far cry from Gregorian chant.
      When I wanted to sing the Messiah choruses from my easy enough road, I could not. But I was happy in this season, silently preparing for our granddaughters' visit.
 
 
 

Motorcycle Santas

One Santa

 

Motorcycle toy run

Another Santa

  Judy has counted herself lucky in recent years to catch sight of hundreds of Harley-Davidson motorcycles roaring through town, carrying large stuffed animals.  Sometimes the bikes are decorated for Christmas, and often driven by a biker Santa.  They navigate en masse up our windy Pill Hill to the Shriners' Hospital, where the designated Santa gives the stuffed animals, along with a trailer truckload of donated new toys, to the young patients.  The bikers also raise thousands of dollars to buy braces, wheelchairs and
other medical equipment  for the kids.

All kinds

   

of bikers

 This year we decided to find the beginning of the toy run.  I found the least illegal parking place directly across from the parking lot where 2000 motorcycles were gathering.  I parked the wrong

Another kind of Portland biker

way in front of the driveway of a distributor of gluten-free soup.  We had about 45 minutes to stay there and photograph the cyclists as they rode in.  To my dismay, the driveway just behind us became the meeting place for the motorcycle cops who were to form the escort for the parade.  As one cop, then another, then three more pulled into position behind me, I got more and more nervous.  "Put your oxygen on," I urged Judy.  She just laughed and continued taking pictures.  She was having a fine time.   The police made sure not to notice us, but I was greatly relieved when they drove off to begin the parade.

Illegal parking

Thanksgiving swirl

   I heard someone refer to  Thanksgiving as "the one dinner of the year when we say grace."  Oh, no. In my family we said grace every night.  There were a lot of us, and almost always visitors.  First we passed all the serving dishes  around the table.  When everyone had been served, we CLAPPED once  in unison and began "Bless us o Lord..."  Only then did we begin to eat.
      My mother's cooking was plain and adequate.  We had  roasted meat, two frozen vegetables without sauce,  potatoes, and a glass of milk every night except Friday, when we had fish sticks or tuna casserole. Thanksgiving was a bounty, and so were birthday dinners.  My mother made a fancy l
lunch of chicken salad and curried fruit when I brought Judy home for the first time.  Usually, though, the meal was simple. One young man joked, with early college arrogance, that my mother's meals were Hobbesian--nasty, brutish, and short.  But he kept coming back, eagerly, for Sunday dinners. The food was nothing special, but dinner was.
    Dinner was an occasion every night.  We caught up and told stories and celebrated the children and told more stories.  We often sat around the table long after we'd finished eating, some of us drinking coffee, some of us smoking.  When we were teenagers, there were boys who came for dinner every night for months on end.

Proud parents-to-be

     The daily celebration depended on my mother's faithful cooking and on all of us showing up. We are scattered across the country now: three sisters in Maryland, one in Washington and one in Oregon, and my brother in Texas.  In the next generation, we have one in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut,  five in Maryland,  one in DC, one in Texas, one in Chicago, two  in Seattle.  And yet, as my sister Siobhan says, "We're Sullivans. We show up." We learned that by showing up for dinner.  This Thanksgiving I am grateful for the family's continuing determination to come together.

Janet and Kelli at Thanksgiving

   For big events like weddings we gather en masse.  We can't do that for Thanksgiving every year, but it pleases me no end to think about the swirl of ways we still connect.  David and Courtney go to Donnie's, Cole and Bianca join Jess and Rob at Rob's sister's, Florrie and Eileen and their families are at Vonnie's, Rose is at
Jacob's who has invited his cousin Christopher from New Hampshire, Paul and family stopped at his cousin's in Cleveland just before Thanksgiving.  Judy and I were invited to Sequim by Rose's brother-in-law's son Joe.  We couldn't make that trip, but celebrated Thanksgiving with our good neighbors, Janet and Robert.  In Janet's family, they show up.  That makes me feel right at home.
 

Abby's wedding

Florrie and Abby

Abby and Cliff

     I couldn't stop crying at Abby's wedding ceremony, from the time Cliff's  grandmother was wheeled down the aisle in her wheelchair to the recessional when Maxine declared, "I'm gonna dance with that ring bearer."  Dance she did, and so did everyone else at the reception.  Simone began dancing in her fascination with the string quartet.  Bianca's example got the crowd on the floor, and TJ wowed us with his rhythm.  Charlie tried to imitate  Bianca in his athletic way, and Sammy learned disco moves from a woman I did not know.  Jack had his own style, and Maxine danced with the ring bearer the whole time.
   In the week before the wedding there was much discussion about what to wear, because the invitation said "formal."  The men fretted about tuxes and suits.  I decided that dressy pants were OK for me.  In Oregon, if it's not fleece it's formal.  Once the dancing began, all levels of formality were lost in the music

Colin and Maxine

.

Simone playing

David and Simone

My guys

    We were  gathered at the Tidewater Inn in Easton, Maryland for the wedding weekend. The 52 of us from our portion of the family took over one of the many comfortable gathering rooms off the main lobby, telling stories and playing cards.  Everyone was there eventually except for Judy.  Tom helped Maxine mix colors in the  perfectly chosen coloring book that the wedding bunny had given her.  Simone wanted to climb the grand winding staircase over and over again, whispering so as not to wake the other guests, Charlie found the courtyard and explored the outdoors.  Don's four caught us up on their college studies. Don had been going through our father's papers, and brought us treasures.  He gave me the tax returns that Dad and filled out when I had my first job, as a 16 -year- old lingerie clerk at the S. Klein department store.

Florrie

    Abby is the younger daughter of my sister Florrie and her husband Mike.  Last year, at big sister Liz's wedding, I sat with Mike's family.  I was happy to see them again, and also Liz's in-laws, who came up from North Carolina for the party. I had a good conversation with a member of Florrie's 27-year book club.  That made me happy, because I know what a treasure it is to have longtime  companions in the sharing of books. I like seeing my sister in the context of her life.

    Before the weekend in Easton  I visited Mary and Jeremy at their farm. Mary and I tromped through the rolling land they have nurtured. We walked over cut cornfields with pretty vistas and through the rich autumn woods.  Jeremy's loving, direct questions helped me clearly my thinking.  At dinner with Bo and Rita I was surrounded by Mary's fine landscape paintings.  I had rental far kerfuffles and borrowed car breakdowns, so the next morning Mary drove me the two hours to

Mary and Amelie

Easton while Jeremy waited for AAA. Mary and I  had lunch and caught up with a librarian friend, and shopped in the upscale consignment shop. The next day, Mary and Jeremy drove Vonnie's old but mostly reliable Buick back to the Maryland suburbs, and then continued on to a christening in DC.
     After the weekend, we relaxed back at Vonnie's house.  Ernie lit a fire and coddled Bert, who had been at doggie camp.  Eileen regaled us with her (disputed) theories about why our family is a little strange.  The next morning

Shep in farmhouse kitchen

John went searching for his grandmother's grave in the Greenbelt
cemetery.  Florrie, the official hostess of the elaborate wedding, showed up with still-warm banana bread she had baked that morning.  My sisters and I talked and laughed, and then it was time to fly home.
   At Abby's wedding, I was overwhelmed with all the good people I have known so well for so many years, lives distilled and gathered together for a joyous beginning.   Now that I am home, I remember how they make me strong.