Category Archives: Always Blooming

50 Shades of America

Well, I did it! I completed my bucket list item and visited all 50 states in America. As a fun surprise for finishing with North Dakota, my husband and I were able to join the ‘Best for Last Club’ hosted by the Fargo-Moorhead visitor center. The visitor center sits right at the intersection of North Dakota and Minnesota, in Fargo. A team of nice people on staff made the completion of 50 states a truly memorable experience and fun picture-taking opportunity! My husband and I loved every minute of it. That night we savored a celebratory dinner at Rosewild in the Jasper Hotel (not to be missed) reliving stories from our travels during the past 20 years together. We mailed ourselves a postcard to memorialize the occasion and later joined the club community on Facebook. Now I interact with others having the same thrill. I’m loving seeing the joy that traveling this country brings to all types of people.

With that bucket list item ‘checked off’, I have sat down to soak it in and reflect. Where do we most want to return? Should we move to one of these new places? It is tempting. If you are like us, you consider this every time you visit a new state and explore its’ nature, food & drink specialties, and local culture. We’ve been in Arizona over twenty years now and a new adventure is appealing. I’ve swooned over farm wineries in Virginia, stunning Fall colors of the New Hampshire mountains, red Maple forests of Vermont, rolling plains of Idaho, and the white sparkling beaches in Alabama. How do I even begin to convey the beauty and variety across the 3.5M square miles of the United States? First of all it begins with a heart overflowing with gratitude and appreciation that I’ve had the health and circumstances to travel. And have the privilege to live here in America. I’ve seen and done. God is good.

The goal to visit all of America began for me with an airline career at age 18. The airlines paid little but I managed to get on a few planes. One of the first trips I took was to drive up the entire California coast, packed with Mission Impossible cliff edges and road twists. Then, of course I had to go pay my respects to Elvis at his Memphis mansion. I felt the windy chill of Chicago for myself. The magic of America got to me. The freedom and opportunity to see anyplace I wanted. Still, you know how it is after you marry and have kids – time flies. Career and life changes became consuming. And ‘yada, yada, yada’, years pass. It was 2012 that I became re-ignited with travel after taking my first cruise. I realized that I’d been talking about ‘when’ for a lot of things yet putting them off. So, I changed it. I adopted the new attitude of ‘let’s just go’, vs. ‘someday’. I booked that trip to see my favorite football team in another state (go see the Bronco’s stadium!). I took ALL my work vacation time. It made my life completely different, when I compare ‘before’ and ‘after’. It feels like a few years are sort of lost in the ‘before’, actually. I was less present when I didn’t proactively plan time to have new experiences and lived in a work obsessed auto-mode.

A big part of why visiting new places brings joy is also who you travel with. Because having the right partner means having the best experience. That can also mean only YOU! Choosing to travel alone might be the best choice for what you want to get out of traveling. After all, travel companions can enhance or detract from the adventure, just as our choice of people we include in our lives makes such a difference. Personally, other than for work, I have not taken a trip to a new place by myself yet. I am certain I would enjoy it! I love traveling with either my husband or my daughter and son who have joined us. A partner by your side who shares a similar energy level, passions and likes, transforms seeing new places into glimmer moments and not just travel memories. For me, it would not work to travel with someone who needs to sleep in. As a ‘rule’, I start every day early, explore physical activities outdoors and nature, find the craft brews, attend a concert/sports event if possible, eat local fare, have a least one ‘dress-up’ dinner, drive the countryside, savor a slow sunset, and sightsee the ‘must do’s’ in every new place.

Since having a nature experience is one of my ‘must do’s’ of any trip. Many times a national park, scenic hiking trail, or lake is the destination a trip is planned around. We live in the Phoenix area, so we especially love trips that involve cold weather season. It’s amazing how comfortable we feel traveling in cold weather because we’ve planned and expected it, but when it goes below 70 at home we need a parka! (my Arizona peeps understand). One cold memorable trip was when we took the Bridge Walk across New River Gorge in West Virginia. We chose to visit in October for its array of spectacular colors and then, surprisingly, the temperature dipped into the 20’s. Deep greens, bright and rust oranges, rich gold, and velvety reds surrounded every step during the tour. Our breathe floated in the air in front of us like a guiding spirit. Walking the 3030 foot bridge about 900 feet above the river truly was the ‘walk of your life’, made more memorable by the chilly weather. I highly recommend this exhilarating experience!

So, I ask myself, what are your top favorite states? To think of it, I get a tingling sensation along my skin as if I’ve just exhaled blissfully under the hot sun. For a moment, it just soaks in. I am flooded with memories of golden aspens, waterfalls, beaches, sparking sunshine upon a lake, fresh cider donuts at a farm, the gurgle of a creek flowing over rocks, the bustling city view from a corner high-rise hotel room, the breathtaking landscape of a sandstone Arch right on the edge of a mountain, tasting fresh sugar can juice in the fields of Hawaii, crying at the majesty of a glacier, and other countless moments each worthy of their own article. I could go on. This country is every shade of beautiful.

So it’s hard to pick favorites. I believe the feelings we take away from visiting a new place are colored by life’s perspectives and experiences at the time. What might feel like a favorite to me today may not have ten years ago. My view of livability, diversity, conveniences, and opportunities for any location is based on how I currently perceive the world and what I think is best or worst. We all have personal views in this regard, that scarcely stay the same over time. A huge benefit from travel is to expand our minds and understand history and how people live in different places. Taking home a little bit of the culture and learnings from each place is the most satisfying result of every journey. Like the taste of that heaping fried pork tenderloin sandwich at the Northside Cafe in Winterset, Iowa when my husband and I visited for a Bridges of Madison County tour. I don’t know if Clint Eastwood ate it when he visited, but I will never forget that sandwich!

I do think I have ‘Oscar winners’ that are my top states in this beautiful country, but I will caveat it like this. Spending a week in a state and in just one to three cities of that state is a limited view. I acknowledge that. However, although limited, it’s a lovely view. I’m so happy and blessed to have seen what I have seen!

#1 Arizona – Living here is hard to beat. It is sunshine 24/7 like living in a constant vacation. Outdoor scenic adventure is bountiful. You can go north to enjoy all four seasons, and even snow ski. It’s accessible to California beaches and western/midwest states. And it is true, a dry heat is a pleasant heat.

#2 Virginia – a top producing wine state with access to beaches and absolutely gorgeous countryside and seasons. I’m in love with Charlottesville. I like the ability to access many states from this location. Weather is rarely severe in any direction. The Fall season of this state romanced me and it is rich with history.

#3 Vermont/Rhode Island/Maine – maybe it is because I grew up in the South and have so little experience with these states. But I am enamored. The coast, the harbor towns, the quaint farms, and countryside. The way you are lost for words at the view atop Cadillac mountain in Maine. I tell myself I could learn to live with snow. We met the nicest people and spent quality time in road trips seeing every mile we could across these states. STUNNING. Especially loved the charm of BoothBay Maine and Newport, RI.

I was surprised by the crystal beaches of Alabama and the serene plains of Idaho. I’ll go back again. Picking what to revisit is something to look forward to! For now, I sit back in gratitude and appreciate what I’ve experienced and cherish it. How we are enriched by travel is found in the stronger stretch of our smile, the increased intentionality of our breathing, and a deeper appreciation of the sunrise and sunset each day. Every place is carried in us, filling out our heart.

The new Mothers Day

I’m sitting in my brothers home the day after the flight from hell. It is February 2018. I didn’t make it in time for goodbye and she is gone. For the first time in years, our family is in one location at the same time. Even Aunt Becky, carrying her bag of disfunction. Her husband, who she no longer speaks to. Her daughters too, who have made no effort to speak to one another in years. The church Elder knocks on the door and my younger brother lets him in. Dad and the siblings are in the room, planning the memorial service. This particular church member was chosen for his history with our family. I haven’t seen him in years and when he enters, I am reminded of my youth. The time I sat in a morose room as a teenager while he and other authoritative men berated my choices with boys. I look at him as he enters. He has not aged during the past twenty years. I give my warm regards. The rest of the family welcomes him. Here we all are, the gang who used to play Clue. But something is wrong. Instinctively, my eyes keep searching the room for you, mom. How can any plans be approved if you’re not here to tell us it’s ok. Not a single thing is ok.

Earlier today, we chose your favorite songs for the service. You would have loved the attention we paid to considering the choices. The pictures we selected for the program. The laughs we had about your fashion. How we focused on the beauty and realness of the words that will be said to celebrate you. During all of this, I feel a sixth sense hovering, mocking our efforts. It’s asking if everyone properly sad? Emotions are confusing and years of pain are bottled. In a way our activities are surreal, as though we are going through the motions. Feelings of relief are unspoken. We simply can’t.

My younger brother leads decisions about the service, falling into his most detached communication style. I stare at him, wondering who he is. Sad that we’ve grown apart. He has had it the hardest; living here watching every step of your health unfold. I wince. Then I look around for you. I need to talk with you about everyone in the room, mom, exchange our thoughts and exhale the snarky parts. The Elder proposes what he will say at the service and I gasp, then cry. His words are impersonal, as though he could be talking about anyone. Impersonal the way much of their unloving religious rituals are. Robotic. It aches that certain things have stayed the same.

I share my opinion openly. Everyone looks at me the way I know I’m viewed, the outsider. The contrarian. There I am again, that teenager. Years evaporate instantly. But I keep talking. For you I think.

“But mom won’t be there! How can we have a funeral for her if she’s not here? I just can’t believe she won’t be there,” I shrill hysterically. Quiet stares pierce me.

My siblings are remembering the way I broke at the hospital that time we waited for results of your stint procedure. The screaming. I’ve become a zebra at the zoo. They gawk and I look back. The room energy sizzles with everyone’s thoughts. You aren’t able to reach out to hug me or provide comforting words and it feels wierd. Dad sits clueless, his capacity to comfort was castrated by you years before. My brothers look away, not understanding what to do with me. My sister had already left the room, walling off her sadness with the humor she relies on for sanity. I hear her cackling in the other room.

The sixth sense whispers, “Fakers.”

A flower arrangement arrives the next afternoon, just an hour before the service. We are under the influence of wine. I have on the black dress I bought in a hurry. The one I will throw away the next day. My sister in law walks into the room carrying the flowers, fragrant with Stargazers. The same arrangement I had purchased for you in the hospital when you and the nurses enjoyed them so much. My heart pounds heavy with regret that I had not sent another arrangement while you could enjoy it. I remember you asked for it. I lower my head to my chest involuntarily.

When it’s time, I’m looking for you and dad, always the pair, hoping for a sense of normality for the drive to church. Letting the old ways you taught us wash over me. The past being a comfort. God being the truest part of our family that you and dad most believed in. The way you felt a mother should be. The best you knew how.

Framed pictures are placed on tables throughout the lobby alongside the Stargazer arrangement. Your face is so happy and young, shining from the frame. The family pictures convey a life that is beautiful and pure as it should be. I feel gratitude for you and the love you raised us with. Your laugh from the Nebraska family reunion comes to mind and makes me smile. Then I feel angry at myself for not making time to be better and listen more. The years that have slipped by. It disgusts me that I’m thinking about my own issues when this service is about you. I walk over to the Stargazers and breathe in the scent. My chest sobs and I choke back sound in my throat instead of letting it out, to save others from me. It’s time to go sit between Dad and my sister. The only possible way to get through the next hour. After sitting I look around the church. And here I am again, in the seats we grew up in, making God proud of us. Which seemed more important to you during my whole life, rather than being close and understanding one another. I’m glad God is here since you aren’t.

Today it is as if you’ve closed your bedroom door again all day. And it will never open when you are in a better mood. You’ve locked it forever.

The Hummingbird

May 2020

I had an experience in my yard today. My sanctuary. A loud buzzing began very close to my ear. I was certain a bee must be landing on me. Until I felt the power of wind on my face. My head turned into direct eye contact with a hummingbird, mesmerized. THE hummingbird. Since moving into this house she has been all the messages of my mother, lover of hummingbirds. Delivering signs, answering your heart. The sign you feel in your soul from God just when needed. Silky, feather gray with black eyes bore into me, explaining everything. Time disappeared. Uncertainties became certain. She was all the answers, all the reasons. Everything I have asked and all that is unhealed in me passed between our eyes. It was a sacred space apart from either now or then, a separate peace connecting our conscious. The unexplained. With only inches between us, our eyes spoke. Her long elegant beak opened in silent serenade. It was an eternity in a moment. A miracle. Then she fluttered into the desert willow to dance.

Selfish

It is early 2020, a year with a lot of quiet time. Two years have passed since my mothers death, and the healing isn’t really improving. Peace is slow to come and painfully selective in sifting through memories. Sometimes I relive wrong decisions, embarrassments of my past self. My mother taught me to feel shame early in life and at times it is an olympic sport if I don’t stop it. I accept why, since I know her childhood. Its like a train chasing me faster and faster as I run down the track and I imagine the relief of just laying down to let it crush me. It’s been hard not to connect my mother with ‘the bad stuff’ even though there is good stuff also. In these moments, I feel all the things I mistakenly chose to do and the things I should have done but didn’t in a final rush of giving in and becoming nothing. Nothingness. Peace from nothingness must have been my mother’s primary thought when she gave up. Why couldn’t she be strong for herself?

The story of her last few months disturbs me in quiet moments. I remember the years it seemed like she could never be gone. It couldn’t really happen. How could she not be around. There would always be time for her to get better. Turn around her weak spirit. Time for me to call her every day and to be a better daughter who cared more. Then I got the call. Hopes and wishes to become better shattered. No more chances to give more, listen more. The last few exchanges I had with my mother quickly went from jury to sentencing in my mind. What we accuse ourselves of becomes part of our identity, without us even knowing it. The guilt just finds a space inside and gets stronger as it claws for more and more breath. My guilt needs to get out. I’m nearly out of breath. 

Part of me is compelled to relive wrong choices as a flogging for the ways I failed her. Another part hopes it will help me let it go. I think of how my mother felt. Alone. Abandoned. As though no-one in this world understood her. Her daily existence was loss; loss of will, loss of strength, physical and mental. Loss of connection with people as she struggled with a cloud of sadness. She didn’t want to tell anyone her real feelings because she would be embarrassed. Too much pride. The strong face she put on was for others. As I realize I knew this, it hurts that I did not acknowledge it to her then. Find a way to let the small issues go and just embrace her more deeply.

Her body wanted to give out and always attacked her, punishment for not respecting its needs. She watched as her husband was fading from his former self, unable to support her with his slow succumb to Alzheimers. Who would be her best friend now? The house she knew and loved for three decades was taken in a natural disaster. Her children treated her with respect, but did not look upon her with respect, mostly clueless to her inner demons, and focused on their own lives. I sometimes go through this checklist, trying to come to terms.

Did you ever feel so much regret for your behavior that the pain hits in the stomach and causes you to gasp aloud? You lower your head without even recognizing you are doing it. I do this thinking of my mothers pain. How I seem to care more about it now, when I should have cared then. In the most critical of moments, it was my own comfort and convenience I sought. And now, still replaying the loneliness she must have endured for so long, I envision that unpacking the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of her pain may somehow provide answers and reasons. But I will never have answers. Never understand why she couldn’t be stronger for herself and advocate her own life. Even as I write this, I find myself blaming her that I am blaming myself.

I inventory all the ‘what-ifs’ and ‘why didn’t I’s’. Too many to recall. I should have spent the night when she asked me too, that opportunity to have our last slumber party. Why didn’t I see her earnestness and how much she needed me? We could have talked all night. It may have encouraged her. Why didn’t I fly to Houston and sit with her in the rehabilitation center and be a friend? We could have read books together and talked about our favorite movies. She would have laughed. We would have shared our joys about all the small and funny things like we used to. And, maybe, she would have realized a lighter place. That she could leave rehab and be stronger. That I cared and was there for her. That she could get better. What if she had improved for a few more years and she could meet her great grandchildren. What if I was less selfish. What if my mother was not so weak for so many years that she damaged her body to the point of no return. Can I ever stop being mad at her for being gone.

She tried, you know. She needed me at her lowest point and told me all her heartbroken feelings.  It was during my last trip to Houston to visit her. I didn’t listen; I fixed. When she ordered me around her apartment in the condescending tone she used with daddy, I got offended and called her on it. She was just acting out in fear. I was too. Two women in shame not being real enough to reach out for love they both needed in that moment. 

The relationship with my mother was always complicated. Mothers who have complicated and painful relationships with their mothers must try really hard not to pass down the same dynamic to their own daughters. And it was hard for my mother to try hard. 

The House

It’s July 5th, 2019. I wake up in a new place, too early, and too eager to sleep any longer. I want to unpack. Yesterday I’d been in one house, and today we live in a different house. I am surprised by how quickly I have lost sentimental feelings for the old house we lived in for such a long time. When we first arrived there, the children were in elementary school and the house became a place of personal healing for me. We left Texas during a difficult time in my marriage, and the future was uncertain.  I no longer loved my husband, after a painful betrayal. I was leaving my job, friends, brother, sister, and parents back in Texas for an unknown life in Arizona. An unsure life, but a hopeful adventure. I needed to go somewhere new. Although I love my family deeply, their religious judgements in my life were stifling. Not only did I not feel free to simply be myself, but I constantly felt I was justifying my existence because I was different. Different from my family and also different from those in Church, who were full of “should”. Growing up, I’d been made to feel that different meant bad. Conformity meant good. I understood that something was wrong for God did not intend his example of love to cause people to make others feel bad. In the life and that marriage I was living, I felt love draining from me every day with no end in sight. 

The adventure in Arizona was everything and I began to allow myself to breath. We had a swimming pool and the kids made friends right next door. I made the difficult decision to separate from my husband and began to feel love coming back. The cold fog that had seized my heart for more than a decade was dissipating. Arizona was a new place; a place to be me. The house was part of me growing into the woman I am, a phase which experienced many delays in my twenties as a young mother in a dysfunctional situation. I learned slowly to trust and be vulnerable, habits that I did not yet have. I remarried. I went to college as I had always wanted, but had been denied. I outgrew my first career and began a new career that I excelled in and became successful. I watched my children grow into teenagers, and create their foundations. I made new friends, tried new things, and formed bonds of friendship with my children when they left home as adults. I lost my mother, our dear pet Pug, and watched my husband go through trauma surgery and recovery. The old house saw and heard over eighteen formative years.

This morning I let it go. I honor my old house. It was a good house and I loved it. Now I will unpack my new house. The fresh air of new feelings, creating new stories, and planning future adventures. Healing will never end, but I have made friends with it. We are all getting better all the time. I know each house has a role in our life’s story and this new house joins my journey today.