24 Days of Ornaments: Dec the 24th

Why does this ornament get pride of place by being number 24? It's certainly not the plastic and yarn frame which, by the way, is red and not pink. (Scanner!) It is my husband's favorite ornament, the one packed first, the one he searches for first, and the one I put front, center, and at eye level.

My mother is responsible for this photo. She was keeping the boys while we were out of town. She took them to the dime store that was having a photographer in. Somehow, she sweet-talked (she was a master of this) them into letting her bring our dog as well. For this is Jenny, our "first child." She was very, very good with the boys as long as they didn't come between her and her food bowl.

(Note: Two ways to learn: listen and do as you're told, or stick your hand in there anyway. Matt can tell you the difference.)

The boys are probably about 2 and 4. It must be spring or summer. A friend gave me the frame, and photo and frame just found their way together. Last year, I scanned it into the computer, so now there is a digital copy. Whew!

It is hard to believe that today is Christmas Eve and my 24 days of Ornaments is over! I've had such a wonderful time writing about these special mementos in my home. Guests have circled my tree trying to find them and I've been able to tell more stories. If nothing else, your take-home lesson from this should be to circle your host's tree and appreciate the sentiments expressed thereon.

Thank you for reading my blog this month and taking this journey with me.

Merry Christmas.

Memory Monday: Birthday Week

August has always been special to me. It's my birthday month! My dad's birthday. My sister's. Along the way, I picked up an anniversary and a son's birthday. It's a crowded month. And I'm just Leo enough to want everyone to help me celebrate.

But the one thing that always made my day more special (there's that Leo thing again), is that I share the date with my Dad. I was his 29th birthday present, or so Mother always said. I imagine she had something else tucked aside just in case I missed my debut date. In fact, my parents, because they couldn't agree on a name for me should I be a girl, had a bet on my name. (The boy name had Jr. tucked onto the end of it.) If I were born on Daddy's birthday, he could name me. If not, Mother, weighing the odds carefully I'm sure, could have the honor. I popped up (out?) at 9:26 AM and Daddy made her stick to it. The summer she died, the thing I missed most was her phone call at 9:26 AM to wish me happy birthday.

But in the middle were lots of birthday cakes and I ran across this photo from the year I was three. Daddy had his own cake here, whereas he hadn't the year before, so I liked this one best. This year, he won't know it's his birthday, so I'll have to do the remembering for us both.

Memory Monday: Twenty pages of someone else's memories

When my mother died 12 years ago, my dad did not wish to live alone for the rest of his life. Within the year, he had courted, and persuaded to move from PA to TX, a woman he'd briefly known in high school. She was widowed and her son wished her well, but she only lived as my dad's second wife for 5 years before dying. At that point, Daddy's stress from caring for two ill wives caught up to him and the rest, as they say, is history. My sister and I decided the best place for Daddy was assisted living and that's where he started his too-short run toward Alzheimer's and where he is today.

However, in the interim Lil, wife two, gathered loads of Daddy's photos from boxes, loosely organized them, GLUED them into albums and wrote brief bylines on maybe 10% of them. So when I began my march through the old albums in order to archive, I found a page labeled: "Dick, friends and time in the service before he married."

There was Daddy in high school with friends, mostly girls. Then a few service photos. More girls, or by this time, young women. Service... women. Women. Women.

Twenty pages with 4-6 photos per page. None did I recognize. Then: "Dick, Velta, family and friends". Whew!

But... twenty pages of old girlfriends? Daddy--you rascal!

So, what happened to this woman?

When my daughter-in-law asked for photos of my dad as a child, little did I know it would open a scan-fest for me. Scan one, scan a dozen. Why not pick my favs and make CDs for everyone? My sister's birthday is coming up. Maybe she'd like a greatest-hits album of our parents?

I have three physical albums dedicated to old photos. There are pieces of others, mainly reprints and doubles, scattered about elsewhere. I found the photos my DIL requested, whizzed them off to her, then started a journey.

We can start with: why don't people mark the backs of their photos, although Mother was MUCH better about it than Daddy. Most of Daddy's are identified in my handwriting when I was making the albums from loose photos, asking him for names and places, and he could still remember.

But this post, my 400th by the way, is about my Mother. Viewing her photos, I see a child whose own mother never looked directly at the camera and whose father scowled at it. But Mother? Mother was smiling. Smiling holding cats (and the rest of the family wonders where I get it from), smiling atop a horse, smiling in a lake, smiling from the top of a picnic table, smiling from under a soldier's cap while at college, smiling in band uniform, modeling a two-piece bathing suit, playing a guitar, hugging her favorite cousin, riding a bike, holding a baby...

Where did that woman go? Ride a horse? A bike? Swim? Sit on a table? Who is this woman? Can't be my mother! She never did any of these things with me!

But it is she. And as she's been dead 12 years I'll never know where all that joy went.

Happy Birthday to me!

Yep, today is my birthday. Being of a "certain age", I'm not telling the exacts, but I doubt I'll be living the same number again.

Birthdays are nostalgic. I tend to look back to special birthdays and smile. I also think of the parties I've given myself at 30, 40, 50, 55... oops! telling my age here... and the supposition that I don't want to wait until the next milestone at 60 to be doing it again. So, this is fair warning to my friends: I'm seriously considering one for 57 1/2.

So far today, I've fielded "happy birthday"s from the cat who woke me up at 4:30 in order to be first (my husband thinks he was merely hungry but did rush to be second to say it), both sons, my sister (who lauded that I'd always be older), and a friend who asked me to lunch. My dance card being full today, we're dining on Thursday. This is how one celebrates one's birthday all week.

My greatest birthday story is how I was named. My parents (in a fit of feistiness I never recall seeing) bet on my name and date of birth. I was due near my dad's birthday. They readily agreed on the name for a son (something to do with a Junior) but the girl name was leading to disagreement. So they bet that should I be born on my dad's birthday, he would name me. And I was. And he did. So instead of being a Deborah Kay which is what my mother wanted (and as it turns out there were three others in my class), I am a Velta Kay, named for my mother, Velta Lee. In most instances, I've dropped the Velta, but it lingers nonetheless. Two years later, with my sister due around the same date, my mother declined to bet. I think they must have agreed upon the name anyway.

But every year after I left home and married, my mother would call at the minute of my birth to wish me happy birthday. Sad to say, I think I miss that the most about her. I know I did the year she died. There was no one to call at 9:26 in the morning and say, Happy Birthday.

We're having a heat wave...

(It's really hard not to finish the line, isn't it? So, okay, all together: "...a tropical heat wave.")

And we really are. After a June with temps in the 80s for highs and enough rain to turn off the sprinkler system, July came a little closer to being normal, and now August is typical. Typical only in its 100+ days; atypical in that they've just now started.

Every time I listen to the weather, they report the normals, highs and lows. What has struck me is the number of highs set in the year I was born. In August.

With no a/c and pregnant-out-to-there with me, my mother must have been at her most miserable. That she repeated the feat two years later with my sister is a testament to her will to "family plan" rather than any suffering she would do with a toddler and in the heat.

I've rarely had sympathy for any of my mother's health problems (she died ten summers ago of kidney failure due to a heart that couldn't pump efficiently due to ignoring what was best for her health). I've felt she brought most of them on herself. She was loathe to exercise, ate what she pleased (all of it fried), and in later years, ignored the doctor's advice that she was on the verge of diabetes brought on by obesity. I think in her last months she had a few regrets or the fact of her mortality snuck up on her, one, because her attitude changed just the slightest bit.

But think of her pregnant with temperatures over one hundred--records still standing after more than half a century--and I do feel sorry for her.

Bless your heart, Mother, for all the complaining you ever did, you never mentioned it.