sweet * bitter

This morning we took a hike at a nearby state park.   It was a perfect day for it – the light was autumnal, but there was only the barest chill in the air.  The dog strained on the end of a leash, Jack and Liam ran ahead of us, fleece sweaters unzipped, racing each other.  Along the boggy riverside we walked on boardwalks, old ones, wonky, not entirely stable.  Through the cracks in the boards below our feet we viewed saw palmetto and marsh, and no alligators, though we searched for them.  Later, on a leaf-strewn path, we saw a snake, a hefty, sinuous brown, a sleepy serpent with a triangular-shaped head, venomous.  Since that moment when we paused and looked at it stretched across a stone by the side of the trail, Liam has been fearful of every stick he sees.  Our cautious boy Jack did not bat an eyelash, but Liam remains captivated hours later, certain he spies snakes in the corners of our house, on the porch, in his bed.  My anxious mother’s heart is glad it made an impression, that it frightened my fearless boy.  He should fear venomous snakes.

After the hike, when the boys were sleeping, we received the long-awaited delivery of a kitchen table and benches, hand-made for us.  We ordered them from etsy, where I found for a reasonable price the rough-hewn farm table I was hoping for.  This table will literally change our lives – the children can eat, do homework in the kitchen while I make dinner.  They can do art there.  We can play family games.  I made sure to select one that will wear well, one that will carry paint and scratches and little-boy-marks and look even better for it (the exact opposite of our finicky art-deco dining table, which has a beautiful finish that scratches if you sneeze on it).  I’m so sentimental, I can barely stand it – welcoming a new piece of furniture into my house, knowing it will be in our lives for probably decades, is almost beyond my emotional capacity.

*****

I am reading the blog of a husband of a friend – a girl I knew in college.  In fact, I once dated her brother, briefly.  She is of course, like me, no longer a girl.  The husband has cancer, vicious cancer, one that escalated from “not so bad” to “infused throughout his spine and bone marrow” within a matter of weeks.  They have three children, young, and their falsely chirpy facebook statuses notwithstanding, the prognosis is not good.  He writes the blog from the bed of his parents’ home, where he is staying for the moment so that his children will not tire him.  He is lonely, feeling useless, unoccupied by anything but thoughts of mortality.  Frightened.  Cared for by his mother.  What a blessing, I think, what a terrible, awful blessing, to be given the opportunity to serve your adult child in this way, to lay yourself down at the feet of your child and give him everything you have, to see that he still needs you, to fulfill that need.  In its futility, its humility, it is beautiful, and very sad.

*******

After the kitchen table came, I stole a few rare moments of peace and took a hot bath.  A glass of Sauvignon Blanc, a New Orleans Christmas mix playing, hot bubbles and an old novella that I’ve read three times, am reading again.  Outside the window of my bathroom is an empty, wooded lot, and so I left the window blinds open.  Natural light, wine, music, and fiction . . . it was perfect.

We bought a little bit of firewood – enough for at least one fire.  It’s on the brick steps in our garage, waiting for us to light it tonight.  The weather here is mildly chilly – 40s at night, 60s by day.  Cold enough for a fire at least, if not exactly “wintry.”  Jack intends to build a snowman in the front yard “tomorrow.”  Heh – heh – sorry kid.  You’ll never build a snowman in your front yard, my dear, but neither will you have to shovel your front walk, so count your blessings.

Blessings, blessings.  Tall lovely trees in the backyard, where the children play with their little cars and trucks.  A new pretty kitchen table.  A job that makes me happy when Monday rolls around.  Enough money to buy a new wreath for the front door, a new kitchen table, Christmas presents for my family, wallets of the boys’ school pictures for our Christmas cards.  Holidays – Thanksgiving in a few short days, and then Christmas not long after, and then a new baby, another perfect niece for us, a baby girl named Harper who will likely bless the world with her presence on The Professor’s birthday.  Friends’ lives fall apart miles away, and I carry them in my heart, while rejoicing in my own turn of fortune.

As I get older, I am continually taught that happiness and sorrow are closer together than I once thought.  Like love and hate, they are two sides of the same coin – each carries the shadow of the other.  My current happiness is haunted by the ghost of sorrows past and future – and sorrows current, experienced by the ones who live in my heart, and are miles away.  People I love who have died, are dying (literally, figuratively) – they crowd my happy days, pull up a chair at my holiday feast, seat themselves by my fire, hover over my children’s heads and whisper to me that happiness is fleeting, these moments are flying.  The bitterness spices my happiness, and it is sweeter by the contrast, though sometimes I wonder if ignorance would be sweeter.

****

My children are currently fighting over Legos.  Each has taken half the available Legos and built a tower, as high as it will go, and each is furious that the other will not give up his own Legos to make the other’s tower go higher.  We don’t build Lego towers and just leave them, boys, I say.  We build a tower, and then we knock it down so we can build something different.  That is how it works.  We destroy, we remake.

They don’t get the lesson.  But one day they will.