Birthday Party for One

Save the cards that arrived days before.  

Leave them unopened.

Pick up one gluten-free cupcake.

Ride bicycle home slowly. 

Savoring the warm air.

It may be the last of the year.  

Arrange cards, packages, flowers on the dinner table.

Throw together a salad.

Music.

Take it all in.

Flip through New Yorker.  

Savor the feta and chicken on spinach.

Wash it down with flat wine.

Finish with sweet chocolate-y cake.

Open the card from your dear friend, your teacher.

Her handwriting shows her age.

Her words her wisdom:

“Cherish each other and all that you do!”

Card from mom. Saccharine. Real.

Grandmother’s confession:

“I write how much I spent on bread and milk, but I haven’t marked the date of your birth, my only, my favorite granddaughter. I am ashamed.  I hope this reaches you in time.”

You cry. 

You wail for your grandmother’s decline.

Or is it for your loneliness?

Taking stock

Home.  That was the impetus for starting this blog.  The search for home.  We all know that it’s more complicated than at what address one lives.  And at last count, I’d lived at 17.  To that, I’ll add two more, and arrive at the address where Tom and I currently reside.  We have lived here for 2.4 years now.  It is our home.  It is what adults in this country strive for - to buy a home.  Each of us have already owned a property prior to this, a condo of some sort, but this free-standing house, with a garden, a driveway, on a tree-lined street, is the first and only one we bought together.  And although we’ve settled in with all kinds of mixed feelings and tribulations, it is our home.  

It is where we’d like to start a family.  Which brings me to the second aspect of home: family.  Beyond just an address, a physical space, there are the people who make up one’s home.  Sure, one can live alone, and feel at home.  Both Tom and I have done it.  But as a married unit, we are an intrinsic part of each other’s home.  We like that. 

And we’d like to expand.  Whether that means having our own or adopting, we’d like to stretch the boundary of what home means.  That is the journey we’ve been on for a while now, since shortly after we moved into this new home of ours.  I know from my previous 25 years of searching for home, that that journey is never easy or straight forward.  It is full of curves, hills, and plateaus.  And so it would appear it is with this: expanding the meaning of home to small individuals beyond Tom and me. 

Summer Solstice Manifesto

Summer & Winter Solstices are easily the most under rated holidays on the calendar.  How can we let the longest and shortest days of the year slip by without paying them proper respect?  Shouldn’t kids be running around the street with cups of lemonade and sparklers?  Neighborhood barbecues with music and fireflies flitting about in the darkening humidity of the late evening ? Maybe next year.

This year I celebrated summer solstice on my own, but sweetly.  I picked flowers from our garden and placed them on the altar along with dates and almonds as an offering.  I chanted Gayatri Mantra 108 times and then sat for some time.  The Gayatri Mantra is traditionally chanted when one lights candles, watches the sunset or the sunrise.  It is a mantra which helps focus the mind onto the light within us, and ask for its guidance.  

With two months of summer vacation stretching gloriously ahead of me, I asked for guidance on how to spend such precious time.  This is what came to me.

This summer:

I grow deeper roots

I blossom creatively

I become healthier and stronger.

Yes, corny, but it rings true with meaning.  And it becomes my summer solstice manifesto.  What's your summer manifesto?