My mother had a hard time with our decision to adopt María. I’ve written about that elsewhere. The silence stretched long and painful between us after our big confrontation about my determination to adopt our girl. One day, more than a year later, I got a call out of the blue from a family friend who was passing through Miami. She had a package my mom had sent me. I worked in the Blue Lagoon area in those days and it was easy to swing by her hotel and pick up the package on my way home.

Inside were five of the most beautiful little girl dresses you could ever hope to see, several of them with a matching barrett, or head band. There was also a little nightgown—the one María wore the first night she slept in our home. I could tell how much care my mom had taken choosing them. When all else fails in my family of origin, we give each other gifts. Sometimes we sweat and toil and fret almost endlessly to come up with the right gift. This wasn’t just an olive branch, it was the most extravagant gesture of a love that couldn`t understand but wouldn’t quit.

All the dresses were exquisite. I took one with me to México for a weekend when there was a big party for FedEx employees and I got to take María with me to the party. I got up before daybreak to get María and brought her back to the nice hotel I was staying in. I bathed her and put the dress on her and stood her on the bed so she could see herself in a full length mirror. The way she stared, moved around a bit, stared again, and then puffed up makes me believe that she had probably never seen herself in a mirror like she did that day. How not to love the dress fiercely, like I loved her that day?

The stories go on and on, and María outgrew the dresses quickly, well-nourished and well-loved, beginning to thrive in her new home. One day, I got a big plastic storage bin and carefully folded and put the dresses away. I regretted that my mother had never seen her granddaughter in the dresses except in pictures. Because María was making a lot of progress, I told myself we would turn a developmental corner and what I was doing was putting the clothes away for the day that would surely come when I would tell my own granddaughter about her great-grandmother Ann.

Yesterday evening, after over 11 years of not seeing them, I took the dresses out. I am taking most of them to Isabel Ann, my niece, who is Ann’s other granddaughter, the one who was born 11 days before my mom died. Mom would have been delighted to see that little girl in those dresses. Though I have not met her, I have seen several videos of a blond, blue-eyed cherub who is a perpetual motion machine of curiosity. I bet she will look like a little doll in the clothes I am bringing. Giving Isabel these dresses is quite laden with meaning. Soon after my mom died, my brother and I had another one of those epic Lindahl fallouts and we have barely spoken since.

There is no way to know where the dresses will go after Isabel. After all, they are a gift. I will confess that I briefly thought to ask that the dresses be returned to me when Isabel Ann outgrows them. But that is clinging. The dresses will go where they will go.

There is a word in Spanish that describes what holy indifference is about: despojarse. The English equivalents for the root verb, despojar are divest, despoil, denude, bereave. Despojar comes from the Latin word for stripping bark off a tree. Despojarse makes the verb reflexive. Opening that box, looking at those little, little dresses, smelling and touching and holding them to me – was an act and decision to divest , denude , bereave myself. Jesus said, “what will it profit a person to gain the whole world and forfeit her life?” In order to gain our lives we must be willing to lose them. Without death we cannot know resurrection.

I know all this sounds raw and painful, and of course, it is. But I no longer know any other way to get to the next place except through the pain, not around it. Along with the sorrow that inevitably wells up as I pack the dresses and unrealized dreams, I also feel the little butterflies of excitement about my trip, about being with my dad and brothers, one brother’s lover and the other’s new wife and that little girl. Life runs on.

Last night was simply lovely.  I realized the categories I saw the world through in high school were narrow, shallow and full of fear.

In my true Swedish way, I got to our classmate David’s house exactly at 8 PM.  There was only one other person from our class, Kenny, and her husband already there.  Each person that came in after that was like finding the precious pearl.   I had a commitment at 7:30 this morning so I had to leave at midnight–the party went on for another couple of hours–Colombianos, a fin de cuentas. We are headed to some more time together.  I have regained something of great value I didn’t even know I had lost.

We have had almost incessant rain for over a week here in Fort Lauderdale.  Walking when streets are flooded gets to be impossible but finally, yesterday, the sun came out, we got no rain and I was able to eke out enough time to walk.  In the wash of evening light, with so much scrubbed clean by the rain, the world was new again and I had to stop and stare twice.  The first time, this is what I saw:

The second time, it was a night blooming cereus that took my breath away.

Sherod has had a night blooming cereus plant for years, the gift from a dear friend in Memphis who had tended her plant from adolesence, when her grandmother in Alabama gave her a cutting of her plant.  If you are not familiar with this plant, the blossoms open at night and only last for a few hours.  They are fragrant and exotic and crazy beautiful in an absolutely fleeting moment.  Don’t blink or you might miss it.  On my rambles, I go by a house that has a jungle of a front yard with several cereus plants. Yesterday, it was light enough and I was mindful enough to notice.

This Sunday, the Gospel passage is about Mary and Martha.  We are so tempted to make that split: action vs contemplation, busy-ness vs attentiveness.  More than ever, it is precisely in the action and the vigorous business of walking, that I find the moments of an ‘eternal now’.

Two weeks from today, my brother Hans, his partner Anne Marie, and my dad will wait for me at the dock at Linanäs, the small town on the island of Ljusterö where we are having our family reunion of sorts this summer. I have already started taking out my flannel jammies and sweaters and thick socks because the high today was 68 and right now it is 54 degrees. I am however, also taking my bathing suit because this child of Swedes will take at least one jump off the granite rocks, into the Baltic while I am there.

I leave on the morning of the first of August to Newark. In the early evening, I will fly away from the night, across the Atlantic to Arlanda airport, and after riding the high speed train into Stockholm, I will catch the ferry that goes through the archipelago, making stops along the way. I’ll be on the ferry for a couple of hours which should put me in Linanäs at about noon, Swedish time, 6 in the morning on this side of the water. Almost 24 hours traveling. I will force myself to stay awake as long as humanly possible because that helps me get acclimated to the new time zone.

Very close to Ljusterö, there is an old fortified castle, Vaxholm. It is a restaurant now, a lovely one. The first time I ever ate smoked salmon, I was with my great uncle Gösta and his wife, Moster Lillan, who took me there for lunch when I was 9 or 10. I felt incredibly grown up because my parents trusted my manners enough to allow me to go out to lunch with older relatives unsupervised. I was also, in my mind, so sophisticated because I found smoked salmon and caviar to be delectable. Now, my dad is way older than Morbror Gösta and I am only 10 or so years younger than my great uncle was that day. I will know I am close to my destination that morning when the ferry slips past Vaxholm and I begin to see the swans.

Several folks will come visit with us during those two weeks, relatives and friends. One of the people coming to spend a night at the cottage is Tonia Tell. After Sherod and I married in Huntsville, AL, I got my green card and started job hunting. I had been working as a freelance translator and had even passed the English to Spanish Certification Exam of the American Translator Association. But though it earned me enough of a living, I would sit at home day after day, getting more and more lonely and isolated so I had decided that would not do. I had already accepted a job as a manager of a nursing home (!) when out of the blue I got a call from the translation department of Intergraph Corporation. A spinoff from the space and military complex in Huntsville, Intergraph was a company that specialized in cartography, CAD/CAM and a couple of other engineering subspecialties of software development. This was right around the first Gulf War and Intergraph had a tightly secured area very few people could go near, where they were developing software for military intelligence.

It was a booming company and the translation unit represented 8 languages. Celia, the lead for the Spanish translation team had stumbled across my name in the ATA directory and over the phone that day, basically offered me a job, sight unseen, for double what I would have earned as a nursing home manager. At first, she, Mariano from el Perú, and I, were the only members of the Spanish team. But the need for computer manuals was growing so rapidly that they decided to hire another person and selected Tonia Tell. Tonia is originally from Barcelona, the daughter of a Catalonian dad and Belgian mom. She and I became very good friends, and with a couple of the German translators and a French translator, became a little pack of twenty-somethings doing the corporate thing. My favorite story of Tonia is when, in all seriousness, she went to our manager and asked why Intergraph couldn’t open a “siesta lounge” with cots where we could all nap after lunch. I wish I could have captured Dean’s utter incredulity in the face of such a request.

I moved to Memphis, eventually she left Huntsville too and ended up marrying a Swede and moving to Sweden. We lost touch and then found each other on Facebook and agreed that this summer, we would meet. So she will come from southern Sweden and spend the night with us. My mom and dad got to meet her one summer when they came to see Sherod and me in Huntsville and my dad thought Tonia hung the moon. She was merciless about our “Sudaca” accents (the despective term Spaniards use for the barbarians of South America who claim to speak Spanish), she has a wonderful accent of her own and the best laugh around. ¡Qué cachondeo! We will see each other one week after my 35th high school class reunion when I will have seen almost half my class and a few days before I get to meet my younger brother’s wife and daughter.

Sitting at my kitchen table on a quiet Friday afternoon, I am aware once again, my past is literally my future. Reality, man, what a concept…

It is a busy morning and I have a mile-long to-do list.  We are in the middle of our intensive summer reading camp and the mamas of our participants help prepare the lunches for our children.  Today the aromas are dizzy-making.  And in the middle of the hub-bub, the patter of feet and two little boys who come in and sit down to visit with me.  Truly, this is the bestest job in the world.  Just the absolute best…

The Episcopal Church Foundation does quite a lot of online publishing–congregational resources kind of stuff. They have asked me to become a regular contributor to one of their blogs. My first writing gig for pay. Tonight, this minor success makes me grateful for A Room Of One’s Own

Ah, my husband.  He came out of his procedure rosy cheeked and doped up so he was his very most winsome, funny self. He had the little nurse who had to walk with us to the car just whooshed.  Both of them were in stitches all the way down the hall, into the elevator, down three floors, out the foyer, past the old, old lady in a wheel chair smoking a cigarette just outside the main entrance, and out into the parking lot.

Me, not so much.  In fact, I got more cranky-pants with every step I took.  I wasn’t on drugs.  I  was the one who was going to have to drive his daggummed truck (did I ever mention, I HATE driving that truck) through the spaghetti junction between the Turnpike and 595 in almost blinding rain and wind.  I was the one who sat and watched several people who went in after of him come back out way before he did.  My imagination had been relentless with that, images of a medical team desperately coding him because something had gone horribly awry while everyone else came through just fine. It was almost 4 hours of desperate vigil I kept yesterday.  So I was not the least bit amused by His Cuteness Made Flesh and that sweet young thing. Not one little bit.

We had plenty else to tend to in the afternoon so I basically had no choice but to get over my snit.  Sherod was feeling too fine to react.  At some point I was able to step back from myself enough to acknowledge how deep the fear runs below that particular kind of anger.

Today, someone shared a link with me related to the Buddhist understanding of pain and life.  Somewhere in the first few lines, I was suddenly aware that  life has become most meaningful for me in these past few years in the experience of hosting my own grief, my own pain.  My spirit no longer goes rigid and and spastic. In a strange sort of way, my long walks allow me to open spaces to welcome the grief, not because I am a masochist who seeks out suffering, but because I accept that grief is now a real part of me.  The grief does not well up every time—in fact, I basically cannot ever predict when it will.  But out walking, somehow, I am both riverbed and river, of joy, of surprise, especially of wonder, but also of an ocean of sorrow.  Over time, it seems like the riverbed gets deeper, the stones smoother, maybe the river itself gets wider.  I don’t know—pushing the metaphor too far can get to feeling cloying and hokey.

But there is this little bit of new insight, or at least mindfulness, about yesterday.  I sat in that office and paid no attention to my breathing.  The chair was uncomfortable and I never once stood up.  I was aware enough to post about the experience but not aware enough to see how stuck I was.  The truth is my husband is 67 and there will be more pain in his life and I will need to be able to allow it through my life without making it my life. Otherwise, I will drown in it.

Sherod has had awful back pain for years now. The cause and the cure are complicated. The pain has been life-diminishing, really for both of us, but especially for Sherod. I am sitting in a waiting room while he gets yet another Lumbar Epidural Steroid Injection, which doctors keep insisting should help. I am along because I will need to drive him home after the procedure.

To say this is hellish doesn’t quite convey what it’s like. These procedures always run late and sitting in waiting rooms has taken up a whole lot of time in my life. I can’t help but hear ca-ching each time another patient comes in–and lots come in. I wonder about the snake oil factor. And then, there is my experience of painful medical procedures as a child that combines with an overactive imagination and my struggle with boundaries. Because the thought of either my child or my husband having to undergo any procedure that will cause them pain elicits in me the most primitive, protective and stressed out response imaginable. I want to go in and yank that catheter out of the Dr’s hand, beat him up, and then sit and sob. It is all out of proportion to the situation, I know. And being married to someone means you do the tough stuff. I just really am hating watching my strong, beautiful husband deal with the realities of aging. I keep wanting to turn back the clock. Say a little prayer for us.

Words don’t seem to count for much these days.  I try stringing some together and it feels like dry clay that crumbles under its own weight.  There are truly terrible things happening in our country.  It isn’t just about a 17 year old boy who is dead and now blamed for his own death, his family told in no uncertain terms he asked for it.  I listen to the conversation in Texas, watch the machinations in North Carolina that rob women of the kinds of wrenching decisions we never want to make but sometimes must.  I look at the rich, white old men who run so much of our country, say ugly things to each other.   I walked out of the room where Sherod was watching a program about the devastation caused by fracking.  I haven’t been able to get rid of the bronchitis all the way.  I literally feel ill much of the time right now.

Yesterday after church, a 92-year old woman came up to me.  She was visiting and comes from a Pentecostal tradition.  As I greeted her, she began to shake and pray.  She clung fiercely to me and said she had felt close to God during the service, that she would pray for me because there are such horrible times coming.   I thought to myself, it isn’t that they are coming, it is that those horrible times are here.  Now.  I wanted to cling just as fiercely to her and instead did my usual thank you and greeted the next person in line.  How can we bear to allow so much suffering to continue to unfold, wringing our hands and writing pretty lines, but still, holding to the old familiar order no matter who pays the cost?