Cherish Studios

Author: Cherish Studios

  • Moving On

    Last week was filled with visits from old friends colliding with my present world.  While catching up with my old high school friend, Karen, my step-daughter was at the house getting geared up for moving her Nana’s things out.  I sat next to Karen as she deftly knitted away on a scarf of lacy yarns while I wore a finished one she had given me in my favorite green and rust colors, wondering how it was going for Christie as she looked over all the things she grew up seeing around her Nana’s house.  While catching up with my old college friend, Dan, my step-son stayed by the side of our old man, Rusty, until the dear old dog had to visit the vet for the last time.  Sitting between Gary and Dan at a comedy show, I laughed just as hard at the two of them heckling away as I did at the comedian’s morose humor.  Somewhere, deep in my brain, I was with Rusty.  Thinking of all the times he made his great escapes from the yard. Keith would hop in the car and coax him into chasing behind it around the neighborhood until his tongue dragged on the ground and he stopped bounding along.  Then Rusty would be content to go home.  I could not shake the thought that he has now made his last great escape. Keith is waiting for him, engine revving, just in case Rusty wants to chase freely behind him.

    These are bitter sweet days.  I’ve made the decision to move out of the house so that I can rent it.  It is a fiscal decision, simple as that.  Emotionally, there is nothing simple about it.  All the children are pitching in to clear out everything they ever wanted or think they might need.  I spend my days off, loading up the car and making hauls of stuff to the new place.  Each shift of things from old place to new place brings me joy and sorrow.  As if I’m starting with a clean slate using pieces of my life infused with memories of all that was and gone.  My grandmother’s dishes now rest on a beautiful oak hutch as if they belong there, while images of those same plates sitting on her red counter tops drift into sight.  The sewing machine the Klinglesmith family gave me 20 years ago sits perfectly next to a handsome mahogany leather couch and I think of all the miles of battenburg lace I sewed onto bed sheets with it while working on “As You Like It” at the Shakespeare Theater.  The hutch I managed to sweet talk away from the boss 10 years ago has a new home and the scrapbooks I’ve made over the years will once again live on its majestic mahogany shelves.

    Once again, I’m meshing what was with what is already there, in a new abode.  Just as I did when I moved in with Keith 8 years ago.  Today I had my moment.  I had moved a desk without thinking, so I moved it back.  Sitting on the floor under it, hooking up the wires and cables to the computer, I had to stop.  The sobs were too strong to focus on the task at hand.  I couldn’t comprehend why. Tears rolled down my face while sitting under a desk in a little room, wondering if I would ever be able to stop this disjointed life I live.  To move to a place that is not yours that feels like home.  To own a home that feels like it isn’t yours any more.  It occasionally pushes me to madness.  Just as I stand on the cliff, ready to to make that final leap into that dark mad place, a couple of gentlemen show up.  They load up the truck with a mahogany book case, hang curtains, clean the weeds away from the deck where my firepit sits, and allow me to have one little room with a desk I can cry under.

    Moving is stressful.  Moving on and moving is, well – I don’t know – strange.  I know the shifting from one place to another will end and I can stop this mind racing project and start a new one that might cure cancer or solve homelessness.  Something a little more productive and constructive.  I think Rusty had it right.  If you have to escape the yard, do it in style.  Run till your tongue drags the ground.  Only chase the cars driven by people you love.  Never look back unless you absolutely have to.  Feel the joy of just moving.  And take a nap when your done.

  • Time in a Bottle Rocket

    I sat on the deck watching the neighbors and Gary’s son launch fireworks. It took me back to a time in my twenties. I was a newly wedded new mom, standing in the Inlaws’ driveway, watching the boys launch an arsenal of rainbow colored explosives until one of the neighbors had enough and called the police. In my thirties, I still see so clearly Keith’s ear-to-ear grin as we stopped at a mega fireworks stand driving out of Florida so he could stock up on bottle rockets and Roman candles.

    There have been so much melding of memories over the past 2 days. Zach’s childhood friend, Cody, stopped in to visit yesterday. Now a grown man on leave from the marines, I still couldn’t help myself from seeing that same old kid who spent so much time on the farm. He sat at the piano and played it for a while, just like he always did. He showed us his tattoos and quipped that they were drawn in sharpie, with that same razor sharp dry humor he has always had. The child that once threw snow caps at a movie screen 10 years ago till one stuck, was now standing before me, sharing stories of being gifted a ring by Buddhist monks, traveling to Afganistan, suffering through the humid Japanese summers, and learning to play “Sweet Child of Mine” on the piano in a music store.

    Today I spent the day on the Selina II to take pictures. Being aboard her is always magic. She brings me joy. My heart sings as the sail is hoisted. The couple on board asked where to get sushi in Baltimore. Next thing I know, I’m on the phone with my ex, Jimmy, getting names and directions. Reaching across the years to the father of my son, still happy to hear his voice and chat with him for a while. Captain Iris shared the story with them of my failed attempt to disguise myself as a shipmate to cover up the fact that I was actually on board to photograph a surprise proposal. She quoted me saying “what do you want me to do with this?” as I held a rope in my hand with a deer in the headlights look on my face.

    My parents spent the last three days packing for another run to their new home in Bamberg, SC. I joined them on their last day. They took me out for an early birthday dinner where I indulged in the age old tradition of eating lobster to celebrate. At 4:00 am this morning, the Lankford gypsies were on their way home, just like we used to do when the family drove to Florida to visit relatives. My mother pointed out that this time they left me in my bed instead of bundling me up in a blanket and carrying me out to the car. Their brief stay with me as tenants has come to an end. A strange empty nest in reverse has settled on my soul, as if I were the parent sending them off to be on their own. My son is living on his own, my stepson is moving on with his own life, and my parents finally having a place to call home. All the while I think I am too young to retire and too old to keep moving heavy furniture to other places.

    Gary stopped by my house to get the big TV Keith and I bought a couple of years ago. It’s all set up at his house. I’m sitting here in the dark, watching it in all its glory, the images glow and leap across the screen. There is some sort of nostalgic pleasure here in this moment, taking me back to when I would rub Keith’s feet until he fell asleep on the couch so Agent Jay and I could steal the remote and watch stupid movies on Netflicks.

    We think of memories as frozen in time but they aren’t. Memories are like constantly changing flickering points of light, exploding before us. We find ourselves listening to the laughter as the rocket launches, the ohs and ahs as it bursts in front of a carpet of stars, and realize that we have been here before, we will be here again. Even if it is as fleeting as the pop after lighting the firecracker.

  • The Deconstruction of Stuff

    Maybe the Egyptians had it right.  When nobility breathed their last, their mummified bodies would be placed in a pyramid with all the food, drink, furniture, clothes, and jewelry necessary to use in the afterlife.  All those things, all those belongings, all with no question of where they would end up.  Freeing up the living to go on living without the trappings of the departed one’s chattels and the memories that cling to them.  Egyptian blood may have coursed through Keith’s veins, but the ancient practice of sending him off with all his worldly possessions is no more.  Time and time again, I’ve witnessed our modern sensibilities dissolve in the face of what to do with all the “stuff” left behind.

    It’s been a year and a half now.  I’m still surrounded with all the things Keith would have carried into the afterlife in an ancient world long gone.  Dust covers everything in the garage in silent testimony to the decay of a once glorious man cave.  There’s a trunk in my bedroom full of watches, shirts, jackets – once worn by the king of our little palace.  Every room bulges with furniture handed down from the queen mother to her son.  We are all ready – his children, myself, my son – to claim what we want, disperse the stuff, get rid of the undesirable parts of the clutter.  And yet a strange thing happens – we hold those things in our hands, we gaze on them, and they become more than stuff.  As if they were infused with the essence of Keith, as if they have drank in all the memories of who we were when he was alive, and we step away, turn our backs to what has to happen.  The lid to the trunk closes, we pass on pulling up a moving truck, the dust continues to pile up as if to enshrine the memories evoked by all those things.

    For so many years, Keith would baffle me with his need to hang on to everything that belonged to his mother.  For 10 years, we shelled out a fortune on a storage unit to hold her things that wouldn’t fit into our house.  There were so many fine pieces of furniture but mixed in between them were boxes of soap, empty cleaning bottles, stained dishrags, broken hangers, worn out stockings.  I never understood it until now.  But I can’t hold on.  It’s time to let go.  Touching, seeing, smelling, feeling this “stuff” won’t bring him back.  Letting it go won’t lessen the memories.  I can’t move into my next life, my new life, my afterlife clinging to the things.  I have to remind myself it really is just stuff.  I just wish I knew how.

  • The Fairy Tale Phenomenon

    I was an awkward teen, donning braces and glasses and toting around a few extra pounds.  In my bed, in the dark quiet of the night, I’d pretend to be a princess in need of rescue as I lay there surrounded by the gauzy white netting that hung down from the ceiling.  I’d pucker my lips to the air in sweet anticipation of the fine young gentleman that would rescue me from the ordinary.  Then along came Rick Springfield and I had a face to go with my rescuer.  I’d rush home from school to catch his turn on General Hospital as the handsome doe eyed Dr. Noah Drake.  I rushed to the store and bought “Jessie’s Girl” on a 45 and found myself listening to the B side song – “Carry Me Away”.  Fitting for a 14 year old unsure of herself.  Why yes Mr. Springfield, please carry me away.  I’m also “sick of all this shit that I feel.  Show me something real.”  When I’d go with my mother to the grocery store, I’d make a bee line to the magazine rack so that I could peruse the teen idol magazines for a glimpse of my future knight in shining armor.  I’d imagine him swooping into the halls of my high school and whisking me away from the drudgery of my young life.

    Of course, it never happened.  What did happen is I went about life as usual.  Then back in 2009, my friend Kitson and I went to a Rick Springfield concert.  Then we went to another in 2010.  Next thing I know, we’re on a cruise ship in 2011 for a fully immersed Rick Springfield experience where we met Jane and Marcia (A. K. A. Ninja friend).  So in 2012, Marcia and I landed in Las Vegas to take part in a lunch with our one and only rock idol.  This past week, Marcia, Jane and I did it again – attending a local concert with the guy who wished that he had Jessie’s Girl.

    On the ride back from the concert, Marcia and I commented on the fact that it just wasn’t the same.  We had reached the pinnacle of our fan-dom.  Reflecting back over a handful of conversations I’ve recently had with my fellow ovary bearing friends, I started to see a pattern.  Those of us damaged by our pasts, haunted by the dream of that fairy tale but having to walk through ordinary lives – we tend to read too deeply into the silent moments of our relationships.  The delay in responding to a text.  The phone that doesn’t ring.  The distant gaze as we sit next to them.  Churning up inside of us the thought that we really aren’t as special to them as we want to be. That there is someone else more exciting to them.  So we start to picture ourselves being rescued yet again.  Wondering when Rick Springfield will roll up on our doorstep and show us just how beautiful we are.  But it doesn’t happen.  So the magic fades.

    But it doesn’t have to.  We can be our own rock star.  We can idolize ourselves.  It is time to cast aside our glass slipper, to climb out of our own tower, to spit out that poisonous apple.  I’ve earned the right to believe in a fairy tale of my own making.  To find my own fans that stand by me every day.  To don my own armor and ride into the battle against my own worse enemy – myself.  It is the only way to truly live happily ever after.

  • The Patterns of History

    Sometimes, history moves in fluid circles.   It affords us an opportunity to use our past to tackle our today and to give us a glimpse of our future.  The circles rippling out, touching each other, intersecting delicately, changing their perfect circumferences until they become something all together different.  The trick is being present to see it unfold, knowing it for what it is and curiously wondering what it can become.

    I’ve seen it.  Starting with stepping on the DC metro last Thursday.  As the train moved down the tracks, images of me 20 years younger floated through my brain.  Back in a simpler time when money was tight.  My son, his father and I lived in my in-law’s basement to help us make ends meet.  I’d hustle for work in the theater scene back then.  Shifting from costume sewing with the Folger Shakespeare Theater, to running the sound for Round House Theater, to designing properties with Round House, Olney Theater and a handful of small venues around 14th street.  On those rare days off, I’d gather up Zach and pack a lunch, then we’d walk to the metro for a day trip into the city.  There were so many places to go and things to see and all it cost us was the $3.50 round trip metro fare.  A bargain adventure.  Zach’s first visit there was before he was born.  His father and I were on the mall and I was quite pregnant, waddling along and starving.  I was always starving in those 9 months.  So Jimmy and I stopped at a pretzel stand.  The vendor took one look at me and pronounced that I would have a boy because I was carrying high.  She was right.

    So here I was walking around DC all these years later – heading to the Nike Women’s Marathon expo so I could take advantage of all the free stuff I could get my hands on.  My parents are living with me for a while to help me make ends meet.  I’m back to hustling, this time in the pursuit of a new job and photography customers.  My son and I still go on budget adventures.  The metro now cost $7.00 round trip but still worth the money.  I got a free makeover and a free hairdo and picked up a free coffee and was quite pleased with myself.  I got to see the C&O canal as it ran through Georgetown and watched as a construction crew hoisted a large beam into place 8 stories into the air.  I picked up enough free luna bars to stave off having to buy lunch.  Once again, working it like I used to when I was younger, this time with a little more savvy and smarts.

    Just before leaving the expo, I was faced with a large blank wall and a sharpie – the attendant and the wall both stated that I was to write “Why I run . . . . ”  The crazy thing about a whirlwind mind like mine is that handing me a tool to write with is like handing me the laser pointer on my thoughts.  It takes the mental tornado and pinpoints it into what is really going on in the madding howling winds.  And this is what I wrote . . .

    Image

    . . . the epitaph I wrote in my blog the night Keith died.  I took a step back and just stood there in shock.  My eyes started to feel that old familiar burn and I fought the urge to put my sunglasses on.  Just a few hours ago, I was thinking about being pregnant with my son, sharing a pretzel with his father.  Now I was standing there, in silent witness to a memorial in honor of my late husband.  The two strongest circles of my personal history colliding.  The joy of bringing life into the world and the pain of watching someone leave it.

    I was back on the metro Saturday night. A young couple sat across from me.  His arm cradling her across an obviously pregnant profile with such tenderness as she laid her head on his shoulder.  Jimmy had done the same thing as we crammed into a full car coming back from an evening on the mall.  We couldn’t find a seat so he wrapped his arms around my 7 months of pregnancy while I held onto the bar.  I got off the train, leaving behind the couple and my memories and headed to the hotel.  Stepping into the lobby, I called my boyfriend to let him know I made it.  We had a conversation about keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior and things I should do to make sure I was safe at all times.  It was the kind of conversation reminiscent of the ones Keith and I would have whenever I traveled.  I found myself in my tornado thoughts again  – thinking about how I’ve managed to always be so protected by the men in my life, including my father.  At the same time, all of them have always given me total freedom to be me and do what I enjoy doing – even if they didn’t agree with my choices.  I can’t imagine any other way to feel love from another human being.

    Today at lunch, I was talking about my run on Sunday with a friend.  She reminds me so much of where I was a year ago.  I had been walking a little over a year when my coworker put the thought in my head that I could do a 1/2 marathon.  “Right” I said with a great deal of sarcasm.  But the more I thought about it, the more I believed that it just might be possible.  I had thousands of questions for her.  I was a bundle of nerves when I committed to doing my first one.  I doubted myself at every training session.  I couldn’t see how I could build up to it in time or get enough training in.  But I did it – walking of course.  Then I did it again.  This Sunday, I did it again.  I ran most of it.   I shaved a half hour off my best time.  I can do it again.  When the topic of my friend doing a 1/2 marathon first came up, I could almost hear her say “right”.  Today at lunch, I answered the questions.  We compared her current walk time with the pace necessary to complete a race.  I know there are doubts and I also know that all she has to do is trust in that voice inside that says she can – and she will.  I’ve lived it.  The circles of our histories are moving across each other.

    And where does all of this go?  I don’t know.  It will be behind me soon enough.  Archived into my memory to pull back up when deja vu strikes.  I’ve had a great run on my life so far so I don’t mind having parts repeat themselves.  It is that fluid movement of my history, the circles intersecting and merging, and me seeing them as they happen that is the very tool necessary to embrace my today, my tomorrow, and into my unforeseeable future.

  • A Perspective of Fear

    On Sunday, April 28 at 7:00 AM, 15,000 women will start the Run Nike Women Series’ Inaugural half marathon in Washington, DC.  I am one of those 15,000 women.  Just one of many who have grappled with that personal journey that drives us to the finish line 13.1 miles after the start whistle blows.  My own journey has been compounded by recent events in my life that have shifted the focus away from race day – a work schedule that has prevented me from training properly, if at all; concerns over not having the funds to invest in new shoes, shorts that fit right, and replacing a broken race bra; the knowledge that race day is during peak pollen season which this sneezing wheezing girl is highly sensitive to.  I was teetering on the edge of backing out all together.

    And then Boston happened.  This Monday I had backed out.  There wasn’t any more teetering – just raw real fear of what could happen.  By Wednesday, I was back in.  Why?  Because we can not let terror attacks scar both our national and personal psyche.  Because we have to maintain a perspective of our fear.  It is time to look at a few real numbers.  The Boston Marathon was witness to 3 deaths and 140 injured.  We can not make light of that.  We need to honor the deaths and send prayers for the injured.  As these events unfold into our history, we can not let this tragedy fade from our memories.  But we also need to put it into context of the average American day-to-day existence.

    As part of this upcoming half marathon, Nike partners with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to raise funds for continuing blood cancer patient services and research.  In 2011, there were 66,360 new cases of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.  In that same year, there were 19,320 deaths – one of them being my husband.  One of 66,360 diagnosed, one of 19,320 who died, but the one most important number to me.  And this is just for his particular blood cancer.  The total counts for all blood cancers in 2011 were 215,500 cases diagnosed and 73,630 deaths.  (see http://www.nhlcyberfamily.org/statistics.htm)

    Of course, cancer is an act of nature.  We do not have any control over it.  If it chooses us, we must acquiesce, adapt, accept.  Even though the chances of dying from lymphoma is far greater than dying from a cowardly terrorist attack at the finish line of a marathon, it is still dictated by forces beyond us.  Not so true when it comes to driving the humble automobile though.  This is something we choose to do every day.  This is something we have within our control – where we go, how fast we drive, how attentive we are behind the wheel.  There were 32,267 automobile accident deaths in 2011.  The potential of being killed behind my own wheel is far greater than being killed by a terrorist attack as I come around the final stretch of a marathon, yet I do not feel that deep well of fear that I felt Monday whenever I start up my little go-cart and head down the road.  Should I?

    We need to never let up on people who attack our country.  We need to be diligent, stand strong and united against our enemies.  We need to pause and honor those innocent lives that were taken by cowards’ hands.  We need to always be aware of our surroundings and to be witness to suspicious behavior, do our part to call it out and protect ourselves.  But equally important is to never let these events expand our fears beyond our capacity to function, to do the things we want to do in our daily lives.  If we do, we hand them exactly what they want – a broken national spirit, citizens scattering for cover driven by their fears.  I have greater odds of getting cancer or getting in a fatal car accident.  I’m probably even at greater risk of injury due to pollen attacking or using old shoes during the Marathon than I am from a terrorist attack.  Yet I fear none of those things.  Its all about perspective and I am choosing to keep it there – in sharp focus – so that I can cross the finish line for myself, for my husband, for Boston.

  • A Metamorphis

    No one can see where life will take them.  No one can know what is in store for them in the minutes and hours and days and years that are yet to reveal themselves.  But we are all faced with that need to make a plan, prepare for what can be, all the while staying engaged in this one second happening right now that we have under our control.  It is the duality of the human condition.

    For two years now, from that moment in April of 2011 when Keith collapsed on the bathroom floor to today, my spirit is splintered.  Divided neatly by that very duality that normally coexists in most humans.  I started to live in each moment – not just the beautiful moments but also the heavy, heartbreaking, self-destructive ones.  All the while, planning and over-planning and analyzing and over-analyzing everything – in the here and now, and into the unforeseen future.  I may have managed to rise from the ashes of Keith’s death but I am just now discovering  how the fire scarred me more than I ever knew.

    At some point in time, I had stopped living in the moments and let that worrying fretting planning part take over.  I’ve done it to the point of wrapping myself in it, making a cocoon of worries and fears and self doubt.  What if my son can’t make it on his own?  What if my parents don’t get their little cottage in the country?  What if my new friends can’t embrace the madness that is Cherish?  What if my long standing friends tire of who I’ve become in the aftermath of my widowhood?  What if I don’t find the strength to stand by my step son in his journey to an independent life?  What if I frighten off my new love by revealing all my warts, flaws, and eccentricities? What if I lose my job and have to find a new way to financially exist?  All of these thoughts churning inside me, crystallizing the cocoon until they started to spill out into the real world.  With late night chats on facebook with friends forced to talk reason to me.  With my random relationship analysis of sheer stupidity tossed out over lunches with Gary.  With late night calls from Brandon as I made an effort to rationalize his feeling.  None of it sane or rational or sensible and only one of those fearful thoughts coming true – this Tuesday – when I was let go of my job.

    And then something amazing happened.  I can feel the worries fade away.  The crazy thoughts clouding my head are lifting.  My fear of being alone is lighter.  I am living in the moments again, the beautiful ones – the joy of bustling around a kitchen fixing breakfast, the silly giggles of my niece as we watch her sister’s concert, the wind moving over me as I ride on the back of the motorcycle, the delight of walking barefoot in the cool damp grass.  All thanks to losing a job.

    I’m still in a cocoon but this one feels different from the harsh one I made for myself.  It is not one of my own making.  Fate or destiny or karma or God’s will has given me a way to stay safe and protected until I am strong enough to emerge into a fearless future with a new spirit.  Whether I do so as a simple humble moth or a brilliant vibrant butterfly doesn’t matter to me.  Either way, I’ll have wings.

  • Across the Miles

    The work whistle blew yesterday and I had just settle in for the evening when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was the shaky voice of my stepson, Brandon. It’s midterms and he was stressed and feeling alone and missing his father. Keenly aware of my own feelings as of late – of feeling Keith’s absence, we sat on the phone with both of our voices wavering. There is so much of Keith alive in his son. That boundless energy, that passionate stance, the dogged determination. And yet he is still so young, so much to learn, that he hasn’t mastered his father’s seasoned skill of harnessing all that – well – stuff. Knowing this, I want to protect him from his own whirling dervish. It’s not possible. Like his father, he has to figure it out on his own.

    So I sit on my cell phone, across the miles, trying to find the right words to say to a young man desperately wanting to find his place in a scary world, find his emotional footing without a father to extend a hand to steady him. All the while, I find myself searching for the same things – my place in a scary world, my footing without a man who so adeptly steadied me when I would spin out of control. I know it’s his father’s voice he wants to hear on the other end of the phone. I know that when I hang up, I just want to bury my head in my pillows and smell Keith there as I once did. We can not get that back. We can’t replace what was lost. We can’t even lean on each other since we both are so precariously perched on the quicksand of our grief.

    I could tell him that although I can’t fix it, I can understand it. I could tell him that if he can get through this, he will be stronger, smarter, better. That I am proud of all he’s fought for, gained, learned. But most of all, I could promise him that I will always love him – in a voice without wavering, crystal clear across the miles, as if I was right next to him, as if Keith was saying it through me.

  • Bad Weather

    Being witness to wind and rain and storms and snow are still the strongest singular events that make me feel Keith’s absence. Bad weather would electrify him and turn him into a one man National Guard. After hours of watching the weather, tracking the path of the storm, analyzing the radar loops, he would formulate a plan.

    His first directive was to head to the gas station with each vehicle and all 5 of our gas cans before the clouds moved in, topping off each vessel with all the gasoline they could hold. The generator that still sits in our garage, a silent reminder of Keith’s ever ready approach to threatening weather, would get the once over to make sure it would fire up when needed. Then it was a trip to the grocery store for water and canned goods. Then he’d busy himself around the yard to clear anything that could blow around. If snow was imminent, he’d line up all the cars at the end of our driveway, wiper blades lifted off the windshields as if they were reaching their black rubber arms to the sky, praying to be merciful to them. It was very clever of him because we never had to shovel the driveway and there were no trees to drop their snow laden branches on our precious modes of transportation.

    After the snow passed, Keith would clean every snowflake off of every inch of all the cars and hop in the lead car which was always the best to drive in snow – because he had planned that out too – and take an assessment tour of the town. He’d come back home, babbling excitedly about all the drifts, impasses, emergency vehicles he drove by, reporting in on any damage, and which businesses were open and which were closed. Then it was back outside with him so he could shovel the steps and walkways.

    If it was rain that fell, Keith would suit up and head out with his shovel in hand, always at the torrential stage, to dig trenches through the back yard to channel all the water away from the house. I’d sit in the nice dry house, peaking out the windows at him, watching the rain drench him and roll off his cheeks and nose, fascinated with how it didn’t ever seem to phase him as he trenched away. He never stopped to wipe his face or shake off the endless drops. I can still see the faint trails of those bygone trenches snaking across the back yard like ancient dry river beds. They are the mark of a man who was master of the elements, protector of home and family.

    I tried to fill those shoes Wednesday. I found the shovel but left the gas cans empty, I moved my mother’s van to the end of the driveway but didn’t lift the blades, I ran to the store but only to get dog food and laundry detergent. I surveyed the scars of the old trenches – all the while feeling that old familiar heaviness that sits in my chest when I become acutely aware of who is not there. Keith must have sensed my distress because the blizzard that could have been wasn’t. The rain lifted, the winds subsided, and my weak attempt to batten down the hatches was more than enough to survive unscathed. Once again, he gives me the gift of returning to my life without him, as if to say he still is protecting his home and family – through this storm and all the storms to come.

  • A Postcard to a Friend

    Last week the front of a cherry pop tart box arrived in my mailbox – a custom pastry tart postcard with the simple message – thinking of you – from my childhood friend, Karen. It took me back to that time in our lives when we were young, in college, full of dreams – and would mail each other postcards from the sides of wine cooler cases with our critique of the bouquet and essence of each flavor.

    We first ran into each other on the playground in second grade – literally. Actually, I ran into her and we knocked heads. I broke her glasses and gave her a nasty gash right next to her eye. It wasn’t long after she was rushed to the nurse’s station that I felt the goose egg rising on my forehead, so I straggled in behind her. And that is how we met. We formed a girl gang so we could chase the boys on the playground. She being the fiery bold Captain and I the sensitive gentle second in command.

    We went to separate schools until our paths crossed again in high school. She was still that fierce bold girl from the playground but had metamorphosed into a stunning blonde beauty. She made the cheerleading team and worn the Caroline County Farm Queen crown. I was still the shy sensitive girl, tuned in to all the hormonally charged emotions rolling around the halls of our educational confines. An Emo before Emo’s existed.

    We spent our free time together, sleeping over at each other’s house, driving around in her Mach I listening to Her Yaz cassette tape. Our last summer before going off to college, we worked together busing tables in the sleepy tourist town of St. Michaels. We shared our dreams. She would be a dazzling lawyer and I a renowned journalist.

    Time has rolled on so far from that day on the playground when a shy sensitive freckle faced girl crashed into her bold fierce beauty of a friend. The miracle of us is not that two opposites could create such a strong friendship. The miracles lies in the fact that we have always seen in the other what we carry in ourselves. She has always seen my own fierce beauty. I have always felt her deep well of emotions. Our lives may not have landed where we dreamed them to be – but sitting here, holding my cherry pop tart postcard, I know it will all be ok – because we still dream big for each other.