Lake friends come calling on a continuous basis. We throw our own cocktail party for nineteen friends, and when a guest plays ragtime on our old upright piano, Vera grabs my hand for a spontaneous dance, such is her happiness.
On our last night, a friend generously takes the ladies out on her pontoon boat so they can see the lake once more. It is especially hard for my mother to get into the boat, but she finally makes it.
Coasting on the blue water in the shimmering sunlight of late afternoon, they take in all their beloved sights: the eagles’ nest boasting two big eaglets, the loons bobbing, and the familiar islands that dot the water like emerald ships at sail.
As the warm wind blows across our bow, Vera and Woody grow quiet, their serene faces taking in all the surrounding beauty. Are they wondering if they’ll ever pass this way again? Are memories of cherished friends and family, many of them now gone, washing over them like so many waves upon the shore?
All I know is that they have never dwelled on what might have been. Despite great heartbreak and sorrow in their lives and current physical struggles, they continue to savor each moment and to seek joy and optimism in every day that God gives them.
Some might say I was foolhardy to undertake such a trip, but as their chauffeur, I believe I soaked up some wisdom. As my ladies would attest, it’s always about the journey. And my dance with Vera was worth every mile.
You’ve Got Mail
There are too many of them. Too many to sort. Too many to read. Too many to save.
And yet, they are a lifetime of letters. A cache of history spanning several generations that have been stashed in our family home for years, tucked into closets, corners of the garage, and any nook and cranny that would hold them. Boxes and boxes of them, overflowing with love and tears and joy and the activities of the times.
One batch came with us when our family moved to a new home in 1954. Over the years, more were added and remained in the house when my brother bought it from our widowed mother after she retired to Ohio.
Now fifty-four years after we bought it, the house is leaving our family; my brother is selling it and moving away. It is time for the letters to move as well. But what to do with them? None of us realized how many had been saved. Out of sight, out of mind.
As my brother kept uncovering boxes and boxes of letters, the task of sorting through them became almost overwhelming. One look at the musty cardboard containers and dust-covered letters, and practical folks would have pitched them without a second thought.
But we have never been a practical clan. Our creative curiosity got the better of us, and we began to take a peek.
Amazingly, our random picks seemed uncannily appropriate, as though the letters were still speaking to us all these many years later.
As my mother and I sat at the kitchen table in the light of the early summer sun, we began to examine the contents of one of the boxes. The first letter I pulled out was written years ago by my mother’s sister, and because my eighty-eight-year-old mother can no longer see well, I read it to her.
It was filled with good cheer and the happy chatter that my aunt, now deceased, so often included in letters over the decades to her sister living three states away.
“Oh, how I have been longing to hear from my sister,” my mother said, “and here is a letter from her, like it was written yesterday.”
That was only the beginning.
Here was a long letter from my grandfather to my father on his twenty-first birthday in 1936, officially welcoming him to manhood. In it he wished his son happiness in the years ahead, offered up wisdom for life, congratulated him on meeting some secret goal between the two of them, and sent him into the future with endless love and devotion.
No wonder my father kept it.
Here was a 1944 love letter from my mother to my father overseas during World War II, describing her day, making plans for the year ahead, and lovingly longing for his return.
Here were boxes of get-well letters from friends and family to my maternal grandmother in 1953, offering her courage and faith in her struggle with cancer, and a follow-up box of sympathy cards upon her death.
Soon the boxes of letters began to move into the next generation, giving insight into my siblings’ and my growing-up years. Thankfully, my younger sister arrived on the scene to help out.
She found a hilarious letter I’d written from camp in 1960 when I was about ten years old. It recounts a fellow camper’s insistence that she “saw a great big round light way up in the sky and it would light up everything and would stay there for about five seconds . . . I didn’t see it because I had a headache and didn’t want to see it.” Another camper told me she saw a “man in a white suit and hat look in my window . . . but I know it isn’t true.”
Apparently I liked reporting interesting events at an early age.
Another fun find was a letter from my paternal grandmother in 1958 describing our stay at our cabin in northern Wisconsin. She writes to my parents that I am good about swimming at the lake only when older adults are around. However, I have a problem remembering the time, even though I have pinned my wrist-watch to my beach robe.
“So you had trouble being on time even back then,” remarked my husband, a prompt creature if there ever was one, who has put up with my lack of punctuality for our entire marriage.
Other discoveries included small books of love poems from my sister’s boyfriend over forty years ago; endless business transactions, old wills, legal letters, résumés, and banking papers that unraveled some family mysteries and created others; joyful letters from friends sending welcomes to the newest baby in the family; news from aunts, uncles, cousins, fathers, mothers, and grandparents graced with good wishes of the day; and a remarkable memoir from an unknown great-uncle describing his family farm at the turn of the century and their oxen, Buck and Board, plowing the prairie.
Even my mother, the main keeper of the letters, muttered an “Egad!” as yet another box was hauled to the table to sort through. The question, of course, is why in the world they were kept all these years.
My brother-in-law, a history professor, remarked that it almost seems disrespectful to the writers to throw them away. We all agreed. After all, someone was thinking of a loved one, took the time to gather pen and paper, sit down and write, find a stamp, and post these letters in the mail, often timed to the mailman’s schedule.
Nowadays, of course, letter writing has all but disappeared in favor of email, text messaging, and cell phone calls. And although these are the communications of the times, something is definitely missing: a paper trail of lives lived.
Despite the dusty work and the emotional roller coaster that these letters sent us on, the ones we randomly selected to read spoke to each of us as though they were meant to be discovered.
In truth, beneath the many laughs and funny finds there was an undercurrent of sadness. Life, we know, does not always turn out as we had anticipated. So many of the good wishes for joy and success written so lovingly to the letters’ recipients did not come true. Failures, illness, death, financial misfortune, lost love, personal struggles, and various disappointments often occurred instead.
Despite the setbacks, however, there are a myriad of blessings. The writers continually express joy in everyday simplicities, humor, an awareness and appreciation of the natural world, and, most importantly, faith in the future.
These letters offer testimonies to lives lived fully and with the best of efforts no matter the circumstances. The strong bonds of love connecting family and friends are the things that make a difference.
Perhaps the ultimate message of these heartfelt missives is to open our hearts with faith to the paths of light and love that lie ahead.
No matter what comes our way, joy awaits.
Heaven in a Wildflower
Out of the cold dirt they come. Beneath the brown leaves, next to the gray rocks, beside the sculpted tree trunks, their colorful faces lift toward the light. Brilliant blues, egg-yol
k yellows, and pale pinks welcome the warmth of spring’s sunshine.
They are back, these woodland wildflowers, like God’s confetti upon the earth.
And we of little faith wondered if they’d ever return. Enduring the cold gray winter made us feel as if we were stuck in a perennial snowbank.
Yet beneath the frigid ground, these little wonders lay in wait. And now that they are here, I know exactly what I must do. I call my mother.
“The blue scilla are in bloom!” I announce.
“Oh, we don’t want to miss them!” she says.
She has been waiting for this call. After all, she is the one who passed her love of wildflowers on to me. So together we check the weather, pick a day, and postpone all our seemingly important business in order to see the wildflowers. As my mother says, “It is our thing.”
Even at age eighty-eight, my mother’s memory is filled with wildflower outings, like a virtual album of pressed blossoms.
In the 1920s, when my mother was growing up in the rolling hills of Ohio, soft spring days meant family excursions into the wooded countryside in search of trailing arbutus, a rare and fragrant flower that creeps along the ground, making for a perfect picnic spot.
When she moved to Illinois as a young wife and mother, she discovered Morton Arboretum near the village of Lisle. Each spring she frequently packed my siblings and me, a buggy, and a picnic into the car for a leafy stroll around the arboretum’s winding paths. In one of my favorite pictures, I’m a plump eight-month-old baby plopped in a patch of daffodils, studying their golden trumpets with wide-eyed wonder.
For a lover of wildflowers, May Day provided the perfect excuse for my mother to haul her five kids out to a country road at the crack of dawn. There, amid the dewy grass, we picked wildflowers for the baskets we’d made the night before. Back home, we stuffed them to overflowing with our flowers, popcorn, and gumdrops, dashed to neighbors’ houses to hang them on doorknobs, rang the bell, and ran home. All before school started.
I can’t say we were very alert for our schoolwork that day, but we knew our wildflowers.
Not surprisingly, when it came time for my first major science project, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. My mother drove me back to Morton Arboretum, this time as a fourteen-year-old, and I explored, identified, and photographed all the blooming wildflowers I could find. It was my first attempt at nature photography, a love I still pursue.
Wildflowers, however, bloom for only a short time and fade fast. So for my mother—who can still recite Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” memorized over eight decades ago—it is time to seize the day.
Like the wildflowers themselves, my mother and I have come full circle. Our roles are reversed, and just as she pushed me in a buggy, I will push her in a wheelchair in order to accomplish our mission.
“We’re off to see the blue scilla!” she happily announces to her friends as I wheel her out the door of her retirement home.
“The what?” they ask.
“The blue scilla are blooming all over Fabyan Forest Preserve,” she explains. “They are just gorgeous!”
With a wave we roll on by, no time for chatter. Beauty beckons.
My sister and my mother discovered the blue scilla some years back just by chance. They had gone there to picnic and found the woods and hillsides covered in a carpet of tiny blue flowers, perfuming the air with a delicate scent.
On this fine spring day, I unload her wheelchair from the car and roll my mother along the bike path in search of a perfect picnic spot. Easily finding one, we sit and admire the gently flowing river, greet passing bikers and hand-holding lovers, share our picnic lunches, and listen as birds serenade us with their happy spring songs.
Then, we move on to seek the scilla. Although they are all around us as I wheel my mother along, I must point them out to her. Legally she is blind. And although she can see somewhat, much is dimmed and diminished.
“Here’s a patch,” I say.
“Where?” she asks.
“Right beside you,” I answer.
“Oh, how lovely!” she says, looking hard.
As I push her along, I point out our beloved bright daffodils and the hints of a magnolia tree’s first white blossoms.
“To think that so many don’t know about this beauty!” my mother says.
Pausing to rest on a hill, we gaze at a sun-dappled ravine filled with endless scilla bobbing in the breeze like a sea of blue butterflies. In that moment, we know exactly what the poet William Blake meant when he described seeing “heaven in a wild flower.”
“I just want to be able to remember this sight forever,” my mother says.
And so do I.
The return of the wildflowers signals a sense of rebirth and renewal, hope for new beginnings, and faith in unimagined possibilities on the horizon. In all of life’s circumstances, my mother has continually sought beauty and, in doing so, finds the bliss so aptly expressed in her beloved Wordsworth poem: “And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.”
If I can remember those gifts of optimism, then as in the hymn of old, perhaps my soul too can sing.
In Search of a Silver Lining
The day we all dreaded had arrived. But there was no way around it.
No one wants to put a loved one in a nursing home. And, more importantly, no family member wants to live in one, least of all my mother.
For a widow who still loved visiting and partying with her family and friends and thrived on activity, even in a physically frail state at age eighty-nine, a nursing home was the last place she would have chosen.
It all started with a small stroke, and while she was recovering from that, a fall resulting in a snapped ankle sealed the deal. A wheelchair had become her permanent new friend. Because her retirement home provided unassisted living, there was no other decision my four siblings and I could make. Two of them lived on opposite coasts and the other two lived several hours away, and so I was the one in charge.
It was not a leadership role I cherished.
Yet, time was of the essence, as the Medicare clock that designates how many days a patient can stay in rehab care was ticking away. Her days were numbered. And so were mine. I needed to find a suitable nursing home fast.
Because money was an issue, our choices were limited. I had not been in a nursing home for a long time, and to say I was shocked the moment I walked into one would be a gargantuan understatement.
The first and closest nursing home I checked out was crowded and noisy. Televisions blared. Wheelchair-bound patients sat in slumped repose scattered all over the premises. Therapy dogs roamed the hallways, which was rather unsettling for a first-time visitor. The scents of urine, dogs, medicines, and nursing home food wafted through the air. Although this care facility had a reputation for being competent, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I knew my mother would recoil as much as I did.
The second one was no better and had an opening only in an Alzheimer’s wing until a bed in an appropriate area opened up. This for a woman who could still recite Shakespeare from memory and play a competitive hand of bridge?
The third was similar to the other two. The fourth was a strong possibility, but alas, no room at the inn.
At my wit’s end, I was sliding into panic mode. Fatigue and worry were my constant companions. Where could she go? Coming to my home even for a short time with hired help was next to impossible due to its stairs and lack of a first-floor shower. Would I have to start looking for a nursing home out of our area?
And then what?
How would I visit her on a timely basis and manage her health care? Would I be isolating her even more from friends and family? More importantly, would she feel as though I had abandoned her? Thrown away the key, so to speak? Out of sight, out of mind? Guilt shackled my soul.
And then, by the grace of God, I was alerted to an opening in a nursing home twenty miles away. It was a place where several of my friends’ parents had stayed, which wa
s reassuring. Even so, I drove through the early morning traffic with trepidation in my heart, wondering what I would find.
The first thing that greeted me when I walked in the door was an oasis of living plants and flowers surrounding a small pond filled with goldfish. A path for wheelchairs ran around and over it with places to pause or for a visitor to pull up a chair. When I spotted a live turtle resting on the pond’s raised rocks, I knew I had found my mother a home.
The staff was welcoming and friendly, and the fact that it had one of our favorite trees, the pine, in its name was the icing on the cake. With my siblings’ approval, I signed on the dotted line.
Yet, the worst was not over.
A nursing home, no matter how clean or neat, is still a nursing home. Elderly patients still slept slumped in their wheelchairs; TVs blared the latest soap operas in the commons area; intercom announcements calling for staff reverberated down the halls; and the occasional, sudden shouts from an incoherent resident unsettled all within earshot.
Even as a visitor, it was easy to get depressed, and I wasn’t even the one who would be living there. My mother was. And it was time to tell her.
But how could I ever tell her that she needed to move out of her beloved retirement home where a cast of friends, fun activities, loving staff, and great food had been her daily experience for the past four and a half years? How could I tell a woman who was keenly social, mentally sharp, attractively dressed, beautifully coiffed, and who still loved her lipstick, that she would be living in a shared room with only a bed, dresser, and tiny closet to call her own?
How could I tell her that she would share this small space with a roommate who was one hundred years old and totally deaf? How could I tell her that meals were assigned seating with folks who could barely feed themselves?
But most of all, how could I tell her how sorry I was to have to do all this? How could I tell her it was breaking my heart?
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