Month: October 2024

30 years

Today is my 30th wedding anniversary. I have known my husband since I was 18 years old. We met on my first weekend in college. I have spent my entire adult life with my husband. He is the most important person in my life and he always will be. I’m still very much in love with my husband. I believe that he is still in love with me. I understand that this is special. I understand that this is a rarity. I am totally, totally grateful.

My eldest son just got engaged. My second eldest son has been ring shopping (and I can say this because he and his girlfriend went ring shopping together). What has been my advice to my sons and their significant others for a long and happy marriage? Always, always put your “marriage” first. When you get married, the marriage becomes its own living entity. When you make your marriage the most important thing in your life, and you nurture it, and you believe in it, and you give it your highest attention and your energy, it will give you everything that you gave it, back in spades. (Now I realize that it takes two people who are willing to treat the marriage like a sacred child to raise and to adore and to be committed to in life, but if you do your part, and you believe that your spouse will do the same, then the battle is already won.)

Our married life hasn’t been perfect. Life isn’t perfect. However, my marriage has been the most vital part of 30 years of really good living. My marriage is my sanctuary, my comfort, my joy, my adventures, my framework for how I go about living my life. It’s been perfect for me.

J, thank you for choosing me. Thank you for believing in our sacred marriage as much as I do. Thank you for everything. I love you forever and ever and ever.

Year of the Aunts

When I was shopping with my future daughter-in-law last week, she pointed out a poster of Hocus Pocus with a smile on her face. She told me that she loves that movie. I smiled to myself for a different reason. I immediately thought of my three aunts.

Now, I mean no disrespect to my aunts. My aunts are way more attractive, alluring, kind and interesting than the stereotypical, storybook witch. But to me, in my own inner version of what a witch is, my aunts fit the bill: magical, crafty, resilient, mysterious, wise, attuned to nature, assured in themselves, faithful to Life. My aunts have always been a fun, spoiling, soft spot in my life since I was a little girl, but as I have grown older they have also become my inspirations.

My (only) three aunts are all in their 70s, yet they stay fit and active and “with it.” They are adventuresome and confident. I call this year, “The Year of the Aunts”. This is the first year in a long while which I have experienced one-on-one visits with each of my aunts. This is a rarity. We all lead busy lives and we are all spread out in different states. One of my aunts even lives in a different country.

We women need each other (even as awful as we can be to each other), and we need each other in all forms. We need our female friends, sisters, mothers, daughters, cousins, grandmothers, mentors, and aunts. Sometimes one of our female cohorts is more than just one of those things to us. We women are that powerful. We can be shapeshifters if need be. There is something unrepeatable in the strength at the core of a woman. We know this fact deeply and intimately, and we inevitably share the wells of this female strength and wisdom when we convene with each other.

I have always loved my aunts, but I didn’t realize until this past decade, how much I need them. I didn’t realize how much they teach me, just by being themselves. I didn’t realize the depth of the nourishment I get from each of them, and the familial care and concern they have always held for me, even when we are not with each other. I hope and pray, that I can be the same source of solidity and comfort for my nieces and nephews, in different stages of our lives. My own aunts have treated me, as if this was their sacred duty. Perhaps it is . . . .

Aunts, I love you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Flowers Bloom

So, I am back home and I am bone weary. And I am brain weary. We had a wonderful visit up north, celebrating the wedding engagement of our son and his fiance’, and enjoyed visiting other family members. We did some hiking on the Appalachian Trail. And also, we might as well have been hiking in New York City. (14,000 steps in one day) I was so busy with all of the fun and the action and getting home and getting organized and getting unpacked and getting our groceries replenished, that it is just now, when I have fully and completely realized that my mind and my body and my spirit have yet to process what we have collectively been through in my community. I am tired. I am quiet. I am taking a big exhale.

We moved to Florida for my husband’s job in 2011. We have been through many hurricanes since then, but only one other time did we decide to evacuate. (that was for Irma in 2017) People who aren’t Floridians watch the hysterical, oversized, 24/7 news stories about hurricanes and wonder why we all don’t just flee the state, and also wonder why we ever go back. It’s not that simple. Nothing ever is. People don’t evacuate their homes for hurricanes for many reasons: finances, pets, stubbornness, a perhaps false sense of security from past experiences, horrific traffic and gas shortages, the uncertainty of where a hurricane is going to hit despite the gigantic “cone of certainty” ominously pasted over the entire state of Florida, for every storm (there are many, many recounted stories of people evacuating to places that end up getting the worst of the storms. For instance, one acquaintance told us that she tried to escape Hurricane Helene by going to her dad’s cabin in Lake Lure, which is in the mountains of North Carolina, with her elderly grandmother and young child. You can imagine the rest of that story, a story that she will likely tell for the rest of her life. Sigh.)

Since living here since the summer of 2011, this is the worst that I have ever seen our own local communities hit by hurricanes. It is sad. It is horrific. The pictures that you are seeing on the news are not exaggerated. Helene flooded most of our coastal communities. People have piled their ruined belongings, furniture, carpeting, mattresses, drywall at the end of each driveway, or have dumped them on specified empty lots, where the piles of debris are growing up like instant, ugly little mountains. Right after Hurricane Helene, in less than two weeks, Hurricane Milton decided to stir the pot with ferocious winds and rains and tornadoes. The devastation is immense. Trees, and street lights, and billboards, fences, and people’s roofs have been tossed around like Milton was an angry three-year old, throwing around his legos.

And yet, the facts are, most of us are relatively unscathed. Most of us (in our county alone there is over a million people who live here) survived with our lives, and our homes mostly intact. Most of us had some small, inexpensive clean-ups and repairs to do, and maybe some raking up of some sticks and leaves in our yards. And so most of us, walk around with that sickly feeling of great relief which is mixed with some sad and empathetic survivor’s guilt, when we see what the hurricanes brought on to others less fortunate than us.

So why do we live in Florida? Why is my one small county densely packed with a million people? Why do we live with the fear of hurricanes every year, and why are we willing to pay four times the average cost of homeowners’ insurance compared to the rest of the country? You tell me. Why do you come to Florida for vacation? I bet almost everyone of you has been to Florida at least once. We have gorgeous beaches. We have amazing wildlife. We are surrounded by water everywhere. (and water is from whence we came) We get to experience beautiful sunshine almost every single day of our lives. We have something for everybody here. Florida is one of the few true melting pots, of the bigger melting pot of our own great country. You cannot feel out of place in Florida. Anything goes. We embrace “Florida Man” and everybody else.

Please don’t feel sorry for us Floridians. We get the hurricanes. We call them “the price we pay to live in paradise.” We understand, and we take on the risks. We are processing right now. We are licking our wounds. Some of us will decide that the price is no longer worth it, and will leave. And that is okay. In the end, we will all be okay. The sun still shines upon us, the land of flowers. Flowers bloom.

Sneaky Bits

Hello. It’s a been a minute . . . but I’m feeling the need to write an update . . . . for me. My cousin was recently laid off from a high-powered job. She has started writing a blog about this experience. She has expressed to me, that me and my blog inspired her to start writing her own story. She says that she is surprised as to how cathartic it is to write about what happens in your life, and how it makes you so much better understand how you are processing everything which you are experiencing in your own one, precious life. Friends, write about your own life (even if it is in a private journal, just for yourself, for your eyes only). Learn about yourself. Be surprised. I am beginning to believe that this act of writing is practically an imperative, in order to fully experience the entire scopes of our lives. Your story is an important thread of it all. Write it. Read it. Embrace it. Begin to understand . . . .

I am writing to you from a hotel room in New York City. New York City has been a part of my history since I was young child. We would visit relatives in New York City almost every Thanksgiving when I was a kid, experiencing the Macy’s Day Parade, Broadway, and all of the visceral sights and sounds which are entirely New York City’s alone. The pace of NYC is insane. I was walking along city blocks tonight, all by myself, laughing at how out of breath I was, trying to keep up with the rush hour walkers. I usually pride myself in my unusually fast pace of doing anything and everything. Yet, on this evening, New York seemed to say to me, “Move to the side, Floridian . . . . we’ve got places to go and your slow-ass is in the way!”

Recently, I paused writing this blog, because I felt that I was in a turning point time for me. It was one of those times of false security. It was one of those times that I falsely believed that I had it all figured out. I honestly felt like, “You’ve made it, girl. You got all of your four children to adulthood, all in good stead. You got through the pandemic years, and the worst years of your son’s epilepsy, and the deeply depressing years of your mother-in-law’s slow decline and eventual death. And now, Voila! You got to a good year- a really good year -2024. And honestly, 2024 has been a year of amazing adventures, and new excitements, and pride and relief, and a rekindling of the focus on just me and my husband, since the two of us were barely adults. And it’s been great! And it’s been revitalizing! And then, in just the last couple of weeks, the community which I have called home for more than a decade has experienced two horrific hurricanes in the span of about ten days. And also, at the same time our eldest son and his wonderful longtime girlfriend, got engaged to be married. And I was soberly reminded that I will never be at the “all settled” point in my life while I am still living it. I got reminded that there will always be good in my life, and there will always be less than good in my life. Life is messy. Life is wonderful. Life is hard. Life is simple. Life is complicated. Life is confusing. Life is beautiful. And all of this swirl of life, usually happens all at once. And so you have to be brave to accept it all, and to deeply know that you are up to the challenge of feeling it all, experiencing it all, handling it all.

In my life, I am most grateful for my ability to connect. As Garth Brooks sings, “I have friends in low places” but I also have friends in palaces. Tonight, in my wanderings in NYC, I chatted with homeless people, and investment bankers in swanky bars. I chatted with bellhops, and a priest in a world-famous cathedral. I connected with all of them, all because of my deep intuitive knowing that we are all so imperatively and intrinsically connected to each other. I don’t think that this wisdom fully comes about until you are willing to surrender to the idea that you honestly don’t know shit. Your primary job is to experience it all, and then, to write it all down.