Tiny Tuesday!

Mark, if you come by here, happiest of birthdays to you today. 🎂

Today’s a good day in our family memories.

Our nephew Aaron was born on this date in 1993. It seems impossible he’s been gone eleven years. We can never have enough time with people we love, especially as deeply as he’s loved. I hope everyone who knew him has a wealth of good, funny, happy, sweet, powerful memories to celebrate his time here with us. I think of his parents, brother, sister, and all the aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends who miss him. Today, may they remember the connections to him that bring joy.


Aaron, Penny, Pixie, and Timothy on March 12, 2012.


Since it’s Tiny Tuesday, here’s a photo from last year, though the snowman Aaron and Alex gave me one Christmas is displayed this year, too.

I’ve said it on here before: Aunt Becky is the best job title I ever had.

Trees at the Hall

I was worried about a tree at the Hall because it looked like this post-drought.

We constantly get business cards and flyers stuck through our front security fence. I save them for “in case of” times, and this seemed like one of those times. We picked the business that seemed to offer most of what we wanted now or might want in the future for the trees on our property.

Now I have dozens of pictures to show some of what was done, but I’m too tired to compare all the photos I’ve uploaded from my phone and camera. Maybe sometime next week, I can do a few posts that show why several men (and one woman) were here on Thursday and Friday to help us with our trees.

The dogs were not amused by any of these shenanigans.

More to come, but in the meantime, today I did some front porch cleaning that includes Aaron’s Garden. We lost only two small succulents that need to be replaced. In this case, at least, we triumphed over the drought.

First of three

I’ll be sharing some very cool stuff Lynne put a lot of work into for me. Since I want to write about each one, I’ll feature them in different posts.

This is Lynne’s recent restoration of a quilt my mother made in 1982 and 1983 with squares each contributor signed with our names and often some artwork. It included family members, people who were special to her and my father during that time, and people who were part of their three kids’ lives during the same period. For privacy, I’ve blurred out last names (other than Cochrane).

The original version hung in the writing sanctuary, which means I’ve looked at it every day from the time I began writing in this room in April 2020. I had some issues with it. I’m not sure what my mother’s reasoning was for how she arranged the signature squares. I think it likely had to do with when they were returned to her or when she had time to embroider them. It left family members oddly placed.

It also included two people who left our lives within a few years of the quilt’s creation because of their toxic impact. It meant each time I looked at the quilt, I was reminded of them, and I didn’t want to be. I don’t deny our history, and I recognize whatever good there was in these two people, but ultimately, they weren’t good for us.

I asked Lynne if it would be possible to alter the quilt, and that request resulted in a complete deconstruction and update. She saved every square–including the two that were removed, which are now stored elsewhere. I didn’t obliterate them, just stopped them from being featured–deciding not to glorify wrongs of the past that are hurtful. Lynne meticulously cleaned forty years of dust and the stain of cigarette smoke from them in a way that would cause no damage. Debby wanted to alter her square, and between the three of us, that was managed, with Lynne doing the embroidery required.

Removing those two squares was like removing a weight from my heart, and I asked Tom and Timothy to create squares to replace them. They’re not the only people who I could wish were on this quilt because of their deep connections to my mother through the years, but they both did so much for her in the last four years of her life: moving her several times, driving her when she was no longer able, entertaining her, shopping with her, treating her to meals, and celebrating holidays and birthdays with her. Tom is family by marriage, and Tim is family by choice. They’re appreciated not only for all they did, but for those relationships, and they represent other family members of both types. (I’m going to make particular note of Terri, Lois, Arliss, Lisa B, Aaron, Alex, Jay, Amber, Lindsey, and Rhonda.) Lynne embroidered Tim’s and Tom’s squares just as Mother would have.

Lynne rebuilt the quilt using my diagram, which means every Cochrane is now linked to another Cochrane, and children are connected to their children. The same was done with friends who are now connected to their children. There’s also an embroidered label on the back giving the dates and makers of the original and restored quilt.

Would my mother like being edited? I don’t know. She’d like knowing how much what she created means to me and that I display it. She’d appreciate the care Lynne took in preserving and restoring it and adding her own stitching to it. Lynne also added a border that ties together the colors Mother chose, and she put loops on the top so it could hang in a way that wouldn’t damage the original quilt.

This painstaking labor of love on Lynne’s part, and the contributions from Debby, Tom, and Timothy, remind me of the significance of our birth and chosen families. THIS is something my mother absolutely believed and taught us. I think she’d be happy and proud that her three children, and her grandchildren, continue to share that belief.

Thank you, Lynne, from one of your other families since 1968. <3

Low-key

Sad day; no need to get into reasons.

Our Internet and cable were out for most of the day, and that limited my ability to do the research required for what I was writing.

I shot a few photos of things around the Hall so I could spend time outside.


Finally, the return of ruellia (aka Mexican petunias) outside the kitchen window.

After two days of heavy rain, these popped up.

There’s a larger one almost hidden by shamrocks.

This is the first time any succulent in Aaron’s Garden has bloomed. It was a nice surprise to see today.

Tiny Tuesday!

Today’s Tiny Tuesday post is dedicated to our late nephew Aaron. This is the anniversary of his death, so I chose to clean up Aaron’s Garden while I thought about him. Tom and I got a couple of new things to put there, including this little horned toad (or horned lizard?) for a bit of whimsy.


I picked him up at the nursery, then I reconsidered and set him down. Before I turned away, I patted him on the head and back in a kind of apology.

Two women were shopping nearby, and one of them saw me, laughed, and said, “You just patted him so gently.” “I don’t want him to think I’m rejecting him,” I said. I meant it.

We walked away, continued shopping, and then when we went back that way, I chose him again. It wasn’t until we got him home that Tom told me he was missing a foot (not noticeable in this photo). It confirmed for me that I was right to get him; I never saw a flaw.

I don’t know why I anthropomorphize objects; from childhood, I felt energy in places and things. It’s why losing some, not all, things can sometimes be hard on me emotionally.

Losing a person however, is always hard, especially Aaron, who was so young and had so many things yet to experience and do, so many people to meet and affect and be affected by. He was, and is, deeply loved, and even now, in objects he never saw or touched that are in his garden, I feel an energy connected to the love he gave us all and we all continue to give him.


We also added a colorful dove wind chime. It has a lovely, delicate sound. I like the look and the music of it.

Tiny Tuesday!

As a child, my mother taught me, sometimes enlisting my siblings’ help, how to play Candyland and Old Maid. I didn’t play Go Fish or Crazy Eights, though I remember having cards for them. When I was a little older, my siblings taught me how to play Clue and Concentration, and sometimes one or both parents sat in with us. I’m sure I rarely, if ever, won. I had zero interest in Monopoly and never played it. Occasionally, we played Scrabble; a game played with voracious readers who have good vocabularies is an awesome thing, and that game has always been a favorite of mine to play one-on-one, which is why I still keep several different games going online with Tom and three friends.

My father taught me how to play my first “gown-up” card game, Rummy. He probably deliberately lost to me many times so the feeling of winning would keep me engaged. My sister later taught me how to play every version of Spades I’ve played, including going nil. Spades is one of the games I like best, but it also causes me stress when I have a partner depending on me. It’s a love/stress game.

As young adults, Debby and I learned Parcheesi and had the most competitive games of it imaginable with her first husband/children’s father and my boyfriend who became my first husband. Many years later, we played it with other people and the tameness of it made us bewildered by how those games in our memories were so fiercely played.

Some of my other games as an adult were Cribbage (my brother David taught me); Boggle, which I learned with Lynne and her sister Liz and won a lot, only to be consistently trounced by our friend Steve V many years later in games with him, James, and Tom at Toopee’s, a now-closed lesbian coffee place/restaurant we liked. I’m still not over the shock of my Boggle losses, and that was the mid-1990s.

Lynne and Liz also taught me Yahtzee, and no game-playing ever made me laugh so much, both with them and, later, with my sister, her friends Connie and Dottie, and Tom. We once taught Aaron to play Yahtzee when he was tired, almost falling asleep over the game. He persisted, but I suspect it was his version of Gitmo and he chose never to play it again–at least with us. May have had something to do with our Full Sheet Yahtzee, which involves playing five games at once.

In the early to late ’80s, it was all Trivial Pursuit all the time, and I kicked butt at the original and the Baby Boomer editions. I’m pretty sure if I played that now, I wouldn’t remember shit. =) If Bad Boyfriend No. TWO and I played as partners, we were unbeatable. Life Lesson: Knowing a crap-ton of trivial information does not ensure a successful relationship. But the game was fun.

Also in the late ’80s, Aunt Audrey taught us Progressive Rummy (I used some of that in Three Fortunes), and it may be this game that brings out the most intensely competitive part of my personality. Through the years, we have lured others into the game, and I’ve lost many times. Sometimes I’m even gracious about it, but I’m always out there lurking, waiting for a chance to avenge myself.

From the late ’80s into the ’90s, with Tom’s family, as with Lynne and Craig’s, I’ve laughed hard over Pictionary and Uno. (Uno has the tendency to turn into the remembered viciousness of Parcheesi, and that may be universal; I’ve read about many Uno matches on social media in which empires have fallen and families split up forever.) With Lynne and Craig’s whole crew, when we delayed Progressive Rummy so we could play other games with the kids in the afternoon and early evenings, we also played Scattergories, and when Jess was younger, a game called Guess Who?

With my undergraduate friends, we played a lot of Spoons (this game can get physical!) and Scrabble, and it was my college roommate Debbie who taught me the real point of this post, Backgammon. I loved Backgammon so much that I taught Lynne, and later Tim, to play. Backgammon is another one in which I’m highly competitive, but in this case, I’m not cutthroat. Tim became a far more ferociously skilled player than I am, and as he and Jim play with the same intensity, I happily sit back and watch their death-matches when Jim visits (not for nothing was it Jim who taught us a fun card game called Spite and Malice).

Tuesday, when I was writing, suddenly a little gift from my past appeared without any planning. And it looks like this, tucked into its 9.5×7-ish-inch case.

Under its fabric, the board is metal, and the game pieces are magnets because it’s a travel version of Backgammon. Nothing slides around, except the dice, which are meant to roll. It’s still owned by Lynne since late ’70s/early ’80s, and both of these photos are courtesy of her. You can’t imagine how many nights we sat on the floor in front of her fireplace back in Alabama, and played on this board. Later, after both of us were divorced and sharing a house, we played at the dining room table; at the pub we went to; and on breaks at the restaurant where we both worked, she as a cook and manager; me part-time as hostess/waitress. I also had a full-time teaching job and a teaching job at a business school two nights a week, where Lynne was a student; we were busy women, and Backgammon was a quiet way to relax.

Or it should have been. It’s a Pandora’s box of memories, one of them involving Bad Boyfriend No. ONE. He, too, worked at the restaurant, had another part-time job, and was a full-time college student. He, too, played Backgammon, and his was a game of strategy. Lynne has her own strategy, and he hated to lose to her because he said she played by LUCK and that was WRONG, and one night, he got so angry when he lost that he picked up the entire set and threw it out the front door. I don’t know if Lynne and I went out together and retrieved the pieces, or if I stayed inside, but I think Lynne and I both thought, He’s as overtired as we are. He’ll get over it. No big deal.

It was a big deal. A warning sign, one I didn’t recognize. I’d be sorry for that later, but I can’t change the past. Or… I can. Because when this specific Backgammon game unexpectedly slipped into my writing yesterday, it did so with sweetness. It’s a small, gentle way to take an awful piece of the past and turn it into a moment celebrating friendship and love. As hard as some experiences are, all those other times of my life with family and friends are really what matters on this side of my decades lived.

My characters are based on everyone and no one, and they are always my teachers.

Challenge

Somehow I came late to the game of a happiness challenge being published in the online New York Times feed. Wednesday’s challenge is Day 3: Make small talk with a stranger.

I was doing labs (routine, every three to six months) barely after sunrise this morning, when the tech turned my arm over, preparing to draw blood, and she noticed my tattoo. She asked whether it hurt to get a tattoo in that area of the wrist, and I said that it hadn’t. She said she was considering getting a tattoo on her wrist but was hesitating because it might be painful.

“Do what makes you happy,” I said. “Life is short.”

“I think I will,” she said with a big smile.

Yep, it’s basically clichéd old-person advice. Sometimes things get repeated because they’re true.


Me, Daisy, and my tattoo, 2018

ETA: If you’re interested, the Day 1 challenge is “Take stock of your relationships”; Day 2 is “Try the 8-minute phone call”; and Day 4, Thursday, is: “Tell an important person in your life how you feel about them.”

looking back/looking forward


Sometime around Thanksgiving, I shared a photo of the underside of a stone and promised to show you the other side. This is a gift I sent to a dear friend. Every time I see a heart, I think of her.

It’s been a quiet week but a good one for connecting with longtime friends by text, email, and phone. We’ve mostly gotten our Christmas stuff down and by tomorrow, it will all have been packed away. I hope to be asleep well before midnight, despite the fireworks that distress the dogs at Houndstooth Hall. I’ve never fully gotten my energy back since being sick in September/October, but other than fatigue, I feel pretty good at the end of another year.

One thing I feel positive about, as I look back, is that I managed to read seventy-six books this year, both fiction and nonfiction. After a prolonged reading dry spell the first two years of the pandemic, it feels promising to know I can once again give my attention to other people’s books. I’ve been a little concerned that I haven’t written much over the last quarter, and it occurred to me that my focus might have been another thing impacted by my health challenges.

Also in 2022, I did finish one novel and begin another. I’ve done three or four paintings on canvas; painted six ornaments I gave away; painted the wooden letters Aa to hang on the brick wall of Aaron’s Garden, and colored, I think, 36 projects–coloring pages, a bookmark, and an angel. I’ve written a few poems and sewn a few doll outfits, done a lot of organizing, donating, and purging from the Hall, and grown new plants and kept old ones alive. When I add it all up that way, I feel like I’ve been more creative than I realized over the past year.

Wishing you all a new year of good (or improving) health, satisfaction with the things you attempt or complete, abundance in all good things, serenity and energy as needed, and the gift of knowing what a wondrous creation you are, even when you don’t remember or believe it.

Much love and peace to you all.

Mood: Monday


Untitled
circa 1950, oil on canvas
© Forrest Bess, USA

Name that mood.

Posting this in the wee hours of the morning and then hoping I can sleep through the night and wake up feeling better. Our weather’s beginning to change, with a freeze expected later in the week, and I think my body’s struggling to adjust, so I’m feeling a little rundown.

Happy birthday to Mark in England! I know you enjoyed a celebration with friends earlier in the month and hope you have a good “second” birthday on your actual date.


This is also the birth date of our late nephew Aaron. I can’t believe it’s been ten years since he died. He’s so deeply missed and loved. This photo is from a spontaneous trip David, Geri, Aaron, Tom, Debby, and I made to Galveston during Mardi Gras in 2011. I don’t remember who shot the photo. It’s a day that I always think of with happiness.

Button Sunday

The second Sunday of December is Worldwide Candle Lighting Day. At 7 pm local time in every time zone, people light candles in memory of children who have died. The intention is to embrace the globe with warm light for a full twenty-four hours to honor and remember children who have lost their lives, whether to illness, accident, violence, or any other reason. You can read more about this day and its history from many Internet sources.

Although the observance of lives cut short too soon is a sad one, I believe any of us who have experienced such a loss find comfort in our memories of joy, of laughter, of every quality that made a child unique and lovable. We want lost children to be remembered by others, and we want to express the fullness of what we’ve lost.

For me personally, I envision the light of a candle sparking an inner fire to transform grief into action. Working toward peace in war zones, raising awareness of diseases that take children, advocating for gun reform, and breaking silence on suicide or child trafficking and exploitation are just some of the ways those impacted by the loss of children find purpose in surviving and remembering those they loved–in fact, continue to love every day.

If you haven’t known such loss, and even if you’re not with others, lighting a candle during your 7 pm hour makes you a part of a global community. We’re never alone when we recognize our shared humanity.

ETA: Tonight.