Old Things

Marking our sixth move in two years (yes, that's right sixth), my husband and I drove a uhaul of stuff from my parent's home in FL back to TX this past July. Much of what was on board was furniture that they were kind enough to give to us, allowing us to finish furnishing our home. Beds, sheets, towels, dressers, and shelves will turn our previously empty rooms into a place for friends and family.

Then there were the boxes. The boxes that you inherit when you become an adult, live in your own place, and have some elbow room to take on all those pieces of your childhood that you left behind. As I mentioned a while back, I have a special affinity for hand-me-downs, for things that once lovingly belonged to a friend and now belong with me. On this, my husband sits almost diametrically opposed to me. The newer the better. Brand new preferable.

So, as I gush over my old puzzle collection, my many boxes of Legos, and my baby dishes, my husband grumbles, as good-naturedly as he can manage, that we will always be surrounded by old things. He wonders if our children will someday ever have new things even as I lovingly hold baby blankets made for generations of children before me and imagine covering our someday-child with them.

Looking for a way around this stand off, I briefly thought that we should wade through our old things together. Compromise is always easier when we are both involved. The idea never even made it to the table though. As soon as it had formed in my mind, I realized exactly why it wouldn't work. My husband's family left things behind when they immigrated to this country. The baby blankets belonging to great grandparents, the hobby horses, the toys, the hope chests, and the heirlooms, were all left behind for a new country and a new life. My husband doesn't have old, he only has new, and, as much as I want my old things to be our old things, they only tell the history of my family, not his.

I wonder what old things my family once left behind and I wonder where those things are now. It was so long ago though that the whole thing is intangible to me. It's someone else's history that is only very distantly related to mine. I hope that someday both my husband and our children will love the history in those old things but, in the meantime, perspective makes the grumbles and complaints about them easier.

The cat knows how I feel

Blogging recently has been tough. Work has been especially busy and, many days, feels entirely overwhelming. Maybe someday I'll blog about that, but today isn't that day. I'm facing another knee surgery in the not too distant future and, despite knowing that the surgery and recovery will be a lot easier than the last one, it's not a fun or happy prospect. I actually did write a blog about that but decided not to post it for any number of reasons. If you want to read it and don't feel like it will make you squeamish, let me know and I'll email it to you. The election is looming and, while there are so many things I'd like to say about that, I've started and stopped those blogs more times than I can count.

So, what's this not-very-cheerful sounding blog about?

Maybe it's the value of life. Maybe it's me wondering where all this rage is coming from.

It seems like I can't log on to facebook anymore without encountering angry posts and articles. With the exception of my friend's who post pictures of their children and (or) cute animals, it feels like wherever I look there is someone angry about something. Usually I roll my eyes, find a cute kid picture, and try to put whatever unnecessarily mean thing I read out of my mind. As the election draws nearer though, it's getting harder to ignore. I genuinely like reading posts from different political, cultural, and economic views. I seek them out. I have friends with whom I deeply disagree on a broad spectrum of issues but we still love each other, respect each other, and frequently get to have good debates with each other. And then.

And then I read an article from an author who hopes that every member of the opposing political party will die.

I'm not even kidding. My heart rate sped up and I did a double take and then a triple take. How has it come to this?

I can't separate my belief that all life should be respected from my faith but I'd like to believe that, whether a person holds a faith or not, they can respect that life is a precious and wonderful thing. It's fragile and too easily destroyed. There's a lot to be angry about this election season and I know how angry I am personally about things that I feel shouldn't be happening. I still can't imagine ever wishing someone dead over it though because your life is precious whether we agree or not.

When I was in the second grade, a boy in my class started shouting that he hated me. I can't remember what triggered his reaction but my teacher's response has been indelibly ingrained in me ever since. She pulled us both up to her desk and said, very gravely, you do not hate, you do not know what hate is, you never say that to another person again. It was, by far, not the worst experience I can remember from that school but it has defined nearly every bad experience I've had since then. You do not hate.

I think I wish my second grade teacher was here now. I'd like to think she'd be telling people on both sides to stop name calling, to stop saying awful things, to sit down and talk.

Maybe consider doing something nice for someone on November 9th. Donate to a food pantry or a charity. Buy a meal for someone who needs it. Adopt a pet. Send someone flowers. No matter what happens, it seems like there are going to be a lot of upset people next Wednesday morning but it would be awfully nice if everyone could take a deep breath and try to make someone else smile.

PS. If you're not sure what the picture has to do with anything, I chose it because (a) cute animal and (b) the title of this post.

How the cookie crumbles

Years ago, I was going through a really rough time. The exact how, what, and why aren't really important anymore but I definitely wasn't in a good place. At first, the boy I was dating thought he could fix me. When he couldn't, our relationship was over. Not long after, my closest friend at the time followed him in the same way. I will never ever forget her telling me that she just couldn't stick around and watch me be sad. It took me years to find any peace with what happened, with the idea that people I trusted, people who loved me, could walk away like that. Months later I sat down and talked to a priest about everything that had happened, about my confusion, my anger, my hurt. His response was nothing I ever would have anticipated.

Maybe they did you a favor.

It didn't feel like a favor at all. It felt very much like the opposite of a favor. The priest didn't stop there though. He went on to suggest that people who walk out of your life when things get rough aren't friends at all. That I was better off without those kind of people. I didn't even think priests could say that kind of thing.

Luckily for me, I found better friends. Friends who loved me exactly where I was. Friends who were sad that I was sad but knew that sometimes you just need time and space to be sad. Because that's okay.

Recently a friend going through a rough time, mentioned that they felt they had to be a certain way- the way they were before. Our situations are so different but all I could think in that moment was that I needed my friend to know that it's okay to be different, to be sad, for as long as it takes. Because everyone who loves her will be sad with her and when, down the road, a day comes that feels a little warmer and a little sunnier and a little better, we'll all be there for that too.

Two Years

Yesterday, my husband and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary and I think that all we know for sure about this marriage business is that two years feels a lot like one.

We hadn't been living together for a month yet when our first wedding anniversary rolled around. We celebrated in a big way (Red Bull Air Races! Hockey game!) but we missed out on many of the things you might expect from a couple that has been married for a year. Among those things, the year old wedding cake tradition. In all of our moves, our cake ended up with neither of us until well after our first anniversary. So yesterday we dutifully pulled it out of the freezer and dug in (after letting it warm up a little) to our now two year old wedding cake, which was surprisingly delicious!

Of course, I'm wondering if we'll always feel a year behind or maybe we'll just always feel like we've been married for half of the actual length of our marriage? Probably time will catch up with us at some point but for now it's kind of cool to feel like we've had two first wedding anniversaries.

Backyard Science Part II

Composting is SO COOL!

That's not even sarcasm. It is really the neatest, dorkiest thing ever. Maybe it wouldn't be as cool if I wasn't so into science, it's hard to say. It's been four months since we started composting and the shear weight and volume of material that has been diverted to our backyard compost bin is pretty incredible. I haven't been keeping a tally of exactly what's gone into the bin but I do know that we have filled it to bursting at least a dozen times. (Total volume of the compost tumbler, 37 gallons.) I'll be pushing material in and thinking to myself "okay, this is it, we're going to close it up soon and let the last material in decompose." Then I check it a week later and half the volume has disappeared into thin air. So, some adventures from the last four months.

Adventure the First.
I've become that person. The person I said I wouldn't become. The one who brings a spare plastic container to work so that I can bring home my orange peels or apple cores and compost them. After four months of composting, throwing things like that out just doesn't sit well with me anymore. My husband rolls his eyes but is reasonably good-natured about it.

Adventure the Second.
Having guests over. Sometime, back when this all started, my husband and I had a conversation that went something like this:
Husband: You're not going to compost at parties are you?
Me: Of course not! That would be a ridiculous pain!
Well. That went the same way as "of course I won't bring compostables home from work." I spent the first party we threw after the compost tumbler was set up cringing at food waste going into the trash. Now I set out three bins at parties: compost, trash, and recycling. And our friends have been fantastic about it.

Adventure the Third.
But won't it smell? I often ask guests to the house if they would like to come out to the compost with me. Often this is because guests mean extra food, which means that I need an extra set of hands to carry everything. This invitation is often met with a concern over the smell. No one wants to hang out with smelly stuff. I sure don't. That's okay though because the compost doesn't smell. It's pretty incredible but a well balanced compost is pretty unscented. We had one incident early on when the compost was getting a little too dry. I added moisture and then we entered rainy season. I'll admit that it smelled for a while then. I had to start scrounging for carbon sources to add, which leads me to...

Adventure the Fourth.
Importing other people's compostables. Leaves are a great source of carbon for compost. That's awesome and easy if you live in someplace where leave drop easily and often. If you live in southern Texas though, there just aren't enough leaves to keep up with our food trash. Especially in the rainy part of the summer when everything is hot and wet all the time and nothing dries out ever because the humidity is ridiculous. Paper is another great carbon source but it composts quicker if it's shredded. We don't own a shredder so I now import shredded paper from other people. We keep a whole cabinet of it on hand to add when we add another batch of kitchen waste.

Adventure the Fifth.
Mushrooms. Oh my goodness the mushrooms. I thought at one point that the compost was molding. That does happen sometimes and is a good indicator that we are not adding enough carbon or that it needs more oxygen, or both. Some vigorous tumbling and a little poking around though (with a long stick) proved that my compost wasn't molding. It was growing the largest mushrooms I have ever seen. Coincidentally, the mushrooms of doom started appearing about three weeks after a batch of mushroom scraps made their way into the tumbler. Go figure. A composting friend says that these are called "volunteers." She recently had some volunteer cantaloupes come out of her compost. I did not cultivate my mushrooms. No problem though, they are organic (very, very organic in this case) and simply decomposed once the temperature of the pile heated back up.

I really wasn't sure how the backyard science experiment in composting would go. We still haven't harvested any dirt, though we could if we needed to. So far though, it's just really cool. Sometimes I take food out and just spend a little while poking in the compost with a stick to check out how quickly different things decompose. Yes, that does make me pretty weird. That's okay. My parents assure me that the Oscar the Grouch "I love trash" was my favorite as a kid. I'm sure they especially loved me singing it in public, which I was apparently pretty fond of. So maybe this whole composting thing was pretty predictable after all.

Heads or Tails

As in, things I cannot make heads or tails of.

After struggling to keep up with yard care over the summer, we finally bit the bullet and decided to look into hiring someone. My husband was meeting with one potential business owner when he had a conversation that neither of us knew what to make heads or tails of. The lawn care provider asked some questions about us, which was pretty normal. Somehow our different last names came up. Suddenly the conversation took an abrupt left turn.

"Around here, I can see why she wouldn't take your last name. That would make getting hired really hard."

Wait. What?

My husband then tried to explain that it was a personal choice. That it was partly because of my doctorate and partly because of a family legacy that is dear to me. The guy wouldn't hear anything of it though. He was sure it was because I was afraid of reprisal, of racism.

The guy had no idea that way back in college, I nearly broke up with a guy who said he wouldn't marry someone who wouldn't take his name. (Ironically, he later did just that but that's the sort of thing love does to a person.) He didn't know anything about us at all but he was sure he did.

The whole thing was surreal and weird and discomforting. Most of all though, it had me worrying that maybe other people felt the same way that that guy did, that they made the same assumptions. And regardless of anything else, making sure that that possible assumption doesn't stand was worth a blog.

Something about 30

I had planned a great 30th birthday blog- 30 things about being 30. I knew it wouldn't be universal but I thought it would be fun. I had spent days in the car driving to or from work, thinking up things to include in the list. Then I sat down to write it and everything flew right out of my head. And not by way of my fingers and the keyboard. Oh well.

The truth is that being 30 feels just like being 29. Twenty nine felt a lot like 28. And so on. That's not to say that 30 feels anything like 13 but the differences are small, fluid, and ever changing. I remember being baffled as a kid when I was asked how it felt to be a new age. I never felt any different. It would almost definitely be more accurate to ask how I felt after a life event. For instance, my grandmother died between my tenth and eleventh birthdays. Any growing or changing that I did that year was far more altered by that than anything to do with my age.

Speaking of my Grandmother, I think the single biggest change I can point to between twenty and thirty involves her. I remember my 20th birthday. It was preceded by a rough year and a lot of uncertainty. At the time, I had a healthy sense of "well, what now?" I had no idea, no particular sense of direction, and was still working out who I was as a person. I can't say that any of that is untrue now but I also have a sense of working towards becoming something that I did not have a decade ago. I'll always be me but if I could grow to be some of my Grandmother too, I'd consider that a huge success.