Author Archives: alexandradane2014

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And so we go on.

 

The mother-of-the-bride status has been interesting. Sort of like being visibly pregnant and strangers feeling free to rub their hands on my belly. With the engagement of my oldest daughter, suddenly the subject matter of every conversation is weddings past and present. And dresses. And money. And the best way to do things is…

But here’s what keeps me up at night.

I regret many decisions or lack of decisions back thirty years ago when I got married. So I cannot help imposing my “what-if’s” on their “maybe’s.” Today the issues are not that different: While the costs are so much more significant, getting a wedding planned still makes it hard to remember that love drives us to these conversations about flowers, and dresses, and invitations. I keep a running mantra in my head, thanks to a friend — what will make this wedding feel wonderful to you? I repeat myself often to everyone’s frustration.

I have an Aunt who now has known five generations of women in my family. One of my favorite conversations with her over a cup of tea sitting in front of her bay windows wreathed in rangy red geraniums is listing them off and commingling our memories. My Aunt was a young adult when I was five years old yet our memories of Anma, my great-grandmother, her grandmother, are not dissimilar. As the eaglets fly outside the picture window and the sea lions dive for fish in Puget Sound just beyond our chairs, I never cease to be amazed how our ages evaporate as we laugh over these women, how pulling the thread of family and time tighter between us makes me so incredibly happy.

How do I pull the thread tight as our family marches towards the next phase, a new man at the table, new holiday traditions? My son watches us as we role model as sisters, mothers, daughters, women. I want all of them to be able to pull that thread tight in the years to come — with or without me — to laugh at the memories, to remember shopping for the wedding dresses, the successes or disasters of our first holidays as a new family. Our favorite colors. How we stayed in touch.

In the middle of the night I am filled with a fierceness that keeps me awake until the birds begin to sing. How do I make this feel right for all of us?

I want them to remember all the quirks and failures and fabulousness like my Aunt and I share together. I want to rub their bellies and swat the hands of strangers away. I want to welcome my son’s partner into our quirky house and applaud her for jumping into this family of strong women that will soon go back six generations in my memory when babies arrive. I want to rub her belly when the time comes and tell stories about a great-great-grandmother that embroidered the footrest for her swollen feet.

And so we go on. I just have to keep the faith I am a thread that will not break, despite any and all changes. That I cannot control much of anything.

But I will keep saying,

“What do you want to feel so this is the most wonderful day of your life?”

And ignore the eye rolling.

 

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Me and the girls. Canton, NY May 2016

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Holding Space

This article on holding space hits home. After holding space for so many family members, friends and strangers with my hospice volunteer work, I am reminded that there is nothing easy but everything rewarding by giving the gift of holding space for people who need us. Occasionally, I like to post something I have not written but would like to share with my readers.  Thanks again to Ann Teplick, here is this.

What it Really Means to Hold Space for Someone

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Blessings.

This morning at six I sipped tea and checked my phone, gearing up for the last seven hour trip up to St. Lawrence University to celebrate our family’s last college graduate. This was the poem of the day on The Writer’s Almanac. My cup runneth over. Enough said.

 

Blessings
by Ronald Wallace

 

occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.

All around me people
are making silk purses
out of sows’ ears,
getting blood from turnips,
building Rome in a day.
There’s a business
like show business.
There’s something new
under the sun.

Some days misery
no longer loves company;
it puts itself out of its.
There’s rest for the weary.
There’s turning back.
There are guarantees.
I can be serious.
I can mean that.
You can quite
put your finger on it.

Some days I know
I am long for this world.
I can go home again.
And when I go
I can
take it with me.

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WITS Voices: All the Warm Night, Sleep in Moonlight

By Ann Teplick, WITS Writer-in-Residence Sleep in a field of salmon peonies. A rooftop with saxophone jazz. A sand dune with peacocks. All the warm night, sleep by the creek with its burble, the sh…

Source: WITS Voices: All the Warm Night, Sleep in Moonlight

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Here it comes.

 

Twenty-nine years ago and nine months after my mother had died from ovarian cancer I closed my eyes, gave a final push and became a mother. An hour later, her Dad out making phone calls, the little pink bundle tucked into the crook of my arm, I listened to the joyful racket outside my hospital door — new grandparents, nurses, flower deliveries, baby deliveries, laughter. My room was silent and my heart broke into a million pieces.

I cried hard that day, dropping tears all over this newborn; messy, snotty salty tears of loss and love and blessing and disbelief. My mother was not going to walk though that door, swooping up my baby, crying tears of happiness. She never would. But there I was, given a new life in my arms to cherish. I was so overwhelmed by the roiling emotions inside me, by the incredible magic of lost and found.

And so, one of the loneliest days of my life was the day I was never lonely again.

Here it comes, another Mother’s Day. On Sunday I will brace myself for the rapid-fire emotions — remembering who is not here, feeling that familiar little break in my chest, but smiling, thinking how amazing that my eldest carries her name, how my son has her blue eyes, and how my youngest laughs just like her. These days, with all of us far flung, I will lie back, drink tea, and think about the phone calls and the updates I will get over the phone. I might spend the day in my gardens, filled with decades of Mother’s Day peonies and roses, trimming and fertilizing and staking them up for the impending growing season. I will embrace the sadness and dig deep for the future as I do every year. And this year, I will be thinking about that little pink bundle and her wedding. I will probably cry a little bit and take a beach walk. I will say a prayer.

There is no question I am a little moody, a little tender on the second Sunday in May every year, spending time alone to contemplate.  But I am so full of grateful, too: mothering brought me life and love and peace. And so, with every bitter comes sweet. That is just what life is all about.

We never lose our mothers, they swim in our veins and camp in our hearts and are always there to talk to. Trust me. Mine can visit in the linen closet. We are full of them, every single day, every single minute. Missing them, loving them, wanting them and seeing them run by in little footed pajamas. They never really leave us, they just leave the room.

Look what I got, Mom. Aren’t they just beautiful?

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Alexandra Dane and Alexandra Hammer 1960. Milford, Connecticut

 

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Filled to the Brim.

 

Yesterday I worked in the gardens for six hours, sinking my hands into the dirt, chatting with the cardinals, whisking compost off Olive’s beard, planting tightly-closed plants and tipping my face up to the warmth.  The sun, the birdsong and the simple tasks disconnected me from my head. I needed this.

In brief, a lot has happened in the last twenty-eight days, most of it unimaginable:  I kissed a friend good-bye for the last time. I received a call from a young man asking to marry my oldest daughter. I prepare to graduate my youngest from college. I attended my very last family lacrosse game after twenty years on the sidelines. Sometimes I felt I couldn’t catch my breath.

Have I taken this all in stride? On one hand, there is a hole in my heart the size of Kansas, the loss of my friend from ovarian cancer inconceivable. On the other hand, the love pouring into me from her family, friends and mere acquaintances has filled me to the brim. And while the sadness running out of me has left me wrung out, proposals and wedding plans smack me on the side of the head, reminding me that our lifelines go on, and on, and on, and I am full of joy and happiness AND sadness — a nest of words and emotions exploding in my head and heart.

So there I was, pruning roses and teary, illogically wishing I could call my mother, dead thirty years ago, to tell her all the amazing news and this popped up on my phone screen from a friend:

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And I realized, as the sparrows squabbled overhead and the earthworms wriggled below, that there is truly always more room in my heart, that hearts are made to expand —  to have and to hold, to hug and to cherish, to grieve and remember, to love and to lose.

How lucky am I to have all these memories and all this emotion. I am filled to the brim. And yet? There is room for more.

Bring it on.

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Tasting Memory: A Night of Paella.

 

Paella night

By the grill, Bainbridge Island, Washington, April 2016

Last weekend I poured a blood colored Spanish into my glass and watched the seals slip through the borage blue water. Behind me, the cast iron pans slid onto the grill suspended over smoldering hardwood coals as a pair of eagles flew screaming into the evergreens above. The familiar hiss and cackle of arborio rice and garlic stirred hard into the hot oil drew our crowd of family and friends, dressed in a kaleidoscope of Seattle April attire — white linen, puffy vests, scarves, caps — away from the sunset on Mt. Rainier to watch the chef. I can map my fifty-seven years by paella: so many paellas in Connecticut, all the paellas in Boston, one amazing paella in Madrid and tonight, a Pacific Northwest paella on Bainbridge Island, overlooking Puget Sound. A dish of summer. A dish of layers. Tonight, a simmering pan of memories.

My mother’s best friend always made my childhood paellas, gathering her ingredients from the Boston fish market on the edge of the Quincy market. She would arrive at our door in Connecticut arms laden with paper-taped bundles of shellfish, flat fish, fish with eyes, peppers with stems, chicken with pin feathers not quite plucked. We would dance around the grill ducking flakes of ash while she layered the ingredients into the expanding rice, fragrant steam rising, the pan nestled into a homemade grill of rock and coals outside the kitchen door. As the eyes of the small smelt laid last on top began to bulge and bubble, we would shriek and run, fast on bare feet, into the darkening light.

1973 in Madrid: Visiting family that hosted my mother decades before, garlic and saffron and smoked paprika as intense as the language flying around me, the fish chopped apart next to the grill, the heads tossed to the cats milling under the tables. Course chorizo flecked with fat sizzled and jumped. I leaned over the pan, trying to be the sophisticated teenager and inhaled smoke straight up my nose. Feigning a deep drink of the unfamiliar sangria, I flicked the tears away with my sleeve, the night soon a blur for too much fruity wine. That week, I hand-carried a cast iron paella pan home to the States, a gift from this family that loved my mother, wrapped in brown paper and tied with butcher twine.

Then in Boston, married, small children, little fingers tossing the chicken, the peas, holding the youngest over the pan so she could place the red peppers in her pattern of choice. Small dresses danced on the lawn and gin and tonic rattled in glasses. Over the next thirty years we adopted some of the old ways, added some of our own. We used more saffron.The oysters and clams were farmed by a cousin from Vineyard sound. There were allergies, and vegetarians, and paellas in the rain.

And last summer: My son bent over the grill, the flat wide spoon that stirred a hundred paella before in his hand. I watched him measure and stir the rice, the garlic, the saffron,  carefully laying the fish, the chicken, the blue mussels, the redolent chorizo, each ingredient nestled into the deeply oiled pan, this pan older than he is, the hardest grains first, the tenderest flesh last. His father standing nearby, passing on each step learned from this deep history of paella, places and hands; the steps learned from the one who has died, who had learned from a Spanish beauty, who had cooked for the one who now sits on our patio, our guest of honor, my mother’s friend who stirred the rice on the rocks while fireflies danced so long ago. She pulls a sweater close, drinks a small sherry and smiles. Memories laid down one by one into the pan, hands reaching back in time.

And here, on Bainbridge Island: New friends and old family. Fresh Halibut and mussels from the Sound. A child who waves a whisk and runs to watch for Orcas. A mountain as old and as stately as the first peasant paella, thrown together from leftovers. We carry the traditions, we change the traditions, we taste our past and adjust the flavors for our future.

Such is cooking. Such is life.

I dig the spoon deep into the chicken fattened rice and remember.

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I have an unusual relationship with chairs.

Forty years ago, after falling off a horse and bodily taking down a post + rail jump, I was x-rayed (pre-MRI days) and was diagnosed with a cracked vertebrae. Twenty years later, countless MRI’s, three herniated discs and three children later, I had the cutting-edge surgery that stabilized my L-3, 4 and 5. But for four decades, I have had to adjust to a very different center of gravity.

Which leads me to chairs. And life.

I sit on the edge. Otherwise, my left leg goes to sleep or my sciatica barks. The trick is to sit at a certain angle, with butt bones hard against the edge, feet planted flat, straight upright. No slouching for me. In restaurants I make a beeline to the seat against the wall so I don’t trip the wait staff. At home, a very odd assortment of hard backed chairs, usually designated to the kitchen table or hallway are my choice for movies. In the kitchen I mostly stand. On airplanes I suffer and fight tooth and nail to book an aisle seat for stretching breaks.

Sometimes at dinner parties I switch the placecards.

I have to make demands for the best arrangement and be fearless about getting my way. So I don’t suffer. So those around me enjoy my company. Apply a little fearlessness so I can accommodate this alternative center of gravity and find peace.

Today, I worry for a friend and feel a sense of vertigo. I find myself on the edge of a high-backed red stained wooden chair, perched, searching for fearlessness, to find my center of gravity and core of faith. I watch my bird feeder teeming with birds and cast a prayer out to my friend, her family and the doctors that make her care team who are making difficult decisions.

I wish them fearlessness: Because even if no one agrees or you change the seating arrangements, you must sometimes be fearless to make things right.

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Olive prefers the couch.

 

 

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How To Be Fearless

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Leaping.

Today is February 29, 2016. Leap day. I would like to think today was full of activities making this an extra-special extra day in the year — more coffee, walks, decadent chocolate, perhaps  a fresh sumo mandarin orange peeled wide — but the reality is I am presenting my book outline on Thursday. This will be a bonus day of work, moving post-its and staring out the window contemplating words until the letters twitch. And besides, the rain is pouring down.

Food keeps sneaking into my story, my narrator escaping into the kitchen and baking  gingerbread and soft-curd scrambled eggs, furtively eating entire boxes of chocolate, skimming the crackling fat off roast beef. I feign and block this diversion and intrusion daily; this isn’t a food story, this is a coming-of-age during the worst of times story! Just eat and move on!

But for my writing group this week I gave in, set the scene where it belonged in the kitchen, where spices and thick batter filled the house with scented memories, where four generations of women kept me company in the kitchen while I baked from the recipe they passed down to me, written on a yellowed slip of stationary. Recognized that the square pan of moist crumb was essential for me on the last week of my mother’s illness as much as wine, friends or sleep.

The more we write the more this happens, the pull of the senses, the surprise at the end of the page. Just like I cannot leave out my brother in my story, I cannot leave out the intricate layers of pleasure that were necessary to survive the trauma of 1982-1986. As my mother slowly died, I lived by slipping into the kitchen and more. That is the complicated equation of  survival.

Today I will peel a thick skinned orange while standing up over my writing table, look out the watery windows, and later, make cream scones for tea. And remember. There is no stopping these memories leaping from heart and pencil.

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My father, Richard Grave, eating scones and eggs  under the Shagbark hickory tree.  1981

 

 

 

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Party on.

A few minutes ago I did the unthinkable. I changed my political party.

Politics have always been a hot button issue for me in different ways than most other people. I was the granddaughter of Senator Lucy T. Hammer, Republican, Connecticut. I attended rallies young enough to get bounced on Senator Lowell Weicker’s knee, sat at endless chicken dinners with my white gloves tucked under my thigh, stumped with her at county fairs handing out expandable sponges that read, in large black letters, Vote For Lucy T. Hammer!

She was larger than life, all five feet of her, the wife of a small-town factory owner who wanted to make a difference. Politics were the only topic of discussion at the dinner table: Political squabbles, bills for education (her passion), the upstarts on the House floor, the ones who had promise (“this new man Lieberman will go a long way,” she had exclaimed one September). We were all Republicans and there was no other option.

And just like I promised her I would never, ever, take her from her home and put her in a nursing home, I promised her that I was Republican for life.

So I have played a little cat and mouse game at dinner parties over the last three decades, championing who I agreed with but skirting the party issue, claiming independence. All the while gone cold in my heart that she would somehow hear me lean towards the ultimate disloyalty — lose faith in all that she believed in and championed. All things Republican.

But today, would she agree?

I don’t know that, but I do know I cannot skulk into the voting booth and see Republican next to my name another year. Not with the rotten whiff of Donald Trump’s cologne exuding from the newspaper pages. Not with the Republican Party’s inability to be non-partisan and represent common, basic human understanding regarding abortion, immigration, and education.

I would like to think this afternoon Lucy T. Hammer is applauding me, that she is as disgusted about her party as I am. But just like I had to ultimately move her to live near me in an assisted living facility for the last three years of her life to keep her safe, I had to change my political party to keep my politics safe. And as my finger hovered over the ‘send’ button on my computer, I had to reassure myself that deeply and truly, I was preserving her legacy of fairness and integrity with my decision.

Hello, Democrats. Let’s party.

LTH

Alexandra Dane, Benjamin Cornell and Lucy T. Hammer, photo shoot, 1969.

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