A Beautiful Weekend of Normal - How Weird!

Sunday night and we are winding down from a lovely, productive, happy weekend - the kind I never dreamed I'd have with a spouse. Never thought I'd have a spouse that I'd have long enough to WANT lovely weekends with. I adore my husband.
Anyway, with that as the backdrop, let me paint my weekend for you:
Saturday morning my sweet husband got outside and built a raised garden bed for me.I had already bought some heirloom tomatoes to plant there and went to Lowe's to get more.

                                           These are my blackberry bushes.
I got Blackberries, eggplant, zuchinni and yellow squash along with another cucmber plant. I also had to get some flowers!

                                          Lantana and begonias having a drink in the sink.
We went to dinner Saturday night at the world'd finest Italian restaurant, Ferrucci, with our friend Dan. He was in town to dismantle an amateur radio tower. He lives near Sarasota and reminds me of a Koala bear. He loves going to Ferrooch (our nickname for the restaurant) as much as we do. If you are ever in Panama City, do yourself a favor and go downtown to Ferrucci. Have the handmade mozzerella appetizer and a bowl of God's own Tomato Soup.

Today we met our son, lovely daughter-in-law and granddaughter for brunch.

                      Decisions, decisions! Do I eat the lemon slice or another cheese cube?
Her hair is long enough to hang in her face but not long enough to tuck behind her ears so the Cindy Lou Hoo look is the coiffure of choice these days. I love that Dr. Seuss is the Vogue magazine for the under 3 set:)
She likes to eat and walk and have faces made at her. I think I have taught her to bat her eyelashes. I fluttered mine at her to see if I could get a giggle and instead got a stern look followed by a very deliberate blink. She is a very attentive child; the people around her aren't just occasionally amusing flesh-trees but creatures to be studied. There are new tricks to learn, new things to teach her body to do - like eyelash-fluttering:)

           This is her "I am most displeased that you have taken the bag of cheese cubes, Mommy" look.
We ate on the outdoor patio-like area so we could see the bay. Jacque wanted to walk without an adult holding her hand so her Granddaddy and I obliged her. This meant, of course, that we were bent over nearly double so that we could be sure her little feet didn't encounter any dangers that might lead to skint knees and sobs.
The kids are really good, calm parents. Heather (my DIL) has given her curly-lipped smile to Jacque and her whole face changes when she grins. She smiles that smile herself when she tells Jacque to "sit on your bottom, you know you're not supposed to walk on the table."
Chad, like his daddy, is a big bear of a man and when he holds Jacque she looks like a doll. When Charlie holds her the non-verbal communication begins. They look into each others' eyes and nod and then begin making raspberry noises.

After brunch we drove back to town and did the necessary errands for dinner to happen, watched the rest of a movie, and I planted some of my vegetables in the garden. We had Greek Spaghetti for dinner. I was feeling so happy and geeky about being so goofily happy that I looked at my husband and said "I think this was a very good weekend."
He raised his eyebrows, his "really? why?" face in place and I looked into his light blue-green eyes and said "I am happy. Not about just one particular thing, just happy."
He said "Good. You're supposed to be happy."

Isn't that a nice thing to be told by someone you love, who loves you?

My legs are brown!

I got back from the tanning salon this afternoon and realized I had allowed myself to be seen in public in a pair of shorts for the first time in I don't know how many years. My legs are brown and look quite nice!

Let me back up - about a week ago, after several weeks of consideration, I joined a tanning club. My fair, freckly skin has been protected for about the past ten years by determined sun avoidance. I love the feel of the sun on my skin and have felt deprived over these years but reminded myself that this exercise would keep my skin young.

Well, I am going to spend a week on some beach with my mom in June and decided I'd like to enjoy the sun rather than fearfully spackle myself with SPF 50 whitewash. I want to walk in the sun without fear of burning, smile at the sky with a golden face and enjoy the warmth of summer on my skin.

I have dutifully applied the proper products and gradually added to my minutes in the tanning bed and my legs are now a very pretty, healthy-looking tan. I am ready to wear dresses again, and skirts! No pantyhose, ever!

The heat and the sun, they free me - and in my mother's presence, I am renewed...

Thursday I left my west Florida town to drive to my mom's house on the farm, south and east of here in a part of the state where the earth is rich and palms grow alongside oaks.

I was tired, mentally and physically, and just needed to be with my Mama. Anti-anxiety pills, visualization and meditation can only do so much. I've watered my garden, talked to my plants and sung to my kittens and cats. Even the solid comfort of my husband's company can't polish the rough spots of my soul that are smoothed and soothed by being in my mother's presence.

The further east I go the richer the fragrance of the soil becomes and the healthier the shade of green of the wild growth along the roadside. I take the back way to the farm down two-lane roads to avoid traffic and see the water-meadows, full now of reedy weeds with yellow pom-pom heads, and the road-side stands selling tomatoes and melons. The last of the two-lane roads before US 19/27 is used so little that the asphalt has shifted and cracked along the pollen-yellow center line and allowed a tiny patch of grass to sprout.

The road leading to Mama's bright, happy house winds over a hill and past a pond, often past pigs grazing on the right of way under the watchful eye of a billygoat. They belong to my uncle and are probably the most relaxed livestock in the Southeast.

She greets me in the driveway and we drag all of my pack-for-two-weeks-for-three-days stuff into the house, passing the stinky black lab and lazy farm cats up the garage stairs and into the kitchen. A little tiny grey kitten is staggering across the floor of the garage and Mama says that it is the only surviving member of Princess' last litter; Princess is a long-limbed black and white beauty who has been (up to this point) a very good mother. Princess won't nurse this baby.

We bring the baby in and take turns holding and feeding her with a small syringe, talking all the time of what we'll do next, where we'll go, what is happening with family, all comforting topics and I feel my neck muscles loosen for the first time in weeks.

We spend the next few days tumbling from the farm to town to my favorite aunt's house, feeding the kitten (who sleeps in a snuggie bed at the bottom of my bed), talking and laughing. Mama is so easy to be with, open and loving and sharing. Her grace is everywhere and she believes that Princess will go back to being a good mother and at least groom the baby. She will groom, but roughly so we bring the little thing back into the house.

The sun is high and strong everywhere we go and the heat in some places is stifling. We go to a place Mama and Aunt KayKay call "The Place with Pretty Stuff." I don't think it even has a real name. It is a couple of acres just off the highway with a blacktop apron full of cement statuary and metal sculptures and two large metal buildings with no A/C or fans but stacked with fascinating merchandise.
Mama wants me to pick a sink from the vibrantly patterned collection in the first building. The sinks are from Mexico and painted ceramics; most are a palette of flowers, some are dominated by sunflowers or tropical fish. I am drawn to one with pale blue calla lillies on a darker blue, a simple pattern with touches of matte gold and buff. Peaceful.
Mama and KayKay are clearly surprised, it almost seems as if bets were taken as to which I'd choose:)
KayKay pushes the sink I've mentally dubbed "flowerpower" for the rainbow colored flowers and their flow from one to another. "I thought you'd like this one, it looks like your plates from your first wedding!"

I say, "No, that's who I was then. This is who I have become."
And that's true. I was once a wild melange of red and orange and purple and green and a yellow that would hurt the eye. I've changed, found who I should be, and I am much more peaceful. There is still some yellow in me but it is the soft yellow of fresh butter, sometimes even the icy yellow of a cut lemon, but I am mostly blue and green.
When I am feeling best I am the color of a richly blue summer sky wrapped around the deep green of spring pine-needles. I had dulled down to the occasional fitful grey-blue of February skies and no green at all before I went to see Mama.
We walked across the lot, Mama in her sun hat and the rest of us bare-headed and only me fair enough to be in danger of burning or fainting from heat. At least as far as Mama is concerned. I am still her baby even on the shady side of 40 and that is a comforting thought at any time.
The salesman wants to show me everything and talk the whole while. He knows where every breeze pops in the complex. Mama catches him talking to me at the back of the first building, me between a power pole and the building's corner. He said there was always a breeze there and the prevailing winds proved him true.
The wind snatched my damp hair from my neck and sent it out like a flag behind me.
I was still growing redder from the direct sun and I think Mama could feel my skin heating even from ten feet away. I was happy - hot sun overhead, heated air around and a breeze to keep my hair moving.

"Sweetheart, you need to come into the shade before you faint."
It was so very hot, and her words were sent with the warmth of love, but they splashed on me like the cool water from the porch spigot at the old farm house.

I love the heat, its depth and thickness; the wealth offered by the sun to my skin and my self, and the cool places my mother provides when the heat is too great for me, when being a grown-up is just too hard.

We kept sharing the feeding and petting of little Possum kitty, so named for her genrally odd appearance and, in my case, in hope that an ugly name would drive the bad spirits away from stealing her. She can't hold her head up too well and walks like a drunk so she needs as much Mama attention as she can get.

I drove back west today with a full heart and a smooth sould. My fingers always want to add a 'd' to "soul" so there must be a reason. Maybe I have a 'sould,' a sun-soaked vitamin-d soul instead of the garden variety white bible toting soul:)
I came home with the happiness I'd been missing.
It's the stuff that lets me do laundry with a good attitude, read deadly dull work crap so I can get to the good stuff that makes me think (it's like shelling nuts, the work to get to the good).
I am happy, peacefully happy. I plan to walk in the sun again tomorrow and to talk to my mother on the phone to soak in some extra food for my heart.

Sometimes a girl just needs her Mama.

The Smell of the Gulf, the smell of the sun

There were a few patches of shade today in the parking lot at the former motel restaurant I stopped for lunch. The old bay side hotel had been converted to housing for Visa workers who did house-keeping and other jobs at the beach side hotels the man owned.
He's a lot better than other resort owners who stack Eastern European workers in three bedroom rat-holes six to a room and charge them for the pleasure.
The parking lot is rumpled blacktop and I found a pinch of shade beneath a scrub oak.

Today was nice. It was only 91 and the breeze from the bay was steady so I never broke a sweat. As I crossed that lumpy asphalt the smell of salt water and someone's bait and a hint of Coppertone covered me for a few seconds and I wanted to be ten again.
I remember riding on the beach in the back of somebody's daddy's truck, feeling the effects of the sun on my shoulders and knowing my hair was a big tangle and looking into the rear-view mirror to see how bad it was.
I was beautiful. My pond-scum green eyes were full of fire; sparks of gold and bright green with the colors made bolder by the savage island child color of my face. My hair was a big tangle of white sand-colored strands mixed into the usual pine-straw red.
When I left the restaurant a skinny laughing woman in a floppy t-shirt and shorts passed me on her way in with her man. She looked like my youngest aunt for a second with long hair hanging over her shoulders like a girl on a 70's album cover.
I wanted to call my aunt and see if I could drive down right then to go to the beach and go crabbing with her and collect the best sunburn we could in a few hours.
I let that daydream tumble behind my eyes from the restaurant back to the office, never trying to work the logistics, just enjoying the vision.

I'll be going to spend the weekend with Mama soon so I have decided that we'll snag my aunt, a cooler, a net or 3 and some chicken necks and head to the beach. We'll get too much sun and wear our hair down so the wind can tangle it in knots and lighten it up. We'll smell like Coppertone and beach sand and I know my skin will nearly glow in the dark and feel warm even in the coldest air conditioning.

I'll be happy leaving footprints on the ancestral beach sand with these women who are so important to me. I've always looked at them as ethereal critters whose toes barely touch ground; faeries who dance across flower tops and hardly ruffle a petal, women who are so grounded and deep in what being a true woman is that they ascend the mundane world that I inhabit when I'm not looking.
One day, with much effort, I may be like them.