I recently spoke at a woman’s retreat on the subject of contentment: a tough subject for most of us. Our gathering was small, about thirty five women in all. Yet it was exactly right. One by one, we opened closed doors and introduced each other to the person hiding behind them. One by one we admitted to the discontent in our lives and of the challenges we face daily in accepting life as it is. The decision to be content is as life altering as the decision to love. And yes, it is a decision. Does the honeymoon go on forever? Do the babies have that wonderful smell, that sweet fuzzy head, those eyes of shear adornment all the days of their lives? Do our strong young bodies stay the same, regardless? Because we have no choice in the matter, we struggle to accept these changes with grace. The only choice we really do have is in how we, as women, chose to react to them. I’ll never forget the day I realized I was no longer the object of mens admiring eyes. My daughter was. It was literally shocking to me. She was blossoming into quite a beauty and…
Month: February 2013
Wine in a Box
It was late July or early August and we were all at the lake, hanging out at the old cabin. It was just past sunset – that time of day when everything cools off and those familiar night sounds begin to echo from the surface of still waters. There was always a damp earthiness that filled our senses reminding us that we were part of a unique environment, tied closely to nature. We could hear them talking and laughing, our mothers, the ones we were at that moment uneasy about. It was getting darker by the minute and as we paced the length of the small beach we wondered about their unusual behavior. Shadows from the thick forest of evergreens kept the little paddle boat they were in well hidden. The two sisters, paddling around the shoreline of our mountain lake, laughing and talking and drinking wine from a box they’d brought with them. They didn’t normally do these things, drink wine in a paddle boat in the dark, that is. They were normally home, waiting on all of us kids, making sure we were safe and in sight. Finally, we spotted the small boat in the moonlight heading towards…
The Neighbor Girls
When we first moved to the island our next door neighbor was probably close to ninety years old. She loved us because we sat out on our deck in the evenings with a glass of wine just as she did. We were kindred spirits, she would say. As that first summer in our little beach house fell into place, we were introduced to each of her eight children as they came to visit her and her husband on those glorious sunny days. Standing in the corner of her deck, so as to get as close as she could, Veronica would holler, “Mary Ann? Are you there?” I would step out of my little cabin and greet her. Then she would tell me, “I want you to meet Ronnie. She will be here in an hour.” “Okay,” I’d say. “Just holler when she gets here.” This is how I came to know her four daughters. Sometimes she would forget that we’d met and she would call me up from the beach or out of my cabin to meet one of them or one of her many grand-daughters, for a second or even a third time. Veronica didn’t live more than…
Sister-friends
When I was growing up, I had one sister four years older and the other one twelve years younger, therefore I looked to my neighborhood for a suitable sister-friend. I found one in my neighborhood playmate, Karen. She and I were closest during the “dress-up” years. We loved it. Karen had a “dress-up” box containing all sorts of fancy clothes her mother and older sisters no longer wanted. Best of all, of course, were the high heels. We put on anything and everything found in the box, added hats and gloves, and then the grand finale – the high heels. Now, our feet were small and the shoes were far too large so we stuffed socks in the toes in order to keep them on. Then we would stuff socks in our shirts so we could have boobs. Sometimes, she’d have a tube of lipstick from one of her sisters and we’d put it all around our mouths and smile, getting it on our teeth. Now, we didn’t want to let this all go to waste, so we’d wobble around the neighborhood to be noticed. One day we had an idea. We decided to call on a particular neighbor who…