baby love letters

Friday Letters...81

FRESH;

*Excitingly or refreshingly different from what somebody is used to or what has been done previously

*Natural, pure and wholesome,

*Recently harvested or made and showing no sign of staleness or decay.

    

a few of the definitions from Encarta World English Dictionary

"Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up."

Walter Benjamin

It's a fresh start for us this week. I think all of the definitions above apply to our move back home. After 3 years of structurally putting our house back together, we are finally seeing it from a fresh, new perspective. So... FRESH had to be the topic this week.

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Friday Letters...80

"If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera."

Lewis Hine

To spare my children I won't put my favorite images of them on the web.

But I have a picture of two of my grandchildren from a couple weeks ago. Their mother had told me about something that happened the night before and wanted to see if it would occur again, this time in front of my camera.

Picture this:

A dad half way around the world on a work assignment. Add to the mix, a series of NBA playoff games where his hometown team is on tv. Another ingredient: his two little children wanting to be sitting beside their dad during the game.  Enter amazing technology...skype. Now arrange the furniture so the childrens little table is sitting in front of the tv with a chair on top of it. Perched on the chair is a laptop computer tilted at just the right angle so papa, in a far off land, can see the tv. Sitting on two little chairs on either side of the computer, with arms wrapped around the laptop, are his children. Twelve hours apart and yet all together watching the game.

Did I get that snapshot? Sort of...but the words are actually better this time.

Friday Letters...79

"Each moment is a place you've never been."

Mark Strand

My dad was from Sweden and when I was quite young he, my grandfather and uncle took a propellor plane back to their homeland. While there they also spent a few weeks traveling around other parts of Europe.

A few gifts from these far off lands made there way to our home. The tan leather purse that was made of such soft leather it felt like a slowly cooked marshmallow, but without the stickiness. A delicate vase with gold etching, which I managed to break years later while carefully dusting . A cameo bracelet that was so fragile no one ever wore it. And my favorite...the tiny madonna painting that my dad had watched a street vendor paint in Florence.

During college my best friend, Syl, and I took a summer and travelled Europe in the powder blue volkswagen bug we bought at the factory in Germany. Our favorite place was Florence, Italy...we fell in love with a couple Italians and swore it would be our place to return the following summer. But that never happened even though Italian lessons lasted for a few months upon our return and romantic letters were shared for about the same amount of time.

I grew up that summer...became so much more confident in myself...a world traveller.

Not surprising I wanted my children to love Europe like I did.

Friday Letters...78 Happy Mother's Day!

"Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."

Elizabeth Stone

Somehow I always had the feeling that being a mother was a couple decade experience, and somewhere along the road it would morph into a grandparent mode. I have no idea where I picked up this notion. Now having traveled down the road a little farther, for me motherhood gets more expansive as I watch my babies turn into adults and then to mothers and fathers in their own right.

No longer do I have to count to 3 to make sure I know where each child is...and that they are safe and cared for...I'm counting to 12. My heart is now walking around with my children, their spouses (my next set of children) and my grandchildren. Gracious sakes... can you see this continuing to multiply?

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