MountainMornings

As most of you already know, I started this here blogging thing to help me make sense of my daughter, the Bride’s wedding. Like any good writer, I kept at it long after the last bill was paid. Managing not to even mention a certain Royal Wedding that just took place across the pond, while tornadoes and now floods here at home became footnotes to the Royal Couple’s honeymoon plans. Well, this morning I awoke to the news that the Governor and First Lady of California are separating. Maria Shriver, niece of JFK, is a part of the family we Americans call home-grown royalty…and now she’s joining the ranks of the Baby Boomer’s final hurrah – the Grey Divorce (pronounced ‘dee-vor-say’).

The single largest age group with increasing divorce statistics, Boomers ranging in age from 45 to 65, have never done things the conventional way. After all, we participated in Love-Ins, pushed for the Pill, and dared to institute the “No-Fault” divorce, aka irreconcilable differences. Before us, women had to prove their man was a philanderer or a wife-beater to break free. Now, marriage is on the decline and grey divorce is on the incline, what’s happening here?

My first clue about this trend was the Tipper and Al Gore break-up. People married for 30 plus years are calling it quits for a variety of different reasons: women’s financial independence; we’re living longer and were never meant to be monogamous, like geese; and wait for it, one day after the kids leave home, we turn to each other and ask the age old question, “Who are you?” My in-Laws have been married for thirty years, the Bride was their Flower Girl. They found love later in life; the widower (H) found A after a messy divorce. A is still a marriage and family counselor, at age 87; and H is a woodcarver, a WWII veteran who used to be a Baptist missionary and pastoral counselor. Here he is at the Bride’s wedding rehearsal.

H - Grandpa and Officiant

I don’t need to ask them what they’re doing tonight. They’ll be meeting their friends for pot pie at a diner, cause that’s what they do on Tuesdays. Growing old gracefully takes tending, just like friends or a garden or a marriage.

Born in 1908, Gertrude Smith was a flapper. Barely 5’2” tall, her blonde hair was neatly combed into a Marcel wave ending just below her ear. She told me once or twice, that when she was young she was a “rebel.” Her ancestors were Irish coal-miners, who settled in Scranton, PA. She was widowed three times. I was her last child, and these are some of the things she taught me.

“Signs are for sheep.” My Mother could always find her way in, around, over  or under a problem. She encouraged us to think for ourselves, never to take “No” for an answer, and to always hit back harder when faced with a bully. She did not suffer fools at all. When Nell and my Mother first met as teens, she was sporting a black eye. When asked how she got it, Nell said, “Your Mother could swear like a sailor.”

“I’ll not only walk again, I’ll dance.” After losing her husband to a brain  tumor, and surviving the car accident that sent me to live with Nell, this is what she had to say to her doctors. The engine of the car had crushed her beautiful dancer’s legs. The legs that had won many a late night contest with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. There would be no wheelchair in her future.

“Fine, all the more for the rest of us.” This was said whenever I refused to eat something. Mother believed in reverse psychology; this was her parental mantra. Surprisingly, it worked. Watching my brothers and sister chow down with glee always made me rethink my decision. Nell made me finish everything on my plate, which I hated. With apparent indifference, Mother gave me permission to control my own life; and maybe saved me from an eating disorder?

“You are in your perfect place.” A big believer in Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (this came in her later, post-Freudian years), Mother would hang a picture of something she wanted on the refrigerator.  Inevitably, she’d get it. She talked about the science of the mind and eventually became a big muckity muck in the Unity church. I knew she hated most organized religions, so this was puzzling to me. But in the end, I believe the combination of spirituality and psychiatry brought her a certain peace.

“When they’re in here, I’m their Mother. When they’re outside , they’re in God’s hands.” Having six children may foster this type of thinking – it is the antithesis of helicopter parenting, necessary for survival mode parenting. Once as young wives, Nell was having coffee in the dining room with Mother and saw my older brother Mike teetering on the porch rail, over a 30′ drop to the back yard. This was her reply, looking serenely at Mike out the bay window, to my nearly panicked foster mother. You might say I benefited from the Yin and the Yang of motherhood.

Happy Mother's Day, I still miss you.

Met our Bride’s Chef Mark of L’Etoile for mint pea soup; found Marie’s best biscuits; and filled a tray with Mother’s Day flowers for my planters. Life is Good!

Collen Davis came to town today. It just so happens that Mimi Hyde, the owner of our local yarn shop, The Needle Lady, spotted Colleen at a conference in Atlanta last month. She recognized her by her sweater, of course. And since the famous free-style designer from San Diego would be visiting her daughter in Richmond over Mother’s Day weekend, well, one thing led to another. Here is Mimi modeling a Colleen Davis original.

Colleen told us that it all starts with color for her, “…color, color, color!” Although she’d been knitting since she was a girl, she started playing with yarn in a creative way after taking a class in 1996 on a Japanese style of dressmaking. Wanting to use up her stash of odds and ends and “…try something new,” she thought she could knit in a modular way, with color as her muse.  I was enthralled, really no patterns? Her inspiration might come from nature, or a building, or a layout in a magazine. Baskets of yarn are organized by color in her studio helping to create the free-form, butterfly effects of her beautiful sweaters.

Some of Colleen’s designs look like stained glass, and others look like a babbling stream. It’s as if someone just opened up a box of fingerpaints and said, “Go at it, have fun!” She told us that free-form knitting cannot be written down; and that “…gauge is a naughty word.” I felt my inner creative child was about to be given a permission slip! What a treasure. Here is her website:  http://www.toboldlyknit.com/ And here is Nicky, the mascot of the best little yarn shop in Virginia; thanks Mimi!

Thought you may want to see my first attempt, last year, at knitting a cable (also a first) scarf from the heavenly alpaca wool of my friend, Rivanna River Farmer, and neighbor, DeeDee!