A few years ago, I came home and found this in the bathroom:
No one could accuse my daughter of not being resourceful.
The toilet wouldn’t stop running, so she repurposed a shoe.
Okay, maybe it was Aunt Jeannie’s shoe that she left at our house, but it was a shoe nobody was wearing and it did the trick. (Warning to visitors: don’t leave your shoes at our house.)
I’m not sure which I like more, the shoe holding the float up or the sign.
I debated about using photos of my children in sports.
Swimming, tennis, soccer, and diving all have their graceful moments.
graceful bubbles?graceful kick?
I also have little ballerina pictures. Ballerinas are the embodiment of grace.
Mine is the one trying to curtsey.
But I knew immediately which photo spoke grace to me. The trouble was finding it.
It was a picture of my father taking care of my mother.
Not this one
He visited her every day. Twice a day. He fed her. He pushed her wheelchair on walks.
or even this one
This was after my brother passed away. He went to tell her the news that her oldest child had died of a heart attack. Because of her dementia, she couldn’t understand, and he had to repeat the painful words over and over. It broke my heart. His grief was doubled because she was unable to share it.
But her bore it.
The graceful picture I thought of was this one. It may not be the best picture, but it was a special moment.
My mother was in the hospital and my father brushed her hair for her.
Mothers brush other people’s hair all the time — sometimes even adding a little spit to do the trick. Of course, I never did that — added spit, I mean.
But this was new territory for my father. He was a little clumsy doing it. But he wanted her to be cared for, and he wanted to be the one to do it.
So he did the best he could to brush her wayward hair into place.
And it was an act that was full, very full, of grace.
“Can I rearrange this room?” “Fred” asked a couple of days before Christmas.
“Sure,” I said. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to move the Christmas tree,” he said, “and, I don’t know, I need to think about it. But the feng shui in this room is all wrong.”
“You can’t move the Christmas tree,” I said. “It stays by the sliding door so people driving past the house can see the lights.”
I told Bud about it later.
“Who’s Frank Schwa?” he asked.
How do I explain feng shui, the harmony in a room, to man who had hoed out so much junk just to make this room usable?
The family room, as we called it, had become a depository — first for the boxes that we moved out of my brother’s apartment after he passed away, then for the boxes and furniture we moved when we rearranged to make space for a downstairs bedroom and bathroom for my father, and finally for the boxes that we moved home from the nursing home after my mother passed away.
Maybe the feng shui was all wrong.
Maybe the “flow” didn’t work.
But there’s a level of comfort in that same orange loveseat being in the same spot through the years.
My grandparents — Christmas 1979Christmas 1999Christmas 2009
I confess — we moved it this year, though. Not because of feng shui, but to make room for a smart TV.
The focal point still is, and always has been, the fireplace.
I think Frank Schwa would approve.
The ambience, the aesthetic appeal — both are present in its friendly warmth.
Even more important to me, though, are the people who fill the room.
I was reading another person’s post on Facebook that contained a list of questions parents can ask their children to get funny answers.
I knew I was in trouble when Mary answered, “I’ve suddenly forgotten everything you’ve ever said.”
“Really?” I asked.
“My mind just goes blank sometimes,” she said. “Once in geometry class, the teacher asked me a question and I told that I had just forgotten everything I ever knew about angles. She thought that was pretty funny.”
Mary’s answers revealed that she recognized my penchant for coffee.
Q: What makes me happy?
A: Coffee.
Q: What makes me unhappy?
A: Lack of coffee.
Q: What’s my favorite food?
A: Is coffee considered a food?
And that she understood how important home is to me
Q: If I could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?
A: Home
But one answer definitely needed more explanation.
Q: What’s my favorite thing to do?
A: Cut pictures out of children’s books
Yes, this is true. But it may not be exactly as it sounds.
I’ve been playing with collage, and using old picture books — the ones with pages falling out, or colored on, or ripped — and cutting out the pictures to use in my collages.
For Christmas, our place holders didn’t have names on them, just pictures that made me think of that person. To make 20 place-cards required a lot of pictures. Mary watched me spend a lot of time snipping. And she saw me get excited whenever I found a beat-up copy of a favorite book.
Some of my cut-out pictures have made their way onto cards. Quirky cards, at best. The possibilities are infinite when combining children’s books.
A dear friend (and recipient of one of these strange cards) sent me a stamp so I can add my name to the back of the cards and make them official.
To make 20 place-cards required a lot of pictures. Mary watched me spend a lot of time snipping. And she saw me get excited whenever I found a beat-up copy of a favorite book.
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 
