I was walking at the beach with my daughter and my husband the other day. I was thinking about how big she’d gotten, which led to thoughts of her at different ages throughout the years, and how I received that sign from my dad that I was pregnant with her.
Of course, thinking about one dead relative inevitably (for me) leads to thoughts about other dead relatives. Wells Beach reminds me of Nantasket Beach in the 1970’s, and Nantasket beach reminds me of my grandmother. She always took me to the beach (ocean) when I was growing up, and I always think of her when I am near it, so granted, thoughts of Nana had been hovering there in the back of my mind for the past hour or so.
After we finished our beach walk we went to Forbes to get some lunch. I was telling my husband how I had been trying to get to Forbes all summer but something kept coming up and I never made it. I decided to take it as a sign that it was because I was supposed to be there this day in particular. He smiled at me, indulgently. He is used to me ascribing meaning to things that he does not.
As we were finishing up our lunch, I suddenly became aware of the conversation at the table behind me: “Nana, are you happy here at the beach? You’re an angel!”
I swear to God.
I felt a huge surge of emotion as the tears welled up and spilled forth (zero to 180 in a millisecond!).
I just finished a pretty good book that has an angel subplot: Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt. Check it out!
I don’t know about you, but when I go to the beach, I am most comfortable when almost every inch of me is covered from my chest to oh, say about mid-thigh. Let’s just say that I am a big fan of those skirted bathing suits, which my husband refers to as ‘mommy-suits’ (or in his less charitable moments, suits his grandmother wore).
I wouldn’t have been caught dead at the beach when I was in my early twenties in a bikini, never mind in my (very, very) late forties! So, imagine my surprise when just last week I did exactly that: that thing that I thought I could not do.
That bikini in the photo to your left? Yep. That was on me. And not just in the back yard…I was out in public. At Wells Beach. In the day time.
The secret is this: you must have bikini confidence. Know you look good. Most of us women (I think) have a distorted views of ourselves, how we really look to others. What we see and what our husbands (or significant others) see are two very different things. It’s all about perspective.
State Farm has it wrong about what men want…it’s not a falcon. What a (married) man wants ..is to see his wife at the beach in a bikini!
In the book What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty, she talks about the idea of spacious days.
What a concept!!!!
Mostly, my days feel jam-packed to me, without a moment to spare for anything. That’s how I usually think about them, at least. My to-do list is longer than my arm. I suspect that other mothers feel this way as well, since today I heard my friend Donna (also a mother) say those exact words.
In yoga, spaciousness is sought in your body through postures, in your mind through meditation. I’ve been searching for spaciousness through yoga for 4 years now (I’ll let you know when I find it).
🙂
Four years seems like kind of a long time to me…but as a percentage of my age, it’s not that long really. Could it be that all I really need is an adjustment of perspective?
Back to yoga class: this week, our instructor Kristen happened to mention that there was a period of her life that she would gladly relive, which sparked a conversation among the women in the class on this topic. As some of them mentioned ages that they would be interested in repeating, I did a quick review: high school? No way! Early twenties? No thank you! I soon realized that I couldn’t think of any time period of my life that I would want to live through again, but then I reframed the question: What was a happy memory?
When I asked myself this question, I got a very clear image in my mind. It was in the summer: August 1991. It was in the first apartment that I shared with my husband after we got married. The sun was streaming in through the large windows in the dining room, shining on my infant son, born just a couple of weeks prior. I remember being in that room, gazing at the baby, standing in the sun, and realizing that I’d never been happier than I was at that moment. Twenty years later, I can still stand in that room in my mind’s eye, and still feel that happiness just as strongly as I did that day.
So, I guess time is relative, just ask Einstein. Or Liane Moriarty.
I’m still thinking about my New Year’s Resolution: my one word that morphed into two words: Edit and Focus. After beginning the process of setting up a home office and the necessary decluttering that has come along with that, I am thinking it makes sense to continue the momentum that I’ve got built up and “take it on the road”…er, to the other rooms in the house. (Was that an original thought or did my husband plant it in my subconscious mind? Hmmmmm…..).
At the moment, the clutter that spilled over into my bedroom is reduced but still remains. What I have left to go through includes, but (unfortunately) is not limited to:
Knitting supplies: Patterns, yarn stash, needles and other sundries
A filing cabinet with warranties, extra office supplies, vital records, and infinite other minutiae
DVD’s, and (OMG!) video cassette tapes
All of my writing files, notebooks, journals, project ideas
I’m reading a book that mentions a resource that I was following about five years ago but forgot about: The FlyLady. Ready to get real and get rid of clutter but don’t know where to start? The FlyLady is your gal. Her BabySteps will take you right from square one to the finish line, presumably eradicating your clutter along the way.
My other decluttering activities this month: still parting with some books (one at a time, gifting them to friends), still unsubscribing from automatic emails (this month mostly from foodie ones…yes, it hurts). I’m also trying to bring less clutter into the house in the first place (yes, that’s Bill’s idea). I’m also looking at the clutter surrounding finances (mostly paper files that I’m afraid to part with).
P.S. Yes, I admit it: After I went through the house and retrieved every single book I owned…I found more books. 😦 Sad but true.
My friend Charlotte asked me a question today: ” Who has the best cupcakes?” On the surface, it seems an easy enough question, right? Wrong! I tried to apply my “Keep it simple” philosophy to this question but found I was not able to.
I mean, come on!
So here goes my attempt to answer this question:
Cupcake Fetish Bakery, Main St. in Sanford. which has the best variety and most interesting flavors. Hello, The Elvis? Peanut butter, banana and bacon? Plus Tiramisu, Pink Lemonade, Drop Kick Murphy, Chocolate Kahlua…and I’m barely even getting started here. Plus the store has a little window into the kitchen so you can watch the actual cupcaking process as it happens! And the inside of the shop is decorated with cute cupcake paraphernalia that gives it a very fun atmosphere.
The Village Cupcake, Kennebunk. Owner Kristy Douglas was recently at the Keys to the Kitchen in Kennebunk to giving out cupcake decorating tips. She also brought along some mini cupcakes to sample. SO GOOD! Kristy sells her cupcake wares from her home so if you want to pick up a cupcake on a whim, this will not be your cupcake go-to person…I don’t think. Call her though; maybe she does keep some on hand for when the whimsy hits. Also, they have many interesting flavors (amaretto, hel-LO) and are open to creating new flavors at your request (Green Tea cupcakes? You betcha!). They also offer gluten-free cupcakes. 🙂
Tulips Cupcakery, Portland. These cupcakes can be purchased at Kamasouptra in Monument Square; check the website for other locations to buy. They describe themselves as “from farm to cupcake”, since they are inspired by and use local, seasonal ingredients in their recipes. If you are a person who loves strawberry cupcakes with strawberry frosting but doesn’t want any of those annoying strawberry chunks in the batter–you like ’em smoooooth–then these will be the answer to your strawberry cupcake prayers.
This post covers the above 3 businesses because they are the first 3 that came to mind! Apparently, I’ve never met a cupcake I didn’t like…
🙂
Of course, cupcakes made at home or by friends are really the best of them all!
My friend Susan told me to have a: “Happy Birthday!!! Enjoy the whole day and do what YOU want!!”
My response: “Well, since I’m working it will be hard to DO whatever I want, but instead I’m going to EAT whatever I want!”
🙂
So here goes: Day 2B of “The day I ate whatever I wanted”…I’m starting to fear that this is a slippery slope…better reign it in after today. This is what I did on the actual day.
I decided not to go to the gym so that I could sleep an extra hour. Good decision. I decided not to do any laundry and not to stop to gas up the car. Those things could wait. My mantra for the day: “If it’s not ‘all about me’, I’m not doing it.”
Breakfast: Decided to wait until I got to Portland then sprinted over to the Standard Baking Company (no website, unbelievably) to get a chocolate croissant. Monument Square was packed with dressed up, suited up people at 8am; usually it’s a ghost town on the weekend at that hour. I heard there was some sort of a convention going on which almost made me late for work (reference: “sprinted” to the bakery!).
Note: Around noon I started rethinking the whole shorts thing; may not have been the best idea…it barely made it out of the 50’s in Portland.
I continued to go where the whim took me. I didn’t follow any plan at all. I had two days to celebrate: the day before my birthday with my husband (which was awesome), and the birthday itself, which was kind of the icing on the (cup)cake after Friday.
For lunch, Micucci’s Pizza was a no-brainer. I was in luck too; they were just putting out the slabs of pizza when I ran up the stairs and grabbed one out from under the noses of the slower people assembling boxes to my right. When I ran down to pay I got to say “Hi” to the baker, Stephen Lanzalotta (author of The Diet Code), who was just putting out the fresh cannoli…I resisted, since I had a piece of tiramisu from my son and a chocolate coconut cupcake from Two Fat Cats waiting for me for later on. A colleague at work, Laurie, handed me a chocolate shortbread cookie chaser after lunch, which enabled me to save the cupcake for later.
🙂
Had to miss my regular yoga class (with Kristen of Windsong Yoga) in the morning so I was thrilled when a colleague Mary Ann said “Hey, want to do this yoga dvd with me at 2:00PM?” I just happened to have my mat in the trunk, so that’s what we did.
To balance it all out, I ate half the Micucci’s slab for lunch then had the other half with a salad (with greens from the garden) for supper, followed by the cupcake and my favorite (which is unfortunately seasonal) Keurig coffee that I saved from Christmas: Spicy Eggnog.
When I got home from work at 8:30PM I had a surprise waiting for me: gifts from the kids:
An adapter that allows me to play my MP3 in the car from my son Anthony that I’ve been wanting forever and
A handmade card with 3 dark chocolate covered cherries from my daughter Izzy.
What can I say? My kids know what I like. 🙂 My husband gave me my gift The Day Prior, but actually started it last fall. He got all of the raised beds ready for my fruit and vegetable gardens (not to mention most of the actual planting and watering thereof), and he bought many more lilac bushes for me (my favorite flower) and scattered them around the yard. He knows what I like too. :D.
What better day to do so than on your birthday? That was my thought process anyway. As I started planning my day’s meals ahead of time, I recalled reading about this in a book by Elizabeth Berg, entitled (appropriately) The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted. I was a little disappointed that the whole book wasn’t about this; rather, it was just the title of the first story what turned out to be a book of short stories. Oh well. The book is worth reading for that first story.
I’m interested in seeing how close to the plan the day ends up going, so I’m writing a “Before” and an “After” post.
One of the meals that woman in the story ate was doughnuts (her first stop: breakfast). Not just one doughnut…one DOZEN doughnuts. (Well, she didn’t actually eat all twelve, but you get the idea). I didn’t want to be overstuffed (read: sick) at the beginning of the day!
This would not be conducive to a successful day of Eating Whatever I Want.
So here’s my problem: there are so many options!!! How to narrow it down? Darned if I know.
Breakfast: Amore Breakfast, All Day Breakfast (the one in Kennebunk), Omelette Factory, Congdon’s
Lunch: Anthony’s for tried and true good food. Maria’s for dying to try, rumored to be good food.
Afternoon snack: Bread and Roses for an amazing array of baked treats.
Supper: It’s gotta be Varano’s. My favorite Italian…unless I get Italian for lunch…decisions! One thing is for sure: it is totally all about the food, isnt’ it? At least these decisions are happy ones.
Late evening snack: Big Daddy’s in Wells or Brown’s in York for a Kahlua Brownie ice cream cone.
So, this is the before post. Will write Part 2 tomorrow to account for what I actually did end up doing for my birthday.
April gone and it’s May already? I can’t believe it. It’s barely made it out of the 50’s here before today, for gosh sakes!
I am continuing to EDIT, focusing mainly on my time/schedule right now. I have kept to my resolve not to sign up for any classes or programs or anything since November~ well, except for a writing class. Since it directly related to my goal of finishing my book this year, it seemed a worthy endeavor.
I am finding that my alternate word from March (FOCUS) is in my mind as often as is EDIT…like a true clutter collector, I have managed to make my one word into two. But hey, if it gets me to where I’m going, then it’s all good, right?
I had hoped that I’d be almost finished editing my book by the end of April, but I was only about halfway through. My bookstore owner friend Sheila says that it can take years to edit a book, so I should give myself a break This made me feel better…and worse. Now I’m here at the end of May though, and I’m DONE! YAY!
I have continued to bring in books, magazines, and clothing to put on the ‘free’ table at work, but at a slower rate than I did in March. One good thing is that I have maintained the momentum I had picked up with editing my pantry/fridge/freezer. At least once a week I go through the food stores and make a meal (mostly) from what we have already. Sometimes I might have to purchase one or two items to round things out, but I’m still using up more than I’m bringing in. I think.
I have been multitasking less, but am finding that the less I do, the less I want to do. I’m not feeling more peaceful by doing less, as I’d hoped, but rather am feeling less productive and more stressed. My mission for June will have to be to find a happy medium between frenetic activity and slothful do-nothingness.
When everything around you is falling apart, it can feel like the world is going to end (or maybe you wish that it would). Maybe you’re doing your level best to keep things harmonious in your life, but then somehow you lose your focus for a split second.
You make a bad decision and suddenly all hell breaks loose.
It can feel like vertigo: your surroundings are spinning and you are unable to feel stable despite exercising your strongest proprioceptive abilities. People are saying things that you’d never thought they’d say. Worse, people are saying things that you never thought they’d say to you.
To quote the brilliant, insightful Talking Heads from their song Once In A Lifetime:
“You may ask yourself, what is that beautiful house?/You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?/You may ask yourself, am I right, or am I wrong?/You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?”
So, to paraphrase the illustrious Heads, how did I get here? Why did I do/say/think that? It can all be so confusing when you are in the midst of it. Everything can happen so fast that your head literally spins. What do I do/say/think now? Maybe your body takes over and your breathing changes to rapid gasps. You’re sitting down but don’t remember doing so. And are you rocking? Is this really happening?
Then, amidst the chaos you suddenly become aware of the calm. The calm inside you. And in that space you become aware of a thought forming. That still small voice says:
You have no control over how this will all turn out.
You might think this would be a scary thought to have at a time like this, but for some reason, it is not. Instead, you find that it’s a comfort.
Shanti: “The Peace which passeth understanding.” ~T.S. Eliot from The Waste Land
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that phrase? I’m betting that it will have something to do with a midlife woman navigating the perimenopausal years. It certainly always did for me. Now that I’m in the thick of it, however, I’m realizing that this phrase has multiple layers of meaning and can be applied to people at any phase of life, not just midlife.
Graduating from high school (or trade school or college) will amount to a huge change of life(style). No longer confined by the relentless schedule of classes and homework and studying, I still remember the feeling of enormous relief that I experienced the last day of classes when I left the room after the last final. It was a weightlessness, a “lightness of being”. Freedom!
First car after years of taking public transportation. For me, this also brought with it a feeling of freedom, independence. Conversely, I wonder if going back to public transportation after years of carrying the burden of the inherent (read: crushing) costs of owning a car today would bring the same feeling of relief that finishing school brought.
Having a baby. I used to just shake my head at the people (parents) who told me over and over that I didn’t know what it was like to have a child and wouldn’t until I had one. Now I just shake my head at my own naiveté. They don’t say “A baby changes everything” for nothing. A baby does change everything.
Job change. Really, like the man you marry, the job you choose influences every last corner of your life. Every. Last. Corner. Once you’ve chosen, it’s easy to get stuck. Sometimes you are freed without warning (and without any say, for that matter)…angst-tinged freedom.
Of course, that feeling is quickly followed by the inevitable “Now what?” thought that follows so closely on its heels. Here’s hoping that old saying is true: When one door closes, another door opens.
I was walking at the beach with my daughter and my husband the other day. I was thinking about how big she’d gotten, which led to thoughts of her at different ages throughout the years, and how I received that sign from my dad that I was pregnant with her.
Karen Creamer Author, Coach, Speaker 
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