Thanksgiving Eve! Pizza (to spell the cook) and pie tasting (because with this many we have to get started early).
365_2023, Thanksgiving, baking, cookie, family, traditions Grief is a vivid, living emotion. It is not controllable, it has a mind of its own. I've heard it described as a sharp pain, or as a dull, consistent ache, and I have felt it as either, or both. Bringing a pet into your home is easy. Giving them food, shelter, and love is easy. Giving them room in your life is easy. But I'll bet few of us who bring those babies into our warmth think at that instant about the time they will leave it. We don't think, in those moments of bliss, about the pain of leaving, the feelings of regret and loss, the terrible, debilitating, breathtaking ache of seperation. Not that anyone ever said that losing them would be easy, but who could ever have guessed it would be so hard.
We lost Cookie today. She'd been with us for all of our marriage, for so many of our wonderful moments, and our darkest ones. We will remember her walking the ledge in our old house, dragging whole loaves of bread to the basement when we weren't looking, littering the house with socks rescued from the laundry during the long hours of the night, draping herself over my shoulders, my lap, my head, my computer, or any part of me just to be closer, regardless of my feeling about her plans.
We will remember with geat tenderness the way that she let Calvin climb all over her, drag her around, tackler her, and still come back for more.
She was not your typical cat. She greeting strangers with aplomb, she came when she heard her name, she was always present. One of our old neighbors described her as "more friendly than a woman on elimidate". She was so present in our lives that she leaves an immense, gaping hole in her absence. Healthy until her last week, when a tumor closed her throat and began depriving her of breath, the most we could give her in the end was her freedom from suffering, as graceful a retreat as possible, and that is always a difficult gift to give. As I discussed with Calvin, when her suffering ended, that was when ours really began.
It is not for her that we weep, but for ourselves.
The end of the year makes me both nostalgic and hopeful. I long to look back at the days that have gone by while also heaping upon myself great, or insane, goals and wishes for the coming year. So here's a look back at some of the things that we did this past year, which has served in part as a reminder of all those wonderful things, but also as a reminder to myself I get back to it, since the past month or so has been a little slack around here.
Happy new year.
January 2012: Snap Circuits, Legos, and lots and lots of books, and we were just closing up our look at human evolution and venturing into human migration and the history of civilization. Calvin started classes through our homeschooling group on Friday afternoons, and toward the end of the month we went to Disney World.
The North American International Auto Show
February 2012: I comment on the strangely warm weather in several posts, longing for snow. When it finally came, it was for only the second, and what would be the last, time all year, and there wasn't much of it, but we built a snowman. We were out of order, getting an overview of world civilizations before starting at the beginning. Calvin had an MIR, went to his first true musical, and started getting an allowance; we adopted Iris, and our blog images got bigger.
March 2012: We said goodbye to our Dachshund, Moose, with a lot of heartache. Warm weather came early, and with it a tornado that hit the neighborhood nextdoor. We went museuming. Calvin was in his first stage play, he fell in love with the My Father's Dragon trilogy and read it umpteen times, and he filled in his first journal, prompting what is probably my favorite post of the year.
April: Spring. There was fascination with the Titanic, and a museum visit to appease, but mostly history took us to ancient Egypt. There was a big Lego sorting and organizing project, and art.
May 2012: a month of travel, to Holland (Michigan) and Chicago. Plus Calvin performed in his second play (The Wizard of Oz), and we completely alterred our homeschooling approach.
June 2012: Most notably, Calvin turned six. The rest, like his mid-year recital, or learning about gravity, or taking a quick trip up north, was just icing on the cake. Oh, and we raised butterflies.
July 2012: Camping on Lake Michigan, biking around Mackinac Island, watching the fireworks in Harbor Springs; swimming at Independence Lake, hiking, biking, and playing in the sprinkler; three trips to the zoo, two to the Natural History Museum, and one to Greenfield Village; the Rolling Sculptures Auto Show and the Ann Arbor Art Fair. How were we ever this busy?
August 2012: To Niagara Falls and Stratford! Were we ever home this summer? In other news...it was hot.
September 2012: No first day of school here, just good old standard homeschooling. What? Another trip to Chicago, and football season arrived, along with some cooler, wetter weather.
October 2012: Time just flying by. Back from Chicago, headed up north; book reviews, a science experiment, a trip into history; and of cousre, Halloween, my favorite time of the year.
November 2012: An election, one final trip to the zoo for the year, and Thanksgiving.
December 2012: It wasn't that long ago, but it had Calvin in one play and watching one play, a trip to Greenfield Village for Holiday Nights, a winter piano recital, and all the usual trappings of a holiday season, even snow.
I'm living in Lego Land. A sudden burst of organizing energy has us building, rebuilding, and cataloging all the Lego sets we have. It wouldn't be so many except that in addition to Calvin's, we have sets from Jon's childhood, my childhood, and others, like Curtis's and Gretchen's, so that our oldest set is from over forty years ago, and our newest from just one. And what began as a search for a single piece that was missing from a single set, or at least a replacement for it, became a exercise that closely resembled an archeological dig.
Calvin's sets, the newest of the bunch, were identifiable and accompanied by instructions and piece inventories, but the blocks from earlier childhoods had long been combined and tossed about, all memory of their original form having been lost to the ages. Tapping nostalgia and the internet we were able to identify certain parts and locate images, brick lists, and instructions.
It's been a whole family project, including grandparents. It's been a trip down memory lane. We printed, we sorted, we assembled. We disassembled and reassembled. Several times, just for fun. In the end we'd compiled a list of sets we have, inventoried the pieces and made a list of those that were missing, and put all the instructions in a binder for easy access. We labeled zip lock bags for the keeping of sets when not in use, although right now there isn't even one in storage, they're all decorating surfaces throughout the house.
There was a time, probably even just months ago, when an immersion of this kind would have left me uneasy. We'd been traipsing through ancient Egypt, with other ancient civilizations on the horizon, and I would have seen the Lego project as just a small break in a days activity, never been willing to spend whole days on it. But Calvin was keen on diving into it with every ounce of energy, eager to catalog, inventory, research, build, play, un-build, rebuild. I couldn't possibly curb that kind of energy, and in what was probably my first true unschooling act, I easily found the lessons in the one activity Calvin desired to do, in the identifying, the categorizing, the labeling, the building, and especially in the playing. Especially in the playing.
And as with all life lessons this one let us know when its course had been run. So we've come to the end of the project, but Calvin, and the rest of us by extension, is still living in Lego Land. We'll reap the benefits of our researching and organizing for many years to come.
Three childhoods worth of Legos.
