Category: memories

Spring Cleaning

At the beginning of each year, I launch an ambitious spring cleaning project. My goal is to empty every closet, drawer, cabinet, and box in the house, clean it out, wipe everything down, and then replace what we are keeping, but neatly and better organized. I started the process last year but fizzed out, so I am determined to do the entire house this year.

To stay on track, I created a checklist with every single item and area that I want to clean out and organize. This way, I can track my progress, and I can also choose what to clean out, based on how much time I have. For example, an entire closet will need several hours on a weekend or a day off, but if I just have a short window of opportunity, I can clean out and organize my box of nail polishes (yes, I have a bit of a nail polish problem, but I swear I use all of those colors!).

This past weekend, thanks to the polar weather, I mostly stayed inside and got started on the list. I cleaned out both bathroom vanities and medicine cabinets. All I can say is, I don’t need to buy any body lotions, body washes, or scented body scrubs for a looooooong time! But at least now they are all grouped together neatly, and I know I can sit out the next several Bath & Body Works sales.

This morning at work, I figured, why not keep the momentum going? I cleaned out my desk drawers and cabinets, then organized loose items like extra notepads into cute little containers in a drawer.

I just feel so much better when things are neat, orderly, organized. I can’t wait until the entire checklist is marked off, and the whole house has been de-cluttered and tidied.

Sometimes it’s funny to uncover something I forgot that we had. In the small table beside my seat of the couch, I had stashed some embroidery thread and small scissors. I couldn’t remember why I had those, since I don’t embroider. After wondering if I was simply going crazy, I finally remembered that I had used embroidery thread to decoratively stitch the edge of a blanket that I made for my husband a few years ago. How could I forget? I kept the thread and scissors in that little table because it took forever to go around the edges of that blanket. I cut the blanket extra long since my husband is so tall, and I would sit in the evenings, chatting or watching TV with him, working my way around that blanket one section at a time with the thread.

We’ll see what memories I uncover during this year’s round of spring cleaning!

One More

I’m pretty sure I have posted this quote before, but that’s okay. I absolutely love it.

My husband and I got a late start with our Christmas tree this year. What can I say? There’s a lot going on. But last weekend, we finally rearranged the living room, got the tree into position, and pulled out all the boxes of ornaments.

Decorating our tree is quite the undertaking. We have been together nearly 20 years, and over that time, we have collected many, many Christmas ornaments.

Taking the lids off those boxes is a bit like Christmas morning, because each ornament is wrapped in tissue paper or bubble wrap, and each one needs to be unwrapped before being placed on the tree. We end up laughing and holding up the ornament we just uncovered:

“Remember this one?”

“Aww, look at this one.”

“Wow, how old is this one now?”

Some of them are deeply sentimental. One of our ornaments used to belong to my husband’s mother. That one gets handled very carefully, hung on the tree where he can see it but where it’s also protected. One of them was a gift from my mom for me, and that one is also gently and tenderly placed on the tree.

Some of them are just fun: sea turtles or shells from our beach trips, animals from zoo adventures, a glittery butterfly just because it’s pretty, personalized ornaments from amusement parks.

And some of them are mementos from important days of our lives: our first Christmas married, our first year in our house, baby’s first Christmas for our grandkids.

Some of the ornaments were picked out by the kids when they were small. I still remember wandering from decorated tree to decorated tree in the shop that day, letting the kids select whichever one caught their eye. Now, some of our ornaments are gifts that the kids have given to us.

It takes considerable time to decorate our tree. After all the ornaments come the pine cones, some tiny, some large, then the little red bows on as many branches as we can fit them. We play the only two Christmas CDs that we own, and then have to replay them, because we aren’t finished yet.

But when we are done, it’s always worth it. Every year, we say it’s the most beautiful tree we’ve ever decorated. Every year, I take pictures. Every year, my husband says he will miss the tree in the living room when we take it down after Christmas.

And every year, it’s my favorite part of Christmas: unwrapping the ornaments one by one, reliving the memories, small pieces of our lives together hanging on those branches, twinkling in the lights. Our tree is not store-bought. Our tree is us, built one ornament at a time, one year at a time, and even though we are running out of room on the tree, we still add at least one ornament each year.

Every year, as we circle the tree, hunting for an open spot, I tell my husband, “Dear, I think we’re running out of room.”

And every year, he tells me, with a tiny smile as he hooks an ornament onto the tree, “There’s always room for one more.”

Decade

Ten years ago today, my husband and I closed on our house, picked up the keys, and drove our first truckload of boxes and furniture to our new driveway. It had been such a long process–nearly nine months of searching online, meeting with the Realtor, walking through countless houses, inspecting every inch, ruling them out one by one, until one finally stood out to us. We could picture ourselves living there. We could imagine the kids loving it there.

We unlocked the front door together on that chilly December morning and took our first step inside. Just like that, it was no longer a vacant house. It was our home.

That evening, after a long, grueling day of driving back and forth, lugging boxes, hauling furniture, transferring everything we owned to our new place, I took a break to hang our Christmas wreath. I snapped a picture of the front of the house, the empty porch. The picture is blurry, likely because I was so tired and worn out from moving all day, but I’m glad I took it. Looking at it now, I smile, remembering how terrified and excited at the same time I was about buying the house, and exhausted and sore from moving, but so damn happy too.

Before we closed on the house, I had fallen in love with an antique-looking, deep cherry wood bed that I spotted at a furniture store. It was too big to store at our old apartment, so I had to have it delivered to the house after our closing date. I still admire that bed, the dramatic, carved headboard, every time I walk into our bedroom.

I can’t believe it’s been an entire decade since move-in day. Maybe no one else celebrates the day they moved into their home, but my husband and I adore our house and put a lot of work into it, inside and out. Our tradition is to celebrate each year by adding something to the house, maybe something small, like a decoration, or plants in the yard, or something quite large, like this year: we are in the middle of tearing down the old deck and building a new one, complete with new patio furniture, solar lights on the posts, little touches to make it ours.

Tonight, I want to take a moment to step into the front yard, to stand where I was when I took that first picture of the front porch, and look back over the past 10 years and how far we have come. Here’s to another 10, then many more, of loving our home together.

In Her Honor

A 4-day weekend flew by in the blink of an eye. How is it possible for time to unravel so fast when I want it to slow down?

I got a lot done, though, including decorating the porch and the yard for fall. I lit a pumpkin clove candle, put on the fall leaves t-shirt that my husband got for me, and went to town, diving in and out of boxes full of multi-colored leaves, pumpkins, and sunflowers.

It hasn’t actually cooled down much here, but I sneaked a look at the forecast back home, where I grew up. The seventies during the day, dipping into the fifties at night…ahhh, real fall weather! My mom would be delighted, flinging windows open, leaving the screen door open to the crisp, cool air. The shift from summer to fall was always her favorite time of year, too.

This is my fourth time decorating for fall without her. She was in the hospital when I decorated in 2022, but I thought she would be coming home. I never got to show her the pictures I took of our decorations that year. I didn’t know I never would again.

I finished the fireplace mantel, which I always save for last because it takes the longest, and I took a few pictures. One of my stepsons stopped by later that day, and his girlfriend instantly commented how nice everything looked, which made me smile. I put a lot into decorating our home for holidays.

Later, flipping through the pictures, I tried to push the feelings away, but they crept up and sat on my chest anyway. This is when I should be emailing the pictures to my mom, because she had given me some of the decorations, and she got a kick out of seeing them worked into our displays at our house. This was something we always shared, something we had so strongly in common, and the excitement of fall will now always walk hand-in-hand with the ache of wanting to share it all with her but not being able to.

In her honor this year, I featured one of the items from her house as the centerpiece of our mantel. I like seeing it surrounded with fall foliage and lights and colorful pumpkins. I miss her, but I will celebrate her, honor her, through our love of fall and decorating. It is one way that I have found to stay as close to her as I possibly can.

Her First Day

With four kids, my husband and I have experienced many, many first days of school over the years. This year, with all of them well over 18, we have a very different kind of back-to-school: our older daughter will be teaching her very first classroom of students today as a first-year teacher.

From the moment she could speak, she has said she will be a teacher someday. At various times, she also declared that she would be a pop singer, President of the United States, and a few other vocations that momentarily struck her fancy, but being a teacher never wavered from her list.

Over the weekend, I tried to find pictures of us playing school, but since my husband and I were always both recruited as students, neither of us ever took pictures of it all. I can still picture the tightening of her lips and the stern, slight raising of her eyebrows when one of her siblings tested her patience as she ruled over her pretend classroom, and I imagine it won’t be very long before an unsuspecting high schooler witnesses those exact same facial expressions. I can only caution them to heed the warning and change courses of action before it’s too late.

I am sure she will call her dad this evening to tell him all about her first day as an official, bona fide teacher. He is so proud that he is ready to burst, and I know if there was a way for him to sneak into that classroom and witness her first day as a teacher, he would already be there.

How many of us can say that we held onto a dream of ours from childhood and made it happen? How many dreams did we let go of as we grew older? I am proud of her for sticking to it. She never doubted herself, or at least if she did, she never let it slow her down.

I keep watching the clock, wondering what she is doing now, what her students are saying and doing, how her day is going. And I can’t help but picture a little girl in overalls, a yellow sweater, and crooked bangs sitting on the floor with her teacher Barbie and mini chalkboard. I suppose a part of me will always see her as that little girl, but I am immensely proud of the young woman — and teacher– that she has grown into today.

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