Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

holidays

How do you measure a year?

It’s been a full year and I can hardly believe it’s almost over. Nothing that happened this year feels incredibly momentous but I also don’t want to forget the seemingly small things. Every year is unique and contains memories that will never be repeated, not exactly. It’s a time in our lives we can never get back, and I don’t say that to lament. It is part of life. I think remembering is important, and sometimes seeing things all together is a good reminder of the things that filled our life this year.

A quick scroll through social media helps me remember and the more I think back, the more I see themes emerge. I begin to see what our priorities are, what was important to us this year.

An overview. In reverse.

December: Our son turned 9. Maybe that’s not a milestone, but every year older he gets is just evidence of how our family is enduring and thriving. 

November: Phil and I ran a 5k on Thanksgiving morning. We revamped our living room and bought a furniture set for the first time in our married life. Also a new TV. We don’t have to squint to see words on the screen anymore. We redefined family for our Thanksgiving meal, and it was so memorable and lovely. A tree came down in our yard.

October: Phil ran a 5k in Philadelphia. I completed a Whole30 eating plan. I published my first co-writing project with a client. And started playing guitar in church.

September: We spent a day in Washington D.C. that we hoped would include a baseball game, but it rained the whole day. Still, we visited two museums, including the National Portrait Gallery, which was my personal highlight of the day. We hosted a Labor Day gathering at our house.

August: We saw the Cubs play in Pittsburgh. Our daughter went to a sewing camp and discovered she loved it.

July: We spent the Fourth of July in Harper’s Ferry. The kids and I traveled to Illinois to visit family. We gathered a group of friends to watch fireworks. We hosted a Kenya team reunion. The kids rocked their swimming lessons.

June: We took an epic road trip to our vacation in Florida with my family, a wonderful week of unforgettable memories, including a visit to Kennedy Space Center where we saw a space shuttle up close and personal. We took the long way home visiting friends in North Carolina and driving a portion of the  Blue Ridge Parkway. I drove to the Philly suburbs to gather with other Chicken Soup for the Soul writers and to meet the publisher.

May: I turned 40. We bought a car and traded in our van. Phil threw me a small birthday party gathering. I ran with my daughter in the Girls on the Run 5k, during which it poured the whole time.

April: Phil and our daughter ran a 5K at Cowan’s Gap State Park. It was the first time we’d been back there since a visit on our fifth wedding anniversary. I got four long braids of hair cut off.

March: Our daughter turned 10. We went to our first hockey game.

February: I started running again, training for the 5k in May. I met one of my favorite authors at a local event. We watched the Olympics.

January: I started working part-time at a school.

If I was going to pick a theme for our year, it would be “improvement.” Or maybe “rebirth.” This was the first year in maybe our entire married/family life that I felt like we got to make positive choices for our family and didn’t have to settle for doing things the way they’d always been done or making choices that weren’t necessarily bad but also not necessarily good. For so many years, the choices and decisions for our family were based on survival and/or meeting our basic needs. This year, we had more freedom to choose based on what would help our family be healthy in all the ways.

From job decisions to physical achievements to conscious choices about food to vacation and travel, I felt like we had more control over our life. That’s groundbreaking when all I can sometimes remember is feeling like I’ve been carried along by circumstances and the consequences of those.

It was a year of plenty for us, a major shift for a family that has known only “enough” and often “lack.” Where previously we were surviving, this year, I sense what it means to thrive: as an individual, as a couple, as a family.

This does not, of course, discount anything else about 2018 that wasn’t good or great. There has been a lot of sadness and turmoil and the world is still a place with so much hurt. A year can be both wonderful personally and terrible globally. This is a hard dichotomy to reconcile. I think maybe I haven’t allowed myself enough engagement in others’ pain this year. More opportunity to do better in 2019.

How did your year measure up? What defines a year for you?

Ghosts of Halloweens Past

I wore a costume to work yesterday, maybe the first time in 10 years I’ve purposely dressed for Halloween to go out in public or for others to see. It’s not my favorite holiday but because I work at a school, I wanted to participate in the fun. A last-minute Pinterest search netted me the idea of “smarty pants,” so the night before Halloween I was supergluing smarties candies to a pair of pants and questioning my life decisions. (Like, why don’t I have a glue gun already?)

Here’s what I ended up with: Pants with smarties glued to them, a button-down shirt belonging to my husband as well as suspenders and a bow tie on loan from him. Hair in a bun and sensible shoes completed the outfit.

For those of you who need a visual:

Confession: I was really nervous to walk into the building. If you’ve seen the movie version of Bridget Jones’ Diary, you’ll remember the scene where Bridget shows up to the annual Tarts and Vicars party (yes, it’s as terrible as it sounds) dressed as a “tart” only to find out that it’s not a costume party that year. That is my fear every.single.time there is a costume/dress-up/dress-different day. I am certain I will have gotten the day wrong or that no one else will be dressed the way I thought we were supposed to dress. I always look for someone else dressed differently to alleviate my fears.

But my fears weren’t enough for me to not do it, although my husband questioned my decision that morning when I was grumpy about the whole thing. (I thought for sure I’d be leaving candy all over the school. The kids would have loved that.)  Let’s just call the whole day a major psychological win for me, though. Not only did I go through with it; I OWNED it. When you know you’re clever or cute or whatever, it doesn’t matter what other people think. Not as much anyway. I’m at a point in my life where fear has won far too many battles, and I’ve decided it’s time to treat fear like the loser it is. (Mostly. Those are strong words that I don’t always live up to, but I’m trying.)

Anyway, the costume was a big hit. I had to explain it to a couple of students, but others got it right away. And more times than I expected I was asked for a piece of candy. (NO, BECAUSE THEY ARE LITERALLY GLUED TO MY PANTS.) Other teachers smiled. One told me I looked adorable, which really is one of the best compliments you can get on Halloween in my book. (I don’t do scary or sexy or culturally inappropriate costumes. “Creative” is another good compliment but I gave all the credit to Pinterest for this one. I didn’t have a clue what to do.)

At one point when I looked at myself in the mirror I saw my grandpa, who died two years ago. Suspenders and bow ties were his jam and with my hair pulled back into a bun I could see his face for the briefest of moments. That almost made me sad for the rest of the day, but I chose to cherish it as a happy memory. I wasn’t working at a school when he died but I like to think I carry some of the teacher he was inside of me. He would have approved not only of the bow tie and suspenders but of the work I do every day. Gosh, I miss him.

This Halloween costume also got me thinking about Halloween costumes from past years. The most memorable one is the time I dressed up as my husband, long before he was even my boyfriend. He had a unique way of dressing (we called it vintage, I guess; he had a thing for clothes from the ’70s) and sported a mohawk and some facial hair back then when we were all just friends. My roommate and I thought it would be a fun idea, and I probably wanted to back out at some point, but I went through with it, wearing magenta pants and using some kind of costume glue on my face along with a bald cap for the mohawk. I have a picture somewhere but I’m not sure where. I know you’re all wanting to see it. If I find it, you’ll be the first to know.

That costume is memorable because it’s sort of the beginning of the story of us. I don’t know if I was trying to lure Phil with that particular move, but he was flattered enough that he started to look at me more seriously. Or so the story goes. Or so I’m choosing to remember. I count that among the best decisions of my life, and it makes for a great story. Maybe I’ll have to use that in a novel someday.

Another time, when I worked for a newspaper in Illinois, I dressed as a bandwagon Chicago White Sox fan. (I am a diehard Cubs fan FOR LIFE.) It was either the year the Sox won the World Series or were playing for the World Series or the year after that. My boss at the time was a Sox fan so I thought it would be funny to wear my fiancé’s Sox jersey with a player who no longer was on the team and make a “Go Sox” label to tape to my Cubs hat. I don’t know if anyone thought it was funny. Fellow Cubs’ fans weren’t too keen on it. But it got attention. Sadly, I’m pretty sure that costume would only play in Illinois.

One year I also dressed as Lois Lane but because I didn’t have a Superman by my side, I wore a name tag so people would know who I was. I was in late middle school or early high school. I probably shouldn’t have been trick-or-treating. C’est la vie. I lived to tell about it.

There must have been other costumes but those are the ones that stick out. Of course, I have pictures of childhood Halloween costumes, like the year I went dressed as a present. We wrapped a box and I stuck my arms and head through some holes in the box and slapped a bow on the top of my head.

While waiting with my kids at the bus stop Halloween morning, I told them some of these stories, as well as how their Papa, my dad, liked to wear this creepy green monster mask and answer the door to screaming children. My husband told a similar story of how he would sit on their porch like he was a decoration and then scare the living daylights out of trick-or-treaters. Ah, the memories.

I don’t know what my kids will remember about Halloween. We don’t make a huge deal out of it. We spend as little as possible on costumes while still being creative. We adopt a neighborhood to do our trick-or-treating in since we don’t really have one. The candy gets eaten or goes bad or gets thrown out, but the memories are the things that last.

I want them to remember that life is fun and silly and dressing up doesn’t have to be something you outgrow. I got the biggest smile on my face today seeing my co-workers dressed as Woody and Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, a triceratops, and PB&J. Maybe the students won’t remember that their middle school teachers dressed in costume, but maybe they won’t forget that they can still have fun when they’re grown-ups. I know I need the reminder sometimes.

I also want them to remember that Halloween is one of the most unique and interesting times of the year. Neighbors flock to each other’s houses and people willingly give out candy to kids. The community and generosity on Halloween floors me every year. Last night, one guy gave my kids two handfuls of candy. Whatever the motivation, I’m always reminded of the goodness of the human spirit. I love seeing the neighbors who go all out for Halloween with decorations and scary music and the ones who are content to casually hand out candy while they’re watching TV.

Mostly, I just love seeing people in contact with each other. God knows we don’t get enough of that.

When I was a kid and trick-or-treating, we knew the names of every person who lived in the houses where we were trick-or-treating. Not living in a neighborhood complicates that for us, but the neighborhood we do choose to go to is full of kids my kids go to school with. One of my best Halloween memories from the past two years is all the kids who run up to my daughter and hug her, and the boys who run up to tell my son a funny story. They are like rock stars in that neighborhood.

What do you remember about Halloweens past and present?