kate_schaefer: Relationships, relations, friends

My backyard's a bit different from how it was twenty-five years ago. The raised vegetable beds have been replaced by a sunken deck surrounded by raised flower beds. A pair of kayaks sits where the large pink rose used to lose its continual fight against blackspot. I've been digging up the mosaic of stone, brick, gravel, and tile in my effort to kill off all the grass, every blade of it. I will lose that battle, because grass is stronger and sneakier than practically everything.??I'd never even heard of crocosmia twenty-five years ago, but now it's the glorious green and red center of the garden every June and July.

Some things are the same. The concrete dinosaurs are right where Glenn sculpted them with his bare hands (ow! wear gloves when you work with wet concrete, okay?), though the surrounding gravel needs some serious weeding. The lilac and forsythia are beautiful every spring and kinda scraggly the rest of the year. The daylilies are about the same; the Siberian iris occupy more space, but they're just as lovely.

The friends who stood with us twenty-five years ago are mostly still with us.My witnesses were my sister Gini and janeehawkins. Glenn's witnesses were Katherine Howes and Paul Lemman. I talked to Gini on Monday while I waited through Jane's colon cancer surgery (the surgeon though it went very well and that the cancer was contained within the colon walls). We'll have dinner with Katherine and Paul in Oregon later this month. John Hedtke, who performed the ceremony, dropped by to visit Jane in the hospital yesterday. Jane was asleep, so he and I chatted for a few minutes before he went on, and I didn't stay much past that.

The small children who were at that wedding are grown now, some with small children of their own. The medium-to-large children are long since grown, and some of their children are grown or close to grown. It's been a joy and a privilege to be in their lives all those years (and a pain and a bunch of sorrows as well; nobody's life is a glorious cycle of song. I'm happy to have the whole messy package).

I am so lucky to have found and married Glenn. We are so lucky to have these long-term friends, this family we can love even when they drive us crazy. We are lucky to have memories, good, bad, and mixed, of the people who aren't with us any more. This has been a very difficult summer for us; we visited Glenn's parents in Alaska early in the summer, knowing that it might be the last visit with his mother, and that turned out to be the case for me.?Glenn went back to Alaska?and sat by her in hospice for nearly two weeks, so he had extra time with her, which he cherished.?Other relations and close friends besides Jane have had serious health crises as well, so I reached a point this summer where every time I got off the phone, I cried, either because it was more bad news or from relief because it wasn't more bad news. One friend cheered me up by sending me off to read the LJ of an acquaintance with cancer, because she was making great jokes about her cancer (her surgery is today, and I wish her all the best mojo possible).

This is middle age. It isn't easy, and for lots of us, it isn't survivable. Life, after all, isn't survivable. It's here; it's ours. Let's enjoy it as much as we can, and do what we can to make it enjoyable, or at least endurable,?for others.

Source: http://kate-schaefer.livejournal.com/63713.html

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