Bill and I made our decision to sell the house and move into a progressive senior complex quite suddenly. Something transpired that made it perfectly clear that it was time to sell this house that we love so much and move to someplace where there is no maintenance, lots of support, potential for a ton of friends, and a smaller abode with no stairs.

Because of the quick decision, I had very little time to anticipate what it was going to be like to clean out 30 years worth of life. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that there would be a lot of things that needed to be given to Goodwill. I was well aware that we had collected too much stuff over the years and that there would be a lot to pack up.

What I didn’t anticipate — and would have had I had more time to mentally prepare — was how painful it would be to get rid of certain things that in my heart of hearts I know shouldn’t make the cut. I’m not talking about the items about which I’ve been moaning for years that no one will want — my china, my furniture, my glassware, etc. I’m talking about little things that I have collected over my 30 years of marriage. Hell, over my 68 years of life. The little knick knacks I have purchased during my travels. The Christmas ornaments that Court made out of cotton balls and pipe cleaners when he was a kid. My wedding dress. How in the world does someone give up their wedding dress? The photo albums. Oh Lord, the photo albums.

I have argued in the past that while keeping digital photos takes up less room, they’re just as difficult to sort through unless you have a better photo management system than do I. But yesterday, as I made my way, piece by piece, through some of the stuff in our basement, I came across four or five photo albums. One of them held mostly photos of my early college years. I would label them in the back except that I mostly don’t remember the names of the girls with whom I shared a dorm floor. I could probably bear putting that album in the trash. It even has those little triangle-shaped picture holders that have glue on the back. However, one held some photos of my sibs and me as children. It also held photos of Court as a child. Another held photos of this house when we first moved in. There was a tree in the front yard that I barely remember. There were juniper bushes that Bill trimmed for twenty-some years before we realized juniper bushes SCREAMED 1972. Those I can’t give up. But where will they go?

Maybe tomorrow I’ll tackle my cedar chest. I know there are things in there that can go away. I could fill up the spaces with photo albums and my wedding dress. Then I just have to figure out how I fit a circa-1972 cedar chest into our 1200 square foot apartment.

This seems to be more difficult than I thought. At least I am more emotional than I thought.

When we sat down for Mass yesterday, Bill picked up the missal to familiarize himself with the readings. He leaned over and whispered to me, “Today’s gospel is one of your favorites.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or serious.

Really, he was being both. It is one of my favorites, but also one that makes me squirm. It was St. Luke’s version of the story of Martha and Mary. Jesus says we’re all supposed to be Marys, but every time I hear the gospel, I know in my heart of hearts that I am very often more like Martha.

“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving?” Martha asks Jesus. Apparently not, because he tells her Mary’s made the better decision to sit around and listen. That’s when I always want Martha to say, “Perhaps, but just who’s supposed to make the hummus, hmmm? And I suppose you think the wine will pour itself.”

The Old Testament reading and the Gospel were both about hospitality. In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, we are told that three men appeared to Abraham one hot day. Abraham runs up to the three strangers and insists that they stay for dinner. He then runs into the kitchen and tells his wife Sarah to bake some rolls and make it snappy. The Bible leaves specifics out of most stories, but I am nearly certain that Sarah was thinking, “I HATE when Abe invites people to dinner without checking with me. I was just about to finish that article in the Mesopotamia Gazette and it’s the hottest day of the year. I don’t feel like baking.” The passage goes on to say that the men told Abraham that when they come back next year, Sarah will be pregnant. If she overheard, she might have thought, “Not if he keeps inviting unexpected guests that require me to bake.”

The readings made me recall two things about my grandmother. She and Gramps immigrated from Switzerland so English wasn’t their first language. She spoke really good English. However, occasionally, something would come off just a bit off. Like the time she invited her visitor into her home, and told them, “Make yourself homely.”

My second thought about Grammie was that whenever we were stressed or grieved or anxious, she would say, “You need to eat a little something.” It was her answer to difficult times. She grew up learning that hospitality was the name of the game, no matter the circumstances.

There was a time when cooking big meals for my family was a joy. I still like to cook, but I have learned that as we age, things just get a bit more difficult. I don’t know if the Bible ever tells us the ages of Martha and Mary, but maybe Mary was tired of cooking, and wanted nothing more than to listen to Jesus and hear the sound of dishes being washed in the background by her younger sister.

It’s a possibility, isn’t it?

We went from beautiful weather in the mid-80s to hot, just like that. I can’t complain (though I do) about the heat, because my sister Bec arrives this afternoon from AZ. She comes to Colorado for the cooler weather. Mid-90s seem cool when you’re coming from 115 degrees. It’s all relative, people.

Because I knew it was going to be hot, I picked up Kaiya, Mylee, and Cole yesterday morning, when it was still quite cool, for a geocaching adventure. It’s been so long since any of us have geocached that I had to remind Cole what geocaching meant. Their house is undergoing major repairs from a toilet overflow that went unchecked until too late. They currently reside in an apartment, where they will probably live for a shocking number of months. We need plumbers!

Anyway, when I looked on my geocache app, I discovered that there were three geocaches near their apartment complex. We set off in our car to drive and park near the location. Mylee was the first to manage the navigation. (When Addie is the first female president, Mylee will be her VP.)

The first geocache was a pretty easy find. Though camo’d, it was hanging from a tree, and Mylee spotted it almost immediately. One for one.

I located another geocache location not too far from the first one. We were hunting in a pretty busy business area, so though the cache wasn’t far, we decided it was safer to drive. Cole was the second navigator. He got us to the very spot, but it appeared to me that we needed to be on the other side of a stone wall. There was no easy opening, so we trudged about a half block until we could go around the wall. The temperature was rising steadily.

It didn’t take us very long to realize that we had, in fact, made a bad decision. The geocache was definitely on the side of the wall where we had started. The kids hopped over the fence and jumped the two feet to the grass below. They turned and looked at me. As you might imagine, there was no leaping over the fence for this nana. I did, however, manage to get myself to the other side, though it wasn’t pretty. I assessed the two-foot drop and determined it was a go.

I made it, alright. Unfortunately, I landed on my buttocks (as Forest Gump would say), and proceeded to roll down the small hill. Yes, literally roll. The grass was slippery, donchaknow.

After determining that their nana wasn’t broken, the three tried very hard not to laugh. Kaiya held my hand the rest of the way.

This particular geocache was difficult. We looked and looked and looked. We were just about to give up, when Cole shouted, “I see something that looks weird.” Tucked inside the Stone Wall From Hell was a plastic jack-o-lantern containing the geocache log! Cole’s Big Find. Two for two.

We drove to a third location, but try as we might, we were completely unable to find that third geocache. Kaiya and I went home as losers, geocachewise, that is.

By this time, the temperature had hit 92, and we were tired an hungry. We went to the nearby Park Meadows Mall and dined at the Food Court.

I’m enjoying every minute of summer with the kids before school starts. I mentioned to the kids that it wouldn’t be long before school began, and Cole firmly told me that school was a long time away. Time goes by fast when you’re a nana.

Yesterday afternoon, Bill and I made a last-minute decision to go see the movie Elvis. Three hours later (including previews and other miscellaneous advertisements, we agreed the movie was a depressing waste of precious three hours of our time. The only redeeming thing was that it took us away from cleaning out stuff. So I am posting a blog from July 2019 about a movie to which I took Mylee and Cole, and his subsequent confusion. Reading it made me laugh once again.

I, along with scores and scores of others, eagerly anticipated the new version of The Lion King. I am a big fan of the original version and was eager to see how seemingly real animals could play the parts of some of my favorite movie characters.

And then I recently read a review of that movie from some high falutin’ publication or other that panned the film. No heart, it said. Ignore the new film and watch the original. Dang. And I was so looking forward to it. Could it really be bad enough to ignore it altogether?

Then I began getting feedback from people who I really know and like and trust, unlike whatever high falutin’ media outlet it was. These trusted reviewers included some of my grandkids who went and saw the movie with The Other Grandmother. They all said how much they enjoyed the newest version of The Lion King. 

In no time, I was back in the I-Want-to-See-The-Lion-King-Movie-Camp.

Kaiya had already told me with in a solid pre-teen voice that she had no interest in seeing the movie. Cole and Mylee were ready and eager to go. The three of us went yesterday afternoon.

I left with totally positive feelings about the movie, and absolute amazement at the animation. It was animation, wasn’t it? Even Disney can’t get wild animals to talk, right?

But here’s the thing: Should whatever high falutin’ publication it was that panned the movie ask 5-year-old Cole for his opinion, he would admit he is pretty much with them one hundred percent. He prefers the kind of animation where birdies fly around and land on the heads of talking giraffes or lions. First of all, after sitting through the first 12 previews, he said sotto voce, “When is Lion King starting?” We all want to know, Little One, as we sat back for the remaining 12 previews.

His biggest issue, however, was that he simply couldn’t tell the lions apart. In traditional animation, the characters all have different expressions, or maybe one is wearing a bow tie and another a cowboy hat. In keeping with the realistic nature of the film, the lions mostly look the same. During a fight between Scar and Mufasa, he kept shouting out (sotto voce was a thing of the past), “Which one is Scar, Nana?”

And the transformation from lion cub Simba to grown-up lion Simba also threw him for a loop. “Is Mufasa alive again?” he kept asking.

And the ending (at which time I had tears rolling down my cheeks), when the baboon held up Simba and Nala’s new cub, he had about had it. “Nana,” he said in total exasperation. “Why is Simba little again?”

I assure you that the movie is well worth seeing. I enjoyed it very much. I must admit, however, that since Cole needed a bathroom break during the critical scene with the stampeding herd, I had to play a bit of catch-up with Mylee (who, by the way, followed the plot and characters with no problem at all, and even shed a few tears).

Cole, I’m sorry the animals were so confusing to you. All I can say is HAKUNA MATATA…..

I’ve been think a lot about neighbors recently. I imagine that’s because when we move to our new home, we will lose our current neighbors and have to get to know new neighbors.

The neighbors on either side of our house and directly across the street were all here when we moved into this house 30 years ago. Our neighbors to the north have three grown children who live someplace other than Colorado, and have since we moved in. Our neighbors to the south have no children, and were original owners of the home in which they live. Our neighbors across the street have two sons, both of whom were around Court’s age when we moved in.

I remember that our neighbor to the south brought over a plate of brownies the first week we moved in. I didn’t talk to her again for 10 years. The husband of the couple who lived in the house north of us was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not long after we moved in. As such, I didn’t talk to her for years, until he passed away. I can understand now that she was too busy caring for her husband to be too neighborly. We got to know the neighbors across the street best because of the ages of our kids. Kids bring neighbors together, don’t they? Still, we were never close friends.

Interestingly, our gospel reading this weekend was about neighbors and the Good Samaritan. The priest who said our Mass explained to us that Samaritan people were considered traitors to the Jews, and they were archenemies. “Saying Good Samaritan to the people to whom Jesus was talking was like saying “Good Terrorist” these days.” But Jesus used the Samaritan as his example of neighbor when one of his Jewish followers asked how to go to heaven.

Jesus, not to be fooled, turned the question back to the man by asking him what he thought. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, love your neighbor as yourself.

But, the man went on, “Who is my neighbor?”

While that might seem like a trick question, it really isn’t. Our neighbors are everybody else. If we love everybody — and are generous and kind to everybody — we are a long way towards getting to heaven.

Apparently believing that repetition is the best way of learning, our priest repeated at least six or seven times — at the beginning of Mass, during the homily, and at the end of Mass — We aren’t kind to someone because they’re Catholic, we’re kind to others because WE’RE Catholic.

You can substitute other words for the word Catholic: Christian, Jewish, a good person. The point is that we are rewarded for being good because it’s the right thing to do.

Perhaps if I had kept this more front of mind during my 30 years in this house, I would be closer friends with my next-door neighbors. A good lesson to take to my next dwelling.

The last few nights, after Bill and I have finished eating and completed our chores, we have moved out to our back yard to enjoy the weather and our beautiful view from our porch. We will certainly miss our lovely yard, there is no question about it. But we are excited — if somewhat overwhelmed — by our upcoming change. Still, it made me smile to spend time in the cooler evenings with an after dinner drink, and the citronella candle burning. As for Bill, he enjoyed smoking a cigar. Life is good.

Have a great weekend.

4th of July
We once again enjoyed our 4th of July celebration at my sister Jen’s house. Her daughter Maggie and her family almost always visit over the Independence Day holiday, and this year was no exception. It’s Jen’s tradition to serve Chik-Fil-A nuggets (hey! tradition is tradition). Along with the nuggets, she made bratwurst, potato salad, and baked beans, and all were delicious. They all went out after dark to watch the fireworks at the country club. Bill and I begged off — as usual — and returned to our hotel to get comfortable. We stumbled upon an ABC special from New York City, with a couple of performances from Nashville. The event culminated in a 25-minute choreographed fireworks show that was spectacular. Sure, it’s on television. But the music was wonderful and the fireworks were amazing. Happy birthday America.

First Ladies
Jen has turned me onto an amazing program on Showtime called First Ladies. The stories are based in fact, if somewhat fictionalized. The three first ladies featured in what I hope will be a series are Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama. The actors portraying these women are amazing. I am particularly drawn to the story of Betty Ford, some of which I was unfamiliar. I didn’t realize she had been married previously. I think I knew, but had forgotten, that she had been a professional dancer. I remember very clearly when she announced that she had breast cancer, and encouraged women to get mammograms. Nowadays, mammograms are a normal part of a woman’s health care, but that wasn’t true back then. The fact that she made her breast cancer public was controversial, but resulted in a six-fold increase in the number of women who got tested. That, along with her public admission of addiction and her creation of the Betty Ford Clinic make her one of my favorite first ladies. Laura Bush is right up there with Mrs. Ford.

Drop Your Drawers
One of the items I somehow inherited from my parents was a dresser that had belonged to my dad when he was a boy. It’s still in good shape except for the top being warped from water spilling and being left to do damage at some point. It simply can’t make the cut when we move, but never fear; my brother Dave says he’ll gladly take it. How we get it to AZ is a mystery, but mysteries are made to be solved.

More Visits
And speaking of our move, we have plans to visit a few more apartments at Wind Crest next week. This time I think both Bec and Jen will be able to go along with us. Bec will be visiting for a couple of weeks starting July 15. It will be nice to get their input. Frankly, my head is swimming!

Ciao!