Tag Archives: relationships

Dearest Genevra,

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Real Conversation between an unnamed friend and myself:

Her: What did you do today?

Me: I worked on a letter to my sister.

Her, in a confused tone : Can’t you all just email?

Me: Uh, no. That’s not the same.

Doh! Of course we could email, but that is irrelevant here. My sister and I write letters to one another. That is what we do. In intimate communication the object is not always the shortest line between two points. The process of choosing and forming strings of words into thoughts and then putting those on paper is an intellectual as well as a tactile pleasure. In today’s world, receiving a hand written letter is as rare as seeing a horse and carriage driving down one’s street. We like to do our part to keep this all but forgotten art alive.

For my sister and me, if I may be so bold, one function of our letter writing practice is to try to recreate being together. Our physical time together is a sort of stream of consciousness. We may be in her kitchen washing dishes, and one of us will say, ” And about that food coop,” and the other will know what she means though we haven’t actually spoken about the coop since yesterday. Later, we can be in the same room reading, and one of us will look up and say,”Huh. Listen to this. These people went to tea and ate beans on toast!” The other will nod, and return to her own reading without missing a beat.

I know you’re marveling at our heady, rich, vibrant repartee. Well, words can’t convey everything. Suffice it to say that when we are together we are attuned, all of a piece. And when I receive a letter from my sister it too is all of a piece. It is a running narrative of however many days it may take her to write the letter. We intersperse our daily routines with reviews of what we are reading, what our families are doing and with our interior lives.

For several years we wrote our letters as though we were living in the times of whatever literary characters we were exploring. This could mean we would start a letter with:

Dearest Genevra ( We used names more appropriate to the fiction we were reading)

I take pen in hand, fervently begging your forgiveness for the fearful delay in responding to your last missive. I daresay I fairly tremble to recount, though upon my honor I must, as required by my obligations as a God fearing woman, the travails we have endured here at Pilgrimage House, brought upon us by who knows what inhuman scourge. Even now as I write my dear Genevra, grey winds cause the fallen leaves to dance in what appears to be an evil announcement that here, within these walls, lies the plague known as streptococcus.

Or, if reading Barbara Pym, one of our favorites:

Dear Sister,

I hope this finds you in good health. Today was a day like most others. I lit the gas ring this morning to brew some tea before leaving for the office. As I nibbled on my burnt toast, I noticed, too late, that I had a ladder in my stockings. Lacking bus fare I walked all the blocks to work, but as I had my umbrella scarcely got too wet. One of my office mates, Hiram, was under the weather and blew his nose all morning into a large white handkerchief. I believe his mother launders them for him. At the lunch hour I stopped at a nearby cafeteria for a bowl of tomato soup before dropping a few letters in the post. After work I dropped in St Augustus of the Fields for evensong; there were only five of us present including the vicar.

And so on. When events render us unable to be quite so playful, we just launch into the fascinating stuff of our lives. For my part, I just get out paper and begin to write whatever is in my mind. Sometimes I add a little illustration, maybe a stick figure of myself getting myself into some sort of jam such as dumping a plate of food on a stranger at a restaurant.Once I begin to write I go on and on until I have said everything I know: where I’ve been, what I’ve cooked, what I’ve read, where I’m going. And she’s going to love every single word!

Neither of us uses fancy stationery. I prefer a legal pad because my writing is large. Ellen uses paper recycled from her husband’s job at a hospital so the backs of her pages are often printed with diagrams of a human body. But we work around that. Since we write letters we don’t talk much on the phone; we can’t give away what we may have already written. If I see something she posts on facebook, that’s fine, but it doesn’t count because it was not personally directed to me.

We wait weeks for our letters, sometimes patiently, some times not. We usually let one another know that “the eagle has flown” so we know to be on the lookout for a thick, fat letter. Oh, and the sublime pleasure of opening that envelope, of running my hands over the pages of her distinctive scrawl handwriting I would know anywhere! Usually her letters are written in several colors of ink, according to what she had handy to use while waiting for her daughter at volleyball practice, or before her graduate class met. We number our pages, which are never fewer than twenty.

At the end I feel I have made the rounds of her life with her, which I suppose is the next best thing to being there. For a day or two after I receive her letter I ruminate over whatever subjects she has broached, so that I can respond to them thoughtfully. Then the next chance I get I find a legal pad or notebook paper and begin writing back; I know she’ll be expecting my reply. I guess I had best get started right now; it’s my turn!

The Opposing Path, or Kerfluffle and Flow

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Over thirty years ago, I married my complete opposite. I was a young, foolish extrovert who made decisions based on feelings and intuitions. He was equally young and foolish, but was an introvert who made his decisions with facts and evidence. When he wanted to make decisions quickly I felt pressured. But I had been raised in the South to please my man, so at least early in the marriage, I tended to go along with his ideas for the sake of harmony. On his part he was often stunned that there could be any opposition to his ideas, because they were so logical. Of course, too much going along for the sake of harmony makes for a cranky spouse, so through the years we have had to learn to respect and even celebrate our differences.

I understand now that my detail oriented husband may actually have a heart attack if he cannot read the EXACT amount a check has been written for. For me, “about $70.00″ is close enough. So I write checks out of another account he never even sees. Problem solved! He doesn’t like clutter, so I try to cheerfully hang up my clothes at least twice a week. On his part, he tries not to pressure me to make decisions quickly, because I have to know I have looked at all possibilities first. He is kind to me about things I don’t notice, like whether or not a car needs gas. He knows that is way too boring for me to be involved with.

We have worked through the power struggles and communication problems of the earlier years and have emerged into the bliss of the empty nesting world. But a recurring challenge is how to come to mutual decisions. Things always come up. When we have conflicting ideas on how to handle a situation, what do we do? Does one partner capitulate to please the other, and deal with the resentment later? Does one partner doubt his or her own judgement and wonder if they’re just too controlling? Or do the partners keep working and keep talking until an agreeable decision is made? Where is the line between our individual selves and our partnership?

As I look back over the last three decades, I see that we have always done our best when we have been honest with ourselves and each other and have stuck to the work of working it out. Because we are constantly in the push/pull of being individuals and partners simultaneously, it is draining. Because we are opposites in personality styles, it is messy. But in the end it has brought us to the best emotional places in our marriage.

Recently a new “thing”( meaning an incident we will laugh about later but not yet) came up that reinforced the importance for me of listening to myself. Here it is: In the process of preparing our pied a terre, we moved our bed from our home to the condo. This meant we would be purchasing a new bed for our home. But first our bedroom needed to be painted. In the interim, we had been sleeping in another bedroom in our home. When we moved our bed, I gave away an armoire that had held many of my clothes, so my clothes were all over the place in plastic bags and various boxes.

Finally we picked a bedroom paint color and new bed linen. As soon as my husband painted the room we could get new bedroom furniture. But no, first my husband wanted to do something about our laminate floor. Some of the boards had been pulling away from each other, in approximately the same place where I had used a space heater for several winters. My husband didn’t like the look of it. I thought we had bigger fish to fry, as the hardly anyone could even see the place. See Exhibit A.

Would anyone really notice this?

Would anyone really notice this?

My husband proposed that he (which I thought would surely also mean me) would pull up the existing laminate while the room was empty, and lay an engineered hardwood floor. Although I am always happy to improve my home, I did not like this idea. First, we had been neck deep in renovations at the condo for almost a year, and were so close to getting it furnished. I thought our efforts should go there. Second, all projects take longer than people think they will, especially if either of the two of us is involved. Third, I had been without a bedroom or place to put my belongings for six weeks now, and I wasn’t interested in extending the time. I was tired of all this left brain decision making. I even wrote a post about it! I told my husband that if he must have a floor, that I would rather someone else put it in. No, no, no, he replied. That would be too expensive. He could do it himself for much less money. ( And five times the effort, I said to myself. I’ve matured over the years, so I don’t have to say everything I think.)

The next couple of weeks were excruciating for me. Every time the subject of the floors came up, my husband gave me his very logical reasons why we should follow his idea. I gave him my very valid reasons why we should not. I went to a flooring company just to get estimates, hoping there would be little price difference between having someone put in the floor or doing it ourselves. My husband saw the estimates and said they were too expensive.

I stewed. I did not want to be a poor sport, but I did not want to pull up a floor and lay another one right now. Why couldn’t he just listen to me? We didn’t (and don’t) even have a car big enough to bring laminate home in! And what would we do with the old laminate? How many weekends would this take? I wondered if this could be just a rare instance on my part of being stubborn. Surely not. But my husband was so stuck on this idea. Could I just give in? And readers, I could not. I had to listen to myself. We were going to have to go through the messy process of working it out. It made my stomach ache to think about it.

To the Moon Alice!

To the Moon Alice!
Source: rapgenius.com

I brought it up one last time on a Thursday night. Sparks flew. We both defended our positions. I had tried giving my husband lots of facts, since I thought he could hear those better. But finally I told him that if he proceeded the way he proposed it was going to cause more trouble than a few boards gone awry. What was his actual problem with the floor, and could we solve it using less drastic means? Since my husband could not live with the appearance of the floor, we tried to order more laminate on the internet to repair it. But of course it was discontinued. Then he reluctantly agreed to try to glue the drifting parts down. Crisis averted, I hoped. My anxiety went down by one thousand points. I had taken care of my individual self, and the relationship had survived.

That Saturday he glued down the boards. On Sunday he began to replace the quarter rounds he had taken down to repaint the bedroom. We were just about ready for our new bed! Oh, I was so glad I had not just given in to what he wanted. I celebrated by spending an hour or so in my swimming pool. After a refreshing dip, I went into my bathroom for a shower. But…. the threshold to the bathroom was pulled up, and the laminate seemed … damp. What had happened?

My husband walked in at that time and said that yes, water seemed to be coming from somewhere in our bedroom, but where? And why? For the next hour we ran the wet /dry vac and tried to locate the source of the ice cold water, which we had found seeping out from under the wall. Reluctantly my husband began to pull up pieces of laminate to see where the water was coming from. Things kept getting curiouser, and in the end we turned off the water and put in a call to a plumber.

Oh No!

Oh No!

I was planning to attend a Ramadan dinner that night with a friend, so I had to leave before the plumber arrived. Dinner was later than I thought, for I had failed to take in account that food could not be served until after dusk. As I listened to a speaker expound on working for the common good of all, I received a text from my husband. The plumber found that my husband had driven a nail through the wall into a water pipe coming in from under the slab of the house. He would have to jackhammer into our bedroom floor in order to fix the pipe. Water had seeped under the laminate, so our floor was of course, ruined.

On the way to the condo, where we had to sleep because we had no water at our home, my husband was so upset with himself. How could he have done this, he asked. How much was it going to cost to fix it? And why was I not angry with him? Why should I be angry with you? I asked him. It was just a mistake. Anyone could have done it. It’s not the end of the world. I meant that. At that moment I felt fully available to be a partner. That didn’t make my stomach hurt at all.

The next day a plumber came and fixed the pipe, and we were able to wash the 23 or so wet towels we had from the leak. My husband called the insurance man, and someone came to patch the hole in the wall from the repair. Sometime during that week my husband said in a quiet voice that when we got a new floor he no longer thought he had to install it himself. Oh, O.K., I said in a nonchalant tone.

That same day that the plumber fixed the slab, I attended my usual yoga class. Before we began, our teacher wanted to discuss two Sanskrit words, paksa, (roughly , going with the flow, ) and prati paksa (roughly, going against the flow). She related the terms to our yoga practice, saying that sometimes in order to properly do a pose we go the way the body wants to go, but at other times the best way to achieve balance is to take an opposite path. We must always assess which is the better choice: going with the flow, or going against the flow. Indeed.

Ineffability and Responsibility, or To Hell and Back with My Sister

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A Note from the Magpie:

Dear Readers,

You are about to be treated to the Mindful Magpie’s very first guest post, penned by none other than Ellen, my marvelously talented sister. Those who have not met her on this blog might like to visit this previous post and this one , oh, and also this one to familiarize themselves with her coolness, or just jump right in! I’ll get out of the way now before she accuses me of being bossy.

I was rocking out to the radio as I pulled up to the little ticket dispenser at the Greensboro International Airport. Yes, you guessed it! I was on my way to visit my sister in Memphis, my hometown. The dispenser buzzed and stuck out its tongue at me. Still impressing all who might be listening with my vocal talent, I blithely yanked on the tongue to dislodge the long term parking ticket from its jaws. Let the games begin! I pulled forward into the lot without rolling up my window, so when I placed the little ticket on my dashboard as I always do, I saw it flutter gracefully out of my line of sight. No bother. I would place the little runaway in its proper spot before moving onto the terminal. Luck, I thought, was surely with me today. No sooner than I had whipped Zula, my little VW Jetta, into a strategic parking spot than the shuttle magically appeared right behind me. I’ll find that pesky parking ticket on the way home, I told myself. Meanwhile, adventure awaited me in the form of my daughter’s purple roll-on suitcase and the shuttle with its patiently purring engine. With no regrets, I nimbly hopped onto the shuttle and into my wild rumpus.

On my last night in Memphis with my sister I penned a list of activities which had filled our all-too-short time together. Yes, the list was longish (As my sister has pointed out previously, I am methodical). Yes, I really did engage in all the activities happily and willingly (As my sister has pointed out previously, I am motivated). Yes, we had used our time wisely (As my sister has pointed out previously, I am organized). Yes, yes, yes; a thousand times yes! This list, which has been displayed in my sister’s earlier post, is simply a litany of activities. It can in no way encompass what we did together in Memphis. What I achieved was the goal of spending as much time with my sister as humanly possible in the short amount of time we had together. Mini-goals included, but were not limited to, laughing uproariously and in a most unladylike manner (sorry, Mother!) on any and all pretexts; discussing issues large and small in no particular order or chronological sequence; eating some foods which either aren’t available at home or which no one else at my house likes but me-or both; and reading and discussing what we’ve read.

Here’s where ineffability comes into play. The time I spend with Mary Beth is akin to how a sunflower tracks the sun as it moves through the sky. It is how Monarch butterflies journey down to Mexico and back each year. It is how the Earth orbits the sun, and the Moon orbits the Earth in its turn. They do it because they must. And I spend time with my sister because I must. Words will not suffice to make my meaning clear, but I will try (As my sister has pointed out previously, I am determined). I have had Mary Beth in my life as long as I can remember. We share the same sense of humor and the same love of reading and other intellectual pursuits. I rarely have to explain myself to her, and I never have to pretend to act or feel any certain way to gain her approval. I extend her this same leeway. Told ya words wouldn’t really get the job done. (As my sister has pointed out previously, I am task-oriented).

Responsibility touched down on my shoulders the minute I re-entered that long term parking lot after getting off the plane from Memphis via Atlanta. Remember that little parking ticket which had fluttered down off the dashboard in the breeze from my open car window? Turns out it is awfully hard to leave the long term parking lot without it. Having never misplaced one before, I was unaware of this fact. I dumped the purple roll-on in the back seat and commenced to search for the little ticket. I looked high and low, but that little ticket just did not want to be found. No bother. I proceeded to the exit gate. There I learned for the first time what hubbub could ensue when the little ticket went AWOL. No, the man could not just take my word for how long Zula had been parked in the lot. No, I did not have my boarding pass from the outbound trip. No, I did not have my itinerary (but you can be sure I will next time! As my sister has pointed out previously, I am a quick learner). Nothing for it but to trudge back to the terminal in the hopes that the desk employees could find some non-incriminating information for me. That bumpy landing in Greensboro had played havoc with other flights, so I had a long wait for my turn at the desk. Papers clutched firmly in my hand, I approached the exit booth for a second time. The fat raindrops dimpling Zula’s black hood convinced the little man that, as I had averred from the beginning, I did not park inside the deck but rather in the vast parking lot surrounding the exclusive parking deck.

When I was a young adult, Mary Beth tried upon many an occasion to share her worldly wisdom with me, often in an unsolicited manner. Unappreciative, I demanded that she quit telling me what to do. Mainly she has complied with this request. I explained to my friends that Mary Beth could call me in the middle of the night, to tell me to do something, and I would do it. Following her lead had been ingrained behavior, even if I did protest every now and then. Some things never change. If Mary Beth said, “Come on, Ellen. We’re going to hell,” I would get my knitting, my book, and my big girl drink and jump into the car. After all, if that’s where Mary Beth is headed, then I want to go there too.* Uh, we did get round trip tickets, right?

*Disclaimer: The author of the post is in no way implying that her sister is going to hell in a hand basket or in any other type of conveyance. Nor should any reader of this post so infer.