FIELD NOTES: Heart transplant...

My daughter got married in Seattle today...

FIELD NOTES: Coming soon...

Seattle: Part II and lots of other stuff....

FIELD NOTES: The heron has flown back...

Some of Marissa's photo shoots

FIELD NOTES: I have been to another world...

THE EULOGY I COULD NOT DELIVER

Victoria Rose Embros Kucinskas

March 22, 1922-August 27, 2010

Donald Kucinskas

January 1, 1921-January 6, 2009

          I am not sure how a daughter actually delivers a eulogy about a mother, how her voice can hold still if her mind is actually aware of what her mouth is saying, how her eyes can remain a dam against the release of thoughts that are not yet fully translatable even to herself, and to be articulated intelligibly before a gathering of people who surely knew her mother in different ways, their vibrations filling the atmosphere around the speaker; it does not seem possible…or adequate. But I will write it now…at least some of it…

          In the folder from her 60^th High School Reunion, there are pages of “Fun Type Questionnaires for the Graduates of the Class of 1940”.  To the question “After you graduated were you doing what you always thought you would be doing the rest of your life?” my mother wrote: “Yes – being a wife, a mother and a grandmother.” She added a note to the bottom of the questionnaire: “I just want to thank God for all the blessings he’s bestowed upon our lives.”

          As children of immigrant parents in the Great Depression, she and my father were taught not to throw away anything that might be reincarnated into an alternative use or buy anything new unless something had truly worn out (read: disintegrated). She could sew, cook and nurture plants; he could wire, plumb and construct. Therefore, we children grew up not a house of “treats” but a house of resourcefulness, ingenuity, integrity and respect for stewardship. If my parents couldn’t repair something, it truly was broken…and you didn’t necessarily get another…

          My mother’s world was very small; she was proud of saying she lived in Terryville all her life in a great big triangle. She remembered moving from their first rent by walking down the street carrying her little celluloid duck under her arm. As she grew up at the second rent, she made a point of going out to the icebox in the hallway when she heard a certain young man coming down the stairs, a certain young man whose father owned the White Eagle Bakery and whom had delivered bread, for a time, by horse and cart. She was third in her class of thirty-six and was voted Best-Looking. She wanted to be a nurse, and volunteered as a Candy-Striper at the Bristol Hospital, but on her mother’s insistence, she became a secretary and found a place at the Phoenix Insurance Company because it was handy to ride the trolley into Hartford. There she made more life-long friendships with a group of women who called themselves the Gabby Girls until, one day, she said yes to a tipsy baker-turned-sailor on the phone from California; she and her mother planned a wedding in two weeks. After the war, the three-family house on the hill that her father had always greatly admired was for sale. She and my dad and my grandparents never left it. Her world was small, but the space she leaves is large.

          I did not know my mother as the beautiful, young woman with the great legs in the black and white photographs that showed off her inherited skill for sewing fashionable outfits, but I do know that friendship and family were very important to her as evidenced by all the little pieces of writing and drawing and cards in piles around her house. Visually, I knew her mostly in the teased hair of the 60’s and 70’s and enjoyed playing with her pointy, shiny high-heels. I characterize her personality as the good sport at family picnics and the “nice lady” around the town when we went on errands or shopped. Later, I admired her as a “business lady” in my dad’s new adventure called Cheshire Wayside Furniture, her grace to withstand local politics when my dad was mayor and her humbleness at drawing the attention of Polish customers at the bank when they discovered a teller who could speak their native language. She married a sailor, but she never liked to make waves.

          All I wanted to say was this:  “I had good parents.”

          If you can read between these four simple words, then you know how much weight they carry, how little else needs to be said in our complex, grownup world. Now, as a teacher of other people’s children and having had to learn the language of educational standards, I am struck by the idea that my parents somehow supported all the best practices of parenting without even knowing what they were called.

                                                        

Thanks and Ja Cie Kocham

(that’s “I Love You” in Polish, pronounced Yacha kocham)

Victoria Rose Embros Kucinskas obituary

FIELD NOTES: A little something for friends & family...

Seattle Synopsis

Unless you know me personally, have been to Seattle, or are planning a trip out west... you may find the above link...well, boring. Let's face it, nothing brings out squirming and forced smiles more than the words "Let me show you my vacation photos!" I take photos of odd things and am still working on presenting the images I find artistically interesting - they'll probably turn up in my blog somewhere along the way. The PDF document above does have lots of interesting links to all things Seattle, so you can always skip my notes and go directly to those...my favorites are Gas Works Park, the Fremont ones, and the bicycles.

FIELD NOTES: Preparing for the west coast...

Real summer life has kept me from virtual life...not much posting, browsing and commenting...and I won't be very active the next two weeks because I'm finally visiting my daughter in Seattle. Haven't taken a vacation in years...hope to have quality items for Show and Tell upon my return. Meanwhile, I've left a July album and added a new guestbook for the enjoyment of anyone who stumbles here...and while you're at it, check out my older posts...this is a journal blog rather than one that contains time-sensitive material...

Good thoughts!
Diane

FIELD NOTES: She never returned...

Sunday morning musings

…after I last wrote about Charlotte, her web became erratic and haphazard for a few days, her construction too feeble to withstand ordinary rain and wind. Like her namesake in the book, I wondered if she had produced her magnum opus and then proceeded to die. As if to say farewell to my apprehensive daughter who had been in New York City for a few days, the web reappeared towards the end of the week and then, no more. She was gone. For the first few nights, I kept flicking the front light on and off and then I stopped, got out of the habit. Without having to think, without purpose or planning, we could now use the new front door. A burden had been lifted. But my oldest son was the first to say out loud: “I miss her.” Isn’t it just that way, when we have taken the time to perhaps not wholly love, but certainly appreciate, a web of life? Oh that I should be a burden missed! Quite the compliment…

FIELD NOTES: The eye is sometimes the lens best suited for the subject…

Sunday morning musing

…and so it goes for spiders in the night. Charlotte has become our nightly fascination and has even found converts among us. I discovered my daughter (who is ‘grossed out’ by bugs of any sort) trying to best me with her camera shots, but joined me in stronger appreciation for professional nature photographers instead. She also called out the window one afternoon when I drove into the driveway that it was alright to use the front door because the web had blown away. I sensed that we both felt some sort of remorseful gladness. We don’t really ‘like’ spiders; small spiders tend to get squished when they appear in the bed or bath, but Charlotte is BIG. She is big in more ways than one. Initial suggestions were made to perhaps relocate her so we could actually use our new front door, but the nightly lantern, the gutter and close proximity to the garden seems to be an ideal encampment. Wanting to spread appreciation, the teacher in me called the little neighbor boy over to see The Great Web that had stayed intact for most of Wednesday. He was properly fascinated and returned later with a friend…(Ah, a taste of the old days!...B.C. - before computers - when every kid was an entrepreneur by ‘charging admission’ to anything that constituted a ‘show’). So as we continue to use the garage or back door, kudos to Charlotte for her tour de force; it was difficult to use the front entry on a summer’s night anyway because the screen door is usually loaded with moths, Japanese beetles and the like. I counted twelve ‘packets’ in her web last night and watched as more unfortunates careened into the sticky trap for the love of lamplight…Love is blind?

FIELD NOTES: The lilacs are gone but still remain...

...I had a lilac house in the place where I grew up. It was just a row of bushes separating our driveway from the neighbor's backyard, but to me it was another world…the world of my imagination. I wore a path through the shrubs creating an entryway, a kitchen and a rear patio. An old saw horse was the kitchen counter where I made pies and cakes with mud and leaves in my toy aluminum pan. After a good summer rain, I could pretend to take a shower by shaking the branches overhead. Those looking out their windows would see a little girl standing in the bushes, perhaps thinking that I was lonely…or weird…but in my lilac house, I was confident and creative, brave and independent and in control…now isn’t that a wonderful place for a little girl to be?

Find favorite mother-daughter book share: Mud Pies and Other Recipes - A Cookbook for Dolls at Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves

FIELD NOTES: I have never seen mountains....

NYT Art Review: Mythic West of Dreams and Nightmares

Through the window

...I realized as the plane descended into Salt Lake City and I experienced for the first time in my fifty years the American landscape west of Chicago. Only the robotic female voice of the GPS kept my rental car where it should be …headed to Ogden…as I glided past white peaks as if I were in some IMAX theater. There are no words…and no photographs…that can adequately translate this experience…because it is about ‘having to be there’ to the ultimate degree. And I got to ‘be there’ because I was flown from CT to UT for the weekend as a birthday present for my daughter's 21st birthday to see her dance professionally…a surprise gift for both of us from her director. I am not ordinarily a spur of the moment person, so this was a challenge…a ‘monumental’ one for me…and in retrospect, it is as close as I have ever come to ‘running away’. She performed an emotionally (and physically) exhausting interpretation of the human artistic expression lost in the Holocaust and, after the all too brief live contact with my daughter, along with little sleep or food, I was already flying back out of Utah early the next morning with heightened senses and a golden opportunity to observe the changing landscape across the country in a way I had never imagined. Progressing back towards the middle of the country the land smoothed out, the roads appeared like a grid on a tablecloth and the buildings of Minneapolis became the highest peaks. On the approach into Connecticut, I saw the contrast. My daughter was right…we don’t have mountains here. Incredibly bumpy, pock-marked with little lakes and the roads coiling around and up and over the wooded hills like piles of giant garden hoses…I wondered why anyone would choose to settle this landscape. I had brought along a book I had started reading (Three Cups of Tea) which turned out to be a strange kind of coincidence…or not. The setting of the book is in the Himalayas where the mountains are more than twice the elevation as the ones I saw in Utah...so...I still have never seen mountains…but I now can feel, and appreciate, their presence daily…

Excerpt from Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin:

“Nearly a century earlier, Filippo De Filippi, doctor for and chronicler of the duke of Abruzzi’s expedition to the Karakoram, recorded the desolation he felt among these mountains. Despite the fact that he was in the company of two dozen Europeans and 260 local porters, that they carried folding chairs and silver tea services and had European newspapers delivered to them regularly by a fleet of runners, he felt crushed into insignificance by the character of this landscape. ‘Profound silence would brood over the valley,’ he wrote, ‘even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by Nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her.’”

FIELD NOTES: The sunshine will be busy today...

Through the bedroom window

…coming and going, welcoming and warming…or distracting and glaring depending upon my needs…brilliant and all too brief for this time of year. It will radiate through the cold winter air and I will remember its warmth on my body for as long as possible…like a daughter. I have a daughter and I am a daughter…my mother was a daughter and her mother was a daughter…we are a steady stream of light-years. Yesterday the sunshine escorted us as we drove through Hartford to the airport while 30 mph winds tried to push us back. Today the light behind the curtain drew me from slumber. It will take me to Harrybrooke for a much needed walk...and back light for me the black knitted glove stuck on the end of a branch reaching up in an unrequited handshake to last spring’s tattered kite. It will disappear on the horizon, but I will know it is still there…behind something…or shining on another part of the world…it is always somewhere. It will help me remember the way my grandmother sang 'You Are My Sunshine’ in her Polish accent…and its solar power stored within me. The weather forecast for Seattle is rain and 40 for the coming week. Yesterday I had my daughter and the sunshine with me; today I have the sunshine.

FIELD NOTES: I saw the parsley move...

The beginning of August

...which at first I didn’t believe. I still remember how fascinating it was the first time I saw a time lapse film of a plant growing from seed to bloom. We impatient humans need the mechanical lens of a camera to witness such miniscule increments of movement as they happen. Or do we? I keep some parsley in a blue and white porcelain pot that I can move around to confuse the selfish appetite of the resident woodchuck, but it had drooped like a weeping willow. After watering it, along with all the other potted plants on the deck, I just felt like sitting, doing absolutely nothing and I thought about tabouli salad. Usually, I quickly dispense the refreshing water before vanishing to do something else and by the time I come back, the plants are standing tall again, like magic. But it was a globally warmed sort of day; the outside air heated and moistened to an alarming point that it felt like you were trying to breathe through a damp blanket. There was no noticeable breeze, yet I saw the parsley move. Not the whole pot full, but one stalk in particular. One long stalk must have taken its fair share of water and with a great gulp kept courageously kept pushing the molecules through its stem, jerking nearly imperceptibly, hoping someone would notice. Another little jerk and then another, lifting its leaves as gracefully as a dancer. I saw it! It was either a Zen moment or the heat confusing my senses, but either way, I saw it. I’ve planted seeds for years and years and years, yet I am in awe each time one sprouts and grows up. A cucumber, a tomato, a Kentucky Wonder green bean, and even a daughter. Tonight, I would snip off some parsley. Soon my daughter would be three thousand miles away. But tonight one tall, green stalk would not be turned into a salad because it was brave enough to move.

FIELD NOTES: I watched her standing in front of the mirror...

Sometime in July

...for no particular reason. We have one small bathroom and she had blocked my exit so I watched her. It was more observation, like a shiny red shoe catching your eye in a store window or a wavy image you try to figure out from a distance. She is a reflection of me, only taller. Her leotard and tights – the ones that get shabby from so much practice – wrapped her body like a second skin. It took her awhile to smooth her silky golden hair into a ponytail so I watched her arms work rhythmically around her head like a spider weaving. I won’t tell her that. She is afraid of spiders. She looks askance and asks me if I want to get by. No, I say. Okay, my mother is doing one of her weird things again, says the curl of her eyebrow. She is beautiful on stage in costume and makeup and lights, well-rehearsed and centered. But here is where it counts. Here where I watch her using the mirror in the bathroom.