Coffee Chat: Days and Days Ahead

Hello dears, do come in from the chilly outdoors and have a little something hot.  Shall you have tea?  It's satisfying somehow on these cold afternoons, in the same way that coffee satisfies in the mornings.  I recall reading old tea ads which all talked about the enervating effect of an afternoon cup.   It was promoted as a tonic of sorts, bound to cure the afternoon tiredness and carry one through the evening activities.  

What cup would you like to choose?  It occurred to me Christmas Eve as I sipped coffee from a pretty china cup that I have been digging through thrift stores for years looking for 'pretty' tea cups to use...and here I've got several to choose from amongst two matching sets of china!  How silly is that?  However you may take your choice this morning, as you can see.  I've a pretty thrifted pink, a pretty blue that Katie gifted me, a rose covered one and the blue and brown pattern that was my first china.

There's fruit cake, too.  It's a store bought one of course, but next year...Next year I mean to make one myself.  I had a lovely recipe from Pam but it's gone and gotten lost.  Pam, if you're here, please do send it to me again!  I found another on Pinterest the other day that looks nice.  I've decided that I shall experiment and see which I like...but that is jumping ahead a good bit.  Or would you prefer crisp, buttery cinnamon toast?  Oh the choices we must make!

But just at the moment, let's not even consider anything that requires that silly oven.  I've just been cleaning it.  Well, I just cleaned the oven door.  45 minutes of scrubbing away at it and it's down to something I can live with.  Unfortunately, I have the whole of the oven, the broiler underneath and the racks to go.  I've decided that it's quite all right to do it in segments.  And necessary.  I'm bushed from all that scrubbing.

How was your Christmas?   We had the last of ours on Christmas Eve.  It was a lovely day.  We woke extra early for no reason I can tell and I prepared our usual holiday breakfast of canned orange cinnamon rolls and little smoky sausages and endless cups of coffee.  We ate by the light of the Christmas tree which seems to me to be as lovely as ever a Christmas tree has been.

We went to church which was an early service and that ended with a candlelight ceremony which was nice.  I do wonder though, having seen all the wax drips on the carpets and floors despite the little paper shields on each candle,  just how happy the staff will be with the results of that.  But maybe it's just the housekeeper in me that saw that as a problem and they don't.

Before we'd left for church, I'd set a pretty table, knowing full well if I waited until we returned I'd be hungry and antsy and that would be the least of my concerns. 

We came home and made ourselves a proper Christmas meal.  I started with an appetizer of sausage and cream cheese stuffed portabella mushrooms (a recipe from my Atkins diet days) and an entree of New York Strip roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and a salad.  John had chosen corn on the cob which I thought for sure would be tasteless but it proved to be sweet and tender crisp once boiled and was quite good. 

We ate our meal in courses, starting with the appetizers which went into the oven to bake as the roast went in on high heat to get that nice brown sear upon the fat.   Then we had our salads as the Yorkshire pudding finished up and the roast rested.  Then we had our desserts.   John wanted apple pie and I wanted something decadent and Christmas-y for dessert.  He got a small apple pie at the grocery and I chose a single slice of Red Velvet which was very good and we were both happy.  John doesn't care for Red Velvet cake and I think it's good stuff.   Naturally after all that we sat about and groaned slightly and sipped coffee and were good for nothing much.

We watched lovely old Christmas films:  "Christmas in Connecticut" and "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "The Bishop's Wife".   We  looked in vain for the Alistair Sims version of "A Christmas Carol" and we found it at last...on at 2am Christmas morning!  Well we didn't get to see that, not with John working Christmas morning and slated to be up at 5am.

All in all it was a lovely drawn out holiday that began sometime just after Thanksgiving and has gone on all month long.  Aside from only mild disappointment at how quickly my family day went, I have no complaints about the season this year and I hope future years will go as nicely and be as full of pleasant things as this one.

I was no sooner awake Christmas morning that I began to start making plans for the New Year.  Not the holiday but the year itself.  I saw John off to work and had time to spare between his leaving and my going on to his partner's house for a buffet meal.   So I did some light housekeeping and hung a load of sheets and towels to dry and thought of the need to get a new bottom sheet now that I've only one for our bed.   I hung the clothes I'd let drop on the hassock the day before and thought of my need of fresh blue jeans.  I put out fresh towels in the bath and looked at how faded and worn they've become over the past five or six (or is it seven?) years and contemplated new towels.

I'd thought of learning to make fruit cake and my desire to learn to crochet.  I contemplated the work I've already signed up to do with the new year.  I thought of studies I'd like to pursue.  My mind just naturally felt that now, with the holiday rapidly winding down that it was time to really think on the year ahead and what I hoped to make of it.  I thought of undecorating the house from Christmas and wondered what I'd like to put out for the winter months ahead to see us through until Spring.  I do so hate to un-do Christmas and leave things looking bare and bereft just because there's no holiday I want to celebrate after Christmas!

Before I got too involved in planning for next year I decided I should approach first things first.  For one thing there was an invitation to spend time at John's work partner's home with his wife and family.  It was a quiet easy gathering with everybody pretty much eating and doing nothing much.  It was a cold cut buffet dinner with chips and dips and a veggie tray and was just really relaxed and easy.  It was a wonderful respite in a busy season.  I had quiet conversation with my hostess and it was frankly the nicest thing to get one on one time with her.

That was my 'first' first.  I realized after I came home that my next step was to sit down with pen and paper and do some planning.  I can work without a plan but I don't focus half so well if I haven't got a list of things to do be done and the order in which to do them.  Launching my Jamberry consultation business is important, but then so is establishing a working routine, a writing routine, and being aware of everything coming up in the next few weeks.  John will likely want to participate in a Daniel fast and I want to be prepared this year.  I promised him a block of time for just the two of us and that's coming up here in the beginning of January.   In fact, all my thoughts at present are just focused on January which isn't really such an oddity given it's the last week of December.

But I wanted to look at the year ahead, as well.  Truth is, I didn't know I was going to be a Jamberry consultant nor a housekeeper in the New Year and yet here I am at the end of December having signed up to do both!   I finally got time to do just that a little later in the week and it felt good to start my lists.

I woke up one morning this week and decided that Christmas was done and regardless of having no idea what winter décor shall look like I was definitely going to put Christmas away.  I did that and John said nothing much at all, but later that evening he did.  He amuses me no end with his dislike of putting away Christmas these days.  He's always so cast down over it.  I'm so glad that he enjoys it now and likes to extend the season, but there's something in me that is just done with it all at once and so I am ready to put it away and appreciate it afresh next November.

The week has been nothing much really.  We drove over on Tuesday to Sam's dad's house which seems odd to say because of late he refers to John as 'Dad'.   I was sober enough about the death of my ex-husband but seeing how he lived in his final years (and I didn't even set foot in the house, just heard about it from my guys) and knowing how he and his wife died, really sobered me hard.  I am not telling tales out of turn now, since he can no longer be hurt by anything I say, and Sam nor Amie will rush to defend him.  They long ago saw him clearly, as children do...and their loyalty turned to John many years ago.  It was, however, always out of respect for them I said little about their dad and will say only a little now.

When we married, we started out in a nice home, a new doublewide with new vehicles and enough money to pay our bills but within two years we had older used cars and a four room house with no heat or AC.  It was a nice enough house, having recently been updated, but our next home was the old bedraggled, falling apart at seams house I loved so.  Our sole improvements to that home was to put up sheetrock in Amie's bedroom, build a closet in our bedroom (sans doors or paint), screen in the front porch and change out the front door for one with a window in the upper half.  In ten years of living there that was the whole of our upgrades.  The house he was living in at his death was a step down from that house and apparently housekeeping was not even on the list of things they ever did.  The house looked abandoned and yet, until a week ago, someone lived there.

Anyway, I thought back over our marriage and his nature and mine.  I wondered at the girl I was who felt he was all I deserved.  He was smart and a hard worker but there was something in him that despite his upbringing always wanted to sink to the lower levels and he steadily did just that, always going just that one step lower and then down another.  Given a choice of two friends, he always chose the one that made you feel uneasy and who had a reputation that if you said it was tarnished would have been a polished up state.  I don't know why this was so.  His folks were not wealthy but they were decent and had principles about things.   They doted on L as a boy and as a man.    And as is often the case, his sister absolutely embodies all that her parents were, but L did not.

He was seldom without work that paid well but it was with him.  I've said before that even after 25 years, John's wages have never equaled half what L made but I never lived so poor with John as I did with L.  We went without necessities and yet we didn't live in such away that we should have.  I mean that all those good frugal skills I have now were well honed back in that first marriage.  I cloth diapered and hung out clothes to dry and we seldom ate out except maybe on an anniversary now and then.   We didn't have nice furnishings or great cars or pricey clothes though by rights we could have afforded all those things and more.  We seldom had a phone and often went without water or electricity.    Somehow money wouldn't stick with him and I didn't know why until far beyond the marriage when I began to hear things that people had been too kind to let me hear while married to him.  Living was hard in those years but it taught me all I needed to know to cope well when I married John and we had so many mouths to feed and so little to stretch to cover all the needs.

John and I had a long conversation about it Wednesday morning.  'Would I have continued to fall with him?' I wondered out loud.  "Would he have eventually so discouraged me that I'd have willingly lived as he did at the end?" And John said "No, I expect, knowing you the way I do, that your marriage with him was never meant to be a long one.   It wasn't in your nature to live as he did."  I was no great shakes as  a housekeeper back then, in my youth, but I did have a standard to live up to and I did attempt to do so.  I concluded John was quite right.  I wished I'd seen at 19 what I could so plainly see at 59, that L was never meant to be the man for me, nor was I ever meant to live as unhappily as I did with him.  Yet I wouldn't change a thing because that marriage brought me Amie and Sam.

Well it's been an odd month anyway, this dealing with exes and seeing ourselves at this age and remembering who we were and what we were years ago.  I could see quite plainly after meeting John's ex that whatever else they'd done, they had both married decent people the first and second times around.   And I could clearly see that it was meant for my children to know John as their dad and that Jd needed me as much as he did his mom.  I had a lovely note from her on Christmas morning in which she wished us a Merry Christmas "to you and John and yours and ours".  How sweet is that?   For various reasons, Jd was all mine to worry over and raise and admonish and encourage from age 15 to age 40 and V has a lot of time to recover in getting to know him once more,  but I'm glad that she approved of the man her son is and that she credited that to me as much as to herself in his early formative years.  And I'm just as glad that they have the opportunity to rebuild their relationship.

But yes, I can see clearly that the pattern all along was meant to be what it has been.  John was meant to raise my children and I was meant to mother his sons and for whatever reason the ex-spouses were not in the chilren's lives during those years and apparently not meant to be.  I didn't become a Christian until after I met John and he didn't renew his walk until after we'd married.  Yet somehow, I do feel that all was in God's plan even if it wasn't all the way I would have thought it ought to have been.   Maybe we're not meant to live perfectly but to try to make the best of the lives we're given and go through the trials we do to strengthen us and smooth out the edges.  I don't know.  But I do see that it was clearly meant to be just this way for each of us.

So here we are just a few days from the year's end.  I sat down and really looked back over the year we've had and it's been something special this year in so many ways.  There have been so many things revealed and so many changes and so many doors shut quite firmly closed and some we'd thought closed opened to reveal rather pleasant interiors.  It's felt like a big year in many ways and while I'd rather hoped it would be like that year so many years ago when we just sort of glided through without any tragedies or sorrows or great triumphs either, I don't guess I'd wish this year to have been different.

I suppose I really ought to end here or we'll have little to show for the day overall.  I do like to have things ready for Shabat in my home so that I can close down the work for the week and just fully soak in the rest of Sabbath.  Well the rest that is allowed with company in the house...Yes, the guest room is in use again...Season of hospitality indeed!  Peace, dears.