Revisiting 2014: My end-of-year personal summit.

Thanks to Rosie Molinary for inspiring this exercise!

1. Describe yourself at the beginning of 2014.

At the start of 2014, I was physically and mentally tired. My beloved grandfather had just died, we were driving back and forth between states and homes during the holidays, and on the first day of the year, I flew to a polar vortexing Vermont for a week of intensive workshops to begin my grad school program. It was the year of our wedding - though still nine months out - and plans and decisions about the big day were always underlying. I liked my job well enough, and loved the folks I worked with, but after nearly three years, it had begun to feel rote and not challenging.

2. What are five words that describe your 2014?

Transition. Struggle. Fulfilling. Joyful. Weary.

3. Recall 2014. What are three images that pop into your head?

Leaving my house in Charlotte for the last time.

Walking down the aisle at our wedding.

Our first Christmas tree in our cozy little home.

4. How do those images make you feel in retrospect?

Leaving Charlotte feels very far away - six months ago this week - and yet not at all. I/We are still hashing out what it means to be not there. The transition has been daily, difficult, and inwardly chaotic. And yet I find myself grateful and filled to be so near our families here in Georgia. Looking back, without that element of family gatherings and closeness, life in NC seems like it was a little emptier. 

Walking down the aisle makes me rejoice that our wedding ended up just as it should have, surrounded by friends and family and the touches that made it us. I'm glad that I remember it so clearly. I'm also glad that the planning, waiting, and preparation are all over and done!

I'm looking at our Christmas tree right now because we haven't had the heart to take it down yet. It fills me with gratitude that after weeks of searching on Craigslist, driving down streets, and everything in between to no avail, a home became available to us the week Sean moved to Atlanta. I'm thankful that it has every element that we looked for, and landlords who are kind and attentive. No matter the ongoing stresses of this transition, it is a joy to have a house that feels like home.

5. What did you do this year that you had never done before?

Went to graduate school. Left a job. Got married.

6. What dates/experiences from this year will remain etched in your memory and why? (Maybe I'm being lazy, but I feel like the "why" is answered in that I remember and note them!)

Sitting in my car and hearing a job offer over the phone, feeling equally elated and terrified.

My going away party at my job in Charlotte, where I bawled.

My first day at my new job, when my heart was in my throat and my stomach felt liquid.

The in-between surreality of going back and forth between familiar places (but we can only inhabit one at a time! Argh!) while we did long-distance for two months.

Putting together our wedding invitations in the calm and quiet of the office where we met.

Fun and humbling wedding shower celebrations.

Moving into our rental house.

Our full, clear-as-day wedding weekend, surrounded by loved ones from near and far.

Exploring the streets and squares of Savannah.

Sitting outside in our backyard struggling to finish my school work.

Moving moments from all three memorial services for Sean's grandparents.

Standing in the back of my home church on Christmas Eve, hearing "Amen" resound around me in a different and more meaningful way than it ever had. (I'll be writing more about this soon.)

Sharing our first Christmas together.

This list would get way longer if I listed the countless small moments that have brought such joy.

7. What was your biggest challenge?

Leaving Charlotte, a place that we think of as home, for Atlanta, where we grew up but haven't lived in quite awhile. I also started a new job, finished planning our wedding, and successfully completed a semester of grad school all at once.

8. What was your biggest triumph?

I can't describe quite how good it felt to read my grad school advisor's final evaluation of my semester, especially since he knew all that had been going on in my personal life. Finishing the term on such a good note - hell, finishing at all - felt like a massive accomplishment.

9. What are three to five great things you did in 2014?

Celebrated amazing lives, including three of Sean's grandparents, as well as inspirational church members - probably the record number of funerals I've attended in one year, but each felt moving and meaningful.

Had a dance party blast at Chris + Michele's wedding with some of my favorite people.

Gathered my best girlfriends together for brunch on the day of my wedding.

Went to Savannah for a fun, restful, adventurous, sunshine-y, delicious food honeymoon.

Watched childhood home movies with my family on New Year's Eve, smiling, sighing and cackling with laughter.

10. What are some important things you stopped doing?

Twitter. I'm almost completely off, and it's so refreshing.

Driving 30 miles to see Sean. Hooray for one house!

Ongoing process, but attempting to slow my brain-crippling anxiety.

Another ongoing process: I feel like I've stopped (or started to stop?) worrying about putting on a good face when things are challenging or messy in life. I feel surrounded and supported by people who will take me as I am and who also know what it's like to live into the questions.

11. What are some important things you started doing?

Going to a women's group at church one night a week.

Riding the bus to work - using less gas and walking more.

Jessica Smith workouts.

Thinking about what home means for me and others.

Figuring out my identity as an adult and wife within the community where I grew up.

12. Looking back, what was this year’s gift to you?

2014 showed me that I (and Sean and I) can take a lot and get through a lot. Leaving a place we love, a new job, the job hunt, an intensive school semester, a wedding, beginning a marriage, the passing of three grandparents... It reminded me of the messy, deep love and support we have on all sides of us and within us. It also brought us to a new/old home that we're getting to know and grow into. It's given us more time with our families and a vibrant church community that I love experiencing anew and sharing with my husband. The start of a new year doesn't end the time of transition, and doesn't make me stop wondering about home... but it does help me to take a deep breath, give us both a major pat on the back, and say thanks.

13. Describe yourself now.

At the start of 2015, I feel the weariness and heft of all that happened over the last twelve months (which have gone in a snap, by the way). But at the same time, I feel refreshed and forward-looking. I'm heading back to Vermont (hopefully not as polar vortexing) to begin my third graduate school semester. I feel like I have a decent handle on where I'm going with my writing - but I know I'll have to buckle down and get words on the page, rather than ideas floating around in my head. I'll be teaching a memoir-writing class this winter/spring, and I'm nervous and excited about that opportunity. I am in a job that challenges me, in a high-energy higher ed environment whose mission I believe in, working alongside dynamic co-workers and friends. It's wonderful to be in the same town as my parents, my grandmother, my brother and his girlfriend, my in-laws, my sister-in-law and her fiance - all great folks who get along well with each other. Most of all, I am so thankful for Sean and all that he is. Even in the midst of transition, I feel settled and joyous with him. Building a home and a life together, and sharing that on good days and bad, was the best and most rewarding part of 2014 and beyond.

Cheers to 2015! (And hopefully a more frequent blogging schedule...)

Dear Pop Pop,

Last Thanksgiving, we celebrated in our usual buoyant, big-family fashion. It was a lovely sunny day, and you bantered with your youngest grandsons, oohed and ahhed over carrot cake and apple pie, and sat at the round wooden table with your plate and your smile brimming over. I can remember small things from that day that carry over into so many times with you: your sandpaper hand that I automatically grab, and the hard and fast squeeze it gives mine. The comforting feel and smell of your suede jacket or corduroy shirt. Your still-brown hair, even at 86, always perfectly combed. The knowing twinkle you give me in the midst of... something, anything, whatever is going on, it's there, like a fun secret.

Everything changed so quickly after Thanksgiving last year. A year ago today, I came home from lunch at Panera with Jessie and walked in the door and Sean held my shoulders while Mom told me that you'd had a stroke and were in the hospital. You had lost your laugh, your quick tongue, which seems so wrong and cruel to think of even now. You aren't you without those elements - and yet you managed to be you, conducting us with your one good arm when we sang hymns, at turns tearful and joyous, around your bedside. We moved from talking about physical therapy and teaching you how to swallow again to talking about hospice care and making you comfortable (but with those rattling breaths, how could you be?). 

In the span of three weeks, it was suddenly over. I look at photos from that wonderful last Thanksgiving Day and think, how could any of us have ever imagined that before Christmas Day, we would have to stand in a cold and rainy Decatur cemetery and say goodbye? I do not understand.

Now I go through daily life without random-yet-regular letters and poems in your jotted scrawl. I no longer can call a number and hear, "Heyyyy, Claire Claire!" (Pop Pop = Claire Claire) on the other end. At my wedding, I had to pose with a photograph of your smiling face so that I could still have a picture with you. When I think of it, I feel a stab of guilt or bad timing or sorrow that I've only moved back home after you are gone. But then I think that maybe you being gone - the whole process of that happening - urged me to get back home.

There is an unspoken emptiness without you there, even though we are still a full-brim family. Losing one of our leading pair brings an inexplicable oddness to any gathering now, at least to me. There is just a little more space that isn't being used - a lack, a voice not being heard or a joke not being told. A hand not being squeezed. It isn't that something is clearly wrong - but the ghost of an action, your action, floats nearby.

When we mention you in conversation, I expect you to speak or respond in the old ways. I'm still learning the new ways that you speak to us. I'm sure you do, somehow, but it's so very different than the way you held court on earth.

This has been, I think, the year of my life so far that has been most fraught with change, transition, stress, and uncertainty. Sean and I got engaged - and I took for granted that since you were around to celebrate with us then, you would be around a year later on the big day. Then those unexpected last three weeks with you, with me mostly four hours down the road. That was hard. That got me wishing that home was closer. I started a graduate program (I cried the night before I started, because I know you would have sent me a note saying how proud you were). And somehow, within six months, a job opportunity opened up back in our hometown. I took it with excitement, but also great trepidation. Packing up and saying goodbye to a city that we love, then doing long distance for two months leading up to our wedding, starting a new job and looking for a new job and finding a place to live in a place that is somewhat familiar but very, very new...  It hasn't been easy. So many days in this new life I've felt like I was just pushing through to the next day. I could have used your cards, your phone calls - or even better, living near you in the same city once again.

Every day now, I walk only blocks from the airy white house on Clifton where you and Nana spent fifty years. I always find my mind straying towards some alternate universe where you are still sitting at the long dining room table whose windows look out onto the deck, eating Oat Squares in the glazed brown bowls with handles, flapping through your morning paper. I will stop by this afternoon after work and we will shoot the breeze on the porch or in the den.

I find that I don't quite know how to treat home without you there.

Tonight I am sitting in Sean's grandparents' sun room in Ocean Pines, Maryland. We are here to bury both of his mother's parents. They passed away within ten days of each other only weeks after our wedding. And his paternal grandmother passed away in May. Between us, we have lost four out of seven living grandparents in these last twelve months. But you were all over 85; I waffle between missing you like crazy and being grateful that we had you for so long. I lost an aunt too young this September, and I think of her saltwater wit and ocean-deep heart; I want to do so much more for my cousins than simply send texts of love and support. (I can picture you and she swapping jokes in heaven, while our Rusty-dog licks your feet. You'd never let him do that on earth, but maybe Aunt M - a dachshund lover herself - has convinced you different.)

News of death and illness and grief, interwoven with the horrid turmoil of the world, makes me reach this new December feeling drained even before it begins. Last Advent was blurred with the speed and exhaustion of your dying, sacred though it was. I felt like I was in a car or a roller coaster in reverse, watching the coming holiday season grow smaller and more miniscule as we were forced to back away.

Now we are beginning Advent with more death, more goodbyes, and a sense of uncertainty - can we even ask for or expect or hope for a time of solid calm and quiet joy? I am afraid that I am expecting dearth and darkness more than fullness and light. I am tired and weary - of being in the middle, of that empty space that does not contain your smile, of the way that sorrow has seemed to weave itself into the lives of those I care about this year. And it seems to begin and end with you - somehow, I feel like I could be lighter with you nearby. Even if you were in the next room, it seems that something in my spirit would be different.

In some way, I know that you are simply in the next room. But I am still trying to figure out what that means, when the door is locked to me and no sound of you carries through. 

Advent. Longing, waiting. Maybe I've got it just right.

I miss you and adore you.

Love always,

Claire

27 things to do before I turn 28.

First married birthday, featuring our wedding cake topper. Who wants to wait a year when there's chocolate involved?!

So, my birthday was nearly five weeks ago, but I still wanted to write out a list that has become a bit of a tradition over the last couple of years. I was inspired by my friend and mentor Rosie, who makes a birthday list every year. For me, first came 25 things to do before I turned 26. Then 26 things to do before I turned 27. Now it's time for another.

This isn't a list of must-dos, not items to cross off or to beat myself up if I don't do them all, or even half. But I find that simply putting these ideas and hopes out there gives the upcoming year an open space for possibility.

I came up with all of these today while waiting for the shuttle ride home from work. It's interesting, what popped into my head so suddenly for...

27 Things to Do Before I Turn 28:

1. Get a pedometer and track my walking. I had one freshman year of college and really appreciated how conscious it made me of movement.

2. Write one page a day in my journal.

3. Buy a second external hard drive and make sure all of my writing and photos are backed up. Please Lord may I not be jinxing myself on this.

4. Have one catch-up phone conversation every week.

5. This always seems to be wishful thinking, but maybe if I keep repeating it, it might someday become a reality... Get earlier bedtimes and wake up earlier to enjoy the morning and write.

6. Try new recipes out of our many new cookbooks - and plan at least two meals weekly.

7. I tend to look at social media a LOT when I am either a) bored or b) hoping for lots of "likes." It's hardly ever worth it to keep checking and checking, and it wastes my time, and screws up my ego either downwards or upwards. I want to be more purposeful about when and why I am connected.

8. On the same note, when I am with someone (or ones), I want to focus on them - not be sidetracked by my electronic device.

9. Hang pictures and art in our new house.

10. Decorate my office at work.

11. Walk outside every day for at least 10 minutes if it's not raining.

12. Write a letter to my grandfather every year at Thanksgiving, to remember the last wonderful day we spent together before he had his stroke.

13. Save money.

14. Finish grad school (starting grad school was one of my successful accomplishments on last year's list!)... which means teaching a writing workshop in the spring and finishing my memoir manuscript. I'm looking forward to being challenged by and enjoying both.

15. Have intentional date nights with Sean.

16. During the season of Advent, somehow celebrate the ways I see and feel light and longing.

17. Find a way to make Lent meaningful when the time comes.

18. Explore different neighborhoods around town.

19. I've suffered from heartburn off and on (more on) for the last five years and have just found out that there's a heartburn center at a hospital in town. I'd like to make an appointment there and get to the bottom of this.

20. Serve in the community.

21. Be okay with living in between, trying to figure out where home is, what home means, and simply understanding that the sometimes clear but mainly messy feelings surrounding this subject are perfectly normal and should be lived into.

22. Visit a new place with Sean.

23. Pack more and better lunches during the week - too often I resort to eating out, when I know that many more frugal and creative options exist.

24. Continue to build on the good strength training I've started. Jessica Smith, you're the best.

25. Go camping/hiking. I don't make enough purposeful time for nature, and I'd really like to (especially when it gets, uh, warmer).

26. Get more training in graphic design, Photoshop, InDesign - for my job, but also just for my own knowledge and expansion.

27. Enjoy and savor the first year of marriage, and all that it brings.