Memorial Day

31 May 2011 Leave a comment

by Love, Jimmie in Family Tags: , ,

Saturday was one of the most gorgeous days of my life.  Sometimes you just get one of those days that has so many perfect moments you just don’t know what to do with yourself.  I don’t mean to make any of you jealous, but I’m going to share that day with you. 

Memorial Day weekend brought lots of plans for me.  I’m nothing if not a planner.  I had the whole weekend mapped out by Thursday afternoon and took off down south to the homestead on Friday evening.  Madre and I planned to ride horses Saturday morning.  We also planned to pick blueberries.  Later that evening we were invited to a cook out with Martie and family.  After that, I was going to drive back to Nashville so that I could make my Sunday morning run.

Saturday morning I got up at the crack of dawn and drove from Martie’s house where I had spent the night to Madre’s house.  I got there early and was ready to go.  After running some errands, we saddled up the horses and launched our journey.  You’ll see a separate post about that later, but now I can tell you that it was a gorgeous ride.  The sky was exquisitely beautiful as it often seems to be after big rain storms.  The weather was perfect, breezy and warm.  We rode for about three hours, just kind of leisurely and slow.  I last rode a horse in September and can’t say I have any great skills but I can plod along just fine.  My butt now hurts.  I thought you’d like to know.  I also got a really sweet farmer’s tan. 

 After we gave the horses a bath and turned them out, we picked blueberries.  Several years ago, Madre and Poppa decided to plant a few blueberry bushes.  Now a family of 6 can have all the blueberries they want for a year out of just a couple of blueberry bushes, maybe three or four.  Madre and Poppa planted 14 of them not knowing this, so every year they extend the invitation to pick blueberries to everyone they meet.  Everyone.  I’m more than happy to do my part in weeding out the excess. 

Later I whipped Madre’s arse in a couple of games of Spite and Malice.  That’s okay because she will whip my arse next time we play.  It all comes out in the wash.

Saturday evening we were invited to a cookout at Coach’s parent’s house.  (Does that sound complicated?  Let’s call them my sort of in-laws.)  Granddaddy and Grandma are nice people and I’ve always enjoyed them.  Granddaddy cooked ribs and chicken and the rest of us brought side dishes. 

The girls played outside like children are supposed to do.  They played hide and seek, tag, and rolled down the hill in the grass over and over again until they got so itchy they had to stop.  It gave me so much joy to watch them run around the yard with no shoes on in their dresses, cheeks flushed and hair blowing back in the wind.  Their tinkling laughs and giggles were good for my soul.  I love that childish abandon when it comes to having fun.  We ate watermelon and had a seed spitting contest.  I won.  That’s what having a big mouth is good for, apparently.  I also won the affection of every single mosquito in the county.  I have the bites to prove it.

Martie sang for us and played her guitar. She has the most voluptuous voice, full bodied and rich.  It fills an entire room, and being outside and listening to it expand was amazing.  Coach watched her, enraptured, which is very special to me.  I love seeing those moments between couples.   Martie sang a song or two for everyone until we exhausted her voice and her good will with our requests.  It happens when you’ve got that kind of talent. 

When it was getting dark, we made half-hearted attempts to catch a few lightning bugs, then we piled up in our respective vehicles and headed for home.  I just sighed all the way to Madre’s house.  It was such a perfect day.

I felt and commented so many times throughout the course of the day, “I’ve got such a nice life.”  I really do.  I’m very fortunate.  I’m so thankful that I’m aware of it as it happens so that I can send up my gratitude and really squeeze every bit of loveliness out of it that I can.  I enjoy my family.  I’m so blessed to have a good one.  I love you guys!

I hope you all had a nice Memorial Day!  I say a big thank you to everyone who serves in our military, for our country, for us.  I ask for blessings for the families who have lost loved ones during that service.  I ask for blessings for the men and women who have served and who still serve.  My heart is filled with gratitude for all of you.   Thank you.  

 

Uncle Andy

18 May 2011 1 Comment

by Love, Jimmie in Family

Monday I celebrated the life of a good man, my Uncle Andy. Although the celebration included a lot of tears and tissues, I’m happy that we had things to celebrate. I’m hopeful and left feeling a bit lighter and more connected to my family.

His health hadn’t been great over the last few months but I would say that his passing still came as a shock to all of us. We never really expect our loved ones to go away. At least I don’t. I feel that I’m lucky, though, because I know I will see him again, in his changed healthy body, whole and joyful and celebrating.

Celebrations of Life often include memory sharing. Monday I walked away with several new stories of the man I called Uncle. I’ll include a few.

When he was little and my mom was still an interesting creature called Baby Sister, they both had stuffed animals with music boxes inside. Andy had a bear and Mom had a lamb. When Mom’s music box died, Uncle Andy cut his bear open, removed the music box and stuffed it into Mom’s lamb, so she wouldn’t have to do without. And when they were older, we would visit him at his lake house. He often stopped on his way out there to buy a cheeseburger. Mom always wanted a bite but would wait until he got to the middle so she could have the bite with the pickle. He always let her have it. Always the sacrifice, always the love. That’s the kind of man he was.

Once, when I was between cars, he let me borrow an old Ford pick-up truck for a summer. He drove over in that rust bucket and I nearly died. But it was transportation and it was free so I thanked him and drove that visual disaster for several months. God forbid my purse fall into the floorboard (and I use the term floorboard loosely) because the strips of rust that still clung to the area beneath my feet weren’t strong enough to hold a gnat, much less my giant handbag. In an effort to make it more visually appealing, my sister and boyfriend and I used model car paints to decorate it with peace signs and happy faces and hearts. By the time we got it looking like we wanted, Uncle Andy had sold it, sight unseen, to a man who cared not that it looked like a hippie mobile and only cared that it ran well. His reputation as a mechanic was outstanding.

He had five children and a beloved, and listening to each of them talk about what he meant to them gave me such a sense of who he was, outside of my own view. He was dedicated. He loved. He accepted. He was a family man. He was a friend. He got his kids through some rough times. He fixed things for them. He met every need that his family had. And he did it with spirit and laughter and love.

Ah, I’m going to make myself cry again. I don’t want to do that.

I miss my Uncle Andy. I have for a while, because life gets in the way. We let so many things take precedence over things that used to be important. I won’t do that anymore.

I miss Zeke. I miss Reid. I miss Adam and Kevin and Tammy. I miss Boo and Vaughan. I miss the happy times as kids when we were getting to know each other, fighting and hitting and learning and laughing. Now that we are older, maybe we can recapture a bit of that youth and include the people that we have since added to our family. We have vowed to spend more time together and to make better efforts. I plan on worrying the mess out of everyone until we do that.

Yes, I miss my family but they are still here. Uncle Andy is not but we can celebrate him still. We can do that by living the life that he lived – with faith, with hope, and most importantly with love.

Love you, Uncle Andy.

Vignettes of a Mother

08 May 2011 5 Comments

by Love, Jimmie in Family Tags: ,

This weekend Madre came for a visit.  She wanted a pedicure and since she’s never had one, we thought it best that she come to NashVegas and let me treat her to one.  Okay, that’s not the full story.  I believe she’d heard the rumor about how I laugh like a hyena at the nail shop when they scrub my feet because it just tickles so badly.  I also believe she’d heard the rumor about how the staff at my nail shop gives me grief because I have long feet and because of my hyena laughing.  They say things like, “We charge you extra, you so loud.” And “We video you and send it in to funny videos.  Ha!”   But she also heard the rumor about the massage chairs so I feel certain that clinched it for her.  NashVegas and my nail shop were the places that won out so she packed up and came here.

We had pedicures. They were awesome. She is hooked.

Martie did her share of pampering Madre too.  Madre got a new haircut and new color, courtesy of Martie. The best part about Martie doing our hair is that she’s quite talented and we always leave looking better than when we came in.  The worst part about Martie doing our hair is that we cannot always re-create what she does in the shop and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make it stand up this way and poof up that way and sweep across our foreheads in the correct manner.

Saturday morning ablutions rolled around and Madre was in my upstairs bathroom attempting to create Martie-quality hair when her hair blower thingamabob which had been on the fritz lately just stopped working.  I heard it shut off and didn’t think much about it until I heard Madre bellow down the stairs, “I’m throwing that mother f@cker in the trash!” 

I laughed like a hyena at this. 

I love you, Madre.  Happy Mother’s Day.

A couple of years ago Martie and I were in the car or in the movie theater or in her living room or somewhere, and we were digging through our respective purses for something.  Probably this would be a better story if I could remember the circumstances around it but you read the post where I’m facing forty in a few years, right?  They say the mind is the first thing to go.  Anyway, we were digging around in our purses and I said, “I can tell I’m a chick because I have 4 chap-sticks and 3 lip glosses and 2 lipsticks in my purse.” 

 Martie gave me a thoughtful look and said, “I can tell I’m a mother because I have loose raisins in my purse.” 

 She won that one. 

 I love you, Martie.  Happy Mother’s Day.

My parents divorced when I was pretty little and my dad re-married when I was still in the Cinderella phase of my life, meaning that all my sister and friends and I knew of step-mothers was the wicked one who made Cinderella clean a lot and wouldn’t let her go to the ball.  So when I told all my school friends that I now had a step-mother, you can imagine the looks of horror that crossed their faces.  They would ask me questions like, “Is she mean?  Do you have to scrub the floor with a brush?  Are there mice in her house?” 

The thing is, she wasn’t mean and she didn’t make me scrub the floor with a brush and I never saw any mice.  I wanted to convey the fact that having a step-mother wasn’t so bad and that it was actually kind of nice.  So I mustered up all of the wisdom and knowledge a five-year-old has to explain it in the best possible way to my friends so as to gain their admiration and respect and possibly their jealousy.  And I told them the truth.  “She lets us eat raw cookie dough.”  Score!

I love you JiJi.  Happy Mother’s Day. 

And for all the other mothers I know out there: Aunt Jean, Jane, Vonnie, Christy V., Chandra, Monica, Jamie, LaCole, Melissa, Judy, Nikki, Cheryl, Elizabeth, Rhonda, Dawn, Andi, Kat, Katie, Michelle, Julie Ann, Christy H., Anne, Sarah, Jade, Barbara – oh I’m going to forget so many and I don’t want to – Happy Mother’s Day!  Love to you all!

Proverbs 23:25

 . . . May she who gave birth to you be joyful!

  

People I Luff, Family Style; Or, A Handy Checklist

11 Apr 2011 7 Comments

by Love, Jimmie in Family Tags: ,

Okay, I can see where this here blog might get confusing in a short while.  I have a lot of people in my life, and as you can already tell,  these people will feature regularly here.  I’m just so popular . . . . It’s a tough job, but someone must do it.  I’m also very modest.  My everyday life is good fodder for run-of-the-mill discussions as it is.   But I’m also smart enough to surround myself with funny, smart, snarky people and therefore, my life is even more exciting.  It doesn’t always work so well for me (read: pencil lead in knuckle) but for the most part I am entertained.

  

Extraordinary lives require extraordinary people.  Makes sense, no?  I can view anything as extraordinary, I suppose, with the right attitude and lots of creativity.  For example, I was in downtown Nashville last night for a band competition and I walked by one of the karaoke bars.  I heard a woman in there murdering a Joan Jett song.  It was awful. Truly terrible.  But she had on a tiny skirt and a really nice spray tan and lots of hair dye so every man in there was completely enthralled.  It was extraordinary but maybe not in the positive, motivational way I am trying to embrace. 

 

But back to the task at hand.  I felt it was time to provide a handy list to guide you through the people in my life.  This volume is dedicated to my family.  I have them to blame for most everything.  Any dysfunction or weirdness I got was inherited directly from them.  I take no responsibility.  Plus, I’m the boring one.  I mean, yes I’ve got some personality, but I gots nothing on these people.  Shall we go down the list?

 

Madre:  Well, she’s Madre.  I couldn’t luff anyone more.  I’ve never seen anyone her age (or younger, for that matter) who can sling herself around on a horse like Madre can.  Once, when we were teenagers, Martie was upset about something and said to Madre, “You always liked Jimmie better!” To which Madre replied, “Of course I do.  I’ve known her longer.”   

 

Daddy-O:  Again, Daddy-O.  Not a lot of explanation required.  Awesome and super talented.  Wish I would have gotten just a smidge of that.  Sigh.  He laughs a lot which makes me happy.  After reading my first two posts here, he sent me an email that said, “You need a drink.”

 

Martie:  My younger sister, Martie, now she’s extraordinary.  She’ll be on here a lot so you should know about her.  The girl can sang.  She’s funny.  And she’s the pretty one.  My high school crush talked to me once, in Geometry class, and I was so excited! He came over to my desk and said “hey” and I nearly passed out from the giddiness.  I was already gearing up for a huge note-writing session to all of my girlfriends about this conversation in which the Cute One talked to me.  But right after he said “hey”, he said, “So is your sister dating anyone?  Cause I think she’s cute.”  So much for that fantasy.   Looking back, though, I realize that I was fortunate to not connect with him in any romantic way back in the day.  He still looks exactly like he did in high school.  I’ll let you infer what you will about that.  Anyway . . . one of my favorite things about Martie is that she signs her emails to me in this fashion:

 

Love you so very smooches,

Martie

 

Isn’t that cute?

 

The Squirt:  My youngest sister is The Squirt.  She’s the cute one.  She does all kinds of neat stuff like speak Spanish fluently, builds houses, and travels on a budget.  I’m not sure how often she’ll make an appearance but I luff her. 

 

Pooh:  Pooh is my older niece. She’s amazing.  She has these gorgeous blue eyes and all of this dark thick hair.  She’s wicked smart and has a super trendy fashion sense.  I can’t wait to see what kind of person she grows up to be.  A lot like me, I imagine.  And everyone knows that I’m your favorite so I’ve got high expectations of her.

 

Tigger:  Tigger is my younger niece.  She’s also amazing. And slightly bossy.  It’s cute.  Following is a conversation I had with her a while back, about the state of my hair.  It was curly and all over the place because I was too lazy to do anything else with it. 

 

Jimmie:                 Hi Tigger!

 

Tigger:                  <Eyeing me with horror> “What happened to your hay-ar?”

 

Jimmie:                 It’s curly is all.

 

Tigger:                  <not buying it, nostrils flared slightly> “It’s wi-yuld.”

 

Jimmie:                 Yeah . . .

 

Tigger:                  <sincerely> “What if someone laffs at you?”

  

Coach:  Coach is the husband of Martie, father of Pooh and Tigger and brother-in-law of Jimmie.  Poor guy. That’s a lot of chicks.  Plus, he has our Madre and his own Madre.  I’m not sure why he hasn’t croaked off already from the estrogen overload.  One day he will have an absolute freak out and run screaming to the nearest gymnasium and throw himself amongst the teenage boys playing basketball and beg for some drugs, or testosterone.  As it is now, when we have a family get-together and other men will be present, he’s no more put the car in park before he’s sprinting to the man section of the house, looking for beers and guns and camouflage.  I babysit for Martie and Coach fairly regularly and he always makes sure I have a key and code for the house.  His latest note with code read:

 

Oh Jimmie!  You came and you gave without taking . . . Now press the code or the police will take you . . . . 

 

Poppa:  Husband of Madre.  All around general good guy.  Martie, who works in a salon and does my hair for free (score!), dyed my hair red once.  I had begged for it for a long time. I went to Madre’s casa to show it off (and visit) and Poppa took one look, grunted, and said: “Not your best look, is it?”  Well. 

 

JiJi:  Wife of Daddy-O.  One year for Christmas I asked if she would organize my cabinets for me as a gift. Sure enough, right after Christmas she showed up with some roundy shelves and some common sense and got me squared away.  What a woman!

 

Boo and Bear:  Brothers, with assorted wives and children. Gorgeous families and good genes and talent out the wazoo.  I’d hate them for all of that but I have big luff for them, so I suppose hate is out of the question.  We don’t connect all that often but it sure is nice when we do.  Unfortunately I have no funny stories to share about them, mostly because all the good ones happened in elementary school and we would all be mortified to revisit that particular era what with all the bad hair and excessive eyeliner and tobacco products and high top tennis shoes.  Yikes. Moving right along . . .

 

And finally, me again.

 

Jimmie:  When I checked the mail Saturday morning the lone piece of stuff in there was addressed specifically to me, not to “Resident” and said:

 

The Ultimate Outdoorsman Action Pack!

Enter to win your choice of a FREE Ruger Rifle or a PSE Deer Hunter Bow!

 

And the back said:

 

The 100th Anniversary of the 1911, Designed by John Browning. Life’s too short to shoot an ugly gun!

 

What the hell?!  Now this weekend alone, I have waxed poetic about girlie drinks and pedicures that include painting sparkles on my toes and pigtails, not ponytails, and did make up for the girls in our corporate band.  Is there something about me that says “Yes, I want to kill foodstuffs with a gun and/or bow and arrow and serve dead animal carcass that I shot all by myself”?  I don’t get it.  Boo, I blame you.

 

This, people, is the story of my life. 

 

I have many more people to introduce you to.  I felt like this list was enough for one day.  It’s mind boggling, isn’t it?  Personally, I’m thrilled to have all of these people at my back.  I’m a lucky woman!

 

Just for fun, I’ve added a picture.  I took this while on last week’s chocolate run.  Doesn’t that just make you smile?

 

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