Water Rocket Bonanza

The story started some time over the summer when Erik saw a fellow shooting off water rockets in a small park in Cambridge.  An idea was planted in his mind and when he came to Berkeley, he instructed us to begin saving sparkling water bottles.  This Christmas, our grandchildren, his nieces and nephew, got water rocket supplies (empty water bottles, red duct tape, a plastic sheet for fins and a bit white plastic pipe for a snorkel) for Christmas.  I’m not sure they quite understood the plan that Erik had.  But the idea came to fruition on the last afternoon the children were here.  All the children gathered in Bob’s shop to build the rockets.  They put on the fins and taped together two bottles into a rocket and then decorated the bottles with markers and spray paint as Erik and Grandpa worked to make the launching apparatus.  The excitement was building, but it was nip and tuck whether they could finish the building before dark.  I wasn’t sure this was going to work out, but it did.  At 4:30 they began to fire the rockets.  Liam’s rocket was

the first.  He poured the water into the opening of the upside down rocket.  The snorkel pipe was inserted and the bottle turned upside down with the nose cone pointing up and the fin part down.  Then air from Bob’s shop compressor was pumped into the rocket, putting the air in the rocket under pressure while Erik held the rocket in place. When he let it go, the air pushed out the water.  The rocket started to rise slowly, reminding me of the slow start of the big rockets at Cape Canaveral, and then it fell sideways.  Oh no!  They tried again with Sonja’s rocket.  It got placed on the launching pad.  This time, more air was pumped in and the opening was made tighter to keep the water from leaking out.  As Erik released it, it rose high, high into the sky, higher than the house and everyone jumped up and down, so so excited.  The rockets were then fired, one after the other, each one going higher than the one before.  It was a good thing all the rockets but one fell down into the yard and only one got stuck in the tree.  Elsa’s rocket landed in our neighbor’s yard and she was proud she could crawl under the fence to retrieve it.  The children (and adults) were so excited.  The highest rocket flew up at least 75 feet.  The perfect red sunset gave a beautiful backdrop for the rockets flying high into the air. At the end, I heard in my head, “The 1812 Overture” playing dramatically as the rockets were launched faster and faster.  It was like the finale of a fireworks celebration.  Erik gave the children an idea and then showed them how to build and launch these rockets.  The supplies cost next to nothing, but the experience was priceless.  What a fabulous Christmas present!!!

Christmas Wonder

The anticipation has been building all month for the Big Day.  The children have their Advent calendars with little gifts tied on to be opened one each day.  The adults have all the preparations — the Christmas cards to write, the shopping, getting gifts for each person, sending off gifts to friends and family far away, the planning of menus for each day, the laying in of supplies and the preparations of the house.  The children and grandchildren finally arrive.  Christmas Eve and Christmas are the most exciting days.  We have developed quite a few traditions.  We go to the Family Service at church Christmas Eve, then return for a big dinner.  This year, Justin, Arne’s best man, joined us for our spaghetti dinner.  Justin is like an energizer enzyme bringing out animated conversation and laughter in everyone.  The children watch a DVD —this year “Home Alone”—-to pass the time and escape the adults sitting too long at the table before going to bed on the longest night of the year.  Bob and I sneak out to go to the 10 PM Christmas service at church for some Christmas music and candlelight.  Some time in the late night, Santa Claus arrives fills the stockings hung by the fireplace and leaves gifts under the tree.  (S)he eats the cookie and gingerbread house left out for him and writes a sweet note of thanks to the children.  Christmas morning finally arrives.  Another tradition is for Paula, our master chef,  to make fresh cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning.  As we eat our big breakfast, the children grow antsy with anticipation for all presents.  Their excitement and great joy infuse us all with happiness.  There is such a big pile of presents under the tree.  We start slowly, opening the gifts one at a time, all of us watching.  Then it inevitably turns into a frenzy of tearing the paper off.  The adults struggle to maintain a bit of order.  Afterwards, all of us tired from all the excitement wander off to do our own thing: the children play with their new toys, there’s the restorative naps and Paula takes a long long walk or run.  Another tradition is a visit from dear long time family friends, Nancy and Larry.  As the sun sets early, before 5, some of us gather together again, this time in the kitchen as preparation begins for the Christmas dinner.  This is one of my favorite times.  The smell of roast beef cooking makes us all hungry again and reminds me of my childhood.  I love the way people come in to help.  We sit down together to enjoy our delicious dinner of roast beef, popovers, roasted potatoes, peas and horseradish sauce.   We’re all too full for dessert.  At this meal, we say grace and I find it is nice to have a moment to reflect on our Christmas blessings.

The day after Christmas, Erik, Paula and Paul, Karna and kids went into San Francisco, leaving Bob and me a bit of quiet time.  We worked together to create order and then rested in the quiet to restore our depleted energy.  As I sat in quiet, I began to wonder about the meaning of what we all had experienced.  Since my childhood, I have tried to live my life with simplicity and these days aren’t very simple.  I think it’s harder for adults to find simplicity than it is for children.  It was hard to step back and observe with the days so full of excitement and so many people crowded together into our house.  Like Mary, I want to ponder this time in my heart.  I want to remember all the special moments with those I love.  I want to wonder at the mystery of the season.  It is so hard to see clearly and deeply.  I wonder what it is we give each other by our presence?  I wonder what the impact of our words and actions are on each other?  I wonder if our intentions are perceived by others?  I wonder what it means that we celebrate Christmas and what we are teaching our children and grandchildren about what is really important.  Most of all, I want to remember everything and take not a single thing for granted because these are very special times.

Special Gramma times

Some things are so good that putting words around the experience somehow lessens it, but let me try.  I took Erika, my 12 year old granddaughter, to San Francisco to see the musical “Bronx Tale.”  She loves musicals, the dancing and singing and even takes a musical theater class back in E. Lansing.  She was very excited about just the two of us going to see this musical.  I was so excited too.  We took BART into the City and had time to wander the Nordstrom’s mall before getting lunch at a French Bistro.  Strengthened by our meal, we headed off to the Golden Gate Theater where I easily picked up our tickets at will-call.  As the musicians warmed up, we went down to peer into the orchestra pit and to take a closer look at the enormous maroon curtains over the stage.  Our anticipation was growing with each passing minute, so we both read and reread the program, grinned at each other and both thought how lucky we are.  The musical was much better than I expected.  It didn’t get great reviews in San Francisco.  There was lots of wonderful singing and energetic dancing.  I had been told it was a gangster story, but it was much more a coming of age story, about family,  told with song and dance about life in the Bronx in the 60’s.  The final song (Erika’s favorite) was about the choices we make and the dealing with consequences of our choices.  It was a perfect musical and most special treat for a Gramma and a 12 year old granddaughter.  Another special time was making rolled sugar cookies with Sonja.  At 9, she’s quite proficient and meticulous in the kitchen.  I let her take the lead and I was the Sous chef.  She rolled the dough perfectly and decorated the cookies with great patience and creativity.  What a lucky Gramma I am and what happy times I’m enjoying with my family here for the holidays

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Blue Christmas

With Christmas preparations reaching their peak here today (the first family arrives late tonight), besides my abundant joy, I find there is also some sadness in me.  This time of year is very hard for many people: people who are alone, people who are struggling with depression, people struggling with poverty, people from Paradise and other places who are homeless, people who wear injustice like a coat of armor.  Resentments rise up in us.  Some things are really unfair.  This is a time of year when people gather for parties and dinners and with our divided politics, there will be strong differences of opinions.  People are judged and nobody likes to be judged.  We meet those who treat us unfairly. Many people hurt this time of year when everything is supposed to be so good and beautiful.  What to do?  I wrestle with unfairness and darkness in the world.  This morning I’m thinking about how to respond.  In the church we acknowledged these experiences with a “Blue Christmas”  service.  As with most negative experiences, I don’t think it is healthy to ignore and bury them or to focus only on them either.  When we do that these feelings rise up and take over one’s experience in most inconvenient ways.  I think it is good to acknowledge our feelings are real and then to let them go, gently let go of the feelings of hurt and injustice.  Let them flow away from our hearts like logs floating away in a river or like leaves in the wind.  Let go of them.  It is so easy to cling to the hard feelings of injustice because they justify how we feel.  If we are full of hurt or hate or anger, there is little room for love in our hearts.  So many people dwell in darkness, but light really does overcome the darkness.  What can we do?  We meet a stranger’s eyes in the line at the market or post office and smile.  We can look with compassion on the harried shopper or crabby old man.  We can be generous to food banks and organizations that provide help to those in need.  Most of all, bearing our own unfairness or injustice, we can look with compassion at ourselves and let the light of compassion, love, joy flow out of us.  Let us not be dragged down but rise up in the goodness and spirit of this season.

Hog Heaven

I’m just back from a morning happily spent at the UC Botanical Garden.  In November I signed up for a “Conifer Tour” led by Chris Carmichael, the former Director of Horticulture there.  He’s a beloved, gentle and knowledgeable fellow and his tours fill up early.  It was a warm sunny morning, with everything still damp from the heavy weekend rain.  As we stood in a circle around a table overflowing with samples of many different conifers from the Garden, we were serenaded by a single Pacific tree frog and a chorus of cheeping birds, juncoes, titmice and others.  The Garden is very alive especially now our winter rains have begun.  He began by handing us a sheet from “The Gymnosperm Database” summarizing the important facts and listing the families of the various conifers.  He then passed the specimens around as he was describing each—-a celery pine which is neither a pine nor a celery but rather a unique conifer found in the Southernmost countries of the world.  I was excited because I’d seen it in S. Africa, in New Zealand and in Tasmania.  He passed around pines, firs, rimu, spruces, junipers, redwoods, cypresses, cedars and so many more.  My brain got full.  Some people were writing everything down, but I was trying really hard to remember and learn just three things.  After 45 minutes of this lesson, he led us around the Garden stopping occasionally to point out a conifer.  I remember the Japanese Umbrella pine with it’s drooping needles.  At one point, I said to a fellow docent, “I’m in Hog Heaven.”  I just love to go on field trips.  I loved field trips when I was a zoology major in college.  I loved botany field trips in grad school.  I incorporated as many field trips as I could in the many biology classes I taught over the years.  I still get excited and love to go on field trips!  After the tour was over, 5 docents from the tour had arranged to have lunch together.  We found a sunny picnic table and shared our holiday treats.  It is so much fun to be with kindred spirits who love the same things I do.  Botany nerds who get excited over a big female cone dehiscing on a cycad and all manner of conifers.   It was a wonderful morning respite from all the holiday preparations.

A Christmas Prayer

Over the past twenty-five years, since the boys left home, Bob and I have come to a peaceful agreement about how we dothe Christmas tree.  We go together in the truck to Home Depot (Bob’s favorite store) where we choose without much difficulty a noble fir tree.  We bring it home and Bob prepares it to go into the Christmas tree stand.  That task usually involves cutting off some branches and sawing off the bottom of the trunk with his chain saw. This year Bob made a block with a hole in it to fit into the deep holder we have because I didn’t want any branches cut off the rather small compact tree we chose.  Then tree is brought into the house, placed in the stand and Bob goes off to his workshop, his part done.  Now my work begins, I’m left to decorate it by myself.  I’ve come to enjoy this quiet time: it’s an act of remembering all family’s our many Christmases together and a time of creativity.  For the past three years I’ve decorated the tree with a theme using homemade decorations.  But this  year I went back to the treasure trove of ornaments we have from many Christmases together.   First, I put the star on the top and looped tiny white lights all over the tree. Then I laid all the decorations out.  First, I noticed a box labeled stars and thought, “yes, Christmas is about light.”  It comes right after the winter solstice, so the days are beginning to get longer.  It’s also about the light because the Christ child is coming into the world.   If Christmas is to be more than tradition, it has to come to us.  We bring light into the world with intentional acts of kindness and generosity.  I see light in joyful faces as we gather together.  Let the stars bring light to my Christmas.   Then I found a box with angels in it.  Angels are close this time of year.  Maybe it is angels that inspire us to be generous and have a spirit of love toward our fellow beings..  I put all the angels on the little tree.  My task got harder then because the rest of the ornaments were not sorted by kind, but I was on a roll.  So I picked out the ornaments that were babies or children.  Christmas is about children, their joy.  One ornament is a tiny baby in a half a walnut shell  I remember buying when I was expecting our first born.  I found nature ornaments including many birds.  For me, birds are like Spirit, often hidden in the branches, but there and calling to us.  Birds are beautiful and free and infinitely varied in their kind.  I put many birds on the tree, red cardinals, even though there aren’t any cardinals in California, a cedar wax-wing, a feathered owl, a blue bird (I saw one the other day out the window at the gym).  Last but not least, I put on all the many hearts I had.  In Denmark, they put hearts all over the Christmas tree, hearts made of woven paper, made of straw and of wood.  For me, hearts symbolize love and love is what Christmas is all about—God’s love for us, our love for family and friends and maybe even for our all our fellow humans here on Earth with us.  There is a gentle sense of love that comes over us in the quiet moments of this season like I was experiencing decorating the tree.  Finally I put Scandinavian flags festooned all over the tree all from our time in Denmark.  It’s a tradition for us.  Tradition is important too.  We keep alive in our hearts Christmases past. The tree wasn’t done, it needed one more thing:  candy canes, sweet and pepperminty hung tall over the tree because Christmas is the sweetest time of year.  I looked at that tree and was pleased.  When I thought about this time I recognized it was all a prayer, a prayer for Chrismas.  I realize I want light, angels, love, Nature, family and friends and sweetness in my life.  Let Christmas come.  The Tree is ready.

Unexpected Gift

Last night I received an amazing unexpected gift when Nancy and Larry came to dinner.  Nancy handed me a white plastic bag and said “This is for you.  It’s not for Christmas or your birthday or any particular reason.”  I took it and pulled out the most spectacular handmade quilt I’d ever seen.  I don’t think I’m particularly good at receiving gifts so there was no way I could express with just smiles and words how deeply affected I am by this gift.  I know she likes to make quilts and she’s gotten really good at it over the years.  But to receive one?  Wow!  It is bounded on the sides by fabric I’d given her years ago - blues, aquas and greens with a splash of purple arranged into clouds that float and swirl like a tropical sky about to rain.  The center is made of 20 largish squares, each made up of 21 smaller pieces - a center square of winter trees, surrounded by squares of blue set on end, then all this is set in pale green arranged in a square.  It’s machine quilted in free moving looping swirling circles accentuating the clouds motif.  Nancy said the theme of the quilt came to her as she was piecing it together - Promise.  I find myself sitting in my chair with the quilt folded over my legs pondering the gift and its theme.  At my age, what does Promise mean?  I love to think about a long fruitful friendship that still has much promise.  I don’t want to get up and take it off.  It’s so warming, not just physically, but spiritually as well.  I feel wrapped in love.  Larry said to us, “It’s the best  one she’s made.”  All in all, I am still smiling and will be for a long time.  What a wonderful gift!  What a friend!

gift!  What a friend!!

Holiday Preparations

We arrived back in Berkeley from Detroit at the beginning of the week.  It took me several days to pull myself all back together and become functional again.  It’s like a part of me was left behind.  I don’t know if it’s fatigue from traveling or if my focus and attention take their time gathering again.  When I looked at all I had to do in the next couple of weeks, I was totally overwhelmed.  As the windows on the Advent calendar on the frig were opened as the days passed and there were more and more windows open, I became even more paralyzed.  Bob wasn’t disturbed and he worked diligently to complete the Christmas letter and a project we are giving our children for Christmas.  Bless his heart.  All the while I sat paralyzed by the tasks.  I found a pile of old Christmas cards I’d saved and put one that spoke to me on the windowsill in the kitchen.  It’s a simple blessing saying “May there be joys each day.”  Seeing it each morning, I began looking for the joys in my days and you know what, I found multitudes of joys.  Yesterday, the staff at the Botanical Garden gave a beautiful catered luncheon for all the Volunteers.  There was festive eggnog first, as we gathered.  I enjoyed seeing so many fellow volunteers I now know.  We all share a strong bond of loving the Garden and it was a pleasure to be in the wonderful company of volunteers.  We enjoyed delicious gourmet food.  We were given little presents thanking us for our service.  All in all, it is a great pleasure for me to volunteer in the Garden and how nice to be appreciated.  Before the Luncheon I did errands and completed everything on my list with no hassle.  Today I went out early to do more Christmas shopping.  There was no traffic.  The stores I went to were deserted  and everything I bought was substantially discounted.  Joy!  By looking for joys, I find them.  Maybe this really is a Season of Joy, if I can just keep my mind focused on the positive, I’ll find them.   I have so much to be grateful for and so much to give me joy.  How truly blessed I am!!!

Greenfield Village Christmas

Paula booked tickets for us all to go to the Greenfield VillageHoliday Nights at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan last Friday night.  She also rented a mini-van so we could all be together for the 2 hour each way ride.  It was an unapologetic extravaganza celebrating Christmas!  All the historic houses were decorated for Christmas, as it was in the time the house was built.  They were staffed by costumed actors who all had stories to tell.  I found the chocolatiers really interesting.  Since Christmas wasn't really celebrated in New England in the 18 century, the houses were actually decorated for New Years' Open Houses.  There were carolers  on the streets singing Christmas carols.  There was a brass band by the shops playing Christmas carols.  The streets and shops were decorated with copious greens and lights.  There were warming fires placed all around this big village so no one had to stay cold.  We felt we lucked out for the weather, it wasn't raining or snowing and the temperature hovered around 32.  When one is dressed for the weather, as we were, it is really pleasant walking around.  There were drummers and fife players, even a pair of chimney sweeps and of course there was a most jolly Santa Claus.  There was an ice skating rink for anyone who wanted to skate and a craft cottage so those who wanted could make crafts.  It was so much fun!!  I found it mysterious to walk around in the dark, hearing music, seeing the lights, smelling the smoke from all the fires.  It made us all feel transported back in time.  But best of all was the finale:  we gathered by the Town Hall, where there was a parade of actors marching up to Village Green, the Brass Band playing Christmas carols and of course, Santa arriving in a Model T Ford.  Then the announcer told us to all call out to Rudolph to light up the skies and the fireworks began.  I haven't enjoyed a display so much for many years.  In the background, the band played carols, the carolers led singing as we all joined in.  It felt so good to be with others in a public place singing Christmas carols.  I do love the Midwest!!!  The evening was beautiful, fun, interesting and a great celebration of the joys of the Christmas season.  Many thanks to our wonderful daughter-in-law for arranging the evening!

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