~giving thanks~

My favorite camellia grower, on his dock stretching out over Church Creek.

~~~~~

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, I went out to Johns Island to visit one of my favorite people, a man who knows more about wind than anyone I know - and who collects camellias like many people collect coins.  No - he doesn't just collect them - he nurtures them, crosses them - and follows new ones that grow in his garden after hybridizing between this and that. 

I hadn't seen him since two days before my Mother passed away (which was over six months ago now) - it was a Saturday afternoon in mid-April, and knowing that my Mother wasn't well (and knowing that I was a day away from heading back up to Virginia) and not knowing quite what to do with myself - I went out to his place on Johns Island.  We spent the afternoon walking around the camellias and talking about our dislike of cancer.  His wife had passed away several years before - after a lengthy battle with melanoma.

So the evening before I went to St Petersburg for a few days, I got an out-of-the-blue call from my favorite camellia grower, saying that he was just checking up on me, because he hadn't seen me for a long time.  I felt bad - when you have an 87 year old friend, you shouldn't go six months between visits - and so I promised him that after I got back into town and got 'caught up' (which in reality never actually happens), that I would come out and visit.  Which I did yesterday - homemade pound cake in hand.  Once again we wandered the camellias - he showed me a deep pink sasanqua seedling that was 'something new' he had found amongst his sixty year old field of camellias, and a newly registered japonica from the latest American Camellia Society publication that he wanted - and before I left, he gave me a tea camellia seedling, along with a piece of paper that described how to make tea from the leaves.

I have learned alot about grief over the past six months.  I often think about the years before my Mother passed away - and how I couldn't imagine how one makes it through the loss of a parent.  Now, six months later - I realize that 'making it through' means getting up every day, and reminding yourself that your Mother would want, more than anything else, for you to be grateful for the day that you have.  When I told my Father later in the day that I had taken a pound cake to my camellia-growing friend, he said for the first time in my life 'you're just like your Mother'.  We then talked about all of the cakes that my Mother made for people over the years - german chocolate, fruit cakes, six-layer yellow cakes with chocolate frosting, coconut cakes - there was a lifetime filled with wonderful cakes.  I now make the same cakes, find comfort in making them - and even more comfort in giving them away.  I have my Mother to thank for that comfort - even still.

~~~~~

Each year, one early evening during Thanksgiving week, the laboratory heads to a bar (one that serves pitchers of beer) and gives thanks...which means that we take turns going around the table and expressing something that we are grateful for.  It is generally focused on our lab - the science, the facilities, our collaborators - but often migrates in other directions - the election, families, our lives.  Once again we congregated late this afternoon, with pitchers of Sierra Nevada and plates of french fries and took turns being thankful.  It is an interesting exercise - and an important one I think - to reflect back on the previous year (with this one being particularly chaotic) in search of things to be thankful for:  the renewed service contracts on critical pieces of equipment, microorganisms that continue to fascinate us, opportunities to go to meetings, help from labmates - input on specific aims and experimental design and results given and received, gratitude expressed in spite of (or because of?) the challenges and frustrations, realizations of what we might really want to be when we grow up. 

For the past two years - this one as well as this one - Katherine has started our 'annual lab give thanks' with a poem.  She always selects something that is perfect for the year, for the day - and she did once again this year.  If there is anything that I have learned over the past year, it's the appreciation of the moment, of the trivial (that ends up not being so trivial after all) and the mundane.  Before she read the poem, she said that it was a good one for folks working in a marine biology laboratory - and I had to laugh because when she was done, the eclair-baking postdoc couldn't resist saying that the starfish wouldn't necessarily be in the channel.  (It's a tough crowd).      

Starfish by Eleanor Lerman (from Our Post Soviet History Unfolds, 2005, published by Sarabande Books)   This is what life does. It lets you walk up to the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman down beside you at the counter who say, Last night, the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder, is this a message, finally, or just another day?   Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the pond, where whole generations of biological processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds speak to you of the natural world: they whisper, they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old enough to appreciate the moment? Too old? There is movement beneath the water, but it may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.   And then life suggests that you remember the years you ran around, the years you developed a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon, owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have become. And then life lets you go home to think about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.   Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one who never had any conditions, the one who waited you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave, so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you were born at a good time. Because you were able to listen when people spoke to you. Because you stopped when you should have and started again.   So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland, while outside, the starfish drift through the channel, with smiles on their starry faces as they head out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

  

Comments

[Les]

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this post. Your prose is poetry.

[CK]

Fantastic poem! Can I be thankful for your blog, which speaks to the creative parts of me that I have no time to indulge? :)

[Layanee DeMerchant]

The empty seat at the holiday table can be a cruel reminder of what has been lost or it can bring the feelings of love and laughter still wrapped around you from the departed. It is all in the perspective you decide to adopt. A lovely post of Thanksgiving. I think your Dad gave you a great compliment.

[Annie]

Pam, losing mom is horrible, isn't it? Mine passed away three and a half years ago and I promise, it does stop hurting so much all the time. You might appreciate the post I wrote about my own grief on another blog I keep at http://happinessorbust.blogspot.com/2008/10/im-feeling-lucky.html

Sending healing thoughts your way,

Annie