Spooky....seriously

This afternoon I was enjoying a little quiet time on the side porch with a glass of iced tea and a Nora Roberts book, Hidden Star.  Honest to god - there's a line "She thought of honeysuckle burying a chainlink fence, perfuming the evening air while the night bird called for his mate."  

Spooky, if you read my last blog.  Never have I read of honeysuckle and chainlink fences.

Honeysuckle Lessons

While taking a walk with a neighbor yesterday, we passed a mass of thick green growth overwhelming a cinderblock wall, and she wondered what it was.  I told her it was honeysuckle.  And, bam - my brain shot backwards in time and a stream of childhood memories  erupted about my Uncle Louie and what I now call his "honeysuckle lessons."

Uncle Louie was one of those quiet characters in my big-chaotic-Irish-Catholic family childhood whose impact was subtle but memorable even these 50 years later.  Uncle Louie has epilepsy - for which treatments did not exist in the mid-50's to 60's.  He's still alive at a ripe old age in the 90's, a credit to the care and loving attention he's received all that time (not to mention his Irish genes!).  But, I'm thinking Uncle Louie gave more than got.

As an adult, he would be shunted around the families of his seven siblings, spending weeks or months at a time at their homes, doing odd chores, as no one would hire an epileptic and he certainly couldn't drive.  When he came to our house in the summer times, his "odd chore" was usually pulling honeysuckle from the fence.  Yes, it's as nasty a job as it sounds.  We had a big full acre yard in the relatively rural suburbs of Washington DC, completely surrounded by chainlink fence about 4 feet tall.  Honeysuckle loved growing on that chainlink, wrapping it's thin stems tenaciously around the wire, and left unchecked could bring a fence down in just a few years.  So, it was an ongoing battle to control it.  The best method was to cut the stems at the ground or spray now-banned chemicals, but you couldn't just rip the stems off the fence as they were wrapped so tightly around the links.  Patient unwinding of the thousands of stems was the only way to get rid of them without bringing the fence down.

Uncle Louie was a tall man, and would sit on a short stool beside the fence, patiently unwinding the honeysuckle from the chainlink, all day, for days on end, with a smile on his face.  His fingers never rushed, and there was never any anger or sulking about the chore.  I'm sure he wished more than once that I would go away, because I'd stand next to him while he worked and ask five million questions like any young girl would.  But his patience, I now know, was extraordinary, as he quietly answered my questions and gave me little nuggets of life lessons to ponder down the road, whilst endlessly unwinding honeysuckle.  And usually, the sneaky guy would get me to first hold a stem for him and then soon my fingers were drawn to unwinding them as we talked.  It's not as much about the words he actually said, but the way he handled himself and his life and the chore.  I guess it's all about time ultimately.  I spent alot of time with Uncle Louie at that chainlink fence seemingly just chatting the day away.

Everybody should have an Uncle Louie.  I hope you did.   I'm so glad I did.  Those honeysuckle lessons will be with me long past any book learning or adult lectures.  

Half-Empty Days

I was IMing with a friend today and it didn't take long to get the feeling he was not his usual chipper self, though he was valiantly trying to be.  

"So," I asked, "are you having a half-empty day?"

It made him laugh, but it got me thinking.  There are some people in the world who manage to have mostly "the glass is half full" days all the time.  It's wonderful, and in fact, I am one of those people.

But - those are the people who fall the hardest when something happens to change their perspective to "the glass is half empty."   I know if worries bring me to that outlook, it's a tough climb out of the hole, so I empathized with him, and we laughed together.  He's still having a half-empty day as of half an hour ago, but the laughter was good to hear when I told him I see a big ol'  pitcher in his future that will fill up his glass - to at least a little over half full -  very soon.   And he said, "As long as it pours into the glass instead of over my head!"

I like that visual.  I hope I remember it when I have my next half-empty day.