The Quickest Way to Lose Five Pounds

My mother always said that the quickest way to lose five pounds was to stand up straight. And then she’d bark the familiar directive…“Chin up! Shoulders back! Tummy in! Fanny under!”

Go ahead, try it. It pretty much works. Until you have to breathe, anyway.

The summer has been filled with lots of good times, most involving food and there have been more than a few missed Weight Watchers meetings, so these last days of August have become my ‘salad days’. Not the way Willy Shakespeare meant them, though this time of year often has me reflecting on my younger self.

Twenty-nine years ago today, I graduated from college. Fine, they were probably not my salad days, either. I was older and wiser - having taken thirteen years to accomplish the feat. I really enjoyed my time at the University of Texas. I worked harder and appreciated more than my fresh-out-of-high-school-self had and I was exhilarated to graduate at the tender age of thirty.

There was no Pomp & Circumstance, no grand ceremony for a summer graduation, and just as well, since I spent the day in Labor & Delivery, giving birth to our fourth child.

That’s a long way of saying that my baby is twenty-nine today. My baby.

Coincidentally, I’ve recently been sucked back into the rabbit hole (rabbits like salad) of ancestry.com. My older daughter has been digging around the family tree and discovered that my great grandfather Louis, my Grommie’s dad, was married to two people. At the same time.

The revelation comes at a time when I’ve been wondering how to preserve my mother’s bon mots and witticisms (subjective, I know) for future generations. Catch phrases. Familial expressions and inside jokes. Crap she made up. Her renditions of novelty songs from the ‘40s.

Who will sing ‘Mairzy Doats’ to future generations? I mean, besides me.

More than just preserving, I want to understand the life experiences, the highs and the lows and the history of my mother and my grandmother and those who came before them. I wish they had shared all of it with us before they left. Did my grandmother know about her dad’s first wife and her half-brother? Did the half-brother know about the half-siblings that came after him? None of them could have had a clue that the momentous occasions of their lives - marriages, divorces, births and deaths – would now be readily available on this thing called the Internet.

In the moment, Louis probably felt secure that his family in New Hampshire was under wraps to the family he produced in New York.

Moving back to where we were born and raised has fueled a lot of my current interest in genealogy. Earlier this year, I found myself in a diner next to a table of my father’s relatives – a moment of serendipity that opened the door to wonderful reconnection. Now as I sift through census records and city directories, it’s fascinating to think that my husband’s forebears and mine could have crossed paths on an almost daily basis.

My fascination extends to wondering how those ancestors lived and worked and thought about everything. What were their stories of love, found and lost? Of their heartaches and happiness shared?

If they knew we would have access to the salient points, would they have wanted to expound upon the forces that brought them to those points? Do we want to know from a voyeuristic perspective? Or is it the eternal search for connection, for reassurance and meaning in all of life’s occurrences, epic and mundane?

I’m driven by the need for connection, as well as a desire to be a good steward of our family stories. I don’t want to plaster the world with them Kardashian style, what I’m sure my mother and grandmother would refer to as airing the family laundry, but I do want to preserve and pass on the history because it has value and meaning.

A friend recently asked me what I want my legacy to be. I’d never thought about a legacy before and my initial thought was that if I left the world tomorrow, I’d be pretty okay with how things have gone. I’ve never had a burning desire to hit the record books, but the more I contemplated the question, the more I recognized that I want my children to know me, to know where they came from. Not just the physical DNA, but the cultural DNA, the people, the places, the events that defined the lives of those who came before us, giving direction to our own, and those who come after us, as well.

Until I reconnected with my father’s surviving sister and brother, I didn’t even know how my parents had met. They married young and divorced early, and how they navigated life as divorced people had a profound influence on my sister’s and my experience of the world. Growing up, it fostered a special bond between my sister and I, but the topic of our parents’ experience, and ours by extension, was studiously avoided.

But the stories of our parents and grandparents, spoken and unspoken, guide us as we navigate our own lives. When we share our life experience with our kids, there’s comfort and support in the knowledge that we struggled, as our parents struggled, as their parents struggled, to meet the challenges presented by life – marriage, divorce, family, career, death. We are reassured knowing our parents counted pennies as they grocery shopped together as newlyweds. That they had each other’s back shepherding their kids through adolescence and into adulthood. That they weathered windfalls and shortfalls and got to the other side. That they had high points and low points and somehow got through 100% of their worst days, helps us to know that we can, too.

I can use the Internet to look up things like the origin of salad days and figure out what course I’m on, metaphorically speaking, in the seven course meal of life (it isn’t salad). I’m not swirling the drain, but I’m not getting any younger. So I’ll keep up my search, using social media and historical records to identify and deepen our understanding of our story. When I go, I don’t want to take the family secrets and my mother’s one-liners with me.

That’s what blogs are for.

You know that one about the two best days in a vacation homeowner’s life?

The day you buy it. And the day you sell it.

Our lake song began five years ago this very weekend.

That was the time we borrowed my sister’s place. It was the first time in years that we had all our kids together at the lake. We were awash with familial love and togetherness.

And then I saw the For Sale sign.

Despite his protestations of, “We are not doing this again,” it was mere weeks before my husband found himself covered in mouse poop and acorns as we removed insulation from the ceiling. I say, “We,” because much like Jim and Marlin on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, he wrestles the alligators, mice, squirrels and bats while I chronicle events. She who sits and writes also serves.

This is much on my mind this morning as I grab coffee and walk to the porch for a quick scroll through Instagram before doing my writing exercises ahead of the morning hordes, who will no doubt render my keyboard if not mute, certainly moot.

It never ceases to amaze me, the feelings I have when I see the sun on the lake in the morning. We don’t own a boat and I jump in the lake approximately every third year - I wouldn’t call myself a water person. But there’s something so incredibly Zen about looking out on the water from my perch on this porch…my attitude gets an immediate adjustment.

Interestingly, to me anyway, the porch weighs on me when we’re not here. It’s long and narrow with a low ceiling and it leaks like a sieve. The ceiling has been opened at the far end, revealing stained and rotting rafters, to allow for the free flow of water as roof leaks are tracked and repairs attempted. The leak of long standing necessitated replacing a few floorboards and the floor got a fresh coat of paint. To protect that effort, buckets dot the floor when we’re not in residence. When we’re here, as this morning, they sit stacked in the corner.

Built in the late ‘50’s, the porch is an addition to the front of what started as a one-room cabin. The original windows thus open out onto the porch, cutting into key real estate in the space. After a few bumps and bruises, strategically placed benches directing traffic around the open windows have trained us to maneuver with fewer mishaps. The front side of the porch is lined with sliding windows that, despite the screens we had made for them, require vacuuming bug corpses out of the tracks in order to slide the windows open to the lake air.

At the near end, we have our growing rock collection. Rock painting has become the past time of choice for our grandchildren and the porch is both studio and gallery. I had assumed we’d be releasing rocks back into the wild, but no. The ledge that lines the windows is perfect display space.

Not unlike the Zen I get from the view to the water, I find something restorative about the porch itself, even in its ramshackle state. I think about what we might someday do to this space, an ethereal second or third phase plan, to correct the leaks and improve airflow and overall functionality. Should we find a way to salvage the original structure? Is it wiser and more cost effective to remove and replace it?

This morning as I scroll through Instagram lake house hashtags, the polished perfection of space after space stands out in marked contrast to my little happy place. The grandeur and luxury of some of the homes is stunning. As a designer…as a person with a pulse…I love to pore over these images. But none of them capture the feeling that I had when I walked out onto the porch this morning. None of the images captures what it is I’m looking for.

As I sit on the porch, looking at both the minor imperfections and major flaws, I find myself a little resistant to the ‘remove and replace’ option. It’s not so much about respecting the history or integrity of the original structure – which is something I’m always mindful of in my work, but respecting the history of us, the tapestry of our family. Sure, I’d like not to worry about the rain and ice dams. I’d like the chipmunks not to run show on the patio or in the crawl space; I’d like to leave the windows open without worrying about somebody getting a black eye. But I want to avoid something that looks so new, polished and perfect that it doesn’t represent us.

I love good house porn. I appreciate what goes into styling for a photo shoot and what judicious editing can do. But I’m looking for real life. I’m longing for spaces that are lived in. I wish that I were a photographer with skills sufficient to capture what it is I see, with my eyes and my heart, when I walk out onto the porch.

Truths reveal themselves to me this morning.  Maybe you see what it is you’re looking for. And luxury is where you find it.