Beautiful Moments: 2021
Each year brings good and bad, light and dark, joy and pain. I try to hold it all as it comes: soak up the piercing beauty, excavate silver linings, find meaning in the highs and lows of being human. But memory is a finicky thing; it discards what seems like most of our lives, holding onto just a few glimmering moments.
So here are a few of my moments, as they unfolded through this year. (Should you be interested, here is last year’s.)
Without further ado:
I spend my winter Fridays sowing seeds. So many seeds. Hundreds of seeds. I tuck them into cells, keep them damp, adjust the height of the grow light. I come back each week to start more, to monitor progress, to take notes. And in those quiet, meditative moments, I marvel that things so small will become handfuls of flowers if I just give them what they need. I hope I can give them what they need.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and we can’t remember the last time we went on a date but we do fondly remember that our last normal date was Valentine’s Day 2020, when we sat in a crowded theater and visited a plant store. But this year, cases around us are sky-high, so we clean the house spotless, move lamps into the dining room for mood lighting, set the table nicely, and pick up dinner from a favorite restaurant. We dress like it’s a fancy date; I wear heels and shiver in the car while you grab the food. We laugh through three delicious courses and an Aldi wine pairing. I take off my shoes under the table. I think to myself that I would have fun anywhere with you, my love.
It’s March, and the garden is alive with tender, beautiful things. Some are surprises, tucked in by previous owners of this home, and I stoop to marvel at them. But some are mine, researched and chosen and purchased and nurtured through the winter for just this very moment. I keep a count (“this is my second anemone!”) and make tiny arrangements, carrying them with me from room to room as I move throughout my day.
For Joey’s birthday, we invite our friends over for an outdoor dinner party. We buy plants for the deck baskets and tidy up the yard. I make a lopsided German chocolate cake, and we all sing happy birthday (a candle on just his piece) to my favorite person in this world. I think of how many times I’ve already gotten to watch him adoringly from the other side of his birthday cake and how many more times I hope to have the honor. We build a fire and all sit around it together, and my heart could burst from the beautiful mundanity of it all.
Spring came easy and warm, week after week of my favorite weather. I take my virtual meetings on the deck, we eat breakfast outdoors, I swing on a hammock under an increasingly green canopy. One day I see a sign that someone in the neighborhood is selling hellebores, and I show up on their doorstep with a wad of cash to see if I can buy some. I have grocery bags wrapped around my muddy work boots, and I meet Walter, who has varieties I’ve never seen. I come back home smiling with a trunk full of beauty that will return to us each year in the waning days of winter.
Because Alabama cannot get its shit together, I drive to Tennessee to get my vaccine. After almost exactly a year of anxiety dreams where I cannot breathe and no one can save me, I show up at a Wal Mart and wriggle out of my poorly chosen pullover. I was prepared to feel a sense of relief, but I was not prepared for the wave of emotions that rolled over me as my personal nightmare began to end. Four weeks later, I make the trip again.
The wisteria blooms, and I am immediately sad that what has begun will soon end. I chide myself for doing this again — grieving the loss of something that is still mine — and then that weekend I laugh, because the neighbor and her daughter are tearing the wisteria from the fence, saying something about how it’s gotten out of control (sure, but it was perfect). For the first time maybe ever, my (absurd) constant sense of loss was correct.
Something happens that breaks my heart, and I want to disappear. I spend hours in the hammock, staring at the sky, uninterested in doing much of anything other than listening to the same few hours of sad music on a loop, thinking and re-thinking. I feel myself slip into a small depression, but for the first time in my life, I know this too shall pass. People used to say that to me when I was younger and angrier and more medicated: “it’ll pass.” I couldn’t conceive of it then, the impermanence of everything, the cycles of life. I get it now. I let grief and anger and sadness wash over me. I accept them, make peace with them, let them stay awhile, then bid them farewell. I still hear them, but they are so much quieter from a distance. In moments of clarity, I reflect on how lucky I am to feel so safe. To sit on my own piece of land and work through my heartbreaks and know that I will be okay. This is the first time I’ve taken this journey without antidepressants, and I feel lucky for that, too (both that I had them when I needed them, and that I can do this without them now).
My favorite weekend of the year is here, and Joey has made plans to celebrate us. Our fifth wedding anniversary is first: drinks on a rooftop, followed by a fancy dinner. Every year we have dinner for our anniversary, and every year we cry at the dinner table with gratitude and happiness. It’s my favorite tradition. Then it’s my birthday, and Joey has planned a picnic and bought a cake and brought home balloons, indulging every silly little whim of mine. It’s unusually chilly for the end of May, and we wear sweaters to our picnic in the park, snuggling up while we eat fruit and sandwiches. I feel known and cherished.
We are on a boat in the Caribbean with a group of strangers. The turquoise waters hold us. We snorkel and jump from the boat. We learn each others’ names and bits of stories while we sip punches that are spiked harder than we think they are. For five beautiful hours, as we sail just off the cost of the island, my world is small and perfect. It is just sunshine, sticky skin, and saltwater. It is just a group of strangers indulging in laughter and silliness for one day. It is just the gentle swell of the sea as I watch the sails ripple above me. And I know, as I lean off the boat over the perfect water, that I will remember this forever.
I visit one of my projects that is under construction, and I am struck again by the ordinary magic of my profession: I sit down and dream, plan, and draw, then I hand it off and it becomes real as skilled hands take it from there. The lines I drew become walls and doors, glass and carpet and tile. This one is a long way from finished, but when it it is completed later this year, the clients will love it and speak wonderingly about it, and I will feel deep inside of me that I am doing exactly what I was meant to.
On a summer afternoon in the garden, I am poking around the cosmos and dahlias and collecting some tomatoes when I tear a ligament in my ankle. My vision goes black with pain as I call for Joey. And he comes. He comes so quickly, and I know he will help me and take care of me, and I let myself need him. For weeks, he brings me fresh ice and does the grocery shopping and helps me up and down stairs. I cannot walk, I cannot drive, and for the first full week I can barely sleep. It’s a shocking amount of pain for what the doctor wincingly calls “a really bad sprain” (quickly followed by telling me it will hurt worse than if I’d broken it, good luck with the healing). But through it all, he is there, and I am safe, and I relax into the certainty of a husband who will do anything for me. (But he is so so happy when I’m back in the kitchen again. That makes me happy, too.)
I fly to Chicago, where I meet my best friend. We haven’t seen each other for two and a half years, and everything has changed but nothing has changed. I thought we’d busily move from one attraction to the other, but instead we walk 5 miles that first day, catching up and taking in our surroundings. I feel my heart fill at the ease of time spent with her; how lucky we are for a friendship that thrives despite distance. We eat like queens and visit beautiful gardens together, and I can’t stop smiling, and it’s over too soon.
Joey and I go apple picking, an adventure I think of as autumnal and cozy. But it’s Alabama, so it’s 80º while we sip apple cider slushies and pick our way through fermenting piles of apples heaped on the ground, looking for some to take home with us. I watch Joey reach into the trees and laugh to myself, because nothing is ever how I expect it will be, and it’s always beautiful anyway.
On the first beautiful fall day in Alabama, I turn the pile of apples into a themed fall meal, and we invite our friends over for a dinner party. I feel so perfectly in my element as I create a menu and execute it with Joey. We have roasted chicken on a bed of sprouts and apples, a mixed greens salad with apples, cranberries, and roasted sweet potatoes, and a spiced apple cake with caramel buttercream. I arrange flowers for the tables and forget to take photos of our perfect dinner party. I just sit and beam with happiness, finally feeling like this is home and so thankful for connection.
We decide to dress up for Halloween, which we’ve somehow never done together. We chose characters from a favorite animated Halloween series and spend hours scouring thrift shops and JoAnn’s and Amazon to find and create each element. There are no plans for a party, so we wear our costumes to welcome our friends to pumpkin carving. It’s ridiculous. A few days later we wear our costumes for the trick-or-treaters, and not one of them has any idea what we are. Most of them don’t even glance up from the candy bowl. It’s just as well; we dressed up for us.
We spend Thanksgiving in a flurry of baking and stirring and chopping and eating and dishes, just the two of us. I remember last year’s triumph and remark at how much easier it is this time. I’ve gotten better at the planning, and the both of us have gotten better at cooking together. We eat our too-many-dishes, then clean up and start on a puzzle. I worried it would feel lonely, this new little tradition of just the two of us. But it doesn’t. It feels like home. (But I still dream of hosting a crowd.)
As we decorate for Christmas, Joey comments that “we usually—” regarding decorations. I have to stop for a minute and grin, because it feels so special to reach the point of “usually.” We moved so much in our first few years of marriage that we didn’t accumulate much, did things a bit different every time. But in the last 3 winters we’ve settled and found a home, and my sweet forgetful husband is remembering the way we usually decorate. What a gift.
We’re on a ski trip, and it’s a disaster, because skiing terrifies me for a whole host of reasons. But on three different days, I strap myself into ski boots and get on a lift to the top of a mountain, and I learn to ski. I fight the panic in my belly and ignore the sweat in my gloves. I take deep breaths and face my fears. I’m really no good, and I wonder why there isn’t something easier than green. I fly down the mountain cursing and screeching, and the whole thing strikes me as utterly insane, start to finish. But I did it. I wanted to be proud of myself, and I am. And the views from the top aren’t half bad, either.
Just a note: I’m intentionally sharing the soft, lovely memories of 2021, which was a tough year for me like it was for so many. The moments that glint darkly in the saddest part of my heart will stay private for now. With time, some of them will lose their edge; some will remain sharp. They matter just as much, but they aren’t for sharing.
