Well, Where to Start Friday Round-Up?

I’m trying to figure out how to hang my new Ukrainian flag. I’m not Ukrainian but my husband is. Honestly, at this point, I think every clear-thinking American is ready for an honorary designation. We went to a rally for Ukraine last Sunday on the third anniversary of the Russian invasion. We took our new flag but got a little tangled up in it. At one point, a kind gentleman leaned over to tell me I was holding it upside down. We are imperfect but we show up.

Mariann Edgar Budde’s How We Learn to Be Brave is well worth reading although it exudes a calmness and introspection that might fit a different time. I’ve read the first two chapters: Deciding to Go and Deciding to Stay. Next are Deciding to Start and Accepting what You Do Not Choose. And there is more. This isn’t a primer on bravery, a how to. It’s a reflection on courage we didn’t know we had, that we didn’t recognize as courage at pivotal moments. So much of philosophy or theology is recasting what we know, turning our interpretation of life events on their head and, as with this book, freeing ourselves from accumulated regret. This is that.

There is a man lying flat on the floor in our tiny, very narrow bathroom downstairs. At first glance, it appeared he might be sleeping. He is a plumber so there is the pants and backside thing going on. Before the plumber came, another workman tore out the entire floor, laying bare rough wood from 1910, and, quite oddly, finding a lump of coal in the woodwork. He put the coal in his pocket as a souvenir. The original sink will stay but we are getting a new toilet. It feels like Christmas.

This is the year that I put my U.P. stories into a book. I’ve frogged around with this for a good while, thinking first I should do it and then thinking what’s the point. There are so many books and so many better stories. But I’m reminded of a writing friend who recently published a book, the last of several, as a legacy document, like somebody would make a quilt or paint a row of sunflowers and know or wish that the art was kept somewhere, pulled out and passed around at Thanksgiving. Oh. Grandma wrote this. That thought is compelling enough for me to start stringing my little beads together.

Today is our 41st anniversary. We went swimming to celebrate. (Well, we went out to a fabulous dinner last night but today we’re making fried rice from leftovers.) Anyway, I knew going to the pool would be doing what we do best and what has kept us married for so long. Laughing. The pool, my deafness, my husband’s cracked sign language, inside jokes, eruptions of laughter that make people around us stare and smile a little themselves. If we had been really serious people all these years, we’d have been sunk.