The Year of the Play Date (Part II)

Okay, so here's the continuation of that post I wrote the other day.  That is, if you're interested in hearing more about play dates at Papa and Grammy's house!  There will be some cute photos, if that helps to pique your interest.  ;)

When we moved to VA five years ago, we didn't expect to make many friends in our peer group.  We knew that we'd be very busy with family events and commitments, with four of our sons and all of our grandchildren living nearby at the time.  (When we moved here, we had only seven grandchildren altogether, and three of our daughters-in-law were due to give birth within a few months; we now have 19 grandchildren.  It's been a busy five years, to say the least!)  We were in our late 50's, leaving a beloved town where we'd lived for more than a quarter of a century and moving to a new town where no one knew us.  Plus, we planned that we would spend the summer months each year up in NY, managing our Vrbo rental property.  How were we going to have the time or energy to make real friends in our adopted home town?  We had no expectations of having a social life here in VA--at least not with anyone who had a different last name than ours!  We truly didn't expect to make lasting ties outside the family.

One of the biggest blessings of our move (aside from the fact that we would now live close to so many of our family members, of course) was the wonderful Catholic parish we've called home since we arrived here.  The people there are extremely friendly and we've always felt very welcomed.  But during this past year, we have really started to make dear friends at our church.  Since several months before the election in 2020, we've made a practice of going to daily Mass and staying for the Office of Readings and Morning Prayers afterward.  Along with the much-needed graces, an added benefit of this is that we have met so many lovely faith-filled fellow parishioners.

Through our parish, we met a nice man who is a daily Communicant, and he and my husband really hit it off. And lo and behold, we found out that his wife was originally from the same area of Upstate NY where my husband and I grew up.  Aside from that, they had made a big move from the Midwest to this part of VA not quite a year ago to be close to two of their three grown sons and some of their grandchildren--because like us, they had lived for a long time (35 years, even longer than we had lived in NH) in one house, but when their boys left home and settled far away, they were constantly traveling to see them.

We started going out for coffee after Mass once a week with this couple, whom I'll call T and R, and the more we talked, the more we realized we have in common.  What a gift--unexpected, but greatly appreciated--it has been to have friends who are in our same stage of life and with whom we can talk about pretty much anything without worrying that the subject will be "taboo."  They, too, live for their faith and their family.  Like ours, their lives very much revolve around the schedules and needs of their boys and their grandchildren.

When we'd meet for coffee, T and R's 3-year-old granddaughter K was almost always with them (R watches her while her mom is working).  So we thought it might be fun to get this little sweetheart of theirs together with our Hermanita, which we did one Tuesday or Thursday a few weeks ago.

I decided that I wanted to introduce R to the rest of my VA girls. So yesterday, I hosted a little mom's coffee/play date with her and my three local daughters-in-law. Braveheart came in the morning as usual with 2-year-old Hermanita; but Ginger also came with Jedi (4), Topper (3), and Quartus (1).  Unfortunately, my daughter-in-law Preciosa was on her way over to join us with her two youngest, Bichito (2) and Jet (6 weeks), but Bichito got sick in the car and they had to turn back.  :(

Anyway, we ladies had a delicious brunch and sat and chatted, the kids played together beautifully, and it was just an all-around delightful morning.

My friend R and her granddaughter had to leave before lunchtime, but Ginger and her boys stayed while Braveheart picked the triplets up from school, and when they got back the “big” cousins got to play together for a little while.

I must be the luckiest person on earth to be able to enjoy all this day-in/day-out, ordinary yet extraordinary time with these precious grandchildren.  They can come for play dates at Grammy's house any time they want!  The more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned.

And here’s a joyful little postscript: today, my husband and I are attending the wedding of one of the friends we’ve made because we see him every weekday morning at Mass.  Life is indeed full of unexpected blessings!

A Christmas Carol, and a Minor Christmas Miracle to Boot

Before I get started and tell you about the special way I spent this past Sunday, the second Sunday of Advent, I wanted to take care of a bit of business.  I haven't blogged in almost two weeks, and in my last post I announced that I'm running a giveaway here.  I got a few comments on that post, and I just got around to replying to those yesterday (sorry for the delay!).

If you didn't see that original post about the contest, I wanted to say again that I am giving away one copy of Finding Grace and one copy of Erin's Ring, two Catholic novels with appeal for readers young and old (I hope!), to be mailed out in time for Christmas gift-giving.  If you want more information on these books, you can click on their cover images, over there on the sidebar, and it will take you to their Amazon pages.  I will be choosing a winner at midnight on the 15th, so leave me a comment if you're interested in having your name thrown into the hat.  Let me know which title interests you more, and you'll be entered to win it.

I've been at this blogging business a long time now, since March of 2011.  I was already four years into writing Finding Grace when my first daughter-in-law Regina (wife of son number one) mentioned that I might enjoy being a blogger.  I hardly knew what a blog even was back then; I had only read Pioneer Woman's--and I'd only found hers because I'd seen a link to it at the end of an article in Redbook or Good Housekeeping or some such women's magazine.  (Does anyone even get subscriptions to those anymore, or is online reading the only way to go?)  Apparently, though, there was already a thriving Catholic blogging community out there--who knew?  So I tentatively dipped my toes into the blogging pool, and bam!  It was pretty much love at first sight.  Or first word.  Or whatever.  During those first few years, there was a new post up here at String of Pearls pretty much daily.  A day without blogging was like a day without sunshine.  (Or coffee!)  

Little did I know how much starting a blog would change my life.   It's hard to even describe how many blessings blogging has given me over the years.  I have come in contact with so many wonderful people, most of whom I may never meet in person, but who feel like true friends nonetheless.  It's like having a whole list of endearingly familiar pen pals: people you come to really care about; people who pray for you and your family when they know you're in need, and you pray for them right back.  It's the most amazing thing.

One of these special people I'd met through blogging is a young girl named Sarah who was still a student back when we first started corresponding via the comboxes on each other's sites.  I was impressed by what a sweet person she seemed to be: a hard-working, deep-thinking, devout Catholic pre-school teacher, writer, and maker of cord Rosaries.  In fact, I have ordered numerous Rosaries from her, for my grandkids and for my husband and myself.  He always carries his Notre Dame blue-and-gold one with him in his pocket, and I carry my Irish-green one in my purse.  (We had them with us on Sunday, and I think Sarah was touched to see that her Rosary-making ministry has had a big impact on the Pearl family.  But I'm getting ahead of myself here.)

Sarah very generously read and reviewed Finding Grace about five years ago (you can read that review here).  In the years since, this young woman graduated from college, embarked on her teaching career, and got so busy with other projects that she gave up blogging.  But we still keep in touch sporadically.  I'm old enough to be her mother (she is actually about the same age as the youngest of my five sons), but I consider her a friend.

I knew Sarah lived somewhere in Northern VA, and she knew that we'd made the move to the area not too long ago.  Well, out of the blue she emailed me a couple of weeks ago to let me know that she was playing the violin in a community theater production of A Christmas Carol, opening on Dec. 7, and she wondered if now that I'm a local, I might like to come to one of the shows.  It was playing in a community center just a little over an hour from where we live, and this past Sunday my husband and I had the opportunity to attend a matinee of the performance.

What a delight it was!  (If you live in NOVA, you might want to check out this creative take on the Dickens classic: set in the Depression era with accompanying Bluegrass music, it's a play within a play--and the cast is terrific!  The show will be playing again this weekend, Dec. 15 and 16--get your tickets now!)

My sweet and talented young friend, with the playwright who wrote this particular adaptation of  A Christmas Carol.

The thing that was so cute and sweet was that when the cast had taken their bows at the end of the show and started to come out to talk to audience members, Sarah made a bee-line right over to us.  After all those years of blog friendship, she had no trouble finding me.  

See those fingers of mine on the left?  I kept patting her shoulder in a motherly (grandmotherly?) fashion while my husband snapped our photo.  And I was nervous and excited, so I might have babbled a bit...

But the most wonderful thing about meeting Sarah IRL (as they say) is that I truly did feel like she was just the person I already "knew" through her writing.  We were not strangers at all.

I can only speak for myself, though.  I hope she got the same feeling when she met me.

I'm considering having the opportunity to meet Sarah a minor Christmas miracle; not as big a miracle as Scrooge's conversion in the play, of course--and surely not of the magnitude of the miracle that is the Reason for the Season!!  All right, maybe it wasn't quite a miracle; but it was certainly a gift.

God bless us, everyone!

My Daylily Friends

I had the most wonderful morning yesterday, catching up with old and dear friends.  M, a woman I've known since my earliest days in NH (an irrepressible, never-aging spirit like no other!), hosted a lovely brunch at her home.  To give you some background on M, her youngest son, a "change of life baby" who was born many years after his next oldest sibling, was in my oldest son's kindergarten class and went all the way through grade school and high school with him.  Anyway, five other ladies she'd invited, including me, sat around her dining room table drinking coffee, eating quiche and fruit, and reminiscing about old times.  (Okay, full disclosure: there was also cheese Danish.  And I may have partaken of some--you'll never know.)

There would have been more gals there, but during the summertime it's tough to find a day when people aren't on vacation or otherwise busy.  That's why M always hosted a brunch like this right after the kids started each new school year.  It was a given that during August we would all receive a hand-written invitation to her yearly "Back-to-School Get-Together."  There was never a quiet moment at M's table when we all gathered there; we Catholic school moms had so much in common, so many shared experiences.  It was a sad day when M's baby graduated from high school, and the rest of us younger moms realized that this yearly event we all looked forward to was going to end.  How would we start the school year without it?  But M continued the practice for at least a few years afterward, and then the tradition died a proud death...until yesterday.

If you read yesterday's post, and you know how weepy and sentimental thinking of days gone by makes me, you'll be surprised that I didn't break down in tears at the table.  Especially because one of the ladies, who is also the mom of a boy who was in school from K-12 with my firstborn, is getting ready to move away.  She and her husband are empty-nesters, and their four grown children have migrated west and south.  They just packed up a house that they've lived in since before we ever met them.

I didn't cry, but I felt so blessed and happy getting to see all those women again--women I used to run into all the time when our kids were going through their school days.  We met when most of our oldest children were barely older than my twin granddaughters are now.  We never used to have to exchange pictures when we talked about our kids.  But yesterday, we passed around wedding photos of our offspring, and oohed and aahed over how grown-up they all are.  We filled each other in about their jobs and their current places of residence, and a million other things we never could have dreamed we'd be talking about 25 years ago.  And of course, I also showed off many pictures of my three precious little granddaughters, feeling perhaps a bit too proud that other than M, who has grandchildren in college and even one who's married, I was the only one there who'd become a grandparent (so far).

I do hate to brag, ladies...okay, that's not true.  I love to brag about those little sweetie-pies, and also the wee lad who's going to join them in October.  Grammy for the W!

One thing M asked me about, shortly before we said our good-byes, was my gardening.  My gardening?!?  I sort of laughed and told her I might be many things, but a gardener wasn't one of them.  She reminded me that once upon a time I'd talked about gardening at one of her brunches, and then I remembered that yes, I did try (for one or two summers, anyway) to turn my brown thumb green.  Here's the story on that: it didn't take.  The end.  "I like perennials," I told her.  "They grow like weeds, and weeds are the only types of vegetation I know how to grow."

So I'm going to end this post with some photos of my ever-flourishing perennial gardens.  I know you'll be impressed.

In the aftermath of that get-together, I'm feeling happy that I have roots here in NH that won't ever die, no matter how many years pass (and that God made flowers that don't die, either!).  True friends, the kind you can go five or ten years without seeing and then pick up as if no time has elapsed, are kind of like daylilies.  Friendships like that will always survive, even when they've been benignly neglected because life gets too busy for regular watering.