Lack of posts

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. As many of you know, and some of you probably don't because I have lost track of who we've told, we are proud to announce that Baby Bonner will be entering the world at the end of July (God willing!). I am 14 weeks pregnant this week and we've been caught up into the crazy world of expectant parents. Lots to read, lots to discuss...we have a number (I count 7) of other friends who are pregnant as well, so it's nice to be going through this with a number of other folks!

Dream sequence

I am one of those people who never remembers my dreams. My aunt and cousin are always talking about their vivid dreams, but I either don't have them or don't remember them. Very early this morning, I had one with my grandfather in it!

I opened the door to my house (which wasn't our house by the way) because a neighbor had rung the bell. She smiled and said she rang the bell because my grandfather couldn't. (Of course, he's a ghost; even in my dreams I am obscenely detail-oriented.) She went away and there was my Pop, about 30 years old, standing under a blooming tree, looking very dapper in a white dinner jacket and bow tie. It's odd because I never knew him that way - I've only seen pictures. Anyway, he told me he was doing good and he was happy. I was so thrilled to hear this and even when I woke up, I felt like it was real and had been a message from him. We talked a little more; I got the sense that he did not know where Gram was, or even where he was, but it was a relief to see him glowing and happy.

Chilly hill

After weeks of chipping away at it, I finally finished Cold Mountain late last week. In all fairness, there were also a few weeks in there that it was lost under a pile of papers on our coffee table. You must be telling yourself, "Wow, this is such a thrilling book that she forgot she was reading it."

My grandmother lent it to me with the rousing endorsement that it was "kind of slow, but good." Who can't wait to get cracking on something with that review? I admit that I put it at the bottom of a stack of books 'to be read'. I did, however, have an interest in reading it because I'd picked up bits and pieces of the movie on TV one night and wanted to know the full story. Additionally, the Newsweek review on the cover touts the story as "Astonishing...a genuinely romantic saga that attains the status of literature."

I'm not really sure it was astonishing (still words on a page, read left to right, top to bottom, groups of words make sentences...nothing new here) and ultimately I knew the ending, so I'm a bad judge on that. The romance of the book could be estimated to really only show up in the last 1/4, but it definitely is a saga, or more epic, story, and I always want to educate myself with something classified as literature, because I read enough easy fiction. In the end, I figured that it would be akin to my experience with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and East of Eden; while I was reading them it was kind of a struggle, but after closing the back cover, I felt an immense satisfaction with passing the time that way and enjoyment in the classic tales.

With that, I began my journey. To quickly sum up, it is the story of a soldier, Inman, who deserts the Confederacy toward the end of the war. He is wounded in a hospital and basically just walks away with the intention of walking home to Cold Mountain (which I believe is actually in North Carolina). The author's note in the back indicates that he has used an ancestor's story as the basis for his tale, with much elaboration. At some point during his journey home, fraught with many starving, cold and scary nights, he latches on to the idea that he must find out if Ada Monroe loves him and will marry him. He feels like a less-than-human creature after all the killing and the death of war, and only her beauty and love can make him whole.

Ada, for her part, is home on Cold Mountain. While Inman is comfortable making his home in the woods during his journey back, Ada is a Charlotte girl brought to the backwoods of the mountain by her father, a preacher, just a few years ago. They lived as city folk still live, not tending their land or producing anything on their own. When her father passes away unexpectedly, leaving Ada alone with zero skills to survive (in the beginning she is literally eating biscuits for every meal because it's all she can make), she has to decide to buck up and make things work or quit and head back to her familiar city life. To her credit, she wants to make a home at Cold Mountain. Enter Ruby, a local who raised herself when her drunk and carousing father periodically abandoned her. She knows how to work the land and make the farm an efficient enterprise. Ada goes on to learn much about work, doing things for herself, and independence from this interesting character.

In the interim, there's all kinds of folks in the mix, one being Ruby's absent father. Finally, Inman and Ada do connect...and I won't ruin the ending for you, but it is slightly tragic. The book really started to pick up for me when Ada stopped acting like a ninny. It was nice to watch her progress into a true adult, after a lifetime of coddling from her father. Ruby's interactions are colorful and unique, so she is a character worth reading. Inman's self-realization of what he has done to other men, his humble thoughts on what he deserves in life and the ways in which he respects and loves the world slowly become apparent throughout the tale.

The style at first for me was a little slow to bear, but once I resigned myself to it, I enjoyed the way that the tale was told. I also really liked that it seemed similar to epic journeys of Odysseus, but in a more modern way. The book takes a different view of the civil war that one would not always first think of - that poor Southern farmers were shanghaied into service by wealthy landowners to protect their right to own slaves, with little positive outcome for the soldiers themselves. The disillusionment Inman and other outliers feel because of this is evident throughout the novel. Overall, I enjoyed it and have added to movie to my Netflix queue to judge its faithfulness to the novel.

Aftermath

Saturday was Pop's funeral. I don't know if it was because we'd been through it less than a year ago, or because we knew he was ok with death, but the entire experience was less emotional on the whole than my gram's funeral. I also did not have to give the eulogy, so I was spared the close examination and public recitation of the deceased. Now I'm sure will come all the decisions about what to do with what is left - the house, the things...so it's not really over.

At the cemetery, there was a bagpiper as there was at my gram's funeral. That is what really killed me last year. So I cringed when I saw him, along with three Navy seamen. My Pop was a Navy vet, so they were there in an official capacity. One played "Taps" on the bugle and the other two did the official flag folding and bestowal to my aunt Cheech. I was pretty close to the casket, so I could watch everything and see the sailor give it to her, with some words about "on behalf of the Commander in Chief and Commodore of the Navy..." That was pretty solemn and official. The bugle played "Taps" with an agonizing slowness that I do not remember from the few times I heard it played at campsites with Girl Scouts. It didn't have the resting, relaxed quality of a day at its closure, but the drawn-out, mournful tone of a final farewell. So this year, the bugle really got me. Who knew that the bagpipes and the bugle could be such touching instruments?

And now it's Monday and many of us are back to work and school...I can say that I'm not too thrilled to be here. Oh well. For the rest of us, life goes on.

Farewell to Pop

It was a year ago that I was posting on here about how my grandmother was unwell and she passed away on Jan.13. Sometimes it feels like it was much longer away than that, sometimes it just feels like it was yesterday. Maybe that is because it was yesterday that her husband, Frank, and my Pop, passed away in his home.

He has been unwell for a while, mostly due to complications from diabetes and poor heart health, and had been recently saying that he "just wanted to die." He had been an in increasing amount of discomfort lately and on Christmas my dad's siblings decided to give him the morphine pack of pills that came with his hospice kit to ease his pain. He has been on hospice care for about a year, and that is why he died at home.

We all went there yesterday to say goodbye; the hospice nurse and the funeral home came out to pronounce and take him away. The funeral will be on Saturday, 11 a.m. at MDP with a viewing prior. We spent the day yesterday looking through photo albums to make collages for the church like we did prior to Gram's funeral.

I can't tell you a lot of specifics about his life (and it's a shame but I should know more specifics about my family's life) but if I had to pick a big characteristic, it is that he was a hard worker. He kept himself always busy with the house(es) and the yard, working for a living and even after retirement. I think that was why he was so unhappy in the past few years - he was just not able to do anything he enjoyed, or keep his hands busy. He had big hands with big knuckles. The last time I saw him, he had an incredibly strong grip for a guy ready to let go of life. He was in the Navy. He was a photographer, and there are a ton of pictures of the kids in albums. There are not so many of him, because he was on the other side of the camera. He was a runner. He loved my grandmother so much and was telling us a lot recently that he had seen her or she was downstairs. He LOVED ice cream and anything sweet, which is such a curse for a diabetic. We would joke that at the Ponderosa buffet he would just put his head under the soft-serve ice cream machine and turn it on. He was very handsome and always dressed nicely; even yesterday, we were saying that he still had a really nice head of white hair.

Please say some prayers for the peaceful repose of his soul and for my family.