You haven't met them yet
on great loves, and all still to come
I live in a family of big generational gaps. My grandmother was seventy-seven years old when I was born, eighty when my sister came along. She herself was forty when she gave birth to my mother, her only child. That means between my mother, my grandmother, and my sister there were even gaps of forty years each.
Forty years is a long time, a lot of life. There are loves and losses, work and frustration, joys and travel, disappointment and great joy. Of course this could be said of any age, but what I’m trying to say is that forty years is quite a long time to wait to meet the people who will become the lynchpins, the turning points, the stars of your life.
I’m not just being a vain granddaughter here. I know for a fact that my grandmother’s world revolved around my mother, my sister and I. And as I have gotten older I have appreciated her joyful, imaginative presence in my young life more and more. My mother was a whirlwind of activity, almost larger than life in her CEO heels, hosting black tie parties and Christmas fetes. Of course she was the one to read us Harry Potter and make up fantastic stories about our favorite imaginary horses, Pegasus and Browno (we chose the names). She put me on a pony and we galloped across wide open fields. She would race through my room with a vacuum and a to-do list. She was hot and cold, up and down, here and gone, a frantic forcefield of love and intensity.
But my grandmother was something else, something steady and soft and safe.
She was the one for walks in the garden, afternoon picnics, endless tea parties (with shameless little care for sugar - I can still taste the sticky sweet tea filled with 5+ cubes), stuffed animals who could talk, imaginary games where she played five or six different characters. She was Peabody’s longest running piano student (taking lessons into her nineties) and she sat by my side as I practiced for my weekly lesson at Ms. Louise’s studio.
She took us to the pool and ordered us Skylight snowballs. She let us hold her collection of Beatrix Potter figurines and told us stories about when she lived in a grander, more elegant world of horse carriages and cobblestone streets. We took bikes and rode to her house nearly everyday when she moved down the street, a great gift from my parents. There we found a sun-drenched world, picking cherry tomatoes in the garden, sitting on the screened inn porch with cheese and crackers. There was never any sense of rush or time or to-do with my grandmother.
For her, she had all the time in the world.
And well, she nearly did. She had 101 years on this Earth. My mother only had 59.
Who knows what time is left or gone or to come?
Really, I’m talking in between things, because I’m trying to talk about the strangeness of life when you live in gaps between the most momentous things that will shape the course of all your life. Perhaps they have already happened. Perhaps they will happen tomorrow. Or in fifty years. I don’t know.
I read one time how strange it is that in many cases you have yet to meet the people in this life who you will love the most, who will love you the most.
My youngest daughter turned two last month, my oldest will be four in March. That is a small amount of time - four years, but what a tremendous weight, those four years of motherhood, that have sent all other years into a spiral of waiting rooms - it was only for this time that all those other things were for. Perhaps I will think that again. And again. If only I should be so lucky. Who haven’t I met, children or friends or future son-in-laws or grandchildren who will be the turning point of all things, who will shape my life irrevocably and totally?
I shortened the generational gap when I met my oldest daughter on the ultrasound screen, the shape of a head, a forceful wiggle, there - the change, the person, that altered all things. I was twenty-eight years old. The gap shortened, but time continues in its winding back and forth - an in-drawn breath here, an exhale there. Expanding and shortening in ways we cannot know, locked into our linear view of things.
One day I am eighteen years old, wearing my signature look of athletic shorts and a button-down shirt, hair down to my waist, and swimming in the river at my new college. And the next day, I am sitting in a Shakespeare class next to a boy who will play me Thais Meditation on a laptop in my dorm (“I think you’ll like this song”) and ten years later will hold our daughter in a hospital room. Shift, turn. Who could have known, one day to the next, what would come?
All I’m saying is I only ever knew my grandmother from age seventy-seven on and the imprint she left on my life has been immense. I think of her almost everyday and I see her all the time in my love of books, of letters, and music. She is a breathing force in my world, though she died nine years ago and I only knew her in the twilight of her life.
This is a month when we think about love. Romantic love often takes the stage, which is well and good, but there are many loves in this life, and they may be yet in store for you. There is great beauty and great happiness in many seasons of life and many people for you still to meet and rejoice in.
On the note of love, I will leave you with this extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily long sentence from a lovely book I’m reading,
“Still, you knew, you knew that the purpose of human beings was to love, just that, and though you knew it, though it was maybe the only given in a ceaseless search for purpose, the evidence of the perplex of love was all around you, so that though there were weddings and white dresses and roses, though every song was a love-song, there were black eyes and bitter words and crying babies too, and every heart got broken sometime, yet, and yet, and yet still again, because you couldn’t deny it, because, if anything was, it was a fundament, it was in the first intention, part of the first motion when the first key was wound and the whole clockwork of man and woman was first set going, love was where everyone was trying to get to.”
— This is Happiness, Niall Williams
Life lately…
Check your mail!
I am sending out my first physical newsletter this week. Paid subscribers who have directly emailed me your mailing address, you’ll be receiving a letter sometime soon - I just put the cards in the mail today. Every month will be different, I imagine, though I’ll always include copies of a handwritten essay/meditation. You can expect recipes, movie reviews, book recommendations, quotes from my commonplace book, missives from farm life and gardening/agricultural experiments, art, iconography, and more. My husband referred to them as ‘care packages’ when he looked through what I was sending out, and I think that’s a nice way to think of them. I hope they bring you delight and wonder and all good things!
This letter writing subscription model is an experiment so bear with me while I work out any snags. If you sent me your address and don’t receive any mail by the end of the month please email me so I can rectify that right away.
If you become a paid subscriber and would like a physical newsletter please email me (marquettekatie@gmail.com) your mailing address. Please message me your address by the 20th of any given month if you’re a new subscriber, otherwise you won’t receive a physical newsletter until the following month.
If I ever can’t get a letter out for any given month, I will pause subscriptions for that month.
If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you are supporting my free newsletters, the hosting fees for 116 Born of Wonder podcast episodes, and having full access to the archive here on Substack (nearly all posts are paywalled after two weeks now).
Thank you sincerely so much for supporting me and for your enthusiasm and encouragement to do this strange, old world thing and send you some mail. I’m quite excited by it! I had so much fun getting the newsletter together and my daughters helped me pack them up and now my oldest is “writing letters” during quiet time. It’s a benefit to our family already just in its creativity and the ways I can involve others in my work. I know financial situations are very up in the air for many people right now, it’s no small thing to subscribe to these sorts of things, so I want to say sincerely thank you.
I have been one of the people affected by the recent funding changes and cuts, as many of my paid audio work was on contract with NGOs who had government contracts. This has shifted a lot of how I view this upcoming year and perhaps one upside is that I will be putting a lot of focus and energy into making these physical mailings worth your while. Thank you again so much.
cheers and all good things, much wonder and joy,
x Katie
This Is Happiness is an endlessly quotable novel, is it not??
Such a lovely reflection — these questions sparked hope and wonder in me!