Daily Grace, Presence

Graduation Day

June 24, 2023

(Written a week ago on the morning of my daughter’s college graduation day)

Today is “Eat a Donut Day.” (Because my daughter works at a donut shop and donuts are free! And since it will be our first stop this morning, as we are in town for her college graduation, we can also have her make us fancy donut shop coffee and matcha drinks.) She will show off her barista skills, which is especially impressive, since when she left for college she didn’t like coffee at all. Now she both drinks it and knows how to make it. Of course she is not working this morning, since it is graduation day and all. But we can stop by and say hello to her coworkers who are friends and enjoy a donuty breakfast and watch her run the espresso machine. 

Today is “Spend More Money Than You Normally Would on Sunday Lunch” day (because it will be a major celebratory luncheon, the kind that doesn’t happen very often.)

Today is a day when we woke up in an Airbnb that felt like a posh hotel room. It is the opposite of the last Airbnb that we stayed at, the one in Lompoc where I woke up around midnight to the sonic boom of a SpaceX rocket launch. That one shared a bathroom with other guests and had additional rooms rented out, including one to folks who arrived in the wee hours of the morning (possibly because they were out watching the failed rocket launch), guests who snored loudly enough to be heard in our room down the hall.

The backyard of our Airbnb. We didn’t have a chance to use the putting green…

This Airbnb has its own bathroom, a separate private entrance, is in a neighborhood up in the hills that I could never afford to live in, and is run by a host who provided snacks, bottled water, a kettle for tea along with green tea bags, and shampoo (in case you forgot yours).

I was grateful to find this Airbnb because it was relatively affordable (Sure, it is a 40-minute drive from UCLA, but it cost a fraction of what lodging near the university was running).

Today, my daughter graduates from UCLA with a degree in Environmental Science, along with two minors: one in Conservation Biology, the other in Community Engagement and Social Change.

Her roommate of two years graduated yesterday. (UCLA has their department graduations on different days) and is moving out today. My daughter will be staying in her apartment a few more days, but we are hoping to get most of her belongings into our car after the ceremony to start the process of moving her home.

Not that she is actually moving home. Our home for now is going to be the place where she keeps her stuff while she’s off doing other things. First up? An internship this summer where she will study butterflies and do research with scientists  from the University of Washington. 

After that?

Who knows? There are other internships she is applying for, and then ultimately she’d like to go to graduate school to get a PhD.

A PhD?

Who knew that you could go straight into a PhD program without getting a pesky Master’s Degree first? I didn’t.

It’s a donut day. A sweet day. A day of celebration. But also a day of endings, of transition, of change. Of moving! Of packing and loading the car and loading up memories. It’s a day when I want to be present for every moment. To be grateful that we made the drive down from home yesterday, that the car ran smoothly, that there was virtually no traffic, that I remembered where the cheapest gas was on the I-5. Thankful for Google Maps that got us to UCLA and then to Tacos Tu Madre, a little restaurant where we had breakfast burritos for dinner last night, burritos that were stuffed with scrambled eggs and truffle guacamole. (This thing? This truffle guacamole? It is one of the finest things I have ever tasted. It’s tempting to try to replicate it. But that might spoil it. Truffle guacamole will forever be in my memory as something that we ate in Los Angeles on the night before graduation).

There have been celebrations in the past where I have been so worried about getting the picture right, the video right, that I missed what was going on right in front of me. So. No worries today about getting the video, the picture, the forever image of her walking across the stage to receive her degree. Don’t need to do that. I will watch. I will watch and keep it safe in my heart.

Daily Grace, Presence

Hallelujah Fruit

June 10, 2023

The pears are tiny so far, but they are there!

It looks like there will be fruit this year.

Hallelujah.

Because last year in our little town?

There was none.

No pears, no apples, no grapes, no quince, no tiny plums.

It took awhile for me to realize this last year. I had to check with my neighbors to see if I was just being terrifically unobservant. Like maybe there had been loads of fruit and I was too distracted and busy to notice it?

But no. We all agreed. The trees didn’t fruit last year.

I worried about our local animals, our bears and foxes and skunks, who managed to survive one year without their normal sustenance. But two? What would happen if there was no fruit again? 

I noticed on my walk last week that my neighbor’s pear tree had teeny tiny pears on it. The plum trees in my backyard also have little plums.

So this year? There is fruit. And flowers! So many flowers are blooming. The perennials in my front yard came back like never before, and they are alive with all kinds of winged creatures: birds, bees, ladybugs, wasps, moths.  I’ve planted perennials for years, and they’ve usually done OK, but they always seemed a little tired and blah. Like they had to work hard just to survive. This year they are thriving. It’s hard to know why everything seems so alive now. Maybe it’s all the snow and rain that fell in winter and earlier this spring?  Maybe it’s because we took down a poplar tree last fall that was casting shade onto the flower beds?

Or maybe it’s love?

I like to think that the flowers know that they are loved. I am especially pleased that the native bleeding hearts that I transplanted from my mom and dad’s house years ago are blooming and spreading. They are maybe my favorites. They come back every year, even when I’ve thought that they were done for. (Isn’t this true for all of us in a way? We had Covid and lockdowns and an unfortunate president. But somehow? How? We are still here. Even when we thought we were done for.)

It’s not like this means that anything has changed with the climate crisis. It just means that this year we had a sort of reprieve in the form of massive amounts of rain and snow that filled empty reservoirs and temporarily helped California’s never ending drought. There was grace in the rain that came, and the snow and the snow, and grace in the wild rushing rivers that are higher than I’ve ever seen them, and that there is still snow in the mountains on this June day.

Somehow beauty and grace and life find a way. Grace is sneaky like that.

Even though we’ve made a mess of the planet and it’s not how it was. Not how it’s supposed to be.  But it is what it is, and grace still finds us. In the birds at the feeders and the bees and the butterflies and the bleeding hearts that die and somehow still come back every year.