oh i feel so very happy in my heart

when my kids were little, we used to ride to preschool to the tunes of Sharon, Lois and Bram. we'd turn up the volume and sing along to skinnamarinkydinkydoo, shouting the lyrics at the windows. as soon as the kids were out of the car, i would switch to beach music or top 40, craving a few short hours of semi-adulthood as i ran errands around town.

one morning after drop-off as i drove down a leafy street in Winston-Salem, i realized that instead of hitting the radio button, i kept hitting 'repeat,' so i could keep singing along, alone in the car. never once thought of the radio. the song — and i remember it so clearly — was "there's a little wheel a turning in my heart.... ending with a verse that begins "oh i feel so very happy in my heart, oh i feel so very happy in my heart...."

and i kept singing, even after i'd gotten out of the car to go to the store and come home to make the beds, do the laundry. the words had become a little worm in my head and heart... oh i feel so very happy in my heart. because i did. feel that.

i doesn't matter why, really. i just was. with my happy children on that bright day in that town where all the streets i traveled seemed so beautiful. at the time, there were parts of my life that weren't so happy, but in those few hours, i was not thinking about any of that. i was just feeling very happy in my heart. really.

on sunday morning of this week, i woke well before light and lay there, thinking about that song. that's what i was feeling again, that fullness, the heart so big it feels as if it might just burst open into something like butterflies or a brisk wind or a crashing ocean ...whatever it is that makes your heart feel just like that. a dirt road. a lightning bug. the lap of a grandparent on the back porch. a game of chase. whatever. i felt it. and i had not seen a single ocean sunrise (as is usually my beach week habit), or had the chance to sit alone just watching the surf (also my habit.) but the happy heart was there. in the middle of this very early morning on my last day of our family reunion at the beach.

this, i will tell you, was a surprise. i'd spent the last 9 days with my birth family and their many extensions, and i confess now that on day 1 i imagined that by the time day 9 got here i would feel nothing but relief. family gatherings for me in years past have been somewhat anxiety filled. as the old stories crop up of how much i cried as a child... teen... adult... or how i never stayed at camp always made me feel a bit of an outcast in my put-together family. in the days before we gathered, i found myself with teeth clenched, wondering just when the jokes would rise at my expense and how often i would spend with my head sunk in the pillow crying at the end of the night. (what do they say about self-fulfilling prophecy?)

maybe it was a sign to me when we checked into our rental that there were only three pillows in the whole place, (for 8+ people)— and i had forgotten mine. this time there would be no crying in the pillow.

and there wasn't. there was only this:

9 nights with my sister in the house. i have spent no more than a night with her in the past few years, and really mostly just hours. i know now that we buy the same tea bags though not the same toilet paper (close), the same pre-filtered coffee when we go on vacation. the time with her reminded me just how funny she really is, and it is a gift.

watching my brother — sans 30 pounds — play with his one-year-old granddaughter in the surf. and for days, he just kept walking around smiling. another gift.

reading my nephew John's guest blog

walking to the beach with my nephew Jay, talking about his new job

hearing all the good news everyone had to share :)

just sitting in the room with my nieces

taking pictures of nephew's Kip's surprise (:!) engagement

getting to know the new girls

shagging with my brother-in-law, nephew and son in the kitchen (stay in the box!)

recreating a 90s photo of all the grands lined up on boogie boards

walking the beach at dusk with my brother and sister-in-law

reading (one good book, though i usually read four on vacation)

having my five-year-old great nephew tell me he didn't want me to leave

watching my parents at a sunset photo session on the sound

reading a letter my friend-since-we-were-four wrote to her father one summer when we spent a week with my grandparents

walking through the grocery store with my mother as she fingered everything

watching as the whole family gathered to view the video my son made for my parents

hearing my brother toast my parents

listening to the grands and their jokes with each other

meeting my cousin for the first time in many, many years

watching my parents open the pile of cards people sent

lying in the sun with my daughter and rehashing all the stories of the week on our way home


hearing the stories of how much every one of us enjoyed being together

some sun, some rain

laughing, laughing, laughing

tiny spots of quiet to take it all in 

my family is not perfect. maybe some who don't know us well think we are. but we have been touched by illness and scandal, by grief and by grace. and we are blessed to have each other and we know it.


my husband no longer has his parents. my sister-in-law has lost both of hers. my brother-in-law's mother is living, but he lost his dad years ago.

maybe that's why all of us cling to my parents. i don't know. but as i lay there on Sunday morning early, i felt for the first time in a long time completely folded into the arms of my family. 


and the hug was tight.













  

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

susan hooks is here

my sister and i have never shared well. sleeping in the same room for forever, she inexplicably moved to the guest room when she turned teenager. and sometimes she would go into my closet and take a favorite t-shirt without my asking. (though younger, i was larger than she was so i couldn't steal her clothes without stretching them, and alas, getting caught.)

but then 30 years ago today, something changed.

i woke up to a phone call. 'hello susan!' pamula shouted. 'susan hooks is here!'

susan hooks. it took me awhile for this to sink in. my sister had just had a baby. a girl. and she had named the baby after me. (and my grandmother, but still.) wow. i called pamula daily after that, wanting to know who she looked like (her mom), did she cry (not much), how it felt to hold a baby in your arms that was your own. (one day I would learn myself.) in short order i was driving my mustang from augusta,ga to greensboro,nc, where my mother and my sister had spent the week babykeeping in a little house with kelly green carpet on the family room floor.  

the small bathroom in my sister's house had no vanity, as i recall. just a sink, and since there was no room to stretch out the giant baby bathing sponge, the first thing i saw on my arrival at the house was this: the two most important women my life dangling a tiny, wiry, slick-wet frame over the sink. and her eyes were WIDE open. freaked out, i would describe it. wet baby wet hands wet grandmother and mother... i was scared half to death that they would drop her. 

but they didn't. i am sure she was dry, dressed and fed by the time i got to hold her myself, looking into her large blue eyes, marveling at her chunky cheeks — she looked a little like Tweety Bird — counting her toes. a baby. a real baby. my sister's baby, and somehow — because she was named for me — by default my own. we were sharing at last. and something way more important than a t-shirt.

(my sister remembers this week not just because it marked the birth of her first child, but for the fact that beety jean, who thought that kelly green carpet could use a shampoo, sent my just-days-post-partum sister to the grocery story to rent a carpet cleaner — and didn't even help her get it out of the car. or clean the carpet. she probably did help clean it...that's our beety jean!)

being good Southern women, pamula and i started out calling our new baby susan hooks, but as she grew, just 'hooks' seemed to stick. two months later i got married. my sister moved our little baby to just outside St. Louis, but we talked every day about what raising her was like.

the next spring, i had become her godmother, and so i boarded a plane for illinois and her baptism. while i was there, we went to the zoo and the Arch, watched the roaring mississippi close up. and i took a lot of pictures.

on sunday, we dressed hooks up in her finest bonnet and headed to church. no other member of my family was there (another story: my brother's daughter was christened the same day, in a town much closer to my parents, so they were there.)

80s hair... what can i say?

i wish everyone had been with us, though. we stood in front of a congregation of strangers while the priest marked our baby as Christ's own. and then the choir turned to her and sang the most beautiful song i had ever heard, saying her name over and over, 'susan, susan...' as if she were the only one in the nave (and as if she understood). her wide eyes made us believe she did, for sure. I wish i could remember the other words, but pamula and i were both in tears and one thing you need to know about dear pamula is that she just does not cry.

i will spare you more of this story, which my sister describes as the happiest and saddest day of her life... how we drove all over Illinois look for a place for lunch and ended up in a dingy pizza parlor sitting all alone — pamula, her husband, hooks and me — celebrating the very fact of this baby.

when she was two, pamula called to say hooks had said the cutest thing. 'she asked me if a cloud sleeps. isn't that so cute?' that question led this writer on a dreamy literary journey that continues today. (to celebrate my tweety bird, i have been working on do clouds sleep, the bedtime book she inspired, much of the day). 

hooks grew older, gained a couple of brothers, and by then i had a baby of my own. 

hooks & her worm

she moved a couple more times until the fam finally settled in the Great State of Iowa. she came back to n.c. for school, where people just couldn't understand a name like hooks, so she started using susan. she met a tar heel boy (a demon deacon) who, oddly enough, had a nickname: worm. hooks & worm. there was nothing left to do but to marry him.

and now our little susan hooks is here and grown (though she is still little.) she looks like her mother and her great-grandmother (though she smiles much more than Hazel Estelle Hooks ever did.) and she is learning to make beety jean's caramel cake.

happy birthday, tweety bird. maybe by the time you have your own tweety bird i will finally be able to hand you your book.

can you tell they are kin?