Tag Archives: helping

Friends Care And Do–

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Writer Wendy’s weekly blog

Today I am going to Biltmore to see the Christmas lights. Today is Epiphany, the proper day on which to mark the end of the 12 days of Christmas. Tomorrow Biltmore will take down the lights.

It is bucketing rain today. A dear friend widowed during COVID has on her bucket list to see the mansion decorated for the holidays. She has a ticket. She meant to go last week, and everyone going with her got sick. Today is the last day she can go. Being a widow means finding the courage to do many things alone that you would have done with a partner (or even over a partner’s objections). My friend took up salsa dancing. She went back to work, taking diverse jobs using all her considerable skills both in office work and in compassionate human care. (She is my parents’ weekly home care assistant.) She does not want to go alone, because Christmas lights on Epiphany are a thing to be enjoyed with a friend.

I dislike Biltmore. But I like my friend. She isn’t a victim; she’s a survivor who helps other people survive. She won’t care if I make fun of some of the opulence she will be so richly enjoying, and I’ll try to tamp down my natural sarcasm about the excesses of rich people’s stuff. These are the spaces we make for one another. These are the things we do for one another.

I am going with her because she does not want to go alone. She has shown kindness to my family, courage in the face of devastating losses, resilience in becoming a great salsa dancer–even though her church friends think it’s a little weird and perhaps too powerful and sexy for a widowed woman–and her determination that her walk with God not be dictated by her circumstances.

She wants to go see the lights at Biltmore today. It is bucketing rain and going to freeze tonight. We are going to see the lights at Biltmore because this is the kind of thing we who care do for each other.

This story may smack of “Ain’t I great taking my friend to do something I don’t care about in the teeth of a winter storm.” But that ain’t it, either.

We are here for each other because we have known each other a long time and understand the limits of human endurance. She wants to see the Christmas lights. She gets to see the Christmas lights. It’s good to have snow tires. It’s good to have friends.

New Year’s Resolutions —

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Writer Wendy’s weekly blog

New Year Resolutions
We all make them. We all break them. I’m not sure I take them all that seriously anymore, but I do have a list of goals for 2024.

  1. Set up the still. We have a sorta jumbled collection of what we think is most of the equipment in one of our outbuildings. This is the year we try making that bundle of tubes and barrels and little metal thingies into a working machine. Outside town limits, of course.
  2. Befriend a crow, maybe? This one is speculative, but gee, it looks like fun. The crows bring
    people pretty presents, and they seem to be excellent conversationalists. Plus, maybe they’d keep that effing chicken hawk away…..
  3. Say the eff word less in casual conversation; save it for important moments. This one might be hard because I’ve been binge watching Succession. (IYKYK) Still, I would like to maximize the impact of my selected f-bomb moments by making them more, well, selective.
  4. Make some new friends. As we age, we all know that making new friends is weirder, perhaps even harder. A widowed friend took up salsa dancing in an effort to meet people, and now she’s beating back male attention with a stick. A divorced friend joined the women’s club, a do-gooding society that raises money by baking stuff and selling it and then spending the money to buy more stuff for baking, etc. They’re also really good at feeding homeless people and holding the government accountable for not taking care of homeless people. Sorta like librarians, the Wytheville women’s club. Do not eff with them; they will eff you up with soft pillows and sweet treats and kind words so that you will not realize until you cannot get a loan at the bank or a seat at the coffee shop that you have been well and truly EFFED around town. They do their best work undercover. I’m not a good dancer, so I joined the women’s club. Since then I’ve met a lot of nice homeless kids with the same sad slide of small situations tumbling together to form disaster in their lives. Homelessness is made up of a bunch of tangled circumstances coupled with one piece of bad luck or timing. But hey, in a small town, bad luck is bad karma which somehow became a Christian concept known as “not working hard enough.” Never have figured that one out, but we laugh about it a lot at the women’s club, between making box meals and crocheting hats for the homeless kids.
  5. Do not fall for the “God is mean” trick making the rounds. Read Matthew 20 once a week or so (that’s the one where everyone gets paid the same for working the vineyard, even though some worked all day and some worked less than half the day). Cruelty is not listed as a fruit of the spirit; preying on the weak is not Biblical. I will ignore the growing Gordian knot of White supremacy mixed with “God only loves those who (insert X here)” mixed with abortion is God’s most important cause, and thus “we all know that means God loves straight white men more” lunacy flowing from so many spigots these days. Imma read the Bible and stay out of the extrabiblical literature zone. And I’ve always been good at staying away from men preaching a Jesus who has their exact personality. They’re easy to spot.

    So no, not too many resolutions really. Now, where to meet crows….?