By Barbara Berkeley
Congratulations to Lynn on becoming a grandmother for the second time! Her new grandson Luca was born on Friday, and while all babies are cute, I can vouch for the fact that this one is particularly adorable. At almost the same moment as Lynn’s daughter was giving birth, my Aunt Ellie was celebrating her 100th birthday with all of us in attendance in Florida. These two life events could hardly be more divergent yet they share the same center. Life events are moments that can’t be duplicated mainly because they reflect the essence of our being.
This time of year seems to lend itself to life events. Friends of mine are getting married next week. We just attended my daughter’s graduation. In our small town, each Memorial Day is celebrated with a parade, a “Blossom Time” carnival and a hot air balloon race. The weekend serves as a placemark in the lives of locals. “I remember a few years ago at Blossom when I……”
Seventeen years ago, our family moved out here from nearby Shaker Heights. Shaker is a lovely, well-manicured suburb where we had bought our first home after coming to Cleveland from New York. After five years in a home we loved, we decided – for some odd reason – to move to the country. The decision to buy a run-down property with “potential” seemed particularly fool-hardy when we took possession on a warm Memorial Day weekend. I remember sitting at twilight on the front porch looking out over the overgrown lawn and wondering just what we’d gotten ourselves into. I had tried to give the girls a bath and the water had come out bright orange and reeking of sulfur. On our first night in the house, the roof had leaked badly. Nearly everything was in disrepair. Our barn had a tractor inside, but who knew how to use it?
As Don and I sat there despondently, an amazing thing occurred. Five or six enormous, brightly colored balloons ascended out of nowhere, clearing the trees that surrounded our property and floating up into the air like glittering angels. They looked big as houses and had baskets suspended beneath them. We could hear the people in the baskets talking far above us. The balloons were soon joined by others painted with stripes, suns and swirls. They hovered directly over our house, occasionally lit by blazes of fire and hissing breaths of hot air. They seemed an incredibly welcome omen of good fortune. Suddenly, we were able to see the lawn and house as they might be someday, if we cared enough to make them that way.
Each year, the balloons ascend just as they did that night. We are no longer surprised to see them, but we relish their appearance. They are part of our catalogue of life events; a ritual that someone created years ago which has taken on special meaning for us and for many in our town.
We can’t choose to reach a hundredth birthday or plan on balloons appearing over our roofs from out of the blue. But in truth, most of our cherished life events occur because we make them happen. A baby is born because (most of the time) we plan it that way. Our wedding day comes about because we decided to find a partner and opened ourselves to making it work. We graduate because we applied to school and stayed the course. And there are so many millions of other ways that we can create our lives. We eat the fresh tomato because we planted the seed. We joyfully hover at healthier weight because we’ve made it so.
This morning, I laced up my running shoes and set out with no small feeling of trepidation. It was the end of Week Five of my Couch to 5K program. At the beginning of the week, I was asked to run a few five minute segments. On day two, the program called for escalating the running time to two eight minute blocks. Now, on day three, I would face the real challenge. A twenty minute run. No breaks. It didn’t seem possible that I’d be able to go from eight minutes of running to twenty and I actually noticed that my heart was beating quickly in nervous anticipation. It was a gorgeous morning, warm enough for shorts and a light shirt. The oriole that has been living in our silver maple called out as I headed down the driveway. Two mourning doves peeked at me curiously from their perch on the split rail fence. The air smelled like lilacs and hay. A road crew had paved our street just one week earlier. They hadn’t painted any lines yet. In the clear morning air, the road stretched like a clean black ribbon into the distance. In the reality that I had created, I ran the twenty minutes – pounding along the road with a sense of increasing wonder at my accomplishment.
As the time elapsed and I cruised to a breathless stop on this Memorial Day weekend, a bright blue and silver hot air balloon came into view just over the trees.