The last few weeks my family and I have been doing little more than working on our house. We have been unusually united in our objectives, and the house is quickly turning into a beautiful, clean and unfamiliar place.

I usually wake up at 7 am, put on my paint-splattered sweat pants, an old white t-shirt and plan the next task while sipping a cup of coffee. I get the brushes ready, check on the painting supplies, and spread out the floor coverings.

I fill in the scratches, and smooth over the bumps and irregularities in the walls, including the gash that Mike made in the breakfast room. When he was a senior in high school I was scolding him for skipping a class and in a fit of anger he threw the phone at the wall. That hole has been staring us in the face for years now. But no more.

The walls in the breakfast room, as well as the kitchen, are smooth and silky and painted a soothing shade of gray, the color called Tea Stain. A contractor has been working on the kitchen cabinets, paining them white, almost pure white, the color of freshly fallen snow. I bought new knobs, pulls and hinges cut in a modernly spartan design, the patina of brushed silver.

As soon as the cabinet doors are hung back up, we will line the shelves with plates, bowls, cups and glasses. Only the beautiful, white dishes will be displayed, not the colorful, chipped array of mismatched favorites. I have already warned Jeff not to expect his enormous ugly coffee cup (we call it the boat) on the shelves until we move into our new house.

Tea stained kitchen

Branka and Joe have painted all the bedrooms upstairs, including Jeff’s office and the long hallway. The bedrooms are of different neutral tones, the office white, and the hallway a buttery cast of cream. The living room and the dining room are the same cream color. Nena painted the trim throughout the house eggshell white, polished the windows and washed the screens, and then we rehung the lace curtains on the large living room window.

Glasses and cups on the living room coffee table

I have been spending a lot of time clearing the bookshelves. Our bookshelves were tightly packed with volumes collected over decades, books from Jeff’s and my years both separate and together. Our children have been ardently adding to this collection ever since they could read.

Piles of books in family room

I try to decide which books to place in a box that says – To Give Away. At first it’s very hard and I can’t bear to part with any of my old, familiar friends. But it seems to get easier the longer I work at it. Still, I change the wording on the box and now I know what I’ll do. I can’t just give these books away. I will go through the collection once again when we move into our new place, and ask the children if they want to keep any of the volumes.

Next to the books were family photographs: Sam and Nicky dressed formally (she in a velvety red dress, he in a white shirt, white sweater and a bow tie) in a nursery school portrait; Sasha and Nena looking happy but sunburned in their bathing suits during a summer vacation at the lake;  ten year old Mike hugging Silver when she was an awkward, long eared puppy; and many more.

I wrap the pictures in sheets of newspaper and place them in a different box. Everything must go, all the personal objects that tie us to this particular place. The bookshelves need to look clean, uncluttered and anonymous.

Much more needs to be done to ready the house for its debutante presentation. The bathrooms need work. The family room must be painted and  is crying for a new carpet. And don’t even let me start about the garage and the basement.

The garden area and the outdoor plants need to be cleared, weeded, planted, pruned and beautified, but that is an activity I am actually looking forward to. We plan to invite a group of friends to come and help, and then, we’ll have a barbecue, eat, drink and celebrate.

And that’s the state of things at the Holtzman household in this month of May, 2012.

Source: House Work from Gracious Living, Day by Day

For the past year my husband Jeff and I have been trying to decide whether to list our house for sale.

Our children are in school and mostly on their own. My sister Branka and brother-in-law Joe have been living with us for the last two years but will be moving back to their own house this summer. Jeff and I don’t need a large house for just the two of us. A condominium with room for our children (when they come to visit) is a perfect space to transition to at this time.

Jeff and I have been negotiating for months. Should we sell or should we wait a little longer?

Last weekend we made a decision. The house is going on sale after the Memorial Day weekend.

House for Sale

This does not leave us a lot of time and there is much to do to get the house ready. After walking from room to room we made a long list of tasks that need to be completed and assigned a job to each family member.

Every room needs to be painted and this includes ceilings, walls, trim and all the doors. The door knobs should be replaced along with many light fixtures. Bathrooms have to be spruced up. The garage door must be replaced as well as the living room carpet. Clutter must be cleared, pictures taken off walls, furniture removed. And much more.

All this sounds reasonable and attainable except that our house is already overflowing with stuff.

How do we replace the garage doors when the garage is overcrowded with my sister’s boxes? Where do we move the extra furniture, pictures, boxes of books, when our basement is full of furniture, boxes and books already?

We’ll figure it out. It’s a little overwhelming, but I am trying hard to stay calm, do one task after another and not panic.

Dear readers, I will not be writing often in the next few weeks. I will be wearing my old pair of jeans, an old t-shirt and painting, cleaning and packing everything in sight.

Am I sad to be selling the home we have lived in for almost twenty years, the place where my children grew up?

Right now, I don’t have much time to think about it, but I am sure it will hit me at some point. Right now, I am removing traces of all the footprints we have stamped on this house and painting everything neutral.

By the time we are done, this place won’t look like our house at all.

And if the house doesn’t look like our old home, overflowing with people, books and warm colors, it will be that much easier to leave.

Source: House for Sale from Gracious Living, Day by Day

My parents, sister and I moved to Germany in 1971, when I was twelve years old. We lived there for two years while waiting for asylum to move to the US.

The town we lived in was near the Dutch border so we spent almost every holiday visiting our aunt and uncle in Holland.

By this time, Dragoljub and Ans were happily settled in a lovely brownstone and had a baby girl named Bettinka. Joep (as he is called in Holland) had learned Dutch and although he spoke haltingly and with an accent, he was able to communicate well.

Branka and I in Holland - with our baby cousin Bettinka

My sister Branka and I learned German quickly, and now, for the first time, could speak with our aunt without gestures, and without Joep there to interpret. We enjoyed our time with her, and she indulged us and helped us deal with the challenges of living in a society that was profoundly foreign to us. Far from our extended family, we felt lonely and unmoored. Ans became our anchor and our guide.

I remember one evening with particular clarity.  Ans, Branka and I were watching the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird” on television. The movie was in English, with Dutch subtitles.

Branka and I did not speak English at the time, nor did we speak Dutch. Ans spoke rudimentary English, but not well enough to understand a complicated story line. So, this is how we handled the problem: Ans read the Dutch subtitles, then translated to us in German.

All went well until I mentioned how cute the little boy, Scout, was. No, Ans said, Scout is a girl. “Ein Mädchen!” “Wirklich?” Really? At that moment in the film Scout came into the kitchen wearing a dress, ready for her first day of school. The three of us started to laugh. How many other things had been lost in translation?

Years passed, but almost every summer we all met at my grandfather’s house in Serbia.

Ans never ceased to be exasperated by the scarcity of modern conveniences in our grandfather’s ancient house or the lack of privacy in village life. People were as likely to drop in at 6 am as they were at 9 am, sitting on the veranda and catching up on the news while drinking coffee and plum brandy. Ans liked to stay up late and sleep late. She was on a different schedule.

My grandparents and older relatives never got used to Ans’s independence and her modern ways. Sometimes, she wore nothing but her bikini around the house. She expected my uncle to help with the children and with the housework, and he did.  Unlike my mother and aunt, she never stayed home to cook and clean for us while we young people spent the day swimming in the Danube.

Lunch in Banostor - Joep and Ans are at the head of the table, their son Nikola (named after our grandfather) in the middle; our grandparents are behind him

Somehow, despite the signals getting crossed on occasion, we all remember those summers in Serbia as a time of careless joy and delight, an oasis from the hardships of life’s demands. We were always together: swimming and sunbathing by the river; playing croquet or volleyball in the back yard; picking plums in the orchards, or grapes in the vineyards; sitting around the old table and eating, laughing and taking.

Branka and I continued to be close to our aunt, but our roles became reversed. In that traditional, intricate Serbian culture the two of us were expert interpreters and willing guides.

The only thing different was our language of choice. Now, we communicated in English.

Source: Bridging the Gap from Gracious Living, Day by Day

My mother’s youngest brother Dragoljub has lived in the Netherlands since the 1960s.

He moved there after marrying a Dutch girl named Ans. This is how it happened.

Dragoljub - as a young soldier

In the summer of 1964, Dragoljub was stationed on the Adriatic coast as a conscript in the Yugoslav army. Ans was there on holiday and the two of them met and fell in love. Over the next year they wrote dozens of letters to each other.

The following year Ans came to Serbia to meet our family. I was six years old at the time, but I remember well the excitement of being introduced to my first foreigner.

Ans spoke German with my uncle and grandfather, but had no language in common with the rest of us. Despite the barrier, I found her charming, good natured and kind, always laughing and ready for adventure. I loved her from our first meeting.

To my traditional grandparents, though, nothing about Ans was familiar or comprehensible. She was worldly and liberal, independent and emancipated. Traditions didn’t bind her. Ans was her own woman.

We were as foreign to Ans as she was to us.

She liked our family (especially my gentle mother) but our southern European ways were incomprehensible and puzzling to her northern sensibilities. We exasperated her at every turn. Family was central to our way of being and Ans found us old fashioned and feudal. Her favorite expression was, “Only in Yugoslavia!”

By late autumn of that year, Dragoljub had moved to Holland and he and Ans decided that they would have two weddings. One was to be in Utrecht the following spring for her friends and family. The second wedding would be in Banostor the following summer for his friends and family.

No one from our family was able to attended the Utrecht wedding, but there were hundreds of pictures, and they looked as exotic to us as if they were of the Dutch royal family.

The small wedding took place at an old Lutheran church, the reception at a fancy banquet hall.  The bride’s wedding dress had a severe, modern design, while the other women looked resplendent in gowns and large hats. The groom and his attendants were dressed formally, in top hats and tails, white gloves in their hands. The wedding couple was at the center of the ceremony: walking down the isle, dancing the first dance, cutting the cake. The bride threw the bouquet.

The entire occasion was over by early evening.

The bride and the groom - their wedding in Holland

The wedding in Banostor I remember well. I witnessed from the sidelines as my grandparents, my mother, aunt and other relatives prepared for the occasion: set up tents in the garden, cooked all the food themselves, baked cakes and a magical array of confections, arranged barrels of my grandfather’s home-made wine and plum brandy.

Every member of our extended family was invited, as well as, of course, the entire village. No one was sure how many guests would be in attendance, but the assumption was that there would be hundreds.

A gypsy band arrived early the morning of the wedding and didn’t stop playing until the next. People were singing, dancing, shouting, eating, drinking and one was surrounded by a cacophony of sounds, colors and fragrances. The bride and groom were hardly conspicuous in the crowds of revelers; in fact, except during the church ceremony, I hardly remember seeing them that day.

The Serbian wedding - Ans is standing second from left and has already changed out of her wedding dress. I am the girl sitting in the lap of Ans's father.

What I do remember from that occasion was the electric excitement and elation, the pure joy of jointly celebrating my uncle’s transition to a new stage of life.

Most of the guests, and this included the very old as well as the young children, stayed up late and celebrated most of the night. The gypsy band was at the center of it all.

Ans and her parents were a bit bewildered at first, but they got into the swing of things and seemed to have as much fun as the rest of us. We embraced them as our own.

Only in Yugoslavia!

Source: Two Weddings from Gracious Living, Day by Day

After a spell of tropical temperatures that delighted and troubled us at the same time, we are back to seasonal weather here in Michigan.

There was a milky layer of frost on the grass this morning, and my sister had to scrape her windshield before driving off to work.

A couple of days ago, it started to snow while Kaya and I were taking our afternoon walk. I didn’t believe it to be snow at first, but kept assuring myself that what I saw were just white pear-tree blossoms blowing about in the cold wind. But the further we went, the more blossoms fell from the sky, and then there was no denying the truth – it was snowing.

The snow, the wind, the darkly rolling clouds – it all felt comforting and reassuring to me. It has been known to snow in April here in Michigan – many times. It has been known to snow in May. But I cannot remember in the quarter of the century that we have lived here another early March with temperatures in the 80′s. That didn’t feel right.

That same snowy day Jeff and I went to our first softball practice, as we had both signed up to play on Jeff’s company’s co-ed team.

Ready or not!

I have never played softball. Well, actually, I played once in a fun family game the year Jeff and I were first married. Thirty years ago.

We practiced playing catch last weekend with our friends Jelena and Jim. I wasn’t as bad as I feared, and after a bit of practice could mostly catch the ball, and, as my husband said, “didn’t throw like a girl.” I assumed that was a compliment.

But at our first official practice, I didn’t shine. I stood in the outfield, cold and forlorn in the harsh wind, and hoped that the time would pass quickly. While the other players (including Jeff) appeared energized and spiffy in their baseball hats, I looked like a bent old babushka with the purple woolen scarf wrapped around my face. My joints were so stiff I could hardly run after the ball. The two hours spent on the baseball field felt to me like two decades in Siberia.

Everyone was impressed with my husband’s skill and aptitude as a short stop. He did have to ice his hands after the practice, but while there, he could more than keep up with the best players. And all that running around kept him warm.

Tonight is our second practice. And even though the morning has started off cold and frosty, the forecast is for a sunny day in low 50′s. Still, I am taking no chances and intend to wear a lot of layers. But I am leaving the purple scarf at  home.

I’ll keep you updated.

Source: Spring Training from Gracious Living, Day by Day

I read an interesting article about superstition and magical thinking – In Defense of Superstition, by Matthew Hutson in yesterday’s NY Times.

In our scientific-minded, rational age, any reference to superstition is usually formulated in derogatory terms. But Hutson points out that magical thinking (in moderation, of course) can be empowering and beneficial. If a person believes that they have some kind of control over their destiny, they might act with more courage and determination. And this behavior might give them more control over their destiny.

Hutson observes that all of us (and this includes skeptics, scientists, mathematicians, computer programmers and yes, even my husband Jeff) engage in some sort of superstitious behavior in everyday life.

“One study found that a group of seemingly rational Princeton students nonetheless believed that they had influenced the Super Bowl just by watching it on TV. We are all mystics, to a degree.” Ha!

As with anything else, when we want (or need) to believe in something, we cover it with the pretense of reason.

Most of us will agree that superstition, unrestrained by reason can be extremely dangerous. “At its worst, it can lead to obsession, fatalism or psychosis. But without it, the existential angst of realizing we’re just impermanent clusters of molecules with no ultimate purpose would overwhelm us.”

So, I ask you this – and I have asked this question again and again my entire life – why does it have to be either/or?

There is room in this world – no – there is necessity, longing and essential need – for countless perspectives, beliefs, understandings and explanations of life’s infinite mysteries. Some of us lean one way, some the other. To look through each other’s eyes is to get a much better understanding of the puzzle that is our existence.

I, for one, am a natural practitioner of magical thinking.

"The Fiddler," Marc Chagall, 1912

Even though I grew up in a secular, proudly scientific and socialist society, the old stories of Serbian folklore seeped into my consciousness like dew drops into a flower. And there, intertwined with my western, liberal arts education, they have been germinating ever since, giving life to all kinds of unexpected chain reactions.

Come to think of it, my path to that western education has been paved with magical thinking.

When I started first grade, my grandmother Branka convinced me that there was no book I could not memorize or learn by heart if I took a couple of very practical steps.

First, I needed to read the book before I went to sleep. Second, I had to place the book under my pillow and sleep on it. Third, I had to think about the material I had read and review it in my mind in the morning.

I followed this excellent bit of advice through all the years of my schooling, including graduate school. Books got bigger and bulkier and many mornings I woke up with a sharp pain in my neck, but the effort seemed to me a small price to pay.

As Hutson concludes, “to believe in magic — as, on some deep level, we all do — does not make you stupid, ignorant or crazy. It makes you human”

And if you follow my grandmother’s advice, it can actually make you better read and a bit smarter.

Source: Magical Thinking from Gracious Living, Day by Day

Continuing from yesterday …

At forty five years of age, I was not done with life.

In fact, it seemed to me that I was just starting to slow down, to take in and appreciate what mattered most. I had young children to bring up and enjoy, a loving husband who needed me, family members and friends who cherished me.

None of that seem to matter in influencing my chances of survival from the breast cancer diagnosis. I saw no shield that I could hide behind and  felt as helpless and vulnerable, as naked and exposed as I must have felt on the day that I was born.

Except, really, I wasn’t.

Those forty five years of living had prepared me to face greater trials than I ever imagined I had the strength for. I had soaked up the lessons from the stories I had heard, from the culture I grew up in, from the people I loved who had paved the passage before me.

I don’t know where the courage came from, but I stood my ground. I looked death in the face. I looked fear in the face.

As with much in life, a lot of what happens in illness can be distilled to pure luck. And I was lucky to respond to treatments as well as I did, I know that.

But as I slowly floated  back to the surface of the ocean and back to life, I tried not to negate or forget where I had been. I tried to understand. I distressed my husband and family to no end by reading book after book about death and dying. I didn’t want to jump back into life completely without absorbing what I had endured.

At the same time, I worried that the scars of illness, the understanding of life’s impermanence would cloud my pleasure and enjoyment of every moment to come. Would I become sad and depressed, a shadow of my former self?

How does one live when one knows indisputably, conclusively, without a doubt that one will die?

Again, I was wrong in my assumptions.

There is no denying that I have changed. I am not the same restless, sassy, mercurial person that I was when I was young. I have quieted down. My husband never thought he’d miss my argumentative side, but there was a time after my illness when he worried that I was too complacent. It took a while to get used to that new me.

But now, I think we have all come to terms with the person that I have become. And though I have moments of sadness, like every other mortal, the wondrous thing is that I don’t live under a cloud. I live with my face fully turned to the sun.

The knowledge and acceptance of death has not darkened my enjoyment of life. It has intensified it. And even after six years, I can enjoy a cup of tea or a cone of coconut ice cream or a long walk so deeply, so fully, all else disappears.

And the best part of what I have learned? I can think about it and not turn away. I can talk about.

And every now and then, when I am walking on a sunny spring day, thinking about nothing at all, and I happen to look up into the canopy of freshly budding leaves, well somehow, it all seems to make perfect sense.

On my walks - looking through a spring canopy

Source: Talking About Life from Gracious Living, Day by Day

Continuing from yesterday …

While our mother lay dying, my sister and I stayed with her at the hospice for two weeks. Some day I will tell you about it, but for now, I will just say that we sat there, on each side of our mother’s bed holding her hands day and night, and tried to help her prepare for her journey.

We hardly ate, slept or moved and almost never took a walk. We didn’t know that all that time a blood clot was slowly moving from my sister’s leg towards her heart and her lung. That blood clot was like a ticking bomb.

The day we buried our mother, my sister could hardly breathe. We assumed it was sadness and grief. That night, she had a dream that a woman (she could not see the woman’s face, but she was certain that she was our mother) was sitting by the side of her bed, watching over her, guarding her. She had the same dream three nights in a row.

The fourth day I took her to the hospital and we found out that the blood clot had traveled though her heart, and lodged itself in her lung. She had pulmonary embolism. Death had been stalking her and she had escaped, by a narrow margin.

While my sister was sick, I hardly thought about death. There was too much to do – children to shepherd, two households to run, a job to go to, doctors to visit. I was too enmeshed in the web of everyday activity to have time for mystical musings.

It took a year for my sister to heal and regain her strength and then, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The prognosis was worse that the doctors thought at first and the statistics snarled and scowled at my prospects. I had no choice but to let go of the illusion of immortality and hide, for a while, at the bottom of the ocean.

All at once, I had all the time in the world to think about nothing but death. I had nothing else to do.

To be continued tomorrow …

Source: Talking About Death from Gracious Living, Day by Day

I would like to open up a conversation – about a difficult subject.

I have always believed that it takes more effort and energy to avert one’s eyes from what frightens us than to look at awe-inspiring mysteries straight in the face. Unblinking.

These are my thoughts.

Candles in a Serbian Orthodox Church - burning for the souls of the departed

For most of my early life I had lived under the illusion that I was immortal. In childhood, I was sure that I was. I felt so full of strength and energy, I knew that I would live forever.

But an even greater assurance of everlasting life in this world was the fact that I was beloved. How could my parents, my grandparents, my family, the world continue without me?

Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that I lived in an insular or sheltered culture. Just the opposite. Death was an integral part of the Serbian narrative and I grew up hearing stories of wars and death, of children dying young – my grandmother’s brother, my mother’s brother, my father’s brother and many others.

But that had happened to them, that could not happen to me. I was special. I was me.

During my childhood we talked about death often. I learned Serbian epic poetry from listening to my grandfather’s recitations long before I learned to read -  and most of it was about fighting and battles, and old warriors who knew how to face death with courage and panache.

My grandfather, Nikola, bemoaned the fact that so many young members of the Rakic family had been killed by the Germans during the war, and buried in our family cemetery plot. He wasn’t sure there would be enough room left for him and he wanted to spend eternity nowhere else. (Room was found for him and my grandma after all, although they had to be buried on top of each other.)

But until I was an adult, I was mostly spared personal contact with death. My beloved grandparents lived well into their late nineties and when they died, I was far away across the ocean. Other family members died, but again, they were in Serbia and I was in the US. I only heard stories, I was not a witness.

All those stories of Serbian warriors dying in glorious battles did not prepare me well for my mother’s illness and death. For a long time, close to a decade, my mother suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. It is a horrible, slow, painful way to weaken, to disintegrate both in mind and body. I had moments during the long years of her suffering when I thought that I would be glad and relieved (for her and for all of us) when she was finally at peace.

When my mother died, it was the first time I saw death in person.

I will tell you this – the most frightening and despondent sight of my entire life was the emptiness of my mother’s eyes after the nurse opened them to confirm that she had died.

I realized then that my mother had crossed a frontier. We were separated, detached, disunited. We were in different worlds. And all I could do was wonder – will we ever, ever see each other again?

To be continued tomorrow …

Source: Talking About … from Gracious Living, Day by Day

Six years ago I was going through treatments for breast cancer. Every patient handles chemotherapy in their own way – and my way was to become very, very sick.

Grand Canyon

I felt so terribly nauseous from the chemical combination of my regimen that I could eat almost nothing. Eating nothing resulted in my loosing twenty five pounds in just a few weeks. Loss of weight caused feelings of exhaustion and disabling weakness, so I spent days hibernating on the couch, hardly moving at all. Lack of any kind of exercise allowed two blood clots to form – one in my arm and one in my leg – and almost finish me off.

It was not a happy time for my family or me, and sometimes I wonder how we made it through.

But like my step-mother, who came to help us out that harsh winter taught us, you take one day and deal with it, and then you deal with the next day. And if a day seems too long a period of time, too difficult and insurmountable, then just try to get through the morning, and think no further.

That winter, I usually felt spent and anxious by early evening, and since going to sleep frightened me, night provided little comfort.

My family and friends each had their unique methods of distracting me from my misery, of cheering me on, and comforting me. Each, in their own way, was my guiding angel.

My brother-in-law Joe, sat with me many times through those evenings, while the others were busy cleaning up after dinner, and he told me stories that he knew I wanted to hear.

Everyone in my family knows of my great love of travel. So, to spur me on, to get me to fight, Joe told me in great detail how he would take me on a great adventure – the American West, to the Grand Canyon. Neither of us had been there, both of us wanted to go there, and so, he said, I needed to get better so that we could go and see this magical place.

I remember making a pact, first with myself, then with Joe, that I would see the Grand Canyon. Its red, sunlit cliffs beckoned me through my illness like a beacon of light and goodness and beauty of this world that I still needed to see. When I felt I couldn’t lift my head, I thought of those sharp cliffs.

By early spring, my chemo regimen had changed, and my appetite started to improve.  My strength slowly came back and I began taking daily walks. My family cheered me on.

Maybe I will see the Grand Canyon! I thought.

Spring arrived and I slowly healed. I persevered through chemo and tests revealed that my body responded well in fighting the tumors. I recovered from a number of surgeries. I regained my strength and my optimism. I started turning towards life again.

But neither Joe, nor I, have seen the Grand Canyon yet. Something-life-always seems to get in the way.

The canyon is still waiting – patient, ageless, beautiful. And we are still planning to visit. Soon!

Source: The Call of the Canyon from Gracious Living, Day by Day