Birthdays

I recently watched a Portlandia episode where one of the main characters was making a big deal about her birthday. She was going over the top to celebrate it in all the ways that would delight her. She was drawing  a lot of  attention to herself and really wanting folks to make a big fuss over her. While watching this it drew me into my own birthday reflections. What an interesting moment in time. The moment you were born into the world.  I thought how much I want friends and family to make a fuss over me. How those early baby feelings of being wanted, loved and cooed over come up on this date every year.

At different times I have had amazing birthdays. As a child in Connecticut my mom was skilled at making a really fun home made birthday party based upon my interests at the time. I recall a safari petting zoo theme one year, a boat ride through the Thimble Islands when I was 12 with all my friends, and the traditional cake and play outside when I was little. I went through a lull of big celebrations as a teen. It was hard to figure out how to get together my friends who lived in many different states. One year, my 16^th, was the exception. My friends and mom all met up in New York City and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and tramped around Soho and Greenwich Village, owning the city. Experiencing NYC with my loved ones felt like the best celebration to me. 

In my early 20’s, while living in Seattle, I had a lovely friend who was great at coming up with big celebrations for me. When I turned 24 I gave her a list of experiences I wanted to have, pet a llama, have a picnic, go to a hot spring. She made a party out of us going on this big adventure into the mountains to a hot spring ending in a llama farm. I also recall being pregnant with Sweetpea and having a Portland birthday adventure. That birthday included a picnic in a park and dancing to Bollywood at a club that night with my big pregnant belly on the dance floor.  I felt free.

By Jessica Foster

Post kids it has been harder to celebrate me. Last night at my birthday potluck as I waited to gather everyone together, the children at the party had their sticky fingers in the ice cream melting around the second layer of my cake. I stood my ground and said “Birthday girl gets the first piece!” but they swarmed like hounds once that piece was cut. Not quite like my birthday the previous year when I turned 35. The adult celebration I got to have when my in laws took the kids. We had wine, viewed my old art school films, folks showed up at 10 pm and the party lingered to midnight. I got a taste of my life pre-children and it was sweet.

As a parent I savor any alone time I get. I am a combo of introvert and extrovert and I find the best way to balance this is by having a good chunk of alone time. As my first birthday present of this year I gifted my self some time sans kids to write at a café. I used these few hours of alone time to contemplate what it means to be in my mid-30s. My 36^th year feels like my adult prime. I think that your 30’s and 40’s are a great time to take charge of the big things you want to do in your life and have the history, clarity and experience of your 20’s to back up your plans. If anything I feel more relaxed, as I get older, that time is expansive and I can have it all just slowly and not all at once.

By Ian Roberts

I am evaluating my life from this new perspective. I find that growing older just makes life better. I am more focused on my goals and less stressed about getting it all done. There was an adrenaline that ran through my 20’s to get everything done and fast. I now have the perspective of time on this planet, time for many things to happen, many wheels to turn, and many projects to develop. My husband has gifted me this ease to some extent. Though he is a master of juggling multiple things as am I, he does not feel that it all needs to happen in a quick way. I see my life unfolding with many delicious treats, at the moment I am in the thick of parenting and starting a business, but I know that I will not always be in this stage of life.

In some ways I can’t wait to get older.  I imagine I will be hitting my stride in all that I am doing and feeling truly in charge of my life. Maybe at that point parenting will become more of a collaboration with my children where I get to guide them more and sideways teach instead of doing so much to keep them afloat. It is good to think into the future and remember that I will reclaim my birthdays again someday and make them all about me. For now I am surrounded by the needy love of young people and it is still sweet.  I love all the homemade gifts, cards, making messy breakfast omelets, drinking sips of coffee in between threading needles for small felt toys.  But I also enjoy sneaking away to enjoy an adult celebration on my own in a café with big windows and small minty, lavender sparkling drinks.

Spring Crush

The spring is my favorite season, the open possibility, the re-generation of life spelled out in millions of plants and trees. It is the season of green, deep, passionate green. Spring is for romantics, something I have always been. The sensuality of spring holds some of my favorite memories. I have lived through many springs in all parts of the beautiful United States. I want to take a moment to examine the spring of Oklahoma and how it looks up against the backdrop of growing up in Connecticut, my northwest home and plant education and my more recent central Texas life. I am sentimental this time of year for all the places I have lived and miss elements of the spring in each place. 

In Connecticut it was all about the crocus. The elusive lady friend peeking up in grassy patches marking the end of the freezes. The ones with purple and white stripes were my favorites. I love their little pointy striped leaves and the sweet surprise of happening upon them in bunches across wet tracks of city parks. The cherry blossoms lining Wooster square were another New Haven favorite. As a teenager I walked through the park with a camera in hand taking pictures of friends covered in petals laughing with flowers in our hair as we witnessed the beauty of a hundred pink and white blooming trees.  

In the Northwest this season was marked with love, the ending of the dreary season and the possibility of warmth, shedding the under layers and being awe struck underneath blooming plum trees. This was the season of pretending you are not cold when you leave your jacket at home on a hopeful sunny afternoon turned stormy evening. Then waiting at a bus stop stomping your feet to stay warm and shivering through spring! The season of flirty smiles, longer evenings and enchanted bike rides. My friends and I always seemed to go on more dates in the Spring. It was time to start noticing people after the long, wet winter. Clumps of violets bloomed under oak trees and trillium would pop up under cedars as delicate and magical as a fairy. I traveled north to the Skagit valley to immerse in the color of the tulip fields. Thousands of varieties maybe only ever seen before in Holland to the back drop of huge, blue mountains and deep white clouds. I never had as much love for a cultivated plant as when I saw the brilliance of a field of red tulips. 

 In Texas spring is wild flower season, I think it may be the prettiest spring I have ever experienced. The weather warms up to sundress standards and there you are experiencing sunshine and a million varieties of wild plants. Fields of flowers grow on the side of the highways; purple, orange and deep black cones dot every field and lot. The trees come back in full force and electric green blankets the earth. And blue bonnets, blue bonnets, and blue bonnets! Warm and happy you skip around to all the various out door music experiences Austin has to offer. We always took portraits of our family in the flowers. Is there anything so primal as a wild flower? I am convinced the essence of passionate nature lies in the throat of crimson clover. In our yard after a good rain the rain lilies would peek up their heads. A sister to trillium in the northwest these plants are like congratulations for making it through a flash flood, a little white angel of hope in our yard.

In Tulsa it is all about the azaleas. It seems every one here thought it was a marvelous idea to plant this bush in their yard the cumulative affect is the most radiant extreme hedges of color everywhere you look for at least a month. You get so much return with these bushes I am surprised I have not noticed them before living in Tulsa. The bush is filled with blossoms in the colors of white, fuchsia, baby pink, orange, deep red and yellow.  They are like the little sisters of rhododendron, all show and punch. Another plant this town does well is dogwood trees. I have never truly appreciated the dogwood tree till moving here. The elegance of this tree is regal. It comes in white or pink and the underside makes the most perfect cookie cutter shape. The majestic red bud of this region is also a local favorite. Tiny pink blossoms grow up the trunks and branches of the tree and bring a sweet dark pink beginning to the season.

Spring is in my lungs from all the pollen, my back from all the yard work and my heart from all the love of the cultivated and wild plants of this land.