Honbons: And Other Noteworthy Gifts

Last weekend we went to see those sensational Honbarrier folks. Something about those people just creeps into your head and makes a little nest and you don’t want to do anything except stare at them, enchanted by their effortless remarkability.  

Mom, Dad, and I drove up on Friday, arriving close to dinnertime with a car full of crap and a few tricks up our sleeves for the weekend. We drove a beautiful windy road up to their house and before we even got out of the car we were greeted by Gus, the newest puppy member of the family. I felt a kinship with Gus for his uncontrollable enthusiasm. His happy, wiggling, frantic, excited body was the physical embodiment of my mind.

We greeted those lovely Hons, stared at their beautiful view, and then all piled into Dads truck and had a hearty Italian dinner. We came home with plans to play Shanghai until Will and Katie arrived so that we could all then play Shanghai together but we distracted ourselves with pie and ice cream and telling stowries and when Will and Katie showed up somewhere near midnight not a single card had been shuffled.

I spent most of Saturday talking at Will and Katie. Apparently I had lots to tell them and I didn’t know it until they woke up, fixed a mug of coffee, and then sat down across from me and Gus, while we wiggled with joy. I think it’s been so long since I’ve been around people my own age that every thought I’ve had in the last three months that could be related to by a young person just poured out of my mouth at a rate that exhausted even me. I couldn’t stop. They sat politely, quietly sipping coffee and offering their thoughts when I paused for confirmation. Later in the afternoon when we headed out to pick up ice cream for the adults, I sat in the back of Katie’s car just a yappin’ and chuckling. Even my own embarrassment couldn’t hold back my talking.

There is a chance that this Honion was our least physical to date. Typically there is some form of mountain climbing, beach going, or kayaking. This weekend we left the house only for church and food. Laurie spent the weekend running interference between meal times and all the hungry people in her house. She prepared a number of entrees and fruit pies and cookies and insisted we all maintain full bellies.  We played great games, cooed at chickens, wrestled dogs, told stories, chased fireflies, sat through a highly amusing church service, had midday ice cream, took a few naps, and watched a number of beautiful sunsets.

We brought a very special prize along with us this time. This honorable award was reserved for the winner of each game of Shanghai. This trophy, this righteous accolade, would rest atop the head of the ultimate Shanghai winner. We hid the Shanghai hat from the Hons for a full day. We giggled to each other periodically about the anticipation of seeing their reaction. We wondered if only we would be tickled by the concept of a Shanghai winners hat. As it turns out, the Hons were delighted by the winners cap but my favorite thing about it was how hard it made Laurie laugh…every time.

We told them we would take the hat home with us, for no person should be forced to store such an obnoxious monstrosity in their home. We were less than an hour outside of Lynchburg on our way home when one of us shouted, “Oh no! The hat!” and we realized we left it behind. I feel bad that they have to find a place to keep it now but I admit I’m excited about potentially seeing it stashed away in the background of their Christmas photos.

We also knew that Will and Katie were going to try to pass Mrs. Pigglesworth back onto us. Wilhelmina has been living with Will and Katie ever since they returned from their honeymoon last October. Shortly after they left on Sunday, Dad found that they had stashed Mrs. Pigglesworth in the back of his truck. Dad brought that big orange pig into the Hons home and left her strategically for them to find. We were halfway home when we received this photo from Laurie. Turns out Gus is not a big fan of Wilhelmina Pigglesworth. 

I always walk away from my Hon visits feeling refreshed about things. I'm sure it's the good dose of happy chatter, comfortable company, and not feeling guilty for not being productive. I think it's hard to allow yourself to be still. I love all the laughing and the stories but being plucked out of my little life bubble and dropped onto the Hon farm makes everything I fuss over during the week seem so much less important. In fact it's nearly demotivating because suddenly I realize I don't really need much else. As some old guy once said, home is where your people are.

I think Gus agrees.

The First of Many Aging Meltdowns

For the last few years I’ve entertained the notion of writing about aging. Not so much my ‘experience’ with it but my hopes for it, the parts of it that excited me, and how happy I’ll be to be old enough that people stop questioning my “old Southern person” vocabulary. Anytime I tried to write about it though, I couldn’t put together my thoughts. It felt like something big was missing, something crucial. After all, how can a baby tell you anything about growing up.

Ari turned twenty-seven two months ago and she had this slight panic when she realized she was old enough to be a mom. “But you’re not a mom.” I told her, “There’s a huge disposition shift between a mom and not a mom.”

“It’s not that.” she moaned, “It’s that if I told someone I had kids, no one would say, ‘But you’re so young!’ They would think it was normal.”

That’s when it hit me. I’m the age where girls start panicking that they’ll never find someone to marry. Ari’s old enough to have two kids and it not be weird. A lot of my friends are in their thirties. I remember being twenty-two and thinking that someone in their thirties was too old for me but now I realize you’re just as young in your thirties as you are in your twenties. You're just older.

Ari says she’s too old to wear her favorite pair of denim shorts. “They’re way too short!” she whined.

“No they’re not! And no you aren’t… Are you?” Is twenty-seven too old for short shorts? Naturally at this point I made it all about me. I’d always looked forward to aging. I was excited to have a full life under my belt, countless stories and adventures and I was happy to know that one day I would know all those things that prompted your parents to say, “If I had known then what I know now…”

I thought age would look good on me. I thought I’d finally match up with my disposition, my enjoyment for moving slowly through a day and feeling a pure form of glee when a flower blooms. Those are old folk things. But now I’m kind of scared. It’s not that my brain will get older, just my body. There’s no way my parents feel like they’re in their fifties because numbers have no feeling. They’re twenty-three year old kids. They just happen have these achy bodies holding them back from what they want to do. I won’t be older. I’ll just be limited. I’ll want to run and jump into a pool but my damn hip will blow out if I try. That’s not fair.

I stared at my body in a mirror the other day and it does look young but it also looks so different from the body I had in high school. It looks more tired than my high school body. I tried to picture it older.

“Skin not bouncing back like it used to?” Kristen Bell asked me through the tv and a tsunami of bubbles flooded across the screen. “Introducing Neutrogena’s new skin firming….” I stopped listening. Is this bouncy skin? I pressed my cheek up and watched it fall. What’s going to happen to it?

Now I’m wondering if missing my youth will be painful or something that slipped away so slowly that I came to terms with it as it left me.  Will I wish I had played a sport when my knees could let me jump so high? Will I be sad that I didn’t flaunt my young body? Am I wasting my youth? I’m having a legitimate crisis here! Why do I spend so much time thinking about life and people when I could just be out shimming around town without a care in the world? I’ve always looked forward to aging and now I don’t want to get old.

A few days after this crisis I woke up, threw on my work dress, inched into the bathroom, and looked in the mirror. What I saw confused me. My face didn’t look like my face. Maybe I hadn't really looked at me in a while. Maybe I hadn't paid attention to the faint crease between my eyebrows or hadn't noticed that my cheeks are less full. It all seemed so sudden. I held still and pointed my phone camera my way.  I needed a second opinion. I sent the photo of my foreign face to Ari and she only laughed at my look of terror. "It's not funny Ari. Who is that woman? Where are her round cheeks and oily skin patches? She looks dry and frightened."

I’ve got four more years to be in my twenties. I’ve got anxiety, low blood sugar, a bad knee, the tendency to faint in the summertime, a clicking sound in my brain when I run, two painful ganglion cysts, and a big toe that cracks when I walk. One day I’ll long to be twenty-six again. That really scares me.