Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Place of Your Own

4 Replies

I spent years working away at my kitchen table, steering the ship of my job and house while homeschooling my bouncy bunch of four bright-minded students, letting my laptop slip into sleep as I’d answer math questions or teach how to count out change or correct grammar on book reports, all through the late mornings after we’d read from the Bible and our current chapter book while their mouths were busy eating breakfast.

We’d curl up later after lunch with yet another stack of books, full of history and astronomy and earth science and how babies are born. The littlest of them would play with K’Nex on his reading blanket and our time would draw out as we’d learn and learn, and then they’d have a quiet time in their rooms where they’d listen to good stories and classical music on CD’s, played on their very own little portable stereo that reminded me of the boom box I used to carry around back in fourth grade. Minus the CD player, of course.

Sometimes I’d rest too, but most times I’d work some more on the laptop, or I’d write before it was time to start thinking of dinner.

We shared our days.

Every day.

I wouldn’t change those years or that time for all of the money in the world.

For twenty years my space was their space, and that was my life mission without me even realizing it. I was their lifeline and they were mine, and those years make up our family history and legacy and are the etchings of who I am and who they are.

Before them, I used to share space with a shift full of men and women in gun belts and turnout gear. I’d send them on calls where their life was in danger, or a citizen was under threat, and I’d answer routine phone traffic mixed in with a 911 here and there, and I’d keep track of where each and every one of them were, who they were with, and what the danger level was, the status of the house fire, or had the traffic stop yet cleared…all while intermittently typing up a report before I clocked out. And I’d do it all while running background checks and gun permit info and driver’s license statuses and maybe microwaving up a late lunch before the next call came in or putting on a pot of fresh coffee before the lieutenant rolled up to the station for day shift. If I had an issue in my space, I’d hit the big red button and gun belts would jangle urgently up the hall and the fire department door would fly open, and my family-of-that-season would come running to my rescue. They were my lifeline like I was theirs and those years are part of my legacy and are etchings of who I am and who they are.

Since 1993 I’ve shared space with my beloved and it’s been an upstairs apartment with slanted ceilings and floors, and then the space we yearned to buy, a single-wide trailer-house on a quarter acre on the ghetto side of a swanky lake community where we thought we’d arrived; man I loved that place…and then the wide-open space of this Alaska, this land where there’s a place and a space for all who dream to put a stake in the cold, dark ground… and that space was shared with me and with him, and all those who’ve come around us protectively in love, and they were our lifeline and I like to think, I hope to think, that in some way, we’ve been theirs too because oh, how we love them. They are part of the legacy of the two of us and they are etched on our hearts and on who we are.

Our Alaska spaces and places have been friends’ houses, our first rented house, the beaches, the tundra, the first house we ever owned —that one we busted open a bottle of champagne upon, right there on the corner of the concrete block foundation– this smaller one now that looks fancier but that had us cashing in part of our retirement fund in order to secure the land it sits on so that our children would have a countrified, free-range life…this place that maybe we’ll die on and leave to them someday…

…and then there’s Kodiak Island where he spent so much time working and I used to take the ferry over when our first two were babies and I was swollen with our third…we’d walk the beaches and oh, don’t I still have jars full of beach treasurers…and then almost twenty years later I took the kids and their friends, and that one I carried in my belly those earlier trips walked beside me as a near-on adult and it was precious…

…Denali National Park where we’ve driven our band of family and friends through four times now across that wild terrain…big field trips for our little homeschool and I’d read out loud for hours and hours while he drove us safely through the frost heaves and alien landscape…

…Captain Cook State Park where we’ve dreamed of children —and maybe even conceived one all those years ago— and it’s been the close place that seems faraway, where we can escape up the road for a few days or an afternoon, flying kites and camping and building fires and finding agates and ourselves again…

…all the many beautiful lakes, rivers, islands, inlands, glaciers, campgrounds, forests, and backroads of this land that swallowed us whole and made us her own…

…The farm our kids dragged us into…

…The place family comes to ooh and ahh over and sometimes comes back more than once or sometimes even comes to settle because we are here…

Alaska places and spaces have been our lifeline—where we found the LORD…or maybe where He found us—and it will be part of our legacy; it is etched deeply—so deeply—on our hearts and is such a big and beautiful part of who we are.

It’s funny how when you get older places become engraved on us —our memories and our hearts—and get right down into the cells of us.

Mayo Clinic where they saved my husband’s life and gave him back to me; I can hear my shoes squeaking on their immaculate floors as I walk to his room and I can feel on my palm the smooth and delicate strong grip of the heart surgeon, an angel on earth who held my husband’s heart with his two miraculous hands that day, then hours later held my two trembling hands and told me my man was strong.

My soul sister’s kitchen table polished in tears and a couple red wine stains from when we use laughter to add to the warm, worn patina of her tabletop, that meeting place that draws us all to the center of her home and her heart.

Those church chairs, stackable and mauve, chosen carefully by good stewards to hold the growing body of bodies; I always smile when I find one with a little rip that’s been carefully stitched together, and how many times have my people gathered in them, all six or eight or ten of us, singing and listening and opening our Bibles and learning and lighting candles on Christmas Eve?

That faraway island we’ve come to love, come to run to when the bones get cold and the wanderlust gets loud…that place where we celebrated a life still with us, and now many trips later, where we’ll mourn one gone from us…

All the other places that are tied up in our work, some of it decades long, and all of it swirling our family and our schedules and when we celebrate holidays and when Daddy’s off, and when Mom has to spend a day away from her home desk and be at the office desk…all this work our hands have nourished, and the livelihood he’s provided that allowed me to be right here with them all these years, feeding and teaching and being as productive as I could as I pecked away at my littler job, —the paycheck part, not the raising kids part, we both know what a high-value position I held, even as I was still learning it— this job that nourishes kids and clubs and communities while we grew ours up right along with all of the extra workload.

The electric man and the 4-H lady…these jobs have been our places for many years, and they are etched on us and our family forever, and even those will one day be part of our legacy.

I could go on and on, and I have probably…but if you’re with me still yet, where is your place?

Where have you built stories and legacies and what places are etched on your life and your history and your heart?

It used to be I wasn’t as attached to places as I am now that I’m over the crest of the hill of my life, but even as a younger woman there were a few places that molded me…my granny’s house…the beach of my childhood…the little white church where Matt and I were married…

But really, it only came about as I aged a bit that places began to etch their significance upon my heart.

And that I learned that the lesson is, that it usually isn’t even the place so much, but the people with whom you share it that makes a place so precious.

The days and the hours and the years and the minutes…the work and the love and the sweet talks and the hard discussions…the tears, the growing, the learning, the laughter…

…but mostly just the time.

Those are my favorite places.

The places where I’ve spent the time.

And in a world so rife with troubles right now, so much division, so much ugliness, so much uncertainty…don’t we all need a place?

Is that a state? A friend’s table? Your church family? A lake or a library? The four walls in which you dwell?

I hope my friend, that you have a place you love and feel loved.

Where the work of your hands and the love in your heart is safe, and honored, and something you are proud of.

Where you are someone’s lifeline like they are yours.

Where your time there becomes etched on your heart and the history of who you are.

My hope is that you have a place where your heart is heard, and that the heartbeat of your creator is felt.

He has a place for you, and I hope He is welcome and embraced in your place.

I hope you are loved, and I hope that every place you are blessed to be in touches you in ways known only to you and the LORD and your people, and that always, it is etched on your heart and becomes part of your legacy.

*

This piece is dedicated to my mama. I miss her so during this changing of the seasons, and I am so thankful for the time and the places I shared with her. They are etched forever on my heart and my history. I love you, Mommy.

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm. Abraham Lincoln

Building

2 Replies

The table came from dear friends of ours who needed a place to leave it when they moved to the lower states and it had cost them thousands they said, but they’d love for us to have it and see it put to good use.

It’s been a workbench, then our kitchen table when we moved to the new house, then our picnic table, then the shooting bench.

It has seen family meals, game nights and parties, held the artillery of my family as we’ve target practiced in our back woods, been sawn into shape just perfect by my husband, and sanded smooth by my own two hands.

On the underneath is written, “to the best friends we’ve ever had,” and now it’s where I’ll spend my days working for kids I love and writing more books.

We love you so, and have treasured this table well, Jim and Shelia.

My son and my husband moved it into my little shack today, and of all the things I’ve seen come together in this tiny space my beloved has carved out for me, this table was one of the most precious.

I can’t say it’s the most precious though, because how could I choose?

The windows, these ancient, second-hand massive panes given to me by a sweet kind man our family loves, left to him by another sweet kind man our family loved just as much…those windows remind me of the friendship we shared and how he loved his daughter and was building a little palace for her complete with a library and a loft and windows that overlooked their beautiful little pond before she left this world all too soon, and then, less than a year later, he left us too.

I miss you, Joe.

Or the floor, remnants of our Joe too, but a bit more bittersweet as it was blessed to me by his widow, my dear sister-of-the-heart. Fancy and bamboo, my boys loaded it up, and my baby, that tall, broad-shouldered one now that Joe loved, teaching him when he was smaller how to work with wood and measure and cut and make something out of the mind that came from a tree…when my boy set up his saw to lay down my new floor and ended up doing it all so adeptly that Saturday afternoon like he’d been doing it all his life, so efficiently that all I had to do as his helper was hand him a board now and then and keep his path clear of tools and the folding chair I sat on drinking my Diet Coke…we’d come across the occasional board that had a saw cut or a nail hole, and my boy knew that his mentor and old friend had had his hands on it. We were quiet for those ones, and it was special when one of those cut boards would fit perfectly into the space waiting, as if Joe knew my boy would need that cut, that piece.

My boy loved you, Joe.

Or the silly green chalkboard walls, gathered up by my husband and I on one of his days off after one of my sweet, sweet friends texted me a picture of them from the local thrift store for builders. She thought maybe someone in my homeschool circles could put them to good use. I saw the size of them, 4×8, the exact same as a sheet of plywood, and knowing my husband was using his special savings account to fund my shack, their five-dollar price tag drove me to take a long lunch break with him across towns to the shop and convince him that I always wanted chalkboard walls. There were just enough there for what my walls needed with a pair left over to leave for the second gal in line, who only needed two.

I saved almost one hundred dollars on plywood with that purchase, but more than that, I got a trip with my husband where we were on a mission together to gather materials for this project that he set out to build brand-new, while I had tried to convince him I just needed something basic built with recycled junk. It was a compromise of our styles, and he was happy with the price tag, while I am thrilled that my babies have already left their mark in chalk, and I’ve fallen in love with the deep green and its peace.

Thank you, Amy.

Or the lights I found on Facebook Marketplace, trying to save my husband even more dollars from his fund he tries to keep untouched as an extra retirement stream…those glass globes my big boy went to fetch for me on his days off. Upon digging them out after he’d gone back to work, I found them tucked up carefully in a box, with baseball caps bearing my boy’s work logos all in between them, used to safely wrap up his mama’s light source so they wouldn’t break on the wild ride in the backseat of his truck.

Colton, you are so good to your mama.

I dragged out my mama’s rocking chair today, and last month, when Matt told me to start figuring out where I wanted outlets and light switches placed and where I was going to put the things I needed in my little 12×8 box, I drew a little sketch on my iPad and left a corner open for a chair. Somewhere to sit and read, or a welcoming spot for my kids or husband when they traversed across the backyard to come say hi.

My mama would have loved that spot and she would have delighted in me having my own little space probably as much if not more than she delighted in having her own little space in her precious little cabin on our property. She would have been here with me all the time, and this week I celebrated a birthday that was so full and busy that it wasn’t until the morning after that I realized never in my whole life have I ever had a birthday without talking to my mama, and that she is the only one who’s been part of me for every single one of my birthdays…and isn’t it an odd, empty feeling to know that when your mom is gone, there will never be another one for which your day of birth means as much?

I brought out the massive poppy painting today (another Marketplace find) and I had my boy help me hang it on my chalkboard walls over her bentwood rocking chair she so loved. I would have loved her to be my compadre and my company and my motivation here in my little space, and I will imagine the conversations we’d have and the quiet moments together, and even as my heart misses her so, I will smile.

I miss you, Mama.

All these little memories…these precious, precious touches within that surround me with love and warmth and remembrances of who I’ve loved and how I’m loved…but this whole thing, this whole need for this little place, this shack, this quiet place of my own…it’s all girded from the heart of the man who’d do anything to see his woman happy and have what she needs, and not only what she needs, what she wants.

When he saw that I was serious about needing a place of my own to work in the quiet, separate from the ever-changing pace of this home we’ve built, one that has adult children coming and going and days changing on a dime, and every-other week adjusting to the oilfield schedule…that distractions are something his wife’s ever-sharp brain used to be able to roll with and thrive in but now leave her frazzled and frustrated and just pining to get her work done…when he understood that me packing up to work in another room or at my nearby friend’s quiet kitchen table didn’t mean I didn’t want to be around family but just needed to be able to concentrate…when he finally got it that his work-from-home lady was contemplating uprising their whole family life and homeschool and farm to begin a daily commute to an office building forty minutes away or else quit the job she’s poured her life and their family into for the past eight years just so she could have some peace in her brain and in her days…when he heard that she was looking into how much it would cost to have a little she-shed built outside their back door so she could maintain some peace in her brain and have a quiet place to settle and get some work done and do the writing that her heart longed to do…

He got to work.

He was at Home Depot the next day and now, less than two months later, he’s given his beloved a sweet little spot in the woods where it is quiet and where she can step away from the place she loves most but that makes her perimenopausal brain a spaghetti mess of noise and distractions when it is time for her to focus.

He’s given his beloved a peaceful place.

For the past two months, he has given our family a focus, a goal, a common-minded push, and whether he realizes it or not, it was what we needed after the tumultuousness of the push of building for my mama, and the push of getting through the shock and grief of her passing, and the long haul of this parenting young adult children who are steadily going out into their young adult lives while their parents live in the precipice, navigating this new season while still working and loving and holding down the daily routines that make up life that is ever-changing…around us and them and this world.

He didn’t know in his simple gesture of buying lumber that he was really doing something more.

He thought what he was doing what he knows to do, what he has done since the early 1990s, what is in his drive to do: to make his woman happy, safe, comfortable, and loved.

But what he really did was provide.

Provide a place in a season of increased distractions and interruptions where his woman can continue to focus daily on the work of the job she loves while still being available to her farm and her family and their cyclic oilfield schedule, all while remaining on a routine she’s carved out with a high rate of success for eight years.

Provide a refuge where she can pour out the writings of her heart safely and quietly, away from noise and inhibition. (He knows well his wife’s writing time often comes with loud praise music, prayer, out-loud editing, and snot-flying tears.)

Provide a shelter that will be only hers for the days of now but for all the days to come, knowing that a writer’s studio was always a retirement dream of his sweetheart.

Just over a year and a half ago he set down the plans to build the most beautiful interior of my mama’s cabin shell, then put his back and his brain into it, making her the happiest mother-in-law on the planet.

“I’m an electrician, not a builder.” So many times I heard that during his struggle to put my mama’s cabin together.

And now, before he’s probably even recovered, he’s put together this little shack for me so that I’ll be happy and peaceful and can continue on the very best I can in this season doing what he knows I live to do: to work and to write.

He may be an electrician stumbling his way through a builder’s life, but whether he knows it or not, he’s a builder.

He’s built a career with his back and his brain and his hands and his hard work.

He’s built a faith with his trust and his surrender and his listening to the LORD.

And he’s built a family with his love and his faithfulness and his devotion from day one and every single day after.

He’s provided a space and provided a place.

He’s a builder.

And now, he’s built me a writer’s shack.

When you make something for someone you love, aren’t you then a builder?

Builder: a person who constructs something by putting parts or material together.

My sweetheart is a builder.

He’s provided a place and a space.

You are a builder.

What are you constructing with parts or materials or words or actions?

What love or memories or people or character have you added to your daily endeavors?

I am thankful, so thankful, as I step into this little 96 square feet space I never knew I’d need, that I am surrounded by the love and the memories and the character and the effort and the might and the heart of those I’ve been blessed to know and who I hold close and carry with me.

Having that love with me inspires me to love more. To make this world a better place.

To build.

Having this work, these gifts, these memories surround me…

I want to provide a space and provide a place.

It makes me want to be a builder.

The Lemons and Me and This Season

1 Reply

I found a patch of fireweed last week that was in full fuzz, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

How are we here so quickly?

How are we six weeks out from winter now, with the Sockeye gone and the Coho here, and with those Silvers running, the feeling of frost each morning has rushed in too, and the need for a reset each night lingers?

Oh, it’s been a year. And it’s just August.

I think every single person close to me feels the same.

It’s been a year.

It was supposed to be the year when we all finally…FINALLY threw off the bad memories of the pandemic…when we all had a fresh start…when it was just going to be a page-turner and a chapter-changer.

But man, it’s been a year.

And this time of year, this particular season, it always has me yearning for a new planner.

A fresh start.

College classes start back up, a fresh new year begins in my job, my babies crank up their schooling…

It’s a natural start to new beginnings, and some years are happy and others are reflective…

but this one…this one has been a little sad.

Oh I still want a new planner. I’ve chosen my 2026 version, I’ve got the stickers ordered, I’ve got a PLAN for the planner.

That’s just because I’m looking to rein some things in, though.

Looking for some sense in the sadness…some methodical for the melancholy.

Because the older I get, the harder it comes, this changing-of-the-seasons.

And as I take stock in the state of things here in this bottom quarter of 2025, I feel the weight of it all.

This season that has a nation divided. Once again, here we are divided, this time uglier somehow.

This season that has me facing the rest of my life without my mama by my side.

This season that has our family walking the line of being empty-nesters while still having children living at home.

This season that has our farm downsizing as the kids grow up and out of their childhoods, and the animals begin to age out and leave us.

This season that has my body saying her child-bearing years are through, and it’s time to transition into menopause.

This season that is seeing friendships change and morph and fall off or grow deeper.

This season that has me wondering what I’m going to do with the remainder of the years that I have left on this earth.

This season…

Man, this season.

They don’t tell you when the babies are young that THIS season will be the hardest one yet.

That this season will grow you, flex you, bend you, break you, form you, mold you…in ways you never knew you’d be stretched or forced into before.

This season that has graves dug and cremains sitting on the bar in a fancy box, and thyroid medication-refill calls on speed dial, and the last year of high school plans saved in .pdf format after decades of making them.

That this season will have you on the brink of divorce one moment, to clinging in the next to your spouse like he’s the last person on the planet.

Hysterical and heartbreaking.

All at once.

That’s this season.

They don’t tell you that part.

They don’t tell you that your heart will break and you will be angry on a whim and that your bullshit threshold will be so thin that you can barely deal with people anymore.

They don’t tell you that you will feel all the years of your life that have passed and that you will just sit on your porch and ponder how many decades are to come and that you’ll reconsider all of your life’s decisions while holding so fast and tightly to all the ones you’ve made because they’ve all, every one, formed you into a person you wish you’d known when you were a younger woman.

They don’t tell you that the friendships you have will be lifelines or that your spouse who’s loved you almost two-thirds of your life will be the most cherished possession you’ve ever held, or that you’ll marvel when the adults who look like you and who were delivered out of your body will all-of-a-sudden become your closest confidants and that there is no greater joy than having them all together within the same walls you’ve all worn down together with dirt and blood and hearts and handprints.

This season.

They don’t tell you that you’ll care for aging parents and that once you finally, finally get used to that shock of an adjustment, you’ll be too soon saying goodbye and finding yourself an orphan even as you sit there mature and grown and feeling like a twelve-year-old searching.

They don’t tell you that your siblings, that bloodline, that will suddenly become something precious and opposite of what was once disregarded and taken for granted because it was something you were thrown into by chance.

They don’t tell you that friends won’t always be loyal and that what you thought was solid might just be flimsy, or that we live in a time when believing differently from someone might just be the reason they write you off as not-worthy.

They don’t tell you that others may just cling to you like their old age depends upon it, and that one day you’ll realize they’re right, and you’ll cling to them too and look forward to those grey years of laughing and love, and that you’ll hold onto them like a precious jewel because that’s what they are.

They don’t tell you that your faith will change.

That your friends will change.

That your family will change.

And that through it all, you’ll still be expected to be the same.

This season.

I sit on my porch and I work and I think and I ponder it all…

and sometimes I read my Bible, and I remember the fig tree and how it withered, and I cry because I don’t want to wither.

I don’t want to be without fruit.

I don’t want Him to look at me and say I’ve just spent all this time withering and have Him cast me away.

Because I’m not.

I’m not worthless.

I’m not withering.

I’m growing.

I’m budding.

I’m trying.

I’m striving for the Son and I’m trying to grow fruit, and just like my five lemon plants, those precious babies of mine forced to grow in this cold, cold land even though they’d much prefer the warm, tropical home we hijacked them from…

I reach.

My leaves curl, and sometimes they even die and fall off.

But I keep reaching for the Son just like they keep reaching for my windows, and slowly, ever slowly…they grow, and even though it’s not always seen until the sun shines again, I think maybe I am too.

That one, oh, he’s so crooked and curled and lopsided, and isn’t that just like me in this season?

LORD, isn’t that just like me?

Trying. Reaching. I hate this season, I can’t stand this climate, I yearn for the warmer times…

I long for when they were babies and I wish for when things weren’t so politically divisive, and I crave for times when they were simpler…

But I’m gonna keep growing through.

I’m gonna keep reaching.

I’m gonna keep stretching out my limbs and praising and looking for the sun in the dark, dark seasons…

When the hormones make it miserable, or when I’m stuck between peace and the plan, or when the bureauracy of the job hits hard, or when days change so fast I have to turn on a dime, or when the weight of the way forward needs more energy than what I have to bring, or when You may have to install a grow light to help me get through the days when all I see is the darkness…

I will keep growing.

I will remember grace. And mercy. And lessons.

The family I’ve borne and all the years we’ve been given.

The husband who has loved me faithfully and would give his breath to see me happy and safe.

The people who have given their lives so that I may have freedom.

The friendships that are threads in the quilt of my life.

I will remember goodness and love.

Like my lemons, I will reach through the chill of the changing of seasons and the darkness that lingers more and more each day.

I won’t succumb to the cold or the bleak or the uncertainty of what is to come.

I will grow.

I will remember there was One who gave up everything He had so that I might live this life He gave.

I will remember that every day here is a blessing and a gift.

I will remember that not everyone knows yet the freedom I have, the salvation that’s been laid out for all to find.

I will remember.

And on the days I forget, I will cling to the hope and the reminders that are there in the everyday blessings of this life…these ones given to me, those friends and family…those words in the ancient writings that continue to etch their truths into my heart.

I will remember.

And I will grow.

Cheesecake and Dying

1 Reply

I came across an old journal today as I was hunting for a new planner for the upcoming season —Autumn always makes my planner side jittery and searching for something fresh— and it took me two reads of the page to realize the scrawl I saw was my mama’s and not mine.

She’s been gone now three and a half months, but sometimes it still feels like she’s here, and when I realized the chicken scratching was her writing —done in my book from that weekend in the passenger seat where she took notes while I drove—it stopped me in my tracks for a moment because I remembered when she wrote that, and it seemed like just last week.

It was her sixty-ninth birthday, and I’d taken her away to my favorite getaway, “our” cabin in nearby Homer, the place my husband and I have taken our kids and ourselves for over twenty years of getaways.

So many breaks: celebrating mid-winter with the February birthday of our firstborn; taking an annual anniversary break in October or whenever we could squeeze it in, just me and Matt; taking family down when they came in from out of state…somehow, my mama and I had never been, just the two of us.

So that year, that year before she began her serious decline, but after she’d begun to rely upon me more by becoming an Alaskan and my neighbor, I took my mama to my favorite getaway. We splurged on a birthday dinner at the best steakhouse in Alaska, and we took in the hot tub, and we started a book that someday I may just write.

“Cheesecake Conisseurs: The Story of a Mother, a Daughter, and their Quest for the Perfect Cheesecake.”

It started at the steakhouse on Day One (Cheesecake #1) and ended at the pizza joint on Day Two (Cheesecake #2).

It sounds trivial, this cheesecake quest, but you have to understand, at this point in our relationship, my mama had had a stroke and was well on her way into full-blown dementia, me on my way into full-blown caregiving.

We just didn’t know it then…what was to come.

Because then, she was still in her apartment, just three miles from me around the corner, and driving herself to her doctor’s appointments —fully independent but no denying the fact that she’d sold her precious home four thousand miles away to relocate to be near to me where she remained on a waitlist at our nearby senior center to live out the rest of her life.

We had all come to terms with that change of seasons.

But in the cheesecake season, she was cooking, cleaning, driving herself, tracking her appointments and coming over for dinners, enjoying her visits from grandbabies, Sunday church time, outings with friends, and all her field trips for my job…giving all the help and love where she knew how to give it and fitting into the life here in her new state just like a glove.

At that point, it was just us who had to adjust. And I say that selfishly because she sure made her adjustments, too. She had sold up her precious little house in the woods that she loved so much and she said goodbye to best friends and neighbors she knew well, and she plopped herself into a state where she had to establish residency and find new doctors and a new church family…and her self-reliance took a backseat to depending on the family she knew well and loved to be part of, but who she also knew was busy and active and spinning in circles where she knew she’d have to become part of the orbit.

She was brave.

Even in her dependence upon me, upon us, she was brave.

So I tried to make her birthday special because even though our family may celebrate birthdays sporadically or when the oilfield shifts allow, a mama only turns 69 once in her life, and my mama didn’t always know special.

And those two slices of cheesecake the waitress brought out (on the house) made my mama feel like a princess.

She ooh’d and she ahh’d, and you would have thought it was the best cheesecake in the whole wide world.

Because it was.

We talked about how creamy it was.

We delighted in how delectable it was.

We talked about how it literally was the best cheesecake either of us had ever had in our whole lives.

And then the next day, on our way out of town, we hit the fancy pizza joint and enjoyed lunch, and of course, we ordered cheesecake for dessert, because it was a birthday weekend after all, and birthdays in our family are always meant to be extended.

The waitress at the pizza joint also happened to work weekends at the steakhouse, and when we told her about THE most delicious cheesecake we’d ever had, she mused that the cheesecake at her other place of employment was just cheesecake shipped in from Costco and accentuated with strawberry sauce made fresh at the restaurant.

Because don’t you know that Costco has the best cheesecake in the whole state of Alaska?

She thought everyone knew that.

My mama and I didn’t know that —not being Costco cardholders, how would we?—and as we slowly enjoyed that Day Two slice of mango cheesecake at the pizza joint on our day two of her birthday celebration, we mused about how ironic it was that a nationwide wholesale company was in the business of producing the best cheesecake in the state, and what does it take to be THE best cheesecake in the whole nation?

The creaminess of the mango at the pizza place and the subtle tropical flavor made a stiff comparison to the denseness of the New York style we’d enjoyed the night before.

Day Two Cheesecake wasn’t as thick, wasn’t as traditional, but it brought a freshness and a newness to cheesecake that Day One Cheesecake didn’t have, and what about that crust?

We were soon on our way, mid-afternoon, mid-January in Alaska, growing dark with an hour and a half of drive time ahead, and there we were, on the highway in my SUV, still comparing cheesecakes and their denseness and creaminess and richness and what it would take to be declared the best cheesecake in the country.

We could write it down, Mom!

YES!

We could travel around and compare cheesecakes and be just like the fancy restaurant critics, but just for cheesecakes!

YES!

Everywhere we go, we could order the cheesecake and write up a review, and then we could write a book about it and include recipes and photos…and squished into all of it, we could talk about it all from the perspective of an aging mother and her adult daughter.

YES!

Write it down, Mom.

And she fished out of my bag the planner-journal book I haul around everywhere I go, and even though it always made her carsick to read or write in a moving vehicle, and even though in her generation it was a cardinal sin to turn on the dome light when someone was driving, she did both, and she scrawled it out in my book and later that night after I’d dropped her off, I started a shared file with her for our iPhone Notes app, and we’d add to that list over the next few days, ideas of our little book to-be, The Cheesecake Connoisseurs.

And I didn’t think anything more of it until I went flipping through the pages of that planner today, two years old now, my mama gone from me now almost four months.

The scrawl of my mama…it could have been mistaken for mine, just spread out sloppy on the page…but as I came to those two pages while flipping through my books, I remembered that weekend and, looking twice, I snapped a photo of that spread and set that book aside.

Because how precious was that weekend?

And how many weekends since had I watched my mama decline, losing more and more of her memory and her function, having more and more medical issues creep into her life until she had to give up living independently, moving into her precious cabin on our property, until one day she just slipped away to leave this earth and be with Jesus?

I didn’t know on our cheesecake weekend that I would very soon become my mama’s lifeline.

I didn’t know how quickly old age and underlying medical issues and dementia would take over a body and age a person so fast that the doctors could only chase down what was happening on any given day.

I didn’t know that we’d never have the chance to compare more cheesecake.

I didn’t know that less than two years after our cheesecake weekend she’d be gone.

It’s easy to take the cheesecake story and think the message is to just eat the cheesecake.

That is part of the sentiment, yes.

But what isn’t there is the journey between the cheesecake weekend and my mama leaving us.

How we celebrated her next birthday —her seventieth— on Kauai, her favorite place other than Alaska, with just her, me, and her granddaughters, one of whom was turning eighteen.

How that trip was so very special for her, for us all, and how she soaked up the sun on the island she’d come to love because of traveling with her Alaska family that she held so very precious.

Or how she came to immerse herself into a church family, feeling a sense of belonging she’d never felt in all her life amongst believers in Christ. She spoke of them as she spoke of family, remembering their names when sometimes she couldn’t even remember common words.

Or how she delighted in the fact that she was finally going to see her lifelong dream come true, owning her very own cabin in the woods…only it wasn’t going to be in the woods of Tennessee like she’d always imagined; it was going to be even better, her cabin in the woods was going to be in Alaska.

Or how she still got to work with children, her lifelong mission…serving as a volunteer, side-by-side with her family in the local 4-H program, altering her involvement each year to her capabilities, still always useful and helpful and always, always with a servant’s heart.

Or how she was brave and made new friends, even through her insecurities and anxieties, traveling by driver when she could no longer drive herself to the local senior center, forging bonds with her drivers and those she shared lunches and crafty afternoons with.

Or how our family adjusted our orbit to bring her into its swirling, always-going, fast-circling movement, and how she just rolled with it all, only asking for a strong elbow to walk her across the driveway in the dark to her abode 300 feet away.

There was so much in between.

So, yes.

Order the cheesecake.

Eat the cheesecake.

But write a book about it.

Write a book about the days and the weekends and the months and the years of you and your loved ones…and especially your mama.

Because one day, you’ll find her writing and you’ll smile.

You’ll remember what she once was.

When you were young, but when she was old.

You’ll remember.

You’ll remember her voice.

You’ll remember her writing.

You’ll remember the times you had with her.

The good, the bad, the hard, the challenging, the precious, the frustrating, the beautiful, the growing-up years, the growing-old years…

You’ll remember.

And you’ll miss her.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Psalm 139:16

When Your Mama Loves Your Writing…

3 Replies

It’s a weird thing, this writing your mama’s obituary.

It’s not the writing it part that’s odd…the older I get, the more obituaries I’ve been honored to write. It always went without saying that I’d write hers too.

The writing it part was easy.

What’s strange is that her obituary is the first big thing I’ve written that she won’t read.

Aside from the volume of letters to my husband, and those embarrassing junior high journals that have long since gone up in ash, in my fifty-one years, my mother has read almost every single word I have written, and smiled and said, “I like that, honey.”

Because don’t our mamas love our words?

She taught me to talk, she taught me to wrap my chubby little fingers around a pencil and scratch out my letters, and then she taught me how to make those same letters into sounds and how to follow those sounds across a page and grow into someone who loves words and books and reading and stringing sentences together…

She always loved what I wrote.

In school, I’d ask her to review my research papers.

Once it became evident English and writing were going to be my jam, she’d have ME look over HER research papers as she pursued her teaching degree, and she loved the little comments and notations I’d scribble in the margins of her handwritten pages before she’d type it all up and print if off on our old dot matrix printer.

During my college classes, I’d read my pieces to her over the phone, and she’d offer suggestions and tidbits on what worked and what might be changed.

When my kids were young, I kept a family blog about our farm adventures and the growing up years.

She loved that little blog.

She’d tell her teacher friends about it and they’d follow our shenanigans, and she’d post sweet little comments on my page, even adopting one of my taglines: “It’s always an adventure!”

She’d pull our page up on her old computer in her classroom and let our soundtrack play on…those songs became her favorite.

We had a book we were going to write together: The Cheesecake Connoisseurs. We developed that plan on her 69th birthday, traveling to our favorite cabin and eating dinner at our favorite steakhouse where they served her up a complimentary slice of cheesecake with a birthday card, and we determined it was the best cheesecake we’d ever had as we gave it a restaurant-critic infused review, marveling at its creaminess and perfect amount of richness. We changed our tune the next day though, when lunch brought another slice of cheesecake, and we determined that that one might indeed be the best slice of cheesecake we’d ever enjoyed. On the two-hour trip home, we had the outline of our book hammered out in our shared iPhone notes, and a plan to travel around the country and do reviews of all the cheesecake we’d sample.

I might still write that one. We sure did love us some cheesecake.

She adored my book, Annie Spruce, not only because she and her dog Ribsy were such central figures in Annie’s story, but because that book gave her the opportunity to tell everyone she knew that ya knowwww, my daughter is a published author. She carried my little author cards around in her wallet, and one day I caught her passing one across the fabric cutting table to the nice lady at JoAnn Fabrics.

My mama was my biggest fan.

My mama believed in me and was proud of everything I did.

Well, maybe not always…we had some bumpy years along the way, but the thing about my mama is she never let the bumps ruin the ride.

She let the bumps be part of the journey and sometimes, oftentimes, we’d relive them and laugh.

Like the time we drove from Michigan to Alaska together, way back when her only daughter was moving four thousand miles away from her. We had one big fight, we almost killed my dog accidentally with his sedatives, we narrowly averted a tornado, and we nearly dropped the suspension on my Olds Achieva by not knowing how to navigate the frost heaves between Tok and Glennallen. She was miserable in all those moments and I’m sure she may have regretted her decision many times those six days to come along for the ride.

But do you know that over the next two and a half decades, every time we’d talk about that trip, we’d marvel at how HUGE the Canadian Rockies were to a couple flatlanders like us; how it was other worldly to encounter large game right alongside the highways; and we’d always, every single time, laugh about all those bumps and tears and frost heaves.

We were both better for having had that adventure.

These past several years have been full of bumps and heaves and some rocky road too, but to my mama, it was just part of her journey.

She smiled, she laughed, she may not have liked the road sometimes, but she was always along for the ride.

And always, she loved to read what I wrote.

As daughters, don’t the words of our mothers always linger in our ears and on our hearts?

Her eyes would tear up and she’d smile and say, “Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot, honey.”

So I read her obituary one more time this morning after it was published, drinking coffee from one of her favorite mugs, and I sat outside and told the LORD that I am thankful He is taking care of her now. That I am thankful her streets are no longer riddled with potholes but are gleaming and golden.

That I have so much peace she got to bypass all of the congested and ugly traffic jams she knew were just up the road and instead just had an easy exit and was Home.

And that even though she wouldn’t read what I had written about her this last time, that I hoped my words, and my life, and my time with her —bumps and all, that I hoped she knew that I was glad that all these years, I got to be along for the ride.

*

“Someday when the pages of my life end, I know that you will be one of the most beautiful chapters.” —Unknown

“This is the day that the LORD has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 118:24
In honor of Poppy. 1954 – 2025

“I’m tired, boss…”

1 Reply

John Coffey said it in The Green Mile, and I reckon we all feel a bit that way these days.

John was a mountain of a man, and he had a gift of healing people. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when in reality, he was only trying to heal the little girl he’d found injured.

Years back, The Green Mile was one of my favorite books, and unlike a lot of Stephen King’s work, which tends to dull from his literary brilliance once the stories are set to film, when The Green Mile was made into a movie, it was made into a good movie.

Michael Clarke Duncan brilliantly embodied the character Coffey, and even with the outstanding lineup of actors in that film, it could be argued it was Duncan who made the movie.

His largeness made him intimidating, but his softness made him vulnerable.

John Coffey was plopped into a world full of injustice and ugliness and was forced to function to the best his abilities allowed.

Stared at. Talked about. Judged. Misunderstood.

“I’m tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. Tired of never having me a buddy to be with, or tell me where we’s coming from or going to, or why. Mostly, I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time.”

I’m tired, LORD.

I’m tired of the hypocrisy.

I’m tired of the ugliness.

I’m tired of the name-calling and angry words and the endless insults and people being mean and divisive and hateful and forgetting that we’re all here together for just a very short time.

It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time.

It takes one stroll through a comment thread on social media before I daily lose faith in my fellow mankind.

And it takes one stroll through my memories to think of how my Southern grandparents rarely spoke of politics but would joke on voting day that they had just gone to cancel one another’s vote out.

They were married over fifty years, and while I saw many heated arguments between them during my childhood, never once was it about politics. On the day my grandmother died, my grandfather instantly became ready to leave this earth and pass into eternity so he wouldn’t have to be without her. It was sixteen long years before that happened, and every day of those sixteen years he’d tell the LORD how he was ready to go be with her.

They were both raised in the poor South.

His childhood home was the back half of a house set on a cotton plantation and his Daddy and Mama worked their hands to the bone. He left when he lied about his age to go serve his country, and then he went AWOL when his country lied to him about the leave he was promised, and do you know he met my little granny on that leave; a chance meeting that wouldn’t have happened had that bus pulled out on time, just thirty seconds earlier?

If they raised their family any way politically, it could be said they raised us Democrat.

She had been raised just two states over —their accents never left them and even after thirty years of raising their family in the Midwest, I can still hear their yonder and piller and Jaysus and loveyanow, and she loved her mama with all her heart but left for nursing school like her big sister had done, and she wanted to make her mama proud too. She left school when she met that young man on the bus after she’d been home for break, and while her sister graduated and went on to be a nurse, my Grannycakes never did. She cared for children instead, and she taught them about Jesus.

The two of them sang so off-key, my grandparents.

My Grandad joked once coming back from voting across the street at the school…he whispered to me as he came in the door not to tell Granny, but he’d just voted Republican, and he laughed and laughed. That was the most I’d ever heard him speak of politics.

They were the loudest singers in the church, and when they sang together in the kitchen while making hotcakes, we’d take pictures because even then we knew something special was happening in the ordinary.

Their Bibles are two of the very few family heirlooms we own.

They were not without fault.

Deep faults.

It is easy to romanticize a life after that life has left us.

They left us with trauma too.

But that trauma wasn’t over politics.

It was over things that shouldn’t have happened; so many of the same things that happened to the same types of people during that time; things that left life-long wounds.

But they both loved Jesus.

And they tried their best to show us Him and how to love those He gave us, whether it be spouse or children or grandchildren or neighbors.

How to forgive.

How to give grace and how to receive grace.

The two of them lived through the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and my Grannycakes died during Bill Clinton’s tenure. My Grandad saw both terms of George W. Bush and died less than one year into Barack Obama’s term.

Thirteen presidents throughout my granny’s life; fifteen for my grandfather.

They were married long enough to see eleven presidents serve our country.

They both loved JFK. My Grannycakes always cried when she spoke of him.

I’m glad they’re not here today, my grandparents.

I would give every penny I have to call my Grannycakes. Sometimes when I’m driving to town and I just want to talk, I swear I’d give a limb right then and there just to dial that phone number that is forever etched on my heart just so I could hear her delightful squeal at hearing from her only granddaughter, and we’d talk and talk while I drive, and she’d tell me all the small town gossip and how she bought my favorite cereal up at the store today, the kind she always buys special when she knows I’m coming over for the weekend, and I’ll tell her about my babies and how much they’ve grown and how well they’re doing in their jobs and how all their animals are growing strong, and she’ll ooh and ahh over all the baby lambs’ names and tell me how proud she is of my farm girl shepherdess and her hard work and pragmatic mind, and my she’ll brag on my tradesman who would be her superstar because he’s in a foreign land she’s never seen at the tippy top of the world, and she’d go on and on about her eldest great-granddaughter the jetsetter living in the big city working for a high class bakery, and her baby will be the apple of her eye because he’s the baby and such a smarty pants sweetheart, and she’ll want to know every last detail like only grandmas do, and when it’s time to hang up, it’ll take a few minutes and she’ll tell me love ya now at least four times before we finally disconnect, and some days, that’s all I really want is to dial her up, and I can literally hear her voice as though I did call, and really, I’d give anything to do it.

But I’m glad she’s not here.

The world today would break her heart.

She loved people and she wouldn’t know how to be in a world where people don’t love people because of how they voted.

It would tear her up to know that people unfriended her granddaughter because they didn’t agree with her values and opinions.

It would break her to know that members of her own family don’t speak because one felt that everyone should take an experimental vaccine our government pushed, and that those family members had cut from their lives those who felt differently.

It would absolutely crush her to hear that people within the church, sisters in the Body of Christ, removed me from their lives because I expressed disagreement with the progressive Democratic party and its harmful agenda over the past fifteen years.

I pulled away from all we were raised with when I saw what was happening to our world back when things started to shift and the party of my grandparents was no longer the party I knew.

She would support me in that.

But the divisiveness politics has become would kill her to see.

So these days, I have this house and heart full of people we’ve raised to pay attention…to think about what is happening around them…to know how our country was established…to know the history and the heartbreak of all the evils that have been done in the name of power and religion…to know what it means to be a citizen of America…and they have seen their debt increasing, for them and their future children…they have seen their world change at a pace they’ve given up on trying to keep up with, and they have been asked to bend and flex and morph all they know into something this world wants to be the new way of thinking.

We’ve raised them to love the LORD, to love people, and to love their country, and we’ve raised them to think critically, but sometimes, in today’s climate, I wonder if they even care anymore.

Sometimes I think this world has broken our young adults and desensitized them in a way that they may just forget the foundation on which they stand.

We forced them apart for two whole years, asking them not to hug, touch, or socialize in person; we ask them to recognize seventy-two different genders, exhibit acceptance, inclusivity, and an embrace for all, all while we model hatred and insults on social media, exhibiting deep disrespect and schoolyard bullying to anyone subscribing to a different set of opinions as ours; we ask them to pay for the firehose faucet spending of our government, even as we teach them the United States of America belongs to WE THE PEOPLE, which affirms “that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens.” https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/constitution.htm

Why would they care?

What should they care about?

Which issue?

Which one of the many social activism issues or government corruption issues or cultural issues or economy issues should they focus on?

They’ve got to be tired too.

And then during one of the many deep discussions we’ve had round here these past months about current events, my daughter, that middle child who avoids social media like the plague but somehow always knows what’s going on in the world and isn’t ever one to mince words even while not caring much about what other folks do, she hears about the Hitler/Trump posts that are circulating, and she says NO. You don’t get to do that. Comparing what is happening right now, right here in America…to compare Trump to Hitler and what Hitler did in the Holocaust, sorry, but no. They don’t get to do that. That is a horror all on its own and to even compare the discomfort of what we may be feeling in America today, what is happening right now, to compare that to what happened to them is insulting to them. No, you don’t get to do that.

She surprises me with the strength and conviction of her words; she stands on what she believes, but she is okay to let other people stand on what they believe in too.

Not on this issue, though.

Then on the random, my youngest baby chooses Schindler’s List for Saturday night movie, and I realize that even though I’d loosened my grip by the time he came along and let him read the Harry Potter books at a younger age than my older ones, and watch many movies at an earlier age than I had the other three…while somehow I’ve seen Schindler’s many times and read the book, my baby had never seen it.

I watched it anew through the eyes of my young man, and tears streamed down my face as I took in the horrors yet again, imagining the absolute fright, the trains, the gunshots, the starvation, the separation of families…my soul churns. I’ve read so many first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors; I’ve “met” them by way of their stories on news and social media.

How can we compare any time like that time?

How can we compare this time right now to that time?

While my boy usually flits around on his phone or works on his laptop during movie time, Schindler’s List held his attention, even as a black-and-white film would normally be found archaic and boring. He is enough of a history buff to know that this story is important.

The absolute horror of it all.

Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators killed six million Jewish people. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators also committed other mass atrocities. They persecuted and killed millions of non-Jewish people during World War II. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/en

This time when I own a beautiful home on a little chunk of land that is all mine, with cars in the driveway that have my name on the title, and I drive them to a grocery store where I purchase anything I want with money my family and I have earned, or to an office building where I do my work uninhibited and joyfully, or to a church building in the middle of town where I gather with other people from all different walks of life, but all of us enjoying the same freedoms, and we raise our voices to the LORD God in Heaven with no fear whatsoever of government telling us we can’t?

How can we even compare?

My grandparents tolerated presidents and local politicians and Congress and the House for so many different terms and different parties, and they raised their family, and they worked their jobs, and they paid their taxes, and they owned their home, and they loved their neighbors and their friends and the LORD.


They saw many political changes of the guard, and they understood that was part of life, but that life wasn’t politics.

When did that change?

When did riots become the way of disagreeing?

When did burning and looting become the way we expressed ourselves?

Would they think our current state of affairs was any different than the state of affairs in the 90’s?

“The era of big government is over.” -Bill Clinton, 1996 State of the Union Address

The Clinton-Gore Administration has made the federal government smaller by nearly a quarter of a million jobs. This is the largest, swiftest government-wide cut in the history of the United States. It’s not just a post-Cold War defense reduction; every department except Justice has become smaller…The federal government workforce is now the smallest it has been in more than 30 years, going all the way back to the Kennedy Administration…The cuts were long overdue. People had long since grown tired of new government programs initiated each year, with none ever ending. They were tired of stories about senseless sounding government jobs, like the Official Tea-Taster, tired of larger and larger bureaucracies in Washington interfering more and more with their lives. For years, presidential candidates have been promising to make government smaller. But until Bill Clinton, none delivered…The workforce cuts are saving lots of money…Cutting a quarter million jobs, therefore, can save well over $10 billion annually. But that’s not the half of it. The savings from all the commonsense reforms we have put in place total $118 billion…Put that together with the benefits of our healthy economy, and you’ll see that the Clinton-Gore Administration has come up with another one for the record books: four straight years of deficit cuts, for a stupendous total reduction of $476 billion. 
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/nprrpt/annrpt/vp-rpt96/intro.html

How is this right now any different than that?

How is right now any different than the past four years of one-half of our population being angry and unsatisfied with our government and the Biden administration?

We could talk on and on about the hypocrisy we see playing out before our eyes and the double standards and the fact that when the right was dissatisfied, they let it be known by boycotts and using their voice rather than burning and looting and destruction and hurting people.

But I’m tired of talking about it.

I’m tired.

We The People have become We The Divided, and Jesus said Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand, (Matthew 12:25) and Abraham Lincoln echoed this in his “House Divided” speech when he said, a house divided will not stand.

When did we become not united?

When did we quit respecting one another, or the position of the president, or our civilized society…

and turn into a house divided against itself?

I’m tired, boss.

I’m tired, LORD.

I don’t know the answers.

But I know we are not living in Nazi Germany.

I know that we are still the greatest, freest, most liberal, and citizen-empowered nation on our planet.

And I know that my grandparents lived their life together politically opposite and they raised a family and they served their community and they worked hard all their days and they loved Jesus.

So that’s what I’ll do too.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8

~

“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” -Rumi

An Extra Year with Woodrow

4 Replies

We lay in the quiet, cranky with one another after a long day in a long summer during a long season…and I know he is saying it to be kind and to let me know he’s on my side when he tells me low, I had Mike dig Woodrow’s grave while he had the backhoe here.

As happens every autumn in Alaska, some winter-prep chores fall to the bottom of the long list and in the frenzy to button up, uncompleted ones get forgotten once snow comes.

Move it to the spring list, we’ll get it at Breakup.

Except this one was important. When I’d asked him last fall to take our boys out before snowfall and dig a spot for my big white dog to rest –right there in front of that little copse of trees at the edge of the barnyard; he’s watched over it all these years, that’s where I want him…

I was mad when it didn’t make it to the completed chores before the ground froze up.

He assured me it would be okay. This just means he’s going to see it through another winter, babe.

And then around February -five months into our old boy’s 4-6 month prognosis- I noticed a bit of a slow-down, a slight decline.

I turned my dread to anger and aimed it toward my husband, sure my dog was going to die and that we were in the beginning of his last days.

It will be okay. I’ve already decided what we’ll do if we have to put him down. I’ll have him cremated for you.

I fumed.

YOU don’t get to make that decision. He’s MY dog. I asked you to do it last fall and you didn’t…it’s not your decision to make.

And Woodrow and I went out on the porch and I had a cigar and cried while I stroked his big white head that he loves to rest along my hip.

He’s not really just MY dog. He is so loved by so many. And he loves so many, too. But me and him, we’re like peas and carrots and I’m not a furbaby kind of dog owner, but the kids tease anyway and say Woodrow is Mom’s favorite child.

I decided that day that my husband would purchase a freezer large enough for our dog and we would lay him to rest in the spring. That may sound morbid, twisted even; but understand, we live in a place where burial is not an option for half of each year. Folks on farms do what we have to do. And while I wholeheartedly embrace cremation for animals (and people!), I have decided it’s not what I want for Woodrow.

Any other dog and I would be fine with cremation. Any other dog I would be at peace laying them to rest next to Annie and Daisy, our Char and sweet Beau…but somehow Woodrow is different and I want him close to the land he has so loved every day since he learned it was his. His disorientation to his new geography and his thousands of years of instinct took him on a ten-mile perimeter check his first week on our farm before I learned how to teach him that he is only responsible for us.

Right here.

And in the five years since, he’s never once left again.

So in my heart, he deserves to lie next to the barnyard.

He has earned his rest under the trees.

But then his sweet angel doctor from the north of us taught me how to make adjustments to his medications -those wonder drugs that keep his big actual heart pumping in rhythm with the big guardian heart he has for his people and his farm, and he perked back up and started jumping up on the porch again.

It’s been one extra year we’ve had with Woodrow now.

One year since the day I drove back to fetch him after x-rays, my tears streaming as I processed the news that the best thing I could do for him that day would be to have him euthanized.

One year since I my heart fell into my gut, knowing I’d never again have another dog that would ever come close to holding my heart like this one does.

I’ve loved some good dogs that were best friends to me. Some damn good dogs.

This dog is different and it feels more like the relationship us animal folks have with horses -that keen sense of not having to talk but learning to trust one another; that understanding that comes from just the slightest shift of movement, or just a look into one another’s eyes, a sound or a sigh…a telepathy almost and he looks to me for it, and he is smart like I’ve never known a dog to be, and I never knew the high value of a livestock guardian dog until him; nor did I know their intelligence or intuition. Their sweetness in spite of their always being a little guarded. And their deep and undying loyalty. People with dogs feel what I’m saying. People with livestock guardian dogs they’re bonded to KNOW what I’m saying.

I brought him home and I did what I do, I researched and I sought answers and I fielded the advice and I prayed.

And it’s been eleven months since his angel doctor with the high tech equipment was able to narrow down his exact problem and rein it in with a medication regime he remains on to this day.

My friend furiously canned up Woodrow meals, we found our routine with his feed and his meds, and we all know now the red pill is only at bedtime and the rest are twice a day.

Matthew shops the sales for meat, and he gets mad at me when I feed Woodrow a pork roast with the brown rice when I didn’t know my husband was looking forward to pork chops.

He turns his nose up at the blueberries or carrots I add, but happily scarfs up his dish when I add a little chicken broth.

He’d dropped so much weight when he was first sick, my kids now call him chubby since he’s hit 130 pounds. I don’t feel it in his ribs or his belly, but I’m watching him because that’s what I do.

And don’t you know, I got a notice from his big-city vet’s office this week that it’s time for his one-year check-in. They’ve been angels, truly, calling in his prescriptions monthly, working with our local vet for the occasional bloodwork to make sure his medications aren’t tearing up his kidneys…but now it’s time to go see them again. Actually go see them.

I sat in their office nearly a year ago and we cried together and we worked our plan, and both the vet and I knew that we’d probably never see one another face to face again. Why would we? He had four to six months to live, and we’ve got our vets down here on this side of the mountains.

But now it’s time to go see them again.

I don’t know why I’ve been given an extra year with Woodrow, but it isn’t lost on me what a blessing it is.

We’ve had good friends lose good dogs this past year. We’ve lost one of our own. We have friends right now, the people kind and the furry kind, that are in the thick of the fight, daily medications, comfort plans, trips to the CBD store to knock back some of the pain in cancer-riddled canine bones, trips out from the vet to euthanize peacefully on cozy and worn dog-beds…

They get old. They get sick. We have to say goodbye to them so soon. Too soon.

Every single time, it’s never enough time.

None of us really said it out loud, but we knew that this summer will most likely be Woodrow’s last.

So when a top-notch puppy from a top-notch breeder popped up coincidentally, the farmers in our farm family had a conversation.

I didn’t want another dog. I wanted to let Woodrow take part of my heart with him and then maybe someday…long into the future, I might be ready for a little wee baby dog to sit on my dash and curl up behind my knees at night.

But my daughter has too many sheep to not have a guardian, and Woodrow can’t go on forever, as much as we’d all love it if he could.

And like most things we don’t say out loud, we all knew a new puppy was going to be Woodrow’s replacement.

So another little gift from Heaven made his way to us.

These servants of the LORD as my dear friend once said.

This little puppy my daughter and I share, his lazy little personality that matches our big Woodrow’s to a tee…his spunkiness and sweetness a freshness in the house and on the farm…I promise Woodrow every time I see him playing with the puppy that I won’t tell anyone.

He growls at him, he leads him around, he protects him from the marauding geese, he scowls, he lifts his lip, he sniffs him when he sleeps…he watches over him, and in doing so, he teaches him.

These dogs…all dogs…they are servants of the LORD.

Angels here, blessings to make life a little less cold…to bring a little more comfort.

Companionship.

Friendship.

Protection.

Warmth.

They serve a purpose. Every last one of them.

And sometimes, every once in a while in this life…we’re granted a little extra time.

Sometimes it wasn’t our time to say goodbye.

And oh, doesn’t that change things?

Doesn’t that give the heart a little hope? A little reprieve from the heaviness of having to say goodbye today?

The day will come. It always does.

And every single time, they take a piece of us when they go.

But we’ve been given an extra year with Woodrow.

And now, as we smell the snow in the air and see it settling on the mountaintops, my husband telling me there is a grave dug now is a way for him to bring a little peace to my heart.

A way for him to tell me that he loves me, and that he loves my dog too. That he knows what this dog means to me, what dogs mean to all of us.

And that we honor them when we do right by them all the way up until the end, and even after.

What are the odds we’ll have him yet one more winter?

They are slim, but now I know I have a place for him to rest.

He has been a servant of the LORD, and that is what I hear when my husband tells me he has fulfilled my wishes for my big white angel.

That our dog is deserving of the best I can give him.

So in the meantime, we’ll do what we should all strive to do every single day that we are here.

We’ll give all the love we have…

for all the time we’re given.

“All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only human. He wasn’t a dog.” -Charles M. Schulz

The Baby

3 Replies

In true form for me, I was last-minuting some household duties and realized I needed to get my baby signed up for college classes for his junior year of high school.

The baby.

As we wait on hold with the college, I ask him what fun things he wants to do this year now that it’s just him and his ol’ ma. The last one to go through this little homeschool where we read good books and cry together over high math and learn most of the best lessons in the hayfield or on the barnyard.

I think about the days when I was so high strung trying to teach his older siblings that his busyness and need to constantly construct was an intrusion on the school day.

That was before I knew the value in letting them learn how they best learn.

Before I knew how important it was to let their mind fill with things that interested them and to let their creativity flow over the things they were passionate about.

Those are things he taught me, this baby of the family.

The caboose on this crazy train is the one who somehow always brings us all together, either from his sweet and tender-hearted peacemaking, or in allied annoyance at his whistling, tapping, rapping, banging, knocking, or constant need to share the worlds of trivia that swarms in his head and grows while he sleeps.

The baby of the family.

I’m married to one, and it wasn’t until I had one of my own, straight from my womb, -this one has to be the last one, the doctor said after that hard, hard delivery- that I finally understood the beauty and the gravity of the baby of a family.

As a firstborn, I’m the one in control. I’m the one who calls the shots. I’m the one who steers the ship, makes sure everything is just so, that everyone is taken care of, that all the details are tended to.

And years of being married to a roll-with-it, slap-it-together, plan-on-the-fly guy…we argue a lot and why doesn’t he just GET ME? Why doesn’t he just GET IT RIGHT?

But then these babies come along…one…two…three…and the uptight mellows some and the need for perfection gets pushed down to the bottom of the basket right along with the rest of the dirty laundry, and this marvel comes along, this little bundle who ties us all together…who puts a pretty ribbon around the whole package.

His coco brown hair smells of newborn and I brush it with my lips when I walk the room with him in the middle of the night.

Norah Jones plays on the old Bose stereo we play low in our room because she helps him sleep, and his siblings dote on him every waking moment. His big sissy thinks he is her baby, and his other big sissy confides in him, and his big brother takes on a fatherly role and carries him to the changing station for me when it’s time for baby to have a new diaper.

Somehow things change with the baby.

And now, things are still changing with the baby, and when I start the process of his school paperwork, -here we are just a week out from school-year time, I realize he is the last of the students in my little homeschool, and the last of our brood to grow into adulthood.

Somehow in the days between the one when he was born and today, three of my four children have grown into adults.

We have raised a family.

They don’t tell you how quickly it will all go.

Oh, they try. Those grandmothers and the wise women at church.

They tell you Just wait.

Cherish every moment.

But they say it in a way that makes you feel like they are so wise. So seasoned. Like they know how hard you’re working, but that even in that knowing, they know something you just don’t, and maybe never will; something you can’t quite put your fingers on or your heart around.

They assure you and tell you that one day soon, it will get easier, but just you wait. And you feel that one day in a future lifetime, you’ll enter into a world that only the wise, seasoned ones have ventured, and it all feels so foreign as you stand there before them, receiving their warm hugs while breast milk leaks into your bra and rolls down your belly and a little one clings to your knee while the other one runs down the hallway. And maybe your eyes are a little bit forced and wide as you expend every ounce of energy trying to make your face look normal and like it isn’t desperate and longing and feeling beaten and bruised by this life you chose that has you feeling like every day is another chance to run another marathon before you even heat up the skittle for the grilled cheese sandwiches at lunchtime.

They know though. They’re just gentle with us. They don’t want us to be afraid, because they know that really, we already are scared.

We see how fast the years go, even as the days inch.

We see how much they grow, how much they absorb, even as it feels like dinner is a lifetime away.

And the pace of it all makes us fearful.

Because as these children grow, what we don’t realize in the everydayness of dirty laundry and dirty floors and brushing hair and teaching manners and making sure they play outside and don’t eat their boogers but that they do eat enough vegetables…

what we don’t realize is that we are growing right along with them.

We forget that part.

Or maybe not forget; maybe just don’t have time to ponder.

But that is what the wise ones know.

That we are raising those precious ones, yes.

But we are also raising ourselves.

We are growing into women who will one day be wise. We are growing into aunties and sisters and friends who will one day laugh at the days to come, and who won’t worry about changing our face so that others won’t see our fears or how close we’d come to the brink of questioning our sanity as we broke up one more squabble…

No, instead, we are growing into women who will instead embrace. The friends, the fears, AND the uncertainty of our sanity.

We will have walked through a battlefield, a beautiful, wondrous, rolling battlefield…

and we will realize we have grown right along with our children.

That’s what the baby does.

The baby makes a mama realize that really, it will be okay.

That the dirt under the fingernails isn’t neglect; it’s proof that we played.

That the odd blurts and sayings aren’t an illustration of being undisciplined; they are evidence of a free spirit and a decision to embrace life in all its weird and awkward moments of humanity.

That the being late, or being early, or not being there at all isn’t evidence of either being high strung or not caring; it is a flexibility that has fully accepted the fact that life is sometimes really what happens when you’re busy making plans.

The baby makes the firstborn relax.

The baby makes the firstborn enjoy life.

The baby makes the firstborn remember.

That it DOES all go so fast.

That we DO have to cherish every moment.

And that we WILL make it.

So, as he drives me home at the end of a long day -his brown hair long and carefree, blowing in the wind of the open window, I listen to his chatter and smile at the amount of material he covers in our ten-minute drive.

His mind packed full of trivia has to unload it all now and then, and when he feels a connection with someone, he tells of all the things he’s learned in this big world, and soon I’m learning about armor-plating on dinosaurs, which leads to the ideal material for ammunition, which leads to the composition of bullets, which rolls into a brief discussion of radiation and radium, and soon we’re on to the weaponization of diseases by various governments, which delves us into the conspiracy theory side of life as it pertains to the JFK assassination and Ruby Ridge. I make him put a pin in MK Ultra, as my brain is tired, and anyone who has spent more than five minutes with my baby knows the feeling.

He overwhelms with information.

He teaches.

He shares.

He puts a bow on this package of life, and he shows what it means to be part of humanity.

All sides of it.

He loves.

We’ll get him enrolled into his college classes, and I’ll spend my last two years as a homeschool mom with this kid who has really been the one to teach me.

I’ve been casually resting my hand against the headrest of the driver’s seat, and while his long locks blow in the wind, I weave my fingers through the end of his curls and remember his baby brown hair and how it felt on my cheek all those days I cradled him.

How did this all go so fast?

How have I graduated three out of our little homeschool when I was just teaching them how to read, how to count?

How do I have adult children now, young people who are forging their way in life, learning how to lean into their own faith, their own decisions, blazing their own paths?

How are we in the season where we yearn for occasions when we are all in one place at one time, and we stop the clock when that happens?

How is he all that is left of the long years of childhood, those years that seemed to stand still for so long, cradled in the sweet and gentle spot where families are raised?

How are my babies all grown and changing every day from those under my charge to those who are becoming my best friends in life?

How is it just he and I now in this world of mother and child?

He talks and talks, and I laugh at all he knows.

At all the ways he is different from me, but that he is out of me.

He is of me.

How did it go so fast?

What are we going to do this year, bud? It’s never been just me and you.

He opens the sunroof and talks about petrichor and why it smells the way it does after rain, and how much he loves Alaska and her dark forests in the summertime, even as I get a strong whiff of autumn coming through the open windows.

It will be a long winter.

They always are.

But somehow these ten minutes make it all seem a little shorter, and I feel a little wiser.

These days are short, but our years have been long, even as fast as they’ve gone by.

Maybe I have some of the wisdom now of the older ones.

Maybe I’m starting to understand.

The battlefield of motherhood is beautiful.

He doesn’t know it, but as he drives and keeps chatting on and on, I quietly twist his curls up a little bit more around my fingers…

…and I pretend that he is still my baby.

“I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb.” – Jeremiah 1:5

To Making it Through Winter

Leave a reply

He’s been slowing down some and doing a lot of panting, and my heart isn’t quite ready for the next round of labs that will tell me what I already know.

So I pick at his fur, releasing the massive white mats his coat lets go of this time of year, and he rests his big head on my knee while I tell him what a good boy he is.

He’s never far from me and the other day when I put him in the old pig pasture with my little horse who was craving some of the new green treats growing so tall, he sat by the gate and watched me walk away, then went exploring and grazing with Wishes.

I’m not sure why God saw me fit to grace me with such a perfect dog.

The baby girl graduates today, and somehow we all made it through another winter, and isn’t it wonderful when summer finally comes?

Sunshine and warmth, grass and flowers, and we put in some peonies finally after all these years of talking about it, and I feel the ice melting from my bones.

New, good jobs for the kids, fresh horizons on their life, smiles and joy as our house is a never-ending revolving door of them coming and going and stepping into all that is ahead.

I am proud.

I am happy.

A new season lies ahead and soon there will be a puppy in the mix, one who’ll relieve our old boy of his drive and instinct to protect us. Who’ll maybe make him feel young again. Who will eventually replace him.

So when the man up the road comes to do the dirt work with his excavator for the new little cabin going in for my mother, I know when I see my husband walk over and talk to him that he’s quietly asking if he wouldn’t t mind using his equipment to dig one more hole on the property; a big one there under that black spruce where his wife is going to want to lay her best companion to rest here in not too long.

I bought a Quaking Aspen and a Burr Oak I’ll plant there when the day comes because isn’t that just like my Woodrow? Quaking and mighty.

It’s so good when summer comes.

But even in the joy, it’s hard to know fall is just around the corner.

Fifty Things from Fifty Years

Leave a reply

Be a friend to yourself. You might be the only one at times.

Keep true friends close and cherish them always.

Your true friends may be the ones you rarely see. That’s okay.

Not everyone who acts like your friend is. Protect your heart.

But live openly and honestly, trusting the good in people.

Jesus is the best friend you will ever have, and He will never leave you. Ever.

People in the church will disappoint you. Keep going. If you can’t stay at the church you’re at, find one that feels like coming home.

God will sometimes seem to disappoint you too, but He knows the whole story line and we don’t. He can be trusted.

Not everyone will like you. This is a hard pill to swallow when you are a likeable person. But not liking you is about them and not you. Suck it up and keep on keeping on.

Sometimes you have to make your circle small.

Don’t look back; you’re not going that way. Remind yourself of that often.

Love your people fiercely. They are all you have on this earth.

Let yourself rest. The older you get, the more you need to listen to this need and let your body and mind rest.

Push yourself though if you feel your mind and body getting lazy. Being productive flexes our creativity and is something we are made to be.

Mark one weekend twice a year (or each quarter if you can!) on your calendar with big black X’es. Don’t let anything encroach upon your Black X weekend. That is for you and your family to reconnect, rest, recharge. No outside commitments, only what you decide to do or not do. You might have to move your Black X weekend, but don’t let it get too far away.

The years of raising babies and small children will fly by in a blur, and when you come to the end of their childhoods, you’ll be left with an underneath, quiet ache so deep you’ll spend years trying to quietly get your bearings.

Your adult children will become some of the best friends you could ever dream of for yourself. They know the best and the worst of you, and they love you deeply, and you’ve loved them from the very first moment they were yours.

Stop what you are doing when you find yourself in a quiet moment with your children. Life can get so fast and so busy, we can forget that a moment to connect with the heart of our children is a gift from Heaven.

Well meaning experts and friends tell us to make it a priority to have a date night with our spouse, with each of our children, with our girlfriends…do that if you can. But if you can’t, don’t feel guilty about it. Sometimes a scheduled date causes more stress and burden than any relief or connection, so do what works for your family to have quality time together, whatever that looks like for you.

But don’t forget to make the people in your family feel treasured and special, and spend bits of time with each of them, building connections.

Invest in your marriage. Take time away when you can. Pay for the late check-out. Stay two nights. Go to the marriage conference. Or just go to coffee. Make the time. You have to. It’s worth it.

Spend time in God’s creation. Make time for nature breaks to clear your mind and your spirit.

There is no love like the love of an old dog.

There is no lesson from a book that will compare to teaching your children to care for animals and babies.

Don’t let your hangups about sex get in the way of a healthy and vibrant love life with your spouse. Work through it together and enjoy one another. It is the superglue in marriage.

Homegrown meat, produce, and eggs are the very best you will find. If you can’t grow your own, find you a source to buy from. And always use the bones from your homegrown to make stock or bone broth. It is healing for the body and the soul and will make the best soup you’ve ever had. The bones, water, and a big pot or crockpot are all you need.

Hire help if it helps you keep your peace. You don’t have to do everything yourself, and sometimes you just plain can’t.

Your beauty truly is on the inside. There are people who are physically beautiful, but a loving and loyal heart is more beautiful than any physical attributes.

There is a time to keep your silence, but don’t ever be afraid to speak up when you have something to add to a conversation.

Be an encourager. Life is so hard sometimes; the kind word you say to someone today may steer their course toward a better tomorrow.

Nurture people. Sometimes we all just need a hug and a snack.

Some people are adventurous, and some people like the familiar. Both are okay.

Set the tone. You have the power to set the tone. Use it.

Don’t be too busy or too self-conscious to smile. This world needs more genuine smiles, and they connect us.

Be a listener. Really listen when someone is talking to you.

People aren’t here to make you happy. It isn’t all about you. Don’t try to make it be.

Stay in your lane. Life, and traffic, moves so much easier when we all just stay in our lane.

Don’t be afraid to tell someone that you love them. It may be awkward to be vulnerable and share your heart, but people need to hear that you treasure them.

Be a critical thinker. Research for yourself. Our world and our news are both a mess. Do the digging and learn for yourself what a situation is instead of eating what someone else has regurgitated and fed you.

Read. Good literature, the Bible, biographies, poetry…just read. Our books are national treasures. Treasure them.

Read aloud to your family. Kids’ books, chapter books, poetry, the encyclopedia, biographies….read things your people enjoy and read it enthusiastically and with a learner’s mind. Never stop. Books are bonding for families.

Don’t ever be afraid to show your soft side.

But be ready to fight for what is right when someone needs your strength.

Don’t ever not be an advocate for those who need a voice.

Your home is your haven. Not your magazine perfect photo opportunity, but your haven. Make sure what happens there is restful, replenishing, and safe for all who dwell there.

Teach your children how to work hard. In their homes, on their farms, on their projects, in their jobs…kids need to learn to work: for their families, for themselves, for their money. Work ethic is imperative.

You will have times in which you feel completely overwhelmed and are not sure how you will do what needs doing. You will get it done. It will happen. Listen to your body, listen to your emotions, listen to your people, listen to the LORD. It will get done. You will survive.

Don’t give up on marriage unless you absolutely have to. Long marriages are rarer and rarer and are a true gift and blessing.

Treasure your spouse and never give up on learning about them and showing and telling them that you love and cherish them.

Life is a precious, precious gift. Every day won’t be easy, and some days will be just plain hard. But the days add up to weeks, and the weeks add up to months, and the months add up to years…and the more years that go by, the more you realize how short they really are, and that all of them added up make a lifetime, and it is a one-time experience and a gift that is to be stewarded and tended to and cherished and nurtured. Enjoy the gift of yours.

~

Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Psalm 90:12

~

The Story – Brandi Carlile

All of these lines across my face

Tell you the story of who I am

So many stories of where I’ve been

And how I got to where I am.

But these stories don’t mean anything

When you’ve got no one to tell them to

It’s true, I was made for you.

I climbed across the mountain tops

Swam all across the ocean blue

I cross all the lines and I broke all the rules

But, baby I broke them all for you.

Because even when I was flat broke

You made me feel like a million bucks

You do, and I was made for you.

You see the smile that’s on my mouth

It’s hiding the words that don’t come out

And all of my friends who think that I’m blessed

They don’t know my head is a mess.

No, they don’t know who I really am

And they don’t know what I’ve been through like you do

And I was made for you.

All of these lines across my face

Tell you the story of who I am

So many stories of where I’ve been

And how I got to where I am.

Oh but these stories don’t mean anything

When you’ve got no one to tell them to

It’s true, I was made for you.

Oh yeah, it’s true…

I was made for you.

~

To my beloved Matthew and our precious four children… it’s true; I was made for you.