Tag Archives: Family

A Place of Your Own

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

Cheesecake and Dying

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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…

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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…”

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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

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

The Leveling

4 Replies

I haven’t written since Beau.

At all.

Well, a couple bursts of Facebook posts here and there, but this is the first time I’ve come back to this place I love so much.

That horse did something to my heart.

It’s only been a month since he died but it seems like a year and then at night, when I wake up for my normal 3 a.m. insomnia check…it’s last week all over again.

As with any death I suppose, I think of “if only”. If only we would’ve caught it sooner. If only we would’ve known he was compromised. If only we would’ve…

And I go round and round and while I know a horse is a horse and not a human, I still grieve. We are still quiet when we speak of him.

But I know this:

Life is fragile and life is precious and sometimes life is too short. But life is a joy and a push and an embrace and sometimes you have to pause but you can never stop.

So I’m here.

I’m here and I’m yearning to write and my heart spills over now with words needing saying and letters needing typed, and this is where I want to be.

Because when God put a pen in the heart, there’s never any stopping it.

There might be a pause.

But today, again, I write.

A word-stringer might slow and her tears might flow, and her words might cease, and her heart might twist…

but after it all settles and that grief smooths some…

a writer will write.

My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king…Psalm 45:1

If Love was a House

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If love was a house,
where would it live?

Would it settle in the kitchen?
Listening and bowing…
food washed tender and chopped with time, nourishment brought from afar…
board games and laughter and milk spilled and cookies baked…
round the table and a family at each meal?

Would it stake claim in the living room?
Cozy and warm…
snuggles on the couches and stories in forts…
foot rubs and late night movies and popcorn…
lips to hot foreheads and hands bringing ginger ale?

Would it dwell in the playroom?
Loud and giggling…
other worlds being built and workshops noisy…
messes and kingdoms and broken pieces…
creativity and growing in action?

Or maybe it would choose the big bedroom?
Quiet hush…
stately with moonlight and quilts warm and soft…
romance and laughter, breast milk, jambly stacks of books, throw up and icy little feet…
beauty and refreshment, life and rest?

Or would it pick the front porch?
Sunny spot…
collection site for trash out and loved ones in…
where home meets the world, the going to love those outside…
the coming to gather up the air of here?

Would love settle in the learning rooms?
Pencil places…
where reports get written and bills get paid…
the mundane details that are done by heart…
that keep the train on its tracks?

Or maybe the bathroom?
Clean and refreshing…
bodies scrubbed and toes counted and teeth tidied…
and parents hide for small vacations and isn’t a toilet scrubbed…
all in a day’s work?

Or would love forsake the rooms and instead choose the walls?
Fingerprints rub…
photos hang, and calendar pages stand sentry waiting to be flipped while masterpieces are scrawled with glee in crayon. Food sticks and holes happen and memories ooze…
…and clinging to the foundation they breathe out and seem to whisper

right here.

Love lives right here.