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Snowbirding and A hui hou…Until We Meet Again

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We first moved to Alaska and I’d hear people talk about leaving during the winter. Snowbirds, they said. I was incredulous. Why would someone ever want to LEAVE Alaska?

We arrived to AK in 1997 at the height of summer, the season where Alaska shines her best, literally, —we covered our windows in aluminum foil just to have enough darkness to sleep at night—but after that never-dark summer, our first winter was almost magical.

Winter landscapes in Alaska are other-worldly. Fairy tale and history book, geography maps, and a coffee table tome, full-page landscape portfolios…all at the same time…that was Alaska winter…sheer magic.

So those “snowbirds”…I thought of them as fake Alaskans. Half-Cheechako, even as I, less than six months Alaskan, was a full-blooded Cheechako*.

But I thought I knew Alaska.

We’d come from snow country after all, mid-westerners…moonboots and snowmobiles part of our everyday life…soaking up summer before winter came on fast and furious.

What I didn’t know in my Cheechako state was that moonboots in Alaska won’t make it til November, snowmobiles are called snowmachines, and winter comes on faster and more furious, lasting wayyyy longer than I’d ever seen it last in my whole two-plus decades of being a born-and-bred lifelong Michigander. And don’t even get me started on the dark, even though we’d made one of the lightest places in this state our home.

But I learned quick that summer was the elixir that kept us all planted right here in Alaska, and that there is nothing, nothing, like high sun at 11 pm while a campfire burns and hotdogs are roasted for dinner. Or how waking at 5 am feels normal, coming with a full energy store for the day ahead. Or how the mountains look like they are in full rejoice mode from May on, flush with green and large arms raised to Heaven, trying to touch the sun who, in full summer flirtatiousness, never quite reaches low enough to grasp their fingertips.

I love you, Alaska. There is none like you.

But after spending thirty years as one of yours, I get it now.

I understand why people leave. Decades of trudging through your six-month winters—split up over the years, I’m shocked to say it’s been a decade and a half of my whole life that has been spent in your cold, winter months—I get it now.

I get why people snowbird.

Hauling water to troughs at twenty below…days-long power outages from high winds or heavy snow on electric lines…transformers blown because an old tree couldn’t stand up under the weight of it all…trudging through knee-high snow…cold bones.

Cold bones.

I get it now.

So, since that 2021 year that my beloved almost died, held hostage here by distance when the whole world went haywire…ever since, we’ve sought out the tropics to warm bones and melt the freeze of our Alaskan grit…just a little.

I get it.

Five years since that frigid time, we’ve come to this warm place we love, every year since, various clumps of us, each time thawing in different ways, and now, I just want to come here every year. Longer each time.

I want to be a snowbird.

My roots are in you deep, Alaska. You are part of me. My children hail from you. I am proud. You built us and strengthened us, and you’ve formed us into something more we ever would have imagined we would be. Or could be.

But this warm place has such a piece of my heart, and now, I can never go back to just belonging to Alaska all year long.

I can’t afford it on the island. We are blue-collar. We are not rich like the millionaires who have two homes and jet set across the ocean on a whim. It’s unreachable. We are just working to retire in peace someday and maybe leave a little to our kids.

But I just want to snowbird. I want to love my Alaska but also come to Kaua’i and soak up the beauty of this place. The history. The quiet. The aloha. The people. The warmth.

This place reminds me so much of our Alaska…rugged. Off the beaten path of the other 48 states. There is one road in Alaska, here too, on the island.

Try the Big Island. You’d love Oahu. Maui is our favorite. My Alaska friends advise me on all the best places, their favorite islands.

Why would I go anywhere else when I know how much I love it here?

It’s like someone telling me I should try to live somewhere other than the north road. Why would I? Our North Road is home.

And Kaua’i is home.

Our last day, just two short days ago, I buried the remainder of the little supply of my mama’s ashes I had taken over on the plane. Matt and I made a list: thirteen of her favorite places on Kaua’i. Just a little bit here, a little bit there.

Nothing intrusive or dramatic, she wouldn’t want that. But for one whole week, my brother, my kids and I, we all left little pinches of her earthly remains on this place she loved. Sometimes we did it sneaky like, other times I’d pinch some out of the window of the Jeep as we flew down the road —once forgetting there was a passenger behind me with the window open, that was a funny moment—but most times we’d just each take a casual turn with her urn and have a moment to think of her.

The second week of our time, just Matt and I, —having put everyone on a plane back north to jobs after an acceptable vacation—we stayed behind for a few days of quiet us older ones—her urn stayed with us in the cupholder or my pocket, and we crossed off three more of her favorite places before my little 1/2 cup or so supply was almost emptied. Our last day, I put what was left in the sand at the roots of one of the big trees at her favorite beach. When I’d finished and her urn was empty, I realized I will never travel to this island with my mama again.

I’m so thankful for the trips I took with her. We never had any money when I was a kid, but my mama would take my brother and I on little trips all of the time: to the zoo, to amusement parks, camping, to musicals…whatever she could afford…and what an honor it was as an adult, her in her sunset years, to take her to a place she fell in love with so immediately…head over heels in love to the point her favorite flavors became pineapple and coconut…and every single time she’d say…oh, it just tastes like Kaua’i.

She is part of that island now forever, and I can’t explain what that does to my soul. I cried a little when that urn was emptied, but as we traveled our final day, I felt the magnitude of it too, and now, on this first day back in our frozen north land, it makes me feel a little bit warmer to know there is part of her there forever.

And I need that, this first day back in which the snow is deep, and my feet slip into fuzzy Crocs and not the flip flops my feet prefer, those slippahs these toes wore for two weeks straight…the day that warm pants go on under the muumuu instead of just a swimsuit…

I want to be a snowbird. I want to live aloha and be hot at 8 am and watch the sunset at 6:10 pm and then see stars come out bright and not have to wrap up in a blanket to stand outside to see them. I want my bones to be warm and my skin to be tan and my nails to grow long because my body is making Vitamin D like it’s collecting an overtime paycheck. I want to go to sleep at 10 pm and wake up at 6 am feeling refreshed, ready for the day, no alarms, no waking up freezing or sweltering or being groggy when I know I’ve overslept but have no idea if it’s 8 am or 10 am because it is still pitch-black. My body thrives in the tropics. I told my husband, I don’t know what it is, but I feel 15 years younger in this place.

I love Kaua’i, and like Alaska, it holds my heart.

Sweet Ms. Melanie who made my lunch sandwiches…She works three jobs just to live there and help support her family in the Philippines. Aunty Nancy at the gas station, we’ve struck up a sweet little relationship over these few years, and even though she meets a million people from all over the world, we talk each time…she knows the cigars I like to grab with my Diet Coke and she says there is no way I am fifty-two or old enough to have four grown children. She had her first child at the age of thirty-eight and her silver hair is like a crown all combed back, looking like a Polynesian queen. I love her.

Our Jeep guy…as long as he rents out Jeeps, I will never have a need for a private company…he hugs us all and sends lists of the things we need to do and places we need to explore…we bring him fish from Alaska my boy caught out of our wild oceans and his wife becomes an immediate sister to me, and I miss her already.

The sweet couple we met bowling, so fancy in their gear and their bowling stance and scores, realizing they know someone we do here in the 49th and that we could be on a league with them because we have developed a love of bowling like they did…and don’t get me started on Ms Rose at the airport who only wants to come to Alaska as a bucket list trip and go fishing, or Ms Krista at the property rental place who lived in Girdwood for ten years, or the sweet Aunty at the grocery store who once traveled too to Girdwood to promote Kaua’i and did the hula and came home with some walrus ivory…I could go on…the people…man, what a little island in the Pacific has in common with this crazy state way up here off the beaten path…It’s such a small world and I just want to live there, even a few months out of each year.

Just the hardest months.

I’m not an expensive traveler even. A couple lunches out, but mostly picnics at our favorite beach, grocery shopping for dinners in at our low-end condo overlooking the redneck end of the fancy golf course…that’s my kind of travel.

The backside of the fancy golf course was overgrown this year —budget cuts maybe?—and while my husband sleeps in each morning, I got to know who walked their dog early, who power-walks/combo-jogs the overgrown trail, and who sneaks off into the woods with a backpack full of beer, making the stash of empty cans Matt found when he went on an afternoon stroll to explore the little pond across the way that families came to fish out of. Tilapia maybe, and a catfish or two, but I wouldn’t eat anything out of that pond…I think it’s overflow like at the refinery back home. He’s an Alaskan salmon snob, you’ve spoiled us, Alaska.

We ‘d putter into town to grab lunch and take it down to the beach, maybe do some souvenir shopping or people watching, then come back for a lanai sunset and watch the 4:30 convoy of golf carts roll in —nine was the largest count, five the smallest, all in tandem— we surmised there is some sort of daily lesson that happens here on the hillbilly side of this golf course, maybe where they bring those who, like us, obviously have no business being on a world-class course and who would probably have more luck and more fun at the putt-putt course up the road, which we did, and which we loved. An afternoon well spent, full of memories.

Then, just as though they’d rehearsed it, twenty minutes later, they roll out, one right after, forming a single-file line, and just like that, they are gone until the next day’s 4:30 band of misfit golfers.

Shortly after them, almost like clockwork, we’d watch a fancy red quad cart roll up into the middle of the field, and a white-blonde dog would hop off the back seat as the man of the trio whizzed a ball from a Chuk-It —two times precisely— before the female would finish up on her cell phone and hop off the cart, bringing two baseball gloves with her.

The man and the woman would commence to tossing a baseball, —maybe a softball, we can’t tell from the lanai, and we kept forgetting there was a pair of old K-Mart binocs in the top drawer of the condo next to the fish scale—and they’d chat through the tossing…his mom, work, kids…and every now and then, they’d break the rhythm of tossing to heave a ball from the Chuk-It to the dog lying patiently in the grass. We learned after Day 2 the dog’s name was Boyd.

I’d sit lazy in the sun watching it all, plowing through the book I picked up at the little donation-only library at the outdoor mall when my babies were still with us the week before. My youngest, that tall, long-haired Alaskan, he gently helped me find the money box for books nailed to the wall, white and stained there with red dirt and salt water, and I slipped in the four dollar bills I had in my pocket.

That baby, not having his Real ID yet, just a paper copy, I put him on a plane with his big siblings and his uncle, and he’s never traveled without his parents…tall and broad-shouldered as he is, his mama worries nonetheless, so his big sister, that firstborn daughter, she stands on tiptoes inside TSA after they’ve all been through, and knowing with instinct my worry, she finds my face just outside the boundaries, and she gives a me a shaka wave, her in her Carhartt hoodie, sweating there in the tropics but preparing for cold. It’s only her third time here but she loves it like her mama does, and how precious is it that my Alaska babies slip so easily into island life, them with their flannel shirts and knee-length socks-with-crocs, bringing their ruggedness, familiar somehow with this place that is so different from all they’ve known, but so similar too in the and I-don’t-care-what-people-think, odd-man-out kind of way of not caring,

They left and it was just us for a week and I wrote. I wrote a lot. I wrote to the point my professor had to say it was okay for me to say he loved my grasp on the meaning of the literature we were reading as a class but that it was okay to stay within the word limit. My husband laughed at that one. He just doesn’t know you yet,

He chuckled, even after he spent a whole afternoon with me over one of our picnic lunches, giving me good ideas for the piece that was due, and listening to it over and over as I edited it to being just right. He knows how much I love this place and he knows how much I love to write.

He doesn’t even like the beach, but he was a little sad and grumpy our last day…just thinking about all that is waiting for me back home, he told me.

But I knew it was this place. He’s come to love it too.

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve gotten soft. About this Alaska, Kaua’i.

Re-entry has me whining —every single time— and my kids roll their eyes, those tough ones. Rugged, they are. And Matt, knowing how tough I really am down deep, he just lets me go on and moan about him bringing me to this frozen wasteland and choosing it for us, even though we both know it was me prodding him to follow his dreams and drag me along all those years ago.

And I know what a blessing it is to even be able to take a vacation. And how entitled it sounds to be sad and whiny when it’s over. It’s not lost on me that the kids Matt and I once were —still are, most days in our hearts—could have never ever dreamed of taking an actual vacation, especially one to the tropics…completely out of our realm of possibilities,  and once the kids came along, forget about it.

Our vacation was packing up all their 4-H animals to spend the weekend at the fair. Precious memories for sure, but it wasn’t until he almost died and the kids were all late-teens and he had a hefty work bonus on the table and he said, You know what? We’ve never taken an actual vacation and they are almost grown now and this life is short and I think we should go somewhere and show them something outside of Alaska.

We packed them all up and my mama too, and we came to this place I’d come to so many years before, without him and before them, and they all loved it every bit as much as I did those two decades before, and my children slipped into island life like they were born for it and my mama felt like a tropical princess, and it became our home-away-from-home, and now I slip every bit of extra I can find into the place I reserve in my heart and our bank account for…this island that fills our tanks.

It’s not lost on me what a blessing it is. To have vacation time. To have a little extra each payday. To have grown children who can fund themselves now, and who like spending time with their parents, their siblings. To make it a priority. I don’t take one bit of it for granted.

But I learned this trip that somehow, someway, I need to find a way to make this regular. I’m a slow learner when it comes to me, and six trips to Kaua’i and laying a little bit of my mama to rest there has made me realize that this place is such a part of me that I need to be there more than what I am now.

I’ve learned it’s okay to want to be a snowbird. That there are folks who seek out the sun…that just NEED the warmth.

I met a mama at the airport on the way home; she’s from Idaho and had her brood with her. Everyone was tan and happy, but she was sad to be going home. We talked long about how getting cold gets harder as we get older and how our spirits just crave the warmth in order to function at full capacity. She gave me the term: solar-powered.

So I’ve become one of those Alaskans now. Who want to leave.

Who would forsake this magical, majestic northern place for a fraction of each year just to recharge her solar station and keep all systems operational.

I am solar-powered.

We flew through the night, and we met fellow travelers, and I counted up that it takes nineteen hours to get to the warm place I love, and nineteen hours to get back to the cold place I I still love.

When we left Michigan in 1997, it was 4000 miles to get to the land where we decided to put down roots. When we began taking our family to Kaua’i in 2022, it took 4400 miles to get to that land my heart yearns for. It is 4400 miles from Kaua’i to our home start in Michigan. A perfect triangle of miles, 12,800 in all. The place that started us; the place where we raised our family; and now the place that holds my heart.

I am a simple girl and don’t need much. I work from home, diligently and faithfully. I pour into my job, my community, the families I serve; all as I keep watch over mine and the farm they’ve placed under my care. I pluck away at the college courses I’ve handpicked to serve me as a writer; to make my family proud of me and accomplish the goal I set for myself thirty-five years ago.

I love my community and I wouldn’t change one thing about the decisions my husband and I have made since sinking ourselves in here almost three decades ago. I wouldn’t change one thing.

But now, I want to be a snowbird.

I love you, Alaska, but I want to be a snowbird.

Alaska, you have my heart and my soul forever. But so does Kaua’i.

And now, I get it. You’re not a fake Alaskan if you’re solar-powered.

You just get older and this cold place wears you down, chills your bones after years and years of winter, and all of a sudden, you need the warmth of warmer places to recharge and operate and to keep on.

You don’t want to leave. You would never dream of leaving a place that is so much a part of you. You just want to be warm. You just want to be a snowbird.

Our Jeep buddy, Brent, he taught Poppy and I the first year we traveled there as a family and had to leave…he’d hugged us all at the airport and made us feel as though we were ohana (family). We shook hands after hugs all around and kisses on the cheek, he said a hui hou. I smiled and said thank you. He said, you know what that means? And he held my hand and said it slow for me: a hui hou…ah hooey hoh…it means, until we meet again.

And now, each time I leave my beloved Kaua’i, I say it to him, to whichever house we stay, to whichever beach we leave, whichever tree I leave my mama’s ashes under.

a hui hou.

All the time, and I love my Alaska, but my winter bones and my winter heart are there where you hold me warm.

I miss you, Boyd.

I miss you, Kaua’i.

Until we meet again…

A hui hou.

*Cheechako is a term for newcomer, tenderfoot, or greenhorn in Alaska or the Yukon, specifically referring to someone who has not yet survived a winter there. Originating from Chinook jargon during the Klondike Gold Rush (c. 1897), it distinguishes inexperienced arrivals from seasoned “sourdoughs”. 

Pieces of Poppy and Alaska is on the Island Tonight

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Sometimes it’s hard for a mama to let go of seasons that once were.

Sometimes it’s real hard.

When the kids were little…one long season of pregnant, nursing, diapers, noses, and teaching them how to read. Love Jesus. Be nice to one another.

Then one day, a house full of people taller than you, louder than you, funnier…and you’ll cry because somewhere, somehow when they were sleeping, seasons changed.

And you’re sad.

Hang on. Learn how to embrace the new season. How to enjoy the changes.

My friend reminds me in winter…if I don’t enjoy the snow, the season will be long and miserable. And the snow will still be there.

So I enjoy the snow. The loud. The chaos.

Then, the leaving.

So impossible, this leaving. Seemed so far off so long ago. Here we are now though, them leaving, whether literally or one foot out the door with the second foot soon to follow, that boot hovered there, right over the threshold and isn’t that just what we raised them to do?

So proud and each day I’m older and they are too, growing into the lives I’ll one day no longer be part of. They’ll quietly say goodbye and remember.

Season changes are so hard.

And the older they get, the older I get, the harder the season changes get.

My mama coming to live with us changed our season.

I went from raising to caretaking in a breath and without being able yet to catch that breath, she left us.

There have been a lot of seasons in this season. It’s a hard reset to go from orchestrating to observing.

I miss my husband. We are getting to know one another in this new season. We’ve never been in this season before.

I miss my brother. We are getting to know one another in this new season. We’ve never been in this season before.

And why is it that sometimes when you’re just getting used to one season, the season changes and now you have to get used to a whole other season and Jesus tells us to have our lamps lit and always be ready, but when you’re a woman who never feels ready, how do you keep your light bright and ready yourself for a change of the seasons you didn’t know was coming?

How do I be strong and be ready?

I am strong but my mama left before I was ready and now I’m here in this place we loved so much, her loving it because I did and she loved being with me, so it became our place together.

Our favorite winter hobby, scrolling all the beautiful places to stay, making a plan, all the things we wanted to do, keeping our little list of fun little adventures and then going on out and doing them in the warmth, the sun, her holding onto the arm of one of her strong grandchildren or her son-in-law, loving them, loved ones who loved her because she was mine, her feeling like a princess in her little princess suite that overlooked mountains and oceans where she could hear birds sing her awake each morning and us welcoming her day with coffee.

I brought her here with me this one last time, her ashes in my pocket, and I didn’t know that even after saying goodbye this spring and summer, I’d be spending the rest of the winter and the rest of my life saying goodbye.

I wasn’t ready.

I wasn’t ready to go from being caretaker-of-children to caretaker-of-my-mama to being alone on this earth without her, and without them too in a sense, and now every first thing without my mama is a first thing because isn’t our mama with us for all the days we remember all our lives, and every first thing without them is a first because how do we change from having them in every season to letting them go more and more in every season?

My Ella and I —my kids, so much like me but so much like their daddy, strong and stoic they all are—she’s home with me still and we opened up the box that has been sitting on the bar in my kitchen since April, that pretty blue velvet all tied up with two little extra black bags, one for that panic button I made her wear around her neck, and in the other her mechanical heart valve I asked the funeral home to save for me after she was cremated. She was so proud of that heart valve, it saved her life after all, and I am a homeschool mama after all. She would love that we have it.

We’ve kept her on the bar near to us. Part of us. Right in the middle where she liked to be.

We know she’s free, where she always and only wanted to be…Mom, now that you live here with us, we should talk about where you’d like to go eventually when you die. I know that’s a hard decision since you’re not from here and hopefully this will be something we can work out over many years...we talked about it shortly after she got sick and moved here and I became her person, not just via phone but her person in person now.

There was a long pause then. Me, thinking she was trying to find her words like she often had to do…remembering the tricks from the speech therapist her and I found after the word dementia came into our vocabulary. How to not stutter.

She didn’t stutter. Or giggle and shrug like she usually did when calling upon the tricks from her eight weeks in therapy to find the right word her brain was telling her to say.

Well honey. I want to go to Heaven.

How many times have I thought of her there since she left us so peacefully that spring morning?

Whole. Happy. Without pain. No uncertainty about what is ahead.

At peace and full of joy.

And what we have left here of her are earthly remains: quilts and clothes and her precious cabin…memories and her ashes.

My daughter and I, that quiet one, we scooped out six little packages of white powder…what a weird thing to do on a Friday night, Mom, she says.

I knew you wouldn’t flinch doing this with me I tell her.

And then we’re done, very businesslike and sciencey, much like when we work together on a hard farm task, finished now and there are six little urns, one with a missing tassel so I take that one for the trip, the least prettiest to travel so the grandkids can all have the prettiest ones.

I have one to pack and then I think I better check the rules and make sure I’m not breaking any laws —airport, island, or spiritual—because to me, it just seems like the most normal thing in the world to take pieces of Poppy and sprinkle little bits of her in all her favorite sunny places, those precious few spots where she had big little adventures with her family on this island she loved so much.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3)

I didn’t know in bringing this part of her here I would be saying goodbye in a way I hadn’t yet.

I didn’t know we’d be turning into a new season.

Every day I miss her, but in leaving bits of her here, it is a saying goodbye that hasn’t happened yet.

And as I travel with my grown kids, I realize they will one day say goodbye to me and maybe tears will roll quietly down their faces too when they leave pieces of me behind.

The seasons will change for them too.

Matt keeps my little urn in the cup holder of our rented Jeep, and just in case TSA had any questions as to why I had a small container of white powdery substance in my luggage, I emptied our little supply of ashes into a Ziploc and threw in a copy of her death certificate so they’d know I’m not a drug smuggler and that I was just carrying my mama with me through the airport and across the ocean and hopefully they wouldn’t have too many questions because I really didn’t know what would happen on the other end of the journey.

But what is happening is pretty beautiful and precious.

A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.

We’ve spent time as a family getting to know one another in new ways, but in old ways too.

And when we went to our favorite beach I put her little defaulted-tassel urn in my beach bag and over the course of the evening amongst the swimming and the sand digging and the picnic dinner and the laughter, we all took a quiet little time with the urn, me making sure each of us had our own space and time to say goodbye in our own quiet way, and we all left some of her on her favorite stretch of tropical coastline, putting her deep down in the sand where she liked to plant her toes.

We have a list. All her favorite places and stops here on the island, and while disposing of ashes in the ocean requires special permits, and planting them in gardens or cemeteries requires other paperwork, sprinkling little portions here and there is safe and sterile and legal, and I love the feeling of little bits of her ash on my fingers and if I imagine enough, my hands might smell like her favorite strong perfume we all loved to hate and that she’d spray on the letters and cards she’d mail to us in our faraway place Alaska before she joined us in the north land.

We’ve visited her favorite beach thrice now, and her favorite little walking trail once. My brother and I —Matt, so kind, leaving it to me to grieve how I need to, and while he makes sure my tiny urn is always there in the Jeep, he is gentle and leaves it to me and my brother to do with the ashes as we wish—he and I folded a little ash-batch up in the only container we had in the rental, not wanting to carry her ceramic urn in my pocket, a paper bag carrying croissants from the morning stop at the favorite bakery shop on the way through town. I shook enough in for my brother and I to get some good pinches out and I folded the makeshift paper envelope up, complete with coconut crumbs, tidily and tight like a joint, laughing as I used the skills I learned from my high school boyfriend who taught me how to roll and smoke a joint. My mom would’ve gotten a good laugh out of that. We laughed at the crazy, redneck parts of life because never is it perfect or uniform, is it? And she knew that rolling with us, things would always be a little weird and unorthodox, but that it somehow always worked out perfectly, and most always, beautifully even.

Like that time we were here on girls’ trip and had to check out that morning but had a long day before our flight out, so we drove around the island to see all the sights, landing on a beach close to the airport that evening. learning soon that was mostly a spot for locals and the homeless, as she and I navigated around bushes strewn with little piles of toilet paper while my girls strolled up the beach out of sight. It was getting dark and I made friends with the homeless folks in the public restrooms, them happy and grilling their dinners on hotplates, getting dark and raining, but she thought we were having the most glamourous last day of vacation ever, oblivious to my mama-worries as my girls finally strolled back up the beach and I breathed a sigh of relief and she whipped out her iPhone to take some beach photos of her two precious and beautiful granddaughters.

Oh, she loved them.

The apple of her eye those.

All of us this week, on the walkway up to that beautiful spot she and I walked twice, I cried a bit because she and I would be the tail end of that walking throng, all us tourists, her moving slowly, me alongside, wishing I could walk faster and keep up with the group, but knowing my mama needed me, and isn’t that kind of how the change of seasons goes? This slowing down?

I wasn’t ready to go so slow, again after she’d gone, but now, here I am, going slow once more, and she’s not walking beside me, in my brother’s pocket now, rolled up tight like a sloppy joint, and he and I get separated and I find myself walking alongside a nice grandma who lives here but has her whole family visiting from California, all her gown children, and she’s had to slow down because she’s tired and the little 200 yard walk is long like it was for my mama, and I love this grandma and then somehow she’s hugging me and I’m hugging her and in ten minutes I’ve learned all about her housekeeping job at a hotel here on the island and all about her family and her faith in Jesus, and in that short time she’s somehow become my mom and my grandma and my kids’ Poppy and she loves me too because I’m from Alaska and because I have kids grown and because I slowed down and walked with her.

To everything there is a season, and sometimes the seasons are fast, but sometimes when we just slow down we learn to love the snow so we can embrace the season and learn along the way and experience joy while we go.

These are all slow things for me to process, but my husband, that astute and brief one, he tells me when I worry about things that aren’t mine to worry about: those aren’t your squirrels; those aren’t your nuts.

I am learning in this changing of seasons, what is my job and what isn’t my job.

What are my squirrels; what are my nuts?

It is no longer my job to make sure my children are kind to one another. They are, mostly, but it is no longer my job to oversee.

It is not my job to make sure everyone is happy. When they bring new people into our family, I will welcome them and love them and make them feel comfortable with open arms, but it isn’t my job to make them love me or mine. It isn’t my nut to cement them into the fold.

What is my job is to make sure my husband is loved.

To spend time with Jesus.

To grow in my faith.

To navigate the next season, whatever it will bring.

To try to be ready.

To keep my lamp lit.

So much joy on this trip. Laughter. Togetherness.

We trailed behind on the way back, my brother and I, and he brought out of his pocket the little joint-wrapped package I’d given him on the way up, and we were sneaky because somehow it didn’t feel official like it does on the movies and sometimes when you are Gen-X and do things in redneck you assume you’re breaking some kind of law, even if it’s just the law-of-the-norm, and I took a pinch between my fingers and left pieces of Poppy trailing behind me on the little trail she loved to trudge slowly with me at her side.

The overgrowth of vines, huge banana leaves, tiki torches we spent so much time taking pictures of her and I, red spiky flowers I still need to learn the name of…I left a dusting of her there and the tears rolled down my face on the boat ride back because I will never come here with her again.

But I am here with my family now. And she would absolutely delight in that.

Leaving pieces of her earthly tent here is for us.

And she so would have loved that doing so is part of this trip. That we did it over her birthday week. That we came to her favorite place.

That we are together.

She would’ve loved the outdoor luau show with the fire, and tomorrow we go to the restaurant we took her to the first time we were here, that place during Covid that had an indoor luau, and she’d never had a Mai Tai before and that night she had two, loving the pineapple wedges and chewing on them with joy, their freshness.

We have a few more places to leave pieces of Poppy…I’m not sure if we’ll roll her up like a joint or if they’ll be short trips where I can pop her urn in the pocket of my dress or put it in the beach bag like I did the other night, but we’ll make sure all of her favorite places have a little bit of her in the soil.

The canyon…the places we’ve stayed…the cave we held hands in and walked the depths of the earth…

She’s not here and I know that.

There is no power in her ashes other than the emotional power they hold for being her physical remains in our care here on this earth.

My mama the person is with her King in Glory and she’s been there since she stepped out of her earthly tent and stood before Him to be welcomed into the rest of her life, eternity.

And if there is a window from Heaven —a veil where they get to see the good things here on earth—I see her smiling through it.

Having us all here. Sneaking her in.

Oh, she’d laugh at that. How we carried her around with us. Matt saying perfectly natural as we step out of the Jeep…you have your Mama, honey?

She would dig this mission. So much. She’d be all over it, my co-conspirator, legal, normal, weird, or whatever.

She was all-in. Anything to do with her family, their projects, this island, their Alaska, this life…their life…her life…if she was in, she was ALL in.

I want to be all-in.

My squirrels, my nuts, if it’s mine, I want to be all-in.

When my kids have to say goodbye to me someday, I want them to laugh. I want them to sneak me in, I want them to draw together. I want them to have joy and speak Jesus and how much I loved Him and how joyful it is that I stepped up out of here right up to my knees before Him and that I hugged Him tight, tighter than I was ever able to hug them, and that I was whole.

I want them to raise a glass and know that there was nothing on this planet that I ever loved more than their father and them, except our Savior Jesus.

Cheers because she is now whole.

Completely.

So much joy on this trip. Laughter. Togetherness.

These are my squirrels. These are my nuts.

Thank you, Mama. Thank you, Poppy. Thank you, Kauai. Thank you, thank you most of all, thank you, Jesus.

A Place of Your Own

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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

The Lemons and Me and This Season

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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.

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

A Few Hours with Them

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Maybe it was the Christmas decorations that were strewn about…organized disassembly…boxes of deco stacked…a reminder that yet another year has passed…

Maybe it was the talk I had with my kids on the drive over about how life is messy and love is messy and health doesn’t always work like it should, and bodies and minds aren’t always strong…

Maybe it was the sight of a law enforcement co-worker from not so long ago being wheeled around the corner, his strong chest that once carried Kevlar, weaker but still carrying courage …

Maybe it was the beautiful and stoic face of the matriarch figure, walking her strong and determined legs down the hall toward her car to drive home in dark alone, but not before hugging me while I cried with her and listened to her tell me of her beloved, a stroke bringing in the new year and adding to his daily struggle to remember…

Maybe it was the fresh news of a beloved sister losing her daddy just that afternoon…

Maybe it was the old faces I carry daily in my heart of all the elderly in the State of Michigan that smiled proudly and humbly into my 19-year old eyes as I hauled their government box of food to their tidy and inexpensive sedans, shaking their hands during my first job in a line of many that taught me love and compassion for society’s overlooked…

Maybe it was just that I so wish my girls would know my GrannyCakes who left us all too early…

Maybe it was that the elderly man sitting quietly in the green chair at the end of the hall tonight was the spitting image of my Grandaddy the last time I saw him when he was in a place just like this and his smile and his gaunt figure still laid fresh my spirit when we all celebrated his life over pizza while choking back sobs because we knew that his final home there among our country’s heroes would be our family’s final meeting place and that when, 24 hours after flying back home at the end of our years-ago trip, I wasn’t surprised to get a phone call that he’d passed peacefully in his sleep, the smells of his loved ones still on the flannel shirt he’d worn  at that last family reunion.

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Maybe it was the trauma of a hundred little stresses of this past month pressing down and flowing out the corners of my heart.

Maybe it was the knowing that through all the anxiety and all the loss and all the heartbreak and all the tears…

… that faith in the One who holds it all…

…really will hold it all.

Or maybe it was just them.

The sweet, sweet and precious souls that filled the tables of the meeting place where the kids -my own kids and my 4-H kids- all met together and learned how to make cute little packages of art and scent and love.

Maybe it was just them that filled my heart and left me still…

…and left me wanting to watch it all and hug them all and love them all…

all in the two short hours we had with them.

Maybe it was just them that filled the place of grandparents and great-grandparents and homesteads and communities and those-that-have-gone-before.

Maybe it was just them.

This bridging of decades and disabilities and genes and generations.

These kids.

These seniors.

These ones who are new.

These ones who have gone before.

These ones our world could just forget.

These ones who bring knowing and wisdom and innocence and love…

and in bringing all that they bring weakness and they bring strength and they bring what life really is.

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Seventeen club members and at least fifteen residents sat side-by-side, and they put their hands together and made beauty and because they did…

bridges were built over decades and friendships were unfolded over minutes.

And when my precious girl who has such a heart for young and those who are weaker and especially those who are aged…

…when she sat down next to that fragile white-haired beauty who once farmed and who still has work in her hands, my throat made the ugly-cry and I had to choke it off lest I just start sobbing and not stop for the ones who were fighting the fact…

…that ugly fact that it’s all just ending too soon.

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When my children, these four I drive home, when they talk for hours about the joy and they bubble over to their daddy at home the delight the night brought them and how they can’t wait to go be part of the lives of the new friends they’ve made, I want to sob still because while there are new friendships forming, there are endings that come too soon, and this beautiful nest of a place reminds me of that and it leaves me still, and it leaves me remembering.

The endings can be so beautiful.

But the endings…

the endings,

they always come too soon.

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For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations. Psalm 100:5

New Face in a Hotel Room

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We commandeered the lobby level pool.

I imagined him quiet upstairs, tired, ready for bed…and shaving.

I didn’t worry about him, but knew when we returned…

…he would look different.

Smooth.

What had been part of him, part of us, -rugged and soft and grizzly- for so long now…

…would soon be gone.

It needed to come out. Bad tumor filled his face and it was a week until we learned cancer cells built nests, but that night, before it came out…

…I thought of him as always.

With his beard.

But then bare, there he was…

…strong.

And love.

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Twenty Year Song in the Dressing Room

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Several weeks ago I was in Fred Meyer shopping with my bffs for a new shirt to wear to Ladies Night at the gun store. Yeah, we know a wild and crazy Thursday night when we see one. We did duck face pictures with movie star sunglasses and acted like giggly freshmen girls.

Cuz we’re like that when we’re out on the town and forget we’re in our forties and that between the three of us we’ve got eleven kids.

Then the sweetest most precious song came on over the speakers and had me near slobbering tears while I picked out the perfect black shirt. It was so beautiful right there under the fluorescents, I swore to myself I would remember the lyrics and download the song as soon as I was outside. I threw an iTunes card on the belt, paid for my goods and set out to search for my new favorite song from the back seat of my girlfriend’s mini van.

I couldn’t find it.

I searched every single word I thought I’d heard over the tinny loudspeakers. But they got all jangly in my head like the bracelets we had been trying on and before I knew it, my results window was bringing me back to bebop 50’s music and then some Bruno Mars.

I was so sad.

Because you see, in just seven months, if I am still on the earth, I will be celebrating twenty years of marriage to a man I thought I’d never marry. I told him so, in fact, about twenty-two years ago. Sat right down on his lap at a party and told him he was so NOT my type I’d NEVER marry him. He was too nice to me, too good to me, too sweet of a man for me to ever consider marrying. Some date I was huh?

And then, when I DID marry him, I’m sure there were folks who thought we’d never make it much past a few years together. Heck, there were times when WE thought we wouldn’t make it much past a few years together.

We didn’t know what forever was…back before we understood what forever meant.

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The sweet song said “I love you more today than you will ever know, how sweet this life, I’ll never let you go….”

And it reminded me of all these years and all these miles and all these tears and all these laughs and all these sad times and all these babies and all these flaws revealed and all these forgivens granted and all these late nights and all these whispered prayers and all these gifts given and all these joys and all these dark times and all these light times and all this time…

…all this time together.

It made me think of all these near twenty years and right there in the dressing room I was reminded that yes, this life IS sweet. Marriage is sweet. This man is sweet.

And together, we’re sweet.

And while every single moment hasn’t been sweet, every single year of these twenty has been.

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But I couldn’t find the song. I didn’t forget about it, but after coming up empty in my intense search to find it, I quit looking.

Until today.

When, almost a month after the trip with my girlfriends, I dragged my kids through the shoe department of the same store for our annual new-shoe extravaganza. I happened to be standing underneath a speaker in the sneaker aisle three or four minutes after we started shopping and there, right there in my ears, popped a sweet little melody.

I strained to listen while the sweetness of the song started to stir my heart just like the first time I’d heard it. Unbelieving, my chest jumped as I scanned the ceiling to see where the speaker was located. Could it really be the same exact song?? In the same store?? Did they play this stuff on some sort of loop? But now? RIGHT now, THIS second, THAT song just happens to be playing??

I found the speaker and strode urgently over to it, leaving my kids standing in front of the tennis shoes and hissing to them, “shhhhhht” when they loudly asked my back…

“Mama? What are you doing??”

Those sweet words. There it was. I never thought I’d find our dressing-room, twenty-year song and there it was. Right out of the blue it had come to me while I was helping my girl find a pair of Chuck Taylors.

“And dreams are worth the chasing…Love is for the making…and I’ll love you more than you will ever know…How sweet this life…I’ll never let you go…Nothing compares to holding on to you…I’ll love you more this I confess to you…

…I confess to you.”

There it was.

I pulled my iPhone right out of my purse and googled up the lyrics and tapped out the name of the song and the artist in my note pad. I would not lose it again.

There it was. Right there in a song piped out of the dingy ceiling at the department store.

This Life.

When our Creator says for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh…He meant it. What a gift.

And I confess to you:

Marriage has hard times and marriage can have dark times. But marriage is sweet and marriage is precious and nothing…nothing compares to holding on to the one you chose to spend your forever with. When you told God, when you told your spouse, that you were in it until death, you confessed too. You said I’ll never let you go. You clasped hands and claimed dreams are worth the chasing…love is for the making…how sweet this life.

You said it.

Live it.

All the days of your life. If you have that person with you, that is your sweet life.

Hold them close…they may not always be with you.

For as long as you have them, never let them go.

I’ll never let you go.

This life.

That’s my twenty year song.

That’s my forever song.

I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine… Song of Songs 6:3

Click the YouTube link to play Ryan Huston’s, This Life

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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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.

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