Another Life

When I was a girl and lived in the country, I imagined that my adult life would be much the same, only a bit more expansive.  For a long time, I thought that I would live in the country and own horses.  I guess I thought that my career as a famous writer would support my animals.

I am often surprised by how things turned out.  I love where we live, but it's not anyplace that I ever envisioned until I realized we'd been here for more than a decade.  When I was very young, I expected space and wild places, most likely out west, and instead I live on a tiny suburban lot near a large midAmerica city.  I expected to have large animals all over the place, but instead I have had citified (sort of) dogs, cats, gerbils, and birds.

I was reminded of those long-ago dreams this past week-end.  We stayed way out in the country, and my son and I took a walk the first evening and saw a beaver meandering across a lake and horses rambling across a field. 

I'm not sure that I could manage a life like that anymore.  I haven't been on a horse in maybe eight years, and I would miss the ease of city life.  But it's something to think about.  Could I change everything about my existence?  One of my friends is looking at new homes as she prepares for a major move and, while I never imagined myself in a house built in the last 50 years, much less in the last few months, I am entranced by the photos she has sent.  I am thinking that I have become a total stick-in-the-mud and that perhaps we could live completely differently than we do now.

A Week

I'm really, really tired.

There was one day last week when, in the course of an hour, I planned assignments for an 8th grade history class, located music for my daughter to sing at the funeral, and organized a group of recalcitrant seniors headed to the art museum for a class picture. 

The days just went on and on.  With family coming in from New York to Florida to California, the funeral was scheduled for Saturday, nearly a week after my stepmother's death.  My sons came home on Thursday, grouchy after a week of finals, and we hit the road Friday morning.  There was a crowded visitation at the funeral home Friday night -- I'm from a small town where my stepmother has four siblings, one of whom is the mayor -- and the funeral itself, a graveside service, and a church luncheon on Saturday.  In between all that, I took a  few moments to visit a friend whom I have known practically since we were born a week apart 50-odd years ago; her mother had also died last week-end.  (And then I came home to the news that a law school classmate and mother of students of mine had lost her mother this week-end.)

Over everything hung the tensions inherent in families steeped in death, divorce, and remarriage: stepsiblings and half-siblings, people once but no longer related through the generations by marriage, people who have never met each other, people who try to pretend that they have never met each other, people who are delighted to meet each other for the first time.  And over all of that a fog of loss and sorrow draped itself, as the sure knowledge that a woman who once met the canoe trails of backcountry Canada with gleeful abandon was with us no more.

Yes, I am really, really tired.

 

Death Comes When It Will

This morning as I walked to my father's house, nestled in the woods above a creek bank, a red-bellied woodpecker made its insistent whirring cry above me, a pair of mallards flew over the roof, cardinals called, and nuthatches zipped about. 

"She would be sorry to miss this, " I thought to myself.  "The first decent weather in weeks, and sounds of life ringing through the woods."

On Sunday, a series of phone calls indicated that my stepmother had begun a precipitious decline and was probably nearing the end.  Stunned by her mental confusion and physical agitation, my father had called a young relative to put her in the car and driven off to the hospital.  Tests showed that initial fears -- pneumonia or brain bleeds -- were unfounded, and anti-anxiety meds helped to calm her, but I decided to go anyway.  I'm not sure why, but I thought maybe she needed me to help her let go.  She certainly had no intention of leaving, either this life or my father.

I arrived at about 3:00 a.m. after a long drive across a quiet state.  A once vital and elegant woman lay in the hospital bed, breathing roughly but otherwise completely unresponsive.  Since I've always been told that people can hear voices even as everything else is shutting down, I sat down, told her I was there to help take care of her, and began to stoke her hand.  Her jagged breathing began to calm and I told her, my father's intrepid canoeing partner, to lie back in the canoe and let the sun shine on her face. 

Within a few minutes she was gone, quietly and peacefully, my father on one side, I on the other.

I will never know whether she heard me, or whether her breathing was simply the last physical manifestation of someone who hours earlier had moved on.  But I like to think that, as she died, she could hear gentle waves lapping and the loons of the North Woods calling her to journey to a more peaceful place.

Stolen Goods

If you've heard a version of this already, then you probably won't mind remembering it.  If you haven't, you'll probably "get it" before you reach the end.  But it's worth thinking about anyway.  It was part of the presentation at that retreat I went to last week-end:

So a lady pulls into a gas station on the edge of a little town.  The attendant comes outside, and she says that she's moving to town and wonders what it's like there.  He asks her what it was like where she came from.

"Oh, it was awful," she says.  The people were selfish and obnoxious and incredibly irritating.  I couldn't wait to get out of there."

"Well," says the attendant, shaking his head, "I'm afraid you'll find this town is pretty much just like that."

As she drives off in disgust, another car pulls up.  The driver leans out and says, "Hey -  I'm moving to this town next week.  What's it like here?"  The attendant asks her what it's like where she lives now.

"Oh, it's great!" she enthuses.  "The people are so friendly and generous, always willing to help you out.  I'm so sorry to be leaving."

"I think," he grins, "that you find this town is almost exactly the same."

On Behalf of My Father

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.  (Marcel Proust)

My father is unlikely ever to read this.  He's drained and exhausted from four months of 24/7 care of my dying stepmother and, while he still feeds his birds everyday, he has no time for sending out messages from the environmental front.  So I'll do this one for him.

Marigolds2 asked me to refer folks to her entries on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  As I write this, only the first one is finished, so I urge you to keep checking back as she presents the Administration's plans for imminent attack.  And, in case you don't make it over there:

This is the place we're talking about.  Far away -- FAR way -- from most of us.  Most of us won't be going there.  I've been working on our household budget all day, a budget for a household that will support three college students next year.  I don't see a trip to ANWR in my near future any more than most of you do.  No reason to preserve it so that I can make a visit.

Here's a more geologically/terrain-oriented map:

Looks a bit foreboding, huh?  Probably can't do one of those family camping trips there, at least not the kind where you transport the contents of the entire L.L. Bean Outdoor Equipment catalog along with a few coolers of beer and a tv that plugs into your car lighter.  On the other hand, if you COULD get up there, you would see this:

And if you emerged from the safety of your vehicle, you might have an encounter like this (from a safe distance, one would hope):

Or not.  Maybe these things don't interest you at all.  Maybe, like many Americans, you prefer to drive your SUV without contemplating that it must be fueled either by purchases via international relationships from which  we should be disentangling ourselves or by the destruction of habitat which we cannot recover after it's gone.  Maybe, like many Americans, you have a comfortable existence with so much stuff that you could probably live well with only occasional ventures from your home and car.

I can't claim superiority in any of these areas.  My husband, who carts around a lot of equipment for the soccer teams he coaches,  leased a mini-SUV a few months ago.  I was NOT HAPPY, but he told me it's more fuel-efficient than my six-year-old van with 125,000 miles on it, and he's probably right.  And we have a house full of stuff.  And we recyle those things which our community makes it easy to recyle, but we don't go much beyond that.  So no, we don't live environmentally sound lives.

But I can claim two things, and those are attentiveness and appreciation.  I think that if we start with a cultivation of those qualities, we cannot help but try to slow down on our personal purchases and national policies.  There is no question in my mind that we have the talent and capacity in this country to develop long-range solutions to our energy demands that will enable us to demand far less and to acquire it in ways that do less harm to our planet.

We need both.  We need our vehicles and our other conveniences to live the way that we want.  But we need places like ANWR, too, whether we get there as individuals or not:

You must have certain noble areas of the world left in as close-to-primal condition as possible.  You must have quietness and a certain amount of solitude.  You must be able to touch the living rock, drink the pure waters, scan the great vistas, sleep under the stars and awaken to the cool dawn wind. You do not play ping-pong in a cathedral. (Ansel Adams)

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The following is from the website of the Northern Alaskan Environmental Center.  You can click on "Arctic" and then on "Arctic Action" to read more.

This week, the House and Senate budget committees split over whether or not to include proposals to allow drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be included in the federal budget.  The Senate is poised to vote next week on whether or not to allow the drilling provision to stay in the budget.

***

Arctic Hotline for Capitol Hill: 1-888-894-5325 or go to http://capwiz.com/awc/dbq/officials/ and click on your state to get the direct number for your Senator.  You can call the Capitol Hill switchboard at (202) 224-3121

·        Ask your Senator to vote “Yes” on the Cantwell amendment to keep drilling in the Arctic Refuge out of the budget.

Gilead Revisited

A friend of mine emailed me a few days ago to let me know that Marilyn Robinson, the author of my current favorite novel, Gilead, was going to be on the Diane Rehm Show this morning.  I just started to listen to it and decided that, as I am getting sick and not feeling too upbeat tonight, this isn't the time.  Marilyn Robinson had begun by talking about how the main characters had just come to her: an old father and a young son, whom the father would not live to see grow up.

That storyline and its themes of loss, anticipated and sorely felt, is part of why the book appeals to me so much, I'm sure.  My mother was a young mother who never got to see her children grow up.  So young, in fact, when she died, that I was too young to give any thought to what it might have been like to grow up with a mother.  Oh, I eventually acquired Cinderella's stepmother, but she didn't count insofar as the idea of growing up with a mother is concerned and, after she, too, died, I abandoned thinking of my father's wives as mothers.  (I care deeply for my current stepmother, who is dying now, but I was taken aback when my father referred to me as her daughter a few nights ago.  I haven't thought of myself as a woman's daughter since I was seven.)

As a child growing up, I never had and never expected a mother to talk with me about my ideas, my dreams, my periods, my dates, my schooling, my prom, my career, my wedding, my pregnancies.  No Gilmore Girls there.  I can remember a couple of my friends in law school getting into huge fights with their mothers over wedding plans.  I was dumbfounded.  Did mothers have anything to say about the lives of 25-year-old daughters?

I know better now.  I'm sorry to say that my family was so successful in its grief-saturated elimination of my mother's memory from our lives that I didn't think much about her until two babies landed in my arms.  I will never forget looking down at them when they were a couple of days old, after the grogginess of my in-a-haze-of-drugs delivery had worn off, and thinking, "Oh my God.  There was someone in my life who felt this way about me."  I had no idea.

Ever since then, I have thought of my mother often.  All those events that I got to witness and participate in that she missed:  Kids learning to swim.  Kids going off to camp.  Kids at their first recitals.  Kids with the chickenpox. Kids running up and down soccer fields.  Kids in plays.  Kids struggling against heartbreak.  Kids making terrible mistakes.  Kids achieving triumphant successes.  Kids getting on planes without me and getting off planes to come back to me.  Kids graduating.  Kids calling and emailing aboout college successes and missteps.

One day, several years ago, we were all tubing together on a narrow and gentle portion of the French Broad River in North Carolina.  My oldest son, who was about twelve at the time, had a bowl-cap of blond hair that looked like white gold in the sunlight as his inner tube made circles in the water.  

Another time, a few years earlier, his younger brother had stood at the edge of a small pool and waterfall in the Adirondacks, screeching at the top of his terrified little lungs, "My body wants to jump in, but my mind won't let it!" 

Last week my daughter, a high school senior, was stretched out on my bed for a late-night conversation and, as I wondered aloud whether I had become a bit too lax in my attentiveness to her evening whereabouts, said, "I wouldn't worry, Mom; you've got a firm grip."

Thousands of moments like that. Some terrible, some good, some beyond any description of glorious.  I am SO glad that I got this life, that I have gotten as far as being a very middle-aged mother of almost adult (defined loosely) children.  I had no idea.

This Is Not A Real Entry. . .

. . . but it will be someday.

One of my frustrations will AOL Journals is that there is, to my knowledge, no real kind of index anywhere of journals by topic.  I suppose that I could ask the powers-that-be to start one, but that would deprive me of the pleasure of doing my own, just exactly the way I want it.  Plus I want to include non-AOL journals.  So that's what this beginning and ever-expanding entry will be.  I'm just going to keep adding to it, bit by bit, and I would love to receive recommendations for new additions.  And I am going to shamelessly limit myself to blogs that stick to topics of particular interest to ME.  I would be happy, though, to link to anyone else who wants to do this for topics of interest to them.  And it means that journals like my own, which bounce around from topic to topic, don't qualify -- unless I decide someday to start a category for the Eclectics among us.

For today, just categories and a few links:

PLACES

Beside Dry Creek (Colorado)     

Blue Ridge Blog    

Inscribed on the Forest Floor (Yellowstone Photography)    

Dispatches from France      

Spruce Pine Cottage (Florida Panhandle)

THE GREAT OUTDOORS 

Danielle's Den  

Eagles in Maryland 

Wrenaissance Blog

Nomadic Musings

READING AND WRITING    

About Me- Books: Spirituality, Journals, & Transformation

Theresa Williams - Author   

The Biblio Philes 

A Mindful Life

PHOTOGRAPHY 

From Every Angle   

Photo Friday

Photo Journal   

Jersey Girl

Rural Life Photos

PROGRESSIVE/LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY   

Kinesis: Life and Faith in Motion

Dylan's Lectionary Blog

Tread Lightly on the Things of Earth