Chore

Mopping the kitchen.

Condemnation.

The floor is so dirty! How did I let it get this dirty?  My mother was a home economics major in college and a clean freak.  Our house was always spotless. What happened to me? My mother in law told me as a newlywed that the best way to keep your floors clean was to not let them get dirty.  Who can do that?  They apparently could.  Wait a minute...who wants to do that?  Not letting your floors get dirty means not living on a farm, not letting anyone in with shoes on, not having animals in the house.  I want to live on a farm and have animals in my house.  I want people to feel comfortable in my house and not afraid of making it dirty.  I wanted my toddlers to make messes with water and play dough and paint.  I want the kids to play hard and work hard and that involves boots and dirt. I want to craft and create and cook. These are messy endeavors. These are my choices, my values. My house and my furniture and my kitchen floors serve at my pleasure. I do not change my life or way of living it to keep my floors clean.

Menial.

I hate housework.  I have an expensive private college education and yet my daily duties are those of a common peasant woman. A common peasant woman?

Noble.

I clean my kitchen like the generations of sister/mothers before me.  What greater calling than to serve and care for one’s family?  Home making. The making of a home.  The place of  grounding, of nurturing, comfort  and nourishment for the ones I love.  

I am a mopping Goddess...

but the floor is so dirty, how did I let this get this dirty??????

Cherished memory p. 48

Cherished Memory pg 48

It was a bright, Central Oregon Saturday in February.  Pete and I went hiking at Smith Rocks State Park in shirt sleeves. We would occasionally stop and sit on a rock to bask in the winter sun like lizards and watch some hardy rock climbers.  I remember what I was wearing, I remember how my black shirt intensified the warmth of the low angle sun, I remember the deep blue of the sky and the bright yellow rock and patches of snow.  More than that I remember what I was wondering.  

Pete and I had been married for 10 years and believed we would probably remain childless.  This Saturday was different, this overdue cycle was different.  I had had surgery 2 months prior to this outing and had a cancerous tumor and the affected ovary removed.  Earlier that week I had met with a friend for coffee and I had told her I didn’t think I was recovering from the surgery like I should.  I was tired, queasy, tender and food didn’t taste quite right.  She had asked if these symptoms had been there all through my recovery or had just shown up.  When I told her they had just  recently appeared, she covered my hand, leaned in and said “Those are the symptoms of pregnancy.”  I withdrew my hand from under hers and leaned back quickly rattling the coffee cups on the table.  I took a breath, composed myself and began my objective, well rehearsed explanation of why I don’t get pregnant adding, a little too forcefully, that now I had 50% less ovaries!  She just smiled at me.

I had long ago walled off all maternal feelings and longings to protect myself from disappointment.  I didn’t even hold babies. I had wished and hoped too many times and consequently shed too many tears.  I was so good at denying that part of myself that pregnancy had not even crossed my mind.  I had unfortunately not leaned back fast enough because that thought, voiced by my friend Kim, had now infected my mind.  Driving home from the coffeeshop I toyed with that thought some more and it found its way into the “Things that could be Possible” file in my brain.  Against my will and best efforts I allowed a tiny, anemic wisp of a hope to take root. I don’t remember how long I alternately affectionately petted then threw down and kicked at that thought but within the week I had purchased a pregnancy test.  I would not allow myself to see Kim again and have her smile that “you might be pregnant” smile at me without definitive evidence to the contrary. I hadn’t told Pete about any of this because there was no need for both of us to ride this familiar roller coaster again.  Pete seemed fine with not having children.  He had some harsh rhetoric about not spawning any more consumers on this earth along with some personal fear of passing on the learning disabilities that plagued his own family. Perhaps some of this was his own coping mechanisms for being childless.

So we went on a hike. I was now strong enough to hike after my recent surgery.  The sun reminded us that spring was coming. I felt expectant, excited and happy.  I was now a cancer survivor.  Would I have yet another unexpected title soon? I let myself think about carrying a child in my body. I lifted my head towards the sun and let it warm my face and smiled remembering my homegirl Sarah when she laughed to herself in her tent.  Shall I too have this pleasure now that I am an oldish thirty three year old?

When we got home I went upstairs and took the test.  Pete came up the stairs just at that moment to use the restroom.  I showed him the test.  We dug the directions out of the trash can and rechecked the results.  Pete sat down on the toilet and cried for joy.  

Churchy word essay

Churchy word essay

The dew was still on the roses and morning was gilding the skies when I noticed that I suffered the mortal ills of hunger. I was prone to wander and I cared not to tarry in this garden o’er long for the burning sun with golden beam was rising high.  I spied a mighty fortress of an eatery that looked to have been there since ancient of days.  This looked a good shelter from the stormy blast so I girded my loins and drew nearer in fog to see.  My staunch heart was gladsome within my breast as I drew closer and gave ear to the melodious sonnet within, oh how sweet the sound.  I also gave nose to some heav’nly scent. Through many dangers, toils and snares I had already come so I went into the narthex and hailed a waitress.

In the vestibule I looked down at my rumpled pleated skirt, would they serve a wretch like me? So just as I was, without one pleat, I went. Whither she came I knewest not but I could see it was she from whom all breakfast flowed.

“Fear not!” said she, “I am with you, O be not dismayed.”

So I had a little talk with the waitress and I told her all about my troubles then I asked her what the specials were and she did answer by and by.  

She said “Morning by morning new specials I see, some changest not, eggs and bacon fails not, those wert and art and forever wilt be.”

I implored her to impart me with my just desert. She poured out some coffee and I wondered if this was a foretaste of glory divine?  Then I commenced to lean on the everlasting arms of that chair, safe and secure from all alarms.  

Asked she  “And can it be that thou canst pay?”

I gave her blessed assurance that I could pay the ransom for the bill and that when the time came I would surrender all that was due. I was no highborn seraph with vast riches, royal diadems or mansions on the hilltop but alas I had garnered enough trophies to at last lay down for breakfast.  

And lo! soon she laid prostrate before me the fairest of vitals along with coffee pavilioned with splenda. I extolled its virtues with a thousand tongues and if ever I loved her, my waitress, twas now.  The glory of my breakfast shone round about me and I was struck dumb as I to it pursued.  I scarce could take it in. I asked the waitress to assist me to proclaim, to spread through all the earth abroad the honor of the cook’s name. But when I looked at the bill I realized how great a debtor I was constrained to be. I thought why should I be discouraged? Whence I gave my utmost for this highest of breakfasts. Riches I heed not nor man’s empty praise so I extended to her the right hand of fellowship. The bulwark of a lord who was sovereign of the establishment rejected my gesture as worthless rags. He pronounced this unredeemable and anointed my head with gravy. Softly and tenderly it fell afresh on me.

Authors

“Do you have Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain?” I asked intently.

My Grandmother Irene huffed an exaggerated sigh and drew the worn card from her hand and passed it to me with a chuckle.  

I was 10 and greedy for victory. I loved it when adults played games and I loved the card game “Authors”.  It was our family’s traditional game. No one else I knew played it. My grandparents had very beautiful, well worn cards that they played with often.  It was fun, easy and made you feel a little sophisticated because you eventually memorized the deck and knew 30 famous authors and 4 of their most popular books.  My favorite author was Louisa May Alcott since she was the only woman in the deck and her books were easy to remember, Little Women, Little Men, Eight Cousins and An Old Fashioned Girl. We called Sir Walter Scott “Egg Head” due to the unfortunate proportion of his head in his portrait on the card. Having seen their faces so often I felt like I knew them.  Robert Louis Stevenson looked thin and brooding, Edgar Allen Poe appropriately sinister, Alfred Lord Tennyson jovial, Mark Twain mischievous.  Memorizing the authors and books was not just a byproduct of playing the game but it was important for winning the game.  Once all of your cards had been played you needed to remember the exact author and books on the cards your opponents were holding in their hands.  I was good at this part since I wasn’t distracted by the conversation, I was intent on winning.

My sister and brother were respectively 8 and 10 years older than I.  There was very little in our lives that I measured up to, let alone excelled at.  Dinner conversation was over my head, I didn’t follow the news, I didn’t get most jokes and I wasn’t included in the special relationship my siblings had.  My father would kindly ask me what I’d had for lunch that day so that I would have something to add to the dinner conversation. My siblings went to highschool together, knew all the same people and were teenagers in the 60’s together. I went to a different school, had different friends and all my great achievements were mastered by them long ago.  I probably understood that when they played authors with me it was only to humor me but I didn’t care.  Having everyone’s attention focused, however nebulously, on a task I was competent at was a powerful stimulant to my 10 year old self.

This particular game was between my grandmother and I.  I think my siblings were already off at college and my parents had gone off to one of the many conventions they attended for my father’s work.  My grandmother Irene stayed with me when they were gone and I adored her.  She treated me like I was the most wonderful creature God ever invented.  She thought I was beautiful, talented and smart.  She loved her Savior with all her heart, mind and soul and I felt like a close second.  She felt her job in life was to pray for others which she did with constancy and abandon.  She was selfless and good yet never took herself too seriously.  One never felt judged when you were with her, in fact she made you feel better about yourself because she beamed love at you.  She was probably the most Christlike being I’ve ever known but my 10 year old self didn’t really understand all these things then.  Ten year old Kimmie just wanted to win a card game, this card game.

Grandmother Irene got up to use the restroom before our game was over.  She put her cards face down on the table and left the room.  There was no one else in the room.  No one to see.  

I don’t remember if there was any inner turmoil surrounding the decision I made.  I don’t remember even making the decision but I remember the crime.  I remember picking her cards up and looking at them. I can see myself clearly at the card table in the living room looking at the cards. Looking at the cards of the woman who loved me unconditionally, who took time to entertain me by playing cards with me, who prayed for me consistently since the minute I was born.  I don’t remember the serpent’s whisper before I looked but I do remember the burning shame afterwards, even 45 years later.  I have never told this to anyone and yet it is the first memory that came to me from the “Difficult Memory” writing prompt.  The fruit I had wanted so badly, to win this game, became dust in my hands, sand in my mouth, and bitter remorse in my twisted stomach.  We finished the game, I don’t remember if I used my ill gotten knowledge to win or not.  I do remember wanting to conceal my sin more than win.  To run and hide and stitch together some fig leaves to cover myself. I see now that the shame I felt, the shame I still feel has served a purpose in my life. I never cheated again, that is if you don’t count diets of course.

Dude Ranch

Dude ranch pg.95

It was a muggy day for a family road trip with no air conditioning. I was wedged between my older brother and sister in the back seat of our station wagon. My sixteen year old, gum popping sister was on my right.  Her bleached hair was whipping in my face from the open car window. My eighteen year old brother was composing a song on my left.  The neck of his guitar was out his window and the butt end was jammed in my side but I didn’t mind.  His song was about my Uncle being a western sheriff who loses his star and it made us all laugh.  We were headed to The Blue Mountain Guest Ranch in central Oregon and meeting up with my Uncle Ken and his family for a week long vacation together.  The last big vacation we took we stayed at a resort in Hawaii where I learned to swim, we all got matching Hawaiian outfits, and we drank fruity drinks by the pool.  Horseback riding and hiking was quite a departure from what my mother would call a “vacation”. Looking back, there must have been quite a deal struck between her and my father for her to agree to do this.  

We arrived at the giant old farm house filled with antique furniture and I was instantly captivated.  This house had hidden stairways, a massive kitchen and giant porches built to accommodate large groups of ranch hands or serve those traveling by on a wagon train long ago. A far cry from our cramped hotel room in Hawaii. It smelled different here.  The juniper and sage smelled wild and sharp compared to the asphalt and mown lawn smells of my residential home. I could tell the adventure quotient was high here. I would not be disappointed. There wasn’t an aspect of that week that didn’t change me.  It was a summer camp, best birthday, favorite adventure book, kind of vacation.  

I was eight and my favorite cousin Larry was nine.  Larry was Tom Sawyer to my Becky.  He was mischievous and a little wild and I was afraid of getting in trouble and giggly. We were outside sun up to sun down playing by the hot springs pond. I had never seen a pond that had steam coming off of it, smelled like rotten eggs and was teeming with so much life.  I couldn’t have loved anything better. In the family photos from that vacation, my typically pasty white skin was indian brown and my hair white from sun exposure, a testament to the hours spent outdoors. I learned how to choose the best skipping stones, catch water skippers and build dams. I laughed at every antic Larry pulled and there were many.  My sides hurt from laughing so much. Both families got together every evening to swim in the hot springs fed pool behind the house. This was necessary to relieve the saddle soreness from our daily horseback rides.  Being the most inexperienced, I rode Rockie, the small, 20 year old, sad excuse for a horse that was an exotic stallion in my youthful, greenhorn mind.  At home I had always pretended my stingray bike was a horse and now I was atop a real horse, trail riding the untamed west. In my imagination the well worn trail was uncharted indian territory where my posse and I tracked dangerous and unsavory outlaws.

One day we went on an actual hike up an actual mountain trail.  I had never been on a hike before.  A walk around the block in the suburbs is no substitute for hiking. The Strawberry Lake trail had signposts that told you how far it was to your destination. I wasn’t exactly sure how long a mile was but I remember boasting to my friends when I got home that I had been on a six mile mountain hike.  We walked so long that even my 8 year old feet hurt when we got to the top.  Beautiful Strawberry lake was our reward and we all took our shoes off and soaked our feet in the ice cold, mountain water.  I sat next to my mother by the lake.  I looked at her cooling her high heel deformed feet in the water.  It was the first and last time I would ever see her “outdoorsy”. One morning she took a walk by herself and came back with stories of deer and a fierce badger with large claws that had followed her.  I wasn’t sure what a badger was but I was alittle worried by these unknown dangers of country life.  From then on my brother pretended to beat back badgers in front of my mother whenever we went outside and I was relieved by his smart ass behavior.  Maybe badgers aren’t really that scary.

The proprietors of the dude ranch served enormous breakfasts.  We ate steak, potatoes, biscuits and gravy, all for breakfast!!! My mind was blown by this more than anything else.  The revelation that the rules of the table could be bent was transformational.  The daughter of a home economics major, even at 8 I knew a lot about the proper way to set a table, where your elbows belong and how to dab my mouth before taking a drink so as not to get crumbs in my milk. Table rules were not something you messed with at our house. Dinner food for breakfast was unprecedented and taking things to a whole new level.

The only downside to my experience at the ranch were the huge lightning storms each night.  In my lowland home town the weather was always mild. Drizzle followed by partly cloudy was nothing to get excited about. The teeth rattling thunder however, galvanized my experience at the ranch in the way only pure terror can.  Being the youngest and not accustomed to so much daily activity, I naturally went to bed first.  Alone upstairs in a room with tall dormer windows I felt exposed and vulnerable to all that jagged lightning. My father taught me how to count between flashes and rumbles to determine if the storm was getting closer or moving on but this didn’t mitigate my distress. The nearby hot springs, pool and the impressive height of the old farm house seemed lightning rich targets to my mind.  My limited understanding of the mysterious ways of electricity only added to my extreme unease.  My heart raced with fear.  I know I lost the battle with myself between my need to be comforted by my parents and not wanting to look foolish in front of my cousins. I went down stairs repeatedly, probably even crying which was only natural when death was so imminent.

The combination of so many first and extreme experiences, places this week at the top of my all time best days of childhood.  Constant physical exertion, new territories, cousins, horses, swimming and life threatening storms heightened all of my senses and ultimately shaped who I am today.

I now own a ranch not that far from the Blue Mountain guest ranch.  There are nights when the lightning gets my heart racing and the tree toppling winds have me praying for my life.  I married a man who has a line item on his resume that reads Hiking and Climbing guide.  He has taken me on grand hikes all over the west and I have countless times soaked my tired feet in mountain lakes.  I don’t own a horse but I have a pond and stream where my children have found giant water bugs and learned to skim rocks. I don’t have a giant ranch house but I have a small cozy one where I commonly serve biscuits and gravy for breakfast.

Recently my husband and I were walking around our farm discussing future projects when we saw a large hole near the chicken coop.  My childhood fears were awakened and my eyes got wide.  Pete, concerned by its proximity to the coop, looked at me and in a low, ominous voice said “It could be a badger.”

Communion

Religious tradition as a child pg. 97

Mom and Dad were a little late picking me up from the Primary class upstairs.  Dad explained to the sunday school teacher that they had communion that morning and so church had taken a bit longer than usual.  Walking down the teal carpeted steps to the Narthex I asked my father,

“What is communion?”  

He glanced at my mother and took a breath as if this was going to be hard to explain to a child.  He began in the condescending tone adults use with children when trying to explain something hard.  Even as a child I could sense his hesitation and picked up all the non verbal cues that has seared this particular moment into my memory forever.  I knew this was going to be important if not sacred information he was about to explain to me.  I tried hard to focus on his words.  

He began with “Once a month all the members of the congregation eat a wafer of bread to make us remember Christ’s last supper. He took it with his disciples before he went to death on the cross.  It is called The LORD’s supper, or communion.”  

I had been in church before when they passed the trays of rectangles and tiny cups of juice around.  They told me I couldn’t have any and I was fine with that. I thought maybe there wasn’t enough for everyone. None of the other children took any and it didn’t look good anyway. I knew what bread was and it was not the pressed dough things I had seen them pass around.  I knew what vanilla wafers were but the tiny, white rectangles did not resemble cookies either.  To me they looked more like medicine, almost like a pill.  A pill you took with a tiny bit of juice to wash down.  No mention was made of the juice’s import so I assumed it was peripheral to this LORD’s supper thing. Now I know that trying to explain drinking blood represented by wine represented by grape juice was too large a topic to handle in the stairwell.  Another puzzlement was that nothing about the tiny pressed dough looked like supper of any kind to me.  Was this really what they ate just before Jesus went to his death?? Naw, that can’t be right. The only other sacred food I was familiar with was Manna. I had been taught the stories of the Israelites eating manna provided by God Himself in the wilderness. Perhaps this was manna.  Mystical manna might be something Christ ate before His death. I reasoned that the wafer/bread/manna thing had to have a type of spiritual drug in it that made people remember what Christ remembered.  It activated a part of your brain put there by God to come awake when you ate the Wafer breadmana. Together the whole church had some kind of communal LSD trip that transported them to the actual last supper.  This intrigued me.

I asked my dad if I could have communion.  Both Mom and Dad laughed and looked at one another as if this were preposterous and told me I was too young.  This only confirmed my suspicion that this was, in fact, a drug.  Children have to take medications specifically for children.  I had taken baby aspirin and children’s cough syrup. It only made sense that there were drugs specifically for adults. Being baptists, my parents didn’t drink alcohol so I had never been denied a type of food or drink before.  The only other time Mom told me I was too young was when I asked about another religious topic.  I had asked her what virgin meant.

Now my parents were trying to clarify that communion was for people who had already been baptized into the church and were members.  

Well, this was news to me.  I wasn’t real sure what being baptized into the church meant but one thing was clear.  I was not yet a member of this church, I was excluded, on the outside looking in.  I had accepted Jesus into my heart and said my prayers every night. I had attended sunday school and church every sunday of my life.  I was told I was now welcome in heaven itself and yet there were things that went on in here that I was forbidden from participating in!  I did not like the way this felt.  I asked if my older brother and sister were members. I learned that I was the only one of the family who had not been initiated into the club. I wanted badly to belong.

“What is baptism?”

Again with the look.  

Dad began, “Well you have to go to some classes with the pastors, then you make a profession of faith and they completely immerse you in the baptismal, um, in water, in front of the church.”  Mom tried to help out with  “This represents the sacrament of dieing to your old self and rising out of the water alive with Christ in the new man.” She looked at my 8 year old face. “ You know,... forgiven of your sins.” she sort of petered out.

Interesting. I nodded as if this sounded perfectly reasonable.

“When can I be baptized?” and get the full membership package, I added to myself.

“You are too young now but 12 is about the youngest they baptize folks.” said Mom.

“Why 12?”

“Because when Jesus was 12 he spent time in the temple and understood spiritual things by that age.” clarified Dad.

Again I nodded.  Not really following the connection but I rolled with it.

Twelve.  

O.K.

Four more years.

I could wait.  

Profusion of fate, dunk tank, new man, whoever he is, and then full membership! Then nothing could come between me and the mind bending, members only, transcendent Wafe-bred-anna!!!!

Needless to say my first communion was a bit of a let down.

Infirmary

She was smiling. The plump, kind, middle-aged, black woman with jet black hair was sitting at the foot of my bed and smiling a warm, chocolate smile at me as she gently squeezed my calf. I took a deep breath and let it out slow. Everything…. was going….. to be….. alright.

Sometimes fear would grip me and it became hard to breath, hard to see a future, hard not to slip into an all consuming despair.  

I was in the beginning of my aggressive chemotherapy treatments for a rare and advanced form of cancer.  My oldest child was six and my youngest, three.  My marriage was rocky and we had just moved to a new town for a new beginning.  We were far from family, with no local friends and had lived here only a few months when I got the diagnosis no one wants to hear.  Stage four granulosa cell cancer scattered in my abdomen. If I hadn’t known what that meant already, the tears running down my doctor’s face conveyed the truth clearly enough.  There were only a few other known cases so they were careful not to give me too much information with such a small sample.  The information they did have wasn’t real good. I remember a mention of 5 years.  My youngest, Grace, would be eight in five years.  I didn’t want to leave a second grader motherless.  I didn’t want to die.

We were renting a large house that had originally been the old Union Pacific railroad men’s club house.  There was a giant main room with a huge fireplace for the men to gather, eat and play cards in. The bathrooms had old wooden stalls and the long hallway had numbered wooden lockers. The kitchen was designed cafeteria style with a long, fold down counter to walk by and pick up your plate of hot food after a long shift.  There was a room that was probably used for storage that served us as the kids’ bedroom.  We had partitioned off a portion of the large gathering room with bookshelves for our bedroom but now I needed a dark and quiet room away from the hubbub of family life to recover from surgery and treatment.  In the back, with its own tiny bathroom, was a small narrow room that we used as a walk in closet. With the addition of a twin bed and lamp, it became a sick room for me. We learned later that this room was used as an infirmary for the railroad men.  It was an odd house but it served us well.  The kids have fond memories of all that rambling space, long corridors and generous wrap around porch.  Collectors would come to the door and ask to look in the attic for antique railroad gear.  We never ventured into the full sized upper story which was accessible only by ladder and avoided the dark scary basement as well.

I spent a lot of time in that railroad infirmary alone. Treatments began in April and concluded in September. I used books to distract myself from my pain, prayer to fortify my soul, music to soothe the fear but I would eventually always give in to the tears and the self pity and wretchedness that is worse than the sickness itself or even the poison they use to cure it. Finally, I used the drugs they gave me to numb body and mind and sleep.

I wasn’t alarmed the first time I saw her sitting at the foot of my bed.  I was glad not to be alone with my thoughts, it was so comforting to have her there.  We never spoke.  I saw her only a couple of times but there were many times I knew she was there.  I could feel her comfortable weight at the end of my bed and knew she was looking over me, looking out for me, even protecting me.  She gave me the feeling of being a watched over child with no adult responsibilities and I would remember that none of it was in my hands anyway, why was I fretting?  I guess that is what peace feels like.   Like surrender.  Peace isn’t something you grit your teeth to feel, it is like when anything but being at perfect peace just seems silly.  Eventually, I realized that it made no sense that a black woman would periodically walk into my room and that she couldn’t really be physically there but by then it didn’t matter.  My worldview allows for the Divine, angels and demons all outside of our physical reality.  I’m not sure who or what she was.  A shadow of a comforter from another time? A ghost? She wasn’t what I had pictured God or an angel to look like but none of that seemed to matter either.

I didn’t tell anyone about her until long after my chemo was over.  I didn’t want anyone to dismiss it as the drugs or wishful thinking or to diminish my experience of her.  Then one day I told my sister over the phone and tried to make it casual and easy to backpedal out of in case she thought I was crazy.  

She didn’t think I was crazy.  

That was fifteen years ago and although I’ve had a few more rounds with cancer since, I’ve never seen her again.  The memory of my black angel fades with each passing year but sometimes, late at night, I feel a weight at the end of my bed but when I look down, it’s only the cat.   

Daniel

The guest pastor put a transparency on the overhead projector. An image of a noble, ancient warrior was projected to massive proportions on the pull down screen.  He was large and bare chested with a thin crown circling his head and perfect, shoulder length ringlets.  (The image, not the speaker.) His face was handsome, fierce, and terrifying. This was in great contrast to the projection of the speaker’s weak, elderly voice in the microphone as he spoke of feet of clay and forgotten kingdoms while the giant warrior loomed over his right shoulder in the darkened sanctuary.  

I looked around the church, there was a small crowd tonight.  Only the familiar faces of the core “inner circle” came to Sunday night service here at First Baptist.   My Dad would often lead Sunday night hymn sings and knew how to work a crowd. He always picked the rousing hymns we could all sing well and everyone would be laughing at his corny jokes between songs. The whole event made you feel warm and somehow tender towards all the other Sunday nighters. Tonight’s exegesis of Daniel was no hymn sing and it had me squirming in my seat.

It was 1974 and I was 13, sitting near the back of the church with my church friend Debbie.  Her dad was also a deacon which meant she had just as many attendance awards as I did and came to most Sunday night services as well.  We were allowed to sit together as long as we didn’t get giggly or disruptive.  We usually drew pictures and wrote notes on the back of the visitor cards but tonight I was listening.  There was something about the dim room and the way the guest speaker spoke.  I felt as though he were deciphering some holy secrets specifically for we, the faithful Sunday nighters. I leaned forward. I tried to focus. I knew it was from Daniel but this was not the lion’s den story I was all too familiar with.  He was talking about blazing wheels and strange beasts, rivers of fire and sealed books.  I was confused.  More than confused, I was scared.  I looked around and everyone was blandly attentive as if this was a completely ordinary Sunday night service.  How could they all look so calm?

This was some kind of deep magic, terrifying and unknowable.  I was off balance and out of my depth.  I didn’t sleep that night, Daniel’s vision haunted me that night and well….ever since.  I can see the slide of the fierce warrior in my mind’s eye right now, 40 years later.  

I am not really sure if it was my church’s particular emphasis or only my selective listening but I grew up with a lot of fear concerning God and Salvation.  I was never quite sure if I was one of the “elect” and everyone else’s complete confidence always troubled me.  There was a lot of teaching about end times, a lake of fire and everlasting damnation with that particularly disturbing detail of “gnashing of teeth”.  I selfishly prayed that God would refrain from returning until I could experience some of the milestones of life, next week’s birthday party, getting my driver’s license, my first kiss. This imminent end times ideology did make me a zealous missionary as a child. I signed all of my friends up for church camp but I was motivated mostly by fear.  I asked Jesus into my heart weekly if not nightly, just to be on the safe side.

Around this time I received a Christmas present from my scandalously divorced and shunned, Uncle Don.  The gift was C.S. Lewis’s book The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.  This was an allegory written for children and the Christ character is a great Lion who willing dies at the hands of the evil White witch to save the children. I cried with the Lucy character when I read of the humiliation of the blameless lion being bound, shaved and killed.  I rejoiced when he rose from the dead to romp and play with young Lucy.  This was something I could connect with.  I pondered this in my young heart for a long time.  Was it sacrilegious to imagine Christ as Aslan the great Lion, or was this a breakthrough on my way to understanding the true love of Christ? I had memorized the verse about God sacrificing His only son for me but it had never really stirred any emotion in me. Now remembering the fictional lion’s sacrifice, my head bowed with true reverence in prayer and not just in compliance to family tradition.

Much of the unapproachable “Ancient of Days” God of my youth and even the beautiful, golden Lion, has been replaced by a joyful, vibrant young gardener God. The image of God walking through His garden in the cool of the evening refreshes my soul. I see him searching his tender plants for signs of the flower bud forming.  Rejoicing in all stages of the fruit ripening. He even invites me into the process as He reveals trouble spots and direction for the garden that is my life.  He delights in all that he has made.  He delights in me.   

Until now I have successfully avoided studying the mystical, vision-filled books of the bible and have always prefered the poetical, historical or practical bits.  However, I have been feeling the pull of my gardener God to revisit some of these teachings and dally down the road of a more mystical faith.  I am finding many people of faith combine practical care of the world and those in it with the deep magic of the mystical side of God and faith.  So after 40 years and many incarnations of my understanding of God, I am now ready to explore what so many Christians before me have known.  Confident in the love of the vinedresser beside me I will look into the eyes of that fierce, stone warrior and ask “What have you to teach me?”

Kenya

I couldn’t sleep.  This was unusual given the long day I’d had but my head was buzzing.  I had never felt so strange.  

I had signed up to go on a 7 week summer mission to Uganda to administer  much needed immunizations to the many new orphans that were a result of Idi Amin’s reign of terror.  Our trip had to be changed to Kenya at the last minute because of new dangers to foreigners there, so tonight I found myself in the nicest building in Tharaka, Kenya, a remote outpost where most folks still lived in stick huts.  I was sleeping or rather lying awake, in a cinder block house with no electricity, no plumbing and no glass in the windows.  Our mission group was split into two groups.  The adult leaders had taken half of the group to work in a hospital in a completely different part of Kenya.  The fifteen folks in my group had gotten on a colorful bus headed for Tharaka.  Our student leader who had grown up in Kenya and spoke Swahili was bringing a van and would meet us there.  That’s how this day began.

Most of our group were from Westmont college, an elite, expensive liberal arts college in Montecito, California.  Montecito boasted more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation at the time.  My fellow compadres and I were children of government leaders or wealthy businessmen. Westmont had stiff entrance requirements so we were collectively smarter than the average bear.  Among us were many team captains, valedictorians and my personal crowning glory, prom queens. This was the early eighties, the height of the preppy years, so many of us had leather top sider shoes (for Sunday afternoon sailing), pastel izod shirts and perfectly feathered blond hair.  These facts combined with our average age being just over twenty made us the most beautiful, rich, competent, arrogant, know it alls on the planet.  The next 24 hours would seriously challenge my good opinion of myself.

The bus to Tharaka had to have been one of the most alien places I had ever been.  The tinny music coming from the bus radio was completely unfamiliar to me, the chickens in the overhead compartments, breast feeding toddlers, bright clothes, smell of body odor combined with smoke and constant stares reminded me I was not in Kansas anymore.  Food venders would climb aboard at every stop and shout at us to buy their strange wares. I had no idea what the fried triangles were or what they contained or how much they cost.  I was still so unfamiliar with the money that I didn’t know if they were fifty cents or ten dollars.  They smelled good but I was determined not to eat or drink anything at all on this full day trip because of the whole bathroom situation.  I had seen women pee in the street in Nairobi and some of the other girls and I had peed in a drain we found when we could not find a toilet anywhere, not something I wanted to repeat.  At least I was traveling light, I was hauling a full sized suitcase, a sleeping bag appropriate for Everest, a cot to keep bugs and snakes at bay and a baritone ukulele. The uke seemed like a good idea in the states.  I was wearing a baby pink skirt and white peasant blouse perfect for singing ‘do re me’ on my ukulele with adoring children surrounding me but surprisingly impractical for an 8 hour dusty, sweaty bus ride.  After a very long day of not understanding what people were saying to us or about us we arrived at the bus stop with the handpainted wooden sign that read THARAKA.  We all conferred and agreed that this was, in fact, the stop we were to get out at. We piled out with all of our stuff and the bus driver laughed as he closed the door and drove away leaving us in a cloud of red African dust.  The initial relief of being off the bus was soon replaced with the niggling doubt that this was maybe the wrong stop.  There were no buildings, no people, nothing.  Just a scraggly tree that offered minimal shade from the searing, equatorial sun.  This was before cell phones so if our Swahili speaking companion did not find us, we would be lost forever.  I don’t remember much talk as we waited for the others to arrive.  We sat on our hard, samsonite suitcases in silence unwilling to voice what we were all thinking. No cars passed.  I was so thirsty but more than that I was wondering if I would ever see a toilet again.  Then the blue van could be seen cresting the hill on its way to pick us up. I remember the surprised look on Peter’s face when he pulled up.  We must have greeted him as if we had been shipwrecked for weeks.  We were so happy and relieved to see him.  

We drove to the cinder block house where we would spend the next 7 weeks.  The villagers had brought a live goat to prepare a feast for our arrival.  We were to build a church building for our fellow believers in this desolate, desert village.  When they saw us, the local children began to throw rocks at us and yell in fear because they had never seen white people and thought we were ghosts. The folks from Tharaka spoke english so we could explain that we were in fact not ghosts.  Everyone wondered if we had been in a severe fire because their black skin turns white when it is burned.  After assuring them we were just fine they still looked skeptical.  Why did we cover our feet with shoes and socks? Was something wrong with our feet?  Did they bleed easily?  Why did we all have such baby skin on the bottoms of our feet?  Could we even walk without shoes?  Again we had to assure them that we were not deformed.  They asked us to help dress out the goat they had just slaughtered and were again surprised at our ineptitude at this fundamental skill.  Did we not have goats of our own?  What did we eat? This was harder to explain.  I eased away from the goat butchering and tried to help out with the outside cook fires the women were making. They shook their heads at our feeble attempts.  We used way too much wood and made generally lame fires.  I saw in their eyes that now we were not only deformed but slightly retarded.  Their small children had more practical skills than we did.  When the boiled goat was done I was feeling a little sick.  It could have been the 8 hour bus ride, dehydration, or my physical reaction to the gutted goat hanging from the tree in the yard.  I put some rice on my plate and gently refused the meat.  Now they thought I was either sickly or unappreciative, retarded and deformed. This was not at all how I imagined this would go.  We sat around the fire and the villagers sang like only Africans can sing.  They sang loud, joyous and effortlessly. It was spectacular. They asked us to sing and we squeaked out some lame noises we used to think was music.  All I wanted to do was lay on top of my minus ten completely incorrect sleeping bag and hide from the so very correct judgement of these folks I had come to help.  My skills of knowing how to dress, knowing how to do my hair, and knowing the difference between and salad fork and a dinner fork now seemed, for the first time in my life. like the most ridiculous skill set in the world.  To them I was ugly, useless and stupid and what was keeping me up was that they were right!

China hutch

The same china hutch that is sitting in the corner of my one hundred year old farm kitchen today sat in my mother’s formal colonial dining room in the seventies and in my grandmother’s coastal craftsman style house in the fifties. The delicately rounded glass sides gives the illusion of fragility but I know it is tougher than it looks. I have witnessed many chair bangs, toddler trips and interstate moves in the fifty plus years I have known this piece of furniture and it has not sustained one crack.  Not to say that there haven't been setbacks. The beautiful old skeleton key has been lost forever and the mirrors in the back have darkened with age but it continues to house the beautiful and the breakable for generations of table setters.

Elsie kept her set of Spode pink tower china along with her collection of violet adorned dishes and cups in it. Grandma Elsie was the first of her friends to rebelliously bob her hair in the twenties and one of the few women who had a career in the prestigious government buildings in the forties.  Her smoker’s cackle, keen mind and black sensible shoes were in stark contrast to her pink, flowery china and her penchant for small, dainty violets. This fondness for the soft and sweet reflected a part of her I only ever saw in her china preferences. I remember her signature creamed spinach in the shallow pink soup bowls that I wish I still had. The bowls, not so much the spinach.

Beverley kept her “Sunday only” dishes and Irish Waterford crystal in the china hutch.  The dishes were gold rimmed and formal, showing Mom’s desire to remind herself that she was now a woman of means and not the poor daughter of a philandering used car salesman and a sharp tongued, working mother. The hand me down pieces from Elsie were kept on the lowest shelf and only used for utilitarian purposes. The hutch was in the formal dining room. A room devoted to large formal gatherings. The table was large, the window looking out on the rose garden was large and we always had beautiful large floral centerpiece for every holiday. The hutch was a showcase and not merely a storage facility. Her parties were legendary. Eggnog served in crystal punch cups from the crystal punch bowl and tiny rye sandwiches on the crystal treat tower not only indulged but impressed the guests.

I inherited the china hutch along with my mother’s set of Blue Danube dishes in this decade. I also inherited the odd but useful soup tureen from grandma Elsie. It was not of her set and perhaps has an even older history unknown to me and now lost forever.  I also house a plain silver bud vase from my plain quaker-like grandma Irene in it. My father’s mother, Irene, wore exclusively black long sleeved dresses or navy blue long sleeved dresses. It is not surprising that I have no memory or evidence of any table finery from her. The singular bud vase is appropriate to her nature. I have four sizes of crystal goblets from my mother-in-law’s wealthy and scandalous tante Jennie. A different goblet for brandy, port, wine and water.  Childless and frivolous she left much of her finery to my Corel loving mother-in-law.  Holiday dinners are my chance to open the china hutch and bring out not only beautiful china and crystal but beloved memories of my elder women.  My humble mother in law’s extensive dutch silverware with the fish forks and sterling knife rests complete the table. Who knew? The woman who served thanksgiving dinner on sturdy paper plates had boxes of silver and crystal in the garage inherited from her dutch elders.

As I continue to inherit from the generations long dead or long past hosting dinners I notice how cluttered the hutch has become and reflect on the time when I will divvy up the fancy ware to the generations coming up. I am sad my daughter and daughters in laws will never know the sturdy women behind these dainty plates. Like the china hutch, we are stronger than we look. No doubt my children will live through hard times of their own and find their own strengths. They may not have memories of the women whose blood flows in their veins but maybe some morning they will choose my favorite shamrock china mug for their coffee and remember me.

Dickie

Family stories

I come from a dynasty of Christians on my father’s side.  Men and women who have followed Jesus for generations.  There are many stories of  human faith and divine faithfulness but there is one story that captivated me as a child because it had to do with that greatest of all mysteries...death.

My father is the second of four brothers.  They grew up in a small Eastern Oregon town in the 30’s.  Whenever my uncles got together, my siblings and cousins and I would get them talking about their childhood and to our combined delight, the well worn stories would spill out.  Stories I still tell my children of the boys climbing water towers, swimming across the snake river and accidentally lighting the neighbor’s field on fire when smoking “indian tobacco”.  All of the stories had the same predictable ending, nervously waiting for their punishment from my stern, no-nonsense Grandfather in the black widow infested basement.  I loved the Tom Sawyer quality of these stories, the hours of unsupervised time and the never ending summer days I imagined children had in the “good, old days.”  There was one story that was different from all the rest but I always wanted to hear it. Usually my Grandma was the one to tell it and all the uncles would get quiet and reverent while she spoke. The rest of us followed suit and grew quiet to better hear Grandma's emotion- filled voice.  It was the story of when the youngest brother, Dickie, died at the age of 14.

Dickie had had some kind of childhood cancer that required the removal of his arm when he was a boy.  Despite this disability he had participated in many of the brothers’ antics and was laughing and rough housing in all the photos.  He had even learned to fly the neighbor’s crop duster.  He was quoted as saying that he never felt pain while he was flying.  All the boys learned to fly and for two of them it became a lifelong love.  In 1945, at the age of 14, Dickie took ill again and my dad came home on leave from the army due to his brother’s imminent death.  All the other boys came home to be with the family as well and they took turns watching over young Dickie and tending to his needs.  One evening, while my heart-sick Grandmother watched over her dying child, she noticed his eyes opening and his face lighting up.  His lungs were filled with fluid and it was very difficult for him to breathe or speak.  Dickie would shut his eyes tightly only to open them in astonished wonder again and again.  Grandma Irene leaned close and asked him, “Dickie, what is it?  What do you see?”  He struggled to answer her and finally he looked at her and said “I see the Truth.”  Within the hour, he was gone.  The family gathered around the body and my dad played a hymn on the piano while the others sang in their combined grief, relief and wonderment to what they had just witnessed.  That moment bonded the family like no other.  The hymn became a touchpoint that always brought wistful looks to the aging faces of my father and his brothers.  The music transported them to that room, that event, that moment in time when they experienced one of the most horrible and yet most faith affirming moments of their young lives.  I watched the change in their faces and my young faith was affirmed.  I have heard of people seeing a nondescript tunnel or a bright light but there is no mistaking the meaning of “The Truth”.

The bible states in John 14:6, “ I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  No one has any doubt that what Dickie saw that night was indeed, Jesus himself coming to bring his child home.

In my fifties I went to the small town where my father and his brothers grew up and searched out the graveyard where many of the names from the old stories are now carved on stones.  I found the favorite Uncle Sky, the fast swimmer, Paul Weese and the patriarch, Orrin Bull.   As an adult it is easy to look back at my own childhood memories and wonder if I am not perhaps glorifying some of my father’s old stories.  As a typical westerner I am not always comfortable with mystery or unscientific spirituality but then I found the simple headstone of my young uncle.  I read his name and the dates of his short life.  Then time melted and I was again that eager faced child hearing about the safe passage of young Dickie to heaven.  For there, carved in stone, for generations to see, was the reminder of that old story and Dickie’s vision from that long ago summer night.  It read “I am the Truth.”