Category Archives: writingdownthestory in Blog

Where I’m From

07 Thursday Mar 2019

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I’ve spent the past week in a gorgeous historic house on the south Whidbey Island banks of the Saratoga Passage of Puget Sound. I first attended Christina Baldwin’s Self as Source of the Story writing retreat in 2012, five months after I moved back to this corner of the country. I’ve returned to the alumni retreat four times. It’s a gift I’ve given myself.

I’m writing, reading, and listening to the powerful stories of my writing sisters, eating delicious healthy food, watching eagles carrying sticks into a nearby copse for nest building and two coyote pups trotting about. The first four days the cerulean sky reflected on the calm waters and the white mountain range sparkled on the horizon. Yesterday we cocooned in front of the fire, as the world disappeared in gently falling snow.

I am honored and humbled to sit in communion with the natural world and in community with these beautiful women and bear witness to their sacred words and experiences. Although each year some of them begin as strangers, they are my tribe.

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It’s different to be here this year, not escaping the lonely claustrophobic years of caring for my mother; and not writing about those years, that manuscript complete for now. Yesterday, on the first day of Lent and the new moon, in the midst of this gathering of women, some of whom first heard the beginnings of my story more than six years ago, I pushed the manuscript out of the nest. I sent it to a small press/editorial company (that auspiciously had its beginnings the same year I began my journey of mother care) for an assessment. Later this month I am going to submit the first 26 pages to a contest. It’s time to see if it can fly.

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And now it’s time to move on to a new project. This week I’ve immersed myself in the letters written by my elders during WWII, when they were younger than my children are now, and the stories of their lives on the Michigan farm when they were the ages of my grandchildren. It’s hard to put down an old familiar project and pick up a new one. I feel a little lost. But I look toward spinning the threads of my ancestors’ story into yarn, that it might then be woven into a blanket to wrap around those who will never know them: my children’s children’s children’s children, and their cousins.

The Seventh Generation Principle is based on an ancient Iroquois philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. The decisions my grandparents made in the way they raised their children in love and strong values, and saw that all six of them got a college education—inconceivable for the 1930s and on a farmer’s income during the Great Depression—can be seen one, two, and three generations later (my lifetime) and will continue, I trust, to the seventh generation and beyond.

This is where I’m from. This is where the seventh generation of my family will be from.

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These are the legacy years, when we of a certain age look back at where we have been and ahead to what we will one day leave behind. In the legacy writing circle I facilitate, we wrote “Where I’m From” poems last week, in the style of George Ella Lyon. (How serendipitous that my father’s name is George and his mother’s name is Ella.) I invite you to write your own poem—it’s so much fun. (Google “where I’m from template” for help writing it, apologies that I can’t get a direct link.) Here is mine.

Where I’m From

I am from the slamming wooden screen door and Mr. Bear’s house in the woods,
from Breck shampoo and Ipana toothpaste, iodine and oleum percomorphum.

I am from the house on the bay and the home on the hill,
from stinky sulphur mud at low tide and fresh perfume of evergreens after rain.
I am from the big leaf maple whose arms hide me from parental view.

I am from the bookmobile and the green canoe,
from Stellajoe and George
and Ella and Jessie.
I am from “go help your mother,” “don’t sass me,” and my southern grandmother’s “well ahl swanee.”

I’m from staying put and cross-country moves,
from independence and courage.
I’m from crossing the ocean on a sailing ship and the country on the Empire Builder.
I am from my parents’ Great Depression,
and from my man on the moon.

I am from “This Is My Father’s World,” Girl Scout badges, and piano lessons in the pink house.
From Boston baked beans and chocolate “stir over low heat until thick” Jell-o pudding.
I’m from homemade 2×4 building blocks and dish gardens,
from heart disease and dementia.

I am from eight decades of antiquity stuffed onto basement shelves.
From a thousand letters and shoe boxes of photographs
snapped on cameras that line my window sill
where I sit at my father’s desk to put stories of days and people long gone between the covers of a book.

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In Search of My Mother’s Garden

28 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in writingdownthestory in Blog, writingdownthestory in Essay

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The house is not the only place that needs to be cleaned out, or where I search for my mother. The hillside garden—that was grass I sometimes mowed, before I left home in 1970, with the Toro Flymo hover mower to avoid having to be on raking detail—is the only outdoor area my mother really tended to in the past couple decades. It was a glorious riot of colorful perennials and flowering shrubs all spring and summer: heather, rhododendron, Shasta daisies, lavender, yarrow, iris, allium, dianthus, sweet woodruff, my grandmother’s lemon lilies.

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Emma and Wynne’s 2012 wedding; the last time the garden looked good.

I’ve been here seven years this summer, and have paid it only cursory attention, pulling blackberry vines and cutting down dead stems—nearly wiping out the Canterbury bells in my zealous outrage at having to do the task at all after my mother stopped hiring people to care for it, and stopped caring about it herself. I don’t like working in other people’s gardens, and even my own interest me much more in the creation than the maintenance. It lost all its variety under my watch, only the most hardy survived.

One day last week, though, I walked past it on my way to somewhere else and realized that in the barrenness of winter, before the weeds take hold, it doesn’t look as daunting. I could just rake out the moss, I thought, kicking it up easily with the toe of my rubber boot; bring in some top soil.

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Nothing seems as daunting to me in winter, when all is stripped down to its bones. I see more clearly when there are neither flowers nor weeds; potential rather than obstacles. I’m embarking on a new writing project, diving into the lives of my father and his siblings before I knew them through 1200 letters written during WWII and boxes of photographs, hoping to record their legacy and put it between book covers. It’s easier to attend that project at the desk by the electric fireplace while the rain splats against the window and patters on the roof, occasionally thickening with fat snow flakes, than when sun and warmth beckon. But where to start? How to move forward on this epic idea that right now is hair thin?

Last Sunday, as the wintry mix came down outside the window, covering the moss and weed garden, I dozed in my father’s recliner with my sister’s cat—on loan while she was away—while half listening to a rebroadcast of interviews on “Story the Future.”

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Mary Alice Arthur said something that woke me from my snooze: “Start with the crack, not with boulder. You know,” she said, “that’s where the light is.” Oh, I thought, kind of like don’t look too far ahead.

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What can I do toward getting the letters and the stories my father and his siblings have written of their childhood braided together? How can I bring my mother’s garden to new life as I am doing inside the house, moving out unloved possessions to spotlight those that mean something to me? Where is the crack?

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My dad on the left. Donald at right. The sixth child not yet born.

I can read the letters and the stories, study the photographs. (Thank you to my cousin David for scanning and sending 50 photos I’ve never seen before from albums rescued from the farm after our Uncle Donald died at 106.) I can figure out what I want to have learned about this American mid-west farm family at the end of the book. That’s all I need to focus on right now. What comes in the middle can be left for later discovery.

And I can strip the garden down to dirt. Those cracks are all I need to focus on right now.

When February’s snow and rain took a one day hiatus last Thursday, I skipped my weekly yoga and Olympia day and got outside while the ice was still formed on the puddles and fog still filled the valley as the sun rose promisingly above it.

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I cut down the dead stems of last year’s daisies and rudbeckia, raked out the moss, dug up clumps of grassy weeds, pulled out rogue blackberry vines, and finished extracting the dead branches from the rhododendron thicket. (And, as always, tried to avoid getting sucked down the rabbit hole of all the other tasks that need to be done. One crack at a time.) For the first time in these years here, I started getting curious about what the garden could be. It will always be my mother’s garden, but it’s time to put my own touch on it.

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Before.

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Headed toward cleaned out and ready for what comes next.

As I sat at the dining room table eating my lunch during a brief break, I wondered if my mother is pleased that I’ve finally taken an interest in her favorite flower bed. Just then a bald eagle glided down the valley and swooped over the house and back into view, making several passes. A few minutes after it disappeared, a red-tailed hawk took its place. I only rarely see these birds of prey here, up close enough to see the white head, the red feathers. When I do, I imagine they are my mother and father checking in and, hopefully, approving what I’m doing on this property they loved and nourished for most of my life. I took their appearance as a sign that all is well; though I suppose it could as easily have been a warning to back off.

My body aching, I was grateful for the return to rain, snow, sleet, and wind the next day. I buried myself again in my aunt’s letters to her parents from a dirt-floored tent in Italy in 1944 with the 36th General Hospital, where she washed her clothes in her helmet. When favorable weather returns, I’ll give my mother’s garden one more pass with hoe and shovel, then bring in topsoil and fertilizer. I will let it sit this summer to see what was deep enough in the ground to escape my decluttering. The daisies and rudbeckia, the heather, a clump of daffodils remain above ground. Hopefully the Canterbury bells, alium, and lilies will come back and I can mark their positions. Next spring I will plant around the enduring presence of my mother’s hands.

These are the cracks. This is what I can do right now to find my mother’s garden and to make my own mark. I will be with my writing tribe on Whidbey Island for the next week, diving into whatever opening I can find on my ambitious writing project; striving not to run into the boulder of self-doubt and the magnitude of that adventure.

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Honoring the Past…and Cursing the Remains

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in Notes from Three of Earth Farm, writingdownthestory in Blog, writingdownthestory in Memories, writingdownthestory in Photograph

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I’m immersed in the past living in this house, even as I continue to update it. I’ve moved more stuff to the storage room permanently as I empty rooms temporarily for the installation of new flooring. I hold in my hands a pink and white crocheted hot pad, that perhaps my grandmother made, from the dining room buffet drawer and wonder what I’m to do with it.

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I find three small plates in the back corner of the buffet cupboard and read the note my mother wrote eight years and eleven days before she died in her strong script that held no hint of what was to come. Of course she included instructions. The plates don’t bring me joy, but they are heirlooms. Sigh. Three plates, three daughters. At least I only need put one back in the cupboard.

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Knowing they would eventually come down to paint the wall, I removed the award plaques and certificates from my father’s study several weeks ago and crammed them into a cupboard in the basement. I talk to my friend Elizabeth who has been my caregiving pen pal for years as we cared for our mothers on opposite coasts and tried to stay in touch with our sanity. Her mother just died. Finally. She’s cleaning out her mother’s apartment, bringing boxes to her house. She also cleaned out her childhood home when she moved her parents closer to her a few years back, and took boxes to her house.

“Think of all the wood and metal award plaques in this country,” she says. “What are children to do with them in the end times? They mean nothing to anyone but the recipient. [Even that, only at the moment of the handshake.] We’re filling up landfills with things that will last thousands of years!” I hadn’t thought of that. The cheap trophies every child who plays t-ball gets at the end of the season… “They should be banned,” Elizabeth says.

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I am proud to say I haven’t a single plaque or trophy to my name. My children can thank me later for being so unremarkable. The tiny plaster of Paris busts of dead musicians I got as a piano student were long ago sent to the landfill, before I knew to worry about that. I did not inherit the Depression era saver gene—or my parents unknowingly drove it from me.

The margarine containers our mothers didn’t throw out so as not to fill landfills are left to us to discard. (Hopefully when they are put in recycling bins, they actually do turn into something new.) The military uniforms. (The local museum has all they need.)  Eleven 3-inch binders of letters written between 1942 and 1946. (I’m told there is a national museum in Louisiana that might take them when I’m finished with them.) All! This! Stuff! Multiplied by hundreds of thousands of parents who came of age at the confluence of the Great Depression and the beginning of WWII who have or are leaving it all behind at the speed of light.

This is sounding remarkably similar to my post at the beginning of the month. (Read it here if you missed it.) It’s my life right now, and some day my sisters and I really will have to figure out what to do with the pink hot pad and all the rest. But that is not today.

I spent a rare full day Sunday working on my new writing project. Not actually writing, mind you, but preparing. I’m still revising my memoir of years of elder care and accompaniment too. 138,000 words is down to 113,000. It needs to be fewer than 100,000 before I can even hire an editor.

I’m itching to move on to my epic undertaking involving the 11 binders of letters and a collection of stories my father and his siblings wrote about their childhood on the farm if I have any hope of finishing it before I die. And I need full days to immerse myself. But there’s this old house and its stuff and the roof needs to be cleaned off again and there is a blocked trail and at least three large branches down to saw into firewood and spring weeds and blackberry vines are coming soon to the overgrown property and someone needs to be hired to rebuild rotting steps and paint the deck.

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I’m reading my aunt’s letters now, and it’s throwing me back in time to the departed generation of my family long before I knew them. She’s in Africa, Italy, and France in 1943 and 1944, washing clothes in cold water in an army helmet, trying to breathe on frigid days when the wind blows through the pipe of the coal stove and fills the room with smoke and soot, and the hospital unit has moved again and she’s back in a tent with dirt floors. She falls in love, twice. I’m wondering with her what happened to her navy man Roy when letters are returned “whereabouts unknown.”

I unfold a letter to her little brother and a photograph of Bill, her second love, falls out. “The next addition to the Staebler family” is written on the back. I read that they applied for a wedding license, but she doesn’t know if they will still be in the same country when, or if, it comes—or if he will even be alive. I know there is drama to come; he was not my uncle.

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I’m there with my grandmother as she provides shelter for my mother while my father provides weather forecasts for bombardiers in England; imagining her writing hundreds of letters and reading those from her far away children, making notes on envelopes to remind her of what they have asked her to send them: film (if she can find it), popcorn, chocolate, pajamas.

I have a lively communication with two of my cousins who accompany me on this journey through the Staebler archives. David, bless his heart, is executor of our uncle’s estate, which included cleaning out the farm house the family lived in for a century. At least there are no 30-year-old jars of canned tomatoes in my house. His sister Linda sorted through my aunt’s and uncle’s letters to their mother and put them in five of the binders to go with those my father wrote to his young wife and his mother. She’s downsizing her living space soon and is sending me our aunt’s scrapbooks, photographs, and account of her service. (Insert wide-eyed emoticon.) David has found photographs our grandmother took of life on the farm and is scanning them for me. I’m thrilled to receive it all; and…more stuff.

I sit here at my desk now and wonder how I’m going to pull all this together and get it between book covers. And will anybody care? Which reminds me, I still have my mother’s tapes of her life story to transcribe. I care. Maybe all that matters is to know that I honored their living. And that I remember them.

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Notes from Three of Earth Farm for the New Year: The Rhododendron

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in Notes from Three of Earth Farm, writingdownthestory in Blog, writingdownthestory in Photograph

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New Year’s Eve

I pruned the rhododendrons by the front steps this week. Drastically pruned them. I love how it opened up the front of the house. Like trimming up the fir tree on the other side of the house two years ago, I feel like I can see beyond the present that sometimes closes in around me and out into the what’s next. And I wonder what might grow with more light.

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And then I felt bad. Did I make a mistake? No, I didn’t ask “her” permission, as a friend queried. But if I had, the conversation might have gone something like this.

“My dear rhododendron twins. You have been growing here beside these steps for some decades now. And except for this past summer after my mother died, you haven’t bloomed for many years. You seem like you might be yearning to get back to your roots and start anew. Could I be right about that?”

“I feel weighed down by the responsibility to hold up all these branches,” she replied. “The birds don’t nest in me any more, I don’t bloom any more. My soul is buried down here where even I can’t find it. I’m tired. And they are holding me back from what might be next.”

“But you did bloom beautifully last year. It was incredible.”

“I wanted to honor your mother, who planted me, back when she was young. It seemed fitting that when she died, I should pay my respects. Really it took everything I had. Like the surge of lucidity and energy some of the dying have before the end.”

“I’m thinking of cutting you way back. You will be very exposed until you put out some new growth.”

“It sounds vulnerable, for sure. But I think this is the year, this is the time to step out into the world and take a risk. It may take me a few years to get comfortable, and I’ll probably wish I could just hide again and not have anyone scrutinizing me, but it will get better. And like your mother now, I will be full of energy and new life again! Go for it!”

And so it is. With the rhodies and with me as the sun sets on the last day.

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I sit in candle and tree and fire light on the last night. I have written down and ceremonially burned what I want to let go of as the new year begins. No more remaining tight in the bud of fear, as comfortable as hiding is.

I make another list of 2018 accomplishments and successes. It is much longer. It includes sending my mother on, fulfilling my promise to care for her to the end.

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Through many wind storms, this cairn in honor of my mother has stood untoppled for months.

I’m finishing up Michelle Obama’s excellent memoir, “Becoming.” She says of moving from her loving and encouraging, but always financially struggling, family into the opulence and spotlight of the White House (and even long before, when she went to ivy league colleges), she felt like an imposter.

Each time I have stepped out of my comfort zone I have literally told myself I have no business in the place I have put myself; and it has held me back from taking the next step, paralyzed by fear of someone finding out I’m not good enough.

And so, my mantra for 2019 is: ‘Am I good enough? Yes, I am.’ (Michelle Obama)

These two days of looking back and looking forward have become my consistently favorite days of the year. I did not—haven’t for many years—stay up until midnight. I do not revel or watch a ball drop. I don’t want company nor invitations. I sit here in the firelit room in the waning hours of 2018, aware that soon it will no longer be the year in which my mother left. And I weep. Was I good enough? I hope so.

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The moon out the windows is waning too. And the fresh cuts on the stubs of rhododendrons are exposed to tonight’s sub-freezing temperature. Tomorrow I will look to my goals for 2019 that will send me spiraling, exposed, beyond what is comfortable. Will I be good enough?

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New Year’s Day

As the sun rises on the first day I sit watching the shifting sky and letting the shift occur in me too. Out of the dark comes the technicolor dawn.

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Along with a walk in the woods adjacent to my home, I sit by another fire contemplating what I want in the year ahead. As I have for several years now, I do my friend Joanna Powell Colbert’s new year tarot spread with her beautiful Gaian deck. Usually the cards and my interpretation of them bring up thoughts that are spot on responses to the seven questions. This year’s is very confusing. Maybe that in itself is a response.

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I dream in the new year with a list of intentions. Joanna, my favorite earth mystic, soul guide, and friend, says keep your list to just three or four goals. Otherwise you set yourself up for failure. I have seven. I think they are all doable if I just decide I want it enough. Though there is the one that’s on my list every year, and I haven’t done it yet. Walk more in the woods I loved as a child, and learn the names of what lives there, as my mother knew. Ironically “Explorer of Earth” is the card I drew in the “what do I leave behind in the new year” position.

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As Joanna says of the turning of the year, “[This is] a time when the old no longer seems to fit, but the new is only a dream.” And so it is with the rhododendrons and with me. The space has been cleared, the seeds of an idea have been planted. And now we water and fertilize and wait and see what will bloom.

Will I be good enough? Yes, I will. Will I succeed or fail? Time will tell, but it won’t turn on a lack of planting and pruning.

With a garden you never know for sure what will or won’t happen—whether anything, in fact, will grow…We’d asked everyone to watch what we were doing. Now we had to wait for the results. (Michelle Obama)

And the sun sets on the first day. And now the work of the new year begins.

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The First Christmas without My Mother

25 Tuesday Dec 2018

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I’m spending Christmas at a friend’s wee place on the edge of Hood Canal on the Olympic Peninsula. The Olympics are hidden today, but were sparkling when I arrived yesterday after crossing Puget Sound on the ferry from the Emerald City with the Cascades as backdrop.

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After dropping my family off at the airport the night before, with dinner at Chuck’s before that. (Word today has it that Adrian did take off the cape to sleep, but not the cuffs, and donned it again up awakening.)

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Today, Christmas, I reluctantly got dressed at noon and went for a two and a half mile hike at Twanoh State Park next door.

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As I walked through the deep damp wood, I realized this is probably the first Christmas of my life I haven’t at least talked to my mother by phone. It feels strange. My mind drifted back to the letters my father wrote to her during the war. So long ago. My children are older than they were then.

When I got back to the couch, I looked them up. Christmas is such a time of nostalgia. It’s what makes it special and, for so many whose present doesn’t measure up to the past, sad. My next writing project is to do something with these letters and the story of a family separated by a war. All of them missing each other. They are all gone now, and I miss them.

December 25, 1942
Ann Arbor, Michigan 

(My father was home in Ann Arbor from NYC where he was in officer training; his love was at her home in Tennessee.)

Merry Christmas, Stellajoe. I tried to call you this afternoon but the operator said that it wouldn’t go through for 3 hours because of over crowded lines so I waxed patriotic & cancelled it. I would liked to have talked to you & wished you a Merry Christmas. I wish I could celebrate it with you. I hope that I can the next one. I hope that the war will be over. I hope that you’ll love me as much as I do you. For if you do your name won’t be English.

Sincerely,
 George

Christmas 1943 they had been married for nearly a month and were living in Texas together. They did not yet know that in two weeks he would get overseas orders, something they didn’t think was going to happen at all. But his sister, a nurse already stationed in Italy, wrote to them. And they wrote to his parents.

December 26, 1943
Dallas, Texas

Dear George and Stellajoe,

Another Christmas has come and gone. May we not be separated for another! Everything possible was done to make the day pleasant but nothing could quite eliminate that feeling of loneliness.

Love and best wishes to you both, Helen

Christmas Day 1943

Dear Folks,

We have had a very nice Christmas. Can’t say that I don’t miss being home, because I do. But if we have to be away, me and wife couldn’t have done better than to be married.

Sincerely, George

Dear Folks,

I hope you are all enjoying the Christmas season. It would be nice if we could all be together in one place place, but it is good that a few of us at least could be together.

How much we’ve enjoyed your fruit cake, cookies and jam. We’ve been rationing them so they wouldn’t be all eaten at one meal. Thanks so much for sending them.

Thanks too for the wedding gift. Do you mind if we save it for a while until we can buy something we’ll need? It’s too hard to know what to buy now – when we think we might have to be moving around.

Love, Stellajoe

Christmas night, 1944
Near Paris, France

In a way it’s a shame that the weather was arranged as it was. Yesterday the Air Forces were every way hammering the jerry. And I presume the same was true today. The war reached a peak of fury right on Christmas. Not a pleasant Christmas for those doing the fighting. And even less so for the jerrys. But I’m not wasting any sympathy on them, even on Christmas day.

This abnormal life – such as being away on Christmas – sometimes gets me down. And it’s then that I thank God that I have the love of my wife, of my family, and family background to fall back on. I suppose it’s sort of like a religion. I feel so sorry for those who can’t have memories and visions of a future to live on. Homesickness, and an inability to tell right from wrong, is the inevitable result. That has taught me to be more tolerant of waywardness than I ever was before. War is a terrible thing, and that is one of its worst features.

I was hoping to write you a long and interesting letter, but I just am not in the proper mood. But I can tell you this: I love you, dear wife. My Christmas was much happier because I have you to love. I love you wherever you are and wherever I am! Next Christmas I hope we’ll be together, and every Christmas thereafter.

Goodnight, sweetheart
George

December 25, 1945
Ansbach, Germany

Well, Christmas is almost over. Like I wrote mom, we haven’t had it half bad here. Christmas was a very welcome and happy holiday. But even so, I’ve spent most of my time thinking about and remembering Christmases past. I can almost see what’s going on each hour at home. And the rest of the time I’ve been dreaming of Christmas next year and the years after that. That’s a bit different because you’re in those dreams and Christmas will be our own.

Sincerely, George

Merry Christmas, Mama and Daddy. I hope you are together again forever and with the family you loved so well.

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Notes from Three of Earth Farm: Decorating the Tree

19 Wednesday Dec 2018

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I don’t decorate my Christmas tree the same way each year, and this year my thought was to go minimalist. It’s kind of a minimalist year. My Seattle family is off to Virginia on the Sunday night red eye. My local sister works her make-it-or-break-it-at-Christmas retail business until well into the evening everyday in December right up to Christmas Eve. My Virginia sister and family aren’t arriving until Christmas night.

And my mom is gone.

Maybe just lights, I thought. But, as is my born-in-childhood custom, my tree is not a perfect full-figured cone affair, manicured well beyond its natural shape on a farm; and there was a good-sized hole that lights could not fill. Kind of like the hole the absence of my parents—newly enlarged by my mother’s death in April—has left in my heart.

“Hang your stocking there,” my daughter said. Good idea! And so I dragged out the box of decorations after all. Turns out there were more holes, and I hung three stockings for three daughters, for Three of Earth.

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Of course, I also had to set up my snow person crèche with its many visitors to the manger. Because it’s my favorite thing. You know that question, “what would you hate to lose in a fire?” designed to help you get at what physical things are really important to you? My list is extremely short, but my snow person crèche is on it. The guest circle expanded when I moved back into my childhood home and now includes Playskool Bus wise people, hand-painted ceramic angels, cricket musicians, and “dish garden” flamingos. Other childhood favorites have been schlepped from home to home for many years: the broken plastic reindeer, the polka dotted cat on wheels, the skating snow people candles, a chipped snow globe.

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Once the box of decorations was out I decided to add “just a few” ornaments. Dragging out another box—and fishing through my mother’s boxes—my Christmas tree is all angels, birds, flying reindeer, and stars. In honor of my mother, wherever you are. May you soar.

May you each experience joyous celebration of loved ones who walk the earth with you, and may peace and thanksgiving fill the hole left by those who have departed.

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Technology Is a Foreign Language

10 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in writingdownthestory in Blog

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I bought a new laptop last week. The woman who assisted in the Seattle store was nearly my age, as rare in an Apple store as in Trader Joe’s. She obviously knew the language or she wouldn’t have been there, but she didn’t flaunt it like the youngsters do. She probably still remembers the foreign language she learned in high school too. Some people just have an affinity. Also she and her four sisters shop at HUBBUB every year, which gave us common ground.

I bought a new laptop last week. Tammy, who assisted me in the Seattle store, was nearly my age, as rare in an Apple Store as in Trader Joe’s. She obviously knew the language or she wouldn’t have been there, but she didn’t flaunt it like the youngsters do. She probably still remembers the foreign language she learned in high school too.

Two days later, I dropped off the newby―still sealed in the box―and my “old” computer at the Tacoma store for data transfer. I have never been able to bring myself to pay someone to clean my house, but I had no trouble paying someone to transfer data, which is probably a lot easier than cleaning house. Kind of like using a roomba to vacuum, I expect: just plug it in, push a button, and let it do its thing; but I wasn’t going to go there. I had xenoglossophobia too. (Yep, there really is a word for fear of foreign languages; and it’s a lot more interesting than “technophobia.”)

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My mother’s computer

The pony-tailed guy who helped me was snippy. He was working with a table load of elders and was probably skating rapidly toward the end of his last nerve. Whoever told me the transfer would take 48 hours, he said, should not have. “We always say 72 hours.” (Maybe it takes longer in Tacoma than in Seattle.)

Twenty-four hours later I got a message saying it was ready. Which meant I could pick it up on the way to Seattle to spend a solo overnight with the Littles, rather than on the way home. I signed up for a 90-minute “open studio” workshop to ask a bunch of questions I’ve had for a long time followed by a 60-minute camera class cuz why not as long as I was there.

Emily was a sweet young thing and talked to me like we belonged to the same club, even though she was better at foreign languages. She and I both commiserated with Mary, whom it seemed had lost 1000s of photos because her grandson told her she could remove them from her phone after she put them in the Cloud. (iCloud, I learned from Tammy, is backup, not storage.) Smarty pants millennial, busted! Emily helped her remember, though, that he had moved them to Google Photos! And there they all were. Phew! I felt her pain, and her relief.

In the next workshop, Kyle was like a robot programmed to work with stupid old people without letting them get on his last nerve. Even though every person told him they take a lot of photos, he started at the very beginning and stuck with his automaton script. Maybe it’s a gender thing, rather than an age thing.

In three visits to the Apple Store, I observed that all the people at the workshop tables were late silent generation and early boomers. Gen X and xennials wouldn’t be caught dead, I don’t suppose; and millennials speak technology as a first language.

Enter the Littles, ages four and two (post-millennials) who came from the womb speaking technology. After the moms left, we had movie/pizza night. Elliot was in charge of the movie. They don’t have a TV, but as a special treat, the DVD was cast from the laptop to a stand alone monitor they inherited (E’s mom taught me the word “cast” and how to do it when I got a new generation flatscreen TV and wanted to watch Netflix on it). Elliot knows all about casting and pausing, and at one point decided—having seen the movie before—to skip several scenes and deftly made it happen.

The next morning they got more screen time before breakfast and getting dressed (it was 5:10am), which, Elliot informed could happen on “staying-in” day—i.e. the weekend. I didn’t know the truth of that as their screen time is very limited, but whatever.

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Later in the morning, the moms still gone, things started getting a bit out of hand and I let them have screen time again. (I told them it was a special Gigi treat lest they think they could get away with it another day.) Adrian decided he was in charge this time, and opened the kid’s shows they can watch, picked Wild Kratts (my personal favorite), after ejecting the previous night’s DVD from the drive and returning it to its case, plugged in headphones for whatever reason, skipped the introduction, changed his mind and picked a different show, paused it while I changed his diaper. Did I mention he is two?

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I’m back at home now trying to figure out how use the Photos program on my new Mac, having decided, finally, to put on my big girl pants and let go of the no-longer-supported iPhoto and whining to myself about it looking different, while grumbling about the changes in my WordPress blog site.

In the new year I AM going to start using Instagram, after I figure out how. And I’m considering hiring someone (whom I know from last spring’s Whidbey writing retreat and who advertises as “non-geeky, friendly help”) to create a better website for me. I also learned from her blog not to switch to the new WordPress until they work out the bugs. I switched back to classic layout. I figured out how to do it myself.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty excited to have this sweet one-and-a-half pound space grey MacBook Air that cost about as much as a hover craft (purchased from the sale of my 20-year-old Honda) and won’t bombard me, at least for a while, with messages that my memory is nearly gone. At least my computer memory.

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Happy 75th Anniversary

30 Friday Nov 2018

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Today is the 75th anniversary of my parents’ marriage. They only got 51 of those years together.

They met as co-workers at the Tennessee Valley Authority, where he was a college graduate at his first real job; she was secretary to management. He was a happily displaced Michigander; she grew up in the shadow of the Appalachians, the trails of which became their courting grounds.

They fell in love on the brink of World War II, she refusing through their letters to each other while he was in officer training at New York University to tell him she loved him, even as he poured out his heart to her. He nearly gave up. She never told him why she wouldn’t say the words in the letters she saved for nearly eight decades. But she told me. “I needed to be sure. We had never even spent time alone together. The mail was not a good foundation for a relationship.”

She moved to Spokane, Washington to work a Civil Service job. She hated Spokane. He finished his meteorologist training and moved to an air base in Texas. Thinking he would remain there for the duration, he made a rare phone call to her.

“Do you wanna get married?” he said. “Yes,” she said.

Two weeks later they were joined for life at the biggest church in Dallas, the only venue he could book on short notice, with his friend and her sister the only attendees.

Six weeks after that he got his orders and spent the next three years in Europe.

When he returned, after a brief re-employment with TVA, they moved to Washington.

The rest, as they say, is history.

After 23 years apart following his death in 1995, I want to believe they are celebrating this anniversary together again.

Happy Day, Mommy and Daddy. I miss you.



Notes from Three of Earth Farm: Stopping by the Woods

29 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Notes from Three of Earth Farm, writingdownthestory in Blog, writingdownthestory in Photograph

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I’ve been thinking for some time it’s been too long since I saw my neighbor and one of these days I needed to go knock on his door with muffins or homemade soup. At 91, he has had some heart health issues this fall. I’ve been concerned, I check in with his daughter now and then, but I’ve not rung his doorbell for a while. You know how it is, best intentions.

I’ve been thinking for some time it’s been too long since I walked in the woods. How many times have I promised myself to get in there at least once a week? You know how it is, best intentions.

After Thanksgiving weekend with the Littles and their moms here at Three of Earth Farm, I didn’t go to Seattle for my weekly 30 hour gig away from home―including five hours driving time―and by Tuesday it already felt like I had an expanse of time not usually available. When the rain stopped and the sun unexpectedly came out, I went out in my orange rain boots to check on the supply of firewood left to lie in the woods near the house when the man I hired to cut and split a fallen tree just stopped working on it.

After seeing there is indeed still a lot of wood scattered about that’s small enough for burning if I pull it out from under branches and blackberry vines and wheelbarrow it down the trail to the rack where the supply is rapidly diminishing, I spontaneously head across the meadow to the trail by the barn to walk in my mother’s playground. She didn’t hike in the mountains like I do, but hour for hour, she spent far more time on the trail than I.

Reaching the main trail, I see Robert coming toward me. He has walked the trails most every day for years, but for the past several months I was thinking he wasn’t able to. I’m ecstatic to see him out and about again. His dog Gracie trots down the trail toward me. I’m not a dog lover, but I am very fond of Gracie. I put my arms around her broad neck and pull her in close; then give Robert a hug when he reaches us.

We stand on the trail and talk. I have no where else to be and nothing else I need to be doing that is more important than this. Robert had emailed me a month or two ago that he had discovered an apple tree on the trail he’d never noticed before; spotted it because it bore a single apple. I haven’t figured out where it is and I ask him now. Turns out we are standing under it. It’s spindly and unformed, imitating the miles of vine maple in these woods. No wonder no one noticed it. It’s near where there were remnants of a rotting ancient puncheon road when I was a child, the boards that kept the wagon wheels from sinking into mud on alleged cattle drives through here, returned to soil now.

Robert muses that a wagon driver—or maybe a child sitting on the back, legs dangling—threw an apple core out and a seed took hold. The single apple was good, he says, maybe a Gravenstein.

We go on to reminisce about our former neighbors. The Holits were a  German couple, still with thick accents even after decades in the States. I told Robert I remembered making fudge with Margaret at Christmas, standing on a stool in front of her stove stirring the bubbling chocolate. When their house was cleaned out, after they moved to California to live near their son, I happened to be home and acquired the spoon we used to stir the fudge, it’s end worn down from years of scraping the bottom of the hot pot. He tells me, when the home sat empty for a time, he found a box of silverware overlooked on top of a beam in the basement; and later a box of sample awards ribbons from, presumably, Gene’s father’s family business in Germany before WWI in a dark corner, and something (I’ve forgotten what) with the Kaiser’s picture on it.

Robert remembers helping Gene cross the steeply sloping road to get his mail out of the box. Paying it forward, as it turns out, he says, as now the Holit’s niece, who raised her children in her aunt and uncle’s house, brings Robert his mail. (I really need to get my newly purchased mailbox painted and back in its rightful place between theirs.) We’re silent for a moment then, remembering times and people who are gone.

He tells me another maple tree fell recently behind his house. These damp woods that were my childhood playground are so old. The big leaf maples are nearing the end of their long lives, their grey crowns broken and leafless. They are host to mosses and licorice fern, adding to the rain forest feel of these woods. Lichen clings to everything, making the forest look like a host of hoary old men.

Centralia from Staebler Point, named for my parents for their conservation work here.

I go on to Staebler Point, and Robert and Gracie continue their trek home. I turn back toward the house as the clouds drop into the trees, rendering the forest mysterious and a little spooky in the mist. As I walk back through the now empty arching vine maples where we had stood talking, I realize that, like my mother and father and the Holits and Robert’s wife Sandy, someday Robert will no longer grace these woods with his presence. Like the maples, we all come to the end.

The woods without Robert.
Fallen maple tangle.

I’m hanging up my coat as the earlier rains return, pouring onto the roof I need to clean off again. Just a pocket of time, snatched for a rendezvous in the woods with a neighbor. I vow—again—to stop by more often, and hope I run into Robert and Gracie.

I found this poem when I Googled big leaf maple (acer macrophyllum). Overlooking the exclusive language, it seems a serendipitous find.

A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds.
A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy
reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.
                                                                  – Basil




Gratitude and Grief

22 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Daughter Off Duty, writingdownthestory in Blog, writingdownthestory in Photograph

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As I stand in the window this Thanksgiving morning and watch the sky change minute by minute, tears slide down my cheeks. Missing my mother. Imagining her standing in this very spot through the years of her seasonal depression watching this same sky, while I was emotionally and physically far away. I know it lifted her spirits.

When I arrived back on the scene in 2012, her vision was gradually fading. I tried to describe the sunrise to her, hoping the thousands of photographs she took of it would flood her memory. But she could only say, “I can’t see it,” not understanding how to “see” it differently. I hope she sees it now.

I don’t have clarity about my grief. Do I miss her presence, or did I start missing that long before she died? And which am I grieving now? Or is it my distance from her for so many years that I grieve and regret? I stand here seeing the sun rise through her eyes. I stand here watching the sunrise through my eyes on her behalf.

Thank you, Universe. Thank you, One Who Is More. Thank you, Mama.

…i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth…

e.e. cummings