Category Archives: writingdownthestory in Blog

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

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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

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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

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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

Be the Light: We Can Make a Difference

03 Saturday Nov 2018

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Thank you, dear readers, for this space to pass on two blog posts I’ve read this week about how we can be part of transforming this country, and the world, into an inhabitable place of love rather than a fearful place of hate.

And I would be remiss not to also say VOTE! It’s our privilege and our responsibility. 

From my writing teacher, mentor, and friend, Christina Baldwin: How Apology Works.

Apology requires that we have the emotional maturity to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ even when we are not 100% sure we are 100% to blame. Training in this maturity begins in kindergarten as children are coached through ambiguous social interactions…

“…Again and again we race past opportunities that could help us heal and choose instead to cause more harm. To compound tragedy, it seems quite clear that Justice Kavanaugh has no idea he missed his chance to cross the divide of privilege and pain in this country; that he could have called Senators to their integrity, rallied bipartisan support for his entry onto the Supreme Court, and most importantly, stood as a surrogate in the shattered places in a million women’s hearts by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ And we, the battered citizens of America, would have been shown a model for opening dialogue toward relationships of amends. He might even have shown the president how to behave.

Read the post here to see the words Justice Kavenaugh might have said that could have had transformative powers rather than those he did say that widened the chasm.

Justice Kavenaugh missed a huge and public opportunity. But how many opportunities do we each miss every day? From another author whose blog I read, Heather Lende (author of “Find the Good,”): The Light of Trees and Grandmas.

He was really nice to her, and spoke gently and slowly, and took the time to point her in the right direction, even though there was a line and he was in the middle of ringing me up (and I was late for a meeting.) She was so appreciative she smiled with a beautiful bright light and thanked him earnestly and walked toward the produce section…

“…Did you know that elders played a significant evolutionary role in safe communities? You know how after fifty-five or so we don’t sleep as well as we used to? Turns out that was good for the clan, or the tribe, or the village. Grandmas like me shouted the alarm when there was danger in the night. And don’t you think that now is a good time to be extra awake and pay attention, and call out to the lights all around us when we see and hear them in the darkness– the kind gestures, the well chosen words, the pleases and thank yous, and how can I help yous that shine us on the path to peace and justice and how we want to live with others in this world we share? Isn’t it the least we can do?

Read the post here to see how a grocery store clerk seized an opportunity to be the light. And how the author passed the light back to him.

And as Heather Lende reminds us, there is always Mary Oliver:
“Go easy, be filled with light, shine.”

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

—Mary Oliver

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Daughter Off Duty: Still Learning

23 Thursday Aug 2018

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Her obsession, and it could only be called that, with writing about her mother’s life both flummoxed and exasperated my sisters and me. For the 30 years—nearly to the day—between my grandmother’s death and my mother’s, my mother wrote pages and pages of notes and stories. The jottings I’ve found repeat the same facts, or my mother’s memory of the facts, on typing paper, in spiral notebooks large and small, in stationery pads with paper intact or torn out. When she could no longer see to write, she recorded the story, starting over from the beginning then repeating stories the next time she picked it up.

“Why?” I asked, like a broken record, telling her I wished she would write her own story.

“I didn’t appreciate what a hard life she had,” she would say. “She was so courageous her whole life. I didn’t understand how hard it was to be old, and I was so impatient with her in her last years. I promised her I would write about her life.”

I often wondered if that promise was made before or after the death my mother was not present for, a way to assuage her guilt that she hadn’t been by her mother’s side then or every moment of her last ten years. Like some “if only” promise to God that she spent the next three decades trying to fulfill.

Now, as I read about writing legacy in preparation to guide a group of women in doing just that, I have a new interpretation of my mother’s consuming passion. My mother was in the “legacy phase” of her own life, the time we take stock of where we have been, how our lives have been formed and informed, and how we hope to be remembered. I think my mother thought she was doing that on behalf of her mother, but what if—unbeknownst and unacknowledged—she was really writing her own legacy story?

My grandmother’s life story has been part of the family’s oral history for as long as I can remember, both from my mother’s and my grandmother’s telling. While I am happy to have the written version (or will once the transcription of the tapes is completed by my sister and edited by me), I may never have my mother’s own legacy writing. To be honest, I don’t know what is on the remainder of the tapes; friends worked with her on the project because I didn’t have the patience. Though I’m doubtful, maybe she did get to her own deepest self. Secrets yet to be revealed.

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My sister and I got some of the story done and gave it to our mother for Christmas, four months before her death.

But as I read about writing legacy, I’ve come to understand that part of its purpose can be to heal a relationship, often in the absence of the other party. Is that what my mother was doing? Was she trying to understand her mother in order to better understand herself? Did she achieve what she was yearning for?

I don’t think she could have understood that’s what she was doing, and now I can’t ask her. Perhaps in the death of a loved one with whom we may have our own healing to do, we can make these things up. I can forgive the consumption of her time and her anger with me in wanting her to tell a different story, if what she was doing was reconciling her own life so that she might let it go.

I have wishes of my own. I wish I’d had this glimmer of insight so that I might have talked with her about it. I also know thinking such a conversation might have happened is my own magical thinking. Her fixation did not have any space for reframing; her personality did not allow for talking about herself; she was not in touch with her emotional self. Now it’s to me to reconcile my own relationship with my mother; to figure out how I want to frame my own legacy writing; and to break this mother/daughter cycle with my own daughter of not talking about what matters, things that will be hard to talk about. It sobers me to realize that, having no daughters herself, ours is the last chance to do it different for at least a generation.

Legacy writing—so that I might better understand my own story and what matters to me—is a beginning.

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A Life Well Lived

15 Friday Jun 2018

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There’s a new post on Daughter on Duty: my mother’s memorial service.

If my mother’s celebration of a life well lived was any indication, she was beloved on the earth. Scores of people filled the sanctuary last Saturday: family, friends of my mother, friends of mine and my sisters, Girl Scouts who earned badges under her leadership in the 1960s, my father’s work colleagues or children of those who were, neighbors, church friends, friends of Seminary Hill, her caregivers and property helpers over the years.

Adventure Log: Carkeek Park, Seattle

17 Thursday May 2018

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“Stellajoe!” my father used to say, “How would you like to live in a place like this on a day like this?”

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It’s become my mantra. I would like to live in a place like this, especially when the sky is blue, the trees are bursting into green and pink and red, the rhodies are stuffed with pompoms of bloom, water is sparkling, the mountains are still brilliant in their white garb of winter. Pacific Northwesterners are the luckiest people on the planet. (I know, people elsewhere think they are the luckiest, which is a happy thing.)

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I spent last weekend in Seattle. Friday the Littles’ daycare was closed and I had them both, all day, by myself. They were, um, energetic.

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It wasn’t cold, Elliot just likes his new jacket. And I couldn’t find his sweatshirt.

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The bakery.

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Gigi needed a break.

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Grabbed those bananas himself when my back was turned.

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Elliot, budding creative chef, made a pb/jelly/green bean/carrot sandwich for snack (after not eating the pbj sandwich at lunch).

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Beautiful, but he declared it “yucky.” Said the green beans were old.

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Making a Mother’s Day card while the moms went to a spin class.

Saturday was Adrian’s second birthday.

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Another stunning creation by Mama Wynne. It was, by Adrian’s choice, a Dog Party.

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Best ever gift from Aunt Becca and Gigi.

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Sunday was my first motherless Mother’s Day. I had planned this weekend long before I knew last Mother’s Day was to be her last. I was a little anxious, and a little defiant when I put it on the calendar. What if there are no more years after this one to celebrate my mother, and I’m selfishly off wanting to be the mother for a change instead of the daughter? What if she’s having a bad day and I have to cancel my plans at the last minute?

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Last year, one year before she left us.

To have been freed last month of these dilemmas will, I think, continue to cause me wonder for a long time. I can go off on an adventure without planning ahead, without the possibility that I will have to cancel, without having to watch the clock to return in time to visit her or relieve Rebecca of responsibility. I’m not wishing for those days back; don’t make me into some paragon of regret that they are over. (You’ve read my blog, right?)

But to spend days like this in a place like this, I can’t but think of her, and of my father, with gratitude for their quest to move to the corner of the country, to love it, to instill that love in me and my family. I suspect I will hold them with me everywhere I go.

We went to Carkeek Park. I had never been. It is, incredibly, ten minutes from my daughter and daughter-in-love’s home. And it was a sparkling day.

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Teaming with life,

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(sea cucumbers)

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(anemone)

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and love.

 

I’ve been digging through my mother’s scattered collection of favorite poems, quotes, and her own prolific writing looking for ones my sisters and I will use in special tribute at her memorial service next month. I found notes she wrote about me describing what was blooming two or three springs ago, she wishing she could be out in the glory, that she could see it through eyes that had become pale and cloudy. I hope she is in it now, and in her own glory.

Meanwhile, the weeds are growing. And I’m not out there pulling them. Last winter’s blow down (and that from the year before) still hasn’t been picked up. The hawthorn and the apple trees didn’t get pruned again and are now infringing on the view. The out-of-control vinca is climbing into the lilac. Blackberry vines are growing through the rhododendron. I still haven’t planted flowers, squash, and beans in my garden. I miss winter.

The Joy of Life

How sweet is Life, how beautiful!

Go, happy life, and say to Death –
“I gave this woman sufficient joy
To last her for a thousand years.”

Stellajoe Staebler
June 2008

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A place like this, on a day like this. Happy Mother’s Day, Mama. I love you.

 

It’s Never Over

10 Thursday May 2018

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There’s a new post on Daughter on Duty.

One of the things my sisters and I had to do when the Monday after that Saturday rolled around was sit in the black oversized swivel conference chairs around the big polished table at the mortuary (it’s called a funeral chapel, but we all knew our mother’s body was in another room) and talk about caskets and price packages and things. I don’t think any of us knew we were going to end up talking about cremation. And yet, without warning we were.

Read more here.