Tag Archives: family

A Mess of Pottage

Posted on by under Mess & Place

I get Esau. I don’t get Jacob.

They’re brothers, bursting through the pages of the book of Genesis. It’s likely they hated each other for a good bit of their lives. Jacob, the smarter twin whose name means “supplanter” has tremendous presence of mind to take advantage of Esau’s weakness, not once but twice. First the birthright, then the blessing due to the firstborn son. Esau falls so neatly into Jacob’s trap. I imagine him as a rough and tumble man, boisterous, and dedicated to his own work but ultimately vulnerable in the hands of an opportunistic brother. Sadly, history and my Sunday School teachers remember Esau as something of a doofus. A mess-up. Sneaky Jacob gets to be a patriarch from whom King David, and eventually Christ descend.

A phrase from these stories has stood out to me over the years: “Sold for a mess of pottage.” Pottage, the archaic term for porridge, is what Esau is said to have accepted from his brother Jacob in exchange for his birthright. Since then, selling something for a “mess of pottage” means to behave shortsightedly, ready to trade something valuable for momentary comfort.

800px-Wenceslas_Hollar_-_The_mess_of_pottage_(State_2)

Wenceslaus Hollar – The Mess of Pottage

I can’t say I’ve ever sold my birthright for a mess of pottage. My family isn’t rich. Even though I’m my parents’ firstborn, there’s no blessing or birthright attached to the position. But my attachment to Esau remains. I guess I like underdogs. But I also think most of us go through bouts of bad decision-making and eat pottage when we should say “no thank you, I’ve had enough.”

The past seven months have ushered in some major life changes for me. I have written about starting over in a new city, marrying after a long sojourn as a singleton, attempts at a new career as a writer–which some would consider achingly white and middle class, and trying to redeem lost time pursuing things that would make other people happy.

In the past seven months I have sat in front of the computer screen, bursting with ideas for short stories and novels, ready to drill down and invest hours coaxing half-formed ideas into solid ones, to invest myself in the practice of writing daily so that it becomes the most important thing I do. Then I suddenly switch screens to the comforts of Netflix.

Why do I (we) self-sabotage like this? Why sell ourselves, if not for a mess of pottage, then for something less that what we know will bring us life? Time, if nothing else, may show us how much pottage we are actually eating. How much we thwart ourselves. I don’t really have a crafty twin brother—but I am scared of pushing myself into uncharted mental territories with writing. And I do have high-speed internet.

For Lent this year, I’ve given up YouTube, Netflix, and yes, embarrassingly, the British Daily Mail, the tabloid rag I can easily spend two or three hours on per day. The DM is easily the biggest mess of pottage in my pool of indulgences. But it’s bland and unworthy of a dedicated reader–well, any reader, really. So I am giving it up.

Katherine Paterson’s beloved book, Jacob Have I Loved, retells the story of Jacob and Esau. It is set on an island in the Chesapeake Bay. The players are twin teenaged girls, Caroline (Jacob) and Sara Louise, called “Wheeze” (Esau). Wheeze is angry at Caroline for most of the book, believing her sister has stolen her birthright. Caroline is a gifted singer and the darling of the island. Wheeze, consumed with jealousy, is a cold presence. Only fishing and nature can soothe her inner tumult. Toward the end of the book, her mother presents the now grown-up Wheeze with the idea of leaving the island, where so much of her unhappiness is mired. The island is sinking anyway, her sister has left for Julliard, and Wheeze has always known she’d rather see mountains than the sea. She begins to realize that a person can make her own decisions, independent of her feelings. That one can reject the pottage, jealousy, and dissatisfaction (no substitute for real life) and begin afresh.

I hope that the pull of all-consuming distractions will lessen over time and I can get off the island, away from the pottage and into a space where my true desires and my reality become one.

Elena bio YAH

Making Pennies, or My Father’s Money

Posted on by under Money & Place

When I was a little girl, I thought my daddy made all the money. That’s because when I once asked him what he did at work, he told me, “I make pennies.”

I probably was too young to comprehend the complexities of managing a blast furnace for US Steel, which is how my father actually spent his days back then. But I like to think I might have been able to wrap my five-year-old brain around it to some extent. Instead, I spent quite some time believing that my father worked in a penny factory.

To be sure, he was compensated for his actual work with many, many pennies—and nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollars. Because of this, my life growing up was very different from his.

***

I remember my dad once telling me that, when he was a teenager, his greatest fear was that he would never make enough money to feed himself. For years, he never felt full. He was always hungry.

As the ninth of twelve children born to a Ukrainian immigrant coal miner, my father wore the hand-me-down clothes of his older brothers. He used to joke that his shoe size matched his age until he was 14. Unfortunately, he often had to wear shoes that were a size or two smaller than his feet; the bumps on his toes bore witness to that for the rest of his life.

In 1913, the 18-year-old boy who would one day be my grandfather left his home in a rural village in western Ukraine to cross an ocean to join his older brother in a strange land. After he arrived on Ellis Island, in full view of the Statue of Liberty, he had to wait for a stranger to bring him the $25 he needed to enter the country. Today, that would be approximately $610.

My father was born nearly 30 years after his father’s passage to the United States. In 1959, my dad graduated at the top of his high school class. He was awarded a football scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh, where he ultimately earned a degree in mathematical engineering.

After four years of college, my father was drafted by an NFL football team. After a single season as a rookie with the Kansas City Chiefs, he decided to finish his five-year engineering program at Pitt. He spent the next few decades working his way up the corporate ladder of the American steel industry, even when that industry was in danger of collapsing.

“I sure am glad my dad caught that boat.”

I can’t even begin to count the number of times I heard my father repeat those words.

***

penny_jar_for_web“Our money isn’t really ours in the first place,” I explained. “It belongs to God. Everything belongs to God. We’re just meant to take care of it and to use it well.”

I was sitting in the passenger seat of my boyfriend’s car, explaining to him the finer points of—and theological reasons for—support-raising. He was a first-year medical resident, trying to wrap his brain around why his girlfriend had chosen to work for a campus ministry organization where she was expected to raise a portion of her salary.

My father, who generously and fully financed all four years of my college education at a prestigious liberal arts college, was similarly puzzled by my decision. The philosophical and theological underpinnings of raising support were a mystery to him. He didn’t understand my counter-cultural choice of career, but he supported it.

My father continued to financially support me and my work until his death in 2013. Dad offered his support because he loved me. He supported my desire to use my gifts to do work that fulfills me and that makes a positive difference in the world. He never used the language of “blessing” or “stewardship,” but he embodied both with his generosity—to me, to my brothers, to everyone he met.

Because my grandpa caught that boat, and because my dad made all those pennies, I have been afforded opportunities that would never have occurred to either of them. And I am grateful.

***

Amy YAH bio

When I Was Your Age, We Went to the Bank

Posted on by under Money & Place

On Saturdays, we went to the bank with dad.

The Regency Savings Bank of Geneva, IL welcomed its patrons with platters covered in white paper doilies, piled high with a variety of butter cookies. Dad would fill one of the provided styrofoam cups with coffee from the percolator.

We started coming with Dad when I was a toddler, an era when my memories blur one into the other. In those early days, my older sister and I waited at the Playschool picnic table, laid out with coloring books and crayons. At this point any of our collected coins got plopped into Piggy Banks on our dressers. Soon enough we started to trail Dad to the bank counter, to watch the magic.

The tellers counted the cash onto the counter like tarot cards, experts at slipping paper across paper. They moved through their tasks without looking: stamping, signing, unlocking, typing on the number pad on the computer, and printing receipts by feeding a machine with a small slip of paper that got pulled into the machine to be stamped with account balances.

Bank Teller Counting Money for Customer --- Image by © Duncan Smith/Corbis

Bank Teller Counting Money for Customer — Image by © Duncan Smith/Corbis

At home, we imitated the movements of the tellers in elaborate games of pretend bank, using stacks of pocketed deposit slips and carbon copy return tickets from the local Venture department store. We idolized those women at the bank, second only to the grocery clerks at the supermarket who almost always had long acrylic nails that clicked across the keypad.

On  Saturday mornings, the bank hummed with the financial business of the town locals. I came to recognize the tellers and the bankers in suits who sat at glass enclosed cubicles. When not serving a customer, they popped out of their offices to circulate around the premises and greet account holders by name. We usually got greeted by the tall, lady banker with the short black hair, who seemed to be having a perpetually good day since the late ‘80s.

At the tall desks in the lobby, my Dad endorsed his stack of checks, a lefty with the characteristic curve in of his hand. He always came with his own blue, ballpoint pen since the ones chained to the desk had long run out of ink. Each week, my dad left the bank with a thin white envelope full of twenties that he placed up in the cabinet next to the fridge, so Mom could select a crisp bill or two and take them to the grocery store.

The tall smiley banker told my Dad that we could open our very own savings accounts, and Carolyn and I were each entrusted with a small grey book, monogrammed with the maroon initials of the bank. These very important books were housed in the roll top desk in the kitchen and kept in protective plastic sleeves.  We covered the plastic sleeves with stickers received from the teller for each deposit we made at the bank.

Each visit to the bank corresponded with a new entry in our passbooks. We took a portion of our newly implemented weekly allowance which we had sorted into styrofoam cups marked “savings,” “spending,” and “church.”

Photo Courtesy of Mario Rui on Flickr

Photo Courtesy of Mario Rui on Flickr

I imagine I had some sort of coin purse or hand me down wallet, but I mostly remember holding the coins in my fists till they grew warm and sweaty against my palms. When we handed over our coins and deposit slip, the teller put the coins into a coin sorter, taking  my precious book to feed into a machine that stamped the new balance of my account.

I tried to read over my account ledger with the seriousness the other patrons used as they carried out their banking. I followed the new entry line across the page with my finger to verify the deposit amount matched my handful of change. On birthdays and Christmas, we brought checks from our grandparents and carefully determined how much cash to take out and how much to entrust to the bank, which was very grownup  business.

After the bank, we ran a few other customary errands to the local Ace Hardware store and to Sally’s Sub House or McDonalds, where I couldn’t help but make the connection that the money dad got at the bank bought Happy Meals and packs of grape Bubblicious gum.

I watched my parents do things with cash, taking  it out of envelopes and carefully counting their pennies. I looked on as my mom put items back at the grocery store to match the amount of bills in her wallet. Both my parents were visible stewards of our money, physically placing it into the hands of others or the golden offering plate to save, spend, and give.

The Regency Savings Bank has long been bought up by other bank chains, changing names and buildings and cookie brands. Now our money zooms through cyberspace, teleporting from one account to another. We no longer have to tabulate our finances and I-owe-yous with paper and pen, but pay instantly from the latest app on our phones. Store clerks ask us if we want that useless piece of non-recyclable paper called a receipt, and we wave them off while only a few people still carefully pen their transactions into their checkbook.

But I think I miss touching money, holding it in my hands, and seeing that it is paper and metal. Perhaps I will start to go to the bank again on Saturdays and take out an envelope of crisp bills to bestow with care as my parents did.

***

Meredith-bio-YAH-1024x327

 

The Apprentices

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

The peanut-gallery chatter was almost as entertaining as the 1970s-era slide show my dad was projecting on the wall. Not that I was surprised—I‘d expect nothing less when the Tennants and Sysyns got together.

Our two families have been spending time together since before my life began, but the regularity dipped considerably when us four kids grew up and started moving off on our own. Those stretches of years and miles made this particular reunion, in July 2015, especially epic: 14 of us from Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, and Oregon were gathered at a house on the Oregon coast. Our group represented three generations of two families: my dad’s and “Uncle” Pete’s, my dad’s best friend from college.

In preparation for the reunion, my dad—forever the obsessive photographer—had scanned five decades of slides to share. We watched the greatly-anticipated show our last night together.

photo 2 (2)The early 70s photos showcased my dad and Uncle Pete as beat-poet wannabes. Their weary faces suggested all-nighters spent drinking wine and listening to Miles Davis, scrawling verses in composition books and debating philosophy. But the scene around them tells the real story: four kids under the age of five, joining miniature forces to raise full-sized havoc. As adult versions of those kids, we laughed at the scene our little selves had created in the cramped apartment. Those poor beat poets had no idea what had hit them.

*  *  *  *  *

My beautiful picture

Pete (perhaps working on lyrics to the opera my dad scored).

Dad and Uncle Pete lived next door as college freshmen. Their love for the arts and their well-matched senses of humor sealed their friendship from the beginning, and they lost no time conjuring up the epic pranks they would one day tell their children about (again and again).

There was the time, for instance, when they changed the alarm clock of their dorm’s earliest riser, who had taken on the responsibility of pounding on everyone’s doors up and down the hall each morning to ensure no one overslept.

“You should have seen the guys all coming out of their rooms at three in the morning, ready to pummel poor George Lowe,” my Dad would say, hardly able to get through the telling of the story due to the laughter that erupted from within as he recalled the scene.

When my dad finds something really funny, he laughs in an extreme, choked up way, as if he’s on the verge of crying. My brother and I agree that watching Dad laugh is often more funny than whatever it is he’s laughing at.

The telling of the Alarm Clock Story was often paired with other classics, like the Co-ed Visiting Hours Story, about the time when my dad and a couple other guys on the floor managed to “lock” Pete alone in his dorm room during the university’s first ever co-ed open house.

“He missed the whole thing. We never heard the end of that,” Dad would say, his shaking shoulders indicating a level of laughter that was so extreme it was almost silent.

Not surprisingly, the hilarity at the core of Dad and Pete’s friendship inspired laughter and eye-rolling in the women who eventually married them, which later spilled over into our regular family gatherings each spring break, New Year’s Eve, and summer.

Soon us kids had a whole new generation of funny stories to recall together, from the dance routine we choreographed to the Xanadu album (one of my favorite gifts that Christmas), to the time our families met at a no-nonsense campground in Ohio late one night, unknowingly setting up our enormous shared tent terrifyingly close to train tracks. The rumbling and whistling of the train that woke us up in the dead of night set a new standard for a “rude awakening.”

*  *  *  *  *

The Epic Reunion slideshow continued, shifting from photos of busy toddlers and tired parents into a series of photos Dad and Pete staged for the singular purpose of annoying and alarming our mothers.

My beautiful picture

“Billy” on the brink of disaster.

“Look, there’s the time Billy almost fell into that canyon,” Uncle Pete said, pointing at the projected image of my brother’s eyes peeking over a stone ledge, apparently hanging on for dear life with his fingernails. “We were so relieved we made it back with him alive” Pete added in a stage whisper, ”We never would have heard the end of it from your mothers.”

Uncle Pete is the master of the elaborate aside, holding one hand flat along the edge of his mouth as if trying to keep what he’s saying from a select person or two. And my dad is the master of egging Pete on.

Together, they’re masters of laughter, and as the slideshow came to an end, I realized my brother and cousins and I have been their apprentices. I looked over at the faces of my own daughters—the third generation of this heritage of hilarity—and felt satisfied that our reunion week with the Sysyns had served as a solid orientation in their own schooling of stories and silliness. May they grow into adults who fully grasp the value of friendship, traditions, and pure, uncontrollable laughter.

 

The Divine Secret of the Ho-Ho Sisterhood

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

Their husbands didn’t get it.

Lauren, Mary, Suzy, and I made plans to meet at Beth’s house near Chicago for a long April weekend. Lauren would drive in from Indianapolis, and Mary could handle the six-hour drive from St. Louis. Naturally, Suzy and I decided to make the trip to Beth’s together, from Pennsylvania.

Which is why we booked flights to St. Louis so that we could drive north to Beth’s house with Mary. Because, road trip.

This is what their husbands (and probably mine, if I had one) could not understand. It’s all about the journey.

*****

Our story really starts nearly 100 years ago.

In the early 1920s, Peter met Catherine at a church picnic. Peter was a young Ukrainian immigrant coal miner. Catherine, twelve years his junior, was the oldest daughter of Ukrainian immigrant parents.

Peter and Catherine married in 1923, and over the course of the next three decades, they had 12 children. My dad, John, was number nine. They eventually welcomed 36 grandchildren—I am number 22.

Mary and Suzy are the daughters of number eight, Patty. Lauren and Beth were born to Sonia, number ten. All five of us were born in the mid- to late-1960s, and although we’ve known each other all our lives, we were deeply into adulthood before we took the initiative to spend time together apart from the rest of our families.

*****

hostess-ho-hosLauren, Beth, and I dubbed ourselves “The Ho-Ho Sisterhood” in 2002, after an ill-advised trip to a Hostess Outlet store near Indianapolis. We had gathered at Lauren’s house to help prepare for a family reunion, and while running party-related errands, we each purchased a box full of our preferred snack cake. We then challenged each other to devour its entire contents on our way back to Lauren’s house.

None of us succeeded, although Beth insisted that she would have won the contest easily had we stopped to pick up a gallon of milk to wash them down.

We all felt a little ill, and our sides hurt. I think I managed to ingest four or five Ho-Hos—which was clearly three or four too many. But the stitch in my side had less to do with the volume of snack cakes and everything to do with the laughter.

We later inducted Mary and Suzy into the Sisterhood, minus the disgusting initiation ritual.

*****

Our inaugural Ho-Ho Sisterhood gathering at Beth’s house fell, appropriately, around April Fool’s Day.

Suzy and I ended up with a two-hour layover in Chicago’s O’Hare airport en route to meet up with Mary in St. Louis. The next day, we would drive six hours. To Chicago.

At this point, we wondered if maybe the husbands had a point.

Then we dismissed that idea. It’s all about the journey. We made this our new mantra.

But it was really all about the laughter. It started early between me and Suzy. On our boarding passes, our names were in all caps, and our first names and middle initials had been condensed into a single word. Suzy thought I was nuts when I first called her SUSANE. To this day, she calls me AMYL.

Mary picked us up at the St. Louis airport, and promptly took me to a local Urgent Care to treat my brand new sinus infection. She was the one suffering a bad head cold, which would likely have prevented her trip altogether had we not planned our group pilgrimage to Chicago.

ho-ho-sisters-trollsSUSANE and I congratulated ourselves for our combined intuition and foresight in routing our trip from Pennsylvania to Illinois through Missouri. The next morning, Mary and her box of Kleenex climbed into the backseat of her sedan, and Suzy and I took turns driving north to Beth and Lauren.

The itinerary of our weekend ended up having very little to do with Chicago. We did eventually visit the city’s IKEA store—but only after a pilgrimage to Hebron, Wisconsin, where we posed for photos with trolls and visited The Mustard Museum, where we witnessed Mary’s commencement from “Poupon U.”

We ate giant cinnamon rolls at The Machine Shed Restaurant before returning to Wisconsin to visit The Mars Cheese Castle, where an older gentleman complimented Lauren on her beautiful blue eyes. The rest of us reassured each other: “And you have eyes, too!”

Beth’s husband, David, dubbed himself the “Ho-Bro,” and graciously served as our chauffeur and photographer throughout the weekend.

In retrospect, it seems evident that we were just following the example set for us by our parents at every extended family event we ever attended. Whether a wedding, a holiday, a reunion, or even a funeral, only one element is as omnipresent at Maczuzak family gatherings as pierogies and coolers full of beer.

The laughter. It’s the lasting legacy of Peter and Catherine.

*****

 

Movie Nights

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

I sometimes joke that I grew up thirty years before I was born. I was born in the early 80s, but most of my frequently watched movies and television shows are from decades earlier. As a child, my family rarely had cable, but we did have a large video collection. Most of the videos were carefully recorded from TV onto VHS tapes. Small white stickers with black numbers were dutifully placed on each tape and then entered into a handwritten index. We had indexes listing our movies both by alphabetical order and by number order.

This was mostly  my mother’s influence. She loved the old movies and the shows, many created even before her childhood. They made her laugh, and Mom has always clung to the things that bring her joy. I recently took a vacation with a friend to Niagara Falls and she honored my desire to re-visit these childhood memories by driving an hour out of the way to see a giant mural of one of Lucille Ball’s famous scenes on the side of a building in her hometown of Jamestown, NY.

Posing with a Lucy mural in Jamestown, NY. December 2015.

Posing with a Lucy mural in Jamestown, NY. December 2015.

On Friday nights in my childhood, my two brothers and I would spread our sleeping bags on the patchwork-brown linoleum in the living room for family movie night. On the kitchen table Mom and Dad would put out Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, cool whip, and often some type of candy or sprinkles. We’d build our traditional Friday-Night-Sundae and sit on top of our sleeping bags — ready to laugh along as Jerry Lewis belts out a (rather catchy) song about beans in At War With The Army. Or, we would giggle for the hundredth time at Lucy and Ethel as they shoveled chocolates into their mouths. Sometimes we’d invite friends over; sometimes it was just us. There are dozens of movies (and television shows) in my head that I remember with smiles for the way they filled my childhood with laughter.  

Other times, we’d watch the movies late into the night. My parents would delay bedtime and press play on an old favorite because the night was special. Once, I was laying on the couch, my head in my mother’s lap as she raked her fingers through my bangs. We were watching one of Martin and Lewis’ movies. I would glance up every time I heard her laugh to see the light in her eyes. There were days that it was hard for Mom to smile. Days where Depression did its best to keep her isolated and numb. But there were other days that stretched into the night where joy, and laughter, were present. Those were nights we celebrated and embraced the joy.

I used to wonder why we didn’t watch the movies on the sad days, so that they would bring the laughter. It took me into my young adult years to understand that the laughter came on the late nights because the clouds lifted, not because the movies penetrated them.

This Christmas my younger brother and I stood in our parents’ hallway and scanned the movie collection, laughing in recognition at some of our old favorites. Much of the family gathered around the television and put in Dean Jones’ Snowball Express (Dad’s favorite) and we all laughed along as Jones flew backwards down the mountain, on skis. A few days later we pulled out North Avenue Irregulars to keep us awake as we counted down to the New Year. Mom and my brother had tears in their eyes from their laughter as Cloris Leachman rammed her car into a mobster who had caused her to break her newly-manicured nails.  

Those late night movie watching parties where Mom joined us in the laughter are treasured memories, but as an adult I think the work of joy is more evident in the every-Friday-night routine. Mom set up that routine and maintained it. Despite her own struggles, she made sure there was joy and laughter in the house for her kids. A joy that still pays off for us all these years later.

 

***************************************

Nicole bio YAH

While We’re Renting

Posted on by under Finding Place

IMG_1415

Old houses have a way of making themselves dirty, they crumble pieces of rusty radiators and cracking tile grout. My husband and I rent a place like this. In beams of sunlight, I can track fuzzy dust trails intertwined with all kinds of hairs and particles from disintegrating flooring. Clumps cling to the baseboards and slip under doorways, blown by invisible air currents.

After living here for well over a year, certain quirks get my particular attention. I can get quite distracted by the kitchen flooring, a 1980s white linoleum that turns mop heads and rags black, even on the tenth scrub. The dirt captured by its textured surface has been sealed in by grease and time, yielding just enough to fool me into thinking I’ve made progress by attacking it on hands and knees.

Under the cabinets, the edge of the linoleum curls up, a page of history begging to be turned. Splattered, brown grime creeps up in the crevice between the base of the cabinets and the well-worn flooring. This inevitably sends me into panic, a deep heaving, sweaty fear of mold and the other things that lurk in nooks and crannies.

We have made small improvements on the house, ones that seem appropriate for those only leasing the property. There’s the shower; I cried the first time I used it. We worked for hours with an X-ACTO knife to remove the floral grips someone had stuck on the floor of the tub now outlined with black and dark shades of green. Drew squirted a squiggly line of caulk over the deep crack between the tub and shower wall.

IMG_2120We tackled the back porch in the spring, removing the calico of welcome mats and rugs covering the floor and stapling down a single sheet of indoor/outdoor carpeting. We’ve replaced the light fixture in the bathroom, painted a yellow stripe around the wall in the dining room, and hung some heavy shelves on the plaster walls. And yet, sometimes even our elbow grease seems too much to give to this place that isn’t ours. The landlord seems determined to run his property into the ground, which is working because some of the house is literally sinking.

I tire of the sense that I live a collapsible life, the kind I’ve lived since leaving for college. My existence feels cobbled together from Swedish-named IKEA parts, propped up picture frames, and other signs that I will leave each room without a trace.

We will be renting for a long time. Financial experts have advised some millennials to never buy at all, offering online calculators and formulas to figure out if owning property makes sense in their financial bracket and geographical location.

But, I was raised to want land. I’m a midwestern girl, descended from European immigrants clamoring for a new start and middle American farmers who didn’t have running water, but owned a homestead and a clump of pear trees. The residue of my ancestors’ dreams still course through my veins, and before we go to bed each night, I speak of a future home like a promised land: “When we own a house someday…”

And now a baby is entering into this equation, and I’m more lost than ever. In the early days of sickness and fatigue, I’d lie in bed unable to tend to the everyday messes of dishes and dirty clothes. I watched shows on television where families knocked down walls and pried up carpet floors, installing subway tile backsplashes and farm basin sinks.

I’d walk into our kitchen holding my breath to avoid the odor of the rotting vegetables going to waste from our CSA due to the preferences of my nausea-riddled stomach. I couldn’t even take care of this place, it’s crumbs growing greater than its charms. I resisted planning the nursery. I resisted the stacks of paper and piles of former teaching supplies. I refused to make this home.

But a few weeks ago, a dear professor passed away at forty two, reminding me that we are all renters on this earth, exiles planting gardens and pouring cement foundations for temporary shelters. The night after Dr. Foster died, I moved closer to Drew in our bed, suddenly feeling like this might be our last moment on earth.IMG_1556

I realized how much I’ve held myself back from the places I’ve rented, refusing to be wasteful with transient things. But perhaps, in doing so, I’ve been truly wasteful, letting days and years slip through my fingers.

I lay my palm across Drew’s chest and in his sleep, he lays his palm over mine. I feel his inhale and exhale of breath. Home is here, this bed could be anywhere.

Why do I worry about the peeling linoleum or whether it’s worth it to paint the walls grey? Moving is in the future, now we are here, now I’m feeling Drew’s heartbeat and hearing the faint beginnings of his snoring. Part of me wants to stay up all night, feeling life in my love, but my pregnant body grows tired of my left side.

I pry my hand from his sleepy grip and turn over, now listening for the rise and fall of my own breathing. As I drift off to sleep, time seems such a fleeting thing, and I resolve to make this our home, even if it feels like we’re squatters.

Let’s dig a hole in the back yard, I think,  and lose our security deposit because we danced so much on the floors they’ve bowed under the weight of our living and breathing. Let’s carve our names in the closet and leave the baby’s height etched into a doorway. Let someone else paint over our memories, let them last for a second as we throw the dust of this life as confetti.

 

***

Meredith bio YAH

Homecoming

Posted on by under Finding Place

The snapshot is of a girl in a gray Allegheny College hoodie, one she purchased in the campus bookstore on one of her pre-college visits. She is gazing at the camera, chin on fist, an open notebook on the table in front of her, a pen clutched between her fingers. She is not smiling.

The girl in the gray sweatshirt is me, more than three decades ago.

I look at the photo today, and I remember the melancholy and relief, the complicated emotions I experienced upon completing the first term of my first year of college. I remember that unmoored sensation, adrift between old and new and unknown.

*****

It was a few days before Thanksgiving, and I had a long six-week holiday vacation ahead of me before I would return for second term. I had survived my first round of final exams, and with that stress behind me, I was looking forward to seeing my mom and dad and two younger brothers, waiting for me in a house I’d never seen, on the other side of the state.

Just a month earlier, my family had relocated from a northwestern suburb of Pittsburgh to a northeastern suburb of Philadelphia.

When I chose to go to Allegheny, one of the selling points of this idyllic liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania was its proximity to home. I knew before Christmas of my senior year of high school that this is where I would go. I found out shortly after I graduated that, instead of a two-hour drive to visit my family, it would take eight hours door to door.

Now that finals were over, I felt homeless. The home of my high school years now belonged to another family, and the home I had known for the last ten weeks was a dorm room two hours north. When the photo was snapped, I was hanging out with my mom’s brother and his family for a few days. On Thanksgiving Day morning, we would all pile into Uncle John’s station wagon for the journey from one end of the scenic Pennsylvania turnpike to the other, where I would spend my long holiday break in a home I had yet to see.

When we arrived, I had to ask where to find the bathroom.

*****

I spent the first 18 years of my life getting used to new homes. Thanks to my father’s frequent corporate job transfers, I had never lived any particular place for more than five years. Home was where the family was. I learned to make new friends and adjust to new situations. As long as I could count on going home—wherever that was—to be with my mom and dad and brothers, everything was okay.

Every time I reread my favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder book, These Happy Golden Years, I was thrilled by the romance of Laura finally marrying Almanzo. And I cried every time I read the last chapter, when Laura moved out of Ma and Pa’s house and into a home of her own.

*****

I cried when my mom and dad left me at college one sunny September afternoon a couple weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday. But my tears dried quickly as years of new-kid-in-school practice kicked in. I met the other young women in my residence hall. I participated in all the orientation week events. I found new friends with whom to eat and study and explore campus and the surrounding town. I met boys, and I enjoyed my first post-high school almost-requited crush.

And then came the casual invitation that would set the course for the rest of my life so far.

When a new friend, a senior named Karen, invited me to a Christian fellowship meeting, I said yes. Because, why not? I had been saying yes to everything, from fraternity parties to movie nights to spontaneous late-night pizza deliveries.

A life-long church-goer, I had been involved in my high school youth group, but I had given no thought one way or the other about whether I would continue to go to church as a college student. Bible studies and service projects and retreats had no place on my pre-college bucket list.

Who knew that this is where I would find my people—and my calling?

*****

What the girl in the gray sweatshirt did not know on that long ago Thanksgiving Eve could fill volumes.

She did not anticipate how her decision to attend a fellowship meeting would lead her to a deepening faith in God, and to a desire to invite others into that journey. She did not know how many of the new friends she had just wished a happy Thanksgiving would still be in her life three decades later, or what triumphs and heartaches they would experience together in the coming years.

She did not realize that her own experience of finding purpose and direction as a college student would become her purpose and direction going forward.

She may have sensed that the home she was about to visit that Thanksgiving would never really be hers. She certainly did not yet recognize that Home had found her.

*****

Amy bio YAH

Finding Hope in the Depths of a Woodpile

Posted on by under Finding Place

After “The Move,” we found our way to a small doublewide trailer in the shallow hills of central Pennsylvania, only a few miles from where I had grown up. When we moved in, small patches of ice and snow still resided in the shadows. The forest that stretched up the hill away from the house was bone-bare and brown. The birds were just beginning to find their way through the thaw.

It was the opposite of the neighborhood we had left. It was not glitzy or fashionable. We were not surrounded by cars and people. When we drove down the gravel driveway, slowing for the deeper potholes, we were not in awe of the material success of those around us.IMG_0078

But it was beautiful. And peaceful. We found healing there on quiet afternoons as Maile made supper and the kids’ voices ricocheted back at us through the valley. Lines of geese stretched across the sky and slipped through the dusk, circling, then dropping into neighboring fields.

Everyone, everything, it seemed, was returning home.

* * * * *

The first spring there, we decided we were farmers. We planted a massive garden in the back yard, turning over the deep green grass, exposing rich, brown earth. Anything could grow in that soil. Even hope.

The second spring, having conquered the gardening aspect of life, we turned to raising chickens. We bought them at a local feed store and took them home in a cardboard box with perforated holes in it. So they could breathe. We promptly settled them in large plastic container in the kitchen, and, with the help of a heat lamp and a small feeding system, managed to get them alive through spring.

I don’t know exactly when it was that the chickens started laying eggs, but they did, and we enjoyed them. The kids brought back four brown eggs a day to the house, holding each like a small miracle. By the time fall arrived, they were free range chickens and we lost track of where they were laying their eggs.

We searched the bushes, the woods, the underside of our doublewide. No luck. Leaves blew in sporadic gusts down the hill. We wondered if they had stopped laying because of the cold. We wondered if animals were getting to the eggs before we could. We kept looking.

* * * * *

When we had to leave our home in Virginia, it felt like all the good things had gone missing. Our church, our friends, our future: all of it up and evaporated in the time it took to drive 200 miles north. And for a little while we stopped believing good things could last. We stopped looking for them.

A quick internet search had taken us to that doublewide. My father happened to know the owner. We didn’t recognize it at the time, but being able to move into that quiet space was the first hint of goodness returning.

* * * * *

One day my daughter Abra, three or four years old at the time, came running inside, shouting to anyone who would listen. She hopped up and down and in each of her hands she held an egg.

“Where did you find those?” I asked.IMG_0068

We followed her outside and through the yard to a woodpile the landlord had made from the branches of a fallen tree. Abra climbed back behind the wood and pointed.

There, in a small bowl-shaped space in the depths of the woodpile, lay at least two dozen eggs. It was cold, so they hadn’t gone bad. We used a tongs to reach in and take out each little miracle, one by one.

* * * * *

As the months passed, I found work. We settled into a routine and made new friends. We found a church to call home. The things we had lost in Virginia would not be replaced, but there were good things to be found, even in that new place.

It can sometimes be hard to believe there is still good in the world. It can be so hard to find, especially after The Move or The Diagnosis or The Divorce. But it’s still there. We might not be ready to discover it right away, but the world will thaw, and the good will appear in the most unlikely of places.

We only lived in the doublewide for two years. If you ask any of our children which of our many locations has been their favorite house, each one will tell you that one was it. It’s where we landed in our hurt. It’s where we healed as a family. It’s where we started to find goodness in what had at first seemed a terrible gift.

* * *

shawn bio YAH

Visiting With Ghosts

Posted on by under Losing Place

About once a month, I wish that I could revisit a place from my past. It’s not always the same place (though some are recurring), but my terms are always the same: I want to be alone and undisturbed. I want to be able to look around to my heart’s content, and I want it to be exactly as it was when I was there.

I’m not sure what I think this would solve, exactly. I’m not sure what I would gain by sitting again at the bar of a restaurant, closed for the season, where I ate several breakfasts and dinners with a boy I once knew, who worked there when it was open. I remember the way he made coffee with a practiced, professional hand, and how we cooked together in the industrial kitchen in bare feet.

I spent one day there, alone, meeting food writing deadlines. Autumn sun flooded the floor where tables and chairs usually would have been. If I close my eyes, I can still remember how strange it was to be in a restaurant which wasn’t fulfilling its purpose, as if I were living in a post-rapture world and businesses were no longer relevant.

When that boy moved out of the country a few weeks later, he took the keys to that restaurant with him. I know that if I were to go back, it would not be to the same place where we danced to “Summertime Sadness” in the dark, or watched “You’ve Got Mail” together on Halloween. “That’s my favorite movie,” he had told me. I believed him.

Then, there’s a triplex in a small college town south of Spokane where my ex-boyfriend used to live. Floaty, grey sheers hung on his windows and the frozen early spring light filtered in during the day as I sat on the couch. Sometimes I would drive the hour and a half to spend a day off with him; we would sit together, enjoying our closeness. On those visits, I would arrive before he finished with work. He left the door unlocked for me, and I would lock it behind me immediately, the difference between my San Diego upbringing and his in rural Idaho.

From his window, I could see the local grocery store. Sometimes I would walk over and buy vegetables or salad dressing. He always had plenty of frozen things, chicken, beef, and vegetables, but I was the one who bought and roasted asparagus, quartered brussels sprouts, or sautéed mushrooms in butter.

I spent many hours in that three story house waiting for him to get home. I’m not sure why it still haunts me. In the afternoons there was a silence about it that reminded me of nap times when I used to babysit. I kept an ear out the way I listened for a child who might be stirring. I watched out the window for his return, tuning my ear to the sound of his truck.

Most often though, I find myself mentally walking the halls of my mother’s mother’s house, the one she sold quite a few years ago. Before I even get inside, there is the fragrance of gardenia along the path. There is a bush where I hid a Lindt truffle from my grandmother’s jar, hoping that it would be there for my next visit (it wasn’t). The lawn is split into two levels by a rock wall where we sat to let our sparklers burn out safely every fourth of July.

Inside, I step carefully into the marble-floored entry, remembering how hard it could be in an unexpected fall. I pause in the living room for a moment, remembering the year all of my cousins got gymnastics Barbies and we twirled them all over that floor. Upstairs, I run straight to the Tulip room, so named for my grandmother’s favorite flower and all of the tulip decor, mostly pink. This was where I slept when I visited and where she kept all the toys.

Across the way is the yellow bathroom where I steeped in oatmeal baths during my chicken pox and brushed my teeth with bright blue bath salts the color of my Crest gel.

Downstairs there is a den, beneath the kitchen where the food rested expectantly on holidays, ready to be heaped onto plates. I can’t quite remember how it worked, but I know that there was a bar. That was where my grandparents kept the biscuits for Jebby, their faithful dog, who patiently accepted one from each of the six grandchildren.

That den was where my Poppa, my mom’s dad, introduced me to Indiana Jones and Star Wars in those tender years we shared before he passed away, followed soon after by Jebby. If I pause in this section of the house and squeeze my eyes tight, I can hear the splashes from the waterslide into the pool just through the sliding glass door, and the echoes of a hollow ball meeting paddles and a table, down the hall in the garage where the coordinated are playing ping pong. Any moment now my Poppa will wrap an arm around my shoulder and ask if he can make me a drink. I guess, maybe, when I revisit a place, I don’t always want to be alone.