After Saturday night…

Jane slipped away, dying on a Saturday night while we surrounded her bed in the hospital emergency department. In what feels like a parallel universe, our parishioners, at the same time, were saying reader’s vespers next to my binder and books that I had set out for the all-night vigil the day before. They should have finished their work at the same time she did, and we all quietly retreated back to our homes. The next day, exhausted, dehydrated, and brittle, we forced aching bodies out of bed too early, and we headed to church, feeling like hung-over party-goers scraping themselves together after a wild Saturday night on the town. There is a fog that surrounds the first few days after death, and every death feels like the first death as we feel our way through the days and nights. Order is good. Structure is good. It is important to not let the pieces fall too far apart because they will only be harder to put back together.

Monday’s child is fair of face. My mother-in-law was born on a Monday in a small Kansas town where her father was a farmer and local surveyor. One of the gifts of dementia is that early memories become stronger, like flowers that thrive in the sun and air when the weeds are cleared away. She remembered things we had never heard about before and shared them readily. She told us about the time the tax man came by and spoke to a very young Jane, and she revealed the unreported and untaxed cows that were kept in the barn. When her father went to punish her, she plainly asked if he was telling her that lying was ever appropriate. He had to let it go.

She grew up across the road from the Emporia Zoo, and one time, for reasons she never understood, the monkeys escaped the zoo, and they ran to their farm and took up residence in their barn. The cow was terrified and ran away. It had to be hunted down, but it would not return readily. She remembered the first day of first grade when she walked herself to school, something seven-year-old children did back in the early 1950s. On that day, she met her lifelong best friend. It turned out that Jane had walked to the wrong school; she was meant to go to the other, but she refused, not wanting to leave behind Janetta, somehow knowing this was someone who would become so important to her. The teacher spanked her. Jane refused to switch schools. They spoke to her parents, but they told the teacher she would have to give in because Jane would never. The teacher relented because no amount of spanking would convince Jane.

Jane had complex dementia, there were several causes. What they were mostly doesn’t matter except for one: she had vascular dementia. This form has a very low life expectancy, most sufferers die from stroke on average only five years after symptoms begin. Jane lived for four. We always knew that she could die at any time and that strokes often don’t give warnings. We knew this but also did not. We expected our life with her would continue the way it did for years. We had plans. We had short-term ones and long-term ones and lists of things we wanted to do over the summer. We would not have the summer. We did not know that this would be her last day, the Saturday morning that began with breakfast and laughter and ended up with quiet tears.

I was her daily caregiver. It would not have been appropriate for her son to help her with bathing and dressing and bathroom chores, so I did it. No one made me. I wanted to do it. I begged her for two years to move in with us, and she relented. I know that there was nothing I did to convince her. Jane had to decide because no one could make that woman do anything she did not want to do. My husband was cautious. He did not want to put me in a position like this; he did not want me to feel obligated, but I did feel obligated because I loved her. I loved Jane for the person she was when I met her, when she welcomed me into her family, and I loved her for the person she was becoming as pieces of her fell away, and I loved her for the person she might become when dementia would filter her essence.

I spent hours moving through her routine with her and sitting with her while she ate. I brought hand sewing and knitting with me, and I sat with her, but the real work was silent and still. It was the hours of being present with no words so that the most important things could be said and felt and pondered. My husband has always said that it takes an investment of many long, boring hours of nothing before the real words come out, and he is right. I heard so many stories. So many lost moments were found, and I hold them in my heart. I was devoted to Jane, and as time passed, she leaned on me and into me. I always told the doctors and nurses that Jane was my best friend and that we went everywhere together. She was my best friend, but I was not her best friend, that was Janetta, and I was not one of her children. I was something else and she was devoted to me in a way that escapes definition. When she was in the hospital eleven months ago with a mini-stroke, the nurses and doctors promised they would take care of her and told me to go home. She asked me to stay with her, so I did. I slept in a chair next to her bed and held her hand all night.

On Saturday, the day that she died, she suffered a massive stroke, and as her brain filled with blood, she lost the ability to interact with us. I watched her slip away slowly, retreating to a place that I could not follow. I sat with her, spoke to her, and promised help was coming, and she reached for my hand. I will never, ever forget that moment. I watched her shaky hand reach out for me, and I clung to it in desperation. I felt like we were sinking, and if I held on, I could hold us together. We waited for the ambulance together while my son drove to the end of our quarter-mile driveway to guide them. The rest of the children crowded the windows, willing it to appear.

The doctor believed it would be less than twenty-four hours before Jane died, so she was not transferred upstairs but instead to a large, private room where they wheeled in a refreshment cart with coffee and water bottles and snacks and so many boxes of tissues, which were somehow not enough. They had prepared us for a different kind of all-night vigil, and we pressed in around her. She passed in just minutes, and we were unprepared. Everything had been set out for the work of the night, and now it was over, and these were left unused. Meanwhile, our parishioners fumbled through a shortened version of the service, not really sure what to do with my stacks. Instead, they turned to the horologian and tried to piece it together from there, leaving my books on the stand next to them. Saturday night was over. Our work was finished. All was quiet and still, and it was time to go home and prepare for what would come next.

I am unsettled and disjointed. Everywhere around me are things that Jane left behind. I see her favorite crochet throw made by a friend. Her favorite ice cream fills my freezer. Her Bible is still next to her bed. Her beloved Gospel albums are unplayed. My time is filled with preparing for her funeral, but I always feel like I am forgetting something because I keep feeling like it is time for medicine or blood pressure or a visit with my knitting in my hands. Even though there is no one there in her chair, I feel the need to check that she is there. My husband has a recliner next to her spot, and he went and just laid down and took a nap in it. He has been struggling to sleep, but for a brief respite, he was sleeping, and we moved quietly around him so that he could have this time. Maybe for a moment, he felt like he was holding her there next to him, in the magical chair that always made him fall asleep, resting with her instead of sinking.  

I know what happens after Saturday night. After the night comes the dawn and the morning and Sunday and the Resurrection. Monday’s child is fair of face, and my beautiful mother-in-law died on a Saturday evening so she could be ready for the Resurrection on Sunday.

You can read this post about Jane and me and our dementia journey together here.

You can read Jane's obituary here.

Home...

I am a big fan of John Green’s podcast, Anthropocene Reviewed. I keep his episode about Indianapolis downloaded on my phone and I listen to it repeatedly to remind me that home is before and I live in the after but that home is also something I am building, particularly for my youngest children who are very much products of this place. This is their home of fond nostalgic longing. This is their before.

I think memories of home are what we carry in our hearts and take with us as we go out into the world. We bond with others by taking out those pieces of our homes and sharing them. When we find someone who has similar aspects to their own bits of home and instantly we find our hearts warming and loneliness abated. It does not matter when or where I live, I carry that conceptualized idea of home with me.

This is especially important to me when I consider my faith. Our little mission has but few parishioners and I feel their loss greatly in this time of quarantine. I already grieve my broader family, some days more than others. The ways that I interact with others like myself fall into the usual categories of Facebook and Instagram and phone dates and thousands of texts riding cell signals to faraway Colorado. The particulars of my situation are distinct but the overall message is not. I think most of us live lives searching for connection in a world that has eschewed roots and friendships and God.

This makes the ministry of Ancient Faith so important. I produce content for them; I write and speak on the radio and at conferences. What I say sounds really self-serving and I know that but I am serious. When I sold my first book, I conducted my interactions over the internet and mail through emails and contracts and reviews of PDF proofs. It was sterile and efficient, or so I thought, until the first time I went to a conference and Tonya Maddox wrapped me in a hug. She treated me like a relative at a reunion and not just another author publishing her first book under the guiding eye of her husband, John Maddox. I have watched as others within the organization have done the same for me and for others. There is a lot of love here and it is all because they love Christ first and their home is in Him.

The way people who work with Ancient Faith interact with others is real. I have a friend who was going through a profoundly dark time in her life and listened to Chrissi Hart read children’s books for hours and hours on end. Her gentle and lilting voice soothing when nothing else was. The way that readers and listeners interact with us is just as real. When Chrissi’s husband was valiantly fighting cancer, this same friend prayed for hours and hours for the woman who had sat with her in her own darkest hour. This is real, very real. We have this because Ancient Faith is a new agora, a place where we meet to and share our Christian lives and in turn love each other as Christ loved us.

The quarantine has been hard in so many ways. We have been out of our churches. We have been shut away from our friends and family. We have turned our worlds inward. As we come out of quarantine, how will the landscape look? What will remain of the world that we left behind? Unless people donate to Ancient Faith, which is a non-profit, that landscape will have a gaping void in it. The agora that we built, you and I built together, where we come together to press the like sides of our little homes together, will no longer exist. No new books. No new conferences. It also means no more of the free materials like the radio or the podcasts or the videos. We will all have lost something real.

I have been paid for my books but not the emails or the phone calls or the hugs given in hallways. I pray for you. I keep a list of running prayer requests and I take this seriously. I don’t do this for money. I do this because I can see Christ in your heart and you can see Him in mine. No one who produces content for Ancient Faith is in it for the money. They are in it because that is where we find you and you are worth finding.

I hope that no matter what, you will pray for everyone involved at Ancient Faith. I hope that you will pray that this new agora will last. I hope that if you are able to give, you will. I hope to see you after this quarantine and when I do, I will show you my heart and you will show me yours and we will see our homes in both the before and the after.

You can click HERE to donate. I am on team HMS Swimmy with some of my favorite folks from Ancient Faith. You can pray at any time and anywhere and I hope you will. I am thinking of you. I hope you can feel it in your heart.

Waiting...

I woke up this morning to sun and birds and though it was barely above freezing, I could tell that today would be warm. Well, warm by the relative standards of spring in the Keweenaw. Today is Bright Saturday and I was looking forward to Liturgy and a procession with the artos that I baked a week ago for just this moment. We were lucky to avoid the snow during the procession on Pascha although by the time we left the church, it was chillingly cold and windy with several inches on the ground. Today was clear and sunny with an expected high in the low fifties which is pretty good for late April. Today’s procession in the warmth and sunshine would be glorious. It was to be my consolation.

My husband is the priest and I am the chanter and one of our five sons serves so it is a family affair. Today, I brought four of the six daughters so we could have a small procession. We have been keeping things small, smaller than this at times, and live streaming services over Facebook to anyone who misses church and craves a few minutes of opportunity to live vicariously.

We are clumsy. It is hard to have so few people. There are never enough people to hold books or doors or move the camera for Holy Communion. We all try to fill multiple roles at the same time, moving like circus performers spinning plates on poles. Sometimes we move gracefully and glide past and around each other with those plates spinning smoothly over our heads. Often we fumble and lose track of one plate while attending another. We drop many, many plates and step on each other’s lines and are slow to respond but we are there. I never watch the live stream and I simply hope for the best and pray that the others watching at home are gentle in their judgments.

Today would be that last of the Pascha services, the last of the sung Pascha hours, the last of the Pascha canon, the last of the feast of feasts and it would culminate with a procession of small girls carrying an icon of the Resurrection and the Artos while their father and brother and the lone monk of this isolated community processed around the church. I walked behind them singing, as loudly as I was able, the Paschal canon for the last Bright Week service of 2020. It certainly felt bright and Bright. I felt bright. 2020 hasn’t felt so warm and hopeful for such a long time. It felt like waking up from a bad dream to find the morning dawning clear and full of light.

After we sliced the artos and saved some for the children at home, after some coffee and juice, after a hasty lunch on paper plates, the real world dripped back in like water through the weak seam of a rowboat. There is still a quarantine. State law now mandates that a quick run to the grocery store requires a mask and a queue and to be counted as I enter and exit. Finding toilet paper is a triumph and I am still hoarding bread flour so I can bake the bread that my husband will consecrate during Liturgy. I had been holding my breath, waiting for Pascha, and for what would happen on the other side. Now I am here and I find that I don’t know what I was waiting for but only that I was waiting.

We see the incredibly stark division between life now and life two months ago but are also profoundly conscious of the slow passage of hours and days as we wait to be released from homes to go out and find what the lay of the land looks like these days. There are just shy of three more weeks of quarantine here and it is a day marked out on people’s calendars. That is the day that life begins, it is when we come out of the dark and into the light. I know better, or I should know better. I have seen the Light of Lights and it has come down to dwell among men.

Quarantine was easier while it was winter, while it snowed, while the wind battered our farmhouse out on the peninsula. It was easier to shelter in place as we sheltered from winter. The seasons are shifting and the weather is turning and the earth becoming exposed. Our woods call to the children and teens and they take daily walks down to the creek and wander the ravines that their father and his father and his father before him walked. With the warm weather and the hope of hearing the peeper frogs in the evening comes a disorienting sense that I can’t see what it is we are escaping.

I have a sense that I am standing before a closed door and wondering who is on the other side. Once the door is opened, I cannot go back, I can only go forward. Knowing this, I will take a piece of Pascha with me. I will knock and know that the door will open and when it does, it will let in the King of Glory and where He goes, so I will follow.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Psalm 24:7-10

Review of "Spyridon's Shoes"...

Several weeks back, I received a review copy of Spyridon’s Shoes by Khouria Christine Rodgers and I have been meaning to get that review actually written and not just outlined. Every time I sit down to work on it, another of my kids picks up this book and starts it so I wait for them to finish. Today, I had a teen get the book for me and one of the middle schoolers called out, “I put it there to wait for me! I was going to start it today!”

“Haven’t you read it once already?”

“No! I read it to the little girls, this time it is for me!”

This is the kind of book it is. It's a quick read, taking only about an hour, and is well suited to kids in the middle school years but was easily read by my ten-year-old. It is engaging enough that my sixteen-year-old read it as soon as the mail was delivered, in a single sitting.

It opens on the main character, a boy, which is well noticed by my children who feel like most main characters these days are girls. I think this an important point because even though I have six daughters, I also have five sons and I know that often boys like to read about other boys. The cover shows a scene in the second chapter in which Spyros is helped by an elderly monk who washes and bandages his foot and gives him his own shoe to keep those wraps in place. The story grows from this very tender and compassionate beginning.

This story is about St. Spyridon but rather than an account of his life, it is rather a story about this boy’s encounter with him. I like this perspective. While it might be in my daily life that I come across people who are living saints, I won’t be able to appreciate them. It’s a sad truth. I think that this is something that kids can agree with because their lives are often full of not truly appreciating what they have. This is okay, it's a learned skill, one I am still not very good at yet. I can be patient with them on this.

There is another reason I really like this approach. As a child, I liked reading about saints but I always wondered about the people they interceded for and what happened in their lives. Growing up, I was surrounded by images of saints. My Mexican grandmother had a print of the Christ Child, the Santo Niño, surrounded by smaller little images of people being saved by Christ. Around the frame of the print, she tucked in photos of people she had prayed for or was currently prayed for so that they could be another widening circle of grateful recipients. Sometimes I would ask about this person or that one and she would happily tell me. Only one little image on the print was unknown to her. It featured two women with their hands held up in the air as a bandit wielding a gun approached them. They had been saved and I always wanted to know more but she didn’t have more to offer.

As an adult, I carry this wonder with me. I think about St Spyridon and his worn-out shoes and wonder about all those people he has walked out to help. I can wonder how it would feel to approach him and offer a small measure of gratitude. In this book, the boy has this very opportunity. Khouria Christine gives us an opportunity to think about this saint and his very real work in the world and what it would be like to approach him. I think this is why my children keep returning to this book again and again. They want to know what it would be like to step into his shoe and walk with Spyros, touching holiness and being healed by it.

I won’t spoil this book for you but I will tell you that I, with my tender little heart, cried at the ending. I think I will also have to pick this book up again and again. You will, too.

I was not compensated for my review and was not required to provide a positive review. I did receive a free copy which is super cool because we really, really liked it. The book is available from major online retailers but also through the publisher HERE. Ask your church bookstore to carry it.

The hard things...

Every day, I pull out my big three-ring notebook and help my children memorize poetry. Eli is memorizing a new translation of Psalm 50 and it is killing him. I don’t know this translation myself and I have to stare at the words otherwise they morph into one or another version or maybe just one that I am making up as I go. This is really hard. This translation is so similar but also so different and he keeps sliding into his old one, that one that he hears every day when his father reads the morning prayers which just happens to be the same as the one that lives in my head. So we work on it, just a few words at a time, every single day.

He really has to focus and so do I because I don’t know it and I just keep sliding into the one I actually can say. I kick everyone out of the room and I stare at these words as he sips his coffee and I can see the wheels turning in his head while the ones in my own head struggle to stay on track. He does not have to do this, he is not obligated, but he is doing it anyway. He whispers under his breath, “This is the hardest thing that I will ever do.” He is on to something here.

Just doing hard things is hard. This is something that is a such a mental workout that it feels like an exercise in futility, like watching Sysophis rolling his rock back up the hill every morning. Just like that but, only not, it is just a mental workout. It is not like Eli is climbing Mt Everest or anything, I am not his sherpa dragging myself up a mountain with him; it is just memory work. That is what makes it harder. We have a hard time doing the little hard things, the ones that are actually possible, the ones that show up in our daily lives, the ones that feel both so insurmountable that we cannot muster the strength to even consider doing it but also ones that feel so small that they aren’t worth doing. So, we don’t learn to do hard things. We learn to stop before we even start. I think that we should learn to the little hard things, and do lots of them, and to celebrate them. I am never going to climb Mt Everest but I just might memorize this prayer.

Why is he even doing this? Well, our religion has very scripted services and over thousands of years has developed a number of books that help us to say the right things and do the right things as we stand in the right places. Sometimes, it is easier to memorize pieces of these services to make it easier to do the other things, like hold lots of lit candles and gold plated pots of burning incense that we swing around. One of the publishers of these books is making some changes because of some weird modern day, first world problems, like copyright law. It’s easier for them to publish books if they own all the pieces inside so some of the translations are changing. My husband is adamantly opposed to this. He gets so upset and anxious and downright irritable at the thought of memorizing these little pieces over again using this new translation. He thinks it’s impossible. To him, he might as well be climbing Mt Everest and he is not alone. There is a large contingent of clergy like himself who also think they will never memorize these prayers. They don’t even try because it is just impossible.

Eli has his eyes on the future and he knows that if he does become clergy, like his father, then he will have a leg up if he already knows these translations. That is why, every day, he chips away at Mt Everest. He is starting with one prayer, just one, and only a few words at a time. One of these days, he will look down from the top with this prayer safely tucked into his pocket, ready to pull out at a moment’s notice, and then steel himself for the next mountain.

“This is the hardest thing I will ever do,” Eli tells me.

He might be right. I think the next one will be easier because he did this one first. That is why I sit at the table with him and sip my own coffee. Mt Everest, here we come.

Review of Piggy in Heaven...

My children had the chance to review the newest book from Melinda Johnson, Piggy in Heaven. This is a small little board book filled with bright, colorful images and simple, gentle language that belie its true depth. It is just a little board book but it also a very handy tool designed to help very small people deal with very big losses. This is a book about the death of a beloved pet guinea pig named Piggy, one that the author’s family once owned.

I believe that it is critical to teach children both to love and to grieve. If we are unable to one we will never be able to do the other and there are people, dreams, hopes, and even animals which deserve both. For many children, their formative years will be punctuated by death and learning how to live with it and through it is an important skill because all life is temporary. Nothing lives forever. Like all things that children must learn, grief is a part of the landscape of living.

In the story, Piggy finds perfect natural happiness with health and vigor and grass and daisies and even friends. Piggy is not alone. This is critical. Children see their pets needing themselves as much as they need their pets and the fear that the pet will miss the child can be upsetting. Piggy is happy which is as much as any child can ask.

Last night, I read this book to my children, all of them heaped around on the sofas, the two youngest in my lap. My eight-year-old, Sophia, liked the story so much that she immediately read it again to herself. She told me that she thinks this is an important book because kids will lose their pets at some point. They need to have this book so that they already have it when they lose their pet. She is not wrong.

My youngest, Claudia, is not yet six. For her this book was evocative. It reminded her of her cat’s death two Christmases ago. Sadly, it is pretty much her earliest memory. She struggles occasionally with remembering his death. We have a new young cat but it is not her elderly cat whose only goal in life was to lay close to Claudia and be stroked. I think it is worth mentioning that some children might find this a difficult book to read; not a bad read, just hard. That’s okay. It is important to work through these feelings so that we are prepared to work through even bigger ones down the road. Thinking about this book today, she is glad that she read it and still thinks it is a good book to read but wants other children to know that it is okay if it makes them cry. She is also not wrong. Sometimes kids need an opportunity to cry and if this book helps with that, then it is still helping.

The book is published by Paraclete Press and is available from their website HERE as well as other major retailers. I received a free advance copy of the book with no obligation to review or give a positive review. The thoughts expressed here are my own or those of my two youngest children. I wholeheartedly recommend this book and I am so glad that I had the opportunity to read this with my children.

Canned soup and the city girl...

I am a city transplant living in the rural upper Midwest and trying to find my way. The way that I feel out the world is with food and while it isn’t necessarily practical it works for me. I figure that we might as well eat well. If nothing else is going right, I got a legit recipe for sharp cheddar pâte àu choux that will cure what ails you. If I need to pull out the big guns, you will see me in the kitchen merciless attacking lemons for homemade curd that I will eat right off the spoon. Because reasons. One of the salient characteristics of my personality is how I love food. I love everything about it. I love shopping for food, cooking food, serving food, eating food, writing about food, and I frequently annoy people with what might actually be an unhealthy commitment to food. That said, people who might suggest it is unhealthy also readily accept dinner party invitations so, there's that. My freaky little obsession works out well for them. I used to tell people it was because of my country childhood, which is why I could never bring myself to make or eat what I have unkindly called “cream of barf and potato pellet casserole”. Not a good side of me and I totally regret it. Let me tell you more about that.

My mother and father both had rural roots with farms and horses figuring prominently in their childhoods and since neither set of grandparents headed the siren song to move to the city, these were also a part of my childhood. The difference is that it wasn’t actually my childhood, just a part of it. I lived in the city. As a teen and young adult, I moved around the city in trains and buses and cabs and hung out in chic late night coffee shops listening to poetry recitation. That is how I met the man who is now my husband, a man who had a similar city childhood with farm country summers.  As grownups and married with a slew of children, we moved out of our lower downtown row house and out to the place where the city meets the suburbs. We were looking for the best of both worlds: bigger houses and actual yards but the city limits literally a half a mile away. We had a cute tri-level with a decent yard but my husband could still take the train to work and on the occasional Friday night I could meet him downtown for drinks, dinner, and the symphony.

As they say: that was then, this is now.

A few years ago there was a bit of a quandary with what to do with my husband’s family’s farm. No one really wanted to live out there and no one wanted to pay the bills and someone needed to do both. We made the seriously crazy decision for my husband to quit his white collar job in finance and sell that lovely tri-level with the newly and perfectly remodeled kitchen, the one designed to accommodate my freaky food obsession. That one. You’re welcome, new owners. Then we moved our children to a house half the size with no garage but with an aging grandfathered septic system and patchy electrical service. Clearly, I love my husband more than I love food, which is as it should be. We are now almost a mile from the closest neighbor, two miles from a paved road, seven from the highway, seventeen from the closest gas station, and twenty-one miles from the closest grocery. That one is a unique one. It is an IGA (Independent Grocers of America) slash gas station slash hardware store because when you are out getting Stihl chainsaw parts, you might want to pick up some milk and bread along with diesel. Because reasons, though different ones.

Here I am, in prime casserole country though sometimes they call it hot dish. That’s a word I had to learn, not one that you hear too often back in Colorado. The country world doesn’t feel like I thought it would. Read between the lines on this one: this means it doesn’t taste like I thought it would. There is this city idea that in the country everyone is getting all of their veggies at farm stands run by children in overalls for salads to eat alongside their pastured raised beef steak and farm fresh milk. In reality, it’s a lot of Walmart ingredients. I think there are a lot of reasons for this but in the end, I am no social scientist and if I start up on my soapbox, someone is going to come along and push me off. So let me say this: the food priorities are different and lean towards stability, economy, and ease of preparation before quality and nutrition which are in a dead heat for last place. I have some idea of what people are thinking, they need food stuffs that don’t need to be replenished often and can be easily transported to a place hundreds of miles from an interstate. They want it to be fast and easy because there aren’t the same resources like cafés, bistros, delis, and food delivery. They don’t have a dinner backup, particularly when in the outlying areas like I live. They also need cheap because financial stability is hard fought for in the small economic markets like this. Hello, casserole. Or hot dish. Call it what you want just don’t notice that I was able to sneak in sociological analysis.

This makes things hard for someone who is hyper-dedicated to food and who might be a lot irrational and perhaps even a little neurotic. I am talking about me. It is hard for me. We had someone over for dinner not too long after we moved. He asked what I was making and I told him where I got the beef and that it was pastured raised and had a nice life and that I had made the chèvre cheese and bread myself from a sourdough starter I had made and then I saw his face.

“It’s beef stew,” I said.

He smiled at me and replied, “Hey. Have you guys ever seen the show Portlandia?”

I am not even kidding. I am now a figure from Portlandia. This actually happened and maybe it is not a bad thing because it made me realize something. I realized that there is a difference between being someone who really appreciates good food and a jerk face food snob. I don’t want to be a mean person. Mean people don’t cook for others and if they do, who comes to sit at their table? Other mean people? That sounds like a lousy evening. I want to be someone who is gracious and that means not equating ingredients with moral superiority. It means remembering that people come first and it means that sometimes I will eat canned soup and tot casserole because the most important ingredient in that dish is the love that someone else put into it. I know what it means to feed people and how much of my heart goes into a meal and it isn’t different for others. It’s real.

Several years ago someone told me that she suffered from terrible anxiety at church potlucks because she was afraid I would eat her food and not like it. I was taken aback and told that her if I had ever said anything unkind, I deeply regretted it. Fortunately I hadn't but in the end, it didn't matter. Knowing I was a recipe developer and catered local events made her all kinds of nervous that I would hate her food. She is an incredible woman, someone who is giving and kind and raised kids who could shake hands and smile at adults. I don’t want to think that I am that kind of woman. You know, one who crushes another one because I am not into crushing people unless it is under the weight of pâte àu choux because that is the way to go, guys. Seriously. Bring on the pastry cream, I am ready.

I want to be nice but I am also the kind of person who is unreasonably attached food which is only becoming increasingly obvious to people who live here. The question is what to do about it? I am me and I am here and here is different than where I came from so what now? More food. Pretty much my solution to all the problems is to have more food. I decided that the absence of a food culture here just means that there is a void that I need to fill and I will fill it with food. The best thing I can do invite all the people to dinner and bring food to all the places. See? More food. If I want to find a home here, I can’t be said jerk face food snob. Of course part of my plan is to then lure them into my crazy with homemade sour cream donuts and chicken Provençal which, by the way, can win over the heart of even the most resistant lumberjack. Ask me how I know. Okay, I will tell you without you even asking: harvest party potluck slash game night at the rec building slash ice rink. This one is cooled by winter and not expensive machines so, thank you, Mother Nature.

In the end, I am just a girl who is actually a middle aged mother with a heap of kids and a husband who knows on which side his brioche is buttered. We have moved out to the country and we are building a life here with a dairy cow and her sweet calf, sheep, turkeys, and ducks and I am learning a lot along the way. I am learning to be a better version of me without sacrificing who I am. I am learning how to eat what I am offered and truly enjoy it. I am learning to gently introduce people to my crazy food obsessions like cheese making. I have also learned how to butcher a steer, like actually butcher it in the yard. I can do that, too. If I can do that, I can do pretty much anything. And really, if I can do that, anyone can do pretty much anything. So, let’s start by eating together. The answer to life’s troubles is more food, always more food.

One screen to rule them all...

Sometimes the burden is too much.

I have no idea what is wrong with us. We are crazy people. You know how people talk about the endless arguments over who has the remote control and who gets to decide what goes on the television? Never happens here. Like ever. We are the people who pass around the remote control like some kind of nuclear hot potato, ready to explode and take us all out with it. There is just something wrong with us. If we are the one who has to decide what we will watch, we quickly manage to slip the remote onto the lap of the person sitting next to us, or quietly drop it onto the coffee table and walk away.

We are old-fashioned people in a lot of ways and some of those ways might surprise you. We do have a hand crank coffee grinder on the wall in the kitchen. Who does that? I'll you. People who fight over who must hold the remote control. We have one television, one, and we watch it together in the living room. If you don't feel like watching with the family, you are free to read a book or sew or paint or play Risk with three of your brothers, but you don't get any WiFi. That stuff is in rare supply out here and the family is watching something. If that movie starts to buffer, your siblings will hunt you down like a dog and turn you and your tablet into us parents. You might think that with only one screen to watch that there might some intense battles over what will be on it. But no. Nobody wants that kind of responsibility.

We can't get broadcast television and we don't pay for satellite, we watch Amazon and Netflix and some YouTube (the BYU App is awesome). We tend to gravitate towards series of television shows or movies because it reduced the choices we have to make and we can just do the next one. When we come to the end, there is this terrible crisis of not knowing what to watch and not wanting to be the one who will figure it out. We have watched entire seasons of shows that no one liked simply because there was more to watch and thereby preventing more decision making. Again, who does this? People who hand grind their coffee beans and use a French press and a kettle. Sometimes we use the neat little stove top espresso maker but I digress.

The only ones who actually know what they want to watch are the ones who are not allowed to decide. The two youngest have some series cartoon addiction and there is only so much Masha and the Bear that one can, well, bear, but at least they know what they want and aren't afraid to express an opinion. Also, for the record, these two have lunch daily with a bestie who doesn't even know they exist. They love, love, love to watch Alice, the daughter of Studio C's Jason Gray on his family's YouTube channel, find it HERE. They would watch Alice sleep. It doesn't matter what she is doing, they care. Alice is walking in a store? Awesome. Let's watch. Alice is eating a sucker? Amazing.  Let's watch. Alice is coloring? Brilliant. Let's watch. Alice is in a car seat in a car and pretty much not doing anything yet but, dang it, do not stop this video. Because they don't get to do the same things the older kids do (like online school) they get to watch all the videos of Alice, though I like to leave it at one a day. Today was a three video day because I wanted a chance to use the bathroom, but I digress.

We need another family member, one who does not knit or crochet who has both hands free and is willing to make television watching decisions for us because clearly, we are incompetent.  Only one of my kids is old enough to get married but I am open to adoption. I am taking applications.

Looking to adopt a new family member to wield the remote control and make television watching decisions. Must not be afraid of wolves, snow measured in tens of feet, cow milking chores at five am, or eating organ meats. We have plenty of all of the above. Must be willing to bunk with upto a half dozen existing siblings. Ability to run a wood processor and/or splitter a plus. Apply within.

Starting small...

The little things really are the big things. We say it all the time but I think very few of us believe it because we certainly don’t act like it. We want every event to be like stills pulled from a movie where everyone is bathed in golden hour light and flower petals fall from the trees as we lay in the grass below. We start out any random Friday night and inside we are hoping just a little bit that it will the night of our lives, the one that we could never forget, and if it isn’t we are let down. I think this leads to a lot of disappointing moments in our lives where we are dissatisfied with ourselves, our family, our friends, and our lot in life.

I think there are a lot of things that contribute to this, things I admittedly indulge. Facebook and Instagram certainly don’t make it any easier. I can peek at the small luxuries of women who are both like me and totally not like me and feel like my life doesn’t measure up. I didn’t start this morning with a croissant on a charming antique plate with earl gray tea and imported French preserves all placed next to a novel with a beautiful cover and a bouquet of flowers. Truth be told, my morning started out with me in a rat’s nest bun and leggings as I slurped crappy coffee with almond milk from a chipped mug and a bowl of ramen in my lap and not even the really good kind. Like the desperate kind. More truth, not even that woman’s day actually started out like that because I am telling you right now that she totally composed that shot so we could see a carefully curated selection of her morning’s elements. What may or may not have been outside the frame of that iPhone shot, I will never know. All I can really be sure about is that nobody is sitting down to the breakfast and thinks, “Snap. This looks like an amazing shot. Lemme casually lay my novel down here and snap an IG.”

Life is real, like a lot of real. It is real hard. It is real messy. It is real loud. It is also real good. I think we need to not lose track of that. Life is legit good and probably because it is also hard and messy and loud. When we sit down to think about what our lives mean, too often we are looking for the big things that identify us and it’s unfortunate. If we take a few minutes to think about it, when we sit down and evaluate the lives of someone we loved who died, we don’t think about the big things. It all comes down to the tiny things, the smallest of things, the things that are really real.

Think about someone you lost but whom you loved deeply and profoundly. Do you list their job or college or the kind car they drove (unless it was something cool or quirky because that is something)? I am guessing that you are thinking about things like the way they smelled or the way they always mispronounced a word or maybe songs they sang. I know I do. My grandfather was a musician with long, beautiful fingers with deep nail beds and very, very round tips. My father and his siblings had these hands but I don’t and oddly, I really wish I did. It wouldn’t make my fingers work better or be more finger-like but I could look at them and think of him.

If you asked me at this moment, right now, to tell you something about my grandfather, I would tell you about making tortillas for him when I was a child. I used to make tortillas with grandmother and I would drop them onto her nasty, shedding green kitchen carpet and I would pick them up and keep rolling. After they were cooked, no one else would eat them but my grandfather. He would slather them with butter and ignore the dirt and lint and God only knows what else and eat them and he never failed to tell me that they were delicious. I will never forget that. I was probably five years old and making food that someone enjoyed and it literally changed my life, it set the course for me. It was a tiny little thing but it is also enormous and consuming. These moments are all we get, really. We just scoop up all these small moments and pile them together and they make up our lives and we can’t afford to let them roll away just because we are looking for the bigger thing somewhere else. These things are the big things because of their totality, where the whole is really far greater the sum of its parts.

As a mother I want my children to know this. I want them to look for the small things. The world will creep in with its antique plates and imported preserves and we need to push it back with rat nest buns and a little reality. We need to start with ourselves and looking at these little moments and seeing the beauty in them, even if it is hard to see at first. I don’t always feel like I am at my best. Honestly, I feel like I am just holding on for dear life, but that isn’t what my kids see. I am not sure what they do see but they are watching and they see something. When I die, God willing it is a long, long time from now, they will talk about the things that they remember. They will remember the little things and I can’t know from here what it will be, so I need to give them opportunities to find those little things.

One of the ways that we give them that time is to just be present and not fill every moment. Sometimes these things roll into the room when we move just past the point of boredom. It means not trying to constantly curate my life but let the kids see things that are me, like my rat nest bun. It means letting moments be small and beautiful and waiting to find out later what they were worth. When my grandfather ate those tortillas served on my play kitchen dishes, he had no idea what it would it mean. He was just there, in the moment, doing the little things. He could never have known it would be the most beautiful memory I have of him. There are a lot of ways that we can do this but the truth of the matter is that we won’t know what it all means for a long time.

Things of value are an investment, they take time and they need to develop, and they start small. The little things really are the big things. Just trust that.

Practice patience and not perfection...

Today I am annoyed with one of my children for a pretty small reason. I think that often we are annoyed with people that are ultimately small fry and this is a prime example. This child switched a load of laundry and I know, I know, he just grabbed the whole wad and tossed it into the dryer. I would separate each piece, shake it, and place it in the dryer and never forget to check for stain removal and be sure to hang or lay out all the appropriate items. Because laundry. He should have noticed the line dry only items.

If you know me, you know that I have two things about which I am super, super, embarrassingly neurotic about: 1) Food, 2) Laundry. If you don’t know me, well, now you know one of my salient characteristics. I will cry over food and laundry. I am stubbornly prideful about these things. The former is obvious and the latter, less so. Food is a great joy of mine. I love shopping for food, planning menus, cooking food, feeding other people, talking about food, eating food…food and food and more food. I sure you are not surprised by this. I write about food. The laundry thing might surprise you.

I care a great deal about properly done laundry. I want it sorted very specifically by color and washing temperature. I care about soaking and hand-washing and line drying or drying flat so the clothes last longer and wear well. Having an unfolded basket of laundry puts me on edge and I will get snappy and overwhelmed and drop everything to fold it. I am not like this about all things. For instance, I rarely mop. I sweep, I spot clean, and I ignore. Whatever. More time for laundry. My kids know that I will correct them if they don’t do it correctly and often I would rather do it myself than have it done badly. This means that I am more often than not struggling to keep up because I don’t let them do it. I make the perfect the enemy of the good. I have all kinds of good reasons for it. We don’t have a lot of money. We need these clothes to last. It won’t take me long. They could do other things. All these things sound rational but really they are a cover for pride.

Because I am prideful.

I have right now an opportunity to work on that pride. For Eastern Christians, Great Lent started yesterday. Clean Monday is usually quiet. We do okay. We do small little things with ease, like swap out half-and-half and instead choice almond milk. No big deal. The rubber meets the road when we have to do it again the next day, and the next, and the one after that. Then we start to get anxious and we start to complain. This is not going to be a post about how God is patient with us even when we struggle. He is, but that’s not what I am going to talk about. I am going to talk about our own patience.

I need to be more patient.

I didn’t yell at my son who switched the laundry but I was inwardly annoyed that he can never switch the laundry. He forgets to start one machine or the other or add soap or even do it at all but doesn’t remember that he didn’t. There is an enormous amount of babysitting when that kid is doing laundry. He means well and he is never intentionally disobedient. He just can’t do it. Sometimes I think he will never do it and this reminds me of something my mother-in-law said years ago when my husband and I were engaged.

She warned me he was passive aggressive and he had been so bad as an early teen, she had him stop washing dishes because he always broke at least one every single night. She took it personally. I hadn't seen anything like that so I asked him. He was so surprised. He had never intended to be so destructive; he was just a really clumsy child. It was never intentional. He did outgrow it and now a broken dish is a rare thing and I jokingly tease him that his mother warned me about him but it is a non-event. It’s small fry. Just like my laundry thing. My mother-in-law likes clean dishes and a clean sink and bleaches hers each night. Nothing else worries her as long as the dishes are done and her sink is sanitized, everything else fits in at the edges. She saw offense where there was none and to her credit she never let her son know it, she was very kind about it. I also see offense where there is none. It is just laundry. He will outgrow this but will I?

This Lent I will have lots of opportunities to do hard things (being vegan for seven weeks is freaking hard, guys) and I will have lots of opportunities to lose my cool. I need to practice patience. Patience with my children. Patience will people I meet. Patience with my laundry. Patience with myself. One of the things that I tell mothers is to practice patience and not perfection. When we make mistakes, start over. When we are upset with our kids, step back and cool off before getting back in the game. When someone is sharp with us, take a deep breath and realize that we might see offense where there is none, and give them the benefit of the doubt. Practice patience because nothing will ever be perfect. If I eat all the cheese in the deli case but I am patient, this Lent will be a success. I have no intention of doing that but really, that is what this season is about. I am going to start today with my laundry. Deep breath, people. I am going to have him start the next load.

Review of "Nikola and the Monk"...

I recently received this book for review from the author and illustrator. Nikola and the Monk is Dessi's fourth book for children. I was looking forward to getting my hands on it not only because the author is a friend of mine but because I really need to keep my collection of these saints stories current. I need to have them all. Like I said in my previous post, I have a love/hate relationship with children's literature because there is so much out there that is purely awful to read with children but this one is a joy. 

I always happily receive Dessi's books because they are always beautiful written in her warm, earthy style and the art is always delicate and beautiful but this one will always hold a special place in my heart. This particular book is about a little boy named Nikola who comes to the monk at his hermitage to work out his salvation. The book is in English but draws from Dessi's childhood back in Bulgaria and there are only a few words that should be reviewed before reading and which are found at the back. Nikola refers to the monk as Deda which  means Grandfather and to his black robe as his raso and to the Mother of God, the Theotokos, as Borogodica. From the first time I read this book, I knew it will always be special to me because it reminds me of my son, John, whom we call Jack. This book could be called Jack and the Monk.

My children have the less common experience of growing up in a little mission served by a Brotherhood. Unless we are traveling, and often even when we are traveling, their experience of the Christian services is with monks at the helm. Jack often talks about wanting to be a monk so that he won't have to do the chores that we do at home and instead can pray and read and bake and talk to the bees. This is a lot like Nikola who comes to escape his chores of milking and fetching cucumbers from the garden. I don't think Jack and Nikola are alone in this, I think we all often forget just how much we seek the higher things not for the right reasons but so that we can avoid the lower things. In this book, Deda tells Nikola that, "...doing one's daily work is a prayer, and that each chore that we do and cover in prayer is like building a ladder to heaven." This is a lesson not just for our children, but for ourselves.

As always, the art in Quis Ut Deus books are beautiful and while I cannot say that I know the artist personally, I know a great deal about her from her art. Her art has a misty quality to it with details fading to allow the focus of each illustration to take point of place. It is as if she if wants to highlight a smile here, a wing here, and the eyes over here. My favorite illustrations are the smile on the monk when he plays with the cub, his eyes when the bird is resting on his shoulder, and the icon corner in the family home. I love looking at icon corners and because they are the heart of the home, the are readily familiar to children. I think that children will see the large family gathered around it and they will think of how it feels something like their own families.

That is actually something else to mention, there is a quick but nonetheless lovely mention of large families. I have eleven children and often stories with families with only a couple of children make me children feel as if no one ever has large families. Nikola has three sisters and two brothers while Deda has five brothers and two sisters. Dessi is the mother of six children so she knows what this is like.

I will be putting this book in my basket in the icon corner, but only after it has spent in week in my morning basket. I keep a basket of books and flash cards with which we start each day. I think it will be great way to talk to my younger children who are often "forgetful" about chores. I plan on reading it every day this week and asking my children how they are doing in building their own ladder to heaven and with what chores. I could see it being very useful this lent. If you are looking for ways to use it in your family and in a home school setting, you should head over to my friend, Jennifer's site Illuminated Learning and check out her post.

You can find Dessi's other books also illustrated by Lydia Grace Kadar-Kallen and published by Qui Ut Deus Press from major retailers and on their site including Roses in the Snow (about Roman Catholic saint Elizabeth of Hungary and with my favorite art of all three books) and Saint Felix and the Spider (about St Felix of Nola). You can find Dessi's book The Saint and His Bees (about Irish saint Modomnoc) which was illustrated by Clare Brandenburg on Amazon HERE. It is also available on Kindle for instant download. You might remember Clare's incredibly beautiful book, The Monk Who Grew Prayer. You can find her website HERE. You can read all posts with reviews by clicking HERE.

Coming full circle...

I have mentioned it before but I like photography. It is just a hobby but I enjoy it and I get a lot out of it. Ironically, this week in my group we are doing circles, a more abstract theme than usual. Why would it be ironic? Because on Sunday (or maybe even Saturday night), I lost my wedding set. What was once lost is now found, so no worries, but it gave me a lot of heartache.

That right there is my three piece wedding set. I have sensitive skin and sometimes I need to take off my rings and put some cream on my hands and let them rest overnight. I have a little wooden box from Poland that was given to me by a dear family friend when I was a child and usually I put them in there. Saturday night I decided to just loop them over the cord to the cross on my neck. I have done it before and the rings never slipped off but for whatever reason, I lost my rings while I slept. I realized when we went out to the van. I ran back in and looked in the bed but I only found my plain wedding band and my engagement ring. No anniversary band anywhere to be seen. I went off to Liturgy and was heartbroken. I said a little prayer to St Phanourios and lit a candle and hoped for the best.

When I didn't find it on Sunday, I basically tore my room apart. Then I appealed to the children. I promised them later bedtimes, video-games, homemade cake, ice cream, basically anything that I thought would convince them to look. Look they did but it didn't matter. No ring. In the end, it was not the plain gold band that was blessed by the priest at my wedding. It wasn't the modest diamond engagement ring. The diamond in the ring was given to us by my mother-in-law from a ring my father-in-law had given her and the first but most certainly not the last generous gift from her. She has always treated me like her own child. Once about a dozen years ago I knocked my hand on a doorway and knocked out the diamond which was quickly found in just minutes but I was hysterical. It was not about the money or the value, it is fairly modest. It was because it was a gift from my mother-in-law to both my husband and to me. I now have the prongs checked regularly and had them rebuilt last summer. No, it was the tiny anniversary band.

In the end it was unreasonable for me to be so upset so I tried to calm myself down. It was the two more important rings. Still, that little anniversary band which was so small and so inexpensive. It was a tiny luxury at a time when we were ridiculously poor with kids to feed and my husband in graduate school. I was pregnant for the second time since our wedding and it was just our first anniversary. I think we spent just $100. In the end, that is such a tiny amount but for us at the time it was a serious investment. As Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and even Wednesday went by with no sign of the ring, I began to worry it would never be found. My husband reassured me that he could buy me another one, that we could do it for our next anniversary. I didn't want another ring. I wanted my ring. I wanted the one we bought back when we didn't have money for movies or dinner out and our dates we walks in the park. I wanted to look at it and remember the first year of this glorious marriage that has brought me closer to my husband and closer to God. I just wanted my own ring back. There was a little part of me that was afraid that we would replace it and then find it and I would have a little dalliance on my hand instead of the original.

But then, this morning I was sitting on the bed and talking about the day with my husband while he finished dressing for work and I looked down next to my bed. There it was, just sitting there next to the bed in the open area between it and my desk, as if it had been waiting all along. There was my ring. So. I said a prayer to St. Phanourios and asked the kids to pray for his mother and I baked a cake for him. In the busy patterns of a morning with work and school and books and barn chores and snow and a windchill of -14F I stopped and spent the time to make the cake. I made it with almonds and Swedish sugar and Lemoncello instead of the usual Brandy or Whiskey and the very last of my clementine oranges from the basket on the table. It was fragrant and delicious. I cut slices for the children and asked them to come celebrate with me, just like the woman in Jesus' parable who celebrated with everyone around her when she found her coin. I ate my cake with my little ring of gold around my finger and she celebrated with her little circle of silver, one that represented in its own meager way the entire wealth of her family.

Come celebrate with me for what was lost is now found.

Perspective...

Elijah and Raymond guide the auger
while my husband, Ben, operates it.

We are expanding the barn. We have sheep this year and both the dairy cow and the ewe are pregnant so we need not one but TWO birthing pens to keep the mamas and their babies away from the others. We borrowed an auger from a neighbor but since it didn't fit on the tractor hubby drove five miles there to pick it up, he had to come home with the neighbor's tractor. It takes a while to get used to a new machine but the auger made quick work of the first couple of posts...and then they starting hitting large rocks. So many rocks here! There are giant rock piles out in the fields that are the result of piling up all the ones that are turned up in plowing. These piles are huge, like the size of large car, and there are several of them. When we want rocks to fill in around the house to keep the mud down during the melt, we just take the tractor out there and load up the bucket. Anyway, they had to resort to finishing the holes with a a plain old post hole digger and old fashioned blood, sweat, and tears.

We have some great friends helping us. We helped a new family to the area build their house and by we, I mean the royal we. I basically stayed home and Ben and the boys took lunch over their and worked many days over the summer. Not hard for me! So this family and the father's brother and his wife all headed over here to work on our farm. This weekend was pretty old timey feeling with all the people here and the neighbor who stopped by to see if the tractor was working out for us (royal us). The men and teenaged boys were out there busting their backs in the cold drizzle and the ladies and girls were inside in the warm kitchen. I have a large kitchen table, it is ten feet long and a scant four feet wide. We had yarn all over the place and we were knitting and crocheting and chatting and I cooked enough food for a hungry army. My eleven year old daughter made her first solo cake and even iced it herself. The younger boys did the dishes to keep them from being underfoot since the ladies were busy and the men were working. It was a fantastic weekend for me but my husband is sore as heck this Monday morning. I am actually looking forward to the next few weekends because we get to do it all over again although I think my husband is probably less excited than me.

So, after my glorious weekend, we had a rough evening last night. About a quarter to seven, I sat down to edit these photos and my thirteen year old son started the dishes. We had several minutes of flickering lights and so we got ready for an outage. We get water, we make sure the Berkeys are filled, double check that all the electric candles are in the specified places, and plug in all the devices. Usually we get some warning but we are pretty out there so power outages of a couple of hours are a regular thing. Then we actually lost all power for just shy of five hours.

I complained and whined and moaned and groaned. I was starting a fun project and the dishes weren't done. We had an outage of a day and a half this summer during the hottest part of summer and it was a crisis. We live on a well and when the power goes out, so does the water. No water, no toilet, no heat, no electric fence, no heat lamp for the ducks, and no lights is a tall order. If we have no water, that means that we have to haul water for our animals, 40 gallons twice a day, and the outhouse sees some use, which is less than fun when it is cold outside. I was working on a hat for a friend and in the dark, I could not find the second color of yarn I wanted. Because the fence was off, we had to put the animals in the barn early (the cows have been known to take a powder). The power company didn't update its message and every time I called, I got more annoyed.

I was huffy about the whole thing as I got children ready for bed and the two who were supposed to shower went to bed dirty. We read books and brushed teeth and then my oldest daughter and I settled down with our yarn and an battery operated lantern while my husband read on his charged Kindle. I just wanted the power to go on so that people could shower and the dishwasher could run and so I could flush the toilets. I used a different yarn on the hat, which in the morning light, actually is working pretty darned well. After a while, Ben and I went to bed and just as I was feeding the cat, the power came on. I was thrilled. Everything was working again.

This morning I was chatting with the grandmother of one of Ben's youngest students at our little country school. She had managed to hear from someone at the electric co-op about what caused the outage. Some poor soul had wrecked their car and taken out a pole. While I sat in my comfortable house with my family and whined about not finding my yarn, someone was in an actual crisis. I felt like a heel. I have no idea how this person is doing today but I can tell you that this person and any passengers and their families had a much worse evening that I did. I wish I had known but if knowing would have made me less self centered, that means that I am mindlessly navel gazing and I don't like what that says about me. I hope to take something away from this experience and that is a sense that I don't really know what happens out in the world and I need to spend less time concentrating on my own little heart and it's selfish desires. I prayed for my power. I should have prayed for the people involved. At least I learned something about myself and that might have been the best part of the weekend after all.