Family Reunion

John Family Reunion, 2018

My Dad's family hosts a reunion every summer. He was one of nine, eight of them boys, all of them had children For some years now, the duty for hosting rotates among the families - this year's event was this past weekend. I try to get up there every other year or so - I enjoy spending a few hours with my cousins and catching up a bit on their lives. It's a long drive for just a few hours, but I always find it was worth it.

For me, the hardest part is trying to make my way around the room to talk to everyone in the short time allotted for the reunion. Everyone gathers just before noon, and by three, they're packing up the leftovers and getting ready to head on home. There were over fifty people there this time. Once you take out the time needed to overfill your stomach eating the potluck lunch (I don't know who brought the baked beans, but they were to die for!), there's just not enough time to get around the room.

It's funny. I haven't spent much time at all with my cousins as an adult, but it turns out that if you know someone as they're growing up, they don't really change that much as grown-ups. Nancy still has that quirk to her smile, the twinkle in Mark's eye hasn't changed a bit.

The reunions are smaller these days; our children are grown with children of their own, and most of them don't want to make time to go sit around with a bunch of old people they don't know just so their parents can point to them with pride, and say, 'that one's mine'.  (There WERE a few of the kids there, with their kids in turn. My son Joe and his wife Rita-Marie were among them - and yes, I pointed them out with pride many times during the course of the afternoon.)

These are the ties that bind us and hold us and support us. I have many friends I am closer to than I am to the crew pictured above. We have more in common, they know more of the details of my day-to-day life.

But they weren't there the day we had the epic king-of-the-mountain game in my Uncle Eugene's hayloft. They don't share the memory of our moms, sitting in Aunt Diane's kitchen, the air blue with cigarette smoke, conversation screeching to a halt when any of us kids walked into the room - they'd kindly see what we needed and usher us back out the door.

 I know the reunion tradition will eventually fall by the wayside, but I am grateful it hasn't happened yet. These are the people who knew me when, and love me anyways. You can't beat that.

Labor Day

Ever since I took off in the camper van in late August, my inner two year-old is pretty sure it's time to do it again when Labor Day rolls around. I reinforced this conviction the first couple of years back in town when I took off again for my month-long trips in the summer and early fall. She's downright moping this weekend at the realization nothing exciting is going to happen this fall. The only thing happening on the day after Labor Day will be me hoisting my rear into gear and getting it into work.

**sigh**

It was seven years ago last week when I threw all the cards in the air and took off for points unknown. I spent five months on the road before moving off on my long detour. Though the trip recedes in my rear-view mirror, I carry vivid images of beauty and peace with me yet today. I call them up when I lay down at night, they calm my breath, they calm my mind. Spending day after day journeying to beautiful places healed my soul in places I didn't know needed healing.

There was no particular destination in my travels that stands out - the cliche is true - it was all about the journey. I didn't get anywhere, but everywhere I got, I found what I was looking for.

This past week, I've found myself especially homesick for those days of being, not doing. I have my lists of things to get done, at home and at work. I have goals and measurements and check marks next to completed items. I do a pretty decent job of keeping up with the curve, and every once in a while, getting ahead a bit, but my heart isn't in it.

My gut understands why I go into the office. Retirement might last for a coupl-a-three decades. I don't really want to shortchange my future because I'm restless in my present.

But my inner child is afraid. The gaps between my fingers where time slips through grow ever wider. The days last about the same amount of time they always have, but the weeks and months are here and gone before I've had a chance to savor the gifts they brought. I am afraid I live on borrowed time, that the cancer will come back, and I'll have wasted the only days I have staring at a monitor so I can collect a paycheck. Right now, that paycheck represents a more secure future. What will it represent if I find another lump?

I'm looking for the balance. The point where I have enough in reserve where, God willin' and the crick don't rise, I can take care of myself through retirement, but not so much I waste any of my precious days working for nothing but an extra cushion. Where is the magic moment?

I'm not precisely sure, but I think I'm approaching it with some speed.

And, until it gets here, I will calm my fears with the images from my time apart from my real life. The time I kept my time for myself. The time I trusted in the Universe to help me to land on my feet after my big leap. I trusted, and my trust was rewarded. I need to trust again. When the time is right, I will know.

MIstakes Happen

the finished cabinet,
with Dad's picture on top

A year or two ago some of my friends retired and moved to Florida. As they were going through the inevitable big purge associated with downsizing, they offered me their stained glass making supplies. Learning how to make stained glass art has been on my list of 'things I'd like to do' for a long time, so I jumped at the offer.

I'm not sure what they'd used to store the glass, but it came to me in several plastic totes. I've been working around them for quite some time, holding my breath a little every time I move them around the workshop. Glass is easy to break, you know, and the totes are top-heavy and lopsided

Last weekend I finally got around to drawing up the plans for a storage cabinet, and spent the better part of Saturday making little boards out of big boards. This weekend, I went back outside to put them together.

For some reason, when it comes to making cabinets, I tend to subtract wrong when figuring out how much to cut back when allowing for the thickness of the wood - I make stupid simple math errors. Sure enough, when it came time to put the backs on the cabinet, I'd cut them, and the center dividers, an inch too short.

Bad words. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and I really hate it when I make stupid mistakes. I was complaining to a friend of mine about it this morning, and he suggested I take a picture of Dad out to my workshop. He thought it would help me get in touch with my inner putterer.

I took his advice, and as I was working to fix my mistakes I was thinking of Dad.

Many, many, moons ago he was putting up the paneling in our bedroom. I was following him around and 'helping' as I was wont to do in those days. The bedroom had a low-ceiling, with slanted walls; and he managed to cut one of the pieces snugging up to the angle mirrored - so the back of the panel was the side showing. (I do the same thing. a lot. suppose it's hereditary?) He said, 'oh, shit!', about the only cussword that ever came out of his mouth, and stared at it for a while, hoping it would magically fix itself.

Magic didn't happen, so we traisped on out tot the garage to fix it the normal way. He didn't have enough paneling left to completely remake the piece, so he cut the biggest piece he could, and then a smaller triangle to fill the gap. It wasn't an invisible fix, but it wasn't glaringly obvious, either.  As he fixed the pieces into place, he looked over at me and said, 'It's not that mistakes will never happen; everyone makes mistakes. It's what you do to fix them that counts.'

I thought of him again today, as I worked to correct my errors. The end result isn't perfect, but it'll do. (especially for a storage cabinet that'll always live in a garage...)

Mistakes happen, and, it's OK; most mistakes can be fixed.
Good for me to relearn now and again.

Butterfly Garden, *sigh*

spring, 2018

My butterfly garden started out so beautifully this year.  The stand was filled to overflowing with spring's blues and purples, with just a touch of red for accent. The flowers grew as they always do, then withered in the heat of summer's sun, ready to give way to the season's oranges and yellows.

Except, this year, the summer flowers didn't come.

In years past, the summer garden was impatient with its boundaries, overflowing its designated patch to commandeer the bordering flagstone path and spreading seeds in a wide circle into the surrounding lawn. My then-neighbor to the south called it the neighborhood afro garden - abundant, beautiful, untamed.

summer, 2017

summer, 2018

This year, there are just a handful of sprouts, lonely sentinels standing bravely in the patch of brown.

The summer has been hot and dry, but so was last year's. Should I have watered sooner? Did I pull the not-quite dried stalks down too soon last fall, and thus interrupt the self-seeding cycle? Or were the seeds done in by the long, cool spring, with its freeze - grow cycle lingering long past its usual time? (I'm pretty sure that's what did in the bulbs I had in another bed - by the time I got impatient in late spring and dug one up to check to see why they hadn't come back, there was nothing left but a withered shell of the root.)

I'm not experienced enough with the land to know. The flowers that did come in don't have many blooms, though they do seem to be appreciating the lack of competition for sunlight - their stalks are strong, the leaves reaching gratefully in all directions to the light.

I finally went out a couple of weeks ago to get some annuals to fill in some of the larger blank spots. I know it's too late in the season for them to really grow, but the empty dirt just looked so sad and lonely. I still see a few butterflies about, drinking gratefully from the few flowers I have. The large bumblebees have (I hope) found greener pastures, the small bees have been feasting on the blooms on the mint. The hummingbirds still come by once in a while, to feed from the pink flowers on the bushes I planted to shield my eyes from my air conditioner.

I miss the abundance, I miss my backyard bug friends.

Next year, I will try again with new seed, and maybe, maybe the bees and butterflies will come back. I hope.

Fort Riley

Custer Home, Fort Riley, KS

My nephew, Connor, took a time-honored path to pay for college and signed up for the Army ROTC program. They kept their part of the deal, and are paying for his education. He is six months into keeping his part of the deal, and is on active duty.

When he was getting ready to be an active officer, they gave him a list of bases, and asked him to pick his top choices. When the duty roster came out, he'd predictably (given Army ways) been assigned to none of the above - they sent him to Fort Riley, just down the road a piece from me.

I know he wasn't initially thrilled with the assignment, but I thought it was nice that at least he'd be able to stop by once in a while for a weekend break. Little did I know about the life of a modern Army officer - they've kept him busy with training exercises almost all of the time since he got here last spring.

Finally, last weekend, his unit was given a break from the too-many-hour days they've been working to get ready for deployment later this year, and he was able to get a four-day pass. It was supposed to be Thursday through Sunday, but they didn't finish their work on time, so it got shifted to Saturday through Tuesday. (guess they figure their soldiers should get used to not making plans...)  Undaunted, his sister, Juliann, came on down from Minneapolis on Thursday as originally planned. I took Friday off from work to spend some time with her, and we left Kansas City mid-day to go to meet up with him on base.

It's just over two hours out there; the drive went quickly since she and I had much to catch up on. I'd never been on an Army base before - I was impressed. I've seen part of the base before - you can see a bunch of the equipment from the freeway - but didn't realize how far back into the surrounding area the grounds went.

It took very little time to get through at the Visitor Control Center - apparently Friday evenings are not prime time for visiting the base. From the size of the waiting room, I know we lucked out. You don't have four admitting stations and 40-50 chairs available if they're not usually going to be in use.

The base was established in 1852, and some of the original officer's quarters are still around. Most are actually in use, but they've set aside one of the oldest buildings as a museum.  We went over there on Saturday to see what we could see; were pleasantly surprised to find the building open for guided tours.

I was unprepared for the sense of age and history permeating the building.  We were the only ones there for our tour, and the guide was kind enough to let me behind the guide ropes for a closer look as long as I didn't touch anything. They've done a good job recreating the look and feel of the home as it was back when. I'm a sucker for old buildings in general; this one had me feeling as if someone would be back shortly to invite us to sit on the porch for a spell while dinner was being prepared in the detached kitchen.

Connor says he works with good people. He has a sense of belonging, of service, of duty. While my heart aches when I think of war, I'm glad we have good people like him willing and prepared to protect their country, their families. The Army's 1st Infantry Division takes good care of their historical home. I hope this means they will also take good care of the treasure entrusted to them in the form of my nephew.

Superpower

I used to be skeptical; I didn't believe in superpowers. The Hulk, Spiderman, Wonder Woman - I thought they were figments of imagination. Then, I heard rumors about each of us having a superpower of our own. I scoffed. No way. Not me.

But then, then I began to pay attention to inexplicable events in my everyday life.

I'd be standing in line at the grocery store, a line carefully chosen based on a complex point system which takes into account the number of items in the cart, the perceived distractibility and people-watching interest points of the cart driver(s), and the number of small children with the cart driver (among many other shifting factors), and is supposed to help me determine which is the shortest path to freedom.

My system worked for many years, but then its effectiveness dropped precipitously.

I'd be standing in line behind a guy with one loaf of bread, and a jar of peanut butter, and the lady with the cart full of assorted lunch meats and one of each kind of fruit would be checked out ahead of me because the bag around the bread would be found to have a tear in it, and he'd saunter slowly away to select another one, leaving the register tied up because the peanut butter had already run through.

I'd peruse the lines, and pick the one with two people, each with only a few items, only to have the first person decide they want to pay for their items in small change, which must be laboriously fished, coin by coin, from the depths of a cavernous handbag.

I'd pull up behind the small Honda in the toll lane, and they'd drop their quarter on the ground and because it's the only one in the car, have to take five minutes to crawl beneath the car to retrieve it.

"That's it!", I decided. "That's it!"

It's a little known derivative of the power to stretch time - I have the superpower to be able to stop checkout lines. I know, I know, you find this hard to believe, but it's true. I have story after story to prove it.

I generally keep knowledge of my power to myself. I mean, it would be so sad to see the faces of the people in front of me in line fall in disappointment just because I strolled into place behind them. Who knows what chaos would ensue if they all jumped to other lines? - I'm pretty sure that would be the moment I'd place my first item on the belt only to have the store's power cut out and ALL the lines would stop dead.

No, no, it's best to keep it to myself. But it gives me comfort to know I can change the world in my small way, every time I go to the store.

When I choose Lane 5, the people in Lanes 3 and 6 find themselves run through by the senior super-checkers, who can scan an entire cart in 45 seconds.

When I get behind the scowling meanie in Lane 2, I get to watch the steam rise from his ears while he watches the cashier carefully count each ear of corn in the bag to make sure the shopper got the count correct (Yes, ma'am, you were right - there are 38 ears of corn in your eight bags.  Lessee, that's today's special, and at seven for $4.50, that comes to....), while the mother with the cranky baby in Lane 4 scoots clean out the door.

I've heard it said, 'with great power, comes great responsibility', so I do my best to shepherd my power wisely. And you, my friend, would be wise to take heed and choose another queue should you see me standing, waiting patiently, in line somewhere.

Tomatoes

My tomato garden has become for me a triumph of hope over experience. (An expression I first heard used to aptly describe second marriages.  I rather liked it.)

Each spring, I put a few plants in the ground, hoping against hope for summer's delicious bounty to be mine. This year, I planted only cherry tomatoes, hoping they'd do a better of ripening than the big ones have, given my limited sunlight.

I hadn't reckoned with the absence of my much-missed sycamore tree next door.

My plants this year have taken off. They have overflowed their carefully sculpted boundary and have taken over a good foot of the yard. They covered themselves with blossoms early, a promise of bounty to come.

It's been dry this year, and I have been diligently watering my small crop, already able to taste the explosion of sweet goodness.

Enter reality.

Turns out a lack of moisture leads to thirsty squirrels. My furry friends may have abandoned their condo in my eaves, but they didn't move far; just to the neighbor's oak tree. They, too, have been eyeing my bounty.

Last weekend I was sitting on the porch enjoying my morning coffee, surveying my kingdom. Scampering along the top of the fence came one of my neighbors, intent on her own breakfast. I saw a chance to temporarily delay the inevitable, and chased her away. She didn't go far, just back to the corner of the yard, where she had a handy tree to jump to if I decided to take this to extremes.

For the next hour, we played our game. She'd come down, intent on stealing one of my green tomatoes. I watched for her, and chased her back down the line.

Inevitably, for she was hungrier than I, I was more intent on my phone conversation than the squirrel, and she managed to snag her prize.

She didn't run far before she stopped, took the precious morsel from her mouth, and took a bite. She looked back at me as if to say, 'I don't know what your problem might be - I just took one, and there are many more on the vine. Surely there are enough for you to share just one.'

*sigh*  I suppose.

I have managed to get a few for myself, by going out each morning and snagging them from the vine as soon as they show the slightest hint of turning from green to red, then leaving them to ripen on the counter top.  And one, one was hidden beneath the leaves, and I was able to pick it ripe from the vine. Warm from the heat of the sun, the explosion of sweet goodness was mine!

I win.

Torch: Passed

Iowa - sunset, moonrise

Last weekend was my niece Autumn's graduation party, so I trucked on up to Minnesota to celebrate with her and her family. The trip was good, if too short. (I swear I'm getting too old for these weekend to Minnesota trips every time I do one - and every time I do one, I'm glad I made the effort.)

I drove on up with my brother Ted on Friday night. The trip was the best kind - uneventful. Talked my sister into visiting REI with me on Saturday. (I like to shop up there because there are more tall women running around the area, and thus, a better selection of tall clothes in the store.) Saturday night, my local family was busy (what???  they have lives???), so I met up with my brother Tony from Iowa, and got to meet his new girlfriend (who seemed like a good gal).

To my surprise, Libby and Autumn decided to make time to show up at Saturday's dinner. (I was surprised because I didn't think they'd have the energy - they were throwing a big party the next day.) Libby's hair was gone again - she is on a new type of chemo - Lynparza - a new targeted type of therapy just approved for her type of cancer this past January. According to the ever-helpful internet, the drug targets an enzyme, PARP, fast-growing cells use to repair DNA damage. No repair, the cells die.

She hasn't been on it for too long, but she said it's working to shrink her tumors and slow their growth. She said her last scan showed places in her bones where the cancer had taken hold, and then been stopped. (How they can tell this from a scan, I have no earthly idea.)  Hallelujah! - anything that can give her more good days is a good thing! (Especially since she said the side effects haven't been too bad, given the givens.)

The party was Sunday afternoon. All of my siblings and many of their children came. I talked to everyone, then stood back for a minute to just watch. It was a proper grad party. There was a baby to be passed around, and a couple of four year-olds having a contest to see how high they could jump. Over at this table, the older adults gathered to share stories. Over there, young adults gathered; our children, who are children no more. The little ones belong to them now - my siblings and I are the older ones, the grandparents (and proud of it, thank you very much!). Our offspring have turned out to be competent adults, done with school, in long-term relationships, having children, holding down jobs, buying houses.

It was clear that, sometime in the last decade, the torch of life had been passed. And once again, though I thought I'd been watching for it, I'd missed it. *Dang!* Time is a funny beast. The days seem long, but the weeks and years pass by at an ever-increasing rate. And I think Frankl was right when he said, in Man's Search for Meaning:

In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.

From this one may see that there is no reason to pity the old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that: Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past -the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized -and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past."

It's not that my siblings and I have already reached the point where our futures are devoid of possibilities, but our harvests are certainly well under way. I do treasure my memories, love to sift through the past to find the places I did well, the times I made a difference in someone's life. It's comforting to know these deeds won't be erased, even if they won't be remembered - they have become the foundation blocks upon which the future is being built.

These were good thoughts to carry with me on Sunday's long drive home.

4th of July

Sometimes, I swear the holiday weeks seem longer and are harder to get through than the regular ones. It's the change in routine. Take this last week, for instance.

Monday was a regular Monday.
Tuesday was Friday, since it was the day before a day off. I like Fridays.
Wednesday was Saturday, since I had the day off. I really like Saturdays.
Thursday was Monday again. This is where it got tough. The second Monday of the week, doubly hard to get my keister into the office.
Friday was, thankfully, Friday.

I did enjoy the 4th. Sandwiched in the middle of the week as it was, I initially planned to keep it pretty low-key, but it turned into a bigger day than I'd planned.

What started it was a yen for baked beans like I remember from when I was a kid. You can't just make those kind of baked beans for just one person, so I picked up the phone and invited over some friends.

With seven people now coming for dinner, I got in touch with my inner chef. I woke up on Wednesday inordinately proud of myself for remembering to set the beans to soak the night before. I dug out some bacon from the freezer, chopped up an onion, mixed in all the ingredients and set it in the crock pot to stew for eight hours.

An hour or so later, I walked into the kitchen and inhaled, expecting the intoxicating aroma of cooking beans, bacon and onion. The stench which assailed my nostrils was not what I was expecting. Clearly, the bacon had gone bad. *Sadness*

Fortunately for my taste buds, I'd thrown an extra bag of navy beans in the cart when I was at the store; a little digging in the pantry uncovered enough ingredients to start over. Looking at the bag of hard beans, I knew my relatively cool and easy afternoon had just come to an end. Beans CAN be cooked in a day, but it involves hours of simmering on the stove top.

That's OK. What's the 4th of July without a little sweat? I spent the next few hours chopping for potato salad and anxiously tracking the progress of the beans, turning up the heat to make sure they softened on schedule. I chopped and precooked the bacon this time. (At least that way, if it was bad, I wouldn't have spoiled the entire new batch of beans.) I browned the onions in the grease, tossed the whole mix back into the crock pot and let it cook on high for the remainder of the afternoon.

Amazingly enough, it all came off (with a little help from my friends, who brought the watermelon and other desserts). Beans, burgers, potato salad, and chips - dinner tasted like a 4th of July dinner SHOULD taste. My inner eight year-old was in heaven.

Crawl Space

There's a guy at work who accuses me of being too quiet. Too head-down, too hard working, not enough socializing, not enough partying.

I'll admit he's got a point, and boy, oh boy, did I show him this past weekend. Yup. I spent Saturday insulating my crawl space. Can't get much better than that. (Can I????)

It was AWFULLY warm here in Kansas City, and I definitely didn't want to work outside, so I turned my attention to my list of inside to-dos. The oldest item on the list was insulating the crawl space under my no-longer-new addition. I've had all the piece parts I need to do the project for months (the original plan was to do it last winter), so there was no excuse there.

I still didn't want to do it. But, sometimes, you just gotta buckle down and do something, and so I did.

I got out my handy-dandy kitchen stool and crawled up into the opening, glad I'd been doing situps for these past few months. (It took some core strength to get across the lip of the old windowsill.) As I shimmied in, I had my eyes peeled for spiders and other small residents, but found no evidence they lived there, to my surprise. Guess there's not much to eat, even for a bug, in the space.

Encouraged, I took some measurements, wriggled my way back out, and spent about thirty minutes making little foam boards out of big foam boards.I tossed the boards back into the hole, grabbed some Liquid Nails and started to put the foam into place. Now, I can't remember who told me to use Liquid Nails to hold the foam in place, but they obviously never tried it with any size piece at all, because it didn't work. It would hold for just a moment, and then the piece would plop back down. I didn't let this deter me. I just started making little braces out of the extra foam I'd helpfully brought along with me, and wedged it into place.

Went back out, and got the expandy-foam-stuff to spray along the edges and in the cracks. It's fun to spray that stuff and watch it work, but boy is it a mess if it doesn't get where it belongs. It sticks to EVERYTHING. Fortunately, I'd learned this from past experience and (mostly) managed to avoid getting it on my skin. As a bonus, I'm pretty sure, between the wedges and the expanding foam, my work will stay in place. (When that stuff hardens, it STICKS!)

As I worked, the air grew stiller; I figured it was a good way to know I would see some benefit from my efforts. Three hours later, (covered in rock dust, which sticks very effectively to sweat, in case anyone needed to know) I was done. I have an impressive set of bruises on my knees and left butt cheek (who knew I lean more to one side than the other?) from spending too much time crawling around on the gravel, but they're victory bruises. Received in the line of duty.

When I got back to my list, I checked off "insulate the crawl space" with extra relish. Added an extra check mark just because I could.

Who needs a party to feel good?