Missing

As I mentioned yesterday, I left Johnathan in Provo to get on with his life. Dang. He's been part of the dailies here in the little white house with the red door for about a year and a half since he got home from his mission, and I miss him. Right now I'll be fine for the most part, then the feeling comes at me from around the corner as I think something like "I wonder if Johnathan will be home for lunch-I'll make such and such" and I almost go to text him and I remember. Oh. Right. You see, it really is daily stuff. I just like having him around. We talked all the time. His job kept him coming and going during the days and I loved the constance of his inconstant presence. He always showed up just in time when the quiet started pressing on my ears.

As always, the great dichotomy of motherhood is that we miss them, but we thrill to every evidence of their independence and success. Yes, so it is. I have a moment of awareness each night when I realize that I can lock the deadbolt instead of leaving it open when I go to bed because Johnathan is not out late with friends. Then I hope he still is, but remember that he won't be coming home to this house after I'm settled in my jammies and coming up to say good night because he knows I don't sleep till they're all home, even the 22-year olds. As it should be. Really. It's time. He's ready. It's good. He needs to live in a sketchy student apartment again and meet new people and have occasional Sunday dinners with Jeff and Ashlyn and go skiing if he wants and try rock climbing with his cousin and feel free and strong. It is what I want for him. It's just inevitable that there will be some adjustment and I probably will end up perplexing him with a random text or two asking him when he'll be home and can he pick up something at the supermarket on the way. I've grown accustomed to his face.

I'm ever so grateful that I took the time to drive with him and see his steadiness, his focus on tasks at hand, to laugh along with him and listen to his music and share in the amazement we both felt at seeing the Rocky Mountains. He listened to The Poisonwood Bible with me and seemed to enjoy it. He's just good like that. Sensitive and present.

In the end though, and most importantly, this step is a triumph for him. His admittance to the university of his choice came after long years of hard work and desire. It was not an automatic thing, and I really, truly would not have him here under my wing. As easy as our relationship is, he was still a caged bird and was straining for freedom.

So, I think I'll go listen to this a few times and be glad he's made it up into his very own sky. That makes it worth it.

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There and Back Again

Last week I traveled by car to Utah, stopping in Tennessee, Missouri, and Colorado on the way. I celebrated the university graduations of Jeff and Ashlyn. I spent 4 pleasant days driving with Johnathan, then left him in Provo to start at BYU. I reconnected with people I treasure. I knitted. I iphone-photographed. It was a good time. It was a bittersweet thing to realize that I could have spent weeks on the road if I'd been able to take time to visit all the folks I love in the cities we passed along the way. I sure wish I could have.

I love travel, and I especially enjoyed seeing the country from the vantage point of the open road. I could see the land change gradually under our wheels: Eastern and southern hills lush with trees, to midwestern plains to high desert and Rocky Mountains. It was splendid to see the gorgeousness that is this continent I call home. There is so much here to explore and I intend to spend more time doing it as time goes on.

I left my trusty macbook air with Johnathan to be his college computer. While I save up for a new one, I'll have my fabu iMac to keep me humming for all my photoediting and major, high-powered computing, and now I'm getting used to using our very basic family iPad as my portable link to the world. As such, it has some fun advantages. I'm now blogging in the cloud using photos that have been automatically stored online by my devices. I'm using an app called Blogsy and I think once I get used to it, I'll love it. I also use a bluetooth keyboard for the iPad, so it feels rather laptop-ish when I'm using it for email, blogging and taking notes. I do like that because I'm a lifelong touch-typist and cannot STAND the virtual keyboard of the iPad. Sorry. Yuck. Fortunately, for everything else, I love the touch screen and all the fun apps that I've grown to appreciate on my phone. I'm technologically blessed, there's no way around it.

So there you go. It's great, truly, to be home, but I will remember the delightful times of this trip for a long time. Here are some photos all in one place for my own record-keeping.

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A Meetup on the Plains

My daughter is, at this moment, sleeping in a bit after driving about 15 hours yesterday from Chicago to near Denver. She's helping a friend make the drive to college in the west. She's a fearless and experienced traveler, but this is her first BIG road trip as a driver. Naturally I've been anxious for progress reports that are, to my taste, way too few and far between. But hey, that's the way of the road-tripping teen and so I will cope. Anyway, the stop near Denver is at the home of my brother, but since it's a holiday weekend, my bro isn't actually at his house. Yesterday he was on his way to see his extended family in South Dakota. We knew that, but his empty house was still a fairly convenient, free stop for the girls, in spite of the disappointment of not actually seeing my dear brother and his wonderful family.

But, because Nebraska encloses approximately half of all the drivable roads that cross the Lower 48, it is not surprising that they would both be crossing Nebraska, albeit in different directions, at about the same time. Now that I think about it,  I actually think you have to cross Nebraska to go anywhere west of about Pittburgh or east of Reno. It's a rule. Anyway, to make the best of this fact, they made a plan and I received this text last night around 10:30 pm:

Here are the actual photos he sent. To me she looks happy and tired and both grown up and very young all at the same time. She loves her little-kid cousins, so I know this was a happy moment for her to get to see them after all. It was a very happy moment for me to get a peek inside this experience for her. To know that she connected with family in the metaphorical wilderness of being so far from home AND made the time to stop and see them means so much to me. I know, I'm probably romanticizing it through the fog of my terrible far-family loneliness, but for Pete's sakes, they both had a LONG way to go. They both could have said sorry, we're going through the drive-through and saving time-maybe next time. But they didn't. They found each other on this little dot on the map and said out loud that family matters. And it does. Thank you Aaron and Amy for making a little piece of home for my girl and her friend out on the lonely prairie.

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Scars

Today while out early in the garden, I cut my finger quite dramatically. It wasn't deep, but was a large cut with lots of blood initially. It did not hurt a bit so I stubbornly finished what I was doing, letting it bleed freely for a couple of minutes, then went inside to wash up and assess the damage.
I cleaned my hands thoroughly, let it bleed a little bit more to try and get any grit or dirt out, then put some pressure on it. I've seen this before, of course, many times, but it struck me anew how unutterably cool it is to watch one's body begin to heal. After a few minutes of pressure, the bleeding stopped entirely, and my skin was already sticking together so perfectly that I could hardly make out the faint tracery of the cut. There's one advantage to keeping your gardening tools sharp, I suppose.

It will most likely leave a faint scar, because I tend to scar easily. I thought about that as well. I don't seem to mind the scars on my body. They tell stories for me.  I have quite a few due to surgeries and just using my body a lot. I've cut myself innumerable times, fallen while simply walking down the street, had caesarian sections, burned myself while cooking, poked myself with knitting needles, gotten my leg caught in bicycle chains, etc.. Some of the scars are identifiable and I can remember what happened. The ones that proclaim the births of my children are actually precious. Some scars have left only the mark on my skin and I have no memory of the incident in my mind.

I was talking with a friend last night about a lot of important and tender things, and I am thinking today about the scars on the soul and how they heal. I think slight remnants of past pain always remain, even on the eternal parts of ourselves, even after forgiveness. We cannot be unchanged by what we experience, no matter what. That is simply not the way of this existence. In fact, we must allow ourselves to be changed by the things that cause pain-the trials, the mistakes, the ill-use, the opportunities missed, the times of confusion and sadness, etc.. That's sort of the whole point of being here. A scar, we must remind ourselves, is evidence of two things:

The wound has healed and the worst pain is in the past.

So, scars are not the problem. They proclaim the great healing power of the universe. Regeneration. Repair. Renewal.  The problem is when we worry them and try to open them again, thinking that maybe we can undo the hurt or this time, or perhaps it will heal more smoothly and with less evidence. Not so. Let the scars be. Listen to their stories but let them be. If we let them remind us we've healed and become different, they give us power and peace. If we see our scars only as a bitter reminder that we were hurt in the first place, we ignore the steps we've taken from that place to this.

Bleeding Hearts at 7:30 am

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Little Things

Life is made of moments and here are a few I want to capture:

• Joking with my sister about her overenthusiastic Cervix as if it is a person and suggesting silly baby names to get her to laugh as she endures total bedrest to get her baby here with as much lung capacity as possible. I just love talking with her. She has a tremendous attitude about her current challenge and has become a rocking expert on all the best movies available on netflix. 
• Discovering new things about an old city. Yesterday I went to Lincoln's Cottage with friends and was delighted by this gem of a historical site set on a beautiful, heretofore unknown campus just a couple of miles from downtown D.C.. If you want to know more about Abraham Lincoln the man, go there. 
• Picking up my husband in the middle of the day to spend a couple of hours in the sunshine at said cottage. My kids took off to NYC instead so I convinced him to come and it was so fun to talk about Lincoln and history and everything. 
• The soaring thrill that happens when a favorite 11 year old runs across a meadow to greet me with a hug, and a favorite 6 year old pats the next seat and says, "Sit here Kellie!" Thank you for that, friends. You warmed my heart with your welcoming. 
• Hearing about my kids' day in the big city and marveling at their smarts, resourcefulness and adventurous attitudes as they took the bus up to New York and scrambled all over the city by foot and train. I helped create the circumstances for their fun day, but they did all the rest themselves. It's kind of a metaphor for motherhood, eh? I loved that they were curious and wanted to see so many things. They made a plan and had a great day together. 
• Visiting with another friend on her birthday. I've gotten to know her over the last few years and I feel grateful she's in my life. 
• Thinking about Abraham Lincoln. I've been reading about introverts and considering how to embrace my own introverted characteristics rather than always pretending to be an extrovert to get by. Abraham Lincoln is often mentioned as a "successful" introvert (yes, that idea deserves its own post). In an incident that was highlighted in the tour, Pres. Lincoln spoke harshly to someone in need because he felt stressed and claustrophobic and overwhelmed by everything around him during the horrors of the civil war. He immediately regretted his actions and did something very personal and meaningful for the man he had put off the day before. I similarly feel cornered sometimes and I say the DUMBEST things and immediately wish I hadn't. I'm always desiring to make it up to people after I survive a sensory onslaught with too little grace and poise. I so appreciated knowing about that moment in the life of someone in a really difficult situation and feeling a more personal connection to him. 

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