Orchard Crest Camp belongs to the Southeast Gateway Area of the Christian Church - Disciples of Christ. It is located east of Fredericktown on the Castor River. The cabins have bathrooms and electricity, but the entire atmosphere is still rustic. I spend the past weekend there, at a women's retreat. I've been on retreats there before, and I've counseled at summer camp. This event is about the last one of the year as the camp will close down for winter in October. Already the trees show signs of fall approaching. Yet Orchard Crest is a welcoming place, and it is blissfully out of range of highway or aircraft noise. On a warm fall night, the only sounds are from crickets and tree frogs. By day, scores of bird species still flit in the trees and skim the river. On this weekend we were given several times to meditate and write down our thoughts. Here are some of mine.
The early morning sunlight reflects off the quiet waters of the Castor River. I'm reminded of Thoreau's famous line: "Time is but the river that I go fishing in." No fishing today, but flowing rivers always create for me a metaphor of eternity. So I walked by the river and thought about time.
Time: I don't have enough of it to do it right. I feel rushed, then I can't move. The train is coming and I just sit on the tracks and watch it coming toward me, unable to move. Hospitality needs movement and also the ability to just BE in a moment of time. I really need to let go of the concept of time, the constraints of time. Standing by the river that looks still but is inexorably moving, I wonder about the connections of time and eternity. I need to trust the reality of an eternity that can still contain my time and others' time. And still I need solitude or silent time because I can't think or feel in the midst of chaos.
Around the camp grounds were several meditation stations. The theme was centered around sayings of Jesus. As I visited at each one, I wrote these thoughts:
Jesus is the rock. I can hear a line from a hymn: "On Christ the solid rock I stand, all else is sinking sand." There are a lot of times I have been on shifting sand, if not sinking. But rocks aren't always solid, either. The rocks in the creek bed shift and tumble. How did the vulnerable, wounded man called Jesus become a rock?
Jesus is living water. Why did he say living water? We spend a lot of money to make sure there is nothing living in our drinking water before we call it safe. We know that water makes life possible, but we don't always think of it as having life on its own. Come to think of it, aren't our bodies mostly water? I forget the percentage. And we are living. Is the water in us living water? Is Jesus' image of the living water a metaphor of the incarnation? Jesus is the living water. WE are mostly living water. Jesus is within us. As Cynthia Hale said in a sermon at Quadrennial back in 1998, All that you are seeking, you have within you. Right now.
Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. Will a twig of pipe vine be enough to remind me of the pure energy that sends out the vines of the forest: grape, pipe vine, Virginia creeper, trumpet, poison ivy, clematis? The vines run, climb, twist, furl-- tendril after tendril until frost cuts them down, and then they rest for a season before budding again. So we don't have to grow and bloom and bear fruit constantly, just in our own season.
Jacque Foster, my pastor and the retreat leader, asked us to imagine ourselves in the place where we go for centering quiet, and then to imagine that Jesus met us there. What would we say to each other? I thought of my garden at home. I'm not sure where this following dialogue came from, but I wrote it down as it played out in my head:
Jesus: This is a lovely garden. Did you plant it?
Me: Yes...well..some of it..others did most of the work. But the plants were yours.
Jesus: I know.
Me: Why are you here?
Jesus: Why not? Aren't I supposed to be everywhere?
Me: I guess I mean, how did you find me? I forgot to invite you. I should have invited you long ago.
Jesus: Why didn't you?
Me: I think I just forgot. I'm bad about worrying or concentrating on one thing at a time, and I forget everything else. Even you. And I know I'm not supposed to forget you.
Jesus: What would help you remember?
Me: I don't know. I am getting more forgetful. Worried about becoming old. Tired. Losing interest in things I have always loved.
Jesus: What about the slant of light through the branches, or the flash of a hummingbird's wings or a sweet scent of clematis?
Me: Yes, I know you send these reminders to me. And I thank you. I thank you.
Note: This post contains a correction added on 8/22/08.
August 26, 2007 was the final worship service at Rogers Heights Christian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I grew up. My parents, Jim and Frances, were members of another Christian church when they were recruited in the winter of 1945 to help start a new congregation on the east side of the city, across from the "new" Will Rogers High School that had opened in 1939. I recall being in the "nursery" class that met in Ms. Dessa Bedford's home, and I have a fond memory of my three-year old self drawing pictures with my finger in the condensation on her window panes the next spring. In the summer of 1946, men of the church laid a foundation for a simple rectangular building that would be worship and fellowship space until 1949, when the sanctuary (above, with the steeple) would be completed. My dad and the other men built that first church building with their own hands. When the charter closed in 1947, my parents' names were on it, as well as my grandparents Hugh and Ada Burch, and my aunt Martha, daddy's younger sister. My name is not on the charter, because our denomination (it was a Brotherhood back then!) practices believers' baptism and I of course was not yet of age to make such a decision.
Over the next five decades, more structures would be built and added on to those two original buildings. Where we once faced north to worship, by the time of the closing, we faced south. Where once simple amber glass in casements illuminated the sanctuary, in the 1980s stained glass windows , such as this one behind the communion table at the last service, replaced them. Pews replaced the plastic chairs that had replaced the metal folding chairs that had replaced the wooden folding chairs! Paneling covered the concrete block walls. The bell still hung in the steeple, and on the last day, someone went behind the pulpit, through the prayer room, grabbed the rope and rang it, clear and true, one more time.
Why did the church decide to close at this time? An article in the Tulsa World quoted one of the few remaining charter members as saying the membership, once in the hundreds, had declined to about 15 active folks, not enough to carry on the mission of a church or support a minister. The area was not growing, and demographics were not in favor of a progressive, mainline church in that part of Tulsa any more. After several months, they decided to plan to close and turn over the assets and property to the Oklahoma Christian Church Foundation. The Rogers Heights Christian Church endowment will support other missions and church starts, carrying on the legacy of this faithful congregation into perpetuity. I think my father, and the other founders, would approve, and when everyone gathered in a circle around the sanctuary at the close of the service, I told them so.
In this view, five different roof lines are visible, and they show the stages of the church's growth. At the lower far right is the original little building that housed the charter congregation. It was the site of fellowship dinners, Sunday morning worship, Wednesday prayer meetings, and more. A house stood on the lot where the parking lot is now, with room for the church office and Sunday school. In that tiny building, those first winters, a free-standing gas stove heated the space. I remember backing up too close to it one cold night at a fellowship dinner and charring the backside of a new winter wool coat! The section with the steeple came next, dedicated in 1949. In the mid 1950s the three-story education building in the background was built, and the "bridge" section (the part with the higher roof line) connecting it to the sanctuary was added. The spring I was baptized, 1956*, the baptistry was a copper tank sitting on the grass between the two unconnected buildings, and my baptism took place on a Sunday afternoon at East Side Christian instead.
*Update on 8/22/08: After corresponding with Patricia Ferguson (see comment #3) we discovered a discrepancy in our memories about our baptisms. I finally went back and checked and I was baptized on Mother's Day of 1954, not 1956, at East Side. I know it was because our baptistry was unavailable, but I'm no longer sure if it was because of the construction mentioned above. Thanks, Tricia, for reading, commenting and reconnecting!
The final building addition in the foreground of this picture took place in the 1970s, expanding the first building into a proper fellowship hall with a spacious kitchen and accessible restrooms.
But a church, any church, is so much more than its buildings. Mostly it's memories for me, because Rogers Heights was my only church from the time I was on the cradle roll until I graduated from college and moved to Kansas to start my teaching career. This is where I learned the names of 66 books of the Bible and understood that the Bible was a library of writings of faith, not simply an infallible "word." This is where I learned to sing "Jesus Loves the Children of the World"--red, brown, yellow, black and white. This is where, after I was in high school, I taught the second grade Sunday school class and played piano for singing in Children's church, slipping back into the sanctuary just in time for communion and one of Lloyd Lambert's sermons. After I was in college, I was invited to give the Youth Sunday sermon one year.
As children, one of the boys and I kept the church librarian, a single lady named Edna Mary Letson, in poverty as she undoubtedly bought with her own money the two new books a month she added to feed our appetites for new stories to read. (At the church's 50th anniversary in 1995, Norm and I visited and I went up to the library in the educational building and found the row of orange-bound biographies of famous people. I opened one and pulled the card out of the pocket and yes, there was my name!) Knowing that my name was still on a card in a book in that library somehow made me feel still connected to Rogers Heights, although my last contact with most members of the congregation was in the summer of 1968 when a group of the women gave me a bridal shower. Shortly after that my parents moved and transferred to East Side, which was closer to them.
Because of Rogers Heights, I entered adulthood with a useful grounding in biblical history and the Christian faith. I knew my baptism had not been into one congregation, but into the universal church. During the next seven years of college and work, I would undergo the usual periods of young adult questioning, and doubt, and begin the recovery and re-creation of my faith. Because of the love and encouragement I had always known at Rogers Heights, I continued to attend church, first in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and then in Pittsburg, Kansas. Somewhere in those early years at Rogers Heights, I got the idea that if I persisted, even if I thought I had lost touch with God, God would somehow find me.
It was a very bittersweet experience, the closing and decommissioning of my childhood church. I found out about it in an e-mail my cousin sent me by chance, mentioning the article in the Tulsa World that appeared on Aug. 18. Although I wanted to be there, I would not have made a special trip, but Norm and I found ourselves in Tulsa that week anyway when the same cousin's mother-in-law died and Norm was to conduct the memorial service. It seemed a sign that we should stay over, and I'm glad that we did.
The "little church on the corner" belongs to history now, but it will live on in the memories I have and in the bequest it has given to the larger church. I have said that the death in my cousin's family and our trip to take part in the service had seemed a sign that we should be there for the closing of Rogers Heights. Imagine my astonishment when, at the close of the service, we all repeated the same words of Isaiah that had been the text for the service for my cousin's mother-in-law three days earlier:
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field
shall clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12
This week is an anniversary for this blog and its companion. The first post to Home Stories appeared on Aug. 11, 2006 and the first entry on Thursday's Child is dated Aug. 15, 2006. So a year has passed, and I have learned that blogging requires some self discipline, energy and creativity that I don't always have. But I'll continue whenever something needs to be said.
August 15 is also the birth date of one of my great grandmothers, Paralee Belle Morgan Paris. She was born in 1864 and she died in 1962 at the age of 98. For all of the 19 years of my life to that point, she was old, forgetful and eventually an invalid, but stories about her younger days are intriguing. When she was barely 20, she married a tobacco farmer named Roscoe Paris, of whom her parents did not approve, in 1884. Evidence suggests an elopement. She apparently was a feminist before her time. When her younger daughter (my grandmother) was born in 1890, she told Roscoe "no more babies." Belle had been the oldest of 11 and she didn't want to be bedridden from childbearing like her mother. The family moved to Oklahoma Territory in 1903 and became part of the pioneer settler movement that created the 46th state. I have much more to write about her when I get the 4 Great Grandmothers project underway. For now, happy 143rd, grandma Belle!
What's with the numbers in the picture, you ask? Well, Norm and I were in the Missouri Botanical Garden gift shop a month or so ago and we purchased the lovely ceramic tile numerals and the frame to hold them as an early anniversary (or belated housewarming) present for ourselves. Six years after our move to this address, we decided to upgrade and personalize our house number. So now you know where we live.
Back in July, my cousin Mike celebrated one of those milestone birthdays, and Norm and I went to Tulsa to join in the festivities. There were several presents, but the one Mike seemed to enjoy playing with the most was his new grandson, Jason, who was 6 weeks old at the time of the party. When I look at this picture, I'm reminded of myself at 4 or 5 years old, meeting Mike when he was a baby and falling in love with him at first sight. It's amazing to think we have both made it to this age. Happy 60th, cous!
Jason is a happy, friendly baby who took time out for a nap on his grandma Debbie's chest while the rest of us indulged in the barbecued brisket, pulled pork and spareribs that Mike cooked earlier in the day in his smoker. Now that's a rare man who will cook the main course for his own birthday dinner!
Jason even spent a little quality time with cousin Judi. Here he looks a little dubious. He's probably not used to seeing that much gray hair! We all enjoyed the hospitality of Debbie's sister Cari and her husband, Jack, as well as the company of their daughter Amy and her son Lucus (4 months) and Mike and Debbie's daughter Felicia and her husband Jonathon and Jason's older brother Kevin, plus Debbie and Cari's brother Tim. Debbie has some stories on her blog (Debide's View) about family and baseball which explain why Tim was in town for that week as well.
We are so glad we got to visit with all of Mike and Debbie's family on this trip. Mike and I grew up as only children in Tulsa, separated by 4 years in age. Our families celebrated holidays as well as spent many Sunday nights together. Originally I had four cousins: Jerry died in military service during the Vietnam era, and the two girls who grew up in California, Linda and Robin, have pursued separate life paths: I haven't seen either of them in decades, which I regret. For all practical purposes, Mike is my only living relative, and the only person living with whom I have memories of a shared childhood. So both of his grandsons--Kevin and Jason--are precious to me.
In subsequent posts, I'm going to look more closely at (mostly my) family history and trace some of the the Burch and Brown, McEleya and Paris family lore. I got a start on our return trip from Tulsa, as we explored courthouses and cemeteries in a search for two of my four great-grandmothers. But that's the next story.
Just a short note that I finally got around to adding some favorite blogs to the Links section in the sidebar. Among them are Doug's blog commenting on Southern Gospel; my pastor's blog, a blog by Norm's niece Debbie and a brand new blog by my cousin Debi. I check these every day and enjoy them all. To add these links in the template I'm using actually involves tinkering under the hood of the blog template and correctly typing one line of html tags for each link-- so I'm feeling rather smug that I accomplished the task and they actually seem to work!
This morning in a group at church, my pastor mentioned the post about "Life Lists and Lessons" . Then two other people in the group piped up that they had read it, too. Wow. It's great to know that I'm not just throwing words (and pictures) into cyberspace the way a person stranded on a deserted island tosses a note into a bottle and sets it adrift. Please, though, if you have any reactions, suggestions, questions or comments--feel free to leave a comment or even send me an e-mail. Part of the blog experience is to have a conversation, so if I've said anything worth talking about, please let me know, now and then. Otherwise, I feel like I did at summer camp in the seventh grade, waiting for mail call and no letters for me today.
If you wish to leave a comment, just click on the "comment" link below each post and simply type in the window on the page that comes up. You don't need a Blogger/Google identity to comment. You can post as Other (click the button near the bottom of the comment page) leaving a first name or nickname. Or you can post as Anonymous and let me guess! Click the orange "Publish Your Comment" button and you are done. Your e-mail address is never collected or posted. Or if you have a reply that you prefer that the rest of the world not read, you can send me an e-mail. If you don't know my address already, there is a link for e-mailing me on my profile page. Just click on "view my complete profile" near the top of the blog to get there.
Now that the school year is over (yes, I came out of retirement to teach one class--silly me) I hope to publish on Thursday's Child more often. Talk to you soon!
Earlier this week, Norm was going through a stash of saved birthday and anniversary cards, and he came across a list of Life Goals I had made on Sept. 6, 1975. Back in those days, it was common for a workshop leader to tell you to write down your goals if you wanted to accomplish them. So on or about Labor Day of that year, while I was working part-time at a newspaper and still homesick for the Ozarks and the Rocky Mountains after moving to the Big City, I made a list of 44 items in green ink on a blank church bulletin.
Of course, I lost track of the list and hadn't seen it in at least a decade, but a month or so ago I had wondered about it. Maybe that thought is what helped bring it to the surface. Anyway, I had a good laugh at some of the items, and felt nostalgia for some others. If I had worked at the list and accomplished one a year, I could look forward to total victory sometime in the year 2019, or around my 76th birthday! But the truth is, some of these goals have long been out of reach, and others have been supplanted by different dreams. Here is the list, with those that I did accomplish marked with an asterisk:
1. Climb to the top of Gray's Peak, Colo. (I got to within 1300 feet of the summit in 1972 and wanted to go back and finish the job. Alas, not.)
2. Camp in the Bridger Wilderness in Wyoming.
3. Visit Alaska and Hawaii.
4. Visit all 48 contiguous states. (So far I've made it to 25.)
5. Drive a truck.
6. Publish a book.
*7. Float on the Current River and the Buffalo River.
8. Publish a newspaper
9. Ride cross-country on a bicycle.
10. Have two children.
11. Live on a farm of 10 acres or more.
12. Go up in a hot air balloon.
13. Visit Yellowstone, Sequoia, and Grand Canyon national parks. (I went to the Grand Canyon with my parents in 1960, but wanted to go again and to the North rim this time.)
14. Ride the Delta Queen to New Orleans. (After taking the Huck Finn to the JB Bridge, I think that's as far as I'll go.)
15. Hike the Appalachian Trail. (Will maybe a mile, if I can manage it, count?)
16, Go on a cross-country ski trip.
*****17. Make a quilt. (At last, something!)
18. Refinish an old piece of furniture.
19. Have a craft or yarn shop.
20. Visit Mexico.
*21 Visit Ireland.(I was there in 1967. But I want to go again.)
23. Lead a Girl Scout Troop.
23. Own or manage a camp.
24. Become a campcraft instructor.
25. Qualify for Red Cross First Aid or Lifesaving. (Got the first aid, also CPR. No water stuff.)
26. Get a first class radio license.
27. Operate a ham radio.
28. Learn how to tune up a car. (Kind of obsolete now. I did manage to gap some spark plugs.)
29. Read all the works of William Faulkner.
30. Raise Christmas trees.(On that 10-acre farm, no doubt.)
31. Study herb lore and raise a herb garden. (Do pots of mint and lavender and basil count?)
32. Build a greenhouse.
33. Build a tree house.
34. Trim a tree.
35. Raise all my own fruits and vegetables.
36. Become a vegetarian.
37. Go on a round trip to the moon. (Remember, the first moon landing was only 6 years earlier.)
38. Write a novel.
39. Win a literary prize.
40. Visit an Indian reservation.
41. Visit the birthplaces of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. (So far, the parents.)
42. Get a copyright or a patent.
43. Build a log cabin.
44. Ride a train through Glenwood Canyon, Colo.
Wow. What ambition. I'm amazed that I once had such athletic inclinations. A lot of these ran to outdoor activities, or gardening, or self-sufficiency, which was a big theme in the 1970s. As you can see, there aren't many asterisks. But I did set other goals and accomplish some of them. That is a story for another day. The photos here are from the campus of my alma mater, the University of Arkansas. Near the old Student Union, a bald cypress that was there in the 1960s during my student days still broods over the sidewalk, and it now has a plaque at its base, for special recognition of its longevity. If trees could only talk, the tales it could tell! And the Arkansas tradition of Senior Walk continues, with the name of each graduate etched in concrete. I'm there twice; below is my name from 1966 when I got my master's degree. It's not yet an epitaph; there's more to go.
From Don and Kay in Garden City comes this photo of one of mom Linville's amaryllis plants (more correctly, a descendant thereof) blooming in their sunroom on Monday of this week. As Don noted, just in time for her birthday. Bertha Williams was born on this date 101 years ago in a Western Kansas dugout. A true pioneer, she loved flowers and grew an amazing variety of them despite the challenges of surviving in a a dry, windy, hot, freezing, dusty, unpredictable climate. The amaryllis was only one of the beautiful things that she passed on to her children and their children over the years. And she was the best mother-in-law I could have ever hoped for. Nine years since her passing, we still miss her.
In Central Missouri, there is a retreat center known as Rickman Camp and Conference center, which is owned by the regional Disciples of Christ church. I spent the weekend of March 23-24 there with 21 other women. The rest of the story of the retreat can be found on Home Stories. About 11 a.m. on Saturday, I explored the prayer trail, and found all kinds of small details and wonders to photograph as I walked. I was practicing being in the present moment, trying to be open to what my heart or soul might have learned during the retreat. Our leader, an artist, talked about coming back to her art after many years, finding it a gift she could use for ministry.
Over the years I have explored many gifts, including writing, quilting, photography, and others. But one sensibility I've had since I was very young is an appreciation for the natural world and a desire to experience its myriad changes and moods.
I've collected rocks since I was in grade school (but I left this one in place after taking its picture.). I've identified trees and flowers and birds and tracked the stars.
The night before I took this walk, I had gone outside for half an hour to just sit on a bench in the darkness. Something the leader had shared with us had reminded me of accounts I had read of the old Cherokees and other Native Americans who said they needed physical contact with the ground in order to connect with the Great Spirit. I took off my shoes and socks and let the coolness of the ground seep up through my feet.
As I sat absorbing the silence, I began to hear the peeping of little frogs that come out as a first sign of spring. The next day when I shared that, people seemed surprised that anyone would know what had made the sound. I'm wondering if this is a gift I can use again at this stage of my life. What does it mean that I see the delicate web of a spider in the woods by the prayer trail, or a lichen-covered stump?
A hillside near an outdoor chapel on the Center's grounds is covered with huge, ancient cedar (actually, juniper) trees. They were about to bloom and release a ton of pollen into the air, much to the dismay of anyone with allergies. Even the tiniest thing in Nature can have a profound effect on humans. After I came in from sitting in the night, my feet in contact with the ground, my ears open to the silence, I wrote this:
All the world is quiet except for the buzzing of a street light, the click of a cardoor and someone rolling a suitcase up the walk. And a far off roar of traffic on the highway. And the FROGS! So faint...spring peepers, that falsetto soprano chorus... first night sounds of Spring.
I have to be grounded--I could never live in a high rise, or even on a second floor with a lovely deck. I need the ground to walk on. If only I could be limber enough again to sit down on it, kneel on it, lie on it, and feel the energy of the Earth flow into me, rekindle my spirit. BUT I'm not yet ready to be IN the ground--because I also need to see the sky.
Some 30 or 40 years ago, we hummed a Beatles tune: will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64? That was the age at which we youths expected to become old folks, tottering a bit, needing someone to monitor our meds and take away our car keys if we strayed too far off the center line.
Today, I turned 64. That's 8 times 8, as I learned my multiplication tables in third grade. But as I thought about it, I decided to look at my life so far as 4 times 16. Once, 20 years were supposed to define a generation, but today, with the rapid rate of technological change, a generation is closer to 16 or 18 years. So I tried to break the years into generational, or 16-year segments.
1959--My sixteenth birthday. Most girls of my generation expected a special party, but nothing like the "Sweet Sixteen" social coming-out galas that are commoplace today. That year, there was no party. My grandmother McElyea died one day before my 16th birthday, and her funeral was held a few days after. Mary Paris McElyea left me a legacy of a trunk full of hand-made quilts and a fistful of prized family recipes. I wish I could have claimed additional items at her estate sale, like her full set of Fiesta Ware. But mother did save for me her Apple Blossom china and her Vintage pattern silver plate. When I was about 7, Granny Mc helped me make a simple doll quilt by hand. Unfortunately my desire to make quilts of my own didn't emerge until the late 1980s, some 30 years after her death. But I inherited any talent I have with a needle from her. (The wall quilt above is a Lone Star I made a few years ago that was exhibited at the 2005 Flower Valley Quilt Guild show.) The one bright spot of this birthday was getting a phone call that told me I had been selected to attend a national Girl Scout encampment, called Roundup (kind of like the Boy Scout Jamboree, except these Roundups don't happen any more) that would be held in Colorado Springs in July. So it was a bittersweet birthday when I was 16.
1975--My thirty-second birthday was observed in St. Louis, where I was unemployed and taking an editing class at a local junior college in order to network and try to find a job in journalism. In the 16 years since 1959, I had gone to that Girl Scout camp, attended college and earned a master's degree, obtained a college teaching job in Kansas, met Norm, gotten married, moved to Denver while he went to seminary and moved to St. Louis when he got a publishing job. That was an action-packed 16 years. My dog I had had since I was 10, Rags, had died in 1969, and later that summer, on our first wedding anniversary, Norm and I adopted a puppy we named Sandy from our friends John and Nancy Sanders, and Sandy would brighten our lives for almost 17 years. In March of 1975, I got a proofreading job at a weekly newspaper, which was the start of my journalism career.
1991--How did I get to be 48 so soon? I'm almost 50! I really can't remember how I celebrated this birthday, except later that month, Norm had a wreck on his way to work and I waited in the emergency room while they verified a couple of broken ribs. These were stressful years involving work and my parents' health. In 1989 my father died. My mother had difficulty coping with the details of living alone, but she wouldn't consider moving to live with us, or to a senior apartment. Check stubs from those years reveal that I flew to Tulsa about once a month on weekends to help her with insurance forms, balance her checkbook, stock up on TV dinners, go to church. I had been teaching writing courses at a university since 1987, after working in newspapers, magazines and public relations. Norm had been pastor of a church since 1985. Sandy had passed away in 1986 and later that year we adopted Suzie, a 5-year-old Lhasa-Poo cross, who would be with us until 1995. The 1990s were a dizzying round of emergency trips to see our parents, frantic grading of final exams while someone was in the hospital, all while trying to maintain friendships and a life. By the end of the decade, we had said farewell in this life to both of Norm's parents, one of his brothers, one of his sisters and my mother.
2007--Here I am, at 64. When I turned 50, I got my ears pierced and started collecting earrings. I kept on teaching and started advising a college newspaper in 1994, the same year mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I joined a quilt guild and attended a summer writing workshop in nonfiction. Norm and I began taking short trips to state park lodges where we could indulge in bird watching. In 2003, Norm retired from preaching. In 2006, I retired from full-time teaching but kept a part-time job with the student newspaper. I started writing what I call the Memoir Project and if I finish it, it will be a family and personal history, starting with my four great-grandmothers, 3 of whom were known to be quilters. And we have been blessed with surrogate parenthood: for at least a decade, we have had Doug in our lives as the son we never had. And now we have his partner Matt, also, and their dog Sam. We have enjoyed volunteer projects and have lots of travel plans.
Where from here? Well, if the past is any predictor, the next 16 years should be quite a trip. If I'm still blogging in 2023, I'll be 80, and I'll let you know how the 5th generation is doing.
Orchard Crest Camp belongs to the Southeast Gateway Area of the Christian Church - Disciples of Christ. It is located east of Fredericktown on the Castor River. The cabins have bathrooms and electricity, but the entire atmosphere is still rustic. I spend the past weekend there, at a women's retreat. I've been on retreats there before, and I've counseled at summer camp. This event is about the last one of the year as the camp will close down for winter in October. Already the trees show signs of fall approaching. Yet Orchard Crest is a welcoming place, and it is blissfully out of range of highway or aircraft noise. On a warm fall night, the only sounds are from crickets and tree frogs. By day, scores of bird species still flit in the trees and skim the river. On this weekend we were given several times to meditate and write down our thoughts. Here are some of mine.
The early morning sunlight reflects off the quiet waters of the Castor River. I'm reminded of Thoreau's famous line: "Time is but the river that I go fishing in." No fishing today, but flowing rivers always create for me a metaphor of eternity. So I walked by the river and thought about time.
Around the camp grounds were several meditation stations. The theme was centered around sayings of Jesus. As I visited at each one, I wrote these thoughts:
Jacque Foster, my pastor and the retreat leader, asked us to imagine ourselves in the place where we go for centering quiet, and then to imagine that Jesus met us there. What would we say to each other? I thought of my garden at home. I'm not sure where this following dialogue came from, but I wrote it down as it played out in my head:
