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Loss Creates Space
My brother and I stand at the dresser I used as a child. It is covered with sewing notions. Things our mom used to patch levis, stitch quilts, and add badges to scout shirts. Things that were useful when she was around. My brother said: “It’s just a Chex tin, but I remember it from 40 years ago.” I look at the other tin, full of spools of thread and pins and buttons. It takes me to my mom. Actually everything in the house holds a memory of my mom, my dad or my childhood. Our dad’s death evokes our mom, who has been gone almost 13 years. I pick…
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Lights Along the Path
I sit on my front porch step, the brick still warm even though the sun is long gone. Oklahoma nights are neither cool nor quiet. I listen to the soundtrack of summer: cicadas (locusts) perform loud enough to drown out my reverie and then recede into the background. I am 16-years-old. I feel nostalgic and romantic as I watch the moonlight filter through the branches of the oak tree. My future husband is somewhere under this moon, I think. I picture my future: engaged, married, my first baby. My daydreams get me no further than being married with a couple of little kids. In my actual life, once I had…
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The Biology of Change
I’m in the car with my son, his wife and their daughter. They are moving from a place they love to a place they are meant to go. Almost everything is unknown. I am along to help with my granddaughter. Our drive takes us through a town where I spent 27 years. And my kids know I will savor the trip on Route 66 through my childhood. We pull off the highway. I direct them to the neighborhood where I grew up, but I miss the entrance. It looks so different. As we drive the tree-lined hill that leads to my home, time shifts to a summer day in the…
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The End Signals A Beginning
I put the car in reverse and back out of the driveway. I begin a 14-hour drive to a college we visited once. She has a dream and she’s chasing it. I have a knot in my stomach and peace in my heart. I am at once happy, sad, excited, fearful and nostalgic. I am her mom. She travels to a beginning. I travel to an end. Her beginning leads to new friends, experiences, freedom, memories. My end leads to a house void of her laughter, her backpack on the floor, her school-day run home for lunch, her energy, her clothes pushing out the laundry chute, her friends. Her. When…
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The Long Goodbye
Looking out the window, I squint from the glare of the airplane wing. The view of the runway gives way to unseasonably green hills then snow-covered mountaintops and fades into billowy white clouds. I feel nostalgic. Even though our entire family will be together next month, I mourn the loss of home base. We spent a quick weekend clearing our house. With the help of our local children and a friend (who has literally seen us through every challenge since we built our house), we deposited the final hard-to-decide-on items at Deseret Industries and storage. Gorgeous views from every room. That’s what I wrote in the home’s description, and it’s…
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A Dog’s Life
Scott picked up the leash and we walked out the door with Boomer like we had so many times before. Only this time we weren’t heading out to explore the city or to let Boomer stretch his legs. This time we were going to say goodbye. To him. Cancer. We’ve heard that diagnosis before – when medical tests found the cause of our 13-year-old son’s massive headache. This time the diagnosis was for our dog. We named him Boomer, a nod to Oklahoma, the place we raised our kids. The kids had begged and lobbied for another dog after Sundance. We told them to write a proposal detailing how this…
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Vulnerability and Victory in 7 million steps
The alarm went off at 5:15am. I wanted to hit the snooze button and snuggle deeper under the covers. But I didn’t. My husband was stirring, plus our friends would be in our driveway in 15 minutes. Every Friday (rain or shine, snow or ice) for more than 2 years my husband and I threw on tennis shoes and sweatshirts and met Tylee and Larence Searle for a 5-mile walk. In the stillness of all those mornings before the sun rose, we walked over 7 million steps or 28 million if you combine the 4 of us. It started as a way to exercise and quickly morphed into sacred time.…
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Preface
I read some of Jen Hatmaker’s words last summer. “Sometimes you can connect a few dots and discover a pretty clear path toward vibrancy and possibility.” I thought about the dots that connect for me. My shelves are full of books I read as a child. I keep a list of books I’ve read beginning in high school. Once near the end of a book — Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety — I had a sense of deja vu. I checked my list and saw I had read the book 14 years earlier. As a young mom, I’d slip into a book during stolen moments, promising myself I’d go to…
