Category Archives: Alaska

with vision: reading with Grandma

Posted on by April 19, 2022

Kav’s hair was all tufted and feathery-soft after his bath, copper in some lights and red in others. I sniffed him and ruffled it, and before I knew what I was saying, these words came out of my mouth:

“His hair is so pretty.” I paused. “Listen to me, I sound just like Grandma.”

with vision: reading with Grandma

For nineteen years Grandma has called our babies’ hair pretty, and she doesn’t care whether it’s a boy or a girl she’s crooning over. Anyone under ten is fair game.

The next day, we drove the wavy road to her house in forty degree weather. Puddles from the last few days’ rain on the roadside trail were still glazed with ice in the early afternoon, and you could see their frozen lines crisscrossed on their surface. If you grew up in cold weather, you can imagine the perfect crunch these puddles must make if you walked on them. But no one had walked on these ones yet; through miles of the road, they were all still untouched.

Forgive me for going on about the puddles. We’ve been listening to an audio version of Nicholas Nickleby on these drives between Wasilla and Palmer, and Dickens makes me verbose.

It’s a forty minute drive all the way past the river, and Kav’s tolerance for car rides usually expires around the 25-30 minute mark (I don’t think this is Dickens’ fault). So since we don’t make it over as often as we’d like, we planned a two-for-one-deal this time: Stop at Grandma’s house before heading to Dad’s, where the kids were going to rake leaves while Vin put the winter tires on the Stagecoach.

Grandma turned 88 this month. She’s been losing her vision for years; her peripheral vision is still good, but faces are hard to see and reading is almost impossible. She misses driving and seeing people, but she especially misses reading.

And she doesn’t like audiobooks and I don’t blame her; we both must have similar attention spans.

But I was praying about it the week before and an idea struck me, so I asked her about it that day:

What if we could read to her from home? What if we recorded some of our school readings out loud, and burned them to a CD, and gave her a new one every time we came over?

It would be different than a normal audiobook. It would be us in all our mess and glory – Finnegan’s interruptions, questions from the kids, babbling from Kav and meowing from the cats – and it would be less like being alone or being read to by some stranger (professional though they may be), and more like we’re there with her.

And she liked that idea. She also liked knowing that it would be help us with school, motivating the kids to practice reading aloud.

So we’ve been filling the Voice Memo app on my phone with chapters and we’re halfway through several books now…and so far, only one of them is interspersed with me bossing a toddler to stop jumping on the couch, stop wrestling with his baby brother, and stop driving his racecar over the cat.

See? Like I said, it’s just like we’re there.

I called her again a few days ago – her number is the only one I still dial because it hasn’t ever changed – and gave her an update on our progress. Who’s reading what, what’s almost done, which characters get silly voices.

“Some people are just readers,” she said. “Other people read with vision.”

And then she started telling me about when she was a kid. They had poor light in the evening but she read in it anyway; she needed glasses long before she got them, and maybe that’s at least partly why her vision is gone now.

“It was a different world. People will never know what a different world it was back then.” She talked about the rationing in World War II. Sugar was rationed; it was a rare occasion when you could go to the store and see bags of sugar on the shelf. Paper products were hard to come by.

So many things are ever so much better, she said. Our lighting is so much better now. People have no excuse for not being readers these days. It was an altogether different world then.

But that day when we visited, it was the normal, familiar world of Grandma’s house: We dropped off cookies, the boys used her recliner as a merry-go-round, and we fortified ourselves with hugs before heading to Dad’s for yardwork.

And when Finn went up to her for his hug, these words came out of her mouth:

“Look at you, and your pretty hair!” she said, running her fingers through his blond tufts. But we saw that coming, I guess.

dark to light: change that does a work in us

Posted on by May 21, 2019

It is officially spring in Alaska: The willow trees erupted in stars, change is everywhere, and Vince is painting the kitchen. Don’t rub it in, though.

The man hates painting, but the jagged four-foot long tear in the sheetrock from last winter’s earthquake necessitated it. The kitchen walls were dark brown, the crack was stark white, and there’s no hiding it without addressing it – it must be mudded, retextured, and repainted.

dark to light: change that does a work in us

I think he’s cute in his painting clothes, with his hat flipped backwards. I also think I’m cute with a screwdriver, taking out the switch covers to help prep, easing my conscience before leaving him with all the real work while I escape upstairs to write.

The kitchen is going from brown to white, from dark to light, but the change is everywhere else, too, a sense of transition that feels like impending birth. We’ve been here before. Different times and circumstances but the same level of stress and uncertainty, and we survived. Thrived, even, and sometimes saw miracles and breakthrough. Other times, we just muddled through. In some ways we’re still muddling, still waiting for the resolution at the end of the story, praying the story ends well.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging how hard it is. The shifting ground, the earthquake, the trauma – we don’t pretend it was a little breeze when it knocked over trees, and we don’t pretend something was just a little tremor when it shook our foundations. We recognize the threat, and we inspect for damage so that damage can be dealt with.

Just as it is no big deal when we love those who love us back, it is also no big thing to be at peace when life is calm. But it is an entirely different thing to love without return, just as it is also an entirely different thing to feel peace and fight for calm when the world is shaking.

Whatever it is, we know He moves in the midst of it. These uncomfortable seasons bring questions to the surface and draw things out of us, and it’s productive.

No, really. Change does a work in us, as long as we don’t give way to fear.

And isn’t that the hardest part? I don’t think we ever graduate from fighting fear. Every time we up the ante and leave our comfort zone, we just graduate to new phases of fear and new ways to win over it. We feel the knots writhe in our gut over what’s going to happen. We wait for the news, the diagnosis, the prognosis. We wait for anything that’s certain, in the midst of weeks that feel saturated with uncertainty.

Fear, at its root, is often more than just being afraid of an outcome. Often it is fear that we failed – we failed to heal, we failed to fix that thing, we failed to protect that person, we failed to predict the future so that event didn’t occur, we failed to accomplish what we wanted to do.

We lost. Game over.

We failed to be God. And when this is the case, admitting as much means also admitting that maybe, just maybe, we’ve made ourselves into an idol.

And this stupid sheetrock is preaching to me. Listen:

Did the sheetrock fail in the shaking? Yes, and no. It cracked, but held. It wasn’t meant to do the foundation’s job and hold up everything. It was meant to do its own job, and bear the weight it was given, and let any failure be used for good – because change, and even failure, does a work in us when we let it. We go from dark to light, too.

We want perfection, and when we don’t achieve it (because we are, of course, imperfect humans) instead of glorying in what we did reach, we feel the lack and the loss. We feel the distance between where we got to and where we wanted to be.

And the enemy throws it right at us, taking it a step further: Not only did we fail, he hisses, but we are failures. The gap widens. The bad hand seems worse.

He’s a liar, we know. But knowing doesn’t always fix our feelings.

Our feelings are harder to reign in and correct. The only thing that fixes feelings is facing them, and that doesn’t seem like good news at first because we know that behind these Big Feelings are some even Bigger Feelings that we’d rather not admit. (We don’t just paint over the crack; we must also retexture. Gah.) In fact, ignoring those Bigger Feelings is often what allows the lie to creep in and hurt so bad in the first place.

It is the crack in our facade, and there’s no hiding it. It must be dealt with.

Facing these things is hard. So much pain. Ignoring it only allows it to build up for later, the pressure creating strain and damage on souls who were never meant to bear the weight of perfection, and denial, and holding it all in.

I recently read that you have to accelerate your pain to accelerate your progress. And I believe it’s true – one of the ways we accelerate both pain and progress is to face those fears we’d rather ignore, the grief we’d rather stuff, and the failures caused by our own imperfection.

There’s no help for failing. We all fail. None of us are perfect. But we wanted to be. So finally admitting failure is actually healthy, and good, and right – a victory in itself.

If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

– C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

The victory comes the morning after the deep grief of facing it all — the change, the imperfections and uncertainties, and the potential clean-up operation — when you look at yourself in the mirror and see resigned peace. And it hurts. But denial hurts worse, because refusing to acknowledge what is broken denies the healing that needs to seep into our cracked areas.

The consequences and what-ifs were all laid on the table. And instead of folding, you put everything in, because you know that in the end, you win. It is the only way we go from dark to light.

time well spent

Posted on by October 5, 2023

I was up early – too hot, couldn’t sleep – so I finally got up to get a head start while everyone else was still in bed. I threw the office windows open and watched commuters pour down the highway from Houston, Big Lake, and Willow.

I’m never up this early, and I immediately questioned my judgment when the cats assumed my sole purpose in getting up was to feed them, howling for food loud enough to wake the neighbors. I hobbled downstairs, got their dishes, put old Gusser in the bathroom with his food and gave the other cats their food, went back upstairs, and turned on the computer.

time well spent

The summary of my productivity went like this: Open the document, change several sentences, consult the thesaurus for five different words, and say encouraging things to myself like, Wow, that’s a crappy segue.

Probably, I should’ve just stayed in bed.

It doesn’t help that I now have to wear house shoes, because I am fortier than I used to be. My arches started to fall during my pregnancy with Kavanagh, which aggravated a nerve injury in my foot and had me limping and occasionally losing balance. So now I clomp-clomp though the house in old, scrubbed tennis shoes and we call them my “house shoes” – a phrase I can’t even hear in my head without giving it a southern accent and picturing a polyester duster from the 70s.

You might know already that Alaskans don’t wear shoes in houses. Shoes are only worn in the house in those brief intervals of trying to run out the door, or having to deal with something urgent before even getting our shoes off when we get home. Or, as Iree pointed out, when we’re walking through glass and other debris from a 7.1 earthquake. So wearing shoes in the house feels inherently stressful, and I’m not used to it yet.

The week started rough, like we held time in a sieve and it poured out faster as the to-do list got longer. By the end of the day I was sucking wind and at six minutes after the hard-and-fast time we’d agreed upon for clocking out, I finally hit the shutdown button and closed the laptop.

It has to be enough, I thought. But it didn’t feel like it was. Does it ever?

On Tuesday I tried to make up for Monday. Here’s an example of how that went:

Go to Paypal to update account. Get error message with instructions to call Paypal.

Call Paypal, attempt to update over the phone’s automated system, which almost never works.

It doesn’t. Wait to speak to representative. Estimated wait time is 27-33 minutes. No problem, finding busywork for half an hour while listening to muzak is one of my very favorite things, like jury duty.

At 31 minutes of waiting, the call disconnects. YOU ARE KIDDING ME.

Call back. Estimated wait time is now only 17-22 minutes. This remarkable improvement is brought to us by a propensity to hang up on customers.

Someone picks up, hallelujah.

The representative’s ability to speak English is matched by her listening skills. I wish that was a compliment, but after interrupting me four times while asking what the problem is, it’s not.

Finally she reads from the same script I’ve heard from three other companies over the last month: “I have good news for you today, I can fix this for you.” But she can’t, because after putting me on hold two more times she informs me that my account is now under review and inaccessible by either of us. (Apparently Paypal’s security is so penetrative, it no longer recognizes you if you start wearing house shoes.)

“No worries,” she reassures me from her script. “You can access your account and try again in 48 hours.” Well, yippee. I have good news for you. I can fix this for you. No worries. I don’t think those things mean what she thinks those things mean.

“Can I help you with anything else?” she asks. Um, no thank you, I don’t think I can stand any more help today, I’m good, thankyouverymuch.

That was Tuesday.

Wednesday, five kids and I pile into the Stagecoach and drive over the river and through the Butte, to Grandma’s house we go. After the last two days it seemed like the wrong time to take the day off, but we’d already scheduled this and wouldn’t miss it for anything.

It was Kavanagh’s first trip there, probably his longest car ride so far. The wind was flying and whipping up waves of dirt and river silt in the intersections, and tiny tornadoes eddied along the road in front of us.

Two pictures of Grandpa sit on a shelf by her couch. One was taken a few years before he died; the other was black and white and faded, and he was young and handsome, six-foot-four, the guy Grandma fell in love with – sitting on a tree stump, filling his pipe, legs stretched out in front of him.

They’d known each other for about a week when it was taken. Grandma said he came by her mother’s store and she and all her younger siblings were there, probably driving her mother crazy. So they decided to take the kids all out for a walk to get them out of her hair. They went to a nearby pasture and he sat on that stump and filled his pipe, and she snapped his picture with the camera she took pretty much everywhere.

I asked her how old she was then. Now, she’s 87, though you wouldn’t know it from looking at her or hearing her voice. I grew up with her singing hymns around the house and leading worship at church, and her voice is usually still strong and beautiful – but it wasn’t when she answered my question.

“Twenty,” she said.

She was quiet for a minute, and then added, “I’d give anything to go back in time to that week.” Another pause. “Precious individual,” she said. “I miss him.”

They were married less than a year later, shortly before her twenty-first birthday. Had five boys: my uncle, my dad, and my other uncle within five years of each other, and thought they were done. But we’ve both had two surprises. We were both in our forties for the last one.

And Grandma wears house shoes, too.