All Hallow's Eve

Dear Dad,

Today it's a gorgeous autumn day.  

The sky is that washed out blue with wispy clouds.

The backyard is littered in leaves.

The sunlight has that distinct slanted look, different from the drenching wash of summer. When you are outside, even in the late afternoon sunlight, a long-sleeve shirt isn't unwelcome.

While a lot of the trees around my neighborhood have lost all their yellow leaves, my neighbor's trees are just now turning, and they're glorious!  I have yellow hanging over my driveway, and something bright to greet me as I open and close the curtains in the schoolroom. 

The maple in my backyard is doing what it always does -- several shades all at once, each leaf in its own process of change.  It is a myriad mix of greens and reds and some muted oranges.

This morning we gathered around the table in the front room for journal writing.  We all wrote letters today: Isaiah wrote to Anna, Mia to Nae Nae, Benji to Talon, and I wrote grandparents.  Claire busied herself getting on the table (and being taken off), and I attempted to distract her by offering her paper to color on.  It worked briefly.

We read in the sunshine during lunchtime, and listened to our history lesson while I rolled out sugar cookies.  Isaiah and Mia played with extra dough and Benji played with legos. Claire napped.

Afterward, the boys were downstairs cleaning their room and yelling at each other and my patience is about out.  Mia was busy frosting her bunch of cookies.

Sigh.  

Earlier today, I went downstairs to make my bed and straighten things up.  My book was still open on my pillow, and I looked for a bookmark so I could close it and put it on my nightstand.

I looked at a pile of papers there, sheets that had been at home in the front of my journal, random bits and pieces: letters, talks, quotes, notes of things to write about, saved programs, etc.  I pulled out a card, thinking I would just tuck it in the book briefly until I found something else.  It was a birthday card from you in 2009.  

I looked at your elegant penmanship and read your words.  You said your love for me "goes clear to the bone," and wished me goodness and God's richest blessings for the coming year.

I read it and sat there, thinking about you for a minute.  Thinking about how, then, I had no idea you would be gone in just-less-than-four-and-a-half-years from that point.  

But.

I also sat there, thinking about something I've learned in the past year -- and it is this. Until losing you, I didn't realize that when you lose someone you love deeply, they never really leave you.  

It's like this poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye, written in 1932.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.  

I am not there.  I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning's hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there.  I did not die.

Of course, my sentiments would be different.

You're in the way I think of flowers, the way I stain my fingers with dirt.

You're a piece of Bach's music, fine chocolate, the texts of certain hymns, letter writing.

When I see tulips or Easter lilies, or make pies in my quiet kitchen at night, I feel you in the work and simple, stunning beauty.

(apple pie making, the other night)

Lots of things.

The people you love become a part of you.

I think it is one of God's most lovely gifts, a gift I hadn't discovered til incredible sadness, through loss, carved its way into my heart.  That chasm made room for warmth that I hadn't anticipated.

I've always thought of Lehi's discourse on opposition (2 Nephi 2) as a commentary on the difficulties of life.  But.  It occurs to me, now, that it goes, just as equally, the other way.  When God says that opposition is one of the guarantees, something we can count on, He also meant opposition to pain and struggle.  

He meant that He would meet you, in those dark places.

Just last night, a line from something I was watching stuck out to me.  One of the characters had just suffered a crushing loss, and someone said to her, "You keep on living, until you feel alive again."

My.

This has had application in my life over the past year in so many ways.

In relationships that mattered to me.

In questions that I don't know the answers to.

In forging ahead, when you can't always see the way.

I love that quote.

Keep on living, until you feel alive again.

I've realized that losses can become gains, Dad.

I've learned that pain is part of joy.

I've found that these pieces are part of the same whole.

And as I log off of blogger this afternoon and head to the kitchen to make beef stroganoff, I'll think of you as I make scratch sauce.

I'll brown meat and diced onions.  

I'll add in a little flour and mushrooms, pour in cream and some red cooking wine, mustard, red pepper, salt.

I'll let things simmer and thicken, and I'll taste test.

I learned it from you.

Happy 30th of October, Dad.

All Hallow's Eve.

xoxo

E.

January Sunshine

I thought of a poem today after taking this picture around noon.

Bright beautiful sunshine and the loveliness of deep orange.

Beauty

Beauty is seen

In the sunlight,

The trees, the birds,

Corn growing and people working

Or dancing for their harvest.

Beauty is heard

In the night,

Wind sighing, rain falling,

Or a singer chanting,

Anything in earnest.

Beauty is in yourself.

Good deeds, happy thoughts,

That repeat themselves,

In your dreams,

In your work,

And even in your rest.

Rachel Laura Harmon, 3rd grade

Monday

There is a hill I frequently run up right by my house.

Today, as I was approaching it, I named it Hoofer. 'Cause it takes some umph.

We made muffins for breakfast while listening to a radio program about German Christmas carols. I heard birds sing out the window. I looked at the twinkle lights and red birds on my mantle.

Laundry.

Bathing, and my favorite part was watching one of the boys and Mia giggling in amusement with each other while splashing. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

(Bathing in totes since we are currently without a bathtub.)

Lunch of nachos (for the boys) and tunafish (for me).

Feeling grateful that it hasn't been a hard Monday. Sometimes on Monday mornings, I feel grouchy with my boys almost the moment I wake up. And when that happens, I dread the week ahead because it almost always seems to curse the rest of the week and I am pulling my hair out. Like last weekend, basically. And it's really hard.

Like this poem I was just reminded of about 30 minutes ago.

Wrong Monday

First the alarm is mute. Forgot the plunger.
I discover the milk is sour right after
I pour it on cereal. I pad
to the door stepping into what the cat
threw up. I clean the floor and then
my hands smell bad. Washing them
I splash my blouse and have to change.
After driving for an hour I remember
I forgot to pack underwear and the speech
I'm paid to give. The next sign
I see is ROAD CONSTRUCTION
NEXT 144 MILES. At that moment
stalled in traffic, my period starts.

--Marge Piercy



So now, my kids are up. Besides being grateful that I don't have an animal to worry about cleaning up their throw up, I am thinking about how we will spend our afternoon. What we'll do for dinner, what we'll talk about at family home evening, thinking that bedtime is 4.5 hours away.

I've got books waiting to be read, laundry to fold, journaling to write, and now, right now...

mothering to attend to.

What can I say, it's Monday.

Some Leslie Norris for Christmas

Camels of the Kings

The Camels, the Kings' Camels, Haie-aie!
Saddles of polished leather, stained red and purple,
Pommels inlaid with ivory and beaten gold,
Bridles of silk embroidery, worked with flowers.
The Camels, the Kings' Camels!

We are groomed with silver combs,
We are washed with perfumes.
The grain of richest Africa is fed to us,
Our dishes are silver.
Like cloth-of-gold glisten our sleek pelts.
Of all camels, we alone carry the Kings!
Do you wonder that we are proud?
That our hooded eyes are contemptuous?

As we sail past the tented villages
They beat their copper gongs after us.
The windswifts, the desert racers, see them!
Faster than gazelles, faster than hounds,
Haie-aie! The Camels, the Kings' Camels!
The sand drifts in puffs behind us,
The glinting quartz, the fine, hard grit.
Do you wonder that we look down our noses?
Do you wonder we flare our superior nostrils?

All night we have run under the moon,
Without effort, breathing lightly,
Smooth as a breeze over the desert floor,
One white star our compass.
We have come to no palace, no place
Of towers and minarets and the calling of servants,
But a poor stable in a poor town.
So why are we bending our crested necks?
Why are our heads bowed
And our eyes closed meekly?
Why are we outside this hovel,
Humbly and awkwardly kneeling?
How is it that we know the world is changed?

--Leslie Norris

Dear Mr. Wordsworth

Mr. William Wordsworth

said something lovely when he wrote this thought:

"There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired;

A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,

That penetrates, enables us to mount

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen."

In the last 48 hours, I have had a few such moments that have actually made me stop, while they were happening, and enjoy them so much. These are the little bits and pieces and types of things that I hold onto and will think about when I'm needing something happy to think about. These little slivers of time have made me appreciate and love my life. I decided I'd share a few of them with you.

Just the other night, we'd put the boys in bed and were upstairs getting dinner ready in the kitchen. Listening to Christmas carols and such and watching the rice on the stove. Mr. Campbell was standing with his back against the kitchen counter over by the sink. Out of the blue, he said to me, "Come here." It was that kind of tone. I walked over there into a big, warm hug, and, well...I'll just say that I got kissed in the kitchen!

I pulled one of my sons out of bed before lying down to go to sleep that night, just because I wanted to hold him while he was sleeping. That peace and serenity fill my soul with a sense of profound stillness and gratitude, even reverence.

The next morning, I awoke and looked across the bedroom in the darkness. My boys' beds are side by side, and there they were. Literally forehead to forehead, and giggling. I just can't tell you how sweet.

At the end of a morning nap, my other son (not to be confused with the one I had held the night before) woke up. I could hear him jabbering in his bed. I had been lying in bed, too, and I picked him up and snuggled him in next to me for a few moments before his brother woke up. Again, right in the moment, as I was snuggling him in, he just looked at me with a big smile, and just kept right on smiling at me with a sweet, full grin. It was a look that just seemed to say how pleased he was to be able to snuggle, how glad he was I'd picked him up, how much he loved this -- like I do.

I, just like everyone else, have days where life is painful and hard, where everything seems a little bit off and I feel discontented -- to say the least. But, overwhelmingly, I'd have to say that most of the time...
I get a sensation for how good life feels, the people that make it, the love that blesses it, the tender mercies and blessings that fill it, the grace and holiness -- even sacredness -- these moments all have. I feel heaven's attendant blessings, mercy, love and watchcare, and I feel humbled because of these multitudinous gifts from above.

Outside Glories

On a walk yesterday and today, I was reminded of this poem.

I could have shouted it to the sky...


i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings;and of the gay
great happening ilimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?


(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

--e.e. cummings


...and it would have been perfect.




It was just that kind of day.

I love Utah in the fall.

October in Visual Review

A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun

- W. S. Merwin, The Love of October

Benj's first haircut (before and after)

Walks around town -- noticing the trees

Up the canyon

Taking engagement photos for my sister Christa who is getting married next month

(This is one of the cheap ones with my digital camera. We took about 100 with a really nice one.)

Blissful boys... (gotta love it while it lasts)

Cute little niece Anna with Scott

My whole world

Isaiah

Benjamin

Me and the boys

Time with family...

The babes with their aunties Alli and Dara (also babes)

Alli, Dara and Me (sisters-in-law)

My nephew Zac's soccer game

Nate holding Isaiah, Ben holding Ben, and Tyler

Zac and Isaiah

Junebug

Me with the two Bens

Ashlynn

Daffodil

I love this picture of Isaiah with his dada

And, bringing up the very end of the month...my new haircut (and color -- something I've never done before!!):

What did you do in October?

For Scott (Happy Love Day)

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

--e.e. cummings

Te amo con todo mi corazon. You are my dream and love and life. I carry your heart in mine.

Mothering

After babysitting kids for an enrichment class, attending my friend's class to give support, cleaning my house for like 2.5 hours, baking cinnamon swirl bread, helping put up Christmas lights, braving the crowds at Costco, buying Christmas garland and red berries at Michael's to aid in the decorating of the mantel in the front room and coveting a fall table spread in Pier 1 Imports on Saturday, I felt like the day had been full. I love this time of year with all the things to do and seasonal activities. Just today, I left work and went to a kitchen shop to buy holiday sugar cookie cutters (purchasing a Christmas tree and star) and food coloring. I think I love to do a little bit of anything and everything---so many aspirations. Sometimes the aspirations are smothered, though, with doubt that any would ever come true. Lately I have been thinking a lot about motherhood and mothers and what a lot of work and sacrifice it entails. One of my very favorite things that I remember about my childhood was how my mother read to me, faithfully, each night. I don't know how much she enjoyed it at times (I imagine it was what she probably didn't want to do sometimes with so many things she would have liked to do), but I appreciate it so much now. I can still remember lying next to her and watching her mouth and listening to how she made the sounds in her mouth. Isn't that a great memory? She had just such a way---and it was just hers. No one else sounded like she did. I took a poetry class the last semester I was at BYU, and wrote a ghazal about this relationship with her:

Come on in

She is the image that keeps recurring in
my head. Hers is the wide, joyful quick grin

that still smiles at me when I think of her.
She is the woman who shooed all the men

out so we, alone, could eat the doughnuts
and talk by ourselves in the warm kitchen.

I can still hear her voice as she read to
me, nursery rhymes and the little red hen.

We moved on to "chapter books" as we called
them, thinking about other people's sins

as I saw the world and the hostile place
it can sometimes be. I could see that in

her Sounder reading; things were not the same.
There was much suffering and pain, and I, in

the page, thought I understood. It is not
that easy, but the stories also lend

the way to connect to others, and she
had a way of linking our world, here, in

with the story. That was a marvelous
gift: a window looking from the outside in,

every night, as she called my name. It was
time to read: Elizabeth, come on in.

I am amazed at mothers and what they do---and the woman behind the mother. There is an essay that I love by Tessa Meyer Santiago titled Another Marvelous Thing (since I'm on with the word marvelous tonight). This is kind of what I'm talking about---being a young child and not really knowing my mother for Claire. She was always my mom. I will give you just a sample:

Once my childhood mother stole my center stage. One afternoon she told me, while she checked on the seedlings beneath the study window in the front garden, that she had done acrobatics when she was a child. I didn't believe her. I couldn't believe her. This was my mother who dyed her gray hair, wore panty hose on Sundays, and knew how to make chocolate chiffon cakes so light they floated. So there, in her flowered housecoat, surrounded by passion fruit vines and hibiscus trees, and watched by her disbelieving fifth child, my ancient mother kicked off her sandals and did a cartwheel, landing, quite gracefully, with her long, brown legs in the splits, her garments peeking out from beneath her hem. I was shocked, stunned. She might have just as well grown wings and taken to the air. I asked her to do it again. She didn't. She laughed that laugh she laughs when she can't quite beleive she just did what she did and went back to weeding. If I'm correct, Mervyl, the ancient, unchanging mother of my childhood, was only thirty-seven at the time.
Why then was I so shocked at her impulsive gesture? Perhaps because it revealed the Mervyl behind the mother. To me as a child, my mother was not a woman. She was mother. She was a collection of parts melted together that took her face and smell. She was a red-and-white Volkswagen bus waiting at the end of the school driveway on the days it was too rainy to walk home. She was clean, cool, cotton sheets on my sick bed while I took a bath during week-long asthma attacks. She was a green, dimpled bottle of 7-Up in the refrigerator door during my bouts with tonsillitis. She was a cooler of egg-salad sandwiches wedged between the front seats of the VW bus on the way to Plettenburg Bay. She was ripe-red tomato sections and Vienna sausages on a plate on the counter when Julia Smitherman came to lunch after school. She was fingers stroking my hair as I slept on her lap during golden-lighted Sunday evening sacrament meetings. She was a voice rising, falling, then stopping as she fell asleep during my bedtime story. She was the hum of the sewing machine making quilts from piece goods bought at the Laura Ashley store in London; the bark of dogs as they rounded the corner early on the gray morning walks before the rest of us were awake. She was the smell of Nevia on summer afternoons spent pouring over her Sunday School lessons. She was there, always, mother, unchanging, warm.
...I remember another picture that hides itself as a backdrop to the wedding of my oldest sister, Margo. It shows my older mother, forty-two years old. Her hair is almost gray. She is standing in the dining room beside her sewing machine. Behind her, hanging from the sliding-door track, are seven dresses: a bride's dress, two brides maids', and the flower girls'. Her oldest daugher is getting married in about two weeks. In her arms, she holds her youngest child, Alexandra Margaret, not three weeks old. She is looking at her child with tender eyes, the same way she looked at my children when she cared for them after their births. Her face, though, is almost gray, heavily lined, her shoulders bent.
In my child's eye, I remember the wedding, the pieces and parts of it: My mothers' food, the tuna mousse, the chippolata sausages, the cast-iron tubs swimming with grape juice bottles and ice cubes. My red-sprigged flower girl's dress, the dancing and the reading of telegrams; my youngest sister, five weeks old, in her bridesmaid's dress, carried in my mother's arms down the aisle.
As a woman and a mother now, I see a different picture of the same event. I am shocked by the exhaustion in my mother's face. I am stunned by the sheer logistics of the whole picture: giving birth to your seventh child in your forties, sewing seven dresses while plagued by a severe case of mastitis..., catering a whole reception six weeks after the birth, and caring for your family in the meanwhile. The woman in me aches for Mervyl during that time---that she swallowed her pain, her exhaustion, and her fear that she could not do it all and went on anyway. I ache for her intense love for this unexpected child who made her way into the family at such a time and for her loss as she watched her daughter marry a man clearly unsuited for her. But the child in my thanks the mother in Mervyl for not stopping, for not sitting down in a heap on the kitchen floor and declaring, "That's it. I can't do it any longer. I'm done." While the woman battled her exhaustion and her fear, I practiced for life, building memories of weddings and turkeys with white-frocked drumsticks, filing away snatches of "jolly, good fellows" and confetti baskets to pull out when I remember Margo's wedding.
...Discovering that my mother's mothering contained strains of a struggling self, as well as the woman she was before she was my mother, does not scar my shining memories. It makes her, in fact, more precious. That she could so gently and unobtrusively work her own desires into my incessant demands without pushing me off my stage is remarkable. In my own motherhood, I keep waiting for that Kodak moment when the world will turn hazy around the edges and the camera will focus on me, dressed in pastel, with a tear in my eye as I watch Julia and Christian sing an eager "Mother, I Love You" at the top of their voices during the Primary Program. At that moment, I assume I will be supremely Mother. It has never happened yet. I have hardly felt that supreme confidence, that overwhelming urge to be mother that I assumed my mother always felt. I almost always feel split between my mothering duties and my personal desires.
Once I felt raw emotion, love, I suppose, but bordering on desperate obsession: Christian lay strapped to a table, a large needle in his spinal column; they were testing for meningitis. That night, as I lay next to him in his hospital crib, I would have dealt with the devil for my second child. My love for him was matched only by my fear and utter helplessness. But during the darkest hours when his temperature hovered around 106 degrees, when I hadn't slept for more than two days and I was reduced to tears, I realized my mother had loved me, nursed me, cared for me in the very same, desperately fierce way as I struggled to breathe in my childhood bedroom. Simultaneously, I was filled with both a desperate longing to have my child sleeping peacefully in my arms and a lightening sense of awe that somebody on this earth felt about me in this passionate, powerful, almost primeval way.

(If any one wants a copy of the whole essay, I'd be glad to email it to you. I love it.) I am grateful for my mother and her time in mothering me. Here are a few things I remember:

N-O-W! (We always knew she was serious if she started to spell.)

Trips to Hawkins for hamburgers, french fries and shakes

Naps when I came home from Kindergarten. She would read stories to us before naps, too, and then all three of us (my mother, little sister and I) would take a nap.

Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke, or Diet Dr. Pepper

Walking

Pushing us on the swings

Taking us to the river at the cabin

Thrifty

Decent and modest, considerate and polite

Hot air balloons on the fourth of July

Warm baths at night

Bath cubes

Werther's caramel candies

Microwave popcorn

Tuna macaroni salad

Veteran's Pool and licorice ropes afterwards

the piano

"See Amid the Winter's Snow"

And I see reflections of her when I can't justify spending $25 on a shirt in Gap. Even now, I stand amazed at how ready she is to give, to help, to talk to me. In the same way that I yearn to connect and continue reaching toward her, I feel that returned to me.