My Life as a Country Music Song

Well, my dad, he's sick and doing his best

To grab on to his walker without needing rest.

My mama is stuck in an endless refrain

Of asking "when can he go home again?"

I got a daughter who cycles from bad to worse...

And the vet just told me my dawg Billy has a large tumor 

somewhere inside his abdomen with just a few weeks left to live.

And I'm out of red wine.

Field of Feelings

Two years ago, a developer bought up a farm down the road a piece. He cleared the corn stalks, graded it into gentle rolling hills, ran a nice access road into it...and put up fancy signs about 7 custom-built estates with 20 acre lots each.

Here's how he is doing with that.

About a week ago on a sunny Saturday, with just a bit of chill burning off, I was tramping through the upper left corner of this picture. My mom called distraught about my dad. A former reference librarian, she did not remember how to call an ambulance. She did know to run down the hall to Charlie, "because he is always having to take his wife to the hospital."

Like a bad three-act drama, the emergency room set turned into the second floor acute care unit, and then into rehab on the fourth floor of something ironically called the "Health Center." That would be institutional euphemism for nursing home (the fifth floor, for dementia patients, is called "The Garden.")

He progresses slowly, but at nearly 88 years old, "progress" is also a euphemism. This man, who never met a medical intervention he didn't like, refused further invasive diagnostic procedures. And  he's become a bit giddy with self-management, like a two-year-old who just discovered the word "no," refusing things just to see if he can.

 I sit with my father in this place, literally and figuratively. Unless I have to deal with the disorganization of this organization, so that he gets the promised haircut, the necessary nail trimming. I sit with my mom in her place. Which usually includes an endless loop of 1) torturing my father with grapes, tangerines, and the whatever cookies she manages to steal from the lounge; 2) nagging him to stop sleeping so much.and 3) asking me why he is here. When she agrees to leave his side, we go to the movies, we share a meal somewhere.

My other commitments have proven stressful, not nourishing. So I dropped my class at rabbinical school and I pulled out of volunteering at the nursing home. (Actually, I AM volunteering at a nursing home, just for a party of two instead of a whole room.) For the first time in my life, I make a conscious choice not to busy myself with to-do lists that will subversively distract me from my feelings. Because everything is changing and a world I knew is coming to end.  Distractions will not prevent that and so I might as well be fully and truly present.

Little by little, I test out the hypothesis that I won't die from feeling sad.

I take breaks for that which comforts me: hiking, stitching, getting winter camp in place. My socializing is skeletal and primarily canine. (Himself is tickled to learn that he made the short list of people I can tolerate at the moment.

"Wow," he hums as he pushes out his chest in pride. "My wife can TOLERATE me!"

I remind him that the list is in pencil.

And above all, I try to spend sunrise in the field that the developer built me.

 

Gifts of Love

I've been busy striking the set of summer and starting preparations for winter camp, which, blessedly, brings me a project of love, for two young lovers.

ignore hearts and initials

 My cousin's daughter is getting married next July. Out of great love for my cousin, I had offered her son and his intended a quilted chuppah (the canopy covering the bridal party at a Jewish wedding ceremony). They were thankfully not interested and I never even thought about making the same offer to Stefanie.

Last month, at her engagement party, my cousin tells me that Stef wondered if I would make her a chuppah. She naturally felt out of place asking me but lucky for her, her mom and I can--and usually do--say anything to one another. I felt so very honored (and mightly ashamed that I had never made the offer). And yet, because I had just recently been paroled from the massive wedding One Block Wonder quilt, I was wary of taking on a project like this.

I learned from my last experience that for me, the gift of my stitching labors is really only a gift when it 1) comes from my heart and 2 ) allows me to express my creativity in my own way. So now what? What if I say yes and it turns out that her ideal chuppah and my worst nightmare look very much alike?  What if I decline and miss this very meaningful way to kiss my dearest cousin and her daughter?

Yikes.

I ran over to Himself, who was trying to hide from my family behind a large chafing dish. I  asked him whether he thought I should say yes. He offered his always astute and penetrating assessment:

"Do what you want to do."

"Yeah, but what do YOU think I should do?"

"I think you should do what you want to do."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"Do you know where the bathroom is?"

 I tried to receive an answer from within my soul, but since we were in a large barn with 100 people and a live country music band, the reception wasn't too great. And then I saw beautiful, brown-eyed Stefanie two-stepping across the room and I knew.

When she wandered over, I took both her hands, looked her in the eye and said, "I am pleased and honored to make you two a chuppah." I think I then choked up, either from emotion or because she was throwing her arms around my neck.

"Only there are some rules," I added fiercely. "We have to talk about what you want and see if its something I can do."

"All I want is for you to do it, Julie."

I wasn't going to give up. "We have to find a color, a design--"

"I love you. I will be so thrilled to have what ever you want to make me."

The perfect answer. And so that is how two gifts of love were exchanged in a gentleman farmer's ersatz barn on a Saturday night in suburban New Jersey. Somewhere in there, the groom was told, as most grooms are, that he had always wanted me to make a chuppah and he thanked me from the bottom of Stefanie's heart.

So that's how I have come to be working on this project. As you can see from my sketch, its going to be a large tree, with colorful circles spreading across and down to the ground. It has to fit onto an existing stand, which required multiple communications with a frantic florist reminiscent of that wacky wedding planner in Father of the Bride. It also required lots of addition and subtraction, which I count as particularly frightening forms of higher math.

I came up with a size--about 7 feet wide by nearly 5 feet high. It will be tacked on to an existing white chuppah by the florist's seamstress (who knew that florists had seamstresses??). After the wedding, Stefanie and Mr. Stefanie can decide whether I should add to it for a bed quilt or just finish it off to put on the wall (or in a drawer).

I am going to do it all by hand onto a background that is in turn backed with harem cloth. That way, there is a better chance that the entire structure will not collapse and send the florist (and his seamstress) to the hospital.

The first step is to make a tree on craft paper, cut it out and see how it looks on the background before cutting up pretty pricey hand-dyed fabric.  Sounds easy, until you remember my previous dissertations on my drawing skills.

These are scary trees, good if your wedding has a nice Zombie theme. Lucky for me, Himself and his magic pencil were in the general vicinity when I was throwing the sketchpad against the wall.

He did it on graph paper so I could enlarge and transfer it onto a large sheet of craft paper that we used to use in kindergarten. I did that all by myself!

Now, the tree trunk goes up on the wall on a rough of the background so I can see how it works.

I will have to add the branches but I am happy with this start. I've been auditioning all kinds of browns and grey hand-dyes and will build a tree from them the size of this template. And then I get to make circles--4, 5, and 6 inches--out of my tentative palette:

 I'm sure lots will change but for now, I'm pretty energized and excited.And any and all ideas are warmly appreciated.

Who Lives There?

That's what Grace asked in astonishment after looking at my pictures of the Icelandic landscape.  So here's some answers:

The population consists of about 300,000 folks of mostly Nordic heritage...

Who settled Iceland in the ninth century, when Eric the Red was kicked out of Norway.

Some are imposters.

I found a wonderful sense of humor....

Harvest at the marshmellow farm.

 And a love of color.

They have few natural resources and settled the country with what they had at hand.

Old turf home.

Church from driftwood and turf.

Stirrups.

Even today, they figure out ways to use what is around them.

"Leather" tanned from wolfish skins

Salmon skin.

The only crop of significance is hay and what isn't a hay field is filled with sheep. As are the roads.

Icelanders also raise cattle, which apparently are ocean-going...

...and the famous, fabulous Icelandic pony.

To maintain the integrity of the breed, no other horses are allowed into the country and if one leaves for an international horse show or a week at Club Med, it is not allowed to return.

Speaking of leaving, drastic numbers of young people are abandoning the rural areas of the country (which is just about everything except Reykavik) and heading into the cities. Deserted farmhouses dot the outer fjords.(We can find a ghosttown anywhere in the world, just dare us.)

The wildlife is primarily birds. I could have spent a lifetime watching them as they returned from their day trips fishing to their clifftop nests.

See the white chalk line in the grass? That is the official protection against falling 1500 feet off the cliff.

And finally, there was this. The ultimate indicator of a civilized culture.

And that, she said, is what I did over my summer vacation.

The End.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Earth Science for Dummies: Lesson 2

I grew up in Michigan, so I thought I knew something about ice. But nothing prepared me for turning the corner and seeing a glacier.

The glaciers are the Rocky Mountains of Ice. But unlike the Rockies, they are on the move.

As they melt, the ice pushes up against the earth,creating astounding formations.

The ice melt forms rivers, which carry the floes out to the sea.

 The enormity of seeing ice formed 2500 hundred years ago (Iceland's biggest Ice Age was 500 BC) end a journey...end an existence...before my eyes was strangely poignant.

As was cradling a piece in my hands. Look what water looks like without pollution.

The ice melt does more than create water (and massive floods, if it happens too fast). It creates the essence of the land and in largely untouched Iceland, you can see the story unfolding right beneath your feet.

 

Take a walk through an old riverbed and look closely at the rocks. They start like this.

 Centuries of seasonal thawing and freezing and thawing and freezing cut them like...well, like ice. With no one around to disturb them, the fingerprints of the ice stay intact. 

Bigger rocks get cut smaller...

And smaller...

 

Until they become independent little stones...

Communities of pebbles...

 And then, finally, dust.

I felt overwhelmed by the majesty of this process. I know it goes on all around me in Pennsylvania, but our landscapes are so overrun with blacktop and bulldozers that I have never seen it with such clarity before.

You should go to Iceland if for no other reason than to see this. And you'd better hurry, before Thor smashes it all up.