Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Autumn Leaves


The weather changed this week. Last Saturday was probably our last mild evening for eating out on the deck. Tim and Sarah, friends of mine for more than twenty years, arrived early with their three small boys.

“Give me something to do,” Sarah said as she followed me into the kitchen. Together we shaped the meat into patties, and Sarah told me how she and Tim had finally gotten together. I knew them both back in college, and Tim studied Arabic with Todd and me in Jordan.

“I didn’t even like Tim when we were in college,” Sarah said, laughing. A tiny version of Tim pulled at Sarah’s leg and asked for a drink of water. I half-filled a plastic tumbler, and little Tim carried his water with him as he pushed open the back door and went out to find the other children.

Bill and Amy arrived next, with their younger daughter and a huge fruit salad. Of all the friends who came Saturday night, Bill is the one I’ve known longest—since I was a sophomore in college and he was a freshman. My old friend grinned at me.

“Look at you, Bill, all middle aged!” I teased.

I think it was on Bill’s twentieth birthday that petite, spunky Amy planned and hosted a party, baked a cake. Did she know then what was so clear to the rest of us? I remember as vividly as if I had photographed it: the long moment Amy held the cake out before Bill, candles blazing.

Jeff and Deanna came with chips and fresh salsa. Jason and Holly brought potato salad and extra deck chairs. Todd slapped burgers on the grill. We set up long tables on the deck for the adults, a picnic mat and an extra table down on the grass for the children. My seven-year-old taught miniature Tim and his brothers how to roll down a grassy hill. They couldn’t roll straight but kept veering diagonally down the hill over dry leaves fallen from the aspen tree.

Our children played together like cousins, staying out in the half-light after the adults became chilled and retreated indoors. I looked around the room at these old friends who’ve welcomed us back after twenty years away, yet there wasn’t time for my heart to feel full. Not then. I was too busy, serving and cleaning and wiping down tables and saying goodnight.

The next morning is when I felt it, alone in the kitchen thinking of all the children who look like we once looked, when we were very young. I felt it as I stood with steaming coffee and saw the autumn leaves that had fallen on the deck overnight. I felt it as I watched the sun rising over the cedar trees, and I felt it especially when the light shone against the back door at just the right angle to backlight the small handprints left behind.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

A Writer Blogs about Me

Over the summer I worked with writer Elizabeth Westmark, providing critique and suggestions on her creative nonfiction work-in-progress. This was the beginning of my critique service, officially launched in September. Today Beth blogs about working with me on a writing project. Thanks, Beth!

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Book Release


Through the Veil is entering production, with a release now scheduled for summer 2010. This week I’ve been working on acknowledgements, credits page, bio, and an author’s photo. I’m thinking ahead now to readings and book signings in 2010-2011 and beyond.

Until a few days ago, Through the Veil still felt like my private journal from the years we lived in Syria and Jordan. It was a series of memorials to the people and places I’ve loved, tucked away on my hard drive like an album you share with only the dearest of friends.

Not long from now my memories will finally become a bound book I can hold in my hands—more importantly, a book you can buy and hold and read and pass on to others. In six months’ time, when you hold my book in your hands, you’ll be holding the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of my life. You’ll trace your fingers across pages that reveal my struggles and my dreams. Tread softly, gentle readers.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Compost

Since we moved here in June and discovered a composting bin in the side yard, my daughters have been eager to start composting. I’ve been the spoilsport, insisting that we grind and swish our peelings and coffee grounds down the disposal instead. You see, this bin we discovered was full of beautiful compost, rich and ready. Day after day, from June until now, I’ve found some excuse not to spread that compost. There’s time, I kept thinking.

Today I woke to a steady rain and cool breeze. The sun broke through around noon, urging me to seize the day.

The composter is located at the top of a dozen cement stairs leading down the hillside from our front yard to the back. Along those stairs are terraced garden beds, which until today held nothing but weeds and, in the lowest one, a small and spindly rosebush. I pulled on my leather work gloves.

Please understand that I like a dozen long stems as much as anyone, but spindly and vicious isn’t what I want in my garden, no matter how lovely. In these terraced beds next spring, I envision lettuce and carrots and cucumbers and, yes, zucchini. The beds are small and manageable, they get good sun, and because they’re on a hillside there’s not too much bending required. That rosebush was getting in the way of my plans.

I grasped its base, and the blessed work gloves kept the thorns out of my flesh. The soil, soft from the morning’s rain, gave easily as I pulled. I backed slowly from the bed, still pulling, as the taproot seemed to grown longer and longer, like a magician’s endless handkerchief.

My shovel turned over brittle bits of eggshell, brown and crackled—evidence to prove this really was compost, transformed from someone’s parings and salad leftovers and perhaps last year’s autumn leaves. Shovelful after shovelful I transferred the compost from the dark interior of the bin out into the terraced beds and the bright sunlight. I picked a lone Dole sticker out of one shovelful of compost. Not everything decomposes.

The people who owned this house before we did thought ahead enough to fill the composter with layers of dry and wet and to lift and stir from time to time to keep the oxygen circulating so the remnants of old meals would continue breaking down. Decay is a good thing when it comes to compost.

My shoulders are a little sore, but my terraced beds are ready for winter: Let it rain! Soon I will place a bucket near the kitchen sink, and we will begin to stow what might be thrown away. We’ll stack and stash and layer our scraps in the compost bin then salt it with a few earthworms. We’ll let it sleep for winter and see what it becomes by spring.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Saying Hello

The filbert orchards around Newberg are starting to turn rusty gold. Often I wake in the night to hear rain through our open bedroom window, but by mid morning the sky is blue and the sun warm. Autumn comes gradually here in Oregon, and I’m glad. I want to enjoy every red leaf and raindrop and Indian summer day of it, until cold November takes the stage and the rain begins.

A year ago I was in North Texas, polishing my book proposal for Through the Veil when I wasn’t accompanying my mother-in-law to doctor appointments and increasingly frequent emergency room visits. In October 2008 Todd’s mom chose to receive hospice care in our home, and she died in early November, before the deciduous trees as far south as Texas had dropped their leaves.

Todd and I flew with the girls to Oregon for Thanksgiving just two weeks after his mom died. A few scarlet and orange leaves still clung to gray branches, but most of the glorious colors of autumn lay piled in wet heaps by the side of the road.

We came to spend the holiday with Grandma and Grandpa Ohlen, but Todd also arranged for an informal meeting with the headmaster of a classical school in Newberg. After dropping him off, the girls and I drove our rental car through the rain to The Coffee Cottage, where I ordered hot chocolates and, of course, coffee.

My older girls settled in with books, while the younger two played in the toy corner. I pulled a random literary journal off the shelf and opened to a poem—written by a friend of mine! Perhaps this artsy northwest town would be just the place for our family.

Now—nearly a year later—we are home. The town seems a perfect fit for us, but I know that doesn’t mean we’ll live happily ever after. No matter how sweet this life, we will also face hardship and loss.

I remember my last autumn in Oregon. Fall of 1988 and I was just a few credits shy of graduating from Oregon State. I took lingering October walks out past the sheep barns to the west of campus, between maples hung with red and orange. I savored the crisp breeze against my cheeks and the brilliant colors all around; I knew I was saying goodbye to the Oregon changing seasons, maybe for good.

This first autumn back in the northwest, as the tips of the maples on my street blush red and the morning clouds hang low on the hills, I look to the east and greet the future with a long hello.


Sunday, September 13, 2009

Changing Seasons

Yesterday I stood at Boiler Bay on the Oregon coast as waves crashed against the rocks and the salt spray speckled my glasses. After eighteen years away, I'm back in the Pacific Northwest. I left as a newlywed with my life all mystery and possibility. I'm returning having lived on the East Coast, in the Middle East, in Texas—having birthed four children and written a book and cared for a mother-in-law right through to the end of her life. Whether I'm reuniting with old friends or becoming acquainted with new, I'm keenly aware of how much my Oregon friends do not know about the life I've lived.

Just past the whitecaps I saw a spray of water—could it be? A whale surfaced, turned, then waved a fluke and was gone. We got back in the car and drove south to make our coastal pilgrimage, stopping at Devil's Punchbowl (more whale sightings and a bowl of chowder at Mo's), and the old Newport bayfront (salt water taffy from Aunt Belinda's and a meet-and-greet with the cranky sea lions on the docks), and of course we dipped our bare toes in the cold Pacific. These are the holy sites I paid homage to as a girl, as a college student, as a newly married woman. And now, after so many years away, I thank God that I am still strong enough to hike the bluffs and touch the water. Though I wear bifocals now, I can still see the whales. I am grateful to be back and to be teaching our girls to love this land, too.

Before driving inland, we stopped one last time. Several other people stood on the bluff, using binoculars or the zoom lens of a camera for a better look. I stood back, so the whale watchers formed a frame at the base of my naked-eye view out toward the waves. There—spouting, you see? Just past the whitecaps, where the birds fly low. Yes, he's come up again!

I breathed deeply of the day. Out past the breakers the gray whales surfaced and dove again. The whales will journey south, day and night, moving to warmer waters to birth their young. They will return again, bringing their young back up the coast in due season.