Thanksgiving

Todd and I arrived at The Coffee Cottage for the reading Tuesday night. Already the place was packed, but we nabbed a table near the back door. My cell phone buzzed. College friends Joe and Heidi, who live in the next town over, were one block away. I walked outside to meet them and to tell Joe to carry in patio chairs if they wanted a place to sit.

I knew maybe half the people who gathered for the reading, and as I looked around the room, I remembered. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving a year ago, Todd had an unofficial interview at the school. When we dropped him off, one of the women in the school office told me to be sure to stop at Coffee Cottage.

“Sally, our music teacher is the owner,” she said. “Great place.”

We drove around town—which doesn’t take long in Newberg. Todd’s interview—unofficial, mind you—would last about two hours. The girls and I stopped at a downtown toy store. Walked through Fred Meyer. Drove into the hills and back down into town. Such a gorgeous place, with the fog hanging low in the hills and hints of fall colors still clinging to a few of the trees. But let’s not get our hopes up. It’s not even an official interview. We lunched at Izzy’s, and I looked at my watch. We still had thirty minutes to kill.

After parking in the small lot behind The Coffee Cottage, we walked through light rain and into the coffee house. I ordered hot chocolates for the girls and a coffee for myself. As I put cream in my coffee, I overheard two women at the counter.

“Well, we do have a writing group. Mostly poets.”

The woman speaking looked about my age. She wore an earthy, flowing skirt and her long hair hung loose down her back.

“I can let you know when the next meeting is,” she said. “Enjoy your tea.” And this dark-haired woman with the flowing skirt went to a corner table to eat her lunch.

She’s the music-teacher owner, I thought. I went over and introduced myself, told her my husband was meeting with the headmaster today—unofficially, of course. And Sally seemed to know exactly who I was. Her husband was the writer in the family, she told me. A poet.

After a few minutes I went back to my table where my two older girls were reading and sipping hot chocolate. Before we left to pick up Todd, Sally passed by our table and said something to me—I couldn’t quite understand and was embarrassed to ask her to repeat it, but I think she said, “I hope he gets the job.”

A year ago everything was unofficial and uncertain, trying to contain rising hope in case things didn’t work out. In December came the invitation for an official interview, and in January Todd accepted a job offer in Newberg.

When my turn came to read, Lynn introduced me as a writer with gumption, and I walked up to the microphone, manuscript in hand. I read about that other life in Texas, before Todd’s mom died, about her failing health and our confused expectations and the crazy ways a mother- and daughter-in-law together created a home.

After the reading we walked out of The Coffee Cottage and into the cool night.

“Lisa,” Todd said.

“What is it?”

“I got the job, Lisa. I got the job.”

Five Newberg Writers

A couple of months ago my friend Lynn sidled up to me during the coffee hour after church. “We should do a reading,” Lynn said. “At The Coffee Cottage. What do you think?” I liked the idea, and so did a few other writers in our small church.

Lynn scheduled the event for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, which happens to be the one-year anniversary of my first visit to Newberg. While Todd met with the headmaster at the school that would eventually offer him employment, I took the girls to a local coffee house. And that coffee house is where the reading will be held.

Lynn met with me and the three other writers this past week to discuss what we’re each going to bring to the reading. She passed around a sheet of paper for our approval—Lynn wrote winsome introductions for each writer. I could see from the faces of my fellow writers that each of us was pleased.

Lynn then spread her creative work out on the conference table. “I want you to tell me honestly about these poems.” She looked to Dave, who just sent in his final manuscript for an anthology highlighting the work of seven select poets. Dave pulled out three poems.

“I think you should read these.”

“I just wanted to be sure what I read seems finished,” Lynn said.

“Your work is always good,” Dave said.

He means it. I know, because everything I’ve read from Lynn is good. She writes honestly of hardship—no false happy endings for Lynn—and her work shatters me.

Keith read next (he’s an elder in our church—okay, the elder … it’s a small church). As he read his memoir segment, I traveled back to 1969 and the world of a boy seeing death for the first time at his grandfather’s funeral. In the five minutes it took Keith to read an additional excerpt from a short story in progress, I came to love a foul-mouthed bigot of an old man.

I wish I could write like that.

After we’d all read, Keith commented that this sure isn’t what you’d expect from a bunch of church folks doing a reading. You’d expect something written on a Helen Steiner Rice card.

If that’s what you want to hear, don’t come to this reading. But if you want to hear what a bunch of church folks have written about death and changing seasons and Scrabble and coffee beans, then come.

Five Newberg Writers Read Out Loud

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

The Coffee Cottage, Newberg

To Remember

Exactly one year ago. To the day. After nearly a month of hospice care in our home, my mother-in-law slipped into a deep sleep. When we could no longer wake her, a hospice nurse came to sit at Jeanne’s bedside and administer medications to keep her pain free. Three days later, on November 9, 2008, Jeanne took one last, deep breath and was gone.

This blog is my public writing life, week to week. I blog quickly, following an image or idea for a few paragraphs before a quick spit polish and photo selection. Click and publish.

You know, I’m sure, that there’s private writing, too. The pretty thoughts go to the blog, but I get to know my own heart by smearing the ugly bits onto the page and then sorting through.

In my private writing, the process is slower. It takes me at least a month to write a single essay. Eventually the essays become chapters and the chapters become a book.

I’ve been writing about the seven years we shared a household with my mother-in-law, and especially about the final years when Jeanne’s health grew poor and then poorer. One of those essays, titled “Autumn Sage,” was published this month in Ascent.

I’m stunned at how much has changed since Jeanne’s death a year ago. From an extended-family household back to a nuclear family. From North Texas to small town Oregon. No more wheelchairs or oxygen tanks. No more home health nurses or changing her wound dressings or watching for new signs of infection. My domestic life now is about raking leaves and composting and listening for Canada Geese and watching the seasons change.

I miss Jeanne. I do. We’ve started a new life in a beautiful place because Jeanne said “enough” and stopped medical treatments. She died and released me from caregiving. Now instead of learning side effects to her medications, I am memorizing the names of the trees and mountain ranges and planets in a night sky far from city lights. I’m grateful to Jeanne for making that last, hard decision. This life in Oregon came to us through Jeanne’s death. I watch the geese fly overhead because Jeanne was willing not to see them any more.

Last night we saw a glow to the northeast, at the apex of the hills.

“What’s that light?” I asked Todd.

“It’s the moon rising,” he said.

I looked harder. How is it that I am forty-five years old and have never seen the moon rise? After a few moments the clouds parted like curtains, and we watched the rising of that full and luminous lady.