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.

Almost November

We raked leaves again yesterday—so different from last week. It’s been raining nearly every day now, and things are soggy. Yesterday was dry, with some afternoon sunshine, but it didn’t make much of a difference. Something in the season has shifted, and there’s no looking back.

This time the neighborhood kids needed shovels to lift the soggy leaves into the curbside bin for city composting. There was a matter-of-factness about the shared chore: it’s no fun winging soggy, half decayed leaves skyward. We worked quickly and cleared the sidewalks, gutters, and lawn of my house and our next-door neighbor’s. Then the children left to play tag in the street until we mothers called them to wash hands for dinner.

After soup and bread and cleaning the kitchen, Todd and I went for an evening walk. So different from a few weeks ago. We walked under lit streetlights, not gathering dusk. No one else was out walking in the cold and damp. Many of the leaves piled on sidewalks are dull and starting to decay—not the riot of October color I so recently exulted in.

“It feels like November,” I said to Todd. He took my hand as we turned the corner and we kept walking.

Arriving home, we found the house so cold we had to turn on the heat. The girls asked me to light candles, and they turned out the overhead light. Someone brought my Edgar Allen Poe volume of short stories, and I read “The Tell-Tale Heart” aloud by flashlight. Yes, it definitely feels like November.

We have family birthdays to celebrate this month, and deaths to remember. With heavy gray skies outside my window, I will bake bread and frost cakes. When the rain falls soft on the cedars and Douglas firs out back, I will drink coffee and I’ll write. When darkness comes earlier each evening I will read Gothic tales of mansions and rainy nights and secrets that can’t be kept. I will play music and light candles while rain and wind strip our remaining leaves from the maples. Welcome, November.

Raking Leaves

Rain

Our local weather forecast displays a puffy cloud and raindrops for all five of the coming days. I have known and loved rain in every place I’ve lived.

Philadelphia

After a hot and humid August day in Philly, the afternoon darkens and fat raindrops fall. The rain comes hard and fast, breaking the thick air and providing relief from the humidity, if only for an hour or two.

Amman, Jordan

One fall afternoon I heard cheers outside our second-floor flat. I stepped out onto our balcony—and into rain. The schoolchildren below skipped and hooted and clasped hands in an impromtu dance. In the desert, water is a blessing. But it comes at a cost. When the desert rains fall in Jordan, the skies pour with no breaks—for days, sometimes. The blessing comes with violence, invading low-lying homes in the poorer neighborhoods and overflowing drainage channels everywhere. Each year we heard of at least one death from the flash floods, usually a child who bent low to touch the wonder of fresh and flowing water and was then swept away.

Fort Worth

Texas rains fall hard and fast, too—with the addition of thunder and lightning and the frequent threat of tornadoes. For all my anxiety over tornado watches and warnings, I miss those stampeding storms of North Texas. The sheer quantity of rain that might fall in thirty minutes time would send a river of drainage through our side yard. I measured each storm by how close our street came to completely filling with water. I love that you can see a storm coming in Texas; approaching heavy clouds are visible for miles across the flat landscape. Storms there are dangerous, more so even than in Jordan, but the landscape allows time to prepare. Take in the yard furniture and toys that will become projectiles in the strong wind. Move the car into the garage to avoid hail damage. Close the windows against wind and rain, and put fresh batteries in the weather radio, just in case the sirens wail and you must seek shelter.

Oregon

And now, the softer rains of my home state. Yesterday’s rain was not the unrelenting downpour I remember from Jordan. It came with no lightning, no heavy clouds pressing in. As I drove home from the grocery store, the sun shone on distant hills, brightening the fall colors already magnified by a coating of rainwater. I looked to the shining hills, right at the place where sun and rain collide, and there in the distance I saw a rainbow.

Our Town

I got my library card this week. Wrote my name on it with my very best penmanship.

“You may only check out one book the first time,” the librarian informed me.

That’s like hearing you may only trick or treat at one house. Like getting paid for just the first hour of babysitting. What’s the fun in checking out only one book?

“We find that the majority of unreturned books are from first-time patrons.”

This librarian doesn’t make the rules, I know. It’s not personal.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor thinking I would find a quick read—something to check out this morning, read this afternoon, return tomorrow. I’m a good girl, I am, but I need to leave the library with an armload of books.

Really? Only one?

I browsed up and down aisles, rejecting a thick history of Oregon writers and editors, and a Kingsolver essay collection I’ve not yet read. Too thick to read in an afternoon. I wasn’t concerned with finding a good book for the day’s reading so much as I was with earning the right to check out loads of books in the future.

There, on the bottom shelf stood a humble hardback copy of Thornton Wilder’s most famous drama. A three-act play should be easy to read in a couple of hours and return the next day. Perfect. I’d seen the play years ago, as a child or perhaps a young teen. I remembered a few details about Grover’s Corners: George and Emily’s romance, the stage manager speaking straight to the audience, and the poignant birthday scene in Act III. Twice last summer the play came up in conversation with friends, and I’d been thinking I should read it. Yes, this would do nicely. I walked back down the stairs to check out my single book from the Newberg Public Library.

Once home, I read the play quickly, hungrily. I wondered at the timelessness invoked by the stage manager’s lines skipping from present to past tense in the first act, the way the sparse staging contributes to the play’s movement through time. At the third act I had to take my glasses off to read, because I was weeping.

The next morning, I returned the book. Now I can check out as many books as I like, whole armloads. I can read up on Oregon history and get audio books to keep me company when I’m seeing about all the pesky little things that must be done around the place before winter. I really should look through the fiction section, read some novels, but all I want now is to hold that slim book in my hands. I don’t want an armload of books. I want to read Our Town again, and I want to find a DVD of a stage production. Like Emily—like the saints and the poets, maybe—I want to go back for just an hour or a day. I want to take my time and look carefully, so that I may truly see.

Wilder, Thornton. Our Town: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Coward McCann, Inc., 1938.

Knowing and Being Known

At least once a week someone asks me, “Are you feeling settled yet?”

“The moving boxes are all unpacked,” I’ll say, “And we figured out the back roads to avoid weekend winery traffic on 99W.” My answer implies a positive response, that we are indeed settled. In truth, I know that it will be months and years before we deeply belong to this place.

One night in early September we gathered with other school families to eat hamburgers and hot dogs, to mingle and chat for an hour before entering our children’s classrooms to sit in small desks and be oriented. This is not so different in Oregon than it was in Texas. With few exceptions, I know the drill. I can read the surface. What I don’t know is the deeper history.

My fourth grade daughter has a morning and an afternoon teacher. On orientation night these two women worked as a team, smoothly passing the baton back and forth as they briefed parents on what to expect for the coming year. My husband, who is their new boss, told me later that these women have taught as a team for something like ten years, and they’re the best of friends. No wonder they spoke so beautifully together on orientation night. There’s a whole lot of history between them, probably struggles and triumphs, too.

We were still on campus later that evening after most families had left. Standing under the porch light outside the school office, a different teacher asked me if I felt settled yet. I told her about the boxes and the back roads—but I didn’t stop there. Maybe it was me extending my heart, trying to go deeper. I told her my feeling that we won’t be truly settled until we’ve lived here for years, until we have logged hours and months and hardships and joys with our friends and neighbors. Although I long for that depth now, I know it doesn’t come quickly.

The teacher nodded. “Anything worth having takes time,” she said.

It will be a while before we’re truly settled. I will watch and wait for opportunities to extend hand and heart, but some of what it takes to develop deep friendships is purely the passage of time—living life together in community. Yes, it will take time. Anything does that’s worth having.