August Begins

I’m up this morning before the rest of my family, as I am most days. I love these solitary early morning hours with coffee, reading, writing, and Facebooking to keep me company. The air outside is cool and the windows are open wide. If the window fans aren’t running, I hear birdsong.

Under the eaves on our front porch hangs a barn swallow nest. Mama and Papa barn swallow have already raised one batch of chicks this summer; the babies fledged about a month ago. Just a week after the babies flew, Mama and Papa were again taking turns sitting on the nest, and this morning I see them carrying food to a new brood of ugly, cheeping chicks. Do these babies need feedings throughout the night? Are Mama and Papa weary?

It is now August. In two or three weeks our maples will begin to turn red at the tips of the highest branches. Too soon this second batch of barn swallows—the last for this year—will grow feathers and fly away. Maybe I’ll avoid looking up, so I can ignore the changing leaves and the empty nest. I’m not ready for it to end.

This is a change for me. Summer has never been my favorite season—I love autumn and am always rushing the season, pulling out sweaters and boots as soon as school starts, adding pumpkins and apples and spice to my recipes long before the days have cooled enough to make baking a comfort.

My eldest daughter enters high school this year. She talks of college more and more, of leaving home, of a life apart from us. As each of my daughters grow toward the women they will be, I am also in the process of becoming the woman I will be without them.

A week from today I’ll be driving to the campus of Pacific Lutheran University for my graduate school residency, beginning my final year in the Master of Fine Arts program there. I’ll be in Washington State for ten days, and by the time I return to Newberg the barn swallow nest will be empty and the leaves on the tips of our maples will blush, whether or not I look up to see them.

It’s too soon to say goodbye to summer, to babies, to this season of life. But in knowing how short each season will be, I am learning not to rush; I’m learning to love this season that for me has always been hardest.

Family Wedding

My brother-in-law Jeff got married last weekend in North Texas. We left 90-something degree temps in Portland and flew into thunderstorms in Dallas Thursday night. We woke Friday morning to clouds and a cool (for Texas at least), pleasant day. The kids swam in the hotel pool and we didn’t even bother with sunscreen.

Jeff arranged childcare for all the cousins Friday night, so the wedding rehearsal and dinner would be blessedly kid-free. As we drove from the chapel to the small Italian restaurant for the rehearsal dinner, the rain started again. I’d forgotten how Texas rain falls in sheets, how the water so gloriously pours from the heavens. Todd dropped me off at the front door and I dashed through the rain to the covered porch of a converted two-story house. As I waited for Todd to park, I watched Michelle, my sister-in-law from France, film several seconds of the downpour. I had forgotten to bring my camera.

“I am not going to ruin these,” said the wife of the brother of the bride, who arrived next, carrying her shoes. Her blonde hair was pulled back and she wiped raindrops from her forehead with a smile.

The rest of the wedding party arrived in singles and pairs, splashing through puddles, smiling, barefoot, beautiful.

Perhaps out on the Dallas freeways, rush-hour traffic was slowed by the summer storm, causing irritable drivers to lay on their horns or murmur harsh words. But here we all came in out of the rain, into an old house with pumpkin-colored walls and dark wood and wrought iron details: we had a marriage to celebrate.

We sat at long tables and the servers made their rounds. Red wine or white? Salmon or chicken? I looked across the room and saw one of the bridesmaids, wearing a strappy sundress and sitting with her back to me. So beautiful, the way the raindrops still glistened on her bare shoulders. Even if I’d had my camera, there’s no way I could have gotten the angle and focus right. I memorized the moment.

My new sister-in-law, Pam, came into Jeff’s life—into the life of our extended family—just months before my mother-in-law died. It was Pam who helped us negotiate our path into hospice care and Pam who sat around the family table with all of us when Jeanne told the grandkids that she would not live long and that she’d had a good life and was not afraid. Pam spent time with Jeanne those last weeks. I do not know all that was shared between them, but I do know that Jeanne told Pam, “You make Jeff happy. When Carolyn died I worried that he would never be happy again. I will be proud for you to be my daughter-in-law, even if I won’t be around for your wedding.”

Till death separates. This is the vow Pam and Jeff made on their wedding day, and they both have lived through enough hardship to know what the vow means. Just as I memorized the pearly raindrops and the wedding party laughing through a downpour, I memorized another holy moment, too. On their wedding day, when Pam and Jeff stood eye to eye, remembering the past and anticipating the future, I watched and listened and memorized their promise to one another: Till death separates.

Author's Copies

My copies of Through the Veil arrived this morning!

Deanna Interviews Me About Writing and Editing

I "met" writer Deanna Hershiser via email a few years ago when I edited one of her essays, accepted for publication in Relief Journal. Deanna joined the Relief team a couple of years ago and has been a faithful reader of nonfiction submissions. More recently, she has become an editing client, and I have been stunned by the bare-bones honesty of her writing as well as the degree of improvement since I first read her work a few years ago. I had the opportunity to meet Deanna last fall here in Newberg, and over coffee (for me) and chai (for her) we moved our professional relationship into a friendship.

To celebrate the upcoming release of Through the Veil (next week!), Deanna has posted an interview with me on her blog.

Anniversary

Exactly one year ago we signed paperwork and shook hands and received in exchange the key to our new home in Newberg. We’ve now experienced the full cycle of the seasons. We’ve learned our way around; we’ve made friends. Now we understand the routine of this place, and in our second year I suspect we will know more deeply.

This June is not a replay of our first June a year ago. This June is wetter, cooler, making her way toward July still dressed in April’s gear. The seasons cycle, but as each month takes its turn on stage, the performance is different, unique. Now that we’ve seen the show all the way through once, we will relish the nuances of each performance to come.

Thorny Things

When we moved to this property a year ago, the demands of yard care overwhelmed me. Our place is landscaped on all sides, growing slightly wild only in the back acre that slopes down toward the creek. That’s where the beaver snacked on young fruit trees last spring, destroying a modest orchard put in by the prior owners.

I confess I’ve felt guilty more than once, knowing that the folks who sold us the house still live in Newberg and pass through our neighborhood from time to time. The yard they took such care to establish over a full decade is not looking as well tended these days. Do they notice that I pulled out their roses? That we forgot to put down pre-emergent on the lawn this spring, and now we have as much clover as grass?

In our first months here I joked that the prior homeowners must have loved all things thorned, from roses to barberry to blackberry vines climbing the south side of the house. I had to buy leather gloves to work in the garden! The barberry shrubs were nearly as tall as I am when we moved in, and shaped like giant prickly pink balls. The prior owners offered to sell us their used hedge trimmer to keep the barberry under control. We declined.

At first I felt we should keep the yard looking as it had always looked. I even had a garden journal, passed to me by the prior owner, detailing each month of the year and what needed to be fertilized, pruned, or deadheaded. Inevitably, when I would open the journal I’d find we’d missed something. And anyway, if I don’t like rose bushes, I’m not about to waste time and money fertilizing them! My taste does not run to prickly stems. Soon the journal stayed on the library shelf.

On walks around town, I noticed other barberry shrubs not constrained to a particular shape, their limbs and leaves extending skyward. I like my hedges more bedheaded than coifed, so I asked around: how can we help our shrubs achieve more natural look and a smaller, less lethal, stature?

My neighbor, a landscaper, told me. “Cut them down and let them grow back,” he said. “In the fall, not the spring.” One October day he sent his crew over to saw off my shrubs knee high. Thankfully, the crew also carried away the spiny prunings.

All through winter we had silly sawn-off stumps out front instead of shrubs, and the branches were bare so late into spring I wondered if the barberry would recover. Only over the last few weeks have the barberries claimed their natural shape, feathery and free. The new growth is soft, including the thorns. The yard is beginning to look and feel like it’s ours.

We’re laying claim to this place, letting things grow a little wilder, a little less restrained—except the blackberry vines on the south side, which I hack regardless of potential for fruit. Thorny things must be taught a lesson.

This garden keeping is a careful dance. Does the yard own us, or do we own the yard? A little of each, I think. These trees and shrubs will one day pass to other hands, with or without a gardening journal. Whether surveying wilds or coifed gardens, we’re ultimately not owners of these chunks of earth, this garden, but we are its caretakers.

Wind and Rain

In just two weeks we will have lived in Newberg a year. The end of the academic year makes my kids miss their old school in Texas—especially the friends they said goodbye to through tears one year ago.

My eleven-year-old cried in my arms Friday night. “I love Oregon,” she sniffed, “and I love our school. But I lived my whole life in Texas, and here I still feel like the new girl.”

I told her that the second year will begin to feel different. Instead of learning each activity and observing each season for the first time, the second year is when we begin to establish traditions. We’ll pick berries again, play in the creek on hot days again, and as rains let up we’ll watch the creek diminish to a trickle. She’ll go back to classes in September and will never again have a “first day” at this school.

“And then we’ll rake leaves,” my daughter said, cheering up a little. “And jump in the piles.”

“Looks like patching up the deck and the house paint will be a yearly job,” I said, thinking more grown-up thoughts. The wind and rain have already peeled back last summer’s work on the deck stairs, exposing raw wood to the elements.

This second time through the seasons, I now know that the maples in front of our house will begin to turn red at the tips in August. I know that by October their leaves will be in piles for the neighborhood children to rake and scatter. The seasons come and go so fast.

These annual chores and celebrations are something close to liturgy. This second year in our new home we will celebrate the return of each season by bowing to pull weeds and rising to paint siding and standing together to praise the beauty of a world now baptized in rain and green with new life, soon gold and red with age. We’ll together take our winter rest and emerge again in spring, rising with the first daffodil to start again the cycle of toil and celebration.