I'm Back!

Snow mixed with the early morning rain, and my sixteen-year-old quipped, “They should cancel school. We can’t possibly drive in this dangerous weather.” My poor deprived kids. The rest of the country has been hip deep in snow more than a few times, while here on the West Coast we’ve had a very mild winter.

The thirteen year old stayed home with a cold today, which means I skipped out on my office hours to keep her company and do my grading at home. By noon the sky cleared to patches of blue and intermittent sunshine. Fuzzy buds paw their way out of the tips of the aspen branches, while crocuses and tulips—maybe even some daffodils—push up like green periscopes all over the garden.

June is only four months away—and my freezer is still full of berries from last summer! My daughter mixed berries and flour and sugar in proportions that seemed right to us both. I preheated the oven while she forked together a topping of oatmeal and brown sugar.

I return to this blog with nothing of consequence to report. Just a taste of the seasons all jumbled together and offered to the ones I love.

Oregon Book Award Finalist

Through the Veil has been selected as a finalist for creative nonfiction in the Oregon Book Awards. The winner will be announced at the end of April. Can you believe it? Here's how happy this makes me.

If you haven't had a chance to read the book yet, you can buy Through the Veil from Amazon or from your local bookseller.

Comfort Food

I'm so pleased to let you know that my essay, "Comfort Food," appears in the September 2010 issue of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction.

End of August

Sure enough, our maple leaves are turning their faces to greet autumn. I have blogged my first year in Newberg: autumn, winter, spring, and summer.

When I first moved from Southern California to Oregon as a teenager, my friend Michelle gave me a five-year diary to record my new life. Each page bore a date and five divided spaces for daily entries underneath. When I filled the first year—that first hard set of seasons at a new school with my California friends far behind—I dropped down to the second tier and began again on January 1. Seventeen years old instead of sixteen. A junior now, thinking of college and future—no longer a sophomore grieving a California childhood left behind. Each day of that second year I was able to measure loneliness, a new crush, a choir solo, a part in the play, against my first year in Oregon.

Blogs aren’t set up for this kind of annual self evaluation. Too many clicks and calculations—who can trouble with going back? There’s no blog template that will allow me to hold one year just outside another like tree rings.

I remember some things even without searching the blog’s archives. Last summer was hotter and seemed longer. I thrilled to see those first red leaves on the maples when I returned home from my graduate residency in mid-August. This year the leaves began to turn even before I left for Washington. Last year I was eager to taste fall. This year I am not so sure. But my feelings don’t matter: autumn, like Aslan, is on the move.

This morning my outdoor thermometer showed 46 degrees as I brewed my coffee and put on socks. This evening the breeze is fresh but yet balmy through my open bedroom window. The past few nights have been quiet as winter. No frogs, no owls, no raindrops. But tonight I hear through my window a multitude of crickets, and just above the shadowy treetops I can glimpse the full moon.

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!