Tag Archives: midwest

For Love of America

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Over spring break a friend and I went on a road trip through the American midwest and my mom gave me a portable sundial to take along. This country has a huge number of paths and byways—roads and porches and on-ramps and off-ramps and faces peering through windows. It was nine days and eight nights of good weather and three different rental cars and many different friendly faces and nine different states. The first evening we ate a Hawaiian pizza off the hood of a flashy white Genesis in a parking lot in Atchison, Kansas, the origin point for the Santa Fe railroad line and stayed the night in Leavenworth, down the road from a clean, symmetrical Neoclassical federal prison. 

The next morning I sat on that Kansas balcony just past dawn and thought about spring—the cruel aching of its becoming. The day before we had seen fields and fields of purple where later in the year, wheat will grow. At first I thought it was clover, but a little research let me know that it was a lowly little weed called henbit. The midwest has been lodged somewhere beneath my breastbone since birth, but I’ve rarely—if ever—seen it in the springtime, so the unexpectedness of that constant purple in my periphery gave me fresh eyes for everything.

My main quiet goal of the Missouri day was to see the house that used to be my grandparents’ and to go by their graves. In my eagerness to get there, I kept trying to turn off of US-35 too early and having to embarrassingly reverse course. Everything looked like Highway F to me, like the road that would take me home, but eventually, as always happens, the right road was the right road. We saw the lake, which had risen all the way to the top of the spillway, and then we walked up to the cemetery on a hill.

Car trouble sent us out of our way to St Louis and we eventually crossed the Mississippi at eleven pm near Alton, Illinois, north of the city. The river was only a yawning black expanse at that hour, but we wound along beside it for a while anyway. And there was good morning light the next day at our AirBnB in the heartland of Illinois for writing and for filming (though I found myself baffled by the sundial, for the time being.)

And then Chicago was a quick succession of glassy, shining Navy Pier, families of Hasidic Jews lining up to ride the ferris wheel, turning in a lost iphone found mysteriously on the ground, and then Lou Malnati’s for dinner. The next morning I bathed in a family friend’s apartment in her deep, square bathtub with water the psychedelic color of ancient minerals. Chicago runs its roots deep.

At midday we left and drove up to Madison where my insides turned all to mush. That year I lived there was hard and I was unhappy, but the place itself—the people and Dunn’s Marsh and even the strange traffic patterns to merge onto the beltline—were all kind to me, soft when I was not always able to be. This was my first time back since I moved away, and I missed my client Bonnie who died in spring of 2023. She was Madison to me—she was its parks, its newspapers, its hospitals, its markets, its lakes—and now she is gone. The city itself misses her, even in spring.

The next morning we left before eight and drove north, slowly, through country, to a two-day-a-week mechanic and lawnmower shop and along two lane roads where Amish buggies occasionally rattled past us, then up further north of that, where most of the signs advertised upcoming shops with the simple statement, “CHEESE.”

The Upper Peninsula reaching out over Lake Michigan was grey and open and quiet, as if it knew it was April, but wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet. Shunted backward in time and season, we wandered on a beach in the chill. I flew for a moment on a metal swingset that sang shrilly in the wind and followed two geese out across the sandbar. Spring had arrived on other shores, full of blooms and thawing laughter, but not here, not yet. The only thing that place could do was trust the earth in its turning. That night we stayed in a warm cabin with a Mennonite family down the way. The garbage man waved to me in the morning.

Good Friday brought us to Detroit where my uncle’s tenant let us into his house and we loaded up my grandma’s big table from which I ate so many summer Sunday dinners growing up, and then I sat on the dining room floor and crumpled old Parade magazines to pack bubble glass into boxes. I wrote about Detroit here almost a decade ago and the city has sat up and stuck its chin out since I was there last. It’s dusted off its shoulders and smiled and you can feel it. I stayed in that evening, but Tze went into the city and made friends every which way—on parking decks and sidewalks and in restaurant kitchens. The next morning, Saturday, his friend and her husband walked us through the open air Eastern Market with its thick carpets of flowers laid out in plastic flats, waiting to be planted in earth.

At midday we drove down through the plains to Defiance, Ohio and Abby met us there to putter around a Goodwill. She and I looked for sparkling things, like shoes and dresses, and also for tops because I was running out of clothes. From there we headed straight on to my friend Laura’s family outside Cleveland, and when her six-year-old shrewdly asked me if this was our “first stop with kids” I realized that it sure enough was. So there were books to read aloud and treasure discovered in the backyard dirt pile to admire, because children bring spring in with them from the outdoors. 

And then came Easter Sunday morning, so we drove though idyllic green valleys, where the homes nodded politely to each other all interspersed with churches, to hear a sermon about John chapter twenty, when Mary doesn’t recognize her risen Lord until he speaks her name. He knows her, and through his knowing she knows him: “Rabboni!” she says. After cinnamon rolls and omelets and watching blonde children chase down plastic eggs we drove south through wavering, warming hills on roads nestled into their sides, and found the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock in a very quiet Sunday town.

Our last night we stayed on Main Street in Charleston, West Virginia. At fifty thousand people, it’s the biggest city in an achingly mountainous and forested and impoverished state. The porches on those neighborhood blocks were full of people who glanced at us with quiet suspicion—girls still in their Easter dresses and boys lingering barefoot along the curbs and folks crouched on stoops and a big sign on a bedsheet that said, “Welcome Home, Old Man!”

On our last day, just south of Charleston, our route crossed New River Gorge again and again. It’s a huge, old seam in the earth’s crust that busted open so many eons ago and has managed, with time, to heal itself over with spit and sweat and gumption and growing things, into a great, green scar. As we wound down through the mountains of Virginia towards Greensboro, I thought of resurrection and again, of Christ stepping out of his tomb, and then, merely by speaking her name, calling Mary out of hers.

All these places we had passed through in this shaken, stubborn country I had been before, and yet seeing them in their states of spring—expecting and tender and face-up-to-the-light and Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things”—I understood how much I did not know about hope.  I see it running in veins through the treetops and the concrete and the backs of people’s hands. There is a mystery that abides. We will not know, not really know, the glory of the resurrected Son until he calls us by name, face to face. Until then, like Mary, we usually only see a gardener and a garden. That will have to do for now.

The Part That Doesn’t Age in Colorado

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On Labor Day weekend I flew to Colorado to join a family reunion that was already in progress. When I landed in Atlanta for a layover, I turned my phone back on and found emails from two of Bonnie’s children—Bonnie, the elderly client who I spent most of my time with last year—saying that she’d passed away about a month before. I wasn’t surprised. You can’t be surprised when death comes to a house-bound woman in her late eighties with a laundry list of serious health conditions, but she had been my friend, my good friend, and the news sat heavily on my shoulders on my flight to Denver.

The week before I left, when I told one of my freshmen classes that I was going to a family reunion, one of them immediately quipped, “Is it gonna be fun or is it gonna be awkward?” “A little bit of both,” I shot back. Maybe I thought this was true when I said it but in actuality the week I spent there was often fun, never awkward, and just about always good.

At its zenith, there were 45 people. (We thought. An accurate count was more difficult than it should have been.) We stayed in two huge cabins at a YMCA Ranch a couple hours of switchback highway west of Denver. Both had big common areas with tall windows that faced out toward the horizon of mountains and also had comfortable furniture which my sister kept expressing appreciation for. My mom pointed out that my grandma, who has been gone since 2015, would have loved this. She was always looking for a place where all seven of her children and their offspring and theirs could be all together in one room—eat meals cooked in a line-up of vast pots, sit and play cards, talk and laugh. 

And we kept busy. We were the loudest and most cheerful at a bingo night run by Y employees at the rec center, with several of my cousins’ kids ending up calling the numbers themselves. We played a game of kickball in which there were two participants under four, which necessitated a variety of paces. We were the entire population of the Y trivia night one evening, and the room echoed with an inability to keep secrets from other teams made up of siblings and aunts and cousins and uncles. And we hiked over and over in the thin air, up mountains brown and green and rocky, to see little humps of snow melting by waterfalls.

I’d forgotten how much I like the people I’m related to. We are very different, and yet there’s a unity despite our difference—maybe because of it, at times. It is a unity of practicality, of unfussy kindness, of good humor, of just saying what you mean without pretension. I found even the barriers within myself crumbling at times. The rough beauty nudged my heart into order. All year I’ve steadfastly refused to play chess with any of my students even though I have a board in my room for them, but I played a game with my cousin’s son one morning, because though I can easily turn down a seventeen-year-old, saying no to a seven-year-old is entirely too cruel. He beat me soundly, at one point saying encouragingly, “You’ll figure out how the pieces move soon, or maybe you’re just bad at it.”

I read in quiet corners of one cabin or the other where I could see out a window, and on the last day did a loop on a path through a meadow, while listening to an Austen novel, past the old homestead which housed a family of little foxes who had been darting across the corners of our vision all week. 

On Sunday, in the morning light through all the eastern windows, most of us gathered for a service in the assembly style which many of my family grew up with, sharing one-by-one what we were learning from scripture, and singing hymns acapella. I listened to our swell of song rising to the roof and realized that I knew those voices of old, and was glad to hear them again after so long.

I used to write about my cousins on here a lot—nearly every Christmas. But we are all grown now and see each other much less. We’re spread across the country and beyond—tied to the places we live by jobs and families and commitments. But watching us here in adulthood, properly on the far side of excitable adolescence, I still saw a shared and generous familiarity, a sort of assumed kindness in one another we could all rely on—this was the thing which staved off the awkwardness my students joked about. 

Also, I leaned over to my sister one night and said, “You know, we’re all grown up, but everyone still walks the same.” There are certain things we never do, perhaps never can, grow out of. Once last year, talking about my relationship with Bonnie, Abby gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten, particularly because she’s known me so well for so long. She told me I was good at seeing the “part of people that doesn’t age.” And it’s true—that odd loping walk or wild laugh that has always been and always will be is my favorite part of any person, the part I hold precious in my palm.

And this family time away was a reminder that not only is there a part of people that doesn’t age, but maybe there’s a part of relationships that can’t and won’t age either. On Monday and Tuesday nights after the littlest ones were in bed, some of us cousins sat down to play Authors. It’s not a particularly brilliant game, a little like “Go Fish” but fussier and with the titles of more nineteenth century novels. But we played it so much at my Grandma’s when we were young that it’s in our shared DNA now. One summer when I slept on the couch because we were short of bed-space I would regularly wake up to my brother and my cousin Joe sitting on my feet, already deep in a game at 7:30 in the morning. 

When my cousin Charity unearthed the deck she’d brought last week, at first none of us could quite remember how many cards to deal. But then it all came back, and not just the rules, but the joy. We curled up in our chairs, all cares and griefs of our grown selves forgotten, and giggled for forty minutes straight over well-worn cards with pictures of Sir Walter Scott, all in a large cabin made small by a valley of snow-capped mountain peaks and the dome of a black-silk sky.

Thanksgiving Coming

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I’m sitting in my bed (my favorite place for writing, no matter how I try to create another one) looking out the two large panes of my window, through which I can see bare trees and blue sky and the neighbor’s roof bathed in late afternoon sun.

Writing has been a struggle recently. The blog has not come easy because, though many things in my life have seemed good, not many things have seemed urgent, as if I must run and tell them right away. And as for the novel draft, in its final chapters it has become a millstone around my neck. I mean, that’s a dramatic metaphor, sure, but please believe me when I say that it’s been FAR too long since it’s had anyone else’s eyes on it. After this week, though, the draft will be finished and I will take seventeen big breaths in a row and start writing my pitch letter for agents. 

But the real drama of my life recently has been car trouble. My little silver Kia had already been in and out of the shop a couple weeks ago for an engine issue, and then the battery started dying on me. The second time it happened was this past Tuesday as I was leaving my client’s house in the evening after making her dinner. When the car wouldn’t start, I went back inside to ask her if she thought any of her neighbors could give me a jump.

After she had made about four phone calls (one of which was to her son, who lives twenty minutes away), and had also offered to let me just take her car (I told her “No, Bonnie”), and three different people had asked if I had AAA, and various neighbors, roused from their evenings, had run across the street to knock on more doors, I ended up with the help of two women: Paula, who’s a divorce lawyer, and Marilyn, whose husband Allen drives trucks for a living.

We huddled in the driveway under the floodlights and Marilyn gave Paula and me a thorough tutorial in how to jump a car. The Kia started and then immediately died again. So Marilyn gave me a ride all the way home to Fitchburg, and spent the drive telling me about her stroke a few years ago and about the paper route she used to do with her son and also giving me her husband’s number because he would be home on Saturday and could help. My car stayed in Bonnie’s driveway.

The next day I was off work. I called the shop about getting the car towed. And then, since Abby had a Bible study she wanted to go to, and Taylor was working, I watched Calvin. Our neighbor texted asking if we wanted a walk, so we set off towards the marsh with her and her baby, a folding stroller in tow, in case Cal’s little legs got tired. They did eventually. We went a ways. As I pushed him on the long path around the lake, he stared up at the tallest trees and commented occasionally on “the forest” while Sally and I chatted about moving to a place and how long you decide to stay there.

On Thursday I had a morning shift at Bonnie’s again, and I borrowed my housemates’ car. I took Bonnie to run some errands and when we arrived back at the house, I was helping her out of the car before pulling it into the garage, and Paula from next door (remember, the lawyer?) ran up and not so much requested as demanded that she be allowed to gift me a AAA membership. I said, yes, sure, of course, that was very kind of her.

The problem with my car turned out to just be a dead battery, not the alternator, thank God. It’s back with me now, safe, sound, and covered by AAA.

Some of this was stressful, sure, particularly the cost of repairs, but Abby and I were talking about it a little later, and I said, “You know, I chose this.” I meant that I could have made much different plans for this year. I could have gone back into teaching or some other job with a salary, I could be working from home doing freelance writing so that I’m not so dependent on a car, I could’ve even stayed in Vancouver where a car is hardly necessary. I had the luxury of choice, and I chose this.

I chose this, but I did not really understand the good I was choosing. I did not really understand the way I was laying myself bare to the generosity of the people around me: my friends and my boss and my mechanic and my neighbors and my clients and their neighbors. I did not really understand that in deciding to move to a new city in the wintry midwest and work twenty hours a week so I could write, I was choosing to accept the expansiveness of divine generosity. I was choosing the bright tightrope of God’s provision.

Obvious Things

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I’ve been in Madison for going-on-two months and I have yet to go downtown or eat at any restaurant beside Culver’s or explore anywhere at all really and I am so content.

I work three days a week, going to people’s homes and making their meals and sweeping their kitchen floors and sitting on their couches to chat and sometimes bringing them their medication. When I leave I always tell them the next time I’ll see them. On the days I don’t work, I write some, I look out the window, and in the evenings I watch TV and put my clothes on their hangers.

Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve been stepping softly and steadily. I’ve gained weight. Not much, but still—I’m embarrassingly delighted by it. My brown leather pencil skirt fits properly for the first time in years, though I don’t really have anywhere to wear it. And I’ve been reading, reading the books I’ve been dragging round for years without ever touching, reading for the joy of it.

I’ve found that here—and by here I am not sure if I mean this place or this season of life (perhaps both)—here I can accept my own slowness. I can move along at a plodding, dreamlike pace, contentment rising up in me like a tide, paying attention to obvious things, letting life be self-evident.    

And then sometimes when I am driving from one client’s home to another in the middle of the day, I find that I am crying. I have to retrace the path of my thoughts to pinpoint what it is I was thinking about that brought on the tears. It’s usually some hurt or fear from way deep down, sometimes from decades ago, that has decided that waters were safe and still enough to rise to the surface. That’s how it goes, I suppose. So each time I ride the little wave, then dry my eyes, get out of my car, and go into the next house.

Then, on Saturday night, on a sort-of country road outside Madison, three high school seniors were driving to pick up another friend when they were rear-ended. Their car swerved into the cornfield to their right, flipped over and burst into flames. They all died there, about 300 yards from one of their homes.

I drove by this grief four times in the course of a few hours yesterday, as I took a client to run errands. There was a big mound of flowers and gifts and small precious items and the whole area was marked off by huge orange barrels and watched over by a police car. Each time I went past, one or two teenagers would be standing there, just looking down the memorial, hands in pockets, faces strangely impassive and blank, as if feeling hadn’t reached them yet, but looking hard at the spot where it happened might heal the numbness. 

The last time I went by, around five pm, there was a larger group, nine or ten kids, huddled around the side of the road. But I saw out of the corner of my eye two or three of them had gone farther, had walked down into the great obvious gash in the cornfield, stepped deep into the curving wound as if to see death from inside. 

A part of me wanted to pull over and wait till they emerged, not get out of my car, but just sit and bear witness. I was already past by the time I’d thought it, though, onto my five-thirty appointment, carrying the image with me as a handful of aching memory, moving on with soft and steady steps.

Erring on the Side of Kindness

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I’ve been grateful recently that in art, in the making of things, we have permission to be messy. I’ve been struggling the last few days to make myself sit down and write an entry here based on an idea I had about peace. But now I’ve deleted what I had and decided to tell you stories about my grandpa instead. He was, incidentally, probably the most peaceful person I’ve ever known.

When I was in college I spent most summers in Missouri with my mother’s parents. If you’ve hung around here long enough, you probably know that. One of the things I did, every Wednesday evening, was get in the car with my grandpa and drive him an hour southeast to a town called Moberly where he would lead a Bible study at the state penitentiary. I would sit in the local YMCA with my laptop to wait for him—it was the only time I got internet all week. As we drove we would listen to the radio or to the silence or sometimes, though he was a quiet man, Grandpa would talk. 

He told me about once when he’d driven himself to the prison and accidentally left the car running and the doors open when he went in, so that it looked like a getaway car. And he told me about his friend in the Air Force, David, who had been killed during training exercises at the end of the war. But one of the stories he told me most often was about a visit he made home to see his family when he was in college.

He went home for a weekend and visited his mother and aunt. His uncle, who was a bit of a drunk and the family black sheep, lived just across the street. This uncle happened to officially be on the outs with my grandpa’s mom and aunt the weekend he went home, so to keep the peace Grandpa didn’t go see him—just waved at him when he saw him sitting out on his porch. When the weekend was over, Grandpa went back to school, and not long after his uncle killed himself.

I’m sure my grandpa understood that his uncle’s death was not his fault, yet sixty years after the fact he repeated the story to his twenty-year-old granddaughter as if it had great hold on him. He knew he had not done what he ought. It was a story which I now suspect informed much of the rest of his life. I remember that when I started teaching, my mom advised me to always “err on the side of kindness” when dealing with my students. And that’s how he lived the rest of his life in full view of his seven children and exponential grandchildren: disregarding cruel feuds, generous to the point of seeming foolishness, willing to be taken advantage of by the least of these, erring on the side of kindness, salt and light.

The last summer I spent there, Grandpa, still his same gentle, faithful self, started seeing people who weren’t there. He saw children waiting in hot minivans who needed the door opened for them, strangers—perhaps hungry—approaching the kitchen across the back field, a boy sleeping at the end of his own bed who needed a warmer blanket. He always brought our attention to their presence in his soft voice, unwilling to make the mistake he’d made decades before, determined his uncle would not spend the afternoon alone on the porch.

But my favorite memory of my grandpa is perhaps my oldest. I was maybe five, and it was summer then too. The middle child of his middle child engulfed in a sea of visiting cousins, quiet and large-eyed. And he took me in his truck, just the two of us.

Our errand, I think, was to the slaughterhouse to pick up a side of beef that had fed on their land, but that doesn’t color my recollections. What I remember is tearing down Highway F, the little pick-up catching air at every bump. My grandpa loved speed. When we got to our destination he bought me a soda from the machine—I think it was orange—a treat which overwhelmed me. As we came back, I remember soaring over the hills once again, half-full can in the cup-holder and pop sloshing in my stomach. It’s been well over twenty years now, but I would live that ride again and again and again.

Heartland

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Last Friday, I got home from what turned out to be a whirlwind tour of the American midwest. I was gone for only about a week and a half and in that time managed Dayton (sort of), Chicago, the Iron Range, Minneapolis, Madison, and Indianapolis (kind of).

We drove a lot. I drove a lot. On the days when it wasn’t just me in the car, and I had a back up driver roster one or more family members deep, I spent a lot of time staring at my dad’s big road atlas. I’ve always done this. From the time I was probably seven or eight I spent a lot of time on family trips leaning forward from the cramped back seat of our little minivan and asking for the atlas. It was the way we all avoided “Are we there yet?” Look–here–see for yourself–then you tell me.

For me this habit grew into a love of knowing where I am, of placing myself. I look at the map of where I am, where I’m headed, where I came from, and I trace the blue interstates that connect them like arteries, but once I’ve done that, I still don’t put the atlas down. I’ve learned to go farther afield. And this time around, beginning with British Columbia, of course, I ran my fingers over Canada: the heavy pockets of civilization in the south, thinning out into the stark ranges of the north. (Did you know that not only does Nunavut have no road access in from other provinces, but there is no reliable system of roads between its towns and settlements? Most of it is above the timber line, and you have no choice but to fly in.)

Looking at Canada for very long scared me, though. In a month and a half I am moving to the other side of a notably large continent. The bed I will be sleeping in is just under three thousand miles from the one I’m sleeping in now. I checked. And all that space scares me.

But of course the land that lies between is not just some unknowable, disembodied thing. I can know it–I do know it.

Last Thursday I left friends in Madison to head towards more friends (and my sister) just north of Indianapolis. I spent the first hour or so winding around on back roads in southern Wisconsin, and then glanced down at my phone and realized I had it set on “avoid tolls.” (Despite all my talk about the atlas, Google Maps is just easier when I’m alone.) But I didn’t mind. I accepted my fate even though it would take more gas and more time and once or twice included a gravel road. It was a hot day and the sky was very blue and the cornfields were very green.  For that first stretch, I rarely saw another car and drove on highways with letters for names. The houses and shining metal outbuildings I passed seemed settled in the soil, basking in the sun.

A few times recently I’ve found myself fancifully telling some patient listener that the British countryside (particularly what we walked through in Wales last summer) is the landscape of my soul. But as I drove those summer midwest roads I kept thinking of the commercials I used to see when my Missouri grandma would turn on the news as she cooked dinner, commercials for regional chains like Menards, boomingly announcing their home as America’s Heartland, and I know this seems silly, but for me it is. The midwest is the land of my heart. (I don’t know what this makes North Carolina–the land of my skin, the largest organ, the place I surround myself with? But I digress…)

Of course, the vast majority of my time in the midwest was spent in north central Missouri when my grandparents were still alive, and at no point on this trip did I set foot on its poor-cousin-of-Iowa soil. Instead I wandered through states which I mostly don’t know very well for themselves. But it all felt familiar.

Outside of Dayton my mom and Mary and I took a walk near our hotel and when everything dissolved to rain, we cut back through the parking lot single file, along one curb after another like children, our umbrellas held out for balance under the wide grey sky.

In Chicago we walked around U of C, trying to find the room where my parents first met. We never did find it, which perhaps made poetic sense, because it was called the Nonesuch Room.

The highways we drove were sporadically flanked with those monstrous, calm white windmills, and chains like Culver’s and A&W’s where my grandpa liked to stop to have a chocolate malted for dinner. I had never been down these particular roads before, but they tasted like home and my heart beat to the rhythm of tires on asphalt.

Of course I don’t mean to idealize the Midwest too much. After all, it was at a rest stop in Kansas when I was ten or eleven that I saw a Wanted poster for a sex offender who had escaped from state prison in the area, and then barely slept for the next few nights because I was fearfully processing the existence of human evil, perhaps for the first time. I could still give you a description of the tattoo on his chest. But the presence of wickedness does not negate the perseverance of good, and the heart beats on, yearning–sometimes self-consciously–for redemption.

After I walked out of my classroom for the last time in early June, I went downstairs with my last boxful of papers and books and told my friend that I felt a bit naked. I was leaving behind the teacher, the Miss Hodgkins, in the corner on the floor, and was stepping back out as only Alice. That’s how I left for the Midwest, stripped and small. The original point of the trip was my cousin’s wedding up way north of Duluth and the first night we got there, Mary and I went to the last evening campfire program of teen camp. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and we stayed for the whole thing as dusk slowly set in. Along with lots of laborious prize-giving for verses memorized and games won, we sang worship songs, and one in particular, which is notably not a favorite, stuck to my ribs. Every chorus ended with the line “Look to the sky!” And when I looked to the sky my uncomfortable nakedness and exposure, my unsteady weakness made sense. I fit, a small child in an immense and well-worn palm. I was at peace. The next night, I danced barefoot in the grass alongside my siblings and cousins because Joe and Becky were married and the sky was great above us.

I am still anxious when I think of August when I will get on a plane alone and spend a day suspended in the air between two places, but if I look down at those first flyover states I will see a place that has the power to make me calm. A place of ice cream and gravel, of dry bones and rich soil, of green-brown openness fading grey in the twilight, where they look their dead hard in the face before they bury them. It’s a place I know as well as my own breathing, that’s as close to me as the thumping chambers of my own heart.

Die before you die. There is no chance after.

Summer Update

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This is going to be a little more of a vintage-Alice-blog-entry: more rambling and personal, probably not very philosophical. I guess summer brings out the nineteen-year-old in me.

I’ve been done with work for two weeks now. I’ve reorganized my bedroom, gotten a massage, accidentally made an obscene amount of corn pudding, had my oil changed, gone to a wedding, applied for a credit card, donated four bags of clothes to Goodwill, finished reading eight books (three of which I began at least a year ago, two of which were re-reads), and finished writing one (short) short story. Hello, June.

Other highlights so far have included more in-depth planning for trips to London this summer and next, getting to sit down and talk with various wonderful friends whom I almost never get to see, ordering stuff off Amazon Prime nearly every other day, and listening to heavy summer rains wash down my windows in fresh torrents.

Also, Karen moved out on Saturday. I will miss living with her and her habit of walking to my room and beginning enormous theological and cultural conversations with no preface whatsoever. Even though I have a lot more stuff than she did, it echoes here now.

The last summer I spent at my grandparents’ in Missouri was in 2014. They were not really doing very well at that point and shouldn’t have been left alone for long, but sometimes I got restless. Some nights, despite all the books I had to read and the movies I routinely rented from the Redbox at Walmart, I felt like bursting out of my skin. Everything around me seemed to be either stagnant or in decay, so I would take my grandpa’s pick-up to the Sonic in town, where I would buy a large cherry limeade. Then I would drive out into the countryside for an hour or two, down all the little highways with letters for names, and I would try to get lost out there, in the silence of the thick summer. I was never able to do it, though. No matter how far I rolled down the windows, and how the wind rushed through my hair, all my responsibilities and cares stayed in their neat little pile on my lap. I never managed not to know who and where and why I was.

Over time though, I find I mind that less. Responsibilities and cares tie me to people and purpose and community. You don’t always need to be lost to be found.

So, like I said, hello. I’m here and I’m grateful.

 

Christmas and Tradition

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When I was growing up, Christmas meant Grandma’s. It meant long hours in the car stuffed with puffy coats, reading Dickens’ Christmas Carol aloud stave by stave, and then arriving in Missouri to cousins and orange balls and running fast on carpet in sock feet. Christmas meant crowded rooms and couches and beds. It meant all twenty-some of us choosing a favorite carol in order from oldest to youngest while siblings switched off at the piano. It meant sitting hip-to-hip with contented joy. I was in awe of those Christmases, so in awe that they sometimes made me forget myself.

But I am grown now, and no Christmas will ever be the same. My grandparents have been gone for over a year and the house is sold. The place we went is no longer ours and the faces which used to await our arrival have been buried. The things which made me love Christmas so seem to have vanished. So it is tempting to me to spend the holiday mourning the traditions and the stability that are lost. This time of year, I want nothing more than to run back to the comforts of childhood or even adolescence, to revel in the reliable beauty of those Christmas customs.

But I cannot return to those traditions, so instead I will try to remember the self-forgetfulness that they taught me.  Because Christmas is not actually meant to be about tradition. It is meant to be about the world turned upside down, shook to its core. It is the story of a remote corner of a poor place where a child was born to speak truth, and to sweat blood, and to die, that I may know truth, and be clean, and live.

Every year that is true. The foundations of our little worlds may shudder, the walls which kept us safe and warm may crumble, the faces around us may seem strange and hard, but every year, if we look up, a star calls us to Bethlehem. We are meant to follow its light, to worship and be changed.

On Friday, I read How the Grinch Stole Christmas to my juniors for storytime. I laughed through some of it, but some lines moved me:

Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any presents at all!
He HADN’T stopped Christmas from coming! IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

I am grateful for the Child who has come to save, and I am thirsty for his grace.

In Praise of Light and Salt

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My grandfather died a week ago tonight. (Don’t worry, not many more entries will begin this way.)

He left us less than three months after his wife of sixty years, which is not surprising, but no less hard. This feels like the second half of a whole is gone. In September, when my Grandma died, we felt truncated and sober. Now sometimes we lose the feeling in our legs and we must reach down and check that they’re still there–he did show us how to stand on them, didn’t he?

On Monday night we prayed and my mom said that it felt like some of the light and salt had gone out of the world. It did–it does. There is no better way to explain him than to tell you how he lived.

In 1954, he graduated from medical school in Iowa, got married, and, in 1956, moved down to a tiny town in north central Missouri to  start a practice. And he stayed. While other doctors moved in and out of town, he always stayed.

In college I wrote a paper on small-town doctors, and in the process I interviewed both my grandparents. I dug that paper up last night and reread it and found myself smiling at the difference in the stories each of them wanted to tell. My grandma, who had a love of a good story and an even greater love of her husband, showcased him as the compassionate hero of the town. She talked about the time the child with the suicidal mother called in the middle of the night and he had to go and talk her down by himself, because the sheriff decided he wanted a full night’s rest. She talked about how he regularly treated the local prostitutes, one of whom would periodically slit her wrists, and then call him at his house for a ride to the hospital. The other had such great respect for him that she named her son after him and once asked him to testify for her good character in court. (He declined.)

Grandpa told different stories, though. Smaller stories, which always focused not on himself, but on the things he got the opportunity to learn or to love. He told me about coming out to the barn once and finding a lamb that had gotten into the feed box and was gorging himself. Annoyed, he knocked it out and went on with his chores, and when he came back later it was dead. “That was a good lesson to me not to be too harsh with people as well as animals,” he told me. He always said these things in a soft, light tone, not as if he were preaching it to you, but as if he were preaching it to his own heart and it was just possible you might benefit from it too.

He also talked a lot about delivering babies. Delivering babies was his favorite thing. I knew that, but I asked him why. “Everybody’s happy, even the baby,” he told me. “The baby’s crying, but happy.” He loved life, he loved its beginnings, and he loved its preciousness just as he loved the God who saw fit to give it to His people. Probably half the population of Brookfield over the age of twenty-five was delivered by my grandpa. Sometimes, growing up, I would be approached by strangers who told me wide-eyed how he had attended their entrance into the world: farmers, Walmart greeters, tired single mothers in screen-print t-shirts. All of them spoke of him not only with respect, but with a sort of foreign joy. When these same people would approach him, he would tell them, with quiet but evident pleasure, “Oh, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve changed.”

I meant to say more, but I am worn out and a bit overwhelmed by even beginning to tell these stories and here is why: we all, my siblings and cousins, even my mom and her brothers and sisters, we all grew up being told what a good man our Dr. Howell was. My grandma ceaselessly sang his praises to her children and later to her grandchildren. Not only my mother, but also my father, consistently used him as an example to us of patience and humility and godliness.

But here is how I am wonderfully baffled: this was not just the mythos surrounding a beloved figure. Everything we experienced of him bore it out. It was all true. I am sitting alone on my bed right now miles from most of my family, but I can confidently speak for all of us: he was the best man we knew. He is still the best man we know.

This is important. I am typing very slowly now because I am fighting for the words to tell you how important. For a while in his seventies and eighties my grandfather led a Bible study at a maximum security prison about an hour away in Moberly, Missouri. When the prison officials first asked why he wanted to do such a thing he simply said, “Well, I believe that the Word of God changes lives.” He said this because in the early 1940’s in Cumberland, Iowa, the Word of God changed his life. The Word changed his life and continued to change it. My grandfather and his kind are important, because in a world full of fear and violence and bitterness, where even as Christians we cling harder to irony and mockery than to truth, they are proof that God can clean a sinful heart so new and clear that goodness can shine through it like morning sunlight and fill the room. They are proof that holiness is real and strong and will triumph. And that holiness is what Jesus means for each of us.

About two weeks ago, when we got to my uncle’s house for Thanksgiving, I walked into the kitchen and Grandpa was hunched over the table, thin and gaunt, focussed on finishing a sandwich, breathing heavily with each movement. I asked him how he was. “Greatly blessed,” he said. He knew. Oh, he knew.

Ho! Everyone who thirsts,

Come to the waters;

And you who have no money,

Come, buy and eat.

Yes, come, buy wine and milk

Without money and without price.

A Family Funeral

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Late last Tuesday night, my grandma died.

Grief has been in the periphery of my vision all weekend, and I have avoided looking it square in the face, mostly because I don’t know what I will find there and how it will change me. Also, the whole situation is improbable. My grandmother dead? My grandma to be grieved?

Grandma was not a person of grief but of cheerfulness and hard work and practicality, of swift pats on the knee or a brisk kiss on the cheek, of getting out leftovers on Sunday night.

I did not like to see her lying there in the open casket partly because she never lay still like that. She was always doing and moving. Even in her last months, they had to put up a child-gate at the door to her apartment to keep her from wandering off in a fit of usefulness. And her face in the coffin was not right–they hadn’t drawn in her eyebrows and all the color had faded from her hair. But the hands were hers: round knuckles, dark, familiar sunspots on their backs. (But even her hands were never still and folded like that in my memory–they too were always moving, and usually wet from the water in the kitchen sink…)

I feel as if I am writing this underwater–all of my movements and thoughts are slower. I am unsure of my own feelings, but I’m trying to speak for all of us anyway, which is probably foolish. At the visitation on Friday night, I sat in the front pew with my sister and cousin and Mary suddenly said, “For some reason, I didn’t think this would be so sad.” I didn’t think so either. I didn’t think she would be gone. She was never gone and now she is. I didn’t really know that even in old age, death is ugly like that. It takes. The rest of us know how to keep going, sure, but our roots feel lost without her.

The funeral service was good. I played a few hymns on cello, which wound my nerves up tight into a little ball, the siblings shared memories, and, in an unexpected turn of events, the family stood up front and sang. My grandma would have said it was so nice. I was once publicly chastised in a college class for using that word, but for my grandma it was rich with meaning: appropriate, sweet, lovely, good and right, just-so. It was very nice and mostly we did not cry. Probably because we don’t understand yet. And we cannot express.

We don’t understand this impossible balance between the finite and the infinite. Her face and her voice and her words and even her approval of our niceness are all gone. But she read to my mother and my mother read to me. And when she laughed very, very hard her face crumbled up helplessly like she was crying. The same thing happens to my mother, and sometimes to me. She got up early, early every morning and prayed for children, grandchildren, friends, missionaries whom she’s never even met. These things are infinite, especially that last. At its highest point, her very active love for us meant very actively giving us over to the grace of God.

We came to her to find home, but she knew all along that there was a home and a Host beyond and above, bigger and realler. And in the last year of her life up in Minnesota she asked and agitated again and again to be taken home, until even she was not sure what she meant. But Jesus knew. The home that we found at her table she’s even now finding, to an infinite degree, with Christ.

My grandpa is very feeble, and tired, and now also pretty sad. But what he said over and over this weekend, is this: Christ Jesus does all things well. He did not say much else, but I suppose the things we repeat most often are the things we know we must preach to ourselves: Christ Jesus does all things well.