Colorado Ramblings

As always, our June is full of all the things you can’t do during school and harvest.

Recently we spent two nights at the coast in our pop-up tent trailer. Then two days later, in a 23-hour marathon, the three youngest children and Paul and I drove to Colorado to see Emily.

Some thoughts:

Where but in eastern Oregon would you pass a sign by a farm: “Beetle-Cleaned Skulls"??

Paul once again put a mattress in the back of the van so he and I could take turns sleeping and driving. Smart man. Ben drove for two hours and it was nice for his tally of hours but it wasn’t fun for me, riding shotgun in the dark and the rain. I would rather have been driving myself.

I like Emily’s landlord, he of the seed corn hat and dusty jeans and Oklahoma-country straight shooting. He has made it his project to watch out for Emz and fix stuff that breaks, even if it’s beyond his duties as landlord.

When I came to see Emz in May we made a number of changes in her lifestyle—she moved to a different house and is now practically next door to the Knepps who have made her one of their lovely family, she started a new nutrition-supplement regimen, and she quit working at the thrift store in case all the musty dusty stuff was making her ill.

And she has improved. Don’t ask me which change takes credit for it; I refuse to go there.

I don’t think any of her days have been (my personal ranking here) a 5 (the pink of vibrant health) but some of them have been 4’s (good enough to do schoolwork and housework and maybe go to the post office) and some have been 3’s (headache but “I’d still go to the thrift store if I worked there”) with one or two 2’s (drag around, lie down a lot) but I don’t think she’s had any 1’s (flat-out sick, too weak to get out of bed) which she had for way too much of April and the first weeks of May.

Sometimes I wake up around 3 a.m. and think about how awful it is to have my sick daughter out of my reach. I second-guess every decision we ever made with her illness. I think of everyone who has told me what we should have done with Emily, and I argue with them in my head and try to vindicate myself yet wonder if we should have taken their advice.

Someone told me that the sharpest spiritual battles of this world take place at 3 a.m.

Recently I talked to a woman who has a lot in common with me. We both, in our day, would look at our family around the supper table and have this enormous sense of satisfaction at having them all here, at home, where we could cluck over them and tuck them under our wings. We both have daughters who are out of our reach, and we both cried a bit, discussing this.

However. Her daughter is away for very different reasons than Emily is away, very unfortunate personal/moral choices that break her mother’s heart. I decided, you know, there’s heartache and then there’s heartache, and if it were ours to choose, both of us would a hundred times choose mine over hers.

Emily’s electric-scooter tires both went flat half an hour before we arrived. I thought, ok, what are the chances that they BOTH die at once? Naturally I envisioned what every mom would: an evil young man sneaking in the driveway and stabbing an ice pick in both tires and skulking away with an evil cackling laugh, plotting his next (worse) move.

I went all frantic about locking doors and such. Paul didn’t exactly have an evil cackling laugh about this, but too close to one. Grrr.

How else could two tires go flat at once? Tell me that.

Monday morning I was talking to Amy on the phone. I went wandering around outside, barefooted, looking for better reception while we talked. Down the sidewalk, past the garage, into the vacant area behind. Suddenly it felt like I had stepped on the underside of a bunch of pincushions. Yowch! I cut off the conversation, sat down, and found the bottoms of both feet half covered with odd little vicious thorns, like little cockleburrs with one long shaft.

I pulled the nasty things out, one by one, and tiptoed back to the house.

Some hours later Paul diagnosed the scooter’s problem: a thorn in each tire.

Oh yeah, Emily remembered, last Saturday she got the urge to ride her scooter around in that big open area right behind the garage.

So, praise God, no evil young man with an ice pick, only those nasty hard-to-see thorns.

Emily posted about this too. Here.

Today, on the phone, I told my sister that I have a whole new perspective on all those young people that come to Oregon to work for the summer. Before, I sort of let them go their way and I went mine. Now, I think, I just have to reach out to them, and how many of their mothers are at home praying that somebody, please, please, will at least invite them over for Sunday dinner?

Our experiences in many things in life, as in this case, have been uncannily similar. Rebecca’s son just finished his first year of college, and she said this year she’s had a whole new perspective on the college kids that come to their church. She thinks, how many of them have mothers at home praying that someone, please, someone, will reach out to their child away from home?

Amy flies in today from Indiana where she attended Travis and Alisha Horst's wedding. Yay! Emily and I go to Denver to pick her up, leaving early so we can stop at Denver Fabrics.

Amy reports that her friend DeLora, Alisha's sister, told her that their grandparents drove the car to Indiana that used to belong to her great-grandparents, Loras and Ruth, and now Todd, the girls' dad, is going to drive it around. The girls aren't exactly thrilled about this, since the car is one of those battleships from the early 70's. This coughs up all kinds of sweet memories for me, because back when we lived by the freeway, we would sometimes follow Loras and Ruth home from church, them coming from Fairview and us from Brownsville. Both of them were tiny and old, and Ruth would sit in the middle of the front seat, even though they were old, which was very sweet, and sometimes she would have her head on Loras's shoulder, and there was something about this cavernous car and the two of them snuggled up in about 1/8 of the available space that sticks vividly in my memory. May Todd and Anita enjoy it likewise.

(MennoGame: Todd is Todd Neushwander from Living Water Church. Ruth was a half-sister to Paul's grandpa and a niece to his grandma. This makes Paul and Todd [and Amy and Alisha/DeLora of course] related, but I'll let you figure out how.)

Quote of the Day:
Jenny: You think that I think what you think is not right!
Steven: What makes you think that I think that you think that what I think is not right?
--conversation after about 6 hours of travel