ABC 2020--Post 3--How Our Family Stays Home

This is about how the Coronavirus and its restrictions have affected our family, and what we are up to while quarantined.

But first:

As mentioned in previous posts, this strange season steeps me in nostalgia, and sometimes I'm reminded of the day a jet crashed only a mile or two from our house.

Paul and I and a couple of children lived in a cozy trailer house near Dryden, Ontario, and only a few miles from the Dryden airport.

That winter, the little airport had been so proud to schedule its first jet service. Once a day, an actual jet flew in and out. Dryden was going places.

One winter day, due to ice on the wings and a series of bad decisions by various people, that jet crashed soon after takeoff.

I remember that it was a heavy sort of day, and cold, with poor visibility and low clouds, a hazy gray and white world.

There we were, safe and warm at home, but whenever I stepped outside onto the steps of our trailer, I could hear the roar of machinery as it cleared a path to the crash site. People were dying there, covered in jet fuel, some of them burned alive. Others were stumbling in the snow, seeking family members.

Here I was, and there they were, all at the same time. I didn't have any way to help them.

Today, we are safe, well, fed, and together in our well-appointed farmhouse.  I know that Italy is grieving, the poor in India are hungrier than ever, and a doctor friend in New York tells of the refrigerated truck, storing bodies, just outside his office. I know that locals are losing jobs and many elderly are alone.

Here we are, and there they are, and what can I do to help but to pray and call and text, from my safe little island?

Thankfully, there are also many just like us: neither hungry nor desperate, off the front lines, hunkered down, waiting. Venturing out for broccoli and medicine as needed. Working essential jobs. Trying to make the best possible memories in the strangest of seasons.

This post is for them.

Six of us are living at home: Paul and me, Steven, Amy, Emily, and Jenny.

Matt, our oldest son, moved to Houston in February and works for NASA. He told me the only NASA employees who aren't teleworking right now are the crew on the International Space Station. He and Phoebe are trying to figure out what to do about the plans for their wedding on June 14.

Ben, our second son, lives in Corvallis with a few other guys and researches smoldering combustion at OSU. He came home on weekends as long as he could. Now he joins us for church on Sunday mornings via Skype or Zoom or another of those words we are all learning these days. We had hoped he could continue his research, but his lab is now closed and he works on writing projects at home.

Here's Ben, worshipping with us.

Paul, who has been busier for years than any mortal ought to be, is busier than ever. His warehouse work is considered essential, since he processes animal feed. He had also been teaching every morning. That is now done via YouTube, which involves learning an awful lot of tech skills in a very short time. He also preaches via YouTube.

Paul prepares his pulpit.

Jenny helps Paul figure out the technology.

I have been a homebody for years, so this isn't such a jolt for me. I've often wondered how long I could stay home without getting tired of it, but didn't think I'd ever get a chance to find out.

Now I know: About this long.

The Smucker sisters-in-law have learned to video-chat.
Anything is possible now.

I go walking a lot, inspecting the local lambs and cherry trees a lot more closely than in the past, simply because there's time.

Living in the country and getting out in it are astonishing gifts.

I'm also writing, sewing, cleaning out corners, and calling people I haven't called in a while.

Amy takes classes from OSU at home, tutors via Zoom, and whips up amazing food. "She and Jenny are living their best lives," said Emily.

Amy in one of her natural habitats

Emily, meanwhile, is perplexed by her own cabin fever, since she has been working from home for months already. Was it she who got the idea to take a basket of gifts to a neighbor with a birthday on Sunday? We stood a proper distance outside the door, sang Happy Birthday, and briefly chatted.

"You remind me of Little Women," the neighbor said. "You girls are all together and just having so much fun."

Emily's been mailing out postcards.

Jenny aka Amy March is video-teaching like her dad, video-learning like Amy, and taking walks by the creek in her rubber boots, watching birds and collecting creek-water ecospheres in quart jars.

Here's Jenny, disinfecting groceries.

Steven works as an ambulance guy and is working on his paramedic internship. He left his room yesterday all crisp and handsome in his uniform. "Hey!" said his sisters, "We should send him off like they do to medical workers on all the videos online!" So we stood and applauded while he went out the back door, grinning.

Steven on a Sunday night, listening to Jenny talking about math.

I try not to worry about him. Of course he doesn't necessarily know if a patient has Covid-19, so he and the others take extra safety precautions. Oregon, and Lane County in particular, have been affected, but not overwhelmed like New York.

When Steven's home, he takes care of things around here.

These are bizarre times. We are having fun despite the challenges.

But we remember the suffering.

Jenny baked a lemon blueberry cake.

  

We built a bonfire one Sunday evening.

A new diversion: putting puzzles together.

This season gives us a fresh view of the normal and everyday.

My hens haven't caught on that there's anything to worry about.
We'll keep it that way.

ABC 2020--Post 2--A Tour of the Sparrow Nest

The Nest is surrounded by very large trees.
We note that one window on the side is lower than the other.
That's where my desk is.

I have a writing cabin called The Sparrow Nest.

This is about how it came to be, how it turned out, and why we built it as we did, should you embark on such a project yourself someday.

Every writer dreams of a quiet, secluded spot, I think. One danger of such a place, says Stephen King, is that you might begin to think that your life serves your writing, rather than the other way around.

But it can't be argued that I, being easily distracted, needed quiet in order to write, I needed to write because I had a monthly deadline, and such quiet was hard to find in this populous household living in an old house with porous walls.

At one point, we had considered carving out a little second-story enclave for me at our seed warehouse, and had actually sketched out plans. Then Paul started dismantling the machine shed by the creek that his grandpa, Orval, had built 70 years before, and we got the idea to build a little writing shed with the lumber.

The logical spot for such a building was across Powerline Road, in that narrow slice of swamp and oaks between the road and Muddy Creek. Of course it was too flood-prone there to build on the ground, so Paul decided to put it on concrete posts, level with the road, up above the 500-year flood plain.

We sketched ideas and drew up plans. If we kept it off-grid and 200 or fewer square feet, we shouldn't need a permit, we were told.

We had no idea what we were in for, and how hideously difficult it would turn out to make such a simple project a reality. Would we even have begun, had we known?

I've often felt, in this process, like Nehemiah building the wall of Jerusalem, beset by relentless harassment and opposition.

The Sanballats and Tobiahs of our lives mostly included the following:

1. The county pencil-pushers who regulate such things. All was going well with the process until one guy with the road department saw that Paul was pouring concrete out there and made a great and noisy protest, all the way up the county ladder. As a result, we needed a permit, and the process dragged out for a full year. We had to get signatures, blueprints from an engineer, permissions, stamps, forms, and other frustrating, detailed requirements.

Just recently, we had the final inspection done. Paul told the county inspector the whole story. The inspector apologized for how hard it was and told him that, just between you and me, that should never have happened to us. It ought to have been a straightforward, perfectly permissible shed. 

2. Life. I knew going into it that work on the cabin would come after Paul had taken care of pastoring at church, principalling at school, and officiating at the warehouse, and other duties.

Neither of us had any idea how many crises those jobs would entail, how exhausted he would be, or how discouraging that half-finished cabin would be for both of us.
One small example that is typical of a hundred: Paul had great plans to work on a back deck for the cabin over spring break last week. Once again he drew diagrams on graph paper and picked out lumber. He had a nephew double check his plans for anchoring the corners.
Then the corona virus hit, and there was a run on animal feed. In the one week of spring break, the warehouse processed and shipped over twice as much as normal: 269 tons of two-grain chicken scratch, organic oats, beet pulp, 5-grain scratch, and more. Paul's employees were working around the clock.
Of course we were grateful for the extra business, but both of us were sad that it meant the one little window of opportunity to build the deck was closed. When spring break was over, Paul spent up to 8 hours a day figuring out the technology for teaching online, in addition to cleaning an extra 500 bags of mousy grass seed, taking care of church stuff from a social distance, and shipping the normal 120 tons of feed.

Were we simply too visionary and unrealistic, starting out? Paul and I both regularly come up with great ideas that bog down in the actual materializing.

Or were we beset by spiritual enemies who didn't want the cabin to fulfil its purposes? Because it often seemed like we were pushing up against something unseen but determinedly oppositional.

I worried that the cabin would be irrelevant by the time it was finally finished, that all the kids would be gone and I'd have a whole quiet 2-story house to write in.

The cabin has now been usable for almost three years, ever since it was built off-site, mostly by my nephew Austin Koehn, and lifted into place. It evolved so gradually since then that I can't really say when it was considered finished by others looking on. To me it has felt like my place of peace and concentration from the day the crane lifted it onto the concrete stilts, even when there was still plastic over the windows and I had to climb an 8-foot stepladder to get inside.

In some ways it may never be finished, because we will always have great ideas for improving it, such as that deck that isn't yet.

Meanwhile, it is truly my sparrow nest in the same way that a little brown bird fluffs her feathers and settles into a warm nest shaped exactly right for her.

I write there, of course. "Writing" includes typing out an article for Vibrant Girl magazine or a chapter of fiction, as you would expect. But I also critique submissions from my writing group, research printing companies, organize my stacks of random notes before they slide sideways onto the floor, prepare talks, coax my stubborn printer, write to young writers who ask me for advice, and answer emails.

In the quiet, ideas bubble up. Distractions are minimal. I show up and associate the space with work, so I work.

Except when I take a nap or watch the ducks in the creek.

The Sparrow Nest has proved equally valuable as a place to talk with people. As mentioned, I was afraid I would no longer need privacy by the time the cabin was finished. As it turns out, we have six adults living here. They are in and out all day long, plus, also as mentioned, our house has porous walls.

But I can have someone over for a private conversation in my cabin. We drink tea and no one can hear what we say. The conversation stays within those old wood walls. I've had sisters-in-law over, neighbors, friends, and my own adult children. I've had guests who needed me to listen and others who listened to me. In the laughter and tears as the sun slants through those old-fashioned windows and across the table, I sense that something good is happening here, valuable enough that it's no wonder we faced such strange and relentless opposition.

During this time of isolation, my vigilant children and Kate Brown the governor won't let me have anyone over. I am so looking forward to more afternoons with tea in the yellow pot and interesting people around the table.

Sometimes, the Sparrow Nest is also a guest room. When our son Matt comes home to visit, he sleeps in the loft.

In many ways, the Sparrow Nest feels like it belongs to everyone. Many have followed the story of its coming to be. It's right by the road, so anyone can see it.

Perhaps that was what made people feel they had the right to show up and see it for themselves. The day I looked up from my computer to see an old man with his face up against the window in the door, peering inside and scaring me half to death, that was the day I realized I had to draw some boundaries.

Naturally, this coincided with a year of finally learning to set boundaries in many other areas of my life. These things always come from all directions, it seems, when it's time for me to learn the next life lesson. Boundaries are what you need as a human person with limited resources. They make you sad, sometimes, and they might upset others, but they are healthy and good.

So now there's a gate across the walkway. Any of you could climb right over it, but it still sends a message.

The gate, like the rail, is made of pipes.

Also, you can come inside for tea only if I invite you, because I've learned, painfully, that that is the best way. A place of peace and rest and imagination requires a degree of protection.

Today, though, I'm inviting you inside, via photos, for a virtual tour while you're staying at home.

Thank you for your interest, and I wish you a similar space of your own, when the time is right.

--

A few facts and specs, as requested by my friend Miriam Iwashige.

The cabin is 12.5 by 16 feet, which keeps it at 200 square feet, the county's limit for a basic shed. That is easily big enough for what we use it for, with the exception of a few Thai dinners for 8 or 10 that Amy served.

The posts are 8 feet high. So far we've had floods that came four or five feet up the posts, but I don't expect a floor-level flood in my lifetime.

Paul put four pieces of rebar into each post, and the engineer said that wasn't enough. So Paul added bracing underneath to compensate. We assume this will keep it safe and standing during the predicted Cascadia earthquake.

The sturdy bracing underneath.

Most of the lumber came from the old shed at the warehouse. All of the corrugated metal on the roof and inside came from the same source.

Certain components in the walls and roof, such as plywood, were purchased new.

It was a lot of work restoring all that wood, but the results are lovely.

We bought the windows at garage sales. If we did it over, we would buy new windows. It was far too much work to redo the glass, the glazing, and the painting. Although I love the results.

The view of Muddy Creek out the back door. We've talked about taming this wilderness,
and last summer our son Ben hacked a path to the creek, but
I'm fond of the overgrown, natural look too.

The back door, which will lead to a little deck, when God wills.

As you can see in the above photo, we heat the cabin with a propane heater. It works quite well, except the heat tends to whisk up to the loft. It helps if I run a small fan.

The plan is to have a propane tank underneath the cabin, with a hose coming inside. 

Sometimes a small electric heater is sufficient.

Which brings us to: electricity. Technically, the cabin is off-grid, but we have found ways to bring electricity to it for lights, my computer, and the electric kettle.

If our system doesn't work long-term, we do have a generator we can hook up.

At least one engineer son has ideas for using the creek to generate power.

Half of the cabin has a loft.
Half does not.
This half has an old light I found, where else?
At a garage sale.

As you can see, I never put curtains over the windows. I love all the natural light, but it also looks bare and doesn't offer privacy if someone sleeps there.

I may decide to hang lace curtains or blinds, someday. Or not.

Ann Lamott says to keep a 1" picture frame in front of you when you're writing.
Tell yourself to write only enough to fill that frame.
Do it again.

The ladder--with pipe rails--leads to the loft.

The ladder slides back and forth on that pipe.
The rails extend on up to make it less treacherous to find your footing,
climbing down.

One of the best decisions I made was to insist on the window above my desk being lower than the others so I could see out while I was working. Paul protested about this, since it wouldn't look right to his carpenter eye.

But I insisted, and I'm so glad I did.

I have a big screen, keyboard, and mouse that all sprout from my laptop. You could come up with more efficient methods, but this works for me.

My desk, which is made of--what else?--reclaimed wood and pipes. The two drawer pieces slide underneath,
or I can pull them out if I need more flat space.

These are the little animals that inspire characters in my stories.

My living room.
The corrugated-metal wainscoting is the same stuff that's on the roof.

 I really like to use heirlooms and items with connection to the past. In the picture above:
My mom crocheted the rugs and made the quilted wall hanging.
Paul's aunt Allene crocheted the afghan that's on the couch, for a wedding gift.
The folded quilt also came from Aunt Allene, more recently, when she had to move to assisted living.
The white blanket on the round chair came from my goodie bag at the ladies' retreat in Texas last October.
The green chair is one of a set of three that belonged to Paul's great-grandmother.
Imagine, all those people and times coming together in one place.

Despite all the things we repurposed or bought used, the whole project cost alarmingly much more than we had expected. I tell Paul periodically that I really feel I need to write a bestseller, just to break even.

He insists that it was worth the price. I needed it for me, and the fact that ministry happens there makes it even more of a good investment.

So I honestly don't know how much it cost, exactly, because I don't want to ask and Paul doesn't want to tell me. I am grateful for Paul's attitude about it, but I'd still feel better, overall, if I wrote a bestseller.

  

Here's my "kitchen."
I haul water from the house to make tea or coffee.
The countertop is an old metal "worktable" top that used to be my mom's.
Paul built the island underneath it 25 years ago when we lived in an old house by
the freeway.
I want to make a nicer curtain for it someday.

With the cabin being by the creek and in a flood zone, there was no way we could meet the requirements for plumbing of any kind. So I haul water out as necessary.

Lacking a bathroom limits overnight guests to the young, adaptable types like Matt.

Once the back deck is built, we might build a little enclosure at one corner with a camping toilet inside. It could be carried to the house to be cleaned.

Here's where we have tea. The table is a wonderful find that I bought
from a woman who used to read my newspaper column.
It can go from very small to very large and seat people comfortably at every stage.
My friend Sharon Coblentz gave me the teacup rack on the wall.

 It is a lovely thing to have a nest, a warm and welcoming space. I wish you one of your own.

Special thanks to everyone who played a part in the Sparrow Nest coming to be:
Paul, first and most
Keith Birky
Kevin Baker
Austin Koehn
Our sons--Matt, Ben, and Steven
Emily, who painted, cleaned, and spackled
Everyone who followed along and encouraged us.

April Blogging Challenge 2020--Post 1--These Hazy Days

My daughter Emily and I are doing the ABC [April Blogging Challenge] again this year. We’ll be posting on alternating weekdays. I plan to post family updates, book reviews, current projects, and random thoughts on Coronavirus--that tsunami that has swept over all of our lives--and we’ll examine bits of debris the wave has washed onto our shores.

In a recent Patreon post, Emily wrote:

The world is strange, and scary, and sometimes I feel like I’m not living in the present at all, but rather a memory. 

I thought that was the best description I’ve heard yet.

Six of us are living in our house right now. Some, working essential jobs, leave the house more than others, but we all distance and isolate. Paul and the kids are especially protective of me, since I have asthma.

So I stay home, and non-family members don’t come into the house.

I’m starting to feel like an elderly person with dementia. I move through the day in a bit of a haze, not  sure what day it is and not quite certain what is now and what is past and future.

The day’s little milestones take on great significance. I believe I will go on a walk now, between rain showers. The mail lady has come! Oh, wonderful--it is time for dinner! And now I must tuck the chickens in for the night.

Yesterday, after two weeks of isolation, I felt vague emotions stirring up mud long settled at the back of my mind. It was like smelling a scent you hadn’t smelled for twenty years, and then you got a whiff and it immediately brought back a memory.

Our first two years in Canada, from 1986 to 1988, were spent at a boarding school way out in the bush. It’s hard to describe the experience of coming from Oregon, with its thousands of people, miles of interconnected highways, and endless places to go, to Stirland Lake.

True, it had a road, so one could drive in and potentially out. But the nearest town was over a hundred miles away.

When you were at Stirland Lake, you were very much THERE. You saw the people in the compound. The same people were your neighbors, co-workers, students, Bible study group, and friends. You played volleyball with them on activity nights, worshipped with them on Sunday, and met them in the lane when you went on a walk.

You couldn’t escape.

If one of them had, say, a whiny voice or maybe a bushy beard growing from the horizontal area under his jaw that everyone knows ought to be shaved, and you found this irritating, you couldn’t conveniently avoid that person and their whiny voice or beard. Especially in the dead of winter, with the cold and the miles all around, pressing you hard into this little pocket of community in the middle of the wilderness, you were very much there to stay and so were they.

I wasn’t particularly irritated at anyone yesterday, although I do at times get provoked at the people I live with, especially when they talk too loudly too early in the day, but I had that same suffocating sense of being very much HERE, in this place, with no place to go, as though the rest of the world were a thousand miles away, and these people in this house were the only people left.

That brought with it another sensation that was both current and memory—a vague longing to go secondhand shopping.

I remember this not only at Stirland Lake but also at Weagamow Lake a few years later and even in Kenya in 2003.  It was like a pregnancy craving for acorn squash—suddenly I longed to poke around a good dusty thrift store like I hadn’t wanted anything in a long time. The knowledge that I couldn't do this made the longing much more intense.

The reservation of Weagamow had over 800 people, and I marveled often at what a blessing it was to live somewhere where there were always new people to get to know. But it was even further north than Stirland, and fly-in only for most of the year, so the sense of isolation was still huge.

I used to dream about trains. Trains symbolized connection. They had come from one place and in my dreams they were going past me to another and yet another, honking their beautiful horns.

I would wake up and, of course, we were still at what felt like the far fringes of the universe, tethered only by the thinnest of threads, and the nearest train was hundreds of miles away.

We live in a farmhouse in Oregon today. I would love to go to garage sales and secondhand shopping, those vague longings in my memory that stir to life in isolation. Even more, I want to have friends over for tea in my cabin. I want to go camping at the coast, hike to a waterfall, visit Aunt Allene at the nursing home, and have a big table full for Sunday dinner. I want to hug the friend who is grieving and hold my friend and neighbor Kayla’s baby.

When those gifts return, I don't think I'll ever forget to appreciate them.

Meanwhile, I deliberately appreciate the gifts of here and now.

We live out in the country, so the landscape is mine to wander across and through, unhindered by snow, cold, or potentially contagious people. I’ve been taking more walks than normal and taking time to really look at sheep in a green field and acorns sprouting in the ditches under the oaks, near the cabin.



The insides of these acorns are a bright red when they split open. How have I never noticed this before?

There are neighborhood pigs and goats to visit.

Cars and trucks still drive by. Sometimes the drivers wave.

And the trains are still running. They sound their beautiful horns in the night as they rumble by on the tracks a quarter mile away. They are coming from somewhere and going somewhere else. The world is still connected.

We are not isolated at the edge of the universe.

Someday this time will be a memory stirred up like the mud at the bottom of Muddy Creek when a gently swimming duck suddenly flaps into flight.

My view of Muddy Creek from a cabin window.
There are two ducks in this picture who inspired the analogy.

But now, right in the hazy middle of it, I want to live it fully, with every possible grace.

The lambs' tongues are blooming.

Blizzard Syndrome and the Current Social Distancing

This morning our daughter Emily said we should make Prune Loaf.

I said, "Yes. We should."

We have a malady known as Blizzard Syndrome, and Blizzard Syndrome calls for Prune Loaf.

Back in 1975, we lived in Minnesota in an older house that didn't have any running water or indoor plumbing. The water came from a pump about a hundred feet from the house. We had an outhouse and also strategic buckets indoors when the weather was nasty.

That January a blizzard blew in. Even for Minnesota, it was extreme-- a storm for the history books. It brought tons of snow, bitter cold, and days of wild wind that, they said, lifted the topsoil off the Dakotas and blew it our way, piling huge drifts of gritty gray snow. We'd wake up in the morning to little drifts of snow on the windowsills that had blown through tiny cracks and crevices. If there was any opening at all, the wind found it.

Mom and us three girls, aged 13 (Rebecca), 12, (me), and 6 (Margaret),  were home alone for most of the blizzard. To stay warm, we curtained off the living room and cranked up the oil stove until the metal cylinder inside glowed red hot. We must have hauled enough water before the storm hit, because there would have been no pumping in that weather. We also had propane for the kitchen stove.

Blizzard Syndrome is a peculiar fidgety agitation that takes possession of the soul when you're stuck inside in a blizzard.

First there's a sense of excitement as you check supplies, watch the gathering storm, and make sure everyone is at a safe place to wait it out. Then, once the storm locks you inside, you pace the floor, look out the window, and call people to see how they're doing, such as your brother Fred who is over at his co-worker's house because he couldn't make it home.

You can't go anywhere. You are stuck here until the danger passes.

None of the normal recreations appeal. You don't feel like reading or playing games or painting your paint-by-number kit, all the things you'd love to do, normally, when there are dishes to wash.

We had a bad case of Blizzard Syndrome.

Finally, I believe it was Mom who suggested we bake something, so Rebecca and I poked around in our cold kitchen , looking for ingredients and leafing through a cookbook.

This isn't the actual recipe, but it was a cookbook from this era.

We didn't have a lot of ingredients to work with, and certainly nothing fancy, because we were poor and also because we were in the process of moving to another house, but we found a recipe for something we could make:Prune Loaf.

Dad liked to eat prunes, so they were kind of a mockable food. But this recipe lifted those humble fruits into something slightly exotic.

We steamed the prunes and mixed a sweet dough, then rolled out the dough and wrapped a circle of it around each prune. We rolled these balls in sugar and stacked them in a baking pan.

And baked the resulting loaf, of course, and proudly served it.

Blizzard Syndrome was staved off for an hour or so, at least.


I look back and think I would have been paralyzed with fear if I'd been Mom. Home alone with three daughters in a cold house, short on supplies and clean water, far from neighbors, and utterly unreachable in an emergency.

Later, she said she'd been most afraid that red-hot oil stove would burn the house down, but she didn't let us know. Instead, she gathered us around on Sunday morning, the third day of the storm, to hold a little church service in the sort-of-warm living room. And, of course, she encouraged us to keep busy.

When the storm passed, we found a door that wasn't drifted shut and went out into a bizarre world where we could walk on top of the hard-packed snow over drifts that were like swirling mountain ranges over the fields and up to the top of the chicken house.

A day or so later, the snow plow pushed through, backing up to take a run at the section in front of our house and piling up snowbanks that turned out to be as high as the school bus, when the school bus finally came again and we scrambled up and over to meet it.

We compared stories with everyone we knew and rejoiced that we had all survived.

And "making Prune Loaf" entered the family lore as a code for doing something about that strange and unique restlessness that hits when danger keeps you at home.

Today our world is restricted by coronavirus. The girls are home from college. Events are cancelled. Restaurants and coffee shops are closed. Paul and Jenny teach via the internet, because there are no children at school. All sorts of plans are indefinitely postponed.

Mostly, we stay home.

We are all feeling a mix of that peculiar fidgety excitement, apprehension, and agitation that takes possession of the soul at such times.

We have Blizzard Syndrome.

It's time for our own COVID-19-Quarantine version of Prune Loaf.

Stories, Soul-searching, and Such

We plan to remodel the downstairs bathroom before Matt and Phoebe's wedding in June.

I'll copy what I posted on Facebook last week:

Condensed version: What is the best, most durable and scrubbable, easiest to care for bathtub material?
Long version: An upcoming wedding makes for a great excuse to repair, replace, replenish, and even remodel.
Twenty years ago, we remodeled the downstairs bathroom before we moved into this house. The tiny bathroom that had served the house for probably fifty years, accessible only through Paul's parents' bedroom[!] remained a bathroom with the same configuration, but we took out the clawfoot tub [foolish foolish!!] and put in a fiberglass tub/shower combo.
We put in a different doorway.
The back porch next to the old bathroom, which had been a rough-hewn laundry room for about a hundred years, that became a bright room with a long counter, two sinks, lots of drawers, a big mirror, about 10,000 watts of light to please the husband, and plenty of room for a crowd of school kids to brush their teeth on a Monday morning.
Well.
In twenty years, the tub is tired, the edges around it are crumbling, the varnish on the cabinets is peeling, and the corners of the room are moldy.
Actually, the whole bathroom looks exhausted.
The wedding and lots of guests are coming.
The time has come.
This means decisions. Decisions about colors, styles, and accessories.
About components that ought to last for thirty years and others that can be easily changed in two.
Most of this falls on me.
It fills me with dread.
So. We begin with the tub. The current fiberglass is a delicate prissy material that gets scummy and dirty but hates to be scrubbed with anything a little bit gritty or effective.
Meanwhile, ten years ago I got a new kitchen sink that seemed as durable as a dump truck--enamel on cast iron after all--but it scratched sickeningly easily, right from the start. I couldn't get a refund because this is considered "normal wear and tear." [Two weeks after we got it, my sister-in-law said, 'I see you decided to get a secondhand sink.'] The injustice of it all.
So. What is the best material for the new tub? Porcelain? Enameled steel? Acrylic? Something else we haven't thought of?
Again: Long-lasting. Scrubbable. Impervious to wear and tear.
Thanks in advance.

Remodeling is a big and potentially overwhelming deal for me. Last week Paul and I went to Jerry's, the enormous home-supply store in Eugene, one evening to look at bathtubs and countertops.

Oddly, there weren't a lot of choices in tubs, but there were hundreds, if not thousands, of options in tile and countertops.

Paul, who is becoming wiser every year, briefly mentioned a few potentials and options, but also spent time not talking so I could think. Well, he maybe got a bit carried away with the big nearsighted red-aproned salesman that one time, but other than that.

Ten years ago, we went shopping at that very same Jerry's for kitchen cupboards and counters, and both Paul and the helpful salesperson talked at me the whole entire time, pointing out the advantages of this and what did I think of that and wouldn't this feature be nice and oh no, I don't want that because it'll be hard to clean.

It felt, as Stephen King says in his wonderful book on writing, that I had had jumper cables attached to my head for two hours, but in the moment I didn't have the skills to put into words why I was losing my mind. Also, I didn't want to tell Paul or the salesperson to JUST STOP TALKING, because that's dramatic and rude, so it all ended with tears and a slow hashing out in the car on the way home of what was going on and what I need and other terrible, dreadful, laborious cracking of the mental walnuts and picking out the meats.

If you're an INFP married to an ESTJ, which is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE personality, these conversations are necessary but oh so exhausting.

BUT. This time we went shopping and Paul didn't talk! I could browse in peace.

See? We are getting somewhere. He knows what I need and is happy to provide it. I have the skills to recognize that I need quiet, and to ask for it.

I was surprised at how many people commented on Facebook that actually we shouldn't get a tub; we should get a roll-in shower. Because [cough] we are getting older and all.

Paul said, and I agreed, "This is a home for a family. If we need a roll-in shower, we're moving to a Daudi Haus*."

Happily, enough people shared their specific experiences that I got a good idea of what we want. There's nothing like the experience of a cleaning lady, a plumber's wife, and others who remodeled their bathrooms and survived.

But I am still open to suggestions.

Speaking of Stephen King: I would never read his novels. Not if you paid me. I hate creepy, dark, horror novels. But his writing how-to and memoir, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, is excellent. I read slowly and underline. I'm not sure how that works.

He is very big on authenticity. The hard-drinking miner isn't going to say, "Oh dearie me," if he hits his thumb with a hammer. So he writes what the guy actually says.

Cussing hasn't been an issue for me in my laborious fiction attempts, because I don't know too many Mennonites who use "bad words." 

I've found, though, that the Mennonite world is full of nervous readers who do not like anything about the culture to be portrayed negatively. At all, in any form. You can be as authentic and real as a rainy day in Oregon, and everyone knows that this is true to life, but they won't be ok with it. We all have difficult people in our lives, if we are anywhere near normal. If we are Mennonite, at least some of those annoying people will also be Mennonite. Also, some of us don't have our acts together. We are discouraged, we talk too much or too little, and we wonder if we were actually at peace with God and man last communion.

But we seem to have a cultural taboo about being realistic about this. I wonder why this is so, because most of us are drawn to people who have a few good honest flaws.

In a story I just started for my writing group, we have two teenage girls and their great-aunt:

“Have you girls thought about teaching the Kindergarten One class?”
Aunt Martha’s shrill voice was right in our ears, startling us both. Allison and I turned from the bulletin board in the church foyer where we’d been inspecting the signup sheet for vacation Bible school teachers.
“Oh hi, Aunt Martha!” Allison said. “We were just talking about maybe signing up. Maybe Jenny could take the littlest class and I could take the next one.”
Aunt Martha tucked her black leather clutch and three Sunday school papers under her left elbow. “Oh, I don’t know. That’s a lot of responsibility for a young person, and the truth is neither of you is very responsible, you know, but we do need teachers.” She chuckled. “I think you two should teach one of the kindergarten classes together! That way, what one forgets, the other one can remember.”
Aunt Martha always made me feel like I was about six years old, trying to be grownup but actually silly and ridiculous. I looked at Allison. She raised her eyebrows just a bit, and the corner of her mouth twitched. I knew she wanted to roll her eyes as badly as I did.
I smiled and patted Aunt Martha’s arm. “We’ll make it a matter of prayer.” If that line didn’t impress her, nothing would.

Now. When you were a teenager, you had an Aunt Martha in your life. I would almost bet money on this.

But if this story ever sees the light of day, I will get letters telling me that I'm bitter and unforgiving toward someone who was an Aunt Martha to me.

Stephen King says he gets this sort of letter all the time when he writes the things that people say and do. He's learned to disregard them.

I was thinking a lot about this oversized fear of accusation if and when I ever publish fiction. I realized it came from a long history of believing that other people get to define me, and whatever they say about me is true.

That is a terrifying way to live.

So I had to make that a matter of prayer, and the Holy Spirit had some things to tell me about who gets to see and define what's in my heart, and who does not.

So between remodeling the bathroom and writing, there is no end of soul-searching and growth.

*a traditional Amish house for grandparents

Musings about Missions and Me

We were nudged toward missions from an early age.

Mom introduced us to missionary biographies such as Through Gates of Splendor and The Triumph of John and Betty Stam. I still remember that glossy black and white picture of the Stams and the story of the baby left in the house while they bravely went to their deaths.

When we didn't appreciate the unusual foods that Mom served and Dad loved, such as corn bread with goat broth, Dad would say, "Oh, but you might be missionaries someday!" In other words, if you can bravely chow down this today, you'll be able to casually pop grubs in your mouth in New Guinea twenty years from now.

Mom had great respect for her friend Bertha who was a missionary in Somalia for many years. Dad taught us Spanish words at the supper table.

Eventually, my sister worked overseas for many years. Paul and I worked with a mission in Canada for eight years, served on the board for a few missions in Mexico, and did short-term work in Thailand and Kenya.

There's no question that missionaries had a revered status in the North American church for hundreds of years. Lucy Maud Montgomery's books mention talks by returned missionaries who were welcomed as honored guests. The Young Pilot magazines of my childhood implied their super-Christian status. In Paul's years at a Wesleyan Methodist college, foreign missionaries would come to speak and urge the students to feel a call to missions.

At some point, however, we got a look behind the honorable aura. The internet and social media facilitated those revelations. We also got to know many missionaries personally and heard their stories. Then there were books and articles by the emotionally abandoned children of missionaries and news stories of the horrific cases of sexual abuse that have come to light in recent years. Finally, there was re-connection with people who were the "natives" we and our fellow missionaries had gone to "reach." We heard stories that made us see the experience through their eyes and sit silent in shock. How were we so blind?

I don't want to be cynical about missions. Sharing the good news of Jesus is a basic tenet of Christianity. God didn't commission a fleet of sky-writing angels to let everyone know. He assumes that people will tell people. If that was God's strategy, we assume it to be the best one.

I've met many missionaries who seem to get it right. They seek anonymity rather than platforms and power, speak the local language like they were born into it, and serve with grace and humility and skill.

This isn't about them.

When I look at our experiences in Canada and also the most notable cases of missions gone wrong, it seems that often things go awry when a system becomes more important than individuals. Not that a system is unnecessary--it makes sense to have mission boards to coordinate, recruit, train, and place missionaries. Imagine each of us, individually, trying to arrange visas, housing, transportation, language learning, donations, and support staff.

Like so many missionaries, we were young and idealistic when we went out into the isolated reaches of northern Ontario to work at a boarding school for high school kids from the northern First Nations reserves. Paul taught science and math classes.

In addition to the culture shock of moving from civilized Oregon to a compound of about 100 people over a hundred miles from the nearest town, I was facing the personal identity shock of being a new mom. Only months before, I had been a college student, involved in all the extracurriculars I could get my hands on--busy, productive, successful, fulfilled.

Now, I was the mom of a fussy, demanding baby who took all my time. While everyone else was busy getting ready for classes to start, I was marching up and down the lane with a crying baby in a stroller. The school needed an English teacher and an advisor for the newspaper. I had to say no. Mothering came first.

I remember feeling troubled, a few months in, about the culture of the school. It seemed we had created a little American Mennonite enclave, and the students were the outsiders. Food, language, dress, rules, consequences, entertainment, concepts of time--"they" were expected to conform to "our" ways.

Some of these things were decided by the leadership of the school, but many were decisions handed down by the mission directors hundreds of miles away. The directors' decisions were increasingly dictated by the churches even farther away who supported them financially. One night, months of frustration resulted in violence as the students attacked structures and staff on campus.

Things got sorted out, sort of, and we were there for a total of two years. Paul enjoyed teaching there, we made lifelong friends, and we both grew up a lot. But I felt that, as a young, inexperienced woman without a specific task on campus, I had no voice to express misgivings or to effect change.

I couldn't budge the system.

An uncomfortable truth is that, in a technical and legal sense at least, we were part of Canada's unspeakably evil residential school system. True, Stirland Lake was probably the last such school, and one of the best. It wasn't an arm of the Catholic or Anglican churches, the students weren't kidnapped off the reserves, and there was no mass grave in the back yard. But Paul and I were part of a school that is on The List, and that is a truth that deserves to be wrestled with.

After that, we spent two years at the mission headquarters, where Paul managed the office, and then we embarked on something very different. A chief on one of the isolated reserves was determined to establish a Christian school in his village. Two other couples had helped to get it going. Could Paul, as an experienced teacher, take over? We said yes.

We lived on that reserve for three years. It was hard, lonely, cold, difficult, inconvenient. . . and wonderful. We were the only family from our mission, so instead of living in a little American Mennonite pod with others like us, we were the anomalies and outsiders, endlessly watched, talked about, and chuckled at. The first year, we had three little children in a tiny little house with no running water. The temperature dropped to 50 below.

But it felt right. We were still under the mission system in terms of finances, emotional support, and transportation, but in most other ways we answered to the chief and the local school board. We did things their way. Promptness wasn't important in that culture, so Paul was flexible with what time the kids showed up at school. Tea was important to them, so Paul fixed a big kettle of Red Rose tea for their morning break. Discipline issues were brought to the parents and the school board and handled according to cultural customs, which were very different from American Mennonite customs.

I stayed home with the children and served countless gallons of hot tea and truckloads of homemade cookies to people who stopped by.

I have no idea if we did any lasting good, and I'm sure we got lots of things wrong. For example, I took pictures of people in the village and let the mission use them in their publications, and I didn't ask the subjects' permission. I regret that. However, I don't think we made heinous blunders that brought trauma or deep loss to anyone, and whatever mistakes we made were ours, not the edict of a faraway supervisor that we felt obligated to obey, despite our misgivings. 

Maybe that's the way to do missions: a system to coordinate and facilitate, but most decisions left to the wisdom and good sense of the people on the ground.

I know there are missionaries who have enough freedom to do lots of damage despite being part of a mission. In the cases I know of, the mission would have had the authority and ability to terminate their service and send them home, but their destructive behavior was allowed to continue for fear that the system itself would be damaged through bad publicity, fewer donations, or work left undone. (Somehow, these rogue missionaries are always the ones who get a lot done without a lot of supervision.)

I still believe in missions as a concept but I'm conflicted about our role in the past and what missioning should look like today. Of course, we look at it from a perspective of years later, knowing all we know now, and of miles away, settled in an American farmhouse.

So I wonder: Is it better to do foreign missions and get some things wrong or to keep farming in Lancaster County or the Willamette Valley and not even make an attempt?

Would it have been better for certain systems or missions never to have begun at all? Do those [in my opinion] poor decisions handed down from high up the ladder, the cultural dominance, the cluelessness, and the times the system took precedence over individual needs and good sense negate any good that was done?

Some of the damage that missions have inflicted is so egregious that absolutely, without a doubt, it would have been better not to ever go anywhere or start anything.

"Meaning well" justifies only so much. After that, "they meant well" or "they had a heart for these people" means nothing.

But then there's "meaning well" with an honest heart. We are called to go and tell, and we go with good intentions. We are fallible beings, sometimes perilously ignorant and naive. We're bound to get some things wrong, but surely if we are walking humbly with God, doing justly and loving mercy, his sovereign kindness will compensate.

Missionaries make lots of decisions in the moment, on the ground, in a foreign culture, with limited information. Those of us observing from 30 years or 10,000 miles away can't fully understand.

However. Surely if we become proud of the system we've built, are too proud of our own culture to learn from another, refuse to adapt or flex, refuse to study methods and history, or use the poverty of another group as an opportunity to exploit and dominate, then we bear the full and terrible responsibility for the results.

In all our online discussions, personal reflections, and refereeing from thirty or a hundred years later, perhaps this quote from Teddy Roosevelt is good to keep in mind, side by side with the caveats in the previous paragraph:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

― Theodore Roosevelt