Getting to Emily's

So it seemed like a good idea to go visit Emily. And to try going to Colorado Springs so I wouldn’t have that long drive from and back to Denver.

I found a nice cheap ticket. It had a strange route, Portland-Minneapolis-Denver, which is kind of like going to Missouri by way of New York, but oh well.

Paul took me to the airport, a rare treat, because usually I drive myself up and park in the long-term lot.

I flew to Minneapolis, which is only two hours from my parents’ place. I texted my brother Marcus to tell him I was kind of in the area. “So close, yet so far away,” he sent back.

Our flight to Colorado Springs was delayed 45 minutes. Then we got on the plane and were soon told there wasn’t enough visibility in the Springs so our flight was rescheduled for the next morning. But, we were assured, we could breeze through security the next morning with our original boarding passes. No need to go back to the Delta counter.

I caught a shuttle to a hotel. It was very nice but I didn’t get much sleep.

The next morning half a dozen of us, all in the same situation, were together in the security line when the stern security guy said no, we absolutely cannot get through on last night’s boarding passes. We all trooped back to Delta. Some bad words were heard. The new boarding passes were procured.

Through security, down to the gate, and yes! The flight would be on time. We got on and settled in.

Oops. Visibility was down to a quarter mile in Colorado Springs. We all had to get off the plane again.

45 minutes later we got back on, as things were clearing in Colorado Springs.

An announcement--"I wish I were making this up, but our computers indicate mechanical problems. We'll need to wait for a technician."

I slept for an hour.

Finally we took off.

The guy next to me talked the entire flight. I did the nice womanly thing of nodding and smiling. I didn't try to talk because he was hard of hearing and people can never hear me on planes anyway.

I got to Colorado and picked up the car that had been left for me, the one with the big blue ribbon on the antenna.

Finally I got to Canon City. Emily said,

Quote of the Day:
"It would have been quicker to drive."

Whitewashing the Fence

I feel like Tom Sawyer.

Remember the episode of whitewashing the fence? It was a hard, tedious job, but Tom made it look like so much fun that his friends were paying him for the privilege of doing it themselves.

So I had this wallpaper border around the top of the kitchen walls that needed to come down. Lisa the niece worked on it last week. She peeled off the vinyl outer layer all around, they she'd spray with water to soak the rest and then scrape it off with a paint scraper.

I started working on the rest a couple of nights ago. Up the stepladder, spray spray spray, down the ladder, wait wait, up the ladder, scrape scrape scrape. Suddenly Jenny showed up. "Oh Mom, can I try that, pleeease? I'll be really careful, I promise. Pleeeease??"

"Welll...[stifle a chuckle]...if you're really really careful..."

Jenny removed about 5 feet of wallpaper. During this time, Steven was at the kitchen table trying to do homework and fussing at her. "Jenny, you're being noisy." "Jenny, that's really distracting."

Last night after supper and dishes I was off doing something else for a while and when I came back to the kitchen, what should my wondering eyes behold but Steven up on the ladder, happily scraping, with bits of paper falling around him like clumps of snow. He is cheerfully finishing the job today as I sit here in comfort and type.

No wonder Tom Sawyer felt so smug.

Quote of the Day:
Me: What do you want for supper?
Ben: Something good that does not have green beans, mushrooms, or tomatoes in it.

Update: The New Kitchen

I wrote some time ago about the marriage-challenging ordeal of going to Jerry's [a huge local home-improvement center] to plan our new kitchen. In a recent comment, someone asked how this project is going.

Answer: moving right along.

We agonized and fiddled and juggled the plans from Jerry's and finally decided they just wouldn't work. If you order cabinets from them, everything comes in standard boxy increments--2-inches this way, 3 inches in height. Or whatever.

Well. We have a kitchen that is almost a hundred years old and pretty small and with no place to expand. And it was, I am convinced, designed by dear great-grandpa Daniel in about 5 minutes' time, without consulting dear Great-grandma Anna. I think Daniel was a practical farmer who wasn't into esthetics or detail. We note the chimney's path from the kitchen on up until it finally emerged from the roof a good number of inches to the south.

Yes, well, the kitchen.

So if you have a kitchen like this it's an exercise in frustration to try to work with standard-size cabinets. Instead, we called on Kevin Baker who is a rising star in the local cabinetry/carpentry field, and he was happy to work with us and all our odd measurements and making sure the one cabinet was deep enough to cover the chimney hole.

Kevin is very detailed and thorough and has come back several times to verify small decisions like the size of the flour/sugar drawers.

I think he's working on building the cabinets as we speak.

Paul and the boys finished tearing out the chimney last Friday, from the attic, down through the boys' room, and down into the kitchen where I suppose the wood cookstove was vented into it for many years.

Taking down an old chimney is an experience all its own. I covered up everything I could with old sheets and closed every door I could, but it was still a big mess of old mortar and fine soot. And worse things like dead birds [which I didn't have to clean up, thankfully] and innumerable mouse and bat droppings that still drop down from the hole like a fine rain when the boys pound around upstairs.

In fact, seeing all these dreadful ancient artifacts made me think that it's no wonder I have asthma and Emily felt so sick in this house. In fact, the wonder is that we aren't all sick.

I suggested we move Emily home, if she can stand the climate again, and have a dawdy haus [Amish grandpa house] out back for her, but Paul said the zoning laws won't let us. Sigh.

So yeah, the kitchen.

The "look" I wanted was like an old but nice farmhouse kitchen, so no stainless steel or granite. We're getting maple cabinets in a simple design, a tiled backsplash, and white appliances. And "pewter" countertops from Lanmark, which is fancier than Formica and half the price of Corian. I had my designing friend Sharon over to help me out, since I knew the "look" and colors I liked but had no idea how to actually implement them. She said the look I want is cottagey-French country---"Provence" to be exact, and she even knows how to pronounce it. A blue/white/yellow look with touches of red. Or, as Sharon says, splashes of red.

We picked out the sink, faucets, fridge, and dishwasher on Monday evening.

Now I need to finish taking the old wallpaper borders down, take the old nails out of the walls, wash the grease off the ceiling, buy the paint, and decide about a regular vs. ceramic-top stove.

Our marriage is surviving. I think I am learning to talk, and Paul is learning to not talk.

Quote of the Day:
Me: (on the phone) I'm in bed with a hideous migraine today.
Emily: I wonder if you have food allergies. Maybe you should get tested too.
Me: Well, it's all hormonal. Twice a month.
Emily: Maybe you should take soy.
Me: My goodness, you're becoming quite the medical expert.
Emily: (chuckle)

Bread on the Waters

19 years ago we moved our little family to Weagamow Lake, a reservation out in the bush of Northwestern Ontario. Paul taught at the Christian school and I tried to survive with 3 little children in a 20x24-foot cabin with no running water.

The next year we moved to a house on the other side of the village. This amazing dwelling had two bedrooms, a beautiful sandy beach out the back door, and RUNNING WATER. Luxury.

Something that came with the house was neighbor children. They just showed up, day after day, and played with our children and ate cookies and taught my kids bad words and acted out all the disturbing stuff they witnessed at home and asked questions and taught me Oji-Cree words and listened to Bible story tapes.

One of these was Bambam, about whom I've written before. Bambam had an older brother named James who also came over an awful lot and, despite some unfortunate episodes, was easier to get along with than his little brother.

Our years in Weagamow taught us, among many other things, that it's really about faithfulness rather than results. Paul, especially, poured his heart and soul into his students and when we met a bunch of them four years after we left, going to high school in the city, found them a sullen and cynical group, seemingly bent on wasting their amazing potential.

We never kept in touch with the younger children who would come over to play, but I had no reason to believe their lives turned out any different.

Then, to my complete surprise, a handful of former students "friended" me on Facebook. And how refreshing to find that they have grown up into nice, responsible people.

Most surprising of all was a request from James, who remembered playing with Matt at our house.

Of course I became his friend, and then I discovered that he was an enthusiastic follower of Jesus and involved in some sort of evangelistic ministry. He posts updates like this: The heart of a wise man fears The Lord and keeps His word in his heart. Lord, that is my desire, my will, my passion. Make me for you
Or this: GOD'S PLAN HAS NO DELAY... GOD'S PLAN IS ALWAYS ON TIME...

I am realistic enough to know this has been God's work and not mine. Yet no cup of water--or oatmeal cookie--given in Jesus' name is wasted.

Yesterday James's update made me laugh, and it made me nostalgic for Weagamow:

IT'S 2 AM HERE IN SOUTHERN ONTARIO AND I AM CRAVING FOR SOME FRIED BANNOCK DIPPED IN MOOSE FAT WITH SOME MOOSE NOSE AND I THINK I COULD SQUEEZE IN SOME BEAVER TAIL... AHHH LOL... I ALSO WANT OUTSIDE TEA ALONG WITH MY PEANUT BUTTER JAR CUP.... LOL... REAL REZZED OUT INDIAN IN DA CITY!!!

Quote of the Day:
"We're the Mennonites! You know who the Mennonites are? They're the cooks!"
--James, playing with Matt on the top bunk, back in 1992 or so

Schnupps in World

There's an interesting article on World magazine's website about the candidates for the Hope
Award for Effective Compassion. One of these is Northern Youth Programs and their founders, Clair and Clara Schnupp. We worked with NYP from 1986 to 1994 so this touched close to home.
Here's the link.

Giftings and Church

It is unfortunate but true that there aren't many slots in the church that fit someone with my giftings. So it is very rewarding when I can do something I'm actually good at.

So we have sewing circle once a month. I'm good at sewing, but we don't sew much at sewing circle. We knot comforters, which I don't mind except I'm not very efficient. And we have a meal together and also provide food for the school kids, which involves fixing food and bringing it from home, which always takes me three times as long as I think it should and involves deciding what to make, which gives me gray hairs.

But overall it's a good experience, really.

Today there were several boxes on the table with stacks of random squares of fabric intended for comforter kits to send overseas. Unfortunately no one quite knew how many of each size it would take to make each kit. So Zelma asked me if I could do some figuring. I sat down and crunched numbers for about half an hour, figuring out, for example, how many 4.5-inch squares it would take, across and down, to make a 28x40 toddler bed quilt. I did this for 3 different sizes of blankets using about ten sizes of blocks, and brought the finished chart home to type up properly.

It was very cool to feel like I was actually doing something I was good at, at sewing circle.

Then there's the prayer chain. For years we had a system like the old "telephone" game, where I called Anne and she called Zelma and she called Jean, etc. etc. Then Paul worked up this system where we call one number, record the message, and it gets sent to every number in church.

It's a wonderful system except for the fact that I end up making a lot of the recorded calls and I was feeling like surely everybody else must be getting as tired of the sound of my voice as I was.

Then Anita pulled me aside one evening and said she just wants me to know that she loves the new prayer chain system and wants to compliment me on how I'm doing, that I'm good at taking what people say and putting it in concise form for everyone else. Now that was encouraging and affirming--that my passion for saying things right and in the fewest words possible actually had a practical use in the church.

I think we should all look for ways that others' gifts can be used in the church, and compliment them when they do.

Quote of the Day:
"Am I the only one that does things like this?"
--Emily, when she sneezed and her chin hit her knee and started bleeding again where she gashed it last week when she fell out of the top bunk at a friend's house when the alarm rang and she thought she was in her bed at home. She also broke a tooth in that fall.

The Joke

Recently I was in a group of people--nice, respectable, Mennonite people--having a nice meal together, and the talk turned to politics, since we all know how we non-political Mennonites love to discuss politics.

All this was fine until suddenly an older gentleman started telling a joke, which was ok until he got to the punch line--"And then we put a n****r from Chicago in the White House and now everybody's looking for work."

People laughed, sort of. I did not. This is major for me, since I have deeply ingrained habits of laughing when people tell a joke, respecting my elders, and not being confrontational. But I couldn't laugh at that joke. I didn't say anything to the gentleman because I always freeze in situations like this and don't thaw out until two days later.

Later, several people in the group came back and apologized to me for laughing.

The episode made me realize several things:

1. We have been very very blessed, since we adopted Steven, with kindness and acceptance and careful choices of words. His color has been such a non-issue that I forget that "race" can be a very big deal.

2. In parts of the country the n-word was for many years a generic term for black people, the same as you called white people white and Mexicans Mexicans, and it's only recently that it became something respectable people don't say. So if an older person uses the term in passing, I can give them grace for that. But to use it in a joke about the President--I don't think so.

3. It is very healing when people come back and apologize. The person who told the joke has not apologized. But I wrote him a letter after my brain thawed. Yes I did.

My Exciting Life

Someone talked to me recently about longing for excitement and wishing their lives weren’t so humdrum and they could go places and do things.

I can’t remember who this was, because I can’t remember much of anything at my age, but that’s ok, because I have been able to stay home for longer in one stretch than I have for the past year, and this makes me happy.

And even when I stay home, my life is very exciting.

This morning I was yanked from a sound sleep by my cell phone ringing. It was Emily. She was crying. Now when you’re a mom and your daughter calls you, very upset, at 4:30 a.m. you imagine in a split second things not lawful to be uttered.

This is what was actually the matter: most of the Knepps were gone and Emily was spending the night with three of the younger children. She was in Jessica’s bed, the top bunk. At 5:30 this morning Jessica’s alarm clock rang so Emily did what we all do when the alarm goes off—she bailed out of bed to turn it off. Since she wasn’t at home like she thought, she fell to the floor with a great jarring jolt. She woke up then.

Emily figured out she was in pain but still in one piece and was going to go back to bed when she realized her hand was wet. She went to the bathroom and saw that a square of skin was missing from her chin.

That’s when she called me.

I mothered and doctored her over the phone and by mid-morning things were much more cheerful even though her jaw and teeth are so sore she can hardly talk or eat.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t go back to sleep after that phone call so I got up and chopped onions and chicken breasts for today’s hot lunch at school. This is getting to be a major production with the school population growing every year. We now have 42 students, which meant that I was making pizza for 50.

(Another mom was bringing dessert; we were both bringing veggies.)

After I got the children off to school I made 2 ½ batches of pizza dough and put it in a huge bowl. Then I got myself ready and carried the stuff out to the Honda, which is Paul’s little old decrepit but reliable warehouse car that gets unbelievable gas mileage.

Meanwhile the dough was rising. Rapidly.

I set off down the road with the bowl of dough in the passenger seat beside me, and when I wasn’t shifting gears I was stabbing and scooping at this huge white ballooning pile of dough with a big wooden spoon, because it was taking on a mutant life of its own and threatening to engulf everything in the car.

At one of the road construction sites on 99 I sat there stabbing and stirring while I waited for the pilot car. I was afraid the policeman that slowly passed in the opposite lane would make inquiries but he didn’t.

It is very exciting to get emergency calls early in the morning and to drive the Honda to school while trying to keep rising dough contained. Who needs mountain climbing or a trip to Vegas? Not me.

Quote of the Day:
“No more two-story beds for me.”
--Emily

Child Training

This week we have a special speaker at church who is teaching every evening on family life and raising children. In a way it seems pointless to go, with our youngest already 10, but I am drawn back because he is very down to earth and sensible and real and often amusing.

This evening he spoke, among other things, about how it isn't necessary to have huge battles about food. I wished I could have heard that when my older kids were little and for some reason I thought if I didn't win these battles they would end up in Sing Sing.

So yeah, this is the downside of Child Training sermons at this age: regrets.

But, as I was telling Shannon of the four lovely little ones this evening, Paul and I floundered around and never quite knew what we were doing, and our kids have turned out better, so far, knock on wood, than those of some of our peers who knew exactly what they were doing, and why, and made us feel like we ought to get our act together, really now, if we could just figure out how.

Sometimes it seems like there's not much logic to parenting and it's a mix of chance and the grace of God.

We also note that people who raised a few easy children tend to do more parenting seminars than those who raised a lot of difficult ones. Just saying. (The current speaker seems to be an exception, having raised six who weren't angels.)

Families are so different from one another. Like: my friend Jane's parents were visiting over the weekend. Jane has a whole raft of brothers, six or so I think, and I remarked to her that her mom looks awfully calm for having raised all those boys. Jane said, "Well, you know, they were all the type that thought before they acted, and I don't think any of them ever had a broken bone."

I thought that was astonishing.

It reinforced my observation that kids are different, families are different, and ours seems to be very different from most others. Like, for example, in how our children solve problems.

Last Sunday we went up to Sheridan, over an hour away, to hear Dr. Chittick, a professor and Creation expert. Jenny took her embroidery along and worked on it on the way up there.

When we got in the van to come home, Jenny hollered from one of the back seats, "Isn't anyone going to sit in the front seat?" (I was actually in the front seat but she meant the front bench seat.)
No one seemed to want to. We asked her why it mattered. She said,

Quote of the Day:
"Because I lost my needle and I was hoping someone would sit on it so I'd know where it was."

Garden Lessons

You may recall that last April or May I made the big decision not to have a garden this year. "It's ok, your garden needs a sabbatical," someone told me. Sounded good to me.

So I didn't have a garden, and I was very curious how I would feel about this come September.

I planted lettuce in the flower bed as per Merle B's suggestion. That worked out very well.

I missed a few things like fresh carrots.

It has actually worked out quite well.

The main things I have learned are:

1. There's more available locally, for a decent price, than I had realized. Or maybe Horse Creek Farms is offering more than they used to. The fancier produce places along River Road have pretty fancy prices so I never bought much there, but the Horse Creek stand up by Lake Creek Drive and Peoria Road has had a lot of variety for a great price. The other day I bought a big bag of little apples, a little bag of big apples, a sack of corn, some tomatoes, a few plums, a green pepper, and I forget what else, enough to require two trips to the car, for less than $12.

2. At this stage of my life, I have more money than time. Certainly this hasn't always been the case, like all the years when I had neither, but it worked out very well this summer to, for instance, buy our corn for freezing from a local farmer rather than grow it ourselves.

3. The Lord has ways of providing. Aunt Orpha called me the other day and said she has all the green beans she needs, and would I like to pick what's left? Sure, I said, expecting enough for a meal or two. This afternoon I went down there to quickly pick it before it started raining and mei zeit, I soon saw I would be there for hours. So I called home and had the children come join me. I just finished the first cannerful and there's enough for at least two more. And then Lisa the niece was here today and brought me a bucket of plums, and a farmer that brought some seed in this year brought Paul a bag of apples and pears.

4. Oregon has such a plethora of fruit that you can cycle them. In Minnesota, if a fruit existed, you picked every bit of it you could find and canned or froze it and then pulled it out for company dinners. You even imported peaches and such from Michigan. So the first summer after I was married I picked, canned, froze, and stored strawberries, blueberries, pie cherries, black cherries, Royal Anne cherries, raspberries, peaches, pears, applesauce, and probably a few other things. Because they grew here, you know. Since then I've learned to put away what's plentiful that year and let the rest go. One year it might be grape juice and green beans, the next applesauce and cherries. The plentiful years have a way of supplying the lean years, kind of like in Egypt with Joseph in charge.

Will I have a garden next year? I don't know.

Quote of the Day:
(while snapping beans today)
Steven and Jenny:
"I got the last word."
"No I did."
"No, I did."
"No, I did."
"Well I had the last word in the bean patch when we were talking about if mushrooms are amazing or horrible."
"No, I had the last word because then Mom told us to be quiet."
"No I did."
"No I did."
Me: Listen, guys, someday you two will be missionaries thousands of miles apart and you will wish so bad you could be together again, snapping beans, so you could say nice things to each other.
Jenny: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!--Oh, Mom, you dream big!