Older Than Jesus

Fiction and Non

2012-02-08T09:30:00.000-05:00

I was talking with Eden the other day about writing and the fire.

She is an accomplished writer. When she was in Kindergarten she wrote a book for her dad, a memoir, as a gift for Father's Day. The plan was originally for it to be forty pages (each page being a chapter) but she settled for twelve, I believe. She went on to write many more books all of which I stacked on top of the bookcase in the hall outside our bedroom. I walked right past it that last morning and I have wished, more than once, that I grabbed them on my way.

The other day I told Eden that someone had asked me to write a short account of the fire but I was having a little trouble.

She sat up straight. "You need to write her back and tell her (the editor) that it's impossible; it's going to be long or nothing at all. It's impossible for it to be short. I was going to write a bookabout it but I decided not to because it’s too long."

"You were going to write a book about the fire? When?" I said.

"In second grade."

"Why didn't you?"

"Cuz in a book you have to write your feelings and all thatstuff, but in a story you don’t have to. It’s just a story, such as: 'Henry held the frog. Henry thought the frog feltnasty.' That’s random, but it’s something."

I agreed. It was.

"In a story," she continued, "you don’t have to say, 'But I was really scared.'

Small Appliances

2012-02-06T07:36:00.000-05:00

The good thing about losing everything is that you get to buy all new stuff.

Surprisingly, this didn't really excite me. I've never been much of a shopper and after the fire I was really clear on how little we needed. I didn't want to rush out and buy a bunch of things. And yet there were little pockets of interest where my mind would go and rub its hands together in gleeful anticipation. One of these was small appliances.

In the kitchen of the house that burned I tried to keep the counters uncluttered. As I planned the new kitchen I thought carefully about my counter real estate. I loved my jadeite green Kitchen Aid stand mixer. My old kitchen was all white and the pop of color was so pretty and cheerful, but I could not find a replacement for my Kitchen Aid. Apparently it was a special Martha Stewart shade only offered through Williams Sonoma for a limited time. If it wasn't going to be a pretty green I decided I wanted the mixer in the pantry.

Waring had a blender in jadeite that was just beautiful but we don't use a blender often, which brought me back to a toaster. I did find a minty green one that was so pricey I would be embarrassed for you to know how much.

I hadn't completely ruled out the blender and there was still the dim hope of finding the stand mixer on ebay, so I just thought about it from time to time. But I was leaning towards the ridiculously expensive toaster.

One day a large box was delivered to our door. It was addressed to Paul and I was so excited I think I called him at work to ask if it was OK for me to open it. He said it was something that he had ordered.

I had an immediate sense of foreboding which was confirmed as soon as I pulled this bad boy out of the box.

Holy Cheese and Crackers, Batman!

It boggled the mind and the senses. You can see that it's a black plastic, two slot toaster with a...is that a GOITER?

Yes, my friends it is.

OK, it's merely a goiter-like plastic appendage and it serves a purpose. That's an egg poacher perched on the right side. See the steam gathering?

Back To Basics is the brand name however, as those illustrations on the side show, this toaster is anything but basic.

Below is Paul with Christopher, last summer. Doesn't he look like a nice man?

He is a nice man.

Doesn't he look like someone who, if he wants to poach an egg in a plastic goiter whilst toasting his bread you should just let him?

Thinking about it that way and looking at his kind and handsome face, I know we should. Especially when I remember that he ordered the toaster within months of someone burning down his house.

This wasn't so clear to me when that plastic monstrosity was taking up half the counter at the rental house and leering at anyone who made the mistake of glancing at it. I need to remind myself that it was my house that someone set on fire as well.

We had all been hurt and PTSD is real, people. And yet, even without PTSD, I think Paul would have been tempted to order that toaster and I, almost certainly, would have pitched a fit.

When Paul came home that night I ranted how I wanted a four slot toaster, maybe a pretty one not this hideous, black plastic, bulbous nosed, two slotted one.

Paul told me I could buy the pretty one, still.

I complained about how much space it took up on our small counter. He said we could store it under the counter in one of the nearly empty cupboards and I realized I was being a jerk and apologized. Paul forgave me, as he has on so many other occasions, bless him. At the new house I found the perfect spot for it in a drawer at the end of the island just above the drawer where the bread and peanut butter and Nutella live. It's almost like it was meant to be.

The kids loved it immediately. Paul makes them egg sandwiches almost every morning before school.

I want to suspend my snap judgments. I need to hold back my visceral disgust with things that intrigue or interest my family. I want to be more curious and open for all our sakes.

Do you have any suggestions?

Building the Story

2012-02-02T11:10:00.001-05:00

Today I'm working on a short account of someone setting fire to our home, of losing everything and rebuilding.

Long time readers and friends might have seen "short account" and registered a red flag.

I hear you. I see it waving too. Short has never been my strong suit and I don't feel ready to summarize the experience. We all know I can write about the fire and of losing everything, but when I think about trying to tell the story cogently and well my brain hurts and I imagine it looking like the picture above.

Because rebuilding was as much of the suffering as the fire, in some ways, I've only begun to mourn. The story of everything isn't finished. I don't know where I am exactly, maybe just breaking ground.

But someone wants me to tell the story. I'm being offered a wonderful opportunity and I don't want to squander it.

Maybe I need to look at this "short account" as a blueprint. I don't have to actually build a house today, just write the plan for what I want it to be.

Spree's End

2012-02-01T16:15:00.001-05:00

Christopher called me from school today. He was on his cell phone which spared me the visceral shot of adrenaline that follows seeing his school on the caller i.d.

"I'm afraid our spree of no homework has ended." This was said abruptly and woefully.

"Oh that's too bad." I said. Personally, I was suffused with relief that I was not speaking with a. his support teacher or b. his assistant Principal.

"...because I have the bad luck of being assigned Civics."

Now here I had a jolt of misgiving. Civics was first semester, as today is the third day of second semester, he has no business having any homework there.

"Did you mean 'Economics'?" I asked.

"No, no I'm not in Geometry," he said, "I'm in fourth hour."

We have these sorts of conversations on the phone, all the time and even face to face. Being hard of hearing stinks. And being fine of hearing whilst conversing with the former ain't no picnic.

"E-CO-NOM-ICS!" I enunciated, "Is that where you have homework?"

"Oh yeah! Yeah!' He said.

"Well you can do that," I said. "I bet you can do that easily. And if you need help I know Dad would love to give it." Economics was Paul's major in college and his life's passion. Economics is not to be confused with finance. I don't have a ready metaphor for the difference, but I'm sure he does. It takes all kinds, right?

"OK, Mom." Christopher said.

"You should probably get back to work, Buddy."

"OK, Mom."

"I love you." I said, "Have a great afternoon."

"OK. I love you too."

I have expended more adrenaline raising this kid than...I don't have the strength to make an apt comparison and my sleep debt probably rivals what the U.S. owes the Chinese and, I'm thankful to remember, it's worth every ounce, every minute. He is. Worth it.

Pug Lovers

2012-01-31T15:38:00.000-05:00

This is unprecedented.

Up until last week Oliver would not be separated from Eden.

It's like he read her Pug List and knew "That girl belongs to me."

We got him January 1 and rarely have they been parted. If she happened to leave him, God help the person who was dog sitting. Until we know he is trustworthy in the house, we're keeping a very close eye on him or putting him in his kennel. Since he sounds like a tree frog being strangled when we do, we try to limit his time there to when we're gone.

But last week something shifted. I don't know why, if it's that he's starting to feel at home, but Lydia watched him on Wednesday when Eden and Christopher and I went to the museum and he and Jack slept on her bed while she studied and then Sunday I had him when everyone else was scattered hither and yon.

Pugs snore and snort. They are wonderfully ridiculous dogs. A dear friend of ours has family with pugs. His brother tells him, "You can't believe how relaxing it is to have a snoring pug sleep against you."

The brother is right.

Schooled

2012-01-23T15:32:00.000-05:00

The other day Eden began to tell me a story. I was working on something, but I looked up to give her my attention and then shut the screen to make sure she understood I wasn't just waiting for her to finish, but interested and truly listening.

Eden is almost nine. She is tall for her age and precocious, but she's still a little girl and our baby. I love hearing what she has to say.

We were sitting in club chairs that had been shoved together so they were side by side, with only the two arms between us. Eden was cuddling up under a throw blanket. She patted the arms of the chairs, "I like it when the chairs are like this."

Normally they are slightly apart but angled, convivially, towards each other.

"Why do you like it?" I asked.

"I like that we're so close together and if I'm literally under the blanket, I can creep over the hump, like a hump on the road."

When she said "literally" it was like a dagger to my brain.

I know that most of what children learn is "caught" rather than taught, but I guarantee this child did not catch the improper usage of "literally" from me.

Teachable moment.

"Do you know what literally means?" I asked.

She didn't.

"When you said that you were 'literally' under the blanket, did you mean that you were completely under it?"

She nodded.

"OK, when you say something literally happened you are saying that something, which is usually a play on words, actually happened. For example, An appropriate usage would be when I described Phoebe, Miss Lorilee's daughter, as 'a firestarter, literally' because firestarter is a nickname for a mischievous person and Phoebe has actually started some things on fire."

"She has! What?"

"I can't remember. I think she burned a sponge in the microwave and then, if I'm not mistaken, there was an incident with the toaster oven."

Eden was impressed.

"Now an improper usage would be if I said 'My head literally exploded.' I would probably mean that I was thinking so much, that I got overwhelmed, but if my head actually exploded I wouldn't be able to tell you, right? Most of the time people use it inappropriately when they are trying to emphasize the experience they are describing."

I looked at her expectantly. This was good stuff.

She got up, "OK Mom, this isn't writing class." And then she walked away.

The next day I remembered the conversation and something occurred to me, "Eden, you know how you told me that you like the chairs when they're close together? Were you saying you liked to get under the blanket and then crawl over the arms to cuddle with me?"

She was.

Ugh.

I hate that I can be listening and fully engaged and, still, completely miss my child.

I picked up Eden and hugged her and told her I was sorry.

So it was a teachable moment for me too.

Breathe 2012

2012-01-21T15:07:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned before that I'm a member of a writer's group called The Guild. Long time readers know that we host an annual writer's conference called Breathe. My friend, Andrew, blogged about planning for next year's conference and I liked how he compared it to writing in general.

Here's the link to Andrew's post.

Because I owe you a laugh

2012-01-18T16:03:00.001-05:00

Recently I noticed that I have more than 250 posts in draft on this blog. There are several reasons: I've been blogging since 2005; follow through has never been my strength; every day for over a year I felt like someone hit me on the head with a shovel.

Some drafts are a few sentences, some pages. The snippet below was written in June of 2006. It gives you a peek at our life then and my silly brother, Tanner.

It's been a busy week.

The kids are involved in a fine arts camp at church. Christopher is in the percussion class and Lydia is learning hip hop dance.

When I told my brother, Tanner, this he asked, "What are they going to teach her? Once she has shaking her butt at the audience down is there anything else to know?"

The picture is unrelated, but sweet.

Home and Not

2012-01-17T13:03:00.000-05:00

This post was written in late August. I never finished it, but it gives a glimpse of the strangeness of going home.

We are back in the new house.

It's strange to think of being back in a place that's entirely new. It's strange to be here.

It doesn't feel like home.

"Oh you'll put your stamp on it." A friend said.

She's right, we will and the thing about losing almost all your possessions is that, temporarily at least, your stamp is taken away. I have told you again and again that losing everything was not the suffering and we all know, in theory any way, that things are only stuff. Yet they have their place and one of those is familiarity.

I couldn't understand this until I moved into the house. Now I realize that, in some strange way, I have been in a bubble of waiting, of transition, a little like taking a long trip, but now we're back and part of me expected to truly come home.

Does this make sense?

A couple weeks ago Paul and I were walking with Eden and she started to cry.

"I don't like the new house. It's so clean and perfect. I want our old wonky house. I found some thing new there every day! Why did you have to change it? Why couldn't you build it just like the old one?"

The new house is ten times (a conservative estimate) nicer than the old one, but I knew exactly what she meant.

"And I don't like our family now! We use bad words and we never listen to music anymore like when we use to dance in the living room!"

I was crying now too and we stopped walking. I picked her up but couldn't hold her long, because she has grown so long and heavy. I motioned for Paul to come close and we held her together.

New Growth

2012-01-16T14:09:00.000-05:00

It's a peculiar experience walking through the ruins of your home.

This is the floor of my study about two months after the fire. It was one of the rooms on the first floor hardest hit. The roof burned away and the ceiling was on the floor. The knotty pine paneling had been charred or eaten away by flames, but so many parts of the room were intact, almost burned beyond recognition, but there still.

The weeks before the fire I was working on a book proposal. In the ruins you could see books I was referencing as well as pieces of a friend's proposal I was using as a model. It was so strange to stand in that room, that no longer had a roof and walls, but to see paper that survived.

I had the study one week. We had shuffled around the bedrooms to create room for it. The girls moved in together and Paul and I traded with them, moving into a smaller room that had been Lydia's and changed Eden's into the study. All the bedrooms we redid, repainting the walls and replacing the floors. Everything was fresh and new. The week before the fire Paul and my brother-in-law, David moved in my old oak desk, that was a little too big, but I was using until I found something I liked better. Days before the fire they moved in the sofa that I knew would be a place for Paul and some of the kids to lounge.

The day before the fire I was planning the bookshelves for the hundreds of books that were stacked in the hall and dining room, waiting to move in.

There is a small study, also on the northwest corner of the new house. Since we moved it has been the dumping ground of all our records, supplies for Eden's home school and everything related to the build. A few months ago I made some semblance of order but during the holidays it became the gift staging area and a new mess.

One of my excuses is that I have been homeschooling Eden and need to find a desk or table big enough for both of us to sit beside each other. I haven't found one that pleased me, so we've been doing school at the island or the couch, which is fine, but we're constantly schlepping her books and notebooks around.

Today was the breaking point. It wasn't dramatic, I just hit a wall. I'm working on a new project which means a new proposal and I need to spread out some papers and make room for a stack of books. I need a desk. I have a small, antique library desk that my brother-in-law lent me, but it's not comfortable and doesn't afford a lot of space.

Never mind that.

I cleared it off and Christopher helped me move it in front of a window. There are still baskets full of records that need to be sorted and piles of papers too, but this is it. I'm claiming this space. I'm writing in and through the mess.

In the Deep

2012-01-13T13:47:00.000-05:00

For so many of us, our lives skim the surface. We're busy with the day to day, caught up in the rhythms of normalcy and (depressives, philosophers and poets excluded) we don't ponder what lies beneath.

And then, without warning, the world cracks open and we or someone we know slips into the chasm of what cannot be, what should not be, but is.

Before June 27, 2010 I lived in a world where no one could burn my house down, where my house couldn't burn, period.

In my world you could get cancer as a child, someone could embezzle all your family's money and you might need to quit school to help out, a parent could take his own life, another could die far too young after a long, excruciating illness and, despite a million prayers for health and wholeness, you could have a child with a multiplicity of challenges and needs. All of these things have happened to Paul and to me.

There is a tension in suffering. There is a stress in its very existence, even if it's not my own cup of sorrow. When something terrible happens to someone I know, for a moment, this terrible thing becomes possible in my world too. And that's scary. For a time the veil is rent and we see the fragility of life, we face our mortality and - worse yet - the vulnerability of our loved ones.

When something terrible happens, perhaps it's more like part of a continent breaks away and those affected are bobbing on a little island of tragedy In suffering it can be so easy to feel adrift in your circumstances.

The things we say and what we do for those in need should be a bridge to keep them connected, but too often we say things, to cover our own discomfort and to distance ourselves from the pain and then it's only about us and not the person in need.

What We Don't Say

2012-01-06T08:11:00.000-05:00

I am inviting you into a big conversation. I want to talk about how we support each other, and how we fail. It's embarrassing, because we are all, or have been at one time (or fifty) stupid people with good intentions.

I will be telling you several of my own cringe inducing stories including my ridiculous responses to others' heartbreaks and, sadly, I was trying so hard to do and say the right thing.

It's a big conversation. And I really want it to be a conversation, if any of you are willing. Through a series of difficult experiences I have been given a strange education in how to be supportive in various hard times but I am not an expert and we're talking about people so it's going to be subjective anyway.

Yesterday I said, in most cases, nothing needs to be said in the face of suffering. I intended to say more and decided to save it for another time, so I realize now I did say something I didn't intend, by not saying it fully. A friend commented:

All of us can use encouragement at one time or another. If it's someone you don't know intimately, it's hard to know how to give encouragement so that it won't be taken amiss. We struggled with infertility for a number of years. Lots of friends and family meant well...but their words to us didn't always mean what they hoped it would. They tried because they knew we were struggling. I would have been disappointed had they not even tried to encourage us.

Jeremy is so gracious, "...their words didn't always mean what they hoped..."

I can imagine.

And he makes an important point. A friend of mine was devastated when a close, close friend said NOTHING after the death of my friend's father. She kept waiting and it really became a big thing for her that her friend said NOTHING.

So there are errors of omission and commission.

And I really hesitate to say errors, because that just sets up the whole performance aspect and I want to deactivate that bomb. And yet that desire is really at the heart of it.

So I want to talk about intentions. I am being charitable when I say "good intentions" since my assertion is that, many times, our intentions aren't good enough. Mine too, which is where the humiliating stories come in and you can see what I thought my intentions were, the actions I took and what I know now. Blech.

Ultimately it isn't about what we say or even what we do. It's how we are.

When my father died, one of my sister's school friends dropped off a meal for our family. When I came to the door, he handed me the food and we briefly spoke. I don't remember what he said or what he brought us. I can't tell you if he actually articulated, "I am so sorry for your loss" but everything about him did. And I've never forgotten that.

What We Say

2012-01-05T21:22:00.000-05:00

If you read yesterday's post you might be thinking, "But Alison I know the parents of a child with special needs and they are amazing and, when the child was diagnosed, I did think 'If anyone can handle this...' and I told them and they thanked me. So there!"

You know what? Before Christopher, I said it to another couple whose first child has Down's Syndrome, and it was so true: they are amazing and the mother taught children with Down's syndrome, as had her mother before her, I mean seriously, this woman had training and experience. If there was anyone who could handle a child with challenges...but when it was said to me, over and over again it wasn't a comfort, it just felt like pressure.

This is what we need to ask ourselves before we speak to someone going through something: what are we really trying to say?

"I have so much respect for you."

"You're a wonderful mother."

"I admire you."

Back up. What we need to ask ourselves first: does anything need to be said at all?

I'm here to tell you, most cases, it doesn't.

What do you think?

More Fire Etiquette

2012-01-05T20:49:00.000-05:00

On another occasion I divided the people who gather to help after a tragedy: "those you are glad they have rushed to your aid and those you would rather remained home...the first group are all a variety of heroes and champs, but the second group can be further broken down into stupid people with good intentions and the gaggle of morons, dopes and jugheads."

Oh Lord, spare us the stupid people with good intentions!

I actually prayed this when my father was dying his long and terrible death. If anyone told me he was in a better place I didn't know how I could resist throwing a punch and I didn't want to be brawling at my father's funeral.

Having a child with special needs had laid me open to the SPWGI. My tactic then was to just shake my head and with it try to shake off the ridiculous things that were said. I was merciful because I was reminded of the stupid things I had said, with the BEST of intentions to others.

Tip #1: if someone you know has received a challenging diagnosis for a child don't say "If any mother/father/parents can handle this, you (two) can!" Just trust me, don't. It isn't helpful.

A couple weeks ago I attended Paul's work Christmas party and we had a great time. Paul works with some really wonderful people. We stayed almost until the end. Most of our friends had left, but one couple, Rick and Jane remained. Paul and Rick were talking with another co-worker and Jane and I were chatting on our own. Their children are grown and I like to pick Jane's brain. A third woman sidled up to us and gestured at the men.

"My husband has those guys cornered and I've been looking around, figuring there has to be a couple women stranded like I am." Jane and I stood politely listening. You know when you are interrupted and caught off guard and don't know exactly what another person is going to do? There is that suspension of animation and the underlying tension as you don't know what's coming next.

"May I join you?" This woman asked.

Of course, of course. Jane and I both smiled and turned slightly to open ourselves. The woman leaned forward and touched Jane's arm, "I'm so sorry about your house...about the fire."

It's subtle, but something in Jane relaxed and I stood at attention. This was mine. Crap.

"That was my house." I said.

The woman shifted to face me. "Oh my gosh! My kids and I drive by your house all the time and the first time we saw it - oh my gosh - they were so upset! It was unbelievable! Terrible!"

I can't tell you how many people have told me, in detail, the trauma of seeing our house. This has been a long hard road and some time last Spring, for the sake of my children, I stopped suffering fools. If my kids were with me, I cut people off.

It was just me, so I listened, but I wasn't leaning in. I stayed open, but I wasn't going to make it easy, I wasn't going to play along, if that makes any sense. I wasn't going to accommodate, but I listened.

Apparently, our fire had been very traumatic for her four, young children. All of them were very concerned for my kids and, at various times, our situation was discussed and they prayed for us.

"I don't think you can know how far reaching this was for so many other families." The woman said and I agreed.

She described how talking about my children losing all their belongings had enabled her family to talk about possessions and priorities and more than once she used our fire to shame her kids into gratitude.

"So it's sort of a silver lining, I hope, to your tragedy, how far and deeply it touched others."

Tip #2: You get to define your own silver linings; don't interpret them for others.

I told her that this can be redemptive and asked her to thank her children for praying and to please continue.

The truth is we are connected and we can be deeply affected by and learn profound things through the suffering of strangers, but here's the thing: if it's not your gig, keep it under your lid...or at least wait until you're sober to share.

Two Black Dogs

2012-01-05T15:45:00.001-05:00

Mactography, not at it's finest, but at hand. The two dogs have been peaceful, but not overly friendly. Oliver snuggling next to Jack here is a little more like we imagined it might be. Hopefully more to follow.

O Happy Day!

2012-01-03T15:00:00.000-05:00

I'm sick today and recovering from a fall so this will be short.

I just wanted to let you see the face of longing fulfilled.

Here she is looking up the number for our vet to schedule Oliver's first appointment. She spoke to the receptionist herself right up until we got to the calendar. The receptionist was impressed and touched.

Forgive the quality of the photos. There have been more than a few Mactography sessions. I know Oliver looks quite mournful here, but he's a cheerful little guy, unless you separate him from his happy girl.

Oliver

2012-01-01T20:49:00.000-05:00

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.

Proverbs 13:2

Blessed are those who mourn Part 2 or How to stop worrying and start being comforted

2011-12-28T10:26:00.000-05:00

You might be wondering, "What does Alison being a crappy scrap-booker have to do with her dead father?"

Stay with me.

A light came on when I realized, dead, my dad knew exactly how to live and I prayed that I would inherit his perspective.

The next day I happened to glance at the menacing pile of pictures beside my desk and braced myself for the visceral wince of stress and shame. I was surprised to notice I didn't feel a thing. This thought flared through my mind, "I'm raising these children for eternity!" And just.like.that I was over more than seven years of angst.

I had known forever that I didn't enjoy scrap-booking, but I finally understood it didn't matter and removed it from the ledger accounting my worthiness as a mother, really, it just fell away. At the same time, I became clear and confident about what I do have to offer my children: a passion for reading, an excellent vocabulary and a wicked sense of humor.

"That's what I bring to the table." I told a friend.

"And will your kids, be carrying their baby books into job interviews some day?" She asked.

No, excellent point.

Here's the kicker: even if I had toiled over three baby books and a library of photo albums, they would have burned the day someone set my house on fire.

Who knew?

From my epiphany to the fire was another seven years, almost to the day, and I am so glad I didn't squander them worrying about something I would eventually lose.

Can you understand how liberating this is?

I want this freedom, this eternal perspective if you will, to suffuse every day of the rest of my life.

Blessed are those who mourn

2011-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

I was terrible with baby books.

I dutifully bought beautiful and traditional ones for Christopher and Lydia and erratically filled them out, but not in my real voice. It was like I channelled an extremely loving and unstintingly cheerful lady, with no sense of humor and that's not me.

By the time I got to Eden, I used a lovely journal made of handmade paper that someone gave. I slipped pictures in it and starting writing when I was pregnant with her and continued after her birth. Again with the erratic entries but the voice was my own.

I'd rather not tell you about the photo albums.

Only Christopher had one and it concluded at his first birthday. I bought some really lovely pages for Lydia, but that was as far as I got. I wondered if I was stylistically challenged. I didn't like the many scrapbooks that were available so I went and bought a stack of rigid spiral bound albums with black, acid free pages. I made one book about Paul's trip to Japan to visit me before we became engaged. It was really beautiful, but I never did anything for the kids with those books.

I continued to take pictures of all the children and carefully stored the prints in photo safe boxes. And they sat in a corner of my living room, why I don't know, perhaps to be at the ready in case a fit of scrap booking hit me. Their presence caused me duress and shame. It was one of the many monkeys on my back and a tightness in my chest. This was ridiculous for any mother to feel, but especially for me.

My oldest, our son Christopher, was born profoundly deaf and with a multitude of other challenges that affected us every single day. I had bigger fish to fry, but here's the truth: deep down I believed his impairments were my fault. I had failed, so I wanted to make it up in any and every way I could, even if I couldn't, I knew I should.

That was a lie, but it was my truth for the longest time.

My father died when Christopher and Lydia were seven and five years respectively and Eden was five months old. I had so many regrets, so many opportunities had passed through my hands and his. I was so angry with him for not facing things, for ignoring his health, for leaving my mother nearly destitute. I was angry he hadn't taught me how to die in peace and hope.

It was the first time in my life I was completely and utterly bereft. There was nothing in me to summon to make it OK. It was not OK and I was empty of everything except for grief and rage.

"Blessed are those who mourn" Jesus said, "for they will be comforted."

"Go for it." I said because I couldn't comfort myself.

My brother, Tanner, remembered the proverb "A good man leaves an inheritance for his children's children."

This brought a fresh sorrow. My father had left his four children nothing, forget about our kids.

I worried this thought for a day: "He left us no inheritance." This was like a sword in my heart. For so long my dad had ceased to be fatherly to us, to look out for and take care of us. I thought about it and it felt so heavy and sad. I had committed to mourn this, but I didn't really know exactly what that meant. I knew how to minimize things and then be bitter, but I'd never purely mourned a thing.

So I prayed in way that was a lot of talking out loud. "I'm so sad my dad is dead. I'm angry he didn't do a better job. I wish my children had a grandfather. I'm mad Dad gave up." And on and on. The thought of "a good man leaving an inheritance" returned to me again and again. My dad was, in so many ways, a good man who had been overcome by the cares and stresses of this world.

And then it occurred to me that in death, my father knew how to live.

To Be Continued...

Darkness and Light...Again

2011-12-24T14:26:00.000-05:00

Today my sister and I were finalizing this evening's plans. Originally she wanted to attend her church's Christmas Eve service and invited our family to join them. I thought it was probably too late and tried to remember the last Christmas Eve service we attended. It was a moment before it came to me and then I started to laugh. I wrote a post about it in January 2006. Christopher, Lydia and Eden were 9, 7, and 2 then. Here it is again:

New Year's Day we arrived at church in plenty of time for us to drop off Eden at the nursery, to escort Lydia to Sunday school, to deliver a lecture to Christopher on our expectations of his personal conduct during the service and to find seats where we like to sit. We even got a good parking spot. I walked calmly into church, relishing the peace and unharried pace. And then I noticed the darkness.

The power was out.

The nursery coordinator was at the front door when we approached. She had a sheepish look on her face as she informed us that all of the children's programs were cancelled.

My shoulders slumped for a moment and then I rallied, telling myself it would be good to be together and welcome the new year together with our church family.

The thing is, the last time I was in church was on Christmas Eve. Paul was singing with the worship team and I was up front with all three kids having decided not to put Eden in nursery because I wanted us to be together to sing and celebrate Christ's birth: that was my first mistake.

The second was nodding a cheerfully when Eden asked if she could wave a flag. Lydia hustled off to get it for her. It was purple and 3 x 4 feet. The pole was taller than Eden, but she grabbed it and began swinging it with all her might. I managed her and noted the only people near us were smiling and enjoying her spirit. The rest of the congregation were filling the left side of the church, as had I until we stepped out to wave a flag. Now I was in the front row of an empty section, affording the rest of the congregation an excellent view.

My third mistake was again nodding, when CHRISTOPHER stepped across the aisle and pointed to the pile of flags. Actually it was probably my fourth, because I think my first mistake was wearing low rise pants that are too loose for me. I came to terms with this whilst I bent over to moderate toddler flag waving in the front row of my very own half of the church.

This was my routine: hold the flag, pull down my shirt, hitch up my pants, glance over at Christopher, correct Christopher with subtle gestures, grab Christopher gently and lovingly because it's Christmas and we are in the front row, and that's the right thing to do always - 0h dear! PULL DOWN SHIRT, HITCH PANTS...so church on Christmas Eve was a little exhausting. Normally it is a fairly small, candle lit service. Half the church was packed and the lights were bright and harsh. The sermon was good, but seemed long from where I heard it at the back after running Eden for an emergency potty session then checking her into the nursery.

I waited there until prayer and then the closing song when I hustled back into my seat just in time to catch some sort of exchange between Christopher and my mom where he was not adequately respectful and she seemed to just leave him in it. I slid next to him and tapped him on the shoulder, he jerked away and then I pulled him onto my lap holding him tightly. It was so frustrating. I might have had 5 billion extra hormones surging through my system and so began to cry. As did Christopher. We sat there, tears streaming down our faces, me clutching him in a vice grip needing to hitch my pants again, having those, "I am a terrible mother and he is a terrible child and why oh why can't it EVER be different - we need to start sitting in the back of the church" thoughts while Christopher tried to wiggle free and seemed to be having the "She is a terrible mother and LIFE IS UNFAIR!" thoughts, while everyone around us sang "Joy to the World."

At home, everyone apologized and forgave and talked things through and cried a little more before the children opened a small gift and then went to bed.

Christmas day we all awoke with runny noses and opted to stay home from church.

So New Year's Day we found ourselves sitting in a darkened church, without any power, again in the second row, but this time it was peaceful.

The music began and though we couldn't hear the singers as well and didn't have the words, we sang along just fine. And though the leader had to bend close to a candle to read scripture, we heard it clearly.

Our pastor came forward and was going to pray but paused and said, "The childrens' programs were cancelled today so if you find yourself distracted by some of the extra sounds during the service I encourage you to thank God for it and take that time to pray a blessing on the children."

Something in me I didn't know was there lifted. And then he prayed.

It was a good prayer, a prayer of repentance asking for forgiveness for ways we have shut out God and minimized Him, for ways we have sinned against Him. Pastor Dave was using the Ten Commandments as the guide in his prayer. He asked God to forgive us for making Him smaller and for putting other idols before him

And then the lights came on.

Pastor Dave just kept praying but I couldn't help but note that the light returned the moment he repented for worshipping idols. I have spent the last couple of days thinking about what I put before God and it's a long list.

****************************************************

When I wrote this originally in early 2006 I decided that the idols I worship could all be categorized under "My Feelings" and then I went on to explain where that had gotten me. You can skip down to the original conclusion here.

But truly the main idol in my life, since Christopher's birth, has been The Good Mother.

I would pay any price to appear to be a good mom even, at times, at the cost of actually being one.

For so many years I tried to protect the world from Christopher as if he was an invasion or disease. And until my pastor's encouragement to welcome and bless the noise that accompanies most children it had never occurred to me that anyone who gets het up by a kid who clearly has some special needs, might be the one requiring correction before the quirky kid himself.

Am I the only one who finds it difficult to navigate the line between being a good mother and an angst-ridden control freak?

Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."

What if I didn't worry so much and focused on staying out of the way of the relationship Christ already has with my children?

How did I dare to even try to shoulder the weight of this wondrous boy and his sisters on my own?

God forgive me for hindering you and them.

I'm going to stop hindering and running and trying to lift what no one ever asked me to carry. This is the lesson I keep learning, the commitment I keep making.

Christopher means "Christ Bearer" and all this kid has done since the day he was born is bring Christ closer to me.

"Bring it!" is a verbal challenge, but I say it in peaceful surrender.

Bring Him.

Carry Him to me, again.

Merry Christmas

Keeping it Simple-ish

2011-12-22T14:36:00.000-05:00

One of the good things about having someone burn down your house is that it gives one an appreciation for home. This is our first Christmas back in the new house.

Thanks to my friend Jane who, a couple days after the fire, asked my sister and brother-in-law to climb in the rafters of the wreckage to look for our ornaments. (I don't recommend this unless, like us, you have relatives who are equal parts dare devil and mountain goat.) Astonishingly the Rubbermaid totes, tucked in the eaves of the side of the attic that remained, survived. They were melted a bit and suffused with smoke but we were able to salvage a few of our Christmas things including all of the kids' "Baby's First Christmas" ornaments.

Christopher

Lydia

And Eden in the little tree at the bottom.

Every year we do a candy advent calendar for the kids. Of course we lost ours in the fire and I didn't manage to replace it last year. When I hadn't found one by Thanksgiving this year, Eden started cracking the whip. The paper one to the right is the one she and Paul found the evening of November 30th. I picked up this cute little gingerbread house a few weeks ago at Kohl's that has room for her older brother and sister to have a little treat too and she gets to double dip.

You would never know we lost almost all our decorations a year ago. Some things did survive and I did go into major replacement before last Christmas, and then my mom, who makes Martha Stewart

look like a slacker, downsized and now it's as if Christmas threw up in my living room. It's a little hard to see from this picture but there's a flash mob in front of the creche. The other bookcase is equally burdened with miniature houses and trees that I just set there after Eden emptied all our Christmas boxes onto the floor the day we got the tree. I'm going to pack up everything on these shelves and reassess next year.

Sorting through my mom's things, I can across a bag of mirrored spheres. I don't usually have plates of bowls of decorative things on the table, but miniature disco balls need to be displayed. They catch the light and reflect it all over the ceiling.

It's a simple delight.

The Guild Reads

2011-12-19T15:14:00.002-05:00

I am the grateful member of a writer's group called "The Guild". The founding members named it with tongues in cheeks as a rif on traditional Ladies' guilds which practice the more domestic arts.

We meet monthly and try to have at least one retreat annually (We're overdue, Ladies!). In December we have a little party called the "Christmas Tea" despite the fact that it's always in the evening and tea is never served.

Who hosts shifts from year to year, but what remains unchanging is good food and great books. We always have potluck and a gift exchange that is entirely, and appropriately, books. We draw numbers and choose in order, with the next Guilder having the option to steal or choose another. As we gather before the pile of wrapped books it's the closest I ever get to that feeling I had as a child on Christmas morning. I almost always find myself clapping involuntarily.

Every year I carefully choose the book I give. It's a point of pride that I introduced the group to Dodie Smith's (the writer of "One Hundred and One Dalmations") "I Capture the Castle". Another year I gave the Penguin Classic edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford" another year I found a hardcover of the first American edition of "I Capture the Castle" and gave that.

This year I am hosting. The party is tomorrow night and I can't wait. I thought I had everything ready to go, nothing requiring a last minute trip to the store, when it occurred to me that I haven't yet bought or even decided on my book.

!!!

I've flatlined and need some help.

Normally, I would look on my own shelves for inspiration, but my personal library has been adversely affected by arson.

What's a great book you would recommend?

* Image borrowed from Jana Riess' post on holiday books which I am going to re-peruse for some ideas.

2011-12-16T16:31:00.002-05:00

I rarely complain about the things we lost.

It has been interesting to notice what I miss, the - some times surprising- things I have mourned and, at times, with anger. This week it was my wardrobe.

I am not a fashionista. I clapped my hands when I realized that Christopher had outgrown the slew of hoodies I bought him last winter. It's safe to say that a woman who gleefully inherits her teenage boy's hand me downs is no clothes horse.

When I say I mourned my wardrobe this week, it wasn't really the clothes I missed, it was all that shopping I had done, and now need to do again. My wardrobe was small, but I had everything I needed.

This came home to me this month as I contemplated Paul's departmental Christmas party. I had nothing to wear. And, unlike those of you who say that in front of loaded closets, I really mean it. The invitation explicitly stated no jeans, which is all I got. I do own a pair of dress pants, but they were a donation after the fire that I kept, despite the imperfect fit, to wear in a pinch. The pinch came in July and again in November when Paul's uncle and aunt died in quick succession.

It's one thing to wear a pair of ill-ish fitting pants at a visitation or funeral and another to wear them at a dressy Christmas party on a date with your fella.

If someone had not burned my house down I would have had several things to choose from. Perhaps - special treat - I would have purchased a new necklace to bling a little. I might have checked in with the style of hose most fashionable (sheer? opaque?) and picked up a new pair, if I was wearing a dress, but I wouldn't have worried about boots or shoes, or undergarments because I had everything I needed.

This week I found myself shaking my fist at the sky. Oh the hours of shopping lost! LOST! Because of one man's lack of control! Oh the humanity! I needed a dress! And boots! Or pumps! And tights! Or hose! And a slip! And Spanx! Oh dear God, the Spanx! And we haven't even gotten to accessories, which I, even for my standards, was poor in, before the fire.

Can you comprehend how much shopping that represents? During the holidays!

And the arsonist claims he intended no harm...

I do not shop without my sister Torey. She and I went out a couple of weeks ago and couldn't find a thing. We planned to go again, but we're both busy and I loathe shopping. Fortunately my cousin wrote a very funny blog post about looking for a dress for a family wedding and I ~~had a breakdown~~ commiserated in the comment section. Torey read it and called. We immediately went online and ordered a cute black dress from Boden in two sizes to ensure a good fit. It nearly killed me to pay for two and then express shipping on top of it, but I pulled the trigger and they arrived Monday. Wednesday I tried them on for Torey and she approved the smaller (!) one.

Yesterday Eden and I went to Macy's and did a mad shop: hose, boots and pumps, and the gamut of lingerie all in less than an hour. This morning I took it all over to Torey's for approval. The boots got the boot because they were "dated" but the pumps were beautiful and perfect. The full slip didn't work, but the half slip I also bought was just right and the sheer hose were fine. This is a raring success and basically a Christmas miracle. She liked the necklace I chose, which is antique and gold, but would have preferred something with a little color, since I am wearing black. I showed her my ruby red nails and we called it good.

As an introvert, in the classic and strictest sense (I get my energy being alone; I enjoy people but socializing is tiring) large parties are hard for me. I would rather chat with one person for hours, attend a small dinner party or speak in front of thousands over mingling with a crowd. As the mother of a quirky boy, through the years I have acquired a small library of books on social skills that I usually dip into before an occasion, but I lost those too.

Arson! More fist shaking.

So I've been coaching myself:

"Don't talk about the fire."

"Ask questions; get people to tell you their stories."

"Do NOT grab onto one person and suck the life out of her!" (Paul is fair game.)

"Have fun!"

Any suggestions?

A Brief Correspondence

2011-12-07T13:38:00.003-05:00

Yesterday Eden wrote this email to her dad in Toronto. She had asked to use my computer and carefully typed this:

Dear daddy, I reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally miss you. did you get the fancy hotel soap?:) well ok please listen, did you love ninja? or did you just love us, and not want to hurt our feelings. I don"t want us to have a dog that you have no part of. that you do not like. daddy I wrote this my self. love Eden. bye-bye.

I love the whole thing. It's just a little email and so much more. I love her concern about Paul, the wisdom in knowing that parents often go along with things for the pleasure it brings our children, for love.

"...that you have no part of. that you do not like." It's so easy to just want something and not really care about another's needs and wishes.

And then, "daddy I wrote this my self." This undoes me.

Paul's reply:

Aw, thank you for your note Eden. I miss you a lot too. I've got some soap & its a little fancy - you can be the judge. I thought Ninja was adorable & I'm sure I would love him a lot too if he was ours. You're so sweet to ask me. I love you. Bye bye angel.

Ninja

2011-12-05T12:00:00.000-05:00

After a lengthy application process we went to visit this little guy Saturday. We had hoped to visit him a month ago, but Paul's aunt died and the funeral was the same day. The next opportunity was last Saturday. Paul had a trip for business, but he changed his flight and we drove across the state to meet Ninja.

Minutes before we arrived another couple came and said they would take him. Because I wanted to meet Ninja before committing to adopt, the rescue refused to give us any preference.

This, despite the fact that we had been trying to meet him since mid-October, that Paul had changed his flight and that we drove over two hours.

"First come. First served." Is what the rescue...I don't know his title...told us. That's their process for twelve years he also said and they're sticking with it. That's great for hamburgers, or donuts, but we're talking about a living creature,

as well as our children, who all fell in love with this funny little dog.

We're all sad and disappointed. Unfairness in the name of perfect fairness is such a drag. We have cried and prayed and I have written several emails. Last night, Eden said, "How about we be thankful for what we DO have: Jackie Boy."

We are learning to choose gratitude and hope, in the midst of loss.

This is our lament.

Pug Lover Part 3

2011-12-04T09:18:00.005-05:00

Part 1 and Part 2 are here and here.

All last year Paul and I sort of tuned out Eden about the pug. It was a low yammering in the background falling behind other more pressing issues, and there were so many. A pug was "tomorrow's worry." And we had made it CLEAR that there was no commitment. We had played fair. We weren't letting her down. We didn't promise a thing.

But as I read her little Pug List I realized that none of that mattered. We had approached the whole business with our heads. "Why don't you work and earn the money and then we'll see. No promises!" If there had been a contract we weren't breaking it, but you can't think in merely legal terms when your kid's heart is on the line.

There are these moments in childhood that shine out, where something is so important. Remember that time, when you know your parents did not intend to harm you, but they let you down and it hurt so much?

Some where along the road, Eden is going to learn that you work and you work, you try your hardest, you give it your all and you still don't get what you want. That's life. But did I want her to learn that at my hands? No, and I really, really really didn't want another dog either.

A couple weeks before this, out of the blue, Paul said, "I'm weakening."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"About the pug."

I gasped.

He shrugged his shoulders, "My little girl has been working so long and so hard and I don't know how I can't reward that."

This was classic for us. To start I was the one who had an online romance with a pug and he wasn't even a fan of the breed besides not wanting to get another dog at all. When I was in the depths of love with Tonka, I didn't push because I've finally learned (as far as dogs go) that if it's no for Paul, it's no for us. And one reservation I had always had about getting a pug is the fur. They shed. A lot. And we already have this fella:

I am not a fastidious woman and yet Jack's fur has been my life's bane for four years. I knew he would be a terrible shedder but, like so many things, to know something intellectually is a world apart from experiencing it. To know your dog is a shedder is one thing and then to actually sweep three times a day and still be able to do dog hair angels at the the drop of a hat is another.

Pugs are commonly fawn like this little guy.

You might have noticed that Jack is black. Black fur shows up against anything that is lighter, which is...everything. When leave the house we float in a cloud of black fur, but it's not sticking to our clothes, we just sort of carry it with us. You probably wouldn't know unless you are beyond fastidious and don't have any pets of your own. (I'm looking at you, Torey.)

Now a pug's fur, is not like a Lab's. If there's anything good to be said about Jack's fur it's that it's longer and softer than the kind that gets stuck in things, making vacuuming a nightmare. That's the sort of fur a pug has. And you might have noticed that fawn is light which means it shows up against anything darker, as it reads as white, that's pretty much everything too.

Since we moved back home, five months ago, I have been waging a one woman fight against black fur in an entirely white house. I have swept and vacuumed and dusted more in the last five months than I did the previous five years.

I still love pugs, but I decided I was happy to admire the ones I met at the park or online. A pug was reduced to one more thing that sheds...in a different shade. Thank you, no.

Meanwhile Paul watched Eden work hard and cheerfully. He saw her looking for opportunities to make money, even selling many of her possessions at a garage sale. I will remind you that this is a child who lost all her belongings the year before, but her priorities were clear. All last winter and spring she was tossing stuff in the big box in the basement where she was collecting things for a garage sale. Paul saw this. He saw her going to the bank week after week to deposit her money and never spending it, with the exception of a birthday present for her cousin.

I was impervious: pug = more work = no.

Then I read Eden's Pug List and started to pray.

To Be Continued...

Pug Lover Part 2

2011-12-01T17:58:00.002-05:00

(If you missed Part 1, go here.)

I knew that Eden had a sort of diary she called her "Pug List". I saw her writing in it frequently but I'd never read it until a couple of months ago when I was helping her pick up her room and it fell open. Could you resist?

I couldn't.

(Interrupting to say Eden gave me permission to read retroactively and full permission to quote it here.)

Inside the front cover she wrote:

To: the good pug I WiLL
Have!
~~I Thing~~ I Think That my
Pug List is so ~~FUU~~
FUnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!

Her first entry:

Dear Pug LiST, I almosT
Have a Enough mony
For a pug. But my
parats say NO! and
I. Do Not Like it one
Bit. But I try and try to
get Enough mony!
But it is a hard thing
To do. But it is
Wothe it. But the Th
pug motivates me. ad
and it makes me HAPPY!
so I Just keep
working and working
all Day Long! the
pugs make me
Happy FOREVER.

********

yay! I Have so much
mony! I Have 113$ and
someThing cenTs! and I
am so Excited! and
my goal is To Have
Enough mony By The
Time my hoes is ~~BiuL~~
BulT. So Then I ~~can~~
may get a pug! and
For a Thing To happen!
sh my sisten wants me to hurry up so....
good bye
pug LisT!!

********

well Hello pug List,
It is so Fun Trying to get a pug. I Eden
Hodgson, Will get a pug
and I am so Happy
about it! What
can make a ~~gir~~ girl
happyer then a pug?
Huh ?? I love pugs so
MUCH Yes I Do and someDay I
will Have
one oF my oun. I ♥ pugs.

I ♡ pugs!

Dear q Pug List,
I Have $115.12! I am Haveing
such a fun time with
pug List. and c NoBody can change
That ♡! (I couldn't replicate how she artfully centered the exclamation point over the heart.)
the Deal is to Not
stoP trying hard Eouth. then it
makes it funer.

I Love Pugs

This is when I might have said, "Oh ~~Sh*t!~~ Bother."

To Be Continued...

Pug Lover

2011-11-30T19:15:00.001-05:00

Some of you know about my online romance with another fella...a pug named Tonka. It was love at first sight, for me anyway, and I really think it would have been for him too, if we'd ever had the chance to meet.

Alas, Paul wasn't crazy about getting another dog. I knew it wasn't a great idea, for many reasons, but I just couldn't get Tonka out of my mind. I wish I had a picture of him for you to see with his snappy bandana, his tongue sticking out and his wide smile. I swear the dog smiled. And he was portly. He had looks, personality and a gorgeous bod: the total package.

One day Eden and I were driving around and the van was silent. I was thinking about Tonka, how wonderful he is, when Eden said, "Mom, you know how I like Chihuahuas?"

I did and it was a mystery.

"I think they're more sort of a girly breed and I'm not a girly girl. Do you know any kinds of dogs that are small enough to dress up, that aren't girly?"

It was as if the heavens opened. I swallowed and said as casually as I could, "Well, there are pugs, you know, like Beijing."

Beijing belonged to the owner of a local furniture store. For years we had stopped by when we were in the area to see if she was "working."

"Oh yeah!" And in that moment a love affair began. That night we looked on Petfinder.com and browsed pugs in the local rescue. Tonka was there, large and in charge and Eden thought he was adorable. I didn't make a big deal about him - I wouldn't do that to Paul.

Every few days we would go online and admire the cuties we had, mutually, come to admire. Paul just rolled his eyes, but he did like the fact that she was admiring a dog with Chinese origins. At that time Eden was in a Chinese Immersion program and had been trying to drop out since Kindergarten. Anything Chinese she didn't abhor on principle was to be encouraged. After a couple months of unabated love, admiration and frequent visits to Petfinder.com, Paul gave his blessing to apply to the local pug rescue, but we didn't tell the kids.

When I went to look him up, Tonka was no where to be found. I emailed the rescue to ensure he was adopted and was thankful to find out he had found a home. I was happy for him and disappointed for us and told myself it wasn't meant to be. A month later when someone burned my house down I knew it for sure. We weren't getting a second dog any time soon, if ever.

But neither of us counted on this young lady:

Although Paul and I knew that it wasn't a good time to add another dog to our family whilst living in temporary housing, wrangling with insurance and rebuilding a home, Eden thought it was perfect. And besides she would do ALL the work, didn't she feed Jack every day?

There is more to dog ownership than mere feeding, Paul countered. What about the expense? Who bought the food? Who paid Jack's vet bills?

What if she raised the money to buy the pug?

Weary, Paul finally agreed she could save the money BUT, he made it clear this was NOT a commitment. There was no way we were going to adopt another dog before we moved back to the new house. If she wanted to work and earn the money, at the end of the day, if we still weren't ready for another dog, she would have hundreds of dollars to save or spend as she pleased.

Eden agreed to it and began to work like...well, a dog. At the old house we had taught Jack to do his business in the woods, but in the rental we only had a run and the yard was a mess. One Saturday Eden saw Paul shoveling pile after pile. When Eden asked if she could help, Paul hired her on the spot. She already fed and watered Jack morning and night, for which she was paid a small amount. There was no job too hard or too lowly for her and the money started to add up. Before we knew it she had over a hundred dollars in her Pug Fund.

Paul and I were too busy with the aforementioned wrangling and rebuilding to worry about what would happen if she saved all the money and he and I still didn't want another dog.

Eden made flyers (seen above) and sent them out to a couple of people offering her services and kept working and saving and recording her hopes and dreams in a notebook she called her "Pug List." One day I read it and felt the first sense of foreboding.

To Be Continued...

Flunking Sainthood: a review

2011-11-30T00:38:00.003-05:00

I was prepared to dislike this.

I was almost certain I would, but I read it, still, because it was a gift and I am easy; if you give me a book with an attractive and clever cover, I can't resist.

This is the copy from the back:

In her wry memoir, Jana Riess shares a year long quest to become more saintly by tackling twelve spiritual practices, including fasting, fixed-hour prayer, gratitude, Sabbath-keeping, the Jesus Prayer, and generosity. Although she begins with great plans for success ("Really, how hard could that be?" she asks blithely at the start of her saint-making year), she finds to her growing humiliation that she is failing--not just at some practices, but at every single one. What emerges is a vulnerable story of the quest for perfection and the reality of failure, which turns out to be a valuable spiritual practice in and of itself.

That sounds good, right? Why so judgey?

Well, it's a stunt book and I'm not an immediate fan of the genre. The writing has to be so good that I forgive or forget the intrusion of the stunt and find myself immersed in the story.

And then there was the whole premise: striving and failing to attain sainthood...in a year. It struck me as so glib and controlled and brought me back to the fact that it was a stunt. Fortunately I got off all that and just read it.

"Flunking Sainthood" is lovely and funny and I highly recommend.

The whole book is good. There is a good deal of snark - Reiss's stock-in-trade - and yet she doesn't hold back her own surprise and disappointment in her unrelenting failure. It's informative as you travel with her month by month and practice by practice and I found myself wanting to incorporate at least a couple of the experiments myself, specifically some of the prayers.

The book culminates with Reiss rushing to the deathbed of her father, who has been estranged from the family since Reiss was a girl.

"I'm not sure I can do this," I told a friend I had called from the airport. I was crying full tilt now, my life upended a second time by this man. " I thought I had forgiven him and forgotten all this."

"How could you forget it?" she countered. "He hurt you terribly. You were only a kid then, right?"

"I was fourteen then. I think I'm only about fourteen years old now," I sobbed.

"If you turned around right now and went home no one would think less of you. You don't owe him anything. You are a good person even if you can't do this." she said.

"I feel like this a test," I confided. Today I find out whether I'm really a grown-up and a Christian. What if I fail?"

She does go and forgives again, but I'll let her tell you the rest.

It was only a week or so after I finished the book that I pinpointed the root of my resistance to it. I was talking with Paul and started to cry, "I just feel like I flunked the fire."

This wasn't the first time this had occurred to me, I've been aware of it for over a year, have written about it privately and discussed with my sister, how not everyone frames everything as an opportunity to get an "A" or an "F" but it's almost always either or for me, including the aftermath of someone burning my house down.

It was only when I unconsciously substituted Reiss's word "flunk" for my own "fail" that I understood my initial rejection of her book was the assumption that she was holding back and making fun. I assumed she was detached and I don't have time for detachment.

If you are going to tell your story, write to us from where your heart has been broken. And if you can tell it funny too, all the better. In "Flunking Sainthood" Jana Reiss does both.

* The Kindle version is only $1.99 on sale on Amazon, through Wednesday.

Mother's Day

2011-10-31T08:51:00.014-04:00

Picking up Eden at school the Friday before Mother's Day I saw a friend of hers holding a little package wrapped in bright orange tissue.

"Who's that for, Julia?" I yelled out the window.

"For my mom!" She yelled back. And then she held out the giant envelope that, even two car lengths away, I could see was addressed to her mother, with a hand drawn stamp.

I made an appropriate oohing sound.

"I think it says to the best mom in the world." Julia's mother said.

"That was a given, Katie, that was a given."

"Where's my present?" I asked Eden as I drove away.

"That was just for Julia's class," she said.

"Your class didn't make presents?"

"No."

I was shocked. What is going on in schools? Why didn't Eden get the teacher who has her priorities straight? No Child Left Behind? What about the mothers?

I wasn't always like this, but every card and drawing my kids ever made me burned in the fire.

Some of you know that I was on a mission to de-clutter our entire home in the months leading up to the fire. I donated and threw away so much stuff. I even went through all the boxes of the kids' art and mementoes. If only gluing was involved, I was able to part with it, but if there was any drawing or writing, especially, "I love you, Mom" I threw it in the KEEP box without a thought.

My friend, Jane, who was helping me, said, "Alison, you can't keep every card your kids made you." They all fit in two Rubbermaids and yes I could and I did...for two months until someone burned my house down.

The day of the fire, when Jane heard the news and called, I answered the phone, "Well, I finally got rid of those two containers of paper you were bitching about!"

I lost almost all my possessions and barely shed a tear. It was only, weeks later, when were staying at a friend's cottage and I was snuggled up in bed between my girls that it hit me, not only did I lose everything my kids every made me, but none of it might be replaced.

My children are growing up. Christopher and Lydia don't draw me pictures anymore and rarely write cards. Eden's a loose cannon; the youngest grow up so fast. I thought of all the family portraits they had made. I loved seeing each child's vision of who we were. In the portraits, our bodies might only be big circles, or sophisticated enough to have arms and legs with hands and feet, in some we floated in the air, and in others we were lined up neatly in order: Paul, me, Christopher and Lydia and then, when she came, Eden. One thing that was consistent in every single one is that we all had enormous smiles. In those portraits nothing got us down.

But then, just weeks after the fire, I lay in that big bed with both the girls and sobbed until my head ached. I couldn't stop and we all wept together. I was still happy to be alive. I still knew that the pictures were part of the stuff, that didn't matter as much as the people they represented. I was still unutterably grateful that our family was spared. And, in the light of all that, I was sad to lose those precious cards and drawings, still. One didn't negate the other.

Too often we are told, or tell ourselves, what is important and what isn't. We are told that we need to trust God and choose hope and be thankful, as if acknowledging and mourning what you lost is separate from that.

This is so deep within us, even when we know better, we resist lament.

When a person is in pain, even if you don't feel it directly, it's not comfortable for anyone. The human and visceral desire is to stop the suffering, to tend the wound. Grief is messy and we want things clean, so we stagger about looking for a band aid and usually all we have is our words. Alas, too few of us know, as Kenny Roger's Gambler would say, "When to hold em" so we slap a platitude on the person and call it good.

The thing about platitudes is that they are often deep truths inexpertly delivered. What is said to a grieving person is secondary to when and by whom. If you aren't intimate with me, it's probably not your assignment to comfort me. It doesn't seem to be, but odds are, just expressing your regret for my suffering is more than enough.

But if you are my intimate you can and should say more, and I'm going to hear it because you are, at times literally, in my bed of sorrow. You aren't going anywhere. That night anyone could have empathized or sympathized but there were only three people who could have offered me comfort. Fortunately, one of them spoke up.

Lydia, who was twelve at the time, almost thirteen, said, "But Mom, those cards and pictures and letters weren't us, it's like they were a shadow of us, like an imprint we left behind, but they weren't us. We're still here and we're going to be telling you we love you for the rest of our lives."

Home and still moving

2011-10-03T07:56:00.002-04:00

Photo: Tanner Wolfe

We're back at the new house.

How strange it is to be back at something entirely new.

"Are you loving the house?" We are asked a lot. I actually worked out an answer with our therapist, because the short one for me: "No" leads to a really long one that most people wouldn't want to hear and I don't want to tell, over and over.

Most of the time I say, "We're so thankful to be home" circumventing the actual question and yet answering it succinctly and truly, which is important to me. And then I ask, "But how are you?" It's not all about us - this took me years to figure out - and I don't want to forget it just because something extraordinary happened. It's so easy for me to go on and on.

Here is where I get to and I think I'm finally ready to tell you the rest. As far as the story goes, I left us on the path watching our house burn. To be honest, up until a few weeks ago, I was stuck there emotionally too.

You can deny or minimize trauma but that won't heal it...so I've learned.

Thankfully we're all moving forward and finding our way home.

2011-08-26T13:26:00.001-04:00

I'm fighting the blues today.

It isn't one particular thing, but probably the toll from sustained uncertainty and stress.

I'm going to go work in what's left of my garden.

I became a gardener when I was pregnant with Lydia and in the long process of diagnosing Christopher. It was a hard pregnancy. I was in constant pain and refused to take anything because I was really clear that birth defects were for real and I wasn't taking any chances.

I remember putting Christopher down for a nap and then going outside and digging. My first attempts at gardening were beyond ignorant. I transplanted violets! But it was therapy as much as it was home improvement. I couldn't control anything it seemed, but you better believe I could move around some plants. I could show them where to go. I could dig deep and uproot anything I wanted.

How do you surrender to provision and grace?

How do you simultaneously hold on and let go? I can't always find the sweet spot.

Today, in the face of tremendous blessings, I feel despair.

I'm so weary.

So I'm going to put on my work clothes and invite a child or two to help me prune and dig.

The Logistics of Suffering

2011-07-15T11:22:00.002-04:00

Photo: Tanner Wolfe

The sense of an entailed disadvantage -- the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.
George Eliot

Each experience I have had of suffering has been an education.

This time around, escaping our burning home; watching the fire consume it; losing all our possessions; dealing with insurance; building a new home whilst raising three kids, all of us dealing with trauma, I have noticed how often people respond to our situation with, "I can't imagine."

It was usually said with great compassion. I didn't offend me but it got my attention.

I say it myself. Since the fire I have caught myself saying it after all the devastation in Japan and following the tornadoes in the south, any time I have heard hards news of another's suffering. I can't imagine.

But what if I could?

Eight years ago when my dad was dying in a hospital on the other side of the state, the poverty of our imaginations became apparent to me and my sister. In the beginning both of us were pregnant, then I had Eden. Paul and I were driving to Ann Arbor at least once a week, some times with all three children, but always with newborn Eden, some times spending the night at hotels, other times making the drive back at night.

Torey was pregnant the entire time and driving up from the middle of Illinois, a seven hour trip. She came as often as she could until the very end when she was laid off and then she moved in with us for the final weeks of Dad's life.

We both realized, if this had been happening to someone else, that we might not have tuned in to the details. You know how it is when you hear about some terrible experience that someone is enduring and your heart goes out to her, but you don't really absorb what it all means in a practical way. If some little pregnant lady told me that her father was dying in another state, I would not have leapt to the realities of what that meant.

Of course I could grasp: dying Dad = sadness, but I would have probably missed the logistics, that Dying Dad + long drive + cost of hotel stays + pregnancy = heartbreaking sorrow, stress, and financial difficulties.

I couldn't have put that all together. Or even if I could have, I wouldn't have known what do, how to ameliorate the suffering. I have been one to get tangled up in my feelings about a situation and have held back out of fear of saying the wrong thing or getting in the way.

But I have learned, when a person is going through the unimaginable, she needs others to lean in and help in any way they can.

'Cept Only One

2011-07-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

Years ago, a dear friend of mine, was a helping a refugee family from Africa. Soon after they moved here the father died leaving his wife and several small children. My friend, a kindly soul and social worker by profession, took them under her wing. On one occasion the mother became ill and my friend accompanied her to the hospital.

A pregnancy was suspected and the doctor asked my friend to ask the woman if she might be pregnant. The woman, a devout Christian and a widow for more than a year, took umbrage with the insinuation.

"I HAVE NOT LAIN WITH A MAN!" she said righteously, "-'cept only one."

That went right into the vernacular.

I've been thinking about this lately. Stay with me. As much as I've enjoyed announcing the first part of the statement, especially when Paul has been traveling over much, it's the second half I'm talking about: "Cept only one."

I live in the exceptions.

A couple months ago, at church, I asked a pastor to pray for me. We were up at the altar together. She put her hand on my back. I think I was already crying. Before she began she asked, "How is your marriage?"

I blinked, confused. I had asked her to pray for me about the rebuilding and the anxiety I felt waiting for insurance, making so many decisions and worrying that we were making irrevocable mistakes. I was talking about money!

"Good." I said. "It's good. Tender. Sweet." She was looking at me intently. "We're human, we still grate...but the marriage is sweet."

And that's true.

Before the fire Paul and I both could tend towards the belief that maybe the other didn't have the best handle on HOW.MUCH.I.DO.FOR.THIS.FAMILY!

It didn't come up a lot, it wasn't a volatile grievance, more of a quiet frustration that would some times flare from either side.

The good thing about a near death experience wherein you lose all your possessions is that you get a shot of clarity and the scope widens. This year Paul and I have been stretched so thin, have run so long and hard that -even if I still cared to - I don't have the time to keep score. Any thing he does, any call he makes, I'm just so thankful that I didn't. My appreciation and gratitude for him has grown exponentially. Only the two of us know what this year has been. We've been surrounded by amazingly supportive people who have gone the distance but only Paul and I have been entirely inside it and there is intimacy and tenderness here.

A few months ago Paul needed to have something checked out. He had cancer (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) when he was a boy so he doesn't mess around. It was one of those situations where it could be a virus or cancer which was not really an either/or I needed rattling around in the back of my head - ever - but especially when I was busy rebuilding a house that someone burned down. I really didn't need that, but there it was...rattling.

In one way the timing was perfect. We were under a lot of stress, what with the kids, the house, Paul's heavy workload, insurance and so forth, but far enough removed from the fire itself that we could have become complacent but cue Paul's mortality stage left and wham! I'mjust.so.thankful.to.have.him.

Burn down the house.

Withhold all the money.

Just leave me my husband; please don't make me live without Paul.

What has been coming to me over and over this past year is that I want to love him better. I want to love him the best that I can. I think I have and I do...except...

when he wakes me up out of a sound sleep listening to something on his laptop or drinks too loudly or won't go outside to check on the kids or forgets to turn on the coffee or asks so many freaking questions about the house that he has already asked and FORGOTTEN!

So we're still human and there are swaths in this strong and beautiful marriage that have not love.

If I want to love Paul fully I need to look at the exceptions, where I don't choose, where I withhold, where I place conditions on, love.

2011-06-23T19:51:00.004-04:00

This is the season of our fathers' deaths.

April 23rd marked the 25th anniversary for Paul's dad and yesterday was the 8th for mine. We have missed them deeply and in a whole new way, this year after the fire. Both of us have felt the need for a father's advice and reassurance this long and arduous journey.

I miss my dad.

Paul was gone this week, in another country on business. He left the morning of Father's Day and I burst in to tears saying good-bye. It was a hard cry, the sort that explodes into a long and crazy jag but I choked it back because I couldn't take the time nor tax the kids. It's been there all week, bubbling to the surface at the most inopportune moments.

The house is almost done - which is good - and it's been a flurry of last minute mess ups, decisions and running around to get everything done. I have cried every single day. I cry when I'm happy, so this isn't new. I once cried watching a bread commercial, it was a very moving bread commercial, but still. Since the fire, my tears have been a source of anxiety for Eden.

When she noticed, she would say, "WHY are you crying, MOM!"

My tears seemed to upset her fragile equilibrium. Fortunately she had some trauma therapy and is doing much better in general. This week, when she noticed my tears she was much calmer. "Why are you crying, Mom?" She asked and then, on more than one occasion, she reached out and took my hand. Once we were lying in my bed, both reading, when I had a break down. Never looking up from her book, she reached with one little hand and took mine. What a comfort it was to hold her and to feel her peaceful presence.

"It's gonna be OK, Mama." She said more than once this week.

It is. It's going to be OK and it is OK, right now. I'm worn out, weary and not sure how everything is going to land, but it's going to be OK. It just doesn't always feel like it.

Eden slept in my big bed the past three nights to keep me company. I have been waking in the wee hours and reading. Unfortunately this wakes her too. Yesterday she rolled over and opened her sleepy eyes, half obscured by her soft hair falling over her face. Catching a glimpse of me she sighed, "Daaaaddy!"

She thought I was Paul.

"It's Mama." I whispered and pulled her close.

"I thought Daddy was home." I kissed her head. The night before this she said, "Let's stay up until Daddy comes!" And I had to remind her he was coming home tonight.

But it didn't register. Last night, as she snuggled in she asked that Paul wake her up and say hi. Again I told her, we had one more day.

This wasn't his longest trip, by far, but it's felt so long. How deeply we need each other. We crave and take profound solace in each other's physical presence.

I have been hearing Eden's little voice in my ear yesterday, as I marked my father's passing and today as I anticipated my husband's return.

"Daaaaddy!" It was a sigh, catching surprise and delight, a sweet and delicate exhale.

It was longing fulfilled.

Readers are Leaders

2011-06-21T03:33:00.002-04:00

Years ago I worked for a company called "Readers are Leaders" a program that taught reading to the very young. I only worked for them briefly but Paul and I have laughed about the name ever since.

The other day I tried to get Eden to join the summer reading club at the library. I explained how it worked: sign up, record all the books you read throughout the summer (on the list they helpfully provide), turn it in and get a prize.

Eden wasn't interested. "What's the point? I don't need a prize for reading a book. The story's the prize."

Indeed.

She might look like Paul's miniature, pig-tailed clone, but that's my girl.

One of Job's Comforters Was Right

2011-06-16T19:30:00.000-04:00

"Give in to God, come to terms with him  

and everything will turn out just fine. 

Let him tell you what to do;  

take his words to heart. 

Come back to God Almighty  

and he'll rebuild your life. 

Clean house of everything evil.  

Relax your grip on your money  

and abandon your gold-plated luxury. 

God Almighty will be your treasure,  

more wealth than you can imagine."

Job 22: 21 - 25 from The Message

This year has been one long haul of abandonment to God's provision in every way and on every level. Paul and I have been stretched beyond ourselves in so many ways. As I stood and watched my house burn I thought "I can take this." I was talking about the loss. And I was right. With the exception of my kids' art, some journals, a few paintings and some books, I haven't missed a thing and never looked back. If not for my children and trying to salvage things that were evocative of home I would have gladly walked away and never given most things a second thought.

What I could not understand as I watched the flames destroy all our possessions was that the rebuilding was where it would all come into play: all my beliefs, fears, trust, faith, doubt and strength.

The Bible compares life to a race that we are running. Watching my house burn, losing my possessions was like being dropped into a 5K. If we are speaking metaphorically I knew I could run that race and at the sound of the gun I started running. "This doesn't hurt. I can take this." I told myself. In a way I had already trained for that. Losing every thing? No problem.

What became difficult was as the months passed and the 5K became a marathon and then it turned into an Iron Man and then it was more like the Olympics and Paul and I were signed up for several simultaneous events. Making every single financial decision from how big of a house to build down to what type of spatula to buy while under mental and emotional duress has been so challenging. Making every single decision while waiting for insurance to come through and not really knowing how much every thing is going to cost has been excruciating. A rebuild is not a build; things have to be torn down.

God has been showing me the rickety structures that I have used for shelter: being fiscally prudent, careful, living within our means - all good practices, but God is a jealous God and he won't let us settle for less than abandonment to him and his provision. I think I want grace but it seems risky, it involves too much trust. So I see now.

I have also been learning a lot about how we choose or refuse to comfort each other. It is uncomfortable to just be with someone. Our urge is to fix, to remove obstructions, to placate. But somethings cannot be fixed or removed or placated, they must be born, endured.

A true friend is one who will be with you in the uncertainty, who will sit with you in the mystery of and the suffering itself.

If someone glides in and blithely says "You're going to be fine" we reject that. But isn't that what we really want to know? Am I going to be alright? Is everything going to be OK?

We don't need bland assurance - we see right through that - what we need is someone who has been through the fire and who can tell us everything is going to turn out just fine.

What we have

2011-06-11T19:10:00.014-04:00

A few years ago we spent a week in a cottage on Lake Michigan. It was such a relaxing vacation. It was October but mild so we still spent a lot of time on the beach, playing with Jack and then we cooked together and played games or read books. Every night I tidied things up before bed. That little cottage was so easy to keep clean. I took note and realized that what I can handle in home keeping is furniture, kitchen supplies, books and clothes and spent the next year and a half trying to divest our home of everything else. The six months before the fire I went room by room reorganizing and de-cluttering. I got rid of so much stuff. For months one stall of the garage was dedicated to Goodwill and the other was trash. Paul dutifully hauled it away one carload, one trash night at a time.

We lost almost everything in the fire. When we moved into our rental house, insurance provided a minimum of belongings to get us through: a couch and chairs, tables, lamps, beds, linens and kitchen supplies. We requested a couple bookcases and a desk since we began to rebuild our library from the first day.

With the exception of books, clothes and a few chairs we haven't really replaced anything. From the beginning I felt a real reluctance to buy and then, as insurance dragged and dragged and dragged its heels, it became a necessity to wait.

I told myself, "It's not a problem. We'll move in get the feel for the place and take our time. We've lived this long with the bare minimum, we'll be fine."

And then I remembered that the rented pieces would be returned and as thrilling as minimalism is it's no fun sitting on the floor and I don't want to try cutting meat with a measuring spoon so I began to think about what we have and what we really need.

We have:

4 barstools (a kind stranger generously donated when we moved into the rental)
7 Thonet bentwood chairs (four my mom gave us and three I picked up over the year)
1 antique wicker rocking chair (my first big purchase since the fire)
1 bed (Paul and replaced ours first thing)
2 seven by four foot bookcases
4 lamps (need shades)
1 night stand
1 desk (on loan from my brother-in-law)
1 dining table (it's actually a long, harvest looking table from my mother's elementary school. It was used as as sofa table in my home growing up and will look great but won't work long term as the apron is lower than is comfortable for dining)
numerous plates and bowls (I replaced some jadeite and hit the jackpot with Buffalo china)
1 filing cabinet
1 13 x 9 inch pan
various glass food storage containers and lids
1 XL stockpot
1 sauce pan
1 XL metal bowl
measuring spoons
1 serrated bread knife
2 large cutting boards
2 muffin pans
1 baking rack
2 spatulas
oven mitts
kitchen towels and washcloths
flatware
glasses
goblets
1 can opener
2 wine openers (gifts from concerned friends, bless them! We've actually had three as the rental company provided one too)
1 coffeemaker
1 toaster (that seems such a small word for what this is...will be blogging later)
2 king sets of sheets
7 pillows
3 bath towels
5 beach towels
3 quilts
1 down duvet and cover
1 large blanket
2 wool throws

And then a friend has promised the loan of two leather club chairs.

I think that's it.

Here's what I recognize we need to buy:

knives (I can get by with a 8" chef's and small paring & plan to replace our Wusthof)
1 large skillet
1 dutch oven
a coffee grinder
a pancake turner
long plastic spoon
large ladle
whisk
measuring spoons
gas grill
sheets (twin and queen)
bath towels, hand towels and washcloths
shower curtains
4 end tables or night stands
beds: 2 twin, 1 queen
lamps

Am I missing something obvious?

Are you amazed by how little and yet how much it all is?

The picture above is of a couple of drawers in my kitchen after the great purge. The one on the right was my "junk drawer" replacing three others that functioned as such.

2011-06-10T07:02:00.001-04:00

Psalm 62:5

The Message (MSG)

5-6 God, the one and only—

  I'll wait as long as he says.  

Everything I hope for comes from him,

so why not?

He's solid rock under my feet,  

breathing room for my soul,

An impregnable castle:  

I'm set for life.

Innocence Lost

2011-05-30T06:33:00.007-04:00

The other night Paul and I were lying in bed talking. It was after ten. The window was open above our heads and the cool night air felt just right. The rental we are living in is nestled into a wooded hill just down the road from our old place where we are rebuilding. We hear all the night sounds we heard before - the woods on a warm spring night are very noisy - but the sounds from the road are different. We are above the road here, rather than set back at the old place, but here the traffic is moving faster and the neighbors are closer. There we lived at a crossroads where the traffic slowed to turn or stopped at the sign.

Paul and I were talking, arguing if I'm honest, when we both heard the sound of slow tires hitting gravel and then the quiet thrum of an engine climbing the hill. We both fell silent, listening. My reading light was on and there is no shade, so it shone out the window. I debated turning it off and considered looking out. The car continued to climb and Paul pushed himself up on an elbow to peer out.

"Is it the neighbor?" I asked.

"Yeah" he said easing down. And just then the sound was clearly fading. Even without Paul looking we would have known the car was ascending another drive.

I thought of a friend who has a rare and incurable cancer. I am ignorant of how this is determined but, even when he is cancer free for years, they will never declare him cured because of the nature of this type of the disease. He has talked about what it's like, how an ache is no longer simply an ache, a twinge just a twinge. Any new feeling or discomfort is something to be assessed because he no longer has the reflexive dismissal, "Oh it's nothing." Ennio described it as a loss of innocence.

I started to weep thinking of the wariness we all feel now.

In the days after the fire I was asked, "Are you scared?" I wasn't, as far as I could tell, for our physical safety. Which is so strange since I had spent most of my life anxious and worried and it was in that house, that a madman would burn down, that I learned not to fear.

My earliest memories are of being afraid, of not feeling safe at night. I now know why and it wasn't baseless, but I was living every day under the strain of something that happened long before and it seemed rational. I didn't understand the people who said, "There's nothing to be afraid of." Didn't they watch the news?

Fortunately for me I had a lot of siblings and was rarely alone.

After Paul and I married and he traveled I was always scared. I couldn't sleep and I prayed incessantly asking God to take away my fear. I thought of the verse, "Perfect love casts out fear."

"I guess I don't have enough of your love." I told him and then asked him to take away the fear.

After we closed on the house that would eventually burn, I noticed that there was a security system. "Why would a house that doesn't have a dishwasher have an alarm system?" I wondered.

"Don't think about it!" I told myself and pushed the thought from my mind which was fine for a few weeks until, days before we moved in, the neighbor two houses down came home and found a man with nylons over his face in her kitchen. He ran out the back door and over the hill that cradled all our homes. It was the middle of the day.

The neighbor between us informed Paul. "We've never had any trouble, but your place was broken into several years ago." Hence the alarm.

A tangent: don't you just love it when people distance themselves from your suffering? "We've never had any trouble..." Well, bully for you. You don't have a clue either but I don't hear you bragging about that.

When Paul told me about the break in I was staggered. He had just taken a job that required overseas travel which meant any trip he took would be at least several nights, close to a week, if not more.

"When we move in, we're going to activate the alarm." He told me firmly trying to stave off the panic he knew was mounting.

"OK." I said and then tried to shut up about it so the kids wouldn't hear.

It was funny because it confirmed my supposition that there is no safe place. A friend who knew about my fears and lived in a crime ridden neighborhood couldn't understand. "You live in such a safe part of town." This was back when we lived in the city and now we were moving to a very nice suburb...that seemed to attract men with panty hose masks.

Years before I had written in a journal (that would one day burn) the words of Betsie Ten Boom, whose family famously worked in the Underground and hid Jews in the Nazi occupied Netherlands. Her sister Corrie lived to tell the story but Betsie and several other family members died in prison and concentration camps.

"There are no ifs in God's world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety -- Oh Corrie, let us pray that we may always know it!"

This quote resonated with me and I wrote it down, but I completely missed the point. Since the only safe place is with God who transcends time and space it should be possible to live fearlessly anywhere. I knew that was the gist of it, but I lived in the truth alone: there is no safe place.

We moved into to the house, activated the alarm and, when Paul was out of town, I religiously set it at night and whenever we left the house. And it helped. When I woke in the wee hours and knew that SOMEONE was in the house, I reminded myself that, even though I had left the back door unlocked all day while I was out, I had set the alarm so no one had slipped in and was now lying in wait in the attic. It helped unravel the crazy tangle of fears when I woke in the night.

At the same time things were breaking through for me spiritually. I had been raised in the church and "asked Jesus into my heart" (as some of us say) when I was five, but had never really felt God's love. He had shown up for me profoundly, even miraculously and, in some ways, I trusted him deeply but there was no sense of an abiding, overarching and tender love. But that was changing. I began to feel God's love so deeply and was swept over by his care of me.

Things became really simple. I read the Bible, which I had since I could read, and was shocked, "The Bible is FULL of God's love!" I told people, clutching at their sleeves.

Nobody actually said, "Um, duh!" but it was implied. I didn't care. I was walking in the dazzling light of God's grace and his love.

And one day I realized I wasn't afraid anymore. I still had fears but fear itself was not the undercurrent of everything.

It occurred to me that I had spent so many years asking for God to remove my fears when I should have been asking him to fill me with his love. I'm not saying that it's like voodoo, that I didn't say the right incantation or slaughtered the wrong bat. God isn't like that. But clearly I was focusing on the wrong part of the equation. If perfect love casts out fear - I knew this intellectually, if not practically - then love is the handle I out to be grabbing. Because, "fear involves torment" 1 John 14 continues and ain't that the truth! "But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. We love him because he first loved us."

So someone burns our house down and in the early days, weeks and months, as far as I can tell, I'm unafraid. We decide to rebuild on the site. "Are you nervous about moving back?" I'm asked. And I don't think I am...yet. This is what I say. I know that there will be an adjustment but I also know that today has enough worries of its own and does it ever. I'm worried that the township will never let us tear down the ruins, then that they'll never approve the new plans, then that insurance will never pay, then that the new house is going to be a billion dollars and that the kids will be eating ketchup soup and never able to go to college...but our physical safety? Not so much.

A couple months ago I had a dream that someone was breaking into the house and Paul was holding the door of the room we were locked in and I was calling 911. I woke in a panic and to the realization that part of me is working out the effects of the crime as we prepare to move home.

So we're walking it out.

Last night as I lay weeping, Paul asked me why I was crying. I reminded him of what Ennio had said about innocence lost. He nodded. He's a cancer survivor himself, deemed cured for 25 years. He understands both applications and more still.

We were in the midst of a fight.

1 John 14 concludes, "If someone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from him: that he who loves God must love his brother also."

Oh geesh.

I've never been very good at compartmentalizing, but God doesn't seem to be either. I would like to separate my relationship with him from the one I have with the riffraff and that, on occasion, includes Paul. I have been writing a little about our marriage, how it has been so tender and sweet during this long year, how we have learned to work together, to appreciate each other more deeply, how grateful we are for the other, but I was done with all that two nights ago when the light from Paul's computer woke me from a sound sleep and then he said something disparaging about one of the children and, almost immediately, turned in and fell asleep. It devolved from there into several scenes that had not love (and were mostly Paul's fault if you'll exclude the tone I used and my attitude) and there we were floundering on opposite shores of a torrent of anger and frustration.

And then we heard the quiet sound of tires on gravel and fell silent.

Eventually we found our way back. We both apologized and embraced and even I fell asleep.

When I started this story I thought I was telling you about wariness that I want to turn into appropriate vigilance. I thought I was writing about love casting out fear again and again and again. And I did, but I didn't know it was about our marriage. But how can anything I write about rebuilding our home not begin and end with Paul and me?

What does a petty squabble have to do with someone burning down our house?

Everything.

2011-05-23T08:57:00.003-04:00

Eden crawled into bed with me this morning around 3:30. The thunder had awakened her and she was scared. She cuddled next to me and I held her. We prayed together though I was so tired my head hurt. She offered her fear and worry to God and then opened her arms to receive his love. Something I have prayed for years for our family is that our hearts would be so full of the love of God that there would be no room for fear.

The older two have always been good sleepers, but Eden has been the one to come crawling into our bed in the wee hours. The morning of the fire she awoke a little before four. Because of this I was awake when the alarms sounded.

"I'm so worried." Eden told me the other day.

"What about?" I asked.

"So many things," she said, "that our house might burn down again! Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes!"

She is aware of all the natural disasters that have occurred lately. We have talked about them and prayed for the people who have lost their homes. She knows the pain of losing her possessions and her sense of safety.

I hate that my eight year old is beset by fear. All I can do is hold her close and walk with her and pray with her one day, one night, one early morning at a time.

Please pray for her, for us.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

2011-04-27T17:27:00.006-04:00

The house was still in flames and we had stories to tell. You know how it is when something happens and everyone chimes in and tells his or her part? That is how we tell stories in our family. All five of us are story tellers if only for the simple fact that, from the beginning, we've all been given a lot of material.

A childhood friend, when she heard about the fire said, "More material...not that you didn't already have enough."

Boy howdy.

Paul was the first out of the house, he lead us out. He saw that one of the garage doors was up and ran across the drive to peer in.

"I wanted to see what was on fire," he would say, "if it was something small enough I planned to haul it out and extinguish it, but the flames were already too big."

This is the story he told again and again. If a man was listening he would nod in agreement. Of course you'd grab something on fire and try to put it out it with your bare hands, it's YOUR HOME, any guy would.

If a woman was listening she would, invariably, look at me and I would simply raise an eyebrow to acknowledge "Yes, my sister, I hear the crazy talk too."

In the early days of the fire we were interviewed repeatedly. I let Paul do most of the talking because, as great as I am with a story, I knew that a cogent recital of the facts were mainly beyond me on a normal day and that Paul was the man for the job.

Hearing about the open car door, every single person asked, "Was the car locked?"

Each time Paul answered, quietly, "No...it wasn't."

This man is an "i" dotter, a "t" crosser and I knew this admission, over and over, was killing him, because it was his car that had been left unlocked.

Most of the year we parked in the garage but in the summer it was usually overrun with bikes, yard equipment and house and garden projects. This was my and the kids' doing. Paul's wish was to always have the cars in the garage but, for the summer, he let us sprawl.

I always locked my car doors. My childhood home was half a mile back from the road, in a clearing in the woods, hidden from view, but my father, having lived in a rough part of Chicago, trained all of us to lock up the cars at night.

I had actually asked Paul to lock his doors if he was parked in the driveway and he had begun to, but the habit was not ingrained. Thankfully, I felt only compassion for his unspoken, but obvious self-reproach.

One night as we were lying in bed I said, "Babe, you need to forgive yourself for letting the house burn down." The words came out awkwardly, it was such a ridiculous thing to say, but I knew it was Paul's deep belief and torment.

"You left your door unlocked and you couldn't put out the fire, but a madman set it. It's not your fault."

And then we both wept and I prayed.

This was mercy - for both of us - because I have given him a harder time over selecting a different brand of milk than was my preference but, initially anyway, it was so clear to me, that he was blaming himself needlessly and holding himself apart from grace, but I held it and him.

Months later I roared into a rage "THAT was a picture of our marriage: I have a concern and make a request; YOU consider it, decide it is unfounded and disregard it!"

"Alison, I didn't disregard it. I had started to lock the car doors but, that night, I forgot." Paul said.

And with that the rage was gone. If anyone could understand forgetting, I could and, as I was mindful from the beginning, in Paul's better world the car would have been in the garage.

2011-04-25T22:04:00.002-04:00

I had a little breakdown at the lumberyard the other day.

I was picking out hardware and the salesman asked if I wanted locks on all the bedroom doors. Yes, of course, for Paul and me, yes for Lydia too and then I thought about the thrill of control that Eden would have and Christopher too.

"All of the bedrooms." I said.

And then I remembered smacking Christopher to wake him to get him out of the house and I began to cry. I explained between sobs and would not allow myself to apologize.

"I'm so sorry." The salesman said, which is really all you should say and I thanked him.

2011-03-03T07:17:00.003-05:00

"She hasn't really talked about insurance," you might be thinking.

And you're right, I haven't.

Yet.

But as soon as the last check is issued...and cashed, I will.

I have a lot to say.

What We Carried

2011-03-01T12:18:00.000-05:00

"Why didn't they move their cars?" Someone asked a friend of ours.

I want to track this person down, set his house on fire, start a timer and then let him see what he manages to save.

It is clear that the questioner has no personal experience with fires or priorities. We got four children, a dog and a fledgeling sparrow up and out the door in a couple of minutes. By the time we were across the lawn the cars were on fire.

You get people out and animals after that. You don't waste a second worrying about things.

I grabbed my laptop and that was only once my children were filing out the door after Paul. It was steps away, I knew exactly where it was and grabbing it added seconds to my escape. I didn't even bother with the power cord.

With a few exceptions, we lost everything, but I have no regrets. I would give a lot to have the tote of pictures and cards my kids made me over the years, but I wouldn't go upstairs and risk my life to retrieve them if I could do it again.

Paul was calling 911 as he ran out the door. He grabbed the cordless, which was closer, rather than his cell. The authorities had been notified so the call was short, but he was already outside so he held onto the phone.

Later, as we watched the house burn I heard a strange yet familiar beeping. It was Paul trying to turn off the phone but it couldn't because it was too far from the base. I watched him for a moment. He is an "i" dotter, a "t" crosser. This was killing him.

"If you take the battery out it might stop the beeping," I suggest.

It does.

Later we laugh at how he could have just thrown the phone back into the fire, but he slips it into his pocket and takes it out at Dawn and Thom's. We tell the story and everyone laughs.

It sits on the counter for months. Paul and I don't see it and Dawn and Thom don't want to throw it away. It's one of our only possessions. I notice it from time to time, it needs to be thrown away, but I think we all know Paul needs to be the one to do it.

I talked to Dawn the other day and she told me they still have it.

"I'm looking for a shadow box." She said.

I see us there, standing on the path, our house is in flames and Paul is trying to stop that infernal beeping. I see us both bent over that phone trying to take care of this one small thing, and even that is outside of our control. This is a picture of our life too.

But I'm not judging us. The fire is too big for us to fight on our own and we're waiting for help. Paul takes care of things, he wraps up cords, zips zippers, shuts doors, he turns off phones unless they refuse to be turned off.

Some times the most loving thing you can do is to simply be with another in his suffering and the only way to ameliorate his circumstances is to remove the seemingly small irritants and frustrations that loom right in front of him.

Who We Are

2011-02-28T22:47:00.004-05:00

The afternoon of the fire, the Red Cross comes to Paul's sister, Dawn's house to meet with us. You know things have taken a wrong turn when the Red Cross comes.

A friend called them because she knew I wouldn't. I didn't think we needed their help. "We're fine! We have good insurance! We have savings! That we no longer had a home for them to come to, should have been a clue to me that we needed all the help we could get, but I was riding high on shock and adrenaline...and pride.

The Red Cross representatives decided, since family had taken us in and our immediate needs were being met, that the best way they could serve us was with some help toward clothes. They gave us credit/gift card and some disaster information pamphlets and, before leaving, asked if there was anything else they could do.

I felt great but I knew that watching your house burn down is not good for children, so I asked if they could recommend a therapist and one called a few hours later. I told her what had happened and how, of course, I was concerned for the kids. I sat in Dawn's office with notebook in hand. The friend who called the Red Cross had given it to me earlier that day. Even there I hesitated. I don't need a notebook, I thought, I'm the Imelda Marcos of paper. I was. I remembered that all my notebooks are ash and took the one offered. I will carry it with me for months.

I liked the therapist. She was calm and fully present. She was with me. I asked her what to do, what to look for. She said that a normal response is for the child to exhibit an exaggerated form of his or her normal personality. A loud, outgoing kid is going to be especially loud; a quiet, contemplative child is probably going to get quieter, go deep; a feeling and emotional kid is going to be really, really emotional.

The therapist told me some red flags to be on the look out for and wished me the best, reiterating her sympathy that we were in this situation.

I asked her if there were therapists who specialized in fires.

"Anyone who is trained in grief and loss will be able to help you." She said. I didn't know it at the time but this is her first misstep. What I was asking about, but didn't know to say, was trauma and that is not the same as grief and loss.

The days bore out her initial assessment though: each of the kids was an exaggerated form of his or her normal self and Paul and I found it exhausting. I was all for uniqueness until I became a mother of more than one child, now I find it a lot of work. I'm open to a more cookie cutter approach. I'd like something you can just stamp out and have it work for everyone, but my kids are adamantly individual.

Two days after the fire Paul and I met with our insurance adjuster. We sat with him on our deck, next to our burned out house, and went through our policy line by line. This was our first trip out of Dawn's house since since our initial trip back to the house after the fire and we are moving slowly.

Our meeting was first thing in the morning. I had been up since 4 a.m., but struggling to get out the door. I can't seem to find any underwear despite the fact that I know I own four pairs. I wore one out of the fire and my sister Torey bought me a pack of three and this is only Tuesday so I have at least one pair left! I finally dress myself in a white skirt that would be lovely if it didn't bow out to the sides giving me a Liberty Bell-esque silhouette. My shirt is a pretty greenish-blue but is straining across my chest and the borrowed bra I'm wearing has been pressed into a service it is struggling to fulfill. I'm a picture....a Glamor No. I finally manage to shower, dress and get upstairs.

I'm not hungry but I know that I probably will be eventually. Dawn encourages me to raid her pantry to create a little snack package and I do. I also need water and, despite being up since 4 a.m., I still haven't had any coffee. I gather a water bottle and a coffee thermos and grab the FedEx tote bag, which is my quasi purse. Paul has been ready to go for some time. In general he's a clean cut, fresh looking guy, but two days after his house burned down he's looking rumpled. He is wearing his only pair of shorts, this is his third day in them, and they are stained with ash, and a borrowed shirt. He seems to have his shorts pulled up kind of high and he's clutching his insulated coffee cup and his leather binder which he retrieved from the office. Finally he gives up and goes to get the car.

A friend from work has, very generously, offered us the use of his truck. It is an enormous pickup, a lurid and electric blue. If I had to choose a vehicle more antithetical to our transportational scene, I couldn't. To get in it, I have to hand my water bottle, then my coffee cup up to Paul and then use both hands to pull myself up and in.

We are both sitting strangely erect and I think we must look like Okies who have hit the jackpot. I feel so foreign and ill at ease. I am nervous about meeting with the agent. Paul is ready to go. He was up late the night before reading an e-book an acquaintance sent him about the insurance industry. He is projecting an air of a person who has it all together, except for this woman who is holding him back. But I might have made that up.

For my part, I think he looks like a dorky, uptight hobo.

We drive in silence and I feel my chest tightening.

I reach across the truck for Paul's hand which he gives me. "We need Jesus, " I say, " because I hate you."

He cannot disagree, so I hold his hand and pray simply for help and for love and peace. When I finish I keep holding his hand and sit quietly. I remember what the therapist said, about the children, how they will be an exaggerated form of their normal selves.

My sister Torey and I have divided our families into "Straight Arrows" and "Circles". In simple terms "Straight Arrows don't have ADHD and "Circles" do. Paul is now dotting the thought of an "i" and crossing the suggestion of a "t" and I am wandering in literal circles and struggling to get dressed. This is an exaggerated and terrible form of whom we are every day.

Oh the humanity.

I wish I could tell you that this is where we turned away from becoming our worst selves, that here on out it all gets better and it does, until it gets worse.

But this marriage has already weathered so much, in some ways this is just another fire we'll make it - we're making it - through. There are still days where one or the other of us is our worst self. And too I have found in the midst of it all, as we stretch and bend and grow in this stressful and difficult time, that Paul and I have been and continue to be extraordinary forms of whom we always were.

Eden's List

2011-02-26T16:26:00.006-05:00

Our house was still smoking when donations began to pour in. What do you need? We were asked again and again.

We lost all our possessions but I couldn't think of a thing. We were fine, I thought. "Do people understand that we were insured?" I asked Paul more than once.

I was in shock, yes, and I was reflexively deflecting help, but then I stopped. A conversation I had with my neighbor, Becky, when she was in the midst of treatment for breast cancer, came to mind. "Anything anyone does for my kids, helps me," she said.

"Gift cards to book stores," I said, "for the kids."

I asked the children to make a list of places we could suggest for people who wanted to buy gift certificates. I started with Eden, our youngest and most opinionated child, who sat right down and made the list above. I was thinking in generalizations and broad categories. I was thinking retail establishments but Eden got right to the heart of her loss.

25¢

When we were standing on the path watching the house burn she said, "I'm so glad I put my money in the bank this week!" We had just made a trip to the credit union, but she had kept a quarter back.

TIGER BOOK

The night before the fire we had started reading "Tiger Burning" by Kate DiCamillo, a book about grief and loss.

STRTS

SURS

PANS

CLTHING

Pretty self explanatory: if you ran out of your burning home with only the clothes on your back, in her case, an oversized t-shirt and a pink pair of flip flops.

LIFE

That pressed the air out of my chest the first time I read it. You can't replace that with a gift card.

STUFF

She didn't have the strength to list her art supplies, and stuffed animals and jewelry, her lip gloss!

She left this on the counter and when I read it I wept, but then I immediately tried to pin her down. I was looking for specific stores. You see my little list at the bottom. Target got a smiley face but Old Navy earned a frown.

And then I stopped. The child had said what she needed, so I gave her a quarter and called my friend, Jane, who ran out and bought "Tiger Rising" that day. Clothes came flooding in and toys and art supplies and gift cards, not one of which was to Old Navy.

You'll note how she circled things to prioritize equally first the 25¢, the book and her life. You can't tell a kid, "This is it, baby" that we can give her a quarter and replace a book, but she is never going back into the safe cocoon that was her home before someone burned her house down. And this breaks my heart.

2011-02-20T06:50:00.006-05:00

"What we call despair is often only the eagerness of unfed hope."

- George Eliot (Middlemarch)

We are the first suspects.

Each interviewer apologizes, "I'm sorry for these intrusive questions."

Are you having financial difficulties? No.

Have either of you lost your job? No.

Any marital troubles? Are you considering divorce? No. No.

Do you have any enemies? Anyone with a grievance against you? No, not that we know.

I know that they will check out our bank accounts and Paul's employment, which will support what we've said; I know we are INNOCENT, but it's really uncomfortable being under suspicion.

It doesn't occur to me that our children are suspects too.

"Now about this friend..." the sheriff says. For a second, I don't understand and then I get that he's referring to Hope, Lydia's friend who was having a sleep over. I picture Hope's sweet face, her enormous brown eyes.

Paul and I both assure the sheriff that Hope is a wonderful girl and we know that she had nothing to do with this. He starts with Hope, but suspects Lydia too and grills us about the girls movements the night before, if either one went out to the garage, whether or not they were in their beds when the fire alarms went off.

I can't think of two girls less likely to burn down a house but, after my initial protest, I stick to answering the questions. It's his job to investigate and it's not my responsibility to persuade him where he's wasting his time.

Hope was spending the night. Her parents were out of town, for a rare get away. Friday and all day Saturday the girls were on a youth group camping trip. Paul picked them up from church that night. They unloaded all their gear and then went right to bed without disturbing Eden who was already asleep. I had gone to bed early, but I heard them return, their quiet talking and laughter and then the house was quiet.

When the alarm went off my first thought was for Hope and how startled she must be, how terrible it was for her: worst sleepover ever. I have no idea.

We were safely on the path and watching the house burn when something occurs to Lydia, she turns to her friend arms out "Hope! All your stuff!" Good hostess.

Hope looks at Lydia in surprise and wonder and gestures towards the flaming mess that was our home, "Lydia, your HOUSE!" Excellent guest.

Hope is only thirteen, in the midst of a terrible trauma, without her parents and yet she is mature enough to recognize that this is not her tragedy and delicately separates herself.

"I'm so sorry." She murmurs. She is clutching the box with the fledgeling Sparrow that Eden handed to her before climbing into Paul's arms. "I'm so sorry." Hope repeats several times.

I am in shock, but unafraid. It does not occur to me that Hope might be scared and missing her parents. I think I put one arm around Lydia and one around her. I remember looking at her beautiful, kind face.

"I'm sorry I keep saying I'm sorry." She said. "I don't know what to say..."

I smile. "It's our first fire too." And we laugh at the terrible strangeness.

Two days after the fire Paul and I are interviewed by the investigator hired by our insurance company. "Norm" I call him at first but his name is actually "Norb" short for Norbert. While we meet with the adjuster (for six hours on our deck, next to our burned out house) Norb is checking out the house and shoveling through the wreckage in what was the garage.

During a break with the adjuster he interviews us. He is direct and curt; we are under suspicion. And then something shifts. I don't know what happens exactly but he mentally checks a box and we're clear. But the girls aren't.

"Now about this friend..." and he has us replay the girls' movements the night before. I can handle being under suspicion but the thought of those two beautiful girls, thinking only of the other's loss as our house was in flames...

"You don't know these girls!" I say. I start to tell him that they are honor students, that they were coming home from a church camping trip, that they are GOOD! But I know how "good" kids make terrible choices and how easily deluded parents are if their naughty offspring are seeming rule followers. But I know these girls. That's what it comes down to. I hold my fire.

As if by magic, a van pulls into the drive. It's Hope and her mother, my friend, Krista. They were coming by to look at the house, to talk, to help Hope process all of it. Seeing us, they pulled in.

Norb talks to Hope.

"Who did you text that night?" He asks.

Her eyes widen nervously, maybe even suspiciously. "No one." She says.

Krista jumps in, "She didn't text because she ran out of minutes early this month."

Hope laughs nervously. Our adjuster motions Paul and me back and we leave Norb to it. Later, when they part I see Norb and Krista laughing. This doesn't surprise me. Krista could make friends with a stump. Hope seems relaxed.

When we finally finish up with the adjuster Norb is still there. He's going to take us in to the house to retrieve anything we wish to keep.

"See what I meant about Hope?" I chide him.

He agrees. She's a good kid.

She is.

I don't know why she had to go through this with us, I don't know why we are still. We have joked, "If there was anyone we could choose to have for a guest when our house burned down, it would be you, Hope." She shoots right back, "If there was anyone I could choose to be with when their house burned down it would be the Hodgsons." If I had a choice I would have spared her this. I would have spared us. But it is what it is and I am thankful that Lydia has a dear and wonderful friend who was with her and understands the trauma of that terrible morning. There is no good time to have someone burn your house down, but being a thirteen-year-old girl is arduous enough. I pray that something was forged in that fire, that Hope and Lydia and Christopher and Eden too, will know what lasts and what, eventually, will burn, that having escaped death, they will all live more freely.

Witness and keep track is my assignment. I notice that the last night in our home, as we laid down in peace and then woke in shock and disbelief to what we couldn't yet know was a new life, Hope was with us. In this long journey of inventorying what is past and building something new, although it doesn't always feel like it, hope is with us still.

Fire Etiquette

2011-02-17T16:47:00.006-05:00

I am the last out of the house.

I see Paul peering into the garage and the glow of the flames. Lydia and Hope are by him. It doesn't register for me that the right garage door is up. We all run to the edge of the lawn, to the maple tree where we had established as a meeting spot in case of a fire.

We stop for a moment and turn around and I see the flames for the first time reaching up and out of the garage. The power line that runs across our yard and above our heads begins to crackle. We have to get farther away. We turn again and are about to cross the road when headlights shine from up the road.

It's not quite five on a Sunday morning. I stand barefoot in the gravel at the road's edge and wait for the car to crest the hill and turn left or right at the intersection. I am holding Eden and, I think, Christopher's hands, holding them back. We all want to run but, even then, I see the ridiculousness of getting hit by a car, having escaped our burning house. We are standing on the razor's edge of adrenaline: "FLIGHT! FLIGHT! FLIGHT!" but safety first.

The car stops at the sign and sits there. I feel like I'm poised on the block, waiting for the gunshot. The door opens and the driver staggers out and into the intersection. Paul and I look at each other and wordlessly agree it's safe to cross. We start to run across the road and I look at the driver of the car. He has pulled out his phone and is either taking a picture of the house or texting. He looks up and I look him in the eye.

"IS THIS YOUR HOUSE?" He shouts.

I am so astonished I stop for a split second. I looked at him, perplexed. This might be the stupidest question anyone has ever asked me. I think I replied, "GAAAAAAAAH!" and then ran to the bike path.

In any difficulty or tragedy a crowd forms around those affected that can be narrowed down into two categories: those you are glad they have rushed to your aid and those you would rather remained home and maybe took some sleeping pills, like the whole bottle. (I'm sorry, I've got a wee spot of rage I'm "processing'" as the professionals say, but we'll get to that later) The first group are all a variety of heroes and champs, but the second group can be further broken down into stupid people with good intentions and the gaggle of morons, dopes and jugheads.

This guy was definitely the latter.

Fire burns; we watch; sheriff comes calls Paul's sister, Dawn; fire trucks arrives; Dawn and her husband Thom come and whisk us away, blah, blah, blah. Safe at their house I tell about the knuckle head driver and riff on possible answers I could have given:

"It's the neighbor's and we got the kids up to watch!"

"We're just out for an early morning run...in our pajamas...with the kids...and Lydia's friend Hope...and the dog...and this fledgeling sparrow Eden named Max..."

or everyone's personal favorite until we all know that the fire was arson:

"No! We just set it on fire and our fleeing the scene of our crime!"

Moron.

This is where I first establish the idea of Fire Etiquette.

Fire don't:

1. Muck up a family's escape from their burning home to take pictures and ask questions.

Later, when the fire is out, Paul and I return to the house to talk to Scott, the fire investigator. We are interrupted by people stopping by to ask questions and offer help. Most are neighbors, people we know and they keep it brief. They just want to know we're safe. All are worried about the kids, the dog. One older woman rushes out of her car and runs across the driveway, her arms open wide.

"Is everyone safe?" She cries.

I nod falling into her arms even though I don't know for sure who she is.

"Thank God! Thank God!" She says as we clutch each other sobbing. As quick as she came, she releases me and dashes back to her car. Only later do I remember that she is a distant neighbor whom Christopher and I befriended walking Jack. Later she returns, doesn't ask me any questions and hands me a big, fat check. That's a Fire Do.

Scott, the fire investigator is a what you see is what you get sort of guy. We both like him immediately. Paul tells him about the open car door and the garage door being up.

"Oh Sh*t!" Scott says, "That changes things."

He makes a call to establish a criminal investigation. People continue to stop. Paul and I are sitting ducks. Scott comes back and we ask him about the fire. It was a bear to put out. The sheriff closed off our road and fire trucks lined up in all directions. One joker managed to get through and staggered up to Scott.

WHAT HAPPENED!" He asked.

"A fire, Dumb*ss!" And then went back to fighting it.

This guy was a hot mess of fire don'ts, but here's a tip for those of you sounding the nuances of this; if you're going to break a police blockade because you HAVE to get where you're going, just do it, don't stop and ask the rescue workers stupid questions that a monkey would be able to figure out on his own.

That night Paul and I are in bed and I turn to him, "Here's the thing: I know it was shocking to come over the hill and see our house in flames and that he was a younger guy and not everyone is a social worker, but I can't imagine not having a visceral response of trying to offer some sort of help. Even ham fisted and bumbling but visceral human to human: you need help, how can I give it sort of way."

We tried to piece together what we remembered: the sheriff pulled up right away and neither of us saw the young guy again.

"That he didn't even offer to call someone for us or to let us sit in his car." We didn't need it, but that's the sort of thing I imagine I couldn't help but blabber if I came upon our scene."

Paul agreed and told me I should tell the criminal fire investigator and the sheriffs because I was the one who got the best look at the guy.

There is much more to the fire etiquette, as you can imagine, and I will get to it, but let me start with what is the most fundamental:

1. Don't set someone's house on fire. Ever.

What we don't see.

2011-02-15T19:02:00.013-05:00

Depending on your perspective, the post below took me seven months or three days or several hours to write. I began it the morning after the fire. I woke before Paul and the kids and slipped upstairs. I wanted to get it down, I was eager to write.

I can't remember how long I wrote that morning, but I remember putting the computer away as the household awakened. I didn't consciously stop writing at that point, but the next time I tried to continue the story I found I couldn't. This didn't attract my attention immediately. It's not uncommon, when my writing has been interrupted, to struggle to get right back at it. This wasn't the first time I have left a story in draft form and never returned, but I really wanted to finish this, for a number of reasons. Too soon the shock wore off and I found myself overwhelmed by the demands of...I find I don't even have the energy to list the litany...let's say: rebuilding our life.

We lived at a crossroads. Coming down the road to our house you crest a small hill right before you reach the intersection. It had always been a good feeling, to reach the hill and first see the trees at the top of our own hill and then, there ahead, our house, nestled amongst. Headlights were a pain in the neck, but it was a beautiful setting.

After they put out the fire, the fire chief called us back to the house to interview us for his report. We borrowed Dawn's car and Paul drove. When we left that morning the fire had burned through the roof and was reaching the treetops. Coming over the hill I didn't know what to expect. For a second I was puzzled at the sight and then my brain registered what I was seeing and I understood. My garage and most of the upstairs were gone. One of the first things I noticed was the stairs which led to nowhere. We both gasped at the sight.

Pictured below is a closer view of the door into the mud room. The fire was set in the garage stall just a few feet from it.

Months after the fire I still, despite several attempts, hadn't finished the story of our escape. I cut through all the legitimate reasons and noticed my resistance. I knew that what we refuse to write informs us as much as what we do. I reread the piece and there we were in the mudroom, Paul about to run up the stairs and I finally recognize, what I've known all along: we didn't really think our house was on fire. We were standing several feet from it, our backs to it, concentrating on silencing the alarm. This was such a picture of our life, as the life coaches say, it took my breath away. The fire alarm was doing exactly what it was designed to do in order to save our lives, but we didn't believe it and just wanted it to be quiet.

I have been that fire alarm. I have said, in so many words, "This house is on fire!" and been ignored or told to shut up. And I have done my share of ignoring. I find it hard to write such simple truths.

I didn't want to go back in that room. I didn't want Paul to run up those stairs. Now I know how much danger we were in. Now I know how close the fire was. Now I know, in the seconds we were upstairs, one of the girls could have wandered into the mud room and opened the door to the garage.

We were trying to assess conditions. We were being responsible, looking for our son and determining if the situation was within our control. We were weighing whether or not the alarm was accurate and the danger was real.

All of us made it out of that house without even a piece of ash touching one of us. But now I know how easily it could have gone the other way.

I stood at the top of the stairs and Paul in the middle of the room, the fire was burning just below him. Within minutes where we were standing will have burned away.

When I first saw this, I couldn't understand what I was seeing, but my immediate thought was, "Thank you."

Not everyone gets this vantage point, not everyone gets to see the ruins of her home and face her own mortality. Life is so complex and then we make it even more complicated, but this is what it can come down to, if you let it: I'm alive; I'm thankful.

How easily I forget.

2011-02-14T23:45:00.001-05:00

I don't usually call my mom at 5:30 in the morning, but this was a special occasion and I knew she'd be awake.

"Mom," I said and then paused, "there's just no good way to say it: our house burned down."

"WHAT!"

And then I told her.

My first clue was a hot smell. I had awakened some time after 4:00 when Eden crawled into bed with us. This had been a regular occurrence since she had watched a video of Scooby Doo a few weeks ago that scared her.

I got up to use the bathroom and checked on the abandoned baby bird she had found the day before. Eden made it a little shelter in a box lined with tissue and we fed it with an eye dropper all evening until it didn't want any more and then snuggled in to sleep...or die.

Lifting up the towel that partially covered the box I listened and couldn't hear breathing. My heart sank. Almost exactly a year before, Eden rescued an abandoned baby mouse who died the next day. Eden sobbed for a week and I didn't relish the thought of another round of mourning, but a mom gets to do what her kid needs her to do. I sighed as I crawled back into bed.

Wide awake, I fumbled in the dark for my Itty Bitty Book Light and opened the book I had been reading the night before. I'm not sure how long it was before I smelled the "hot" smell, as if something was touching a lightbulb. This is the point where some (most?) would get up and check for the source of the smell. I just worried that it was the bulb on the book light burning out. I didn't have a back up bulb which, for an insomniac, is like a tightrope walker without a net. I went back to my book. Nero fiddled; I read.

Paul woke up and looked at the clock, it was 4:39. He noticed Eden next to him. "When did she show up?"

I shrugged.

He sniffed "What's that smell?" The jig was up.

"I think it's my Itty Bitty Book Light." I said with a squeak, waiting for him to tell me to turn it off.

"That's not your book light" he said and threw back the covers.

Once before, we had smelled a similar smell and it turned out to be something so benign, I can't even remember the source, but I got out of bed too. We hadn't even reached the doorway when the fire alarm went off.

Now you might be imagining an ordinary fire alarm, but we have a security system so the sound that filled our home was so loud and panic-inducing it could have raised the dead and gotten them running but - alas - not the deaf.

My first thought was for Hope, Lydia's friend, who was having a sleep over and how traumatic it was to be awakened like that in a strange house. Paul's first thought was to make it stop and ran to the security control panel. Despite the fact that alarms were wailing, neither of us really thought our house was on fire. There was a light haze in the air but I've had more smoke from a pepperoni falling off a pizza and burning on the bottom of the oven.

Lydia and Hope came spilling out of the bedroom and Eden trailed after us. Christopher slept through it.

***************************************

I wrote the above June 28, 2010 at 7:14 in the morning. This was one day after the fire. I skipped along telling the story and then stopped here and have never been able to come back. It took me months to understand why.

The security panel for the alarm was in our mud room. The mud room was about 7 x 9 feet. If you entered from the garage, on your right were the stairs, on your left was a door leading to the dining room and straight ahead was a door leading to the living room. We had put in the the door leading from the dining room in order to let western light in from upstairs and to create flow with the living room and kitchen.

I have never been able to remember the full sequence of events because it was such a strange, fast and chaotic time. Paul is banging the code into the panel, desperately trying to quiet the alarm. I remember seeing Hope and Lydia in the dining room before running to Paul in the mudroom. This was where I pictured us, both staring at the panel when I stopped writing. He is about to run upstairs and check for Christopher.

The second story of our house was one large room about 20 x 60 feet with storage on both sides in the eaves. With help, I had recently decluttered and organized everything. Christopher had moved the Wii up there and, since it was summer, was playing games until the wee hours. A couple of times he had passed out on the sofa and, once, on the floor.

Paul and I both imagined him curled up under his large blanket with a lamp knocked over, melting the carpet. Christopher accidentally destroying something is within our understanding. Someone setting fire to our garage? That's not on our radar.

Paul ran upstairs to look for Christopher and I tore after him. Christopher wasn't there. Paul looked around while I stood on the landing. We don't know that the floors we are standing on will be gone in a matter of minutes. The alarm, which Paul temporarily silenced, begins again to blare. I look at him.

The haze is heavier upstairs but I can't believe my house is on fire. I picture us huddled on the pavement and the fire trucks coming to find nothing, some small electrical problem. We will look ridiculous, probably, but better safe than sorry.

"We need to get out, Babe." I say.

He stares back for a moment, "Yes. Let's go."

"I'll get Christopher. You get the girls and Jack." And then I ran down the stairs to Christopher's room. When I open the door Jack jumps off the bed and runs out. Christopher's bed is built in and I have hung heavy curtains to keep out the light and to give him the safe feeling of enclosure his senses crave. He always sleeps under a pile of heavy quilts. I pat the bed and am relieved to feel his leg.

I rip off the blankets and roughly shake him awake. He's wearing only his boxers, so I look around for his pajama pants to hand him. He turns back into sleep. I drop the clothing I've grabbed and jump up to shake him awake again. He grumbles.

"Wake up!" I mouth, "We have to go."

He stares, bleary eyed. I bend down to paw through the pile of clothes on his floor.

He's snuggled back in. I claw at his shoulder and then smack his face.

His eyes open, astonished. "Get up! Get up! We have to go!"

He staggers out of bed, adjusting his processor. I hand him a pair of pants which he falls into. I grab his arm to drag him out the door and he pulls away.

"I need to get my -"

"NO! NOW!" I grab him again and shove him out the door and down the hall, through the kitchen and into the dining room where Paul has gathered all the girls and Jack. Paul leads us out. Lydia has Jack on the leash and Eden the the box where the fledgeling sparrow is sleeping or dead.

For a moment I am alone in the house. I am standing in the doorway between the dining room and the front entry. I don't believe I am leaving my home forever, but something gives me pause.

"What would I take?" I wonder, "if the house was really on fire."

My first thought is my laptop which is sitting on my desk in the study that was just completed. Every day for a week I wake up and, first thing, go and sit at my desk and delight in it.

I run to the study, grab the laptop, throw it in it's padded bag and run back to the dining room. I wonder where my flip flops are but don't want to take anymore time to find them.

Clutching my laptop to my chest I run out the front door, barefoot, into the night.

2011-02-09T23:21:00.004-05:00

This evening a strange memory came to me of when my sister and I went to see "Silence of the Lambs" in the movie theater. I don't know why we chose to see it, since neither of us liked horror movies and both of us were easily scared. The great reviews might have swayed me, I can't really say. It was a good movie, but it scared the dickens out of the two of us and it was years before I didn't flinch at the sight of a rusty white van.

At one especially tense moment as my sister and I were clinging to each other in terror and screaming, I thought of Paul. We began to date soon after birth, but broke up a couple of times in college and this was during a hiatus I initiated which we both thought was THE END. I wondered, if a madman kidnapped me and threw me in a dungeon, if Paul would finally forgive me for not loving him anymore.

Eventually, dramatically (but that's another story) I realized that I was a fool to think I could ever stop and we got married.

The picture above was taken when I was pregnant with our firstborn, Christopher. My brother, Tanner took it when he was finishing his photography degree and anyone who was around was either his P.A. (photo assistant) or a model. I always liked this one of Paul and had hung it in our bedroom at our first home, but it was in storage at this house. I found it under the rubble in what was the garage. That is my arm, like a strap, across his chest.

In this picture we don't know yet that the baby, is deaf and will have a multiplicity of special needs. We don't know that, one future day, I will have to smack this baby's face to wake him, now a 14 year old young man, and then herd him and our two other children, his sisters, out the door to safety.

To safety...

I told you, as we watched the house burn, I was curiously detached, but Paul felt sick to his stomach. Running out of the house he saw that his car door was open and that the garage door was up. He knows, but I don't, that a crime has been committed.

I am trying to pay attention and am struck by how fast the fire is moving. I don't yet know that there is an accelerant involved, speeding the way. The fire races out the garage along the power lines and sets the cars on fire and it continues to spread throughout the garage, growing and expanding exponentially. Through our front door which was all glass I see the glow of the flames through the dining room wall. I know this is not good, but I still believe, if the firefighters would just get here, that it can still be saved. It is when the flames are burning through the front door that I understand: this is no longer our home.

Only God knows how much of my detachment was ignorance and shock and what percentage was me standing in the truth that house was never truly our home and that my security could not be framed by four walls. No mad man can set fire to it and watch it burn away.

And yet we need physical shelter. Paul's sister and brother-in-law whisked us away from our vigil and graciously, lovingly hosted us for six weeks before we moved to our first rental. That didn't work out, for a variety of reasons, and now we are living, temporarily, just a few houses down from our lot. We drive by it every day.

Yesterday, they began to frame and by quitting time, the back wall was up and the Eastern wall was begun. I was on the phone to Paul when I drove by this afternoon and saw that all four walls are up. I saw the space for the front door and through the house, to where french doors leading to the backyard will be. I noticed the framing for the two windows in my study and am pleased with how tall and symmetrical they are.

"All four walls are up!" I say to Paul.

"Oh, that's great!" He says.

I want to agree but I can't speak because my throat has caught and I begin to cry.

I am talking to this man, whom I've loved so long, with whom I have been through so much. Driving in that tender intimacy, hearing his voice and seeing those four walls, I finally understand that we are really building a house, that some day soon our family will have, once again, a physical home.

How I Became a Minimalist In One Simple Step and You Can Too!

2011-02-08T12:38:00.006-05:00

Granted, I had some help.

This was exactly where my family stood and watched the fire. I know because the photographer had to walk past us with his tripod to set up some other shots. I hadn't yet intellectualized that there is a "fire etiquette" since I was in the very early stages of discovering this, but looking back I would give Dave Odette from the Grand Rapids Press a gold star for leaving us alone and limiting our exchange to a look. He was doing his job and we were doing ours.

As I watched my house burn, I thought, "I can take this," which might smack of hubris and a desperate attempt to get a handle on a situation which was clearly outside of my control. That might be true, but what prompted it was recognition that I felt no pain. Shock was a big part of that, of course and my subconscious instantly shuffled through my history of suffering trying to process the unthinkable thought: my house is burning down.

There was a feeling of embarrassment as if it was a big mess we had made, as if we were at fault. I remember willing the firefighters to get there and thinking we just needed a little help and then Paul and I could get it cleaned up. The firemen (no ladies on this job) arrived within minutes, but time has a way of slowing down when you're watching your house burn.

We had many crazy thoughts, standing on that path, watching the fire spread from the garage, to the upstairs and outside to the cars and the trees. It occurred to me that not everyone gets to watch her house burn, that it's a unique experience and that I needed to pay attention, so I did. And a fire is a fire; all of them, from a safe enough distance, are strangely mesmerizing, and the burning of our home was no exception.

What surprised me was the absence of pain, that this was not as painful as the death of my father, our son's multiple and protracted diagnoses, depression, the loss of my childhood home in the aftermath of a massive embezzlement of our family business and the loss of my childhood itself with the death of Paul's father to suicide.

I was in shock yes, but I was also clearer than I've ever been: "that" (our house and possessions) was stuff and could be replaced, my family, standing beside me, alive and physically unharmed, was irreplaceable. It was well with my soul.

How could I know that the actual burning is just the beginning of the suffering with a house fire?

I starting keeping a written record the night of the fire. Writing is how I think. Until I lay it down, it's a tangle of thoughts, a confused clutter. Writing is how I examine my life, how I see. The day after the fire I wrote down our escape from the house, part of it anyway. I could only get so far because, in the writing, I realized something that was so elemental, such a picture of my life, all of life really and with it came the acknowledgment that we could have so easily died and I stopped writing. Bam! Shut the book.

I have written here and there, posting a pittance, trying to keep a record, but I have held back. My mind is a large house with an attic stuffed to the rafters and all the closets ready to burst at the slightest turn of a door handle.

There is no way (for me and for now) to tell this linearly. I'm going to open several boxes a week and go through it all. There might be a bit of a mess as I sort through everything, but I'm going to allow myself that.

"The light that was shadowed then
Was seen to be our lives,
Everything about us that love might wish to examine,
Then put away for a certain length of time, until
The whole is to be reviewed, and we turned toward each other.
The way we had come was all we could see
And it crept up on us, embarrassed
That there is so much to tell now, really now."

John Ashbery "As We Know"

Oh, and I'll get back to that minimalism, it wasn't just a joke.

2011-01-01T23:37:00.002-05:00

As the year came to a close I have been wished, more than once, a better year in 2011. It's strange to think, and impossible to qualify, that 2010, the year someone burned my house down, wasn't the worst one of my life. But how do you measure and compare the goodness of years?

The quote above by Annie Dillard, I had written down and tucked it above our calendar. I found it, smoke stained and crumpled, on one of my early trips back to the house. Obviously it said something for me, as I found it evocative enough to copy and hang so that I could see it often.

It's a commonly known metaphor of the purification by fire. Dross burns away and what is of value remains. This little quote went through the fire, literally and figuratively.

I am expectant. Great things are going to happen in 2011. Mark my words. And I know it is important to be mindful of the future, to set goals, be specific, write things down, look at the big picture, but I want to look at it all. I'm going to stop measuring my life in years. This is my life, moment by moment for all the time I have left. I refuse to be on hold until the insurance comes in, until the house is rebuilt and we move in, until my kids are trouble free and Paul is perfect, until my book is published and I get back into a size 8.

I want to spend it well.

Happy New Year.

2010-12-21T23:22:00.005-05:00

This picture was taken the morning the house was finally torn down. Two bookcases flanked the front door. This was just a taste of all the books our home contained. There was a huge bookcase in the dining room that was stuffed to the gills and stacked almost to the ceiling. Each of the kids had cases in their rooms, I had one in the hall outside my bedroom and we had an entire wall of built-ins upstairs that were filled to capacity as well.

We had plans to build shelves on either side of the fireplace in the living room when we made our final window installations above each one. Also we had rearranged the bedrooms to provide a study for me. When I'm seriously working on something I pull out the thesaurus and several versions of the Bible. I know I can get them online and I do, but I like to bounce between tactile and digital. I'll have notebooks open and note cards strewn everywhere. The plan was to install a wall of bookcases to house all my books about Jesus or writing or memoirs. I had stacks beside my bed, in the hall, the dining room and upstairs just waiting to make their final journey home. The floors were finished and we moved in my desk one week before the fire. I was designing bookshelves the day before. Who knew?

The first time we returned to the house I was struck, as much as what was gone, by what remained. My front door was destroyed. The knob was twisted and partially melted. Part of the roof of the entry had burned to nothing, but both my bookcases were still standing. One was leaning forward and I had the strong sense of two soldiers, bloodied but unbowed. The top shelf of the case on the east wall had held my modest collection of vintage Modern Library. I only had a couple dozen or so, but there were some beauties (9 stories by Salinger with the dust jacket!) and I loved them. The must have slipped off when the bookcase pitched forward but were covered by my set of Shakespeare which must have slid in turn and fell intact and became a sort of stepping stone. But everything else was fine, if you discount the smoke and water damage.

It was when the flames were burning through the front door that I knew that this was no longer my home, that there was no saving it. I'm sure it was obvious before, but that was the moment I knew. How did the fire go through and over all those books and yet they didn't burn?

Every time I visited the house I would peek in the front door and look at them. As time passed they weathered and aged and more fell.

The day the house was to be torn down was bitterly cold and a layer of snow covered everything. I was so eager to have it all gone and yet anxious to see it one last time. Having our home be a ruins was so painful. Seeing it day after day did not lessen, but increased our sorrow.

Waiting for the fellas to arrive I walked around the house and tried to see it all one last time. I took some pictures and then I made my way to my perch on the hill where I sat and watched them tear the house down.

It took one hour to demolish the structure and two days to haul the massive pile of rubbish away. The kids and I drove by several times during it and each time we were astonished at the progress.

On the second morning of the cleanup I drove the big kids to school and coming back down our road I stopped at the stop sign across from our property just as a loaded dump truck pulled out of the driveway. With a childish excitement (That's my burned down house being hauled away!) I turned behind and followed it. I felt this protective connectedness to that pile of rubble that was our home. A piece of paper flew off the top of the truck and danced in the air above me. I caught my breath and slowed down, leaning forward as I tried to see where it was going. I pulled into the driveway of our rental and jumped out. The paper was lying in the road and I recognized that it was a page from a book. I had to find out what it was. I ran out into the road and then rushed back to my van.

It was page 309 and 310 of "Little Men" by Louisa May Alcott, a favorite of mine when I was young. I quickly scanned 309. Some of the boys from Jo's school and her niece, Daisy and Demi are looking at a microscope. I was a little disappointed, though it was from a beloved book, my own lovely edition, a Christmas gift from my parents when I was a child and this page had an illustration of the children gathered around the microscope. The edge of the page, that had been bound was burned.

I was able to walk away from all of my possessions the day of the fire, but there I was clutching a page from a book that was destroyed, like I fully knew what had been lost and I wanted to hold on to anything, even the trash, that was left. So it was just a page from a burned book and not the talisman I had hoped.

But the next day I turned it over and read 310.

"We live in a beautiful and wonderful world, Demi and the more you know about it the wiser and the better you will be. This little glass will give you a new set of teachers, and you may learn fine lessons from them if you will," said Mr. Bhaer, glad to see how interested the boys were in the matter.

"Could I see anybody's soul with this microscope if I looked hard?" asked Demi, who was much impressed with the power of the bit of glass.

"No, dear; it's not powerful enough for that, and never can be made so. You must wait a long while before your eyes are clear enough to see the most invisible of God's wonders. But looking at the lovely things you can see will help you to understand the lovelier things you can not see, " answered Uncle Fritz, with his hand on the boy's head.

...a time to heal, a time to tear down...Ecclesiastes 3:3

2010-12-06T21:18:00.006-05:00

This is what my house looked like at 10:33 this morning:

The demolition started with a gentle tap to Jack's doghouse that caused it to fly apart like a house of cards. It was finished at 11:30 after a delicate pull at the southwest corner of the laundry room. The walls came down then they were pulled up and added to the top of the pile. The ivy that grew along the foundations was pulled up too and, still attached, trailed along.

It was strange seeing things fly to the surface and land on the top of the pile: the antique metal box I used for storage on the bathroom counter, a vintage house coat the girls wore for dress up, Lydia's lavender parka from a few years ago that I was saving for Eden, the granite on my island, one of my living room chairs, a green cereal bowl.

It didn't hurt at the time. It was interesting and strangely relaxing. At the end, when only the laundry room stood - even the roof of it was gone - I found myself sitting up and leaning forward, like the end of the movie, but there wasn't any suspense, just the sense of something long awaited finally coming to fruition, to an end.

What Cannot Be Shaken May Remain

2010-11-17T18:08:00.012-05:00

You can't imagine how much work it takes to tear a house down.

I wasn't there when this particular fire was set, but I know how easy it can be when you have a match and a pile of highly flammable material. Add an accelerant (in this case gasoline) and in no time, you've got a blaze a burning.

In the early days we said, "Our house burned down," but it wasn't really accurate as a ruins, that had been half of our home, remained. Now we say, "We had a house fire," when we have to explain although, if we're able, we try not to say anything at all because it complicates everything.

The truth is someone set fire to our home.

Christopher thought the arsonist should have to walk through the streets naked, but I agree with one of Oprah's gurus who says that shame doesn’t bring about change.

It was after my seventh call to Consumer's Energy, that I told Paul we should forget about prisons. Instead, criminals should be forced to run the bureaucratic labyrinths that spring up and stack themselves one on top of the other, which the victims of crime must navigate in order to rebuild their lives.

An arsonist, as a handy example, might think twice before setting his hand to flame if he had to deal with insurance, meet the demands of zoning boards and design a new house, all on a strict timeline. We could throw in some of those fake babies that they give to teenagers in life classes to simulate the demands of parenthood, since we wouldn't want the criminal actually taking care of our children.

"Do you know I spent ten hours on the phone just with Comcast?" And don't even get me started on the township supervisor!" I imagine our firebug complaining to another criminal in the call/detention center that could be the prison of the future.

There would need to be something that simulated errands: driving kids everywhere and shopping, to replace all the belongings that burned, as well as the day-to-day supplies and food. And let's not forget cooking for a family...I might, but we would need to have that be a part of the rehabilitative process.

"I JUST went to Costco! How can we be out of Veggie Straws AGAIN!?! Who spilled coffee on the inventory? I never knew the suffering! OH THE HUMANITY!”

2010-09-25T13:27:00.004-04:00

The other day I walked in on Eden lying in bed, her eyes closed, arms stretched out, palms up.

"Just a second, Mom," she said, "I'm praying."

"OK."

"I'm asking God if our house is going to burn down again."

Oh how that hurt.

"Only he knows." She said as if it was the most natural thing in the world - and it is - then shut her eyes again.

I perched beside her and waited.

After a minute or so her blue eyes opened and we looked at each other. I may have been holding my breath.

"I think he said 'No,'" she said.

"I think you're right," I said.

2010-09-05T15:41:00.006-04:00

This whole no internet at home deal is really putting a hitch in my blogging get along. We have been relying upon the kindness of strangers, family and friends and their WiFi which has been fine enough for reading email but not so hot for replying cogently, if at all, and certainly not for blogging.

Overall it is well with us, but I cannot get thee close enough world wide web!

Technically we have phone service, except it doesn't work. I had to place several calls to schedule a technician and then asked Paul to go down to the "network interface device" to verify that the problem was not our equipment or AT&T's network. He came back up almost immediately as I was on hold with Verizon trying to get us wireless.

"It takes a screwdriver to open it," he said

I think you all know that I have embraced this fire-induced clutter free life style as cheerfully as possible, but minimalism has its limits. (Bah dum bum!)

My kingdom for a screwdriver.

I just looked at Paul, shrugged and held the phone at him. He groaned and went to look around. We've had many of these shining little marital moments since the fire.

Fortunately he found a screwdriver in the basement and verified that the problem was with our wiring, scheduled a technician who is going to come some time between now and Wednesday. Whoopee thank you.

I was chitchatting with Amber at Verizon who was thrilled to help me get online. I would need a device which, if a signed a 2 year contract, was FREE, with a 1 year contract and some mail-in rebates, was $70 and, in order to go month to month, was $270. I called Peggy, our private adjuster, to get the go ahead, before I raced to the nearest Verizon store and then back in order to get online in the comfort of my rental home.

Alas, it was not to be; she needs to present it to my insurance adjuster to avoid him denying payment in the future which meant I had to drive somewhere to get online to email her the terms that I just outlined above for her to forward to my insurance adjuster who is on vacation until Tuesday.

Everything we do requires permission and documentation and at least 5 phone calls, but the universe seems to prefer 23. I prefer osmosis.

I will be back soonish and be much more cheerful. I don't want to be that gloomy lady whose house burned down.

2010-08-26T16:58:00.003-04:00

This was Eden a year ago. The chair she's sitting on is in the garage of our rental covered with smoke. I didn't think to pull out the table which was still intact and in our front hall. It came from Paul's grandmother and I always liked its silhouette.

We went back to the house twice the day of the fire. The first to meet with the fire investigator and the Sheriff and the second because my brother-in-law, David wanted to pull out any paintings that could be saved. Paul and I were both reluctant to return again. Both of just wanted to walk away. Christopher was upset about not being able to gather any of his belongings so the four of us drove over and walked through the wreckage. I gathered some of my antique bowls and looked for items that would be meaningful to the children, but it was hard to focus. There wasn't anything I wanted. All of it was dead to me.

We would return several more times for various meetings and we would gather things. Each time we would reach a point where we had to go, when it became to painful to stay. It wasn't always a conscious sorrow. Sometimes it was a heaviness, an overwhelming exhaustion.

It is a strange experience to lose so many of your belongings. Like any loss there are the stages of grief and the tricks your mind plays, the surprises that are, often, more confusing than painful.

In the early days, while still living at my sister-in-law's I moaned, "And I just bought that cinnamon at Costco!" My brother-in-law, Thom, laughed because he had never heard me complain about losing any thing else. That is was a spice that I bemoaned amused him. But anyone who knows how big that container is, never mind that I had filled two separate shakers, one for my spice drawer and one that lived next to the cereals and I sprinkled on my morning oatmeal.

That's the way it is. As we remember we mourn. I didn't care to salvage that little pink table when I could have, but now I wish I had and regret that I didn't.

2010-08-24T10:29:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I spent 3 hours on the phone with Comcast and AT&T in an attempt to port our old number to our rental home.

Oh the humanity!

In the process I learned that the only internet service available at the rental is dial-up. The family's collective jaw dropped. We haven't had any service for the week and a half that we've been in the rental, but we had hope for the future.

It really is the little things that get you. I can live with almost all my earthly possessions being destroyed but trying to get phone and internet almost undid me. We don't have either yet. But I refuse to be undone.

2010-08-22T07:52:00.004-04:00

Even the sparrow has found a

home,

and the swallow a nest for herself,

where she may have her young--

a place near your altar,

O Lord Almighty, my King and

my God.

Psalm 84:3

Last week we moved into our rental, where we will stay "up to 12 months" (according to insurance; that's as long as they'll cough up the dough) while we rebuild.

The day of the fire I began to refer to Paul's sister's house, where we were staying, as "home". I didn't miss a beat. For the older kids it was "Aunt Dawn's and Uncle Thom's" which had always been a second home to them so it took me a little while to understand that they felt homeless which, of course, we were.

The moldering ruins we call, "The House." Lydia carefully refers to "the rental." I don't know how it will be when the house is torn down, if it will be easier or more painful still.

What I do know is that I can't fix this for any of my children. They live in a world where someone can start your house on fire. They did before June 27, but now they know it and I can't remove that sorrow.

But I can mourn with them.

I am, and I will.

2010-07-19T11:17:00.000-04:00

She had already--carefully, obediently--stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, rage. Anger to rage--who said she wasn't making progress?

Lorrie Moore

from "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens"

As far as I can tell the stages of grief I have moved through have been: shock, euphoria, sorrow, chocolate-covered pretzels, and now finally, anger. The thing is the anger hasn't been directly about the fire.

...........................................................

Update: I began this post in the early hours yesterday morning. Almost immediately after that I entered the new stage of rage. Isn't that funny?

I don't have time to tell you about it now but I think there might be a cyclist out there who just might be a little bit more circumspect in his dealings with motorists, in general, and almost certainly with female drivers of slow moving mini-vans, specifically.

2010-07-14T09:12:00.004-04:00

I'll be honest, having a house fire isn't all it's cracked up to be.

At first you're all "Whoo Hoo! I'm alive!" and nothing can get you down. You are clear on what matters and a house full of stuff doesn't make the list. You're not crazy or anything, YOU aren't in denial. You just know what can be replaced: stuff, and what cannot: your family, so you're happy.

But then you realize that you only have four pairs of underwear (1. you were wearing as you evacuated your burning home, 2-4 your sister purchased in a massive emergency shop at Target the same day but are not, alas, your preferred style) and you remember that laundry was never your strong suit back when you had your own home and about 30 pairs of underpants and you weren't fire-addled.* And it occurs to you that this is what it's like walking a tightrope without a net so you make getting more unmentionables your life work when you aren't helping your children cope.

Unfortunately your kids really bug you. They are traumatized and CLEAR that a house fire is not a bag of giggles, so they're needy. But you understand (because you're a really good parent), so you listen and hold and talk and play, whatever the child needs.

Regrettably underpants buying gets shifted to the back burner and this is about all you do, other than meet with insurance people and try to get dressed every day. You find yourself, wandering around your room - and you are no stranger to a bit of wandering and a spot of disorder - but this is the limit; it takes you two hours just to get out of the house.

And then you remember that you HAVE to buy more underwear!

*The form of brain damage that Paul and I seem to have incurred. He's dazed, which I was before the fire, but back then I had an extensive vocabulary. Now, if I had a dollar for every time I have said, "What's the word, I'm looking for?" we could forget about the insurance and start rebuilding now.

2010-07-12T06:25:00.004-04:00

It's been two weeks since the fire but it seems so much longer.

I have a lot to tell you.

First of all, I want to tell the story of the fire itself, but I'm finding the writing of that slow going as you can imagine. And yet I want to make a written record for our family and hopefully to help others. I've already heard from so many people who, upon hearing about us, checked their fire alarms, some installed fire alarms, read their insurance policies or made an evacuation plan.

I know that the fire alarms saved our lives. I also think contemplating what I would do in the case of a fire helped. My plan had been - and I had considered it without Paul because he travels for work - was to get the girls up, direct Lydia to help Eden and tell them which way to go, then get Christopher.

Christopher's room is down a short hall and I had already decided, if access was blocked, I would run outside, claw at his screen, break the window, climb inside and push him out.

This wasn't necessary, but just the little bit of thought I gave it propelled me when I needed it. I never really considered what I would take beyond my children and the dog, and even he was secondary.

I don't want to scare anyone but rather point out some specific, practical things that can be easily done. Paul and I had made some good choices on the front end and then, after the fire, we have received some advice that was so timely and helpful we can only consider it Providential.

Bottom line, we are in a state of grace. The outpouring of concern and practical help from our entire community has been utterly amazing.

Stay posted for some tips, observations and stories. With us, whatever our circumstances, there will always be stories.

2010-07-08T11:36:00.003-04:00

"Do you know what day it is?" I asked Christopher.

He glanced at his watch, "July 8."

"And what special day is that?" I raised my eyebrows.

He smiled. "Happy Birthday."

"What festivities do you have planned?" I asked as he flopped across the foot of my bed.

He thought for a second. "Well, if you pick some place cheap - not too fancy - it's on me."

That's my boy.

2010-07-07T10:51:00.005-04:00

The night of the fire I asked Christopher, "How are you doing, Buddy?"

He shook his head "I'm feeling regret that I wasn't able to gather some of my belongings," his voice broke, "I just think I would feel more secure if I had some of my possessions."

A couple of days later, suited up with fire boots, the fire investigator took him back into his room. Paul and I had laughed that the fire marshall would declare Christopher's room a total loss, whether or not there was any damage; it was that messy.

He found his wallet, a magnifying glass, a few stuffed animals and the smoky and waterlogged book he'd been reading when he fell asleep the night before. What impressed the fire investigator was that he asked to go into his sisters' room where he out a few things he thought they would want.

He came home with what looked like a load of rubbish. I sorted through some things that were obviously trash and my sister-in-law, Dawn, has been devotedly washing everything that is washable.

The grieving process has only begun but this was the turning point for Christopher. He will continue to mourn what was lost and he is already being comforted by what remains.

2010-07-06T09:16:00.002-04:00

"Did you ever think your house would burn down?" Eden, our seven-year-old daughter asks every couple of days.

"No." I answer.

"I just never thought my house would burn down."

"It certainly doesn't happen to many people." I say pulling her in for a hug and a kiss. And then that's it until the next time.

Paul and I have three children. Christopher is 14, Lydia is 12 and Eden is 7 "and a half" she would be sure to tell you. Parenting traumatized kids, so far as I can tell, is just like every day parenting in the sense that each child has had his or her unique response and has very personal and diverse needs. The tricky part is that we are traumatized too.

For Paul and me, the house was just a house filled with things that can be replaced. Even the things that can't be replaced: photographs on film, our videos, the kid's artwork, their precious letters and cards, all my correspondence, my journals and notebooks, some paintings, we can live without. For our children, the house was their home, their life and, in many ways, their security. This is the worst thing that has happened to them. Paul and I have been through harder times and have lost more. We both know we can bear this and, in many ways, it's a peculiar opportunity.

But we don't want to minimize things for the children or ourselves.

I have been a writer since I could form letters, and writing is how I figure things out. I'll be keeping a record here.

The poet, Thomas Lynch says, "Witness and keep track. That's the basic work of writers."

It's what I intend to do.

2010-05-24T05:38:00.003-04:00

Yesterday in church, I found this note, recorded from last year, in my notebook:

"I like to sing. It's fun" Eden said to Christopher.

"It would be better if there were disco balls." He's never one to keep a good thing from getting better.

"Oh yeah! If they were pink and purple!"

They would have had a great time at the first Pentecost.

2010-04-28T07:38:00.002-04:00

In Michigan you can never say with certainty when winter is over and spring has begun, regardless of what the calendar might assert. And yet in March, with the milder days and increasing sun, most of us find cause for hope, but this year Christopher found cause for mourning.

"My hope for having snow days is now lost," he said to me out of the blue. I nodded thoughtfully and, I hoped, neutrally; it's rude to rejoice in another's suffering.

"Now I have to hope for bus accidents or whatever."

2010-02-13T19:27:00.003-05:00

Paul's been away this week, several days in Mexico and then several more in El Salvador. He was due back tonight but Atlanta is still slammed from yesterday's storm so he's stuck there until tomorrow. Fortunately his boss bought tickets on another airline or he wouldn't be back until Monday. That would have been a serious drag as the kids have the day off and we were planning a little family day.

He has been home for months, but then he was gone for a week in January, flying home the day before Eden's birthday, was home for two weeks and then off again. Things have gone well here both trips but the quick turn around showed in a bit of friction between the two of us last week before he left this time.

This evening is key. Eden has a bad cough and a touch of a fever. She and Christopher are happily playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl on the Wii, so happily that he is shrieking at an eardrum piercing volume. He's always been such a loud boy.

They reached 118 KO's

.....................................................................................................

That would be Christopher who informed you of what they reached. I had abandoned the computer to tuck Eden in to bed, but not before she plunked down next to me to slurp the remainder of her Trix yogurt - a special treat for Valentine's Day.

Just as I finished tucking Eden in Lydia dropped a glass which smashed and spilled water all over the kitchen floor. Christopher, without shoes, was trapped in his room while we cleaned it up. He pulled a stool as close as was safe, perched there and amused himself by playing recordings on his camera until I threatened to confiscate it.

Now he, Lydia and I are watching Anne of Green Gables. We're at the point where Rachel Lynde is meeting Anne. It needs my full attention.

2010-02-08T14:16:00.002-05:00

OTJ has fallen but she will get up. As you can see, we're in a bit of a transition. I want to spruce up the place, but am lacking in skills. Don't have a plan for the header, but anything is an improvement.

The sun is shining today in Michigan, which is not to be taken for granted. I've been scurrying around the house and the big kids are due home soon, but I'm thinking about dressing in all my snow gear and finding a bit sunlight in which to lay out. My body is jonesing for some Vitamin D.

There's much to say, and I will say it, but I have a date with my snowpants and the sun.

Deep Thoughts with Cakie H.

2010-01-31T17:33:00.003-05:00

Eden turned 7 last Monday. That morning I asked her how it felt.

"I don't feel different yet," she said, "it takes a while to get used to."

Yesterday we were driving when she said out of the blue, "Mom, I can't believe the world never stops."

I asked her what she meant.

"Let's say you're dead but there's still things happening when you're not alive. Somebody's probably still playing, somebody's still running and that's never ever going to stop."

I was quiet.

"It's just something strange I think about."

"It's a deep thought." I said.

"It's a good thing to think about." She said.

2009-12-21T06:25:00.002-05:00

Well, the good news is that, barring the hanging of the closet doors, extensive caulking and a little touch up painting, the living room is finished and a lovely delight. I am thankful and truly surprised since I wasn’t sure how everything was going to look. I bought a couch off Craigslist about six months ago, grabbed a wool rug half off at Lowes right before Thanksgiving, then snagged a pair of chairs off Craigslist a week after that.

The couch spent the last month in the front entry, the chairs on opposite sides of the dining room and the rug was rolled up in the attic. Friday night David finished up the trim and yesterday afternoon Paul and I carried everything into the living room and arranged it.

The couch is a medium, brownish green, the chairs are a light camel and the rug is a light green, almost beige with lighter tones woven through. I chose a cream shade for the walls with absolutely no yellow or red in it and the trim is white. The floors are bamboo with it’s natural color.

In the weeks while we waited for the electrician, as we stared at the water-damaged tiles of the ceiling that was exposed after we removed the faux beams and first layer of drywall, I began to question the paint color. I had been wondering about the rug since before I bought it; not sure if it would work with the floor and the couch, but decided to buy it because of the quality and the price. I knew it would get us down the road and anything was an improvement on the ancient berber it replaced.

I thought the chairs would look good with the couch and hoped that there would be enough of a contrast with the rug, but it didn’t look hopeful. I planned to get some pillows or throws for the chairs to bring some color into the room.

Late in the game of redoing this room, I realized I didn’t have, what those in the business of personal training call, “a vision to lead me through the pain of transformation,” that is, the hope that it would all be worth it. I knew it would be better, and clean and new – which is NOTHING to sneeze at, I know – but I thought all the furnishings would look bland and boring or cold and unwelcoming.

But when we brought everything in yesterday, it all came together and rather than being bland it’s peaceful, which is exactly the sort of space our family needs.

My mom, who had stopped by to accompany us to the Christmas tree farm said several times, “It feels very calm.” That word has never been used to describe anything remotely associated with me and certainly not my décor, but she was right. I wanted to stay and keep putting things back, but we had an appointment with the Christmas tree farm – or so we thought – and the finishing touches would have to wait.

2009-12-11T10:56:00.002-05:00

The kids do not have school for the third day in a row. Eden has been home sick since Monday and the living room has been piled in the dining room for three weeks.

We replaced our ancient berber carpet with bamboo and knocked out the faux beams on the ceiling, hoping to simply mud and resurface it. Alas, the drywall was warped so we had to tear it all down. While we were at it we decided to replace the dingy inset lights. There was a miscommunication with the electrician so he wasn't able to come until Monday and then a little confusion about whether we needed to take the next layer of ceiling panels as well as an attic full of insulation (we didn't) so he wasn't able to actually do the work until yesterday. Tim, the drywaller, is here taping the panels. He should be done some time next week.

We generally get our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. The kids are missing it and wondering when we're going to get one to which I reply, "I don't know." My sister-in-law offered the use of a miniature one but we have no place to put it. In the dining room we have its normal occupants: our table and five chairs, a low and a long bookcase filled with books. We removed the small secretary where we store our bills to make room for five upholstered chairs, a couch, a dresser, the TV, dvd player, two decorative boxes that store videos and dvds, a side table, two lamps, a compressor and a bucket of tools, 8 baskets that are normally in the living room closet and are my standing pile/file. We couldn't fit the second couch and so it's jammed against the wall in the front entry.

My bedroom (if you discount the closet which is stuffed with bags full of presents) and the kitchen are the only rooms I have a handle on, though the kitchen now acts as temporary storage for the living room light fixtures, the calendars - including the large wooden advent one- and any miscellaneous tools and paint brushes.

My task this weekend is to divest our home of one of the couches and three of the chairs and the garage of a large entertainment center that doesn't work for the playroom/attic/residence of doom...when I'm not in class with Eden whose new favorite thing is playing school, having long talks with Lydia or studying with Christopher whose least favorite thing is doing school, but we insist.

Party on.

Mr. T

2009-11-30T21:21:00.004-05:00

I've fallen in love with another man.

We met online.

I didn't really believe in love at first sight until I saw a picture of him and I knew he had to belong to me.

Being short and fat he's not handsome in the traditional sense, but I think he's adorable.

Paul has not been at all reasonable, which is disappointing.

Don't you think we belong together?

PSA

2009-11-24T07:54:00.007-05:00

Some Sundays, during the beginning of the service, our church has a time to greet those around you. This Sunday Christopher had his head in a book and didn't get up. I hadn't noticed but the next time we made eye contact he whispered,

"I wasn't shaking hands because some people don't wash their hands after going to the bathroom."

2009-10-11T21:03:00.006-04:00

This little person only has two aunts and both of us are named Al(l)ison and go by "Aunt Al(l)i to Torey's girls. Ever since a little neighbor boy who adored me would shout down the street "Assalin!" I have encouraged young children to call me Ali. It usually first comes out as "A-wee" but I have no problem with that.

Little Miss Precocious, the same child who could clearly say "Lydia" at 6 months has been calling her two aunties something that sounds like one would make when clearing one's phlegmy throat. The best spelled approximation is "Eh Eh" but that doesn't really capture it.

I had the child speaking Chinese with intonation the other day but when I asked her to say my name she just stared at me.

Allison and I have both hit the wall. She's complaining on Skype from Vancouver and I'm griping here. A couple days ago I threatened to ignore Willa or "Weewa" as she calls herself until she called me by name.

Today, I can't remember why, she said "A-wee" clear as a bell for Torey, then several times more on the phone and yet again in the flesh when I picked up Eden tonight. It was so sweet and terribly, terribly appreciated.

Heckle and Jeckle

2009-10-09T18:40:00.003-04:00

Torey has been heckling me about posting, threatening to start a fund to finance a new router, reporting threats from her sister-in-law Allison who is claiming she's going to fly here from Vancouver to picket until I blog again.

"Of course I'll have to get you to drag her outside so that she knows I'm out there," she said to Torey. This is an allusion to me being a homebody.

Hardy har har!

I'm sorry, Ladies, but instead of retiring from teaching and beginning part time motherhood as I planned, I find that I have now been enrolled in a quasi-correspondence course of 8th grade and my courier is having a wee bit of trouble getting me all my books and assignments, or at least that's what supporting Christopher in his return to regular education has felt like.

Good news though, he just received his first progress report and is doing quite well, but it's been a haul. He is working really, really hard and is still struggling to make it to class on time with all the proper supplies, not to mention get home, do his homework, get to bed at a decent hour, get up the next morning, pack his lunch, get himself ready and on the bus in time just to do it all over again. School has seriously cut into his computer, Wii and personal reading time. And if you think he took that sitting down, you have never met the lad or have just stumbled across this blog. I couldn't pinpoint exactly where he is in the stages of grief, certainly not at acceptance, but closer than he was three weeks ago.

Getting back to the hecklers, Torey wanted me to let you all know that I placed 6th in the Inspirational division of the Writer's Digest annual writing contest. I entered an essay that began as a post here. She commanded me to repost the finished version. She is small but fierce, so here it is.