by jphilo | Mar 9, 2011 | Current Events
Today, I could be bummed because of last night’s thick, wet snowfall which put a damper upon spring’s steady progress. I could be grinchy and grumpy because daylight savings time kicks in this weekend and will make me wait an extra hour for the sunrises I crave each morning. I could lament the steady drain on our checkbook when car licenses, property taxes, and Hiram’s birthday all arrive in March, also one of the two most grey and dismal months of the year.*
But I’m not bummed.
I’m not grinchy and grumpy.
I’m not lamenting our meager checkbook balance or March’s parade of grey days.
Instead, I am happy to be alive this morning after a snowy, treacherous drive home from Clive last night.
The problem wasn’t that it was snowing hard.
The problem wasn’t winds and drifting.
The problem was a sticky, heavy, wet snow that made it hard to see the side of the road.
I was only going 35 when the car veered toward the shoulder. The bump caused the car to fishtail. It went across the road and almost into the ditch. Then it slid to the other side and almost into that ditch. When it finally stopped moving, the car was pointed south in the northbound lane. I moved into the southbound lane and found a place to turn around.
On the slow trip home, I passed one car being pulled out of the ditch. So I drove slower, thinking about how God chose to answer my frantic prayer as the car and the steering wheel spun out of control.
“God, be with me!” I said.
Whether I ended up in the ditch unharmed or injured,
Whether I made it through without a scratch or in the hospital,
Whether I lived or died,
I knew he would answer that prayer.
He would be with me.
Why did he answer by keeping me out of the ditch, without a scratch on me or the car? Only one explanation comes to mind. His purposes for me are not complete. He has work for me to do. So as the mundane duties of this day unfold, I am happy to be alive, uninjured, and able to to accomplish them.
I am happy to fold underwear,
happy to edit more chapters of my book,
happy to cook and wash dishes,
happy to agonize over what color to paint the bathroom,
happy to watch my husband create another remodeling mess,
happy to see the daffodils poking through the pesky, wet snow,
happy to be alive.
*November is the other one of the two most dismal months.
by jphilo | Feb 14, 2011 | Current Events
This past weekend, Iowans enjoyed a break in the weather. It came just in time for Valentine’s Day, so women can wear dresses and strappy, spiky shoes instead of fuzzy sweaters, wool pants, and winter boots. KInda nice to set aside winter toughness for a few days, in anticipation of spring’s kindness.
I took advantage of the sunshine and warmer temperatures hovering around freezing and walked outside on Saturday. This is my version of spring training, my opportunity to toughen up before swimsuit season arrives. Not that I’m big into swim suits (or strappy, spiky shoes for that matter), but that’s beside the point.
The point is that my pride at being one tough women, who braved February weather to walk outside, was properly dashed after reading a couple tidbits in the Harding County, South Dakota weekly newspaper, the Nation’s Center News. You may think it’s pretty pathetic for someone to still take the paper, 25 years after they moved away. But trust me, articles about the tough women who live in the remote, northwest corner of South Dakota keep me renewing my subscription year after year.
In those parts, winter lasts a long time, and this one’s been pretty snowy, too. Which sets the scene for the first article which reported that Ronda Cordell “was a little worried about the ice and snow on her roof, so she chopped the six inches of ice from her eaves, but it was so icy that there was not much she could do about the snow.”
The second story was about Tawni Cordell. (I believe her husband is Ronda’s grand-nephew.) She and her husband went mountain lion hunting a few weeks ago. “When the dogs treed the cat along the face of a cliff, Tawni and Ryan climbed up to have an open shot and brought him down…He weighed 175 pounds.” The reporter concludes with these words. “These women are tough around here, because Tawni is expecting a baby, too.”
Like I said, those two stories put me in my place. Ronda’s the kind of woman who has no qualms about chopping ice from the eaves of her house on a ranch in the boondocks, even though she lives alone. Tawni’s the kind of woman who tracks and kills mountain lions while preparing to give birth. (I’m exaggerating a bit. She’s due in June.) I’m the kind of woman who wears yak tracks on a walk through town and takes her cell phone along just in case, and who refuses to wear spiky, strappy shoes on Valentine’s Day because she’s afraid of heights.
Stories like these keep me subscribing to The Nation’s Center News year after year. They remind me of the tough women who live in and around Harding County –
Of their kindness.
Of their determination.
Of their strength.
Of their resourcefulness.
They remind me that someday,
I want to be like them.
by jphilo | Feb 4, 2011 | Current Events
So far, the week has produced bushels and bushels of bad news. The following items top my gloomy Gus list.
Gas went over $3.00 a gallon.
The peaceful Egyptian protests went nasty.
Food prices will soon rise.
Not as many new jobs were created as expected.
The folks in Washington spend all their time blaming one another for problems instead of finding solutions.
The big blizzard predictions were accurate which will encourage the forecasters to greater hype heights in the future.
Iran may have a nuclear bomb in less than a year.
On the flip side, there’s only enough good news to fill a peck measure.
The local street department plowed out our road very quickly.
My spreadsheet program can make really cool checklists.
At the bakery yesterday, I resisted all the doughnuts calling my name and ordered a salad for lunch.
In an unbalanced news week like this one, it’s hard to keep smiling. I mean, how’s a person supposed to stay perky when nothing can be done about this miserable state of affairs.
I can’t lower gas prices.
I can’t do anything about Egypt.
I can’t stop eating.
I can’t create jobs.
I can’t influence politicians.
I can’t stop the weather.
I can’t infiltrate Iran’s nuclear plants.
Everything I can’t do leaves me feeling helpless. So instead, I’m going to concentrate on what I can do.
I can ride my bike more when the weather gets better.
I can pray for Egypt.
I can serve leftovers for supper.
I can build my business and hire employees someday.
I can vote.
I can dress for the weather.
I can trust God’s power to be greater than any nuclear weapon.
Best of all, I can take Mom to lunch and the library on this cold sunny day.
What I can do isn’t big, but it is important. And that’s enough to perk up this woman and get her moving.
So please excuse me.
I’m off to do what I can today.
My mother is waiting.
by jphilo | Jan 17, 2011 | Current Events
Between having to boil drinking water since Friday night (a city water main broke) and some unexpected news from Harding County, South Dakota, prairie thoughts dominated the weekend.
The water business increased my admiration for Ma Ingalls and every other prairie woman ten-fold. I thought about them every time I ran a potful of water and heated it on my clean, electric stove. Those prairie gals hauled and heated water constantly. Water for washing, cleaning, bathing, cooking. Every drop of it hauled in cold, then heated on a wood stove. Throw babies in cloth diapers, without rubber or plastic pants, and I get tired just thinking about their workloads.
So prairie folks were on my mind before the news came that Sky Ranch for Boys, where Hiram and I worked after college, is closing. The ranch, a residential facility for troubled boys, is at least in part, a victim of economic times. Their website announcement says:
We are deeply saddened to report that our program will cease providing residential treatment and educational services for troubled teens in the first part of 2011. This painful decision was a result of the trend away from the kind of residential treatment program Sky Ranch offers in favor of less expensive, community based alternatives for kids in trouble and at risk. The Ranch is currently caring for less than 20 boys (down from 40 a few years ago) and that number is expected to decline sharply in the weeks ahead as states implement new budget policies. Although exacerbated by the recession, this does not appear to be a short term trend.
After reading the announcement, I kept thinking about the boys who will need residential treatment in future, but won’t have it available. And I kept thinking about all our friends in Harding County who will be affected by the closing: teachers, counselors, caseworkers, cooks, and so many more. Will they be able to find jobs in the vast, sparsely populated, short grass prairie they love? Will they have to sell their ranches and move away? Will the tiny, struggling towns die? These prairie thoughts, disturbing and unwelcome, put a weekend spent boiling water in proper perspective.
I am ashamed of my complaining.
I am grateful for a secure livelihood.
I am praying for my Harding County friends.
by jphilo | Jan 6, 2011 | Current Events
Are you looking at the jumble of letters in the title and wondering if you can stomach another helping of alphabet soup? Believe me, if you were afflicted with EA/TEF, you wouldn’t be eating alphabet soup or anything else without emergency surgery.
EA stands for Esophageal Atresia, which is the new and improved name for a Tracheoesophageal Fistula (TEF), the condition our son was born with. Very briefly, esophageal atresia (or TEF for old timers like me) is a congenital defect. In most cases, the upper esophagus ends and does not connect with the lower esophagus and stomach. The top end of the lower esophagus connects to the windpipe. That’s the version Allen had. Immediate, major surgery was required to correct his plumbing issues, as is the case with all babies born with EA/TEF.
To read more about the condition, more information is available at www.DifferentDream.com, my website for parents of kids with special needs. You might also like this FaceBook page where parents of EA/TEF kids share experiences and seek advice: Bridging the Gap of EA/TEF. Since finding the group and it’s founder, Lori Dorman McGahan, I’ve swapped stories with parents whose vocabularies include words like seal cough, tracheomalacia, sphincter valve, and fundoplication. It is way cool.
During January, I’ll be featuring some of these families at the Different Dream website, if you’re interested. Many of their stories make Allen’s sound like a walk in the park. So take a gander if you like. And if you know a family dealing with EA/TEF, please pass on the information to them. It took me almost 28 years to connect with parents who identify with what we went through. No parent should ever have to wait that long again!
Here’s a note from Kristin Cooley that clarifies some of the information I gave about EA/TEF. I would have posted it at as a comment, but can’t get it to work. If anyone else is having the same trouble, please email me. The odds are slim that I can fix what’s wrong, but it’s worth a try. Now for Kristin’s information:
Hi, Jolene! Thanks so much for taking the time to help out the cause!!
I wanted to say that your second paragraph leads readers to believe that EA and TEF are the same thing; this is not the case. In fact, they are two completely distinct anomalies. EA, or esophageal atresia, is the ending of the esophagus in a blind pouch before it connects to the stomach. TEF, or tracheoesophageal atresia, is the abnormal connection of the esophagus to the trachea. While in a majority of cases they do co-exist, there are instances when EA occurs as an isolated anomaly, especially in long gap patients.
I know your son was born with EA/TEF, so I know the cause means as much to you as any of us. I just felt compelled to bring this to your attention because many of us will share your website with our friends and family who have a very basic understanding of this birth defect. So, for those of them who are trying to grasp the complexity of the birth defect, I wanted to make sure they got complete information.
Thank you,
Kristin
by jphilo | Dec 14, 2010 | Current Events
The season’s first real snow made a grand entrance Saturday, greasing the skids with a sheen of ice, then sliding in with a howling wind that lasted all night. We woke Sunday to three or four inches of snow – it’s hard to tell because of the drifting – no church because of the ice, below zero temps, and a brilliant, blue sky.
Our kids had it worse. Anne emailed Saturday to say they were snowed in. Allen called Saturday afternoon with a similar report, their second snowed in Saturday in two weeks. “I still haven’t done my Christmas shopping,” he said.
We talked about what we want to do as a family when he and Abbey, Kailen and Anne are here for a long New Year’s weekend when we’ll celebrate Christmas. Sunday, the conversation was repeated during a phone call with Anne. Our children’s voices conveyed eagerness and anticipation of some quiet family time together, something in short supply this past year with its crowded schedule of weddings and reunions.
I hung up the phone, keenly aware of the grace surrounding our family on this snowy, dangerous weekend and the festivities to come. Some years ago, our family circumstances required us to relinquish every dream of a simple family Christmas with both our children. Unexpectedly and miraculously, in the past two years that dream has abundantly restored beyond our wildest imaginings.
So today I look outside at the bleak landscape, all bare trees and hard sunshine, and think about our gathering to come. I hesitate and ask. “God, is it too much for me to ask for a weather favor? Could a blizzard hit once they are safely here? Could we all be snowed in together?”
