by jphilo | Feb 17, 2010 | Family
As this winter stretches on and on, retaining sanity is becoming a full time occupation. To maintain it, I follow my doctor’s advice when he’s performing unpleasant medical procedures. “Jolene,” he says, “go to your happy place.”
Tell you what, the road to my happy place is getting worn out this winter, at least metaphorically. See, my happy place is the little clearing on our neighbor’s property, surrounded by huge evergreens, but it’s inaccessible these days because of two feet fof snow on the ground.
With our driveway iced over and the picnic table swallowed by snow, it’s hard to imagine Labor Day weekend, warm and sunny, when thirty of my closest relatives (I come from a big family) gathered at our house for a reunion. Tents filled the yard, sleeping bags covered every bedroom floor, the bathrooms were in constant use. In the deep of this winter, it’s hard to remember walking through the grass and assembling in the shady glen of my happy place where my friend Twyla Wisecup, owner of Impressions by Twyla, photographed our motley crew.
Patiently she arranged group after group: Mom and her sister and husband, my generation’s offspring – first the girl cousins, then the boy cousins, then all together – family groups, including the first picture with all four Philos in street dress since 2001. Most amazingly of all, Twyla corralled the bunch (and some of us are pretty independent cusses) into a cohesive whole and preserved us forever in a few formal shots, then several where we snuggled close, and finally letting us do what we like to do best at the end of every reunion – display our true personalities.
Every time I see that picture, I am in my happy place again, surrounded by a big family, comprised of people who love each other at their best, their worst and their goofiest. When we gathered for the photo, we had no idea this would be the hardest, longest winter in recent memory, with snowdrifts so high it’s impossible to reach my happy place on foot.
But thanks to our Labor Day gathering and Twyla’s talents, I can get there any time I want without a snow shovel or fear of wearing out the road. What a blessing the picture has been this winter.
Thanks, family and thanks, Twyla, for preserving my sanity and my happy place.
by jphilo | Feb 12, 2010 | Family
I take so many things in life for granted: a warm home, a loving husband, more food than I need, education and job skills, freedom to travel, vacations, a functioning government, friends who stand by me, and the ability to pay our bills each month. These privileges are so commonplace I treat them as my due goes on and on.
But each time my children call, I’m reminded of a double privilege my husband and I never want to take for granted. We count it a blessing when they call, their voices full of confidence in our love for them, eager to talk about the events of the past week and dreams for the future. The blessing multiplies when they ask for our advice, consider our words seriously, and heed what we say.
I never dreamed of such a relationship with my adult children after growing up in the sixties watching the hippies and flower children denigrate and scoff the “establishment.” A bit young to participate in the rebellion, a bit of the ‘60s attitude managed to rub off on me. My parents’ advice was considered suspect until after our son was born, and we needed all the help we could get to survive his first five years.
So we never expected our children would value our advice before they became parents. And during Allen’s monastery years, we lost our easy relationship with him and believed it was gone forever. God has blessed our family with restoration. We deserve this blessing no more than any other family. I fight back tears when our children, overwhelmed by the sweetness of God’s grace, acutely aware of families broken by strife, crippled by rebellion. I restrain the tears until after the good-byes and I love yous.
Then I let them flow as I pray, “Please God, make me mindful of your blessings. Don’t let me ever take them for granted.”
by jphilo | Jan 11, 2010 | Family
Our sweet daughter heads back to college on this bright, sunny Monday. The trip takes only 3 1/2 hours, and the temperature is in the low 20s, warmer than it’s been in two weeks. The forecast says no snowstorms, but she’s going northwest, to the snowiest part of our very snowy state.
My head says she’ll have a safe drive, but my crazy side is determined to worry. Anne can’t leave until mid-afternoon, after a doctor’s appointment which was rescheduled courtesy of last week’s blizzard. I keep thinking of black ice, the snow piles that make every intersection a blind one, and of driving on the worst roads after sunset. And when those worries run out, the memory of Anne’s pre-Christmas trip to Wisconsin with her fiance plagues me. I can’t stop thinking about the bad weather that forced them to spend the night in the car at an I-90 rest stop near Rochester, Minnesota.
Then I remember the years after college when Hiram and I drove from South Dakota to my parents’ home in northwest Iowa for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Bad weather accompanied every 12 1/2 hour trip we made. We didn’t have cell phones, and pay phones were few and far between, so the rellies didn’t get many updates. More than once we spent unexpected nights in hotels. I recall one return trip when the temperature started at -20 in Iowa, and never rose a degree. The heater in our VW Rabbit couldn’t keep up, and we shivered our way across the state of South Dakota.
Our travels almost drove my mother, one of the champion worries of all time, crazy. And her worry almost drove me crazy. But Hiram and I needed to drive into the unknown. By doing so we became adults, learning how to face challenges, assess risks, and solve problems. My daughter deserves the same opportunity.
So when it’s time for Anne to leave today, I’ll suck up my worries so I don’t make her crazy. I’ll hug her good-bye, have faith in her ability to overcome the unknown, and remind her to call when she arrives.
You can do this on your own, daughter. I know you can.
by jphilo | Jan 1, 2010 | Family
As our kids get older, as their work and school schedules get more demanding, and as their family circles expand, it gets hard to find a time to celebrate Christmas together. But somehow we managed, and by Wednesday afternoon, everyone arrived for four days of food, family and fun.
Four days may not seem like much, but it’s enough for me. In fact, for the past two frigid mornings, while I walked by the light of a blue moon, my heart overflowed with gratitude for this oasis of common hours, something I thought would never be part of our family life.
Seven years ago we gave up all hope of gatherings like these. In the course of those seven years I made peace with our family’s reality – yearly visits to the monastery where our son lived and quiet home celebrations with our daughter. By God’s grace I let go of old expectations of a house overflowing with young people and their energy.
Then one year ago, without warning or premonition, everything changed. God restored the expectations we had surrendered to him. Soon, our son and our daughter brought two new young people into the family circle, and they’ve already become dear to us.
Every time we’re together, mindfulness of how much God has restored to us changes the way I think. I am learning to be grateful, not just once in a blue moon, but every day of my life. Instead of worrying about the chaos or the grocery bills, I give thanks for the commotion. Instead of complaining about how quickly the hours fly by, I savor each moment. If we can only be together once in a blue moon, I am grateful for the opportunity. After all, that’s more than I ever expected, more than I imagined or conceived.
So this noisy day I am grateful for a busy house, the dishwasher running almost constantly, Riley the dog, mounds of laundry, and for a three-degrees-above-zero morning walk by the light of a lovely blue moon.
God, make me grateful tomorrow, too, and every day of 2010.
by jphilo | Dec 31, 2009 | Family
Last week’s winter storm made the Wednesday evening before Christmas a rather trying one at our house. Anne and her fiancee thought they could outrun the storm bearing down on northwest Iowa by leaving for Wisconsin early in the afternoon. For the first few hours, they made good progress. But as darkness fell and traffic slowed the storm caught up with them.
Anne called around 6:30 PM to say they had pulled into a rest stop on I-90, not far from Rochester, Minnesota. “We’ll spend the night in the car,” she said. “The visibility’s so bad we can’t even get to the next town.” After reassuring me they had plenty of blankets, food, water and gasoline, she hung up.
If the call had come two or three years ago, the thought of my daughter marooned at a rest stop in a blizzard would have kept me awake most of the night. But in the last few years, I have seen God so powerfully at work in our lives, I was able to fall asleep, confident that He would watch over my daughter and the man she’s going to marry.
The same night Anne slept in the car, the cold woke Hiram and I woke in the middle of the night. An ice storm had knocked out our electricity, but instead of fretting about when it would come on and how our daughter was faring, I piled extra blankets on the bed and thought about something I’d recently read in John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life.
“We simply take life and breath and health and friends and everything for granted. We think it is ours by right. But the fact is that it is not ours by right.” Piper goes on to remind us that we are sinful, we’re the ones who rebelled against our Creator. “Therefore, every breath we take, every time our heart beats, every day that the sun rises, every moment we see with our eyes or hear with our ears or speak with our mouths or walk with our legs is, for now,a free and undeserved gift to sinners who deserve only judgement…for those who see the merciful hand of God in every breath they take and give credit where it is due, Jesus Christ will be seen and savored…Every heartbeat will be received as a gift from his hand.”
I lay, waiting for the extra blankets to warm us, and thought about my daughter’s life in a new way. The years we’ve had with her are an undeserved gift. So is electricity and a warm house and Christmas and a husband who loves me. If I accept these good gifts from God, then I can trust him, even when what he gives is not what I think I need. Then, I fell asleep asking him to prepare me for whatever news came in the morning.
When we woke, the electricity was on. The house was warm. An hour or two later, Anne called to say the snow had stopped, and they were on their way. By noon she called to say they had arrived. Once again, God’s grace was poured out upon our family. I thanked him for the undeserved gift of our travelers’ safety. I asked him to make me mindful of his grace.
Please God, I pray again whenever I feel my heart beat, continue to make me grateful. Don’t let me waste your grace.
by jphilo | Dec 23, 2009 | Family
I have no idea when it happened, but at some point in the last year, both our children became bona fide Granola Crunchies. Admittedly, Hiram and I went through our own GC phase in the 1970s. I shunned cosmetics, wore earth shoes on my feet and kerchiefs on my hair. I wore granny skirts, and Hiram wore bib overalls. In the summers, he didn’t cut his hair, so it bleached to a California blonde. We dreamed of building an earth home, or better yet of constructing a house out of a concrete culvert.
But when Jimmy Carter and his sweater were replaced by Ronald Reagan and his snappy suits, we converted. By the time our kids came along, we looked more like Ward and June Cleaver than Earth Mother and Yule Gibbons. So how in the world did our kids become more us than we ever were?
Our forays into crunchiedom were child’s play compared to our kids’ present shenanigans. Anne uses home recipes she finds on the internet to make menacing concoctions out of baking soda and tea, vinegar and beer, nuts and roots and berries. She claims the vile-looking stuff is shampoo or deodorant or tooth polish, gentle on the body and easy on the environment.
Allen is reading up on organic farming – with horses no less – and has researched a European method of house construction that involves a huge central stone fireplace and two logs a day for heat. He and his fiance think they can use the oven for all their baking, too.
The way I figure it, this Philo Granola Crunchie epidemic is the result of a genetic predisposition caused by one of two things:
- Hiram’s upbringing on a primitive Alaska homestead and his dream of entering a commune after high school.
- My incessant reading and rereading of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books throughout my childhood and twenty-five years of teaching elementary school.
So all you young mothers out there, if you don’t want your kids to end up like ours – disgustingly health conscious, resourceful, crafty with their hands, and concerned about the environment – quit reading good literature to them when they’d rather play video games. Don’t let them mess around with craft supplies, Legos, clay, twigs, found objects, and anything else that allows them to use their imaginations. Make them watch TV 24/7.
Oh, and don’t feed them granola and yogurt for breakfast. You’ll live to regret it.
