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.
by jphilo | Dec 18, 2009 | Family
Our daughter made it home from college yesterday evening. She slipped in between blizzards on roads miraculously dry, considering the fiercely wicked early storms we’ve had so far this year.
Hiram helped her haul in more bags, baskets and boxes than I thought her small car could hold. “It was a tight fit,” she agreed, “but I have a lot of sewing to do over Christmas break.”
We old fogies went to bed, but our daughter stayed up, quiet as she’s always been. I didn’t hear a thing as she crept around the house for hours, her body accustomed to the night owl college culture. This morning she’s fast asleep, the light pouring through the six big windows onto her calm face, clothes and fabric cluttering the floor of her room.
Signs of her are scattered throughout the house. A sewing machine in need of repair sits in Hiram’s workshop. Face wash and toothpaste litter the sink in the upstairs bathroom, while the medicine cabinet shelves are empty. Her late supper dishes are stacked in the dishwasher.
Most puzzling of all are the four thread spindles next to the cookie jar this morning, along with an eye-watering, evil-looking concoction in a large measuring cup. Either Anne’s into mixing fairy tale potions, or she’s whipping up one of her homemade cleaning and hygiene products.
This will be our last Christmas break with her, and every sign of her Anneness is dear to me. Her little girl creations – the doll clothes fashioned from Kleenex, the mish-mash stews of leaves and grass and berries, the Barbie zip line stretching from upstairs window to tree, the bungie-jumping action figures in the laundry chute – are ancient history.
My daughter has become a lovely young woman. Her creative streak is as much a part of her as ever, leading her to ideas and dreams beyond anything I could ever imagine. Clutter is part and parcel with the creative world she inhabits. So this Christmas break, I’m determined to enjoy her presence instead of being annoyed by her clutter. When she finally wakes up and explains what’s in the measuring cup, I’ll let you know, unless I die from eating a poisoned apple before I have the chance.
Welcome home, Anne. I’m so glad you’re here.
by jphilo | Dec 17, 2009 | Family
My son called on Sunday and left me feeling all warm and snuggly. He asked me to email all our favorite family recipes so he and Abbey, his fiance, could start their Christmas baking. Don’t ask why the request has me feeling like I just watched a Hallmark movie. I’m not sure I can explain.
But I do know this. For a long time, our relationship with our son was fragile, breakable and delicate as a spider’s web. During the years when he in Washington state and then at the monastery in West Virginia, often the only safe topic of conversation was cooking.
“What’s your recipe for shortbread?” he would ask, and I tried not to cry while I read it to him. Then he wanted the recipe for Early Bird Coffee Cake, Pecan-Caramel Rolls, Gingersnaps, Sugar Cookies and more. When he started asking for them a second time, saying he’d misplaced them in the monastery kitchen, I made a computer file and sent it to him.
When he called and asked for the recipes a few days ago, I found that old file and attached it to an email. I thought of how our relationship began to heal as we talked about baking tricks we’d discovered, variations we’d experimented with, new recipes we’d found. Recipes strengthened my once strained relationship with my son. Maybe they will strengthen the good relationship I already enjoy with my future daughter-in-law. So I added a note to the email. “Let me know what family meals you and Abbey want to learn to cook when you’re here over New Years. I’d love to teach you.”
That’s when my insides went all warm and snuggly. Cooking with my son and his fiance, and perhaps my daughter and her fiance as we celebrate the New Year as a family for the first time. Sounds like a Hallmark movie to me.
by jphilo | Dec 1, 2009 | Family
My sister is three years my senior. For all my life I’ve looked up to her, at least when we weren’t mortal enemies, ready to scratch each other’s eyes out in defense of our respective sides of the bed. Other than that, she’s been a font of wisdom and sophistication, and when we were younger and the age gap seemed bigger, I pretty much idolized her.
As we’ve gotten older, the age gap has narrowed, but there are times when I still rely on her guidance. Over the years, I’ve complied a list of ways she’s guided me down the path of life. Here are some of the things only a big sister can do:
- Put her arm around a little sister’s slumping shoulders to hide her slouch.
- Outgrow her sister dress and pass it down for another year or two of wearing.
- Get Mom to help after her little sister throws up or wets both sides of the bed.
- Teach a klutzy little sister how to jump rope, play jacks, and color between the lines.
- Warn her not to date certain guys with bad reputations.
- Fight for a reasonable curfew that benefitted her younger siblings.
- Encourage her sister to make a risky career change.
- Tell her sister she was a good mother, no matter what choices her kids made.
- Get up early the day after Thanksgiving to drive around Minneapolis so her sister could bargain shop for wedding presents.
- Provide feedback about mother-of-the-groom and mother-of-the-bride dresses on the day after Thanksgiving, never once mentioning her little sister’s stomach pooching out because of too much Chex mix, too much pie and that extra helping of mashed potatoes on Turkey Day.
Once the weddings are history, “arranging flowers” and “being a pillar of strength during emotional meltdowns” will make the list, I’m sure.
Maybe someday, I’ll get to help my sister as much as she’s helped me. But if I can’t, it’ll be okay. Because there’s one more thing only a big sister can do. She loves you no matter what.
And that’s the best thing of all.
