Summertime Birthdays, Tradition, and Pickle Juice

I stayed up late on the eve of his birthday, getting his present out of its clever hiding spot, wrapping it, pulling out ingredients and mixing up sourdough waffle batter, setting a special breakfast place at the kitchen table for the birthday boy, just like my mother used to. The warm June air was spilling in through the open window, bringing with it the scents of early summer evenings - the flowers, the dogwood, the freshly mown grass.

I thought of my mother, mostly.  I’m the same age now that she was the day I was born, and I wonder if she felt then as I do now; if her knee ached climbing the stairs with a toddler on her hip, whether she noticed stray gray hairs and lines slowly appearing in the same places, and if she searched the slightly new face in the mirror, wondering where had the twenty-year old gone who used to smile back at her, yet liking the reflection of her life in these changing features. 

My mother always made birthdays special. My favorite part was breakfast, because it was the first moment of the day. I would get out of bed, the golden summer light streaming through my basement bedroom, and too excited to get dressed, I’d climb the staircase in my pajamas. In the kitchen, where the small table was pushed against the windows, my mother would have set a special birthday breakfast place: a pretty napkin under my plate, flowery silverware, a card, a gift, and a glass with a bloom or two from the garden. I would eat my bowl of cereal while the sun rose higher before me, admire how the light cut through the flower’s water, sparkling on the table, and wiggle with anticipation for the day to come. From that moment forward, I would feel that every minute of that day was a good one, meant just for me. 

I try to recreate that feeling for my own children by imitating my mother’s tradition as best I can. What I didn’t realize was how much work actually went into making a birthday breakfast look so nice, but I’m sure it helped that she is an excellent housekeeper. I, on the other hand, am not naturally inclined towards keeping a very tidy house, which is how I found myself up until midnight on the night before my son’s birthday, trying to make things as nice as I remember my mother keeping them, hoping that he would treasure these mornings like I did. I thought of her as I cleaned a smear of pickle juice off the glass door, and as I scrubbed the tines of a fork in the sink. The scrubbing, the tidying, the laying of special tableware: my mother made this seemingly small act of love year after year, for each of her four children, and we all felt it.

I wonder if my grandmother had the same breakfast table tradition. I texted my dad to ask him to question her about that, but no, this was something she came up with on her own. I wonder if my boys will do this for their own children. 

It’s one big cycle, isn’t it? Parenthood, family traditions, cultures. Mothers do for children, who do for their children, and so on. Staying up until midnight to make that first moment in the morning feel like a hug, wiping smears from a window to make the morning sun sparkle over a bowl of cereal. Generation after generation, on and on it goes.  It’s so beautiful to be a part of it.  

On George Floyd

I have written hundreds of words on the murder of George Floyd, and I don’t feel like I’m saying anything new or more worthy of attention than what’s already been written. 

It is an injustice, it is heart-hollowingly awful, and I am so, so sorry that this happened, and that it is something that black people live with as a very real possibility in their own lives.  

His criminal past does not justify his murder. His intoxication does not justify his murder. His maybe/maybe not knowingly counterfeit bill does not justify it, either. 

I hope that I can help make this kind of thing an impossibility in the future, in the ways I raise my children, in the ways I listen and speak and vote and react. 

Mostly, I can pray, and the prayer that gives me very clear direction on this is from St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, let me sow pardon.

Where there is doubt, let me sow faith.

Where there is despair, let me sow hope.

Where there is darkness, let me sow light.

And where there is sadness, let me sow joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console.

To be understood as to understand.

To be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. 

Distant Connections

Fuchsia blooms all over West Cork - in the hedgerows, the ditches, gardens, and in the windows of long-abandoned houses. When I saw one in bloom at the garden centre here three years ago, the only one, I had to have it. Now it winters in a large south-facing window in North Dakota, and this week, it flowered. Holding a blossom in my hand, I could be the teenager I was, standing in the bohereen by my parents’ house on the hill by the Atlantic, the sea wind blasting as hard as it does on the prairie. I thought I might mash a blossom in my palm and taste its sweet nectar, but the blooms I have are too few, and too precious, for that. 

Real connections with Ireland have been few and far between over the past few years, and I’ve no idea when I’ll taste coarse brown bread again, see a pint of Murphy’s poured properly, or when my ears will be filled with the Cork sing-song that I used to hear all day, every day. It’s almost as if that life were a prolonged daydream to me now, it’s so far away and so different from what I’m living today. 

But since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there is a new connection (and an old one) and it’s not just the fuchsia blossom.This connection is with a group of cousins who meet via Zoom every evening to say the Rosary together to pray for the end of the pandemic.  The times that I can join in, the family Rosary is providing its own miracle for me, though it’s not the one we’re praying for. It’s restoring a bit of my sense of still being connected, of belonging to that place that was home for so many years. 

The cousins do not recite the prayers in unison, but each at their own pace after the first portion of each Our Father or Hail Mary is recited by whoever is leading that decade, voices and words criss-crossing over one another. Like the responses at Mass in Ireland, everyone starting at the same place and ending whenever they end, never at the same time as anyone else,  then waiting for the next part to pick up again, and all off at their own pace once more. It reminds me of how we go to communion or board buses in Ireland - in a big rush, all together, somehow orderly but without order. Oh, I miss it.

Then, afterward, a sing-song. I close my eyes now and think of the screen in front of me filled with familiar faces chatting away, laughing, smiling, and singing in my mother’s accent. Someone got out a squeezebox, a tin whistle was fetched, an organ played off-screen, and one cousin even broke out a stage mic with his guitar. After the rest had finished renditions of Raglan Road, The Wild Colonial Boy, The Rare Auld Times, and Spancil Hill, my American dad sang ‘Sioux City Sue’ and kicked off a spate of American tunes. It always made me giggle, being from the Dakotas and never knowing all the lyrics to the Black Hills of Dakota, while everyone I knew in Ireland learnt it word for word at school - it was no surprise when that broke out too, along with Home on the Range and even a Dolly Parton song. So much fun squeezed into a conference call. And then it was over, and I was back in my prairie kitchen, but my heart was full from such a real and close connection to people and a land that I love. 

Having a whole world disappear from in front of your eyes and be replaced with a different one - every emigrant knows that too well, and now everyone knows it, at least a little bit. What a gift it is that we live in an age when we can see those people and hear the voices, prayers, laughter, and songs that remind us of who we are.

A COVID-19 Spring, Featuring Beauty, Hope, and Ticks

Each year, Spring comes tiptoeing in the door, then jumps in fully with both feet, often dragging Summer in close behind. We on the northern plains know better than to trust it. We know that Spring has left the door open wide and might just as easily hop back out, giving Winter enough room to throw around a blizzard or two in a show of strength, or perhaps to blow frosty air over the budding trees, dust the fledgeling grasses and shoots with snow, and leave us all muttering, even though it’s exactly what we know to expect.

However, when warm weather does come back for good, we all rejoice, knowing the door has been firmly shut against the frigid air, and that’s the moment when two things happen: the ticks come out, and the turkey buzzards return.

When I lived in Ireland, the natural world in North America was a topic that inspired awe and trepidation. Whirling wind storms that could lift a house from its foundation, snakes, venomous spiders, tiny insects that feed off blood and leave disease in its wake, blizzards, bears, bison, mountain lions: all horrifying or fascinating, or both, depending on who was interested. Ireland, in contrast, felt as safe as a feather bed wherever nature was concerned. The worst things a person could encounter were a badger or a slick mountain side. Now, I don’t want to encounter a testy badger or get washed out to sea by a freak wave, but the lack of venom and man-eaters made a walk in the country pretty nice.

But back to the main concern. Yesterday, I found three ticks on me, so it must really be Spring this time. One was crawling up my pant leg, one was navigating the hairline at the nape of my neck, and one was probably shaken from my clothes before it landed in the steep basin of the bathroom sink.

They’re unwelcome little buggers. They show up just when the weather gets nice enough to stretch out on the grass and let the sun warm your poor, winter-worn limbs. They’re like sand in your bathing suit, grit in your picnic sandwich: just there to make a nice time not all that nice after all. If they serve a purpose, I have yet to learn it.

Turkey buzzards are similarly unwelcome, in my mind. Bulky, hunched creatures, hulking in gangs at the tree tops, They float silently over the houses, scouring the ground below for dead rabbits, squirrels, birds; finishing off the evidence of a harsh winter or a skilled house cat. My neighbor, a wildlife biologist, calls buzzards “nature’s vacuum cleaners,” and “super cool.” I’m sure they are, and I know they fit beautifully into their ecological niche, but dang are they creepy. Perching in our neighbor’s tree, they stretch out their huge black wings in the sun and stay like that, looking unsettlingly like vampires about to swoop in for the kill. My children love them. The toddler calls them “birdies.” Hmm. I know they won’t harm people, but I still get an urge to scoot the little ones indoors whenever they start their ghoulish circling (the buzzards, not the children.)

Nevertheless, here they are, the ticks and the buzzards, harbingers of change, whose presence announces joyfully to the world that the deep days of winter are behind us, at long last. They might as well be prancing through meadows, calling out that it’s spring! It’s spring! It’s spring! And if you don’t mind, they’d like to take a few sips of your blood, or chow down on some half mummified bunny leg from your yard while doing a fantastic Dracula impression.

I know there’s a COVID-19 thought about hope in here somewhere. Just give me a minute - I haven’t had my coffee yet.

…a minute…

…coffee…

Ok, here’s what I’ve got. On the northern plains, even in the twenty first century, we are often at the mercy of nature. We are used to waiting, months at a time, for the break that gives us our best days. We are a people who endure with hope, and a people adept at embracing the moment when good things finally come our way. We have to be! The dang climate won’t let us be otherwise. Northern plains people have (generally speaking) an astounding drive to get out and enjoy themselves, to tidy a flower bed like nobody's business, to produce a bounty of canned salsa from a patch of soil, to lounge on a boat and soak in every ounce of warmth that comes their way. Summer is our goal, a land of milk and honey that we have crossed the desert to enjoy. But there are a few speed bumps that nature provides us in the forms of critters mentioned here, and we have to negotiate those, too.

COVID-19 isn’t just a speed bump on the way to summer. This is more like a mountain. We’ve been joking that North Dakota people are great at social distancing and isolation anyhow, but who thought that this year would provide so much of it? The backyard barbecues, pool parties, neighborhood kids knocking on the door - there’s so much about spring and summer that gets us out of ourselves and into community: life-giving, heart-filling community. It seems unjust that we might miss it all this year. It’s starting to feel like we probably will, a winter that will last far too long.

Ticks and buzzards, those bearers of disease and flying momento mori that show up each year have always shown up. This year, if they decided to stay indefinitely, I wouldn’t be shocked; 2020 has been that way. But they won’t. They don’t. 

Eventually we will be able to wander among the hills and grasses without considering Lyme disease. We’ll say, ‘I’m glad they’re gone,” and “Isn’t this nice?” It will feel so good. (Except for the mosquitos, but I don’t want to think about them just yet.)

The COVID-19 curve will, God willing, eventually flatten. A vaccine will be developed. Some day we will be able to gather together again, to embrace our friends and family, kneel side by side in prayer, and to use the same ketchup bottle as everyone else at a party, willy-nilly, as if touching it couldn’t kill someone! What carefree abandon! What ease. What everyday, ordinary joy.

We will make it through this wintery solitude and past the hulking shadows that may remain afterward. Such good things are coming again and, oh, won’t it be wonderful when they do?



Note: This blog post doesn't feel finished, but here we go anyway 

Dispatch from the Quarantine

Quarantine, Day Fifteen. I know because I checked the calendar. It's not always apparent anymore what day it is and this is starting to feel a bit like childhood summers did, one day melting into the next. Now that April 30th is being thrown around as a date when all of this will perhaps-maybe-possibly end, I imagine there will be a lot of melting. But I did know that yesterday was Sunday and when evening came, I still had a notion knocking around that we would have to be ready in the morning to head out the door; that I'd have to make sure there were clean work trousers for my husband, clean school uniforms, a snack, and a washed and filled water bottle for our little guy. But I didn't need to do those things, and the realization of this came not with a jolt, but with a wash of relief.

Relief!

Relief seems almost wrong to feel, given what's happening. It's the same relief of realizing that I don't have to face meeting up with someone I have difficulty with, that I don't have to steel myself to face and respond to pointed criticisms respectfully - not at all, and possibly not for a long time.

Maybe isolation isn't all bad.

And yet I feel like I should cringe at that thought, because there's something tone-deaf about it, when health care workers who are friends of mine don't get to choose isolation, when single people, hospital patients, prisoners, and the elderly are forced into isolation and into its subsequent loneliness. Lucky me, that mine can contain a certain amount of relief. Perhaps being sheltered from this disease, and from the world, is something that my spirit has needed. After all, here I am, writing a blog post after nearly eighteen months without having even peeked at this particular corner of the internet.

There's some comfort in this isolation, too. I feel safe at home. I feel confident that my parents are safe from the virus, tucked up in their own cozy place a mile away. And our home is a blessing that we didn't realize the expanse of until we had to be here indefinitely. On the first day of school closures in our district, my husband and I stood looking out our back door and counted the ways we were grateful to be here. At our house, we have a spacious back yard with interesting nooks and crannies for the children to explore, ample sunlit space for our vegetable garden, low-sweeping tree canopies that can serve as a hiding spot or a fort, rock walls to scale, and three friendly families on each side of the fence. We have a pretty reliable income, and my husband can work from home - again, safely. We even have a secluded room (with a child-proof lock!) where he can go to work in peace, complete with a lovely view of spring creeping across the yard. We are so blessed in all of this. We are blessed that this virus arrived not in the deep freeze of January, but in the surprising warmth of an early prairie spring. We are blessed to live in a place that doesn't have a huge population, where we won't encounter quite as many people when we do have to venture out for food or exercise.

Blessing may be an odd word to use here in light of the big picture of this new virus and the havoc that it is wreaking on economies, cities, and lives, but not if you are a Christian. We are taught from the very start to look for God in all things, to lean on him in times of adversity, to literally put our trust in the Lord. I am trying to remember that this is it, the moment to trust.  I'm not saying that I have been doing it consistently. Day Three of the quarantine is when reality set in and I began to gain a picture of what we are facing and what might come of it. Reader, I had to sit on our staircase while the children watched a movie and take deep, slow breaths in order to stop the tears, to calm my beating heart and my shallow, panicked breathing that had come about from all of the 'what ifs' and 'how wills' that had been assaulting me all morning. This is a scary time, and in many moments over the past two weeks, I have not been trusting in Christ. The days that I have placed in His hands have, conversely, been wonderfully calm, ordered days. He will carry me through this if I let Him.  If I let Him. I mean, God is good all the time, right? Even now, even in this, He is good.

Last thought, I promise. Does anyone else feel like we are living the answer to the Litany of Humility? This prayer kept popping up in my facebook groups over the past few months and into my music streaming and oh look, this is life today.

Take care, trust in God, and wash your hands.

#MeToo

I mean, who hasn't been groped, grabbed, or intimidated, right? It almost feels embarrassing to pull up old stories and share them because I feel that, well, it's something that all women (and probably lots of men) have to deal with in their lives, and we all just get on with things. But this week, thanks to many brave souls who are speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, it is being talked about, as it should be. So here are my stories, even though this feels a bit attention-seeking (cringe). I hope it doesn't read that way.

The first time, I was a fifteen year old girl, hopping into a car with some of my friends. An older guy was in the back seat, squeezed between me and one of my girlfriends. I didn't know him, a friend of somebody's sort-of boyfriend. He was probably nineteen or twenty. Not half a block from my house, he reached over and stuck his hand in my crotch, jiggling it. When I slapped his hand away, he laughed and said 'God, what a virgin!' As if that were something to laugh about. As if that were something to be ashamed of. Everybody in the car laughed. I felt myself turn scarlet, at the violation and the humiliation, crossed my arms and legs away from him and made myself as small as possible. That was the first.

Then there was the boy in school who came back from the bathroom into sophomore algebra class and stage whispered 'I just peed on my hand' while he wiped his wet fingers across my cheek. That same boy who would put his foot in my backside as I crouched in front of my locker to retrieve books, who kicked my chair whenever he walked by. Who supposedly liked me.

Then there were the countless - really countless - times that my body was grabbed in pubs and nightclubs in Ireland as an older teen and a twenty-something. It usually went something like this: standing in a crowded spot, queueing for a drink at the bar, and I would feel a hand on my backside, sometimes in between my legs. I would spin around, angry and ready with some harsh words, and two or three lads would be behind me, acting like nothing was happening, or point at each other, faces serious, feigning an apology for the other's behavior. What do you do in that situation? Give a dirty look, tell the to eff off - those seemed to be the only possibilities, since I couldn't tell who had touched me. Or just ignore them, which is what I usually did.

Then there was the time I stood on the south end of O'Connell Street in Dublin, waiting for the bus to college. It was early in the day, and I had an assignment to turn in at ten in a seminar. I remember standing at the end of the bus queue, watching down the street for the bus, and suddenly being violently spun around by the elbow, a man's angry face blurring towards mine, and then warm spit all over my face. He was gone, dissolved into the crowd of pedestrians as quickly as he'd appeared. Two people in the queue turned towards me - a man and a woman. I stood there, shocked, saliva covering my glasses and cheek. The man started quizzing me - Who was that? What did you do to him? No, surely you know him. Why would he spit in your face if you hadn't done something to him? He probably heard your accent, that's it. Lots of people don't like Americans, you know.

I sputtered back answers. But I didn't know him. I hadn't been talking, I'd been standing silently, waiting for a bus. I started to cry as the angry man's warm spit ran towards my mouth. Could I have a tissue, somebody, please? The man in front of me handed me a tissue, tutted, and turned his back; the woman just stared. I didn't know what to do. Call my boyfriend? Go to the cops? Get on the bus and go to class? I got on the bus because, you know, that assignment was due at ten, and if nobody in the queue believed me, why would the cops? Once on campus, I bolted off the bus to the nearest bathroom and scrubbed my face and glasses with hand soap for what felt like ages. My skin was cracking with the dryness for the rest of the day. Yeah, it wasn't a sexual assault, but it happened to me because I was a young woman, of that I am sure, and disbelieved because of that too.

That summer I was in Rome, visiting a friend, when I went to make a phone call in one of those international telephone shops, tiny phone booths lining one wall. I was the only customer. When I hung up the phone, the man who had been behind the counter was spreadeagled inches behind me in the booth, completely blocking my way, smirking. My heart stopped. I asked him to move in very poor Italian, and when he didn't, I shoved him out of the way. He laughed as I ran from the shop.

Then there was the time that still makes me shake, and I hate talking about it. Thirteen years later, safe at home, happily married and expecting my second child, I can feel my hands starting to tremble as I write this. It was the next year, my final year of college, and I was home in Cork for Easter break. It was a beautiful weekend afternoon, sunny and warm, and I went out for a run. My parents lived in a small rural community outside of the city, and like most rural parts of Ireland, the roads were lined with high stone walls covered in brambles. A mile or so from the house, I turned up a hill by the parish church. That particular road was long and steep, usually very quiet, with no houses or other roads intersecting it on either side. A battered-looking white panel van with no windows in the back came down the hill towards me and I heard it stop after it passed. I heard a sliding door bang open. I looked around and three men were running towards me. I kept running. I remember that my only reaction was confusion, thinking 'this is weird, what are they doing?' Then a car came down the hill and slowed - I looked again and saw the van tearing off. I kept going. The car looped back; a young couple inside, clearly shaken, insisted on giving me a lift home. They said they had seen the men chasing me, stopped to help, and the men legged it back to the van and drove off. The couple followed the van for a bit and noticed that its front and back number plates didn't match. Of course, I then had to ask myself if I should trust these people enough to get in their car. I sort of had to.

When I got home, my older brother was the only one there. I remember how he held me once the story spilled out. He sat with me while I called the local Garda station (the Irish police). The guard I spoke with laughed and said 'ah sure, twas probably just a few lads pulling a prank.' Lads in their forties. Lads who I didn't know. My parents came home a few minutes later, and I remember how upset my dad was when I told him about the guard's response. He phoned a reporter who lived nearby, who then rang the station to ask a few questions. Within a half hour, the sergeant was at my parents' front door, very serious, and ready to interview me.

I have asked myself many, many times over the years if those men were really coming after me, if they were truly going to bundle me into the van and do horrible things, and I've come up with some pretty good alternate explanations of why anyone would chase a young woman up an empty rural road. I still don't particularly want to believe the most obvious conclusion myself.

But nothing had happened to me. Thank God. I wasn't raped. I wasn't kidnapped. Far, far worse actually happens to others. But beyond the incidents themselves, the things that stand out to me, that make me feel sick with emotion are the times when I wasn't believed. I can't imagine what it's like for people who are raped and who are then questioned, laughed at, disbelieved, accused. The humiliation. The frustration. The fury.

Something I really, really need to keep saying these days

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love
Where there is injury, let me sow pardon
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith
Where there is despair, let me sow hope
Where there is darkness, let me sow light
And where there is sadness, let me sow joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console
To be understood, as to understand
To be loved, as to love.
For it is giving that we receive
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi