Friday Five: ...And That's Why It's Good to Be Me

On the RevGalBlogPals blog today, Kathrynzj writes:

This Friday Five will post while I'm at the beach which for me is more than a vacation destination, it is a trip home. I have found it quite easy to wax nostalgic about the places I used to live (well, except for one) and have begun to wonder what it is I like about the place I'm living now? For instance I sure do love the beach, but this picture was taken about 30 minutes away from my house - not too shabby!



And so I ask you to please name five things you like about where you are living now... and as your bonus - 1 thing you don't like.

Excellent -- we were just talking about this very thing during one of our evening countryside excursions. And it fits nicely into this Sunday's lessons too, which  made me think about wanting what we have instead of having what we want.

Five things I like about where I'm living now:

1. Proximity to the countryside. We are literally five minutes away from some of the prettiest countryside in rural Michigan -- roads lined with tree tunnels dripping in wild grapevines, Amish farms and farmstands, winding brooks. It is a blessing to, most evenings during the light months, say, "Hey -- let's go for a ride."

2. Our yard. I love our spacious yard and the trees that circle it, providing a buffer between neighboring properties. Fellow Traveler and I both appreciate a certain amount of breathing room around our house, and we have it.  We also appreciate neighbors who are close enough to provide very basic community -- our backyard neighbor, for instance, an ex-big-city-cop, keeps an eye on our home if we're gone, and as regular readers here know we more or less shared a dog with our neighbors to the west -- but distant enough both physically and socially to not be up in all our business, and vice versa.

2. Our patio. We have a patio with a gazebo providing (give or take various layers of outerwear, of course) three seasons of enjoyment. It's a great place to drink one's morning coffee or work on some portable household chore. And we are slowly replanting around it, so next year it will be even nicer.

3. Stonework. Our house, which dates back to the 70's, features some pretty cut stonework with real, not prefab, stones. That reminds me of the fieldstone farmhouse of my childhood.

4. Proximity to basic necessities. Even though there are definite drawbacks to living on a busy county highway on the outskirts of a town, it's also nice to know that if we need a grocery item or a pizza or gasoline it's all about three blocks down. So even though we feel "out in the country" we also feel connected to civilization. Sort of.

5. Interior decorating. Our interior is still a work in progress -- our family activities this past year put a temporary halt to our plans to paint and to embark on a re-do of our bedroom -- but I love the melding of our two households, and the eclectic look of our rooms -- antiques and Michigan-themed artwork and funky collectibles.

One thing I do not like: We haven't had the time or energy to tackle renovating our main bathroom, which was originally decorated in a style I can only call WTF. Imagine a robin's-egg blue toilet; a cornflower blue tub-and-shower unit; a sink in the same shade but marbled; a kind of French provincial white vanity, all surrounded by tiles with a 70's-contemporary stylized flower print. When the robin's-egg toilet broke about a year ago and needed to be replaced, I cried -- with joy. I'm much more excited by repainting and decorating our bedroom; but I will not be sad when our bathroom also gets its eventual makeover.

Friday Five: Decisions, Decisions

This week's Friday Five is all about one of my least favorite things in the world -- making decisions. But at least the originator of this quiz was kind enough to narrow them down to pairs:

1. Cake or Pie  No contest here -- PIE. What's not to like about pie? You've got your rich, delicious crust; you've got any number of yummy, gooey fillings. Whereas cake is just...well...cake.


2) Train or Airplane  In our part of the world we have no commuter trains. The closest we have are scenic-tour "color trains" that go up and down the state a few times during the autumn months. So if the goal is actually getting somewhere, I've got to go with the airplane. If, however, I lived somewhere with comfortable, affordable passenger rail service, I might choose the train just for the adventure of it, and the windowside sightseeing.

3) Mac or PC  I've only had limited exposure to Mac use. My impression, after spending a couple of hours on a Mac once, was, "Hmmm...this is nice. When can I go back to my old computer?" Sorry, Mac fans.

4) Univocal or Equivocal  I prefer the wiggle room of equivocal. Univocal is too Brave New World.

5) Peter or Paul  Neither; try Mary (any of the major Marys of Scripture). Both Peter and Paul remind me of the sort of ranty, unpleasant sidewalk preachers I used to walk a half-mile around my university campus to stay away from.  The Apostle John's okay too; I wouldn't walk a half-mile around John.

Our Green Scene

After devoting yesterday to marinating in my sadness, I resolved to start getting on with the business of everyday life this morning.
And several of those tasks involved tending our various gardening projects around the yard.

One of our landscaping goals for this year has been to change up the area around our deck -- to pull out the old, straggly spirea shrubs and fill those spaces with perennials. This turned out to be much harder than I first thought; spirea have an extensive, insidious root system, and I wound up  undergoing an unexpected regimen of strength training through several hours of chopping and twisting and yanking. (I'm not sure what benefit, if any, was gained from the concomitant cursing.) I left one tidied shrub on either side of the deck -- a case of turning a necessity into a virtue, because I simply couldn't dislodge one of them -- which actually turned out to make some design sense, because the shrubs form a logical boundary between the sunny and shady ends of the deck.

Now that that's been done, and a layer of new topsoil put down around the deck, the challenge has been to fill in the blanks. Fellow Traveler, who enjoys flowers and who actually came up with the idea of a perennial border but who is frankly not that interested in the particulars, gave me carte blanche in the selection and purchase of plants. I in turn have been restraining my horticultural exuberance and obtaining plants in a measured, prudent way, taking some time each week to visit the local fruit markets' rather neglected hodge-podges of small, cheap perennial starters or, if I'm feeling in need of inspiration, making a trip into the country to the nearest perennial nursery. This place is on an old farmstead, the business right in the backyard of the owners; despite this, it carries a staggering number of potted perennials displayed in thematic groupings all around the old farm outbuildings, and an entire field of hybrid daylilies that looks like a Monet painting when they're in full bloom.

I don't really have a picture in my head of what this is going to look like when it's all planted. With a few calculated exceptions, my plant purchases have been fairly random; the space around our deck encompasses all manner of light exposures, and requires both tall and short plants to fill, so there's lots of room for improvisation.

Today I planted some mixed sedums in the rocky bare space left by the demise of an absolutely ugly old potentilla that the previous owners used, not very successfully, to screen the area around the air conditioning unit. Sedums are great bee flowers, so if we follow through with that goal next year our little friends will have some needed nectar in the autumn. On the opposite side of the deck, in an equally troublesome, unattractive bare patch, are some lavender plants, a tricolor sage and a novelty pink, with soft gray needle-like leaves and odd, raggedy-fringed flowers in various shades of their namesake color -- all plants that can take heat and poor soil and that generally look pretty whether or not they're in bloom.

And then of course there's the vegetable garden. Thank heavens I raised the beds this spring. We've had so much rain this year that after each storm the walkways around the beds have been turned into canals, with ankle-high water; the garden would have been underwater several times this year if it had remained level with the lawn. But we were so busy in April and May, and the weather was so uncooperative at times, that things got planted about a week and a half later than I would have liked, and now our vegetables are a little behind the local curve. But they seem to be doing well; the lettuce is flourishing despite our naturally acidic soil, the seed-raised tomatoes are healthy and blooming, snap beans and cucurbits are loaded with blossoms, and the first planting of corn -- a new experiment this year -- is starting to sprout tassels. Today I planted a row of snap beans for a late crop -- admittedly pushing the envelope, but these are two-year-old seeds I wanted to use up, and by my calculation they can still yield -- and pulled a bucketful of crabgrass out of various beds. There is still much about gardening I need to learn -- I'm still trying to understand the trick of getting my radishes to make bulbous roots, and my maiden attempt at using black plastic mulch for the hot-weather veggies, while practically effective so far, looks like hell. And as I look at the modest rows of herbs, I can't help but think that I consistently underestimate how much we use these in the kitchen.

Gardening is good, cheap therapy, I've found.

Memento Mori

Mortality has been on my mind a lot lately.

Not just because of Gertie. This has been going on for awhile now.

Maybe it's a function of middle age, when our bodies start letting us down in various ways (sometimes literally) -- I mean, when my doctor looked me in the eye and told me that she needed to lower my blood pressure because "I don't want you to die of a stroke," that got my attention. As did Fellow Traveler's recent confirmation that the ongoing, intense pain in her jaw that radiates into her ear and down her neck and often keeps her up at night is the result of rheumatoid arthritis eating away all the cartilage between the bone; that this problem isn't fixable by a bite guard; that there may be some serious surgery in her future.

And I'm sure part of it is also due to the sheer number of people we know, face to face and on the Internet, who are fighting life-threatening illnesses. One of FT's high school friends, whom we saw at her recent reunion, had a stroke about a week ago. Right now we personally know a half-dozen people diagnosed with particularly scary cancers, who are undergoing chemo and radiation.

And then there's random, accidental death, like Gertie's. It could have been any of us, in one of our vehicles, making the wrong decision at any second.

Cheery thoughts, I know. But it's been an uncheery day, mostly dark and rainy, and I spent most of it on the sofa, staring out the window.

I'd like to say that I have full confidence in Dame Julian's assertion that, in the end, "All will be well and all manner of thing will be well." But when death ceases to become an abstraction and feels more like a target on my own back and that of my loved ones...it's hard to hang on to a sense that there is any meaning or purpose or redemptive outcome in it. And, I'm sorry to say, the skeptical, deconstructionist Zeitgeist of the last two centuries has so eviscerated the Christian message of resurrection that it's ceased to become believeable for many people -- because there's little sincerity in its proclamation; more of what my pastor calls "anxiety management"; a comforting fairy story, a little nursery tune to whistle in the darkness of the vicissitudes of life.

And let's not even talk about the loss of an animal companion. Outside the circle of people who love and have been loved by animal companions, it's not taken seriously -- not by the Church, not by health professionals, not by employers, not even by family and friends who don't understand. I know a patronizing pat on the head when I feel it.

Fellow Traveler and I have, since Gertie's death, received many personal and heartfelt condolences by individuals. But as far as any practical help from "faith stuff" -- got nothin'.  And as far as thoughts of what lies beyond our own mortality -- I don't hear a lot of there there in the Church these days. Not only don't we have the courage of our convictions these days, we don't even seem to have convictions, no matter how many times we recite the Creed or celebrate what we call "the foretaste of the feast to come."

I really do not want to be this gloomy, or to depress other people. But this is what I'm feeling, straight up. Hiding it behind a wan smile and fuzzy platitudes would be lying. 

Gertie: Gone

It happened in a blink of an eye.

We were in the Jeep, Gertie and I, driving home from a trip running errands. We had found ourselves behind an Amish cart at a corner, and I patiently waited there for the driver to pull onto the highway and gain some momentum so we weren't tailgating him. Gertie, who loved to bark at horses, was on full alert in the back seat.

"Gert -- now, behave yourself," I cautioned her as I pulled onto the pavement and began to pass the cart driver, who'd gone off onto the shoulder to give me room.

What happened next was -- well, I don't know. I heard barking, and clinking, and then when I looked back to shush Gertie, there was no dog in the back seat. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a dark shape limping into a bush in someone's lawn maybe 50 feet away, and the Amish driver stopped on the shoulder, staring in alarm.

Gertie had never, in her years with us, expressed any interest in jumping out of the window. But apparently this is what she did.

I stopped the Jeep, ran back toward the yard and scooped up Gertie in my arms; she was quiet -- too quiet -- and panting.

"I am so sorry," I said to the Amish man.

"Don't be sorry," he said. "It was my horse she didn't like. I hope she'll be okay. It looks like she might have broken her leg."

We were only about  mile or so from home. I don't remember driving there, but I did. Fellow Traveler was in the garage, cleaning. She smiled when she saw me -- until she saw the look on my face.

"We need to go to the vet's right now," I burst out. "Something's happened to Gertie. She jumped out of the car."

Up to this point I'd been running on adrenalin, my mind a blank, but at that point I broke down.

Not Gertie. Not our baby. Not "our" dog.

FT quickly examined Gertie, who winced and whined a little, but mostly just lay there on the back seat. She'd begun to bleed.

"Here's what I want you to do," FT said. "I want you to go inside and get a damp towel. Then I want you to find the veterinary hospital phone number." I numbly nodded.

FT came in while I was still wringing out the towel. "I don't want you to go with me," she said. "There's probably going to be a lot of pain during the examination. You've seen and done enough right now."

I sat in the living room and listened to the Jeep speed down the driveway and to the next town over, where the closest veterinary clinic is. Across from me Mollie the cat slept, blissfully unaware of the drama playing out in our home. I started to sob.

A very short time later, I got a phone call. "We are at the vet's," FT murmured softly. "We're going to have to put Gertie to sleep. There's too much internal injury for her to get better." This veterinarian's office euthanizes all its animals at the end of the business day, so FT had the veterinarian call our local animal shelter, where we'd taken Katie and Cassie when they were dying, where the staff had been so kind and gentle; and they told FT to bring Gertie right over.

"Now, I can drive home first," began FT.

"No -- no," I cried. "Don't make her suffer any more."

Another half hour passed; and then FT pulled into the driveway.

"I'm so sorry," I sobbed when a red-faced, weeping FT came through the door. "I'm sorry you had to do the hard thing."

She shook her head. "No; you had the hardest part of the day."

And that's how it's been around here. We cry; we hold one another; we reminisce; we try to distract ourselves; we move to opposite chairs and just sit quietly with our own grief.

This morning we began picking up after Gertie for the last time: collecting the dog biscuits scattered throughout the house, bagging up her battered assortment of toys, cleaning her pawprints off the French doors. We're also trying to somehow convey to Mollie the cat, who keeps sniffing and staring out the windows and looking at us quizzically, that her best pal is not coming back.

I know that people who aren't pet people don't get this; don't get how we, whose circle of friends includes people fighting terrible cancers and other mind-numbing calamities, can be so seemingly dispassionate about those things but so uncontrollably distraught over the loss of a dog. And frankly, if animals aren't your thing, I'm not even going to bother to explain.

But for those of you who love your own animal companions: I don't have to explain this to you, because you know the hurt. Add to that the fact that Gertie was our first dog together, and our only dog for most of her life, and the circumstances of our rescuing her, and the circumstances of our losing her...this is a really, really tough one.

This ain't my first rodeo when it comes to the death of an animal. Growing up on a farm, death is a  constant presence among the livestock. And I've lived through my share of dead dogs -- dogs who darted in front of cars in a final, fatal "ooh, shiny" moment; dogs in extremis whom my rifle-bearing great-uncle would take "out back" at the behest of my dad, never to be seen again; graying, cataract-and-arthritis-ridden dogs who simply gave up the ghost in their sleep after a long, full life.  Right now I can't read any treacly homages to pets crossing the Rainbow Bridge...my belief system gives me no comfort, frankly, damn it...I just brood and weep and try to stop the images of those horrific moments and the self-punishing "What ifs" from circling around and around my head.

Gertie was the Best Dog Ever. That's what we would tell her every day, and it's what I'm saying now. She didn't deserve the way she entered into this world, and she didn't deserve the way she exited it. But in the time in between she added so much joy and humor and affection and companionship to our lives. Maybe that doesn't count anywhere but in our hearts and memories. But it counts to me. Gertie left the world, and our lives, a far better place for her having lived in it.

Rest in peace, good friend.

A Forgetful Friday Five

Oh, wow...this Friday Five won't be pleasant...

a) What's the last thing you forgot?

Putting our environmentally friendly clothing shopping bags BACK IN OUR VEHICLES SO WE CAN ACTUALLY USE THEM.

e) How do you keep track of appointments?
I used to be able to do this in my head. I have now graduated to a write-on/wipe-off memo board on our refrigerator and, if I'm really more on top of things than usual, a memo to myself on my cell phone.

i) Do you keep a running grocery list?
We do, again on our special refrigerator board. Whether that list actually makes it into a store is another story.

o) When forced to improvise by circumstances, do you enjoy it or panic?
I used to panic; now I generally utter an un-church-ladylike word and punt.

u) What's a memory you hope you will never forget?
Interesting question. I've been doing a lot of reminiscing about my childhood lately, so I treasure some of the happier memories of those days. And the adventures of FT and me during our first year together, I never want to forget, particularly our fateful first meeting over Buffalo wings and iced tea.

Friday Five: Here's the Church...of My Dreams

Bonhoeffer may have looked askance at "wish dreams" of a perfect Church...but I don't think it hurts to periodically think about what sort of Church we would all like to be part of. And that's this week's RevGalBlogPals Friday Five Challenge. I'll keep it short and sweet -- discuss if you wish:

I want to be part of a Church that...

1. pays as much attention to the spiritual formation of its people -- laypeople and clergy alike -- as it pays attention to doctrinal and social issues.

2. aims for depth as well as breadth, on a multiplicity of levels.

3. says what it means and means what it says.

4. inspires people outside the Church to say, "If I were a Christian, that's the kind of Christian I'd want to be"...and follow up on that.

5. has enough confidence in its beliefs, practices and mission to live into the future without fear -- without falling into desperate faddishness, without equivocating in order to avoid conflict, without drawing its wagons into a circle, without giving up.

6. has potlucks featuring food groups other than sausage, sauerkraut, whipped cream and Jello. (I know...blasphemy. I suppose now I have to turn in my membership card.)

Hangin' With the Amish

With the growing season underway, we've been stepping up our Amishing around the neighborhood, buying onions and strawberries and other delicacies from their local roadside stands.

One day I decided to give back, just a little. I planted dozens of tomato seeds this winter, with seedling mortality in mind -- but all of them flourished, and I wound up with many more than what I needed. So when we went on our weekly round of the farms, we stopped at a couple of the visibly poorer farms and asked the ladies of the house if they'd mind taking our extra tomato plants.

The reaction was interesting. "What do you want for them?" both women immediately asked, frowning.

I explained our predicament. "We don't want anything," I said. "You're doing us a favor. And we're thanking you for all the good food we get here."

That broke the air of formality in both households, and we had some enjoyable discussions about tomato husbandry and farming in general. The women seemed a little surprised, and approving, that I'd started the plants from seed, and wanted to know if they were heirlooms or hybrids. (I always feel woefully incompetent in survival skills when I deal with the Amish, so it was frankly  satisfying to show off my modestly green thumb.)

Afterward FT noted, "I wonder why we get more out of our relationships with our Amish neighbors than the 'English' ones."

We live in a community where people with life competency of any kind are in short supply -- long gone, thanks to Michigan's protracted economic doldrums -- so our 'English' neighbors tend to be, as our friends in social services say, lacking in coping mechanisms and a support network...fancy talk for My Big Fucked-Up Redneck Life. And, ironically, as gay folks, even though we know we'd not be accepted in Amish society, we also seem to have a common set of detractors and harassers -- fundamentalists and good ol' boys, both groups possessing a dangerous mixture of ignorance, inferiority complex, entitlement mentality and xenophobia. When we see a group of 20-somethings in a pickup truck trying to run an Amish buggy off the road, or read hysterical screeds by fundamentalist pastors bleating on about saving the Amish from the dangers and dysfunctions of their "cult," we nod and think, We get that too.

At the same time we hold no idealistic allusions about Amish society. We understand that their community is not immune from spousal and child abuse, addiction, out-of-control teenagers and the vagaries of an economy that affects even these most self-sufficient of people. We obviously have difference of opinion about everything from gender roles to the wise use of technology.And looking at the Amish through my Lutheran lenses, I might point out that, no matter how "called out" from the world Christians might presume to be, we're all still sinners, and no amount of good-works points is going to change that. Despite the grace I see in their actions, I don't always see a lot of grace in their theology.

But -- we still like 'em. We just do. And we love the kids, who -- unlike the sort of Stepford fundamentalist-homeschool kids I've encountered, or the jaded, prematurely "adulted" and technology-numbed children of the rest of the neighborhood -- actually act like kids; like the little boy who played hide-and-seek with us around his parents' roadside stand, or our furniture-maker  friends' toddler daughter who, while we were talking bidness with Dad,  was trying unsuccessfully to write on a bemused family dog with an ink pen, or the self-assured tweenage counter girl at the Amish bakery who, taking a marketing cue from McDonald's, always goes for an extra sell: "If you like that bread, maybe you'd like some cinnamon rolls too."

Our corner of Michigan may not be the hippest or the most scenic or the most historic. But our Amish community helps make it a better place to live.

Loving the Neighbors

Fellow Traveler and I have friends, a lesbian couple in their sixties and seventies respectively, who live a few miles down the road from us; FT met them at a neighborhood Christmas party shortly after moving to this area. The two live in a household I'll call Dysfunction Junction, a remodeled trailer on the edge of a river.

How can I describe this couple? They remind me of characters in a 1950's lesbian pulp novel, all growed up but still dressing and acting according to the Sisterhood's script of those times; think tough girls in jeans with a pack of Camels rolled into their T-shirt sleeve. Each has a past that she seems extremely reluctant to talk about. One partner has numerous health problems and hasn't worked for years; the other, younger partner has worked for years at a physically as well as emotionally punishing nearly-minimum-wage job. They've also been caregivers to two live-in invalid parents, although they seem to have burned bridges with many of their other family members -- including their children.

The two dwell in a cloud of blue cigarette smoke, so much so that we literally can't visit their home for more than a few minutes at a time before FT is sent into an asthma attack.They operate in a state of perpetual personal and household disshevelment; on the margins in a multiplicity of ways. They cycle through doomed money-making schemes; financial crises; caregiving problems; health issues; simultaneously exploitative and exploited "friends" who come and go. We in turn lose track of them for months at a time; then they'll call asking for help of some kind, or wanting to borrow some tool or appliance from us (that is inevitably lost or broken) and we'll briefly get involved in their lives again...until, once more, their neediness begins to overwhelm us.

A few weeks ago, after months of not hearing from them, one of the partners appeared on our doorstep. This time it wasn't about borrowing a saw. She told us that the other partner had been diagnosed with a large, inoperable tumor in her lung, and was about to undergo chemotherapy. She sank down into our sofa and, blinking away tears, began unloading about her partner's illness; problems with her live-in parent; loss of an elderly friend; her overwhelming physical and emotional fatigue and worries about money.

So here we are again, trying to help this couple without becoming completely sucked into the vortex of their household trials. We said we could help take the sick partner to chemotherapy once or twice a week. Knowing how difficult it was for the well partner to make meals for the household -- the sick partner tended to be the family cook, but is now too weak to do that -- we decided we'd make food for them once a week; enough for a good meal and leftovers. FT, who has facility with computers, offered to help fix their computer so that the sick partner can maintain some contact with her family through e-mail.

Yesterday we dropped by to pick up the computer. The ill partner, who just finished her first round of chemotherapy, met us at the door, ashen-faced, surrounded by a pack of yapping toy dogs (the result of a failed let's-make-money-selling-puppies Grand Plan, plus a rescue dog, plus Mama's dog). She let us in, then pulled me aside amid the chaos of the dogs and the durch-und-unter of the tiny living space and the vacantly cheerful, nonverbal mother-in-law who spends the day just sitting at the kitchen table.

"I need some spiritual guidance," she said. "I've been trying to pray. I pray an act of contrition and and Our Father every night. And I've been doing some bargaining with God too. But...I'm just really scared right now."

I can't remember exactly how I responded to her; something about how every prayer is a good prayer and to just keep talking to God; some sort of unnerved, caught-off-guard church-geek gibberish. I also told her to call me if she just needed to talk or wanted me to come over.

It's a daunting thought, being asked to provide the closest thing to pastoral care that this lady is willing to accept.. I had my Moses/Peter moment: "Um, no, God, you really don't want me to do this job. Because deep, deep down I'm shallow; too shallow to walk the valley of the shadow with anyone. You want someone with spiritual chops; not me." But now that I've had a day to think and pray about it, I know that I am being called to carry Christ, somehow, into the life of this individual. How that happens...well, we'll see.

Affliction

Tonight we're attending what's being called a retirement picnic for one of my fellow lay ministers -- an "excellent woman," as they say, in her seventies who was a pillar of our congregation decades before going through the Lay Ministry Training Program. A little (okay...a lot) opinionated and stubborn and set in her ways...but an invaluable part of the church family; a lady who can terrify you if you fail on some point of church protocol, but who prays every single day for each of the names on our lengthy church prayer list, and who helped hold our faith community together during dark days in the late '80's and early '90's when its viability as a congregation was questionable on a week-to-week basis.

Shortly after being commissioned, this lady was diagnosed with MS. In the years that have ensued, she has faced down this foe with the same mixture of faith and cussedness that's earned her the rank of matriarch in our church. When her legs grew unsteady she (with much grumbling) began using a footed cane, then a wheeled walker, on her Sundays as assisting minister. When she was having a bad day and coudn't count on enough strength to make it through an entire service, she reluctantly allowed others on the team to help. Meanwhile, she defied her adult children at every turn when it came to driving or working in her yard. "They think they're the boss of me," she'd confide to a sympathetic listener. "I'm just going to do what I want to do." And that's the attitude she's had toward her illness in general.

This past month, though, on a weekend when FT and I were out of town, we heard that our matriarch had taken a bad spill while assisting during the service, and had decided that enough was enough; she was bowing out of the lay ministry team.

This is an added sadness in a year when a double share of life-threatening illnesses have been dealt to  our little congregation and community and wider circle of church friends. It's made me, particularly in these perimenopausal days, start thinking more about my own mortality, and priorities, and it's made me more impatient with the petty issues that junk up the life of the Church. When I hear someone going on about The Troubles in the ELCA or the color of the Communion wine or some line item in a church council meeting, I want to shake them and say, "There are people in our congregation who are fighting for their lives every single day -- and you want me to care about this? Are you ******* serious? What is the matter with you?" Although I suspect the matter is the same nervous whistling in the dark that keeps us all distracted from what's real and immediate and painful and scary.

So, anyway, we're toting two Amish pies to the picnic tonight, where we will thank our friend for her service and wish her well in the newest iteration of her ministry to our church.

Friday Five: It's Summertime!

An easy, light and breezy RevGalBlogPals Friday Five this week -- name our five favorite things about summer.

1. The light. I covet the sunlight of summer all year long...waking up in the morning light only to discover that it's 6:00 a.m., then working and playing hard all day in anticipation of the sunset, only to realize that it's now bedtime.

2. The food. I'm sorry, but wintertime's styrofoam-flavored out-of-season vegetables imported from God knows where can never compare to a sun-ripened berry just off the vine, or a fresh cob of corn five minutes from stalk to steaming pot, or a juicy tomato pilfered from the garden at midday.

3. The out-of-doors. As pretty and as exhilarating as a winter day can be -- most of us can only take so much of it outside. Not so during the summer. (Especially for those of us with shady patios or porches.)

4. The evenings. One of our favorite things to do this time of year is head out on a mini road trip after supper -- just drive down country roads where the trees meet overhead, watch the farmers finishing up their haying for the day, enjoy the colors of sundown. Or we sit on the patio with some iced tea, or wine, and review the day.

5. The water. This is ironic coming from a non-swimmer -- but I love the water. I love still-fishing on the edge of a lake, listening to the waves wash up on the beach; I love rivers in the summer, with the lush riparian flora and an occasional flash of fish.

Bonus: Thing I don't like about summer: Apart from the bittersweetness of the solstice itself -- it all goes downhill from here, lightwise, until the end of December -- I never feel comfortable in summer clothing; it always feels too binding, even in khaki shorts and oversized T-shirts.

Another bonus: Best ad campaign ever: Every time I see a "Pure Michigan" travel ad on TV I want to drop everything and head up north to Crystal Lake or the Leelanau or Taquamenon Falls. I was delighted to see these running in New York when we stayed with The Kids. Please, out-of-staters -- we need hybrid vigor and skills here; consider relocating; or at least visit and spend some money:

Question Time

Several weeks ago, in an effort to step up the content of our church blog, I began a series called "Worship Whys," where readers could submit questions about Lutheran worship.

Perhaps predictably, the first week no one responded until the last minute; and I suspect that was a mercy question from our pastor or a friend of mine. Our people are not communicators, and they also have a fear of standing out that may override the anonymity of blog comboxes.

Things picked up a bit in the weeks thereafter. We got some questions that sounded as if they were penned by unwilling young catechumens -- "Do you have to be confirmed?"...whinge a little as you read that aloud -- as well as a series of questions from someone who sounded like a lost Baptist who'd stumbled on our blog by mistake. Fellow Traveler, who is not a Lutheran by birth, also submitted a couple of very good questions.

I knew the feature had finally arrived, so to speak, this week, when a new questioner -- someone obviously a part of our congregation -- asked, "Why is apple [sic] juice a Communion option when it's supposed to be the Blood of Christ...and who the HELL picks out the hymns?" As FT notes, once you take the snark out of them, they're good questions. So I was happy to respond to them.

It's risky to begin an FAQ service in a church, for the same reason that it's risky to put up a suggestion box in a workplace: It's can become a vehicle for a lot of whiny passive aggression. On the other hand -- we might actually be teaching our people something. And there's not always the time or opportunity in the course of a church service to accomplish the same thing. So Worship Whys is staying on the schedule for the time being. And I'm actually looking forward to more cranky questions; because it means that people are reading the answers.

Wild Hares

I am spending much of this beautiful, post-storm June day on the sofa staving off a headache that I fear is the precusor to whatever viral bug has stricken Fellow Traveler.  I'm holding my nose and drinking Airborne (yes, I know, there's no proof it works; don't judge), and hoping that the heaviness behind my eyes doesn't begin a predictable chain reaction of sore throat, stuffy sinuses and fever.

I need badly to get outside and do things. Our last trees of the season arrived yesterday -- a pair of sourwoods and a Carolina silverbell -- plus a native autumn clematis vine, all of which need replanting somewhere in our increasingly crowded wood margin. And I'm behind on some of my succession planting plans, and in starting some perennial flowers for next year.

Amid this retrogressive two-step, though, I have developed a number of what Fellow Traveler calls wild hares...you know, those sudden new interests; those odd, persistent promptings to do some new thing.

I've always had a thing for magnificent obsessions. One year, as a child, it was learning shorthand from my mother's old high school textbook. (Not terribly successful.) Another year it was stamped embroidery and rick-rack lace. Then I become completely engrossed in poultry raising. As an adult, I went through The Year of Knitting and The Year of Self-Help Psychology and The Year of Two-Mile Walks and the Year of Making Cakes From Scratch.

Here are a two of my latest wild hares:

Going to the library. I used to be a library geek, even in our book-deprived community. I used to take out a half-dozen books at once and read them all in a weekend. (And then forget to return them; I hope the library board have invested my fines in some fund for a future expansion.) Then my mom died. Then I met Fellow Traveler. Then I got busy. And I forgot about reading books. Wow; I can't believe I just typed that; but I did. This summer, though, I want to read some books, just to read them. The other day we were talking about antiques, and I remember how my aunt used to find interesting old books in secondhand stores -- books that sold for a dime, or by the foot -- and read them. I'm interested in reading a couple of those -- jackets long gone, covers faded, signed in fountain pen on the inside by some long-gone owner. Maybe a travelogue, or a treatise on botany or beekeeping, or one of those progressive novels for girls featuring a plucky heroine defying convention by tenting with the Campfire Girls or going off to college. That and a book by a Michigan author. Traverse magazine's latest issue has a list of 30 beach reads by Michigan authors; that might be a starting point.

Mosaics. We spent many weekend afternoons last year learning how to work with stained glass. Fellow Traveler loves this. I love the look of it, and there are parts of the process (like grinding) that I enjoy and think I do fairly well...but I don't have FT's ambition to launch into a full-bodied, serious art project in this medium -- because frankly I don't think I'm good enough. If I'm going to fail, let me fail with some fairly small, low-investment objet d'art. But the other Sunday we took an afternoon trip to our stained glass instructor's shop for some supplies, and while we were there I found myself attracted to the mosaics in progress in her classroom; someone was in the process of covering a cement replica of the "Bird Girl" statue made famous on the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and I marveled at the tiny bits of stained glass the student was carefully placing on the statue. Then in a book I saw a mosaic patio table using bits of broken china and other colorful tiles, and a mosaic bird feeder made out of a basic $10 pine model covered in ceramic pieces and flat-backed marbles. I can do that, I thought. Not only can I do that, but I can do it using the rather large amount of scrap glass generated by other stained glass work.

I have strangled other wild hares. My interest in terraria, for instance, died a-borning, mostly because I realized we don't have adequate natural light in our home for most houseplants of any kind, and no spot in our living areas that would really do such a project justice. I also experienced a momentary interest in making cheese -- you know, like Martha Stewart telling us that homemade mozzarella is "quite easy and fun" -- but after coming to from that patio reverie I had to remind myself that, no, what I really like doing is eating artisanal cheese.

I haven't had any church-related wild hares of late...ironically, the more involved I am in lay ministry the less proactive and innovative I want to be. My pastor and a couple of other folks want me to lead Bible study Sunday mornings, and I've enjoyed the couple of times I've led Bible studies for our quilters' group during our pastor's recuperation from heart surgery; but my reaction to the sample Book of Faith Bible study we ordered was a big "Meh," and flashbacks to my mind-numbing experiences sitting in on Navigator Bible studies in my college dorm.

We'll see what becomes of the hares bouncing around in my brain this summer.

The Joy of Not Working

I'm writing this on a cold, wet, sinus-swelling day here in mid-Michigan, after a quick walk outside to inspect the grounds (those last stubborn holly seedlings are still resisting greening out, but dum spiro, spero), and to quickly pop a four-pack of sweet williams into the new perennial bed before they became too sodden in their plastic container. Earlier this morning I wrote a review of Sunday's lessons, with questions for reflection, for our church blog. When I'm done with this post I might wander into the kitchen and clean up a straggle of evening dishes before they begin to multiply in worrisome ways.

It's a slow day, by both choice and circumstance. But as I sit here I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to have a slow day, in a way I didn't have when I was working for a paycheck.

What would I have done on a day like this back in the old office -- a day where I didn't feel on my game either physically or mentally? Probably a lot of purposeful action with little work product actually being done, and some surreptitious Web-surfing and subsequent self-guilting in between.

So it's a blessing, even as I'm swallowing my Advil, to enjoy the freedom of a dark, dreary day where not a lot gets done, without the looming presence of multiple bosses and incoming assignments from other people.

That's one thing. And I'm also blessed to be able to (when weather finally permits) engage in some heavy, sweaty, grunt-inducing physical labor. Who needs a weight room when pounds of soil await moving outside? Who needs special flexibility exercises when there are seeds and seedlings that must be planted, and unruly growth that must be pruned? And it's labor that results in a tangible, seeable, living result; unlike years of PR pitchmanship on the sinking boat of  increasingly irrelevant social services -- services that most of the intended recipients emphatically don't want.

So my days have a rhythm and a purpose even without a timeclock. I usually work on the church blog and its Facebook companion very early in the morning -- I'll occasionally work on drafts for other days of the week, but I haven't really gotten into multitasking here. Then FT and I have morning coffee and breakfast together and informally review the day ahead. Mondays, and sometimes another day each week, we go to church for a half day; FT works on church software issues while I check phone messages or work on my own church-related tasks. Oftentimes we pair our "church day" up with grocery shopping, since church brings us a few miles closer to Midland, or we go visit FT's elderly, infirm aunt and uncle, and help them with a few outdoor chores.  We come home and do household and outdoor work. In the early evening we like to take a family "ride" around this or that neighborhood, a ritual that we tell ourselves if for the benefit of our easily bored dog but is really about spending quality time together. FT paid a profound personal price to earn the freedom of this kind of life; but we're so thankful that we can live it.

We never don't have anything to do. The other day we were wondering how we managed when I was working 40 hours a week. And we have some big projects looming ahead, most notably finishing up work on our garage office and really, truly getting started on working with our stained glass, instead of playing around at the edges of this pastime; and, next year, getting our honeybees.

I think about looking for a paying job again -- not this summer or even fall, because our schedule is too full to attempt a new job, but sometime. I worry, not about our current living expenses, but about the future, and also about keeping my skill set sharp. I'm frankly not sure I want a job, as they say, "commensurate with my education and experience"; that's the phrase that keeps getting me into situations where my job winds up eating my life. This old dog is willing to either learn a new trick or to keep busy in some non-status-laden, non-high-commitment position; a job I can truly leave behind when I go home. (Are there even any such things left -- status-laden, high-commitment jobs?)

But in the meantime I'm happy to "chop wood and carry water" in our own little world of work here.

Talking to Trees

Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, "Grow...grow." -- Talmud

I found myself doing just that bright and early this morning as I made a post-rainstorm inspection of our yard and the many seedlings I"ve been planting this spring.

This is part of what I call Project Bee Here Now: Enhancing the bee-sustainability of our property by planting species favored by honeybees for nectar and pollen. Yes, this is a long-haul project. (As we noted ruefully today, with the economy the way it is we may as well invest in the maintenance and aesthetics of our home, because people aren't exactly burning asphalt to relocate to our little burg.)

For the last two months I've scoured online nursery catalogs, extension-office tree-sale lists and other sources for inexpensive bee-friendly trees and shrubs. And I've purchased some: red osier dogwood; redbuds; basswood; ninebark; sumac; elderberry; buttonbush; highbush cranberry; winterberry, aka Michigan holly. Most of them have gone around the periphery of our yard or our backyard pond.

It's been very rewarding to watch the very unimpressive bare twigs of these seedlings suddenly sprout little green leaflets. But the holly -- a deciduous species, fairly common here in wetland areas and  much beloved for its prolific orange-red berries in the wintertime -- has been a tough case.

I planted the hollies in a  humus-y raised semicircular bed at the margin of our woods -- a neglected spot in the yard that until recently had been home to a few half-dead rhododendrons and a burgeoning colony of poison ivy. Those are gone now, after much effort, replaced by the hollies, a pair of pieris shrubs and some wildflowers; and for the past month I've been silently willing the leaves of the wispy holly twigs to emerge.

"Come on...grow," I'd wish each morning, staring disappointedly at the bare seedlings. "All the other seedlings are growing -- even the buttonbushes I stuck right in the pondwater. You're slacking off here. Grow. Please."

Then last week, after being awakened in the wee hours by our bored dog more interested in an outdoor romp than a morning constitutional, I trudged to the forlorn holly bed, expecting to be disappointed again and wondering what I might plant there instead. I focused my sleep-bleary eyes at a holly twig.

A tiny green leaf was protruding from the end.

"Yes!"

In the days to follow, four of the six seedlings have shown signs of life; green buds or full-blown leaves. I thought the last two twigs looked somehow bumpier today, but that might just be wishful thinking.

Con-Evos and the ELCA

With the disclaimer that listening to a bunch of earnest, neo-Calvinist Intervarsity/Navigators-type men (they're always men) doing theology together is my idea of what hell's waiting room must be like...you can read what they think about ELCA Lutherans here and  Internet Monk, specifically the comboxes attached to the series on problems with Evangelicalism (written by an Evangelical-to-ELCA fence-jumper) and the discussion of Lutheran baptismal theology (always good for a cagefight in them thar parts).

Actually, I think hell's waiting room would be more fun. Except maybe for the smelly BP executives dripping crude oil and dead fish over in the corner.

Trinity Sunday Mashup

Generally speaking our Worship Committee does an outstanding job, with very limited resources, in planning our music and other worship elements from week to week.

Memorial Day weekend is always a conundrum, though, when patriotic glurge regularly collides with good theology; and this weekend Trinity Sunday made the mess even worse.

So we got "America the Beautiful" as a prelude, and -- argh -- "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as a closing hymn.

I was assisting today, and after the last note of that hymn, when it was my turn to announce, "Go in peace and serve the Lord," I put a special emphasis on the word "Lord." I doubt anyone noticed, or if they did they probably attributed it to some sort of verbal tic; but it felt good.

Catching Up

So it's finally taken a bout of procrastination -- in this case, putting off trying to write about John Calvin for our church blog's regular "Saints Alive!" feature -- to get me to post here again.

I hope you're having a pleasant Memorial Day weekend. We spent a spontaneous two-day mini-vaycay up in the Leelanau, on what we told ourselves was a reconnaissance mission for The Kids to price wine for their Michigan-themed wedding in August; we began our journey home just as the weekenders' cars started multiplying in the opposite lane, and laughed at our good fortune all the way south. When we got back home I did some gardening; we went on a ride in the country yesterday evening and treated ourselves to ice cream; today we're going to grill some steak.

(Yes, I know; all part of that big, scary Gay Agenda. If you don't watch out your spouse or significant other may ask you some late afternoon if you'd like to go out for a sundae and a spin around the scenic back roads of your county, and then maybe you'll find yourselves taking a long weekend away, and pretty soon civilization as we know it will crumble into ruin.)

Meanwhile, though, we had to do something very difficult.

Four months ago, at the behest of our pastor, we met a woman he had encountered in the course of his volunteer first responder work. She was in her early 40's; had no family or friends in the area or even in the state; had gotten here through an abusive relationship with the father of her small child and wound up in a shelter; was in a custody fight for the child and had a constellation of other personal problems. Our pastor thought that she might benefit from the influence of strong, independent women who could give her a glimpse of an alternative to the sort of dysfunctional situations she seemed to be falling into with regularity. Her stated plan was to leave Michigan for her home state as soon as she could legally do so with her child; it sounded as if she had family there to help her make a new start, and the shelter (one of the best in the state) was setting up a plan to get her temporary housing and other assistance in the other state as soon as she arrived.

Because both Fellow Traveler and I have a tendency to fuzzify boundaries when we hear sad stories and wind up being taken advantage of, we set up some initial ground rules for ourselves when engaging with this person: We weren't going to give her cash, ever. We weren't going to invite her into our home. We weren't going to run errands for her. We were simply going to be friendly voices on the phone, giving her encouragement; and because she'd asked, we were going to take her to church with us, even though it meant getting up an hour earlier and driving to another county to fetch her and take her back. We even figured that we would make Sundays into an outing and treat the woman and her child to lunch. We'd been given a timeline of about a month and a half for her legal status to be resolved, so we thought that was a reasonable commitment of time and resources. We also consulted with our council members and discretionary-fund committee and came up with the means to send the woman and her child back to their home state as soon as she was legally able to leave. Our quilting ladies gave the little family a quilt to take home with them.

But after an initial month of what we had felt was a positive experience, this happy scenario of do-gooder do-bees and soon-to-be-vindicated mother-in-distress began to unravel, for a number of reasons; without going into detail, while we had enough background into this person's history to know that the situation was complicated, we suspected that another backstory was going on, concurrent to our having gotten involved, that we were not a party to. Meanwhile, the ex-boyfriend's attorney had managed to delay hearing dates, so our short-term commitment was stretching ever farther into the future. This began taking a toll on us, our good will, even our health; we'd get home from our Sunday odyssey and promptly fall asleep, exhausted just by dealing with her multidimensional neediness. This past Sunday was particularly stressful and troubling.

The woman had an important hearing this week, so we were surprised when she didn't call us to tell us what happened. We suspected it was bad news; but when we got ahold of her, she told us she'd been awarded joint custody and had been given permission to go back home with the child; the outcome she had consistently told us she'd wanted more than anything else and that the shelter, as far as we knew, had also been planning on. But now she was waffling: "I have to make some decisions...I may not go there right away..."

At that point both Fellow Traveler and I had had enough. So we told her that we had taken her about as far as we could; that if she were going to be living where she was for an extended length of time she needed to find a church home in that community, and that the staff there -- who'd invited her to their churches in the past -- would be a good resource. We told her that we weren't planning on breaking contact with her, that we wanted to hear from her about how she was doing, that we wished her well, but that we simply couldn't maintain the weekly schedule of driving her back and forth. She didn't say much in response. And that's how we left it. We haven't heard from her since.

I am trying not to be disillusioned or bitter here, particularly because we'd been informed about much of the mess we were stepping into when we said that, yes, we'd keep track of this person. I also know that we were just two little part-time-volunteer church elves on the periphery of  what is really a very commendable, comprehensive program for families in crisis, and that this person has an entire staff of trained people working and advocating for her, who are responsible for her much more than we ever were and who have the expertise and means to assist her and her child more than we ever could.  But, that said...we're not going to do this type of favor anymore for people we don't know. If that makes us bad Christians, well...just add lack of hospitality to our Bad Behavior list.

We have a wonderful life; we have a summer busy with family responsibilities; and we have a commitment to one another, to help and support one another. We want to invest more time and energy in one another and our life together.

D-Day

Well, in true "Be careful what you wish for" fashion, my new hands-on holistic doc called me 8 o'clock sharp this morning. The doctor is calling me? I thought. .When's the last time that happened? Oh; yeah; never.

The doctor was reviewing my recent blood work, she said, when she saw something surprising. "You seem to have a serious Vitamin D deficiency," she told me. "A normal lab score for Vitamin D is 70. Yours was 17."

Here I was, in the middle of delighted wonderment at finally finding a proactive healthcare provider, only to be confronted by this alarming news.

The human body can absorb a decent dose of Vitamin D through relatively short periods of time outside. Despite my geeky ways, I am outside a lot. I also eat a lot of vitamin-fortified foods and D-rich fatty fish as well. I didn't get it.

The doctor explained that Vitamin D deficiency can be caused by a variety of things, not just diet or sunlight exposure, and also noted that this problem can factor into several serious health problems, including cardiovascular health, metabolic illnesses, certain types of cancer and depression. She then prescribed me 10,000 IU's of over-the-counter Vitamin D per day; a number I later learned many doctors and nutritionists want to make a minimum daily dosage for everyone.

Well. Now I have a handle on at least one piece of my metabolic puzzle. For that I'm grateful. And I'm grateful to my doctor as well.

Spring Cleaning

We're in the midst of spring cleaning around here. We had our friend the professional housecleaner do a thorough clean last week, and this week we are tackling the yard and garden ourselves. Today I even ventured into Molly the cat's room, formerly the junior spare bedroom/office, stripped the sheets on her bed and threw them in the wash for the first time in nearly a year. (Molly is the the messiest kitteh on the planet, on a par with Bill the Cat in Bloom County, so removing her bedclothes resulted in a cloud of particulate -- hair, crumbs of mulch from around the house, Lord knows what else.)

As you may have noticed, I'm doing some spring cleaning here as well: changing up the blog template, rebuilding my lists-o-links. I'm also rethinking what and how and when I want to post here. But for now I'm likin' the minimalism of the new format; it feels like a new beginning.