Family Grounding

I had a dream in the late spring of 2018 shortly after we had laid eyes on and fallen in love with the piece of land I last blogged about. In this dream I lay in a single bed in a small guest room in the early evening. The door to the right of my head is slightly ajar and a shaft of hall light cuts across the floor. The wall at my feet holds a single open window. There is no furniture save a little wooden dresser below the window at sill height. On the dresser a sheet of white paper, its edges carefully squared to the wooden top. Intrigued by the purposeful placement of the paper, I move to the dresser to look. It is blank.

The full moon comes out of a cloud and moonlight pours in the window all over the dresser and the paper. The paper begins to roil as though marbles beneath a lake are attempting to surface, and encountering a latex skin, are submerging again. Their struggles to break free increase continually until numerous 8-inch towers of stretched surface stand from off the dresser at once only to be pulled back under while others are rising. Eventually this lava-lamp-like dance stretches the necks too thin. They begin to break free. Quivering globules, like flower pod seeds, float on the wind out the window.

I want to go with them, and I follow them out. Out to the moonlit meadow and up through the glowing tree branches. Up through the treetops, they're chasing the moon, and high in the sky I realize I'm still in my bed soaring higher and out into space. And now we are cruising feet-first into the cosmos with stars whipping by and planets and nebulas passing. The globules, filled with excitement, are clinging to the blanket. The moon is all but forgotten and as curiosity mounts, the globules begin to venture out from the bed. Tentatively at first, like kittens exploring, going out a small distance and zipping back to the safety of the blanket.

They grow bolder taking longer and longer treks to examine passing stellar anomalies. Straight ahead, at the very vanishing point of the tunnel of stars racing toward us, I see a light. I know this is the end, the goal. It is very far away but we are moving fast. Some of the globules become aware of the light and go speeding ahead to appraise this new advent. I watch with some anguish as they burst into flames and disappear.

This was a strange dream to be sure, but before I venture any interpretation I think I'd best pick up the tale where I left off two years ago in my blog titled 'Keeping a Lid On It'. As you might recall, in the spring of 2018 I had resolved to make paintings to raise money towards buying 31 acres on Clinch Mountain in northeastern Tennessee. And as far fetched as that might sound to anyone weighing the cost of an acre against the cost of a painting and its likelihood of actually selling, things went remarkably well.

We parked our camper in Keren and Bobby's driveway and they graciously offered me a large room in the basement to use as a studio. So began four months of art immersion in which I became practically inaccessible to my long-suffering family. I discovered a body, drinking only coffee with goodly amounts of heavy cream, could easily go five days without getting hungry, and on average I joined the dinner table every three. I also discovered this low-food regime did absolutely nothing to reduce a certain paunch I had developed over the last few years, which I have since named my cream-belly.

In my overly idealistic imagination I saw myself producing a painting every three days but at the end of three months I had made only 11. This was not disheartening, though, I had made a body of work I was happy with, and I found an art printer in Knoxville obsessed with making perfect prints of the highest quality. Most importantly I had released four years of pressure to create art.

Bethany spent countless hours making the Land Ho! art store, Douglas, Fynn, and I created a video to introduce it, and the sale began. It lasted a month during which I finished a 12th and final painting while packaging prints and art that sold.

This final piece stemmed from a break we had taken in May, two months into my painting spree, to drive out to Chicago for Bethany's Mom's birthday. We had been hearing reports that her condition was going downhill, but seeing it first hand filled our heart-sack with lead sinkers. Her volition was gone. There was no initiated conversation, no walking into the kitchen to see what was cooking. No walking anywhere unless it was suggested. This was far harder for everyone around Mom than it was for her. Seldom did the shadow of lost ability darken her brow, but for those concerned for her, the memory of what had been was agonizing. The increasing amount of care needed was taking its toll on everyone. Bethany's dad, her brother Stephen, his wife Rene, Caroline the daytime caregiver; everyone looked tired.

The balm for this was Mom's smile. Her eyes tracked all conversation in the room, and although she could not volunteer anything, her involuntary reaction of smiling with enjoyment was a floodlight turning on. To see Mom, who all her life defined service, and doing, and self-restraint, in a position where all that remained was to be, to react, to enjoy… was still to see Mom. Clearer even. There was no filter. She welcomed a steady gaze into her eyes, a clasping of spirits, which inevitably ended in buoyant laughter or streams of tears on both our faces, with no words or need to say why. These were the unspeakably sweetest moments I spent with Mom. When we left for Knoxville, two things were clear beyond all doubt; our next move after the art sale would be returning to help care for Mom, and I would be making a painting of her.

I chose a photo of Mom taken the summer before. She is sitting at the dining room table filling up a sheet of paper with the same word over and over in beautiful cursive. This was her daily pastime when the photo was taken. The filled sheets intrigued me and Bethany to no end. What was happening inside as she wrote? Was there subconscious meaning in the word she chose? I picked the photo because it seemed to represent that Grace (mom) was still there as a person despite the debilitation of her mind and body.

As I painted the paper on which she wrote, the image from my dream came to mind. White lava-lamp-like globules rising from the page. The more the image sat in my mind the more compelled I felt to paint them in. So I did. Even though I had no words to explain at the time, the globules came to represent the silent, pure activity of Mom's spirit calmly surfacing in every circumstance handed her.

The sale went really well. We brought in 25% of the cost of the land, and that was super stimulating! We also received some generous donations. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! to everyone who gave, bought, and kept us in their thoughts. 

We began our extraction process from Keren and Bobby's which involved finishing up trim work and caulking in the room I had used as a studio, packing up Fynn's forging operation in the backyard, weather-proofing the go-kart to store under the porch, and removing the camper awning which had been irreparably damaged in a storm. This was a very sad thing as the awning had provided us with shade, shelter, and comfort and seemingly doubled our living space. It gave Fynn a place to spread his unending project generation and Bethany and I a place to sip a glass of wine in the evenings. We knew it was improbable we could afford a replacement anytime soon and this loss of luxury was compounding the growing feeling of dread and claustrophobia of what we were heading into. Little did we know how hard it really would be.

We had taken one trip in April to see the land and explore the 15 acres we hadn't seen the first time. We loved it twice as much. We took another in June to Rogersville, the nearest town, where I rented a spot in the local arts fair drawing portraits. We got to meet lots of people whom we loved and afterward stopped by the land for the sunset. We loved it three times as much. It was excruciating to be packing to head the opposite direction for an unknown period of time.

Our schedule for arriving in Chicago was dictated by a Sol LeWitt job I had taken starting at Harvard on August 13th. I had a train ticket out of Union Station on the 11th. The prospect of being alone for a month was not encouraging for Bethany. She was nearly paralyzed by the thought of helping out with Mom. "You know I'm not a caretaker!" she said to me on the verge of tears. 

"Your ability and your job" I said, using my authoritative and wise-sounding voice, "is going to be helping your DAD. You think like he does, and you will be a great help in organizing his thoughts and plans."  Boy, was I wrong!

We had wanted to take a two week 'family alone' break prior to heading to Chicago, but there was only one week before I had to be on a train to Harvard, and we still had three days of packing and checklists left.  That's when we got the call.

We were at a restaurant laughing with Keren and Bobby when Bethany's phone rang. I couldn't hear what was being said, but I watched Bethany turn gray as fog on the ocean. Bethany's dad had a possible heart attack and was in the hospital. He had been at the park with Mom on their evening walk pushing her mobility chair when, on a whim, he decided to break into a trot and give her a little "zip." Thankfully Stephen and Rene were there and saw him collapse.

Our urgency immediately tripled as did our anxiety. Our ability to leave, however, remained the same. Even dropping the few house projects left on our list and focusing purely on packing it still took us three full days. By then we knew that Dad had a faulty heart valve and was scheduled for open heart surgery on Friday. Stephen and Rene were now shouldering all the night time care of Mom that Dad had been handling, and they were a bit overwhelmed. The messages coming through from them were sounding increasingly desperate. 

On Monday August 6th we hitched the truck (after removing a large family of wasps from the camper hitch) and made the hard decision to spend some family time in a state park over the Blue Ridge Mountains. "There's nothing we can do for your Dad in the hospital," I reasoned to a visibly fraying Bethany, "and we have GOT to have some family grounding before you dive into Chicago and I head to Harvard. Stephen and Rene can last a little longer. We need this."

And so, with an extra scoop of guilt we headed out of Knoxville and, as is our wont, threw up a prayer; "Hey God, help us get the grounding we need before heading into this next phase of the journey." Saying those words "next phase of the journey" was a commitment, a cementing in our minds that the land our hearts were clinging to might very well belong to someone else before we could return. The dream needed set free or we would never have the heart to do the task ahead.

"Well," I said, "if someone else gets the land..."

"Then God will find us some that's even better," Bethany finished. "We were brought to that land after asking for HOPE that we could find a piece."

"It certainly has been that! And very motivating." We were starting to feel quite a bit better about the whole thing. Matilda shifted to third then back to fourth again. "Um, that didn't sound good," we murmured simultaneously. Thus began a number of increasingly frequent shifting abnormalities. By the time we were approaching Boone North Carolina, it was every ten minutes.

We decided to pull into a Walmart parking lot for the night while we tried to figure it out. "Maybe it's just the computer," I said hopefully, "and it just needs to reset itself." I lifted the hood and poked around. I checked the fluids. I unhooked the battery. Bethany made a snack and we talked about our options, coming to no conclusions except that we really didn't want to think about it till morning. We wanted to relax. This was not relaxing. We were chomping through corn chips like wood chippers, crumbs flying, pacing back and forth in front of the truck. We needed a distraction. "Hey, doesn't Caleb Drown live in Boone?" I asked.

Caleb had been on the 'friends to visit' list for years. A personality large as life itself, impulsive as a moose, humming with electricity and goodness. We called. His wife was away, he was home with the two boys, and did we want to get a pizza and hang out? We did. Bethany and I had both spent time babysitting Caleb when he was the size of his oldest and now here he was a blossoming trunk of manhood and his oldest the spitting image of the boy we had known.

The evening was a relaxing fantastic distraction. Of course, waking the next morning in the Walmart parking lot, all of our dilemmas were sitting where we left them, wearing slightly wounded expressions. Did we find a mechanic in Boone for a problem we hadn't diagnosed? Did we rent a car to make it to Chicago? But then what? We'd still need to get the camper. Maybe rent a truck and tow it? But we'd still need to come back for Matilda and I was headed for Boston in four days.

"Well," I said finally, "we don't know the problem and picking a mechanic here in Boone is harder than picking one where there're less choices. The truck still runs and our home still follows, I propose we keep going forward and if we break down, trust God to break us down near a mechanic that knows our truck." 

"That's exactly what I was thinking." Our eyes locked. That was it then. Our hands agreed by squeezing, and together we stepped into the unknown.

We were a half-hour down the road when the transmission started grinding, then shifting wildly, then not really working at all. We managed to limp into Wilkesboro and unhitch at a VFW campground. A local shop called Gear Jammers agreed to put aside their other work and take Matilda in.  I said to Bethany, on our way to the garage, "I didn't expect family grounding to have so much grinding."

to be continued …

gold tried in the fire : part 3 / sifting the ashes

This is my story of the last year, told in six parts. Paragraphs in italics are my dreams, and the dated snippets come directly from my daily journal. I trust my family to forgive me for all that I've shared, because I can't tell this story without including the heart parts … and some of them are raw, and hard to swallow.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6

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sifting the ashes

We got the house tidied up from the whirlwind move that left things all over the place and drawers half emptied. We decided that yes we were taking the camper with us to the beach, so there was an epic sort and removal of the majority of the things and projects the boys (well, Fynn mostly) had flung all over the basement and any other surface that wasn't already covered. A daunting detangle in a space that had been in flux for weeks, and barely kept functional as it was. I also started to get glimpses of how much I'd buried that might start coming to the surface if I dared to relax, and worried a wee bit about that. To top it off, the weather was bitterly cold, and in attempts to empty our black tank before leaving we discovered the valve was frozen. Trying to thaw it with a space heater blew a fuse. I gave up. Our camper isn't built for winter use so the tanks are not heated, and we'd been doing everything we could to keep them from freezing and cracking. We finally pulled out from between the snowbanks on Thursday afternoon, staggering with tiredness, cold, and a dawning elation at being pointed towards the beach and Michael's family.

Two Days on the Road : one freezing night at a truck stop pointed into the 5° air blowing at 20mph and leaving the truck running all night to power the furnace, one frozen and cracked sewer hose, one night in a WV campground that was miraculously open, one warm bourbon at the empty campground's non-empty bar, one tire changed for a couple of ladies stranded with their trailer, one late night arrival, one backing up of a very long driveway with the camper, one cozy tuck in between two huge beach houses, many hugs of welcome.

Seven Days Together : one solo sit in the hot tub, one girls afternoon out, one CodeNames tournament, two family game shows, one beach photo session, two personal breakdowns, four ducks consumed, six fantastic meals that the women didn't have anything to do with, one forging demonstration, 14 life updates given, every day filled to the brim with intensity.

Seven Days Home : one caravan to Raleigh, one fantastic pizza joint, two lovely days with Uncle Dick and Aunt Judy, three days in a familiar state park, one set of taxes almost finished, one lovely Fynn Fort, one night in a free riverside campground on WV land George Washington used to own, one speed bump at 30 mph, one smashed litterbox, one epic camper mess, one long gearing up to return to work, one safe arrival back at 2nd Ave.

We dragged ourselves back to work; emptying the house one box at a time, visiting at Park Ave (the new abode), celebrating Paul's birthday, sitting with Mom on Sunday mornings, and starting to pick away at the overall renovations on the old house. The lists were daunting. Michael spent his days on working on the house, and his nights on communicating with family over some subjects kindled by the time together. I'd assumed for years that Michael and I would be the ones dealing with the cleanout and fixup of 2nd Ave, and Dad had confirmed that in the fall when the decision was made to move them into Stephen and Rene's place. I love working with Michael, and we'd both been looking forward to this for months. So why were we having trouble getting up to full steam ahead?

The cumulative weight of the first six months in Chicago wasn't entirely lifted in the two weeks we'd been gone. I'd barely scratched the surface of anything emotional to be honest, and had come back to more adjustments, endless decisions of how to get rid of things, a preoccupied husband, and a daunting list of things to accomplish. There were more social opportunities now, which were lovely, but we both struggled. Part of the difficulty was due to the transition from a tightly structured schedule as to my responsibilities to Mom and Dad (pre vacation) to a family life with a day job (post vacation), and the resulting re-negotiations of how decisions were made, balanced, and executed. The focus was no longer so narrow, and the emergence from tunnel vision a bit blinding.

We finally found a working groove, got going on spacking and sanding and painting, and Michael's brother Nathan showed up to join the fray, bringing his very welcome electrical and plumbing expertise to the stack of lists now living on the dining room table. The lists that were partly buried under a dish of keys, piles of things to go to Park Ave, envelopes of photos to sort, boxed up teacups to mail, and things to get Dad's input on the next time he stopped by. We sailed jerkily through the next month and I struggled with some resentment at sharing Michael as my work partner, and deep sadness at old issues rearing their heads.

March 1 / Stephen to Mom … “Mom, you raised three little pigs …” Mom “No, I certainly did no…!” … her most coherent response in months!

March 2 / Dreamed I was watching and caring for Grambie

The Sunday mornings I usually spent with Mom were delightful and quiet. Most often just the two of us, though sometimes Michael came along. I came to fully appreciate the changes in our relationship that had come about during her care, and really enjoy the closeness. She wasn't super responsive, but still reacted to things with her eyes and the very occasional word, picked up and ate small snacks with her increasingly gnarled fingers, and listened to stories and music. I'd tell her things, and assume that she knew exactly what I meant. The painful truth was that as fiercely as I'd loved my Grambie (Dad's Mom) during her life, I hadn't felt that same fierceness for my own Mom until the last six months. It made quiet time with her all the sweeter.

March 3 / Dreamed about an eight-ish year old girl, a “princess”, being driven down a road in a cart, surveying. She saw groups of women in funny handmade green suits walking across fields. The princess character sees them. Freezes for a second, then resumes the ride but is changed. The ladies see her and are a bit wary, but are not threatened.

Being back in Addison, working in the house I grew up in, and temporarily in a very similar social circle to the one in my teens and 20's, was a bit of a mind flip. I'm no longer the same person I was in those years, the one who believed that other people had a right to judge everything we had, did, and wore, because a good bit of our income was based on donations from folks wanting to help out Bible Truth Publishers, where my Dad worked (and still does). I felt I had to always be useful, helpful, and an example to others of a holy and modest Christian. I had to help my family be worthy of the charity that we accepted.

I built that self image on my “approval ratings”, and so never wanted to disappoint anyone, especially not my father. I wanted to be all the things I was supposed to, but the internal dichotomy grew between the image I tried to project, and the person I was covering up in the process. I grew roots of worthlessness and unworthiness, because I could never live up to the standards I set for myself, or felt were being set for me. I tried to be more liked, more loyal, more humble. I also got somewhat proud of how unworthy I was, though I labeled it as piety at the time.

I believe my identity now, at 48, is closer to the 7-year-old who moved to Chicago in 1978 than I've been for nearly 40 years. That girl was confident, rather outgoing, self-assured, happy, and a bit wary of change. She didn't have a self-image to live up to, but knew who she was, and didn't shy away from it. The shift really started to take hold last spring.

A few months before we came to Chicago, I had a dream. It was triggered by having a friend help me dig up the unworthy/worthless roots, which set off a cascading realization as to where so many of my defaults came from. My identity was not rooted in who I was born to be, it was based on what other people thought of me. A slippery slope for sure, and one that I'd scrabbled on for most of my life. I knew in my heart that my true freedom is being unafraid, confident in knowing that I'm loved and approved of by the God who made me (thanks to Jesus), and that love is a gift I was born to share. Divorcing myself from the deep need for my fellow humans' approval was daunting though, and I had to have a little help in getting the process started.

I dreamed that I was in a slowly moving and loosely knit group of people, no known destination or purpose or scenery. Only person I knew was Michael, and I didn't see him but knew he was there. I became aware of a slight warmth and fullness growing in my abdomen, and realized it was pooling blood ... and that I was internally bleeding and it was going to kill me. There was no distress or pain, just curiosity and a sense of very limited time left. I rather enjoyed the feeling, mostly out of curiosity, but also found the warm belly to be comfortable. I thought almost idly of heaven, and thought That Will be Nice, but didn't focus on it.

I started to feel like maybe there were some people I should talk to before I died, and had an itch to call my parents. I don't know if I did or not, nor do I remember any words being spoken at all, but the feeling passed. Possibly because I realized the end was coming soon. I had a more urgent desire to talk to my cousin, and Michael helped me find a room off to the side somewhere where there was a desk and access to a phone somehow. I just made it in the room and into a chair, but could feel my life ebbing away. I had to acknowledge that I didn't have the strength to call and talk, and felt very slightly agitated about that.

I don't remember dying, the dream just ended there, and shifted into a different one in which I ran into a couple more people that I thought I should contact. What came clear to me was that the blood of Christ was filling me up to the point that the false identity (worthless and unworthy) that I'd been building on had to die. I had to be reborn, in my heart and my actions, as nothing more than a child of God, no strings attached. It left me feeling light, strong, and peaceful. I was still drying the wings of this newfound freedom when we got to Chicago in August, and I dove back into the bosom of my birth family.

That's a lot of navel-gazing digression, but I had to lay it out to get to my point. Diving in and being very quickly handed the reins of responsibility, by my Dad, for something I'd never expected to have to do, and then not getting one single iota of judgment from him for any decision that I made, most of which directly affected the life and well-being of the most precious-to-him human on earth? It was my father, and my Father, saying to me that if you do this for me, and for her, and for love, that is all that matters. I do not condemn you, shun you, or judge you as unworthy for any decision that you make. I just love you. There will be gold too. Oh yes, there will be gold. It's not about earning approval at all. It's just about doing the good that's put in front of me, with everything I've got, and trusting the results to God. What immense relief I find in that, and stronger wings too.

As John Prine puts it …

Well I'm thinking I'm knowing that I gotta be going
You know I hate to say so long.
It gives me an ocean of mixed up emotion
I'll have to work it out in a song.
Well I'm leaving a lot for the little I got
But you know a lot a little will do
And if you give me your love
I'll let it shine up above
And light my way back home to you.

Cause you got gold
Gold inside of you
Cause you got gold
Gold inside of you
Well I got some
Gold inside me too

Back to Part 2 / On to Part 4

I See You

There is no more delicious feeling in the world than being truly SEEN by someone, and loved no matter what they see. Seeing love covers a multitude of sins, holes, cracks, burns, you name it. It's not blind, it sees ... and loves anyway. I find it to be the underpinning of any healthy relationship … you show yourself, trusting that you won't be rejected, but that you'll be Seen and Known. THIS is the sweetness, the very marrow of life to me.

I've tasted this at many points on this journey, and it never fails to release just a bit more of whatever it is I've spent my life guarding or concealing. Things I'm afraid I'll be judged for, or shunned for, or seen as weak for. I've got a lot of those still lurking in the depths, and they only gradually seem to see the light of day. As they do, and they're seen and not judged, I become a bit lighter, more myself, more free.

I got a very rich dose of this in NC, and I'm still musing on it a month later. Heady stuff, being seen and loved. After Knoxville and the delight of soaking up Keren and Bobby's fellowship again, we finally got ourselves to Raleigh, and the home of my Uncle Dick and Aunt Judy. I'd promised them a visit before the trip ever started, and after 18 months on the road we finally rolled up to their door and dove right into the pool of love and warmth and relationship that is their home. Judy is my dad's sister (the eldest of 7 kids) and an amazing blend of both her parents. Heart savvy, head savvy, and an expert at Seeing and Loving. Her husband is a softie hiding under a tremendous wit, with a servant's heart. I went under, and didn't come up for days.

Spending two weeks with them (camped at a nearby state park) we worked on a bunch of painting and yardwork and housework projects that were either Someday ones, or things that are getting harder for Uncle Dick to keep up with thanks to his Parkinson's disease. We worked, but the relating and talking and sharing was woven right in and around everything, and I felt it in every corner of my heart. Seen. Known. Loved. An absolutely priceless gift.

Our welcome ran out at the state park (we had to move after 14 days thanks to regulations, even though the place was nearly empty) and so we hauled ourselves to the NC State Fairgrounds just west of downtown, and set up camp for another two weeks. Up next was painting at Tim and Anita's, and that was another bit of heaven. Never enough time to talk, but we made a go of it, and managed to get a bedroom and a bathroom painted in between. Anita is Judy's eldest daughter, and knows fierce love as well as any of my Grambie's grand daughters. Her husband's listening love poured out alongside hers, and watered us all.

Our last week in Raleigh was spent getting to know the delightful Rich Bolich, and reworking a gravel pathway around his backyard pool. Rick found our blog online before we ever left on this trip, and contacted us saying he'd love to meet us and give us some work, and support what we were doing any way that he could. Finally meeting in person was a joy for all of us, and he treated us to a couple lovely meals, including one for Douglas for his 14th birthday, and gave us the run of his place and complete trust in messing around with his landscaping and walkway. Another friend for life, and another anchor in Raleigh.

We also had the delight of hanging out with Stephanie and Brandon Smith (Steph's another Rule cousin), and taking the boys to Defy Gravity (a trampoline park) for Douglas' birthday treat. Highly recommended if you've got one near you … he declared it to be the Best Birthday Ever!

Leaving Raleigh caused a lump in my throat for several days, of the very best kind. Choked up with love and kindness and fellowship. Feeling seen, loved, and blessed beyond measure.

We tacked back west after pulling out of the fairgrounds, and holed up near Charlotte for some time to ourselves. While there we made visits to my delightfully colorful ex-Brooklynite friend Carolyn, and Amanda and Jeff Orr and their boys … more open arms and hearts and homes. Amanda is Judy's youngest, and another kindred spirit for sure. Our boys had some great romps with hers, and were fun to get to know. We also fit in a gold mining trip, as there happened to be a 4th generation gold mine right next door to our campsite. A good learning experience for Fynn, whose dreams of King Midas got a healthy reality check :). Just between our campsite and the mine, there was a house with a donkey named Applejack in residence. If you've never been treated to a wakeup bray/honk/screech, it's quite the experience.

We had only two fellow campers at that campground, and both kept to themselves. An older gentleman who we'd once glimpsed washing his truck, and a woman with two huge dogs who appeared to be doing some spring cleaning. The day before we left, the lady walked her dogs past our campsite on leashes, offering a "Hello!" on her way by. I noted it as a slight bit odd, as she'd been letting the dogs roam free all week. A bit later, she came over and halloo'd the trailer (camper etiquette doesn't seem to allow knocking unless you've hollered a greeting first, from a respectable distance of 10 feet or so), and I came to the door to find her offering to show my boys a snake that she'd found by her camper. Fynn was all for it, and so he and I followed her over to find a nicely sized black snake hanging out by her fire pit. I reminded him that Michael had previously offered $5 to the first boy to come to him holding a snake by the tail, and so he picked it up, wincing a bit, and holding it as far away from himself as he could he walked it over to show Dad.

As he was walking away, she handed me a little rolled up piece of grey paper said “Oh, there's one more thing … here's a map for a little treasure hunt that can be done in the woods back here, if you think your boys would enjoy it? I hope it's not a problem … there are some knives and matches involved ...” I assured her that was no issue, and that they'd be delighted!

Fynn unrolled the hand-drawn map and started right out, as Douglas wasn't available yet. He found “Long Log” right by Applejack's fence, and “Root Dam” and “Gnome Home” were also discovered with little trouble (which suddenly helped explain why I'd seen her coming out the woods the day before with a pile of moss in her hands), but he couldn't figure out which tree had the treasure chest under it. He called in Douglas for reinforcements, and a few minutes later they emerged from the woods with a little black chest, full of absolutely perfect treasures for the two of them. It was filled with some special 50-cent pieces, a couple $2 bills, a pair of sheathed pocket knives, glow-in-the-dark pebbles, a telescope, flashlight, and some matches. The effort she went to to provide them with a fun experience, before uttering a single word to any of us, was astounding to me.

It turned out that her name was Lori and she taught dance in a nearby town, had a granddaughter nearby, and was going through some old stuff while her hubby was away on business. The cleaning turned up some treasures that she thought the kids would get a kick out of. I think Lori herself was the treasure. We had been Seen, once again, and Known, before we ever even managed to exchange a word.