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 …

wrenching the heart loose

I’ve tried to start this post countless times, and feel like a dog turning around trying to find the perfect position before settling down for a nap.  Haven’t found it, so just need to wade in …

Since Michael’s last post, we’ve spent 5-ish weeks in the Chicago area working for several families while staying with my parents, 2 nights camping near the Indiana Dunes, a week at Gary and Peggy’s place in Holland Michigan (building a fountain/waterfall feature in one of their gardens), one night at a rest area, one brief but glorious night in our old stomping grounds in Lackawaxen PA with friends, 2 hours in a parking lot catching up with adored old friends we hadn’t seen in over 10 years, and the last 5 days settling into our 3-week digs at a campground in Clinton CT, while Michael works in New Haven doing a Sol LeWitt install.   Whew.  That’s the framework … now to try and fill in a few of the holes!

Chicago was my home for 23 years, and it’s more familiar to me than almost anywhere.  Faces, streets, names, the exact speed at which you can turn left onto 2nd Avenue, where mom keeps her measuring cups, and the back of Helen Maurer’s head on Sunday morning … all pretty much unchanged.  Some folks still steady as a rock, and some wearing at the edges, as you’d expect.  We moved away 14 years ago, and despite the quick visits here and there, I didn’t feel much of the more subtle changes going on.  Until this trip.  Five weeks is long enough to be less guest, and more resident.  Less hurry, more soaking up the minutes and feeling like they didn’t need to be squeezed quite as tightly. 

Except the longer we were there, the more I felt like they did.  The more I realized what needed to be done, and how big the changes were … both what had happened quietly over time, and what was cropping up on the horizon.  The thing is, (so very sorry Dad but I’m about to ruin your ability to share this post with Mom), my mom has Alzheimers*.   She’s had the visible signs for several years now, and things are progressing pretty much as expected.  And what is now, and what’s expected, sucks in many many ways.  She’s still independent and drives to familiar places, but that window will close before too terribly long, and her sense of time is irreconcilably twisted.  She’s lost many of the abilities that have defined her character for most of her life … like being able to run an ever-changing house full of guests, feed crowds on a moment’s notice, finish the crossword puzzle for you when you get stuck, and remember to send dozens of birthday cards every month.

The tide is eating away the definition of who she’s always been, and her edges are getting soft.  The guilt is gone, her worry (about everything except time) is gone, and her epic sense of responsibility is eroded down to a nubbin.  It makes me bawl, and I want to build her back up.  Now.  Put her back together, find the pieces and stitch them into something familiar.  Push up against the beautiful castle that’s always been my Mom, and I can’t.  I have to take her hand, hold her heart, and listen for what she’s saying in between the lines.  Which I can still (now at least) see in her eyes some of the time.  

There is beauty there, achingly lovely beauty, in seeing her happy, mostly content, and depending entirely on Dad and God.  Her pleasures are simple … Reminisce magazines, going to meeting, being with Dad, watching her loved ones interact and chiming in sometimes, food in general (and more specifically yogurt before bed), and feeling useful.  She is still my Mom.  But she’s fading.  It’s a maddening thing to feel, and while Dad is accepting it completely, and slowly trading roles with her, it’s a heartbreaking dance to watch. 

So I spent a lot of time cleaning cupboards, organizing the garage and shed, making lists and calls and suggestions for the future, and furthering the work that some others had already started.  This was all woven into the things that Dad had asked to be done, but made it hard to be fully focused on the named projects, when the needs and soon-to-be-needs became so apparent.  I did what was foremost in my mind and heart most of the time, and that sometimes left Michael and the boys waiting patiently because I decided that the rest of the garage just HAD to be sorted before we left for Home Depot. 

Which brings me to a side note … we appear to be collecting loyalty cards at an almost alarming rate.  Might as well sign up if we’re going to be in and out of the local grocery/drugstore/building supply place repeatedly, and the default choices change often.  I’m also becoming rather opinionated as to who’s got the smartest layout, most knowledgeable staff, and best selection … I’ll take a True Value or Ace Hardware any day over the bigger places, if I have a problem to solve and don’t happen to need stone or lumber or pond forms.  And the fact that we all equally love going in such places is a huge bonus … just look at all the possibilities!  Power tools, new kinds of spack, funny odd little tubes and connectors, carts to ride, shelves to climb, aisles to run in, camper gadgets to check out, and Weapons of all sorts!  This is becoming a rabbit hole more than a side note …

So we built some things in Chicago, fixed some things, organized stuff, and cut down a lot of trees, and hauled a lot of things.  My folks had some landscaping to do … leftover dirt from a sewer pipe fix last year that needed moving, grass to plant, rampant groundcover to tame, mulch to spread, and an “oh there’s a pond next to the foundation!” moment after some heavy rain that resulted in some back-breaking work.  After several days of rain, we took the first dryish day and went to a building site that was offering free clay fill, and slipped and slid our way around a massive mound of clay trying to “shovel” it into the back of the truck.  Hah!  Nothing like doing the dig and twist/heave/grunt that launches what’s on your shovel far enough to land it in the back of the truck (while attempting not to slide backwards down the mound), and have every last bit of the load stay firmly attached to the shovel.  Pitchforks helped a bit, and Michael’s crazy determination basically finished the job. 

Have I mentioned how much we’re enjoying working together?  I was asked a few days ago what the best part about this trip was for me, and the first thing that popped into my head was working with Michael.  There’s something utterly delightful about working shoulder to shoulder, taking turns doing the what-do-you-need-next dance, and tackling rafter angle problems with Google (me) and analog methods (Michael) and arriving simultaneously at the same answer.  Building stuff is lovely.  Problem solving is actually fun when it’s done together.  It gets a little hairy when the boys join in, but honestly their ideas are very helpful in most cases, and sometimes downright brilliant.  Their work habits are slowly improving too, and their abilities.  Douglas has shot up in the last few months, and (shhh) appears to have just nudged past Michael in height.  He’s all leg and angles and falling hair, but has enough oomph now to truly make a difference in the hard stuff … as long as I keep him fed.  Which is more challenging that it looks, as his favorite foods are all carb based, but I’m learning to read both boys’ moods as if they have their blood sugar level tattooed on their foreheads, and so find myself buying snacks constantly. 

After the bulk of the stuff at my folks was taken care of, we moved on to Jon and Kara’s place, though we kept the camper parked in my parents’ side yard.  Jon had a summer to-do-list that included some fun stuff for me on it (outlet and fixture swaps and some rearranging of wires), a bit of yard work, and some caulking and vent work … nothing too major.  The boys came along, and were more reluctant to assist than usual as their place is a kid/teen paradise when it comes to games, toys, and entertainment options.  A lot of my work was in the basement rec room/bar area, and I had more trouble than usual keeping them at the ready.  Douglas managed to be a big help in getting the wires rearranged though, drawing me a most lovely diagram to keep it all straight. 

We stayed over one night after getting their work done, and had the most delightful and decadent Saturday morning I can remember in a very long time.  Grilled breakfast (yes those piles of bacon arejust as big as they look!) and enough laughter and conversation to take my mind completely off the pain of things at my folks for a bit, and pour in some healing salve.  Complete and utter delight, and hard to leave.  Oh, and did I mention Jon is Tina’s sister, of the Ken and Tina chapter?  Yup, we go just as far back with them too.   Deep roots, a lot of water, and a lot of laughs.  Thanks you two!

The last main project in the area was the biggest one … building a cupola, complete with bell and weather vane, on John and Olive Kaiser’s garage … but that will have to be its own post I think.  It was hot, fun, a lovely learning curve, and interspersed with therapeutic bouts of chain sawing down a pile of junk trees and clearing out overgrown brush.  Though I’ve known John and Olive almost my whole life, spending a week in and out of their home (and on their roof) I learned to appreciate them both a lot more.  Several of their kids have spent countless hours in my home and heart over the last 20 years, but in all my interactions I’d never spent much time with their parents.  It was a treat.

There’s something about being folded into other people’s households that’s starting to be a very interesting part of this trip.  We’re working for folks, but we’re kind of guests too, but not entirely … there’s no defining it neatly.   We’ve started to call the work we’re doing Busking, as in the play-your-guitar and open-the-case-at-your-feet scenario.  We ask that supplies be covered (if possible) and beyond that, there are no expectations of payment.  No fees, no hourly rates, no bills.  We do it because we love to, and if we’re paid something more than the supplies cost, that’s lovely, and if we’re not, that’s equally lovely.  Expectations seem to be a killer in many arenas, and this is one of them.  What we do expect is to work hard, finish projects well, and enjoy most of the process.  We expect to have some meals together, get to know you better, and find out what makes you tick.  We expect to get filthy, learn a heck of a lot, and probably take a little longer than we originally estimated.  (We both suck at estimating, period.)  I’m learning to expect problems to crop up, boys to need breaks, and us all to need downtime between cities. 

Speaking of breaks, we did have a few lovely ones while in Chicago.  We took the boys to the Bristol Renaissance Faire for Fynn’s birthday, where he rather obsessively hunted for weapons to buy … he’s working on a post about it so I’ll leave the details to him!  We also were invited to several delicious barbecues, loaned (and given!) stacks of books for Douglas to devour (thanks Sue!), taken to awesome fireworks, found kindred spirits for our boys to hang out with, haunted Starbucks, were treated to dinner by Mom and Dad many times, shipped the boys off with the lovely Su for a day, and to my brother’s family for couple other days (thanks Rene!).  I also snuck away for a couple evenings with friends, catching up after way too long, but picking up right where we left off. 

We ended up staying an extra day longer than our (already revised) plan, and took the boys to the Museum of Science and Industry, which delighted me just as much as it did 30 years ago when I first went.  Michael spent a crazy long time in one of the stairwells, where a little exhibit of working gears (that likely was already there 30 years ago) gave him a bunch of ideas for his birdwing project.

Every evening we could stay home was spent curled up on the couch in my parent’s living room, reminiscing over popsicles and yogurt, and staying up past everyone’s bedtime to the point that one night Mom and I ended up in giggle fits over the retelling of some trip debacle that happened in Bolivia when I was a kid, involving well-filled airsick bags and crabby customs officials … the memories are golden, and the sharing of them at this point even sweeter.  I’ll suck the marrow out of every evening that I can, and even when I’m not there physically, a part of my heart is still parked in that living room, waiting for the turn of a page, the delight of a comment or shared glance, and the chance to say “Goodnight Mom, I love you.”

* ps … please respect that if you know my Mom personally, at Dad’s request she’s never been told her diagnosis, and he wishes it to remain that way.