the days that follow

I don't want to be up at 4:30AM making coffee.  I don't want to hike that trail. I don't want to be so in love with what I have learned is politely called a reactive dog. 

I don't want it to be July.

But most of all, I don't want to be on a 7-mile hike at the top of the canyon on a Sunday morning because I am too afraid to go back to Tanner.

What is there to say?  I was yelled at by a man, probably having his own bad day that had nothing to do with me.  I know, I was with Juneau, give him a couple of minutes you will find plenty of things to yell about.  

However, this man had no issue with Juneau or Ginger.  He was yelling at me. 

 Tanner, on the dog park side, is an off-leash trail every day of the week, all year long.  We go there just about every other day. Or I should say we did.  

This man decided I had let my dogs off-leash a hair too soon; a couple of feet from the arbitrary line he himself drew on the trail.  

"What makes you any different from anyone else!" he screamed repeatedly in my direction and then dramatically threw down the leashes of his 2 dogs.  

At first, I didn't even realize he was addressing me.  

There were at least 4 other dog owners with their off-leash dogs on the trail with us. My dogs were both at my feet.  And yet he was singling me out. 

Of course, knowing full well I hadn't done anything wrong I instantly began apologizing.

Most likely realizing he was actually in the wrong with me still apologizing, the angry man with his 2 dogs walked away.

I altered my route to avoid having to trail behind him the whole time but otherwise continued on our walk. We did have to pass him one more time on our way out; it was uneventful. 

Two other women who had seen it go down went out of their way to tell me how wrong he had been, laughing it off as a nutty guy. 

And I told BC you would be so proud of me I didn't even let it bother me. 

There is a space in my mind where monsters lay in wait.  

It did bother me.  It bothered me a lot.  

Finally, I had to admit I was afraid to go back.  With support from a few friends, I gathered my nerve and three days later returned with my dogs. Successfully twice saw and passed the angry little man. Problem solved. 

Only it's not. 

It's July and I now run the outside trail from 2300 to Wasatch and back. Dogless and alone as the bikers clip by me. Sometimes I startle so badly I have to stop to calm down. 

I go out in the heat on the heavily exposed blacktop walking the biggest hills, running the small ones. 

I look down at the dogs in the dog park and wonder 

what the hell I am so afraid of? But it changes nothing.

The canyon is better.  The trails yawn and stretch.  The dogs run free.  When you are alone in the city it is seen as a weakness. In the mountains, it is a strength.  

I didn't want to hike Dog Lake this morning.  It's not a trail I love but I owed the dogs something.  

Driving in the dark looking for deer stepping out from the trees I followed the canyon road to the end.  

Alone in a dark parking lot.  Alone on a dark trail.  Alone when the sun splits the trees. And alone at a beautiful mountain lake. 

Walking among the trees pockets of hidden snow, breathe the breath of winter over the smell of a distant wildfire.  The world is pine and dust nothing else even exists. 

All of it is for this dog who can't tell us about his past.  Who can't explain why some things scare him so badly while other things don't. 

I suppose the same could be said of me.   

     

lessons from home school

First of all please try to trust me when I say YOU CAN DO THIS.  You can teach your kids from home.  

I promise. 

What you probably can't do is SCHOOL at home. Trying to copy the school day isn't going to work for you or your kids.... because you aren't at school. 

The first thing you do is take all your kids' school work and put it away.  While you are doing that put away the guilt about not doing it.

The next thing you do is find your supplies. 

Pull out all your art supplies, board games, dice, cards, magazines, newspapers (even the junk mailers), interesting books, legos, straws, flashlights, spare change, toothpicks, sewing stuff, broken stuff, and if you have one a junk drawer out on your kitchen table.

What you are looking for are things that might interest your kids. Let's say you find a bag of old gummy candy or marshmallows add the toothpicks and you have a stem project. 

Put scissors on a pile of magazines (you can even use old damaged books).  Make art, make poetry, make a vision board, signs, write notes, etc. 

Make your own board game.  Make it personal about your life.

Create a newspaper: write breaking stories about members of your house, ads, weather, etc.

Pull a recipe out double it (yeah math!). But no really bake something, bake lots of somethings. Make pizza from scratch. Play with dough. 

Make a comic book. Make a storybook. Make a wanted poster. 

Listen to stories on Youtube while you paint or draw together. 

Design a park, a dream house, a treasure map.

Look up science experiments you can do.

Look up math games! So many, so much fun!!!

Clean together- yeah, clean, organize, repair, paint, cook, etc.

Play some of those board games you own.  In fact, play all of them. Make a game and a chart (yeah math).  See how many days (or hours) it takes.  

Didn't like one of them- give it to someone else or make an art project out of it.

Assign each kid to find a strange fact to share with the family. 

Create a list of interview questions and interview each other.  Call family and friends and interview them.

Egg drop!!! Remember the egg drop challenge. Do that!!!! 

Make paper airplanes.

Make a diorama. Create a dance. Play super old music.  Write a play and act it out.  Better yet, write ads for things in your house. 

Memorize a piece of poetry.  I highly recommend Shel Silverstein! 

Watch classic movies together. But don't do it in a regular way.  Create movie tickets, get your snacks together, and REALLY watch the movie together. 

Read a book together. If this seems like the greatest idea you never want to have to actually do try it this way. Find a book like Charlie and the Cholocate Factory or Alice in Wonderland (a classic that everyone thinks they know) set a goal to read 1 chapter a day. And I don't care how old your kids are.

Learn sign language. 

Pick an animal/country/person to study.  Read, draw, paint, watch youtube about your interest.

Make a lego zoo.  Write little signs for the different sights around your zoo.

Go old school with the yard games.

Teach a mini-course of auto shop, map reading, geology.

You don't need me or this random list of ideas you have the internet but if you have a challenge or a subject you want ideas for please feel free to ask.   

The main idea is learning at school looks one way because traditional SCHOOL has brick walls.  

Teachers have limited space, lots of kids, and limited resources and freedom. They spend years learning the set of skills they use to teach the way they do. 

Why is your 1st grader's homework so hard to do? Because the materials are designed to be used within the system of SCHOOL.

Teaching your kids is something you have done their whole lives. Think about it. You are their first teacher. Think of all the things you have taught them!!! 

You can do this! We all can <3 

2020

My calendar stops on March 14th, the week before the State Meet. The reds blues, and greens mark my work schedule and Beach's work schedule, our appointments, Beach's gym schedule, MVP, social activities, bills due, chores, all of it frozen on a whiteboard.

Has it really been a full work week? A Monday to Monday of life altered? That was fast...

I can say that safely because no one can come close enough to me to punch me in the face.

But yes, we have had a lot going on.  I have friends on the frontline working to save as many people as they can.  And I have elderly parents sheltering in place.

I have a partner still working, trying to do it as safely as he can for everyone.  Trying to keep work going for the workers who rely on him to put food on their tables.

My oldest son is a plumber, and he is still working.

My oldest daughter has an underlying medical condition and is in quarantine, fearing for her health and her life.

 Our youngest son was sent home from college last week, but he got stir-crazy in the city so he returned to the organic farm he lives and works outside of Cedar City, Utah.

During this time, BC was forced to travel 2x.  While he was gone, we had an earthquake of 5.7.  The aftershocks are still rolling in. 

The gym sent a conditioning program to do at home for Beach.  She began running for cardio and seemed hooked.

Utah's social gathering number is 10.  As of yesterday, our death count is 1. We are the state with the highest hoarding rate in the nation.  Police are patrolling inside the stores.

We have had to shop (3x) mainly because the grown kids keep showing up (and for care packages and RX's for Alexis), and also for fresh produce.

We have socialized thoughtfully and carefully.  We have chosen our contact risks.  We have a small circle... but they also have small circles... and their small circles have small circles.  It causes a lot of jokes about Sally; if you sleep with Sally, you sleep with everyone Sally ever slept with.

When someone leaves the yard, we yell, "Remember, don't sleep with Sally!" The way I see it, it makes just as much sense as yelling "wash your hands" to someone getting in a car.

I have seen a lot of good.  I would almost say the world looks better this way.  It's slower; it's more thoughtful and more focused on what is real. Resources are respected. Errands consolidated.

I see families out on walks. I see happy dogs. I see friends and neighbors reaching out to each other. Love and caring and kites flying.

This is the slow life that I have been living behind the fast life of being a Gym Mom for nearly a decade.  We plant a big garden, we raise hens for eggs, we homeschool, we bake (a lot), and we live close to the land.  We have a freezer full of meat that BC hunted.

I feel safe in this slow world. When I look up and out over the rim of our little farmstead, I get sad.  I think about the long stretch of not having choices about living little and slow or living big and fast.

I wonder about the surrealness of an earthquake in the middle of a pandemic.  Unbelievable. (How much I would love to be able to laugh about this with Wendi; so many things she didn't live to see...)

Those who know me have been joking that I have been preparing for this my whole life.

When I was little, I had a dollhouse. Three stories high, my dad had made it for me.  The year before that, he made me a huge train track on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood and turned it into a table attached to a pulley system so I could raise it to lay flat against my bedroom wall. When the train table was down, it was level with the third floor of the tiny house.

I would set up the dolls. Tiny bottles, plates, toys, books, mini forks, tables, beds, and porcelain dolls. Then I would run the train full throttle at a blocked track calculated to derail it straight into the dollhouse and play out the disaster.

Sometimes, I would set the dollhouse up and just shake it and play an earthquake.  Or bunker the family in one room of the house and play out a blizzard.

The disaster wasn't the fun part it was the hunkering down and the gathering of resources that I liked.  I liked to feel safe by playing out survival. I am a planner, an organizer, and a caretaker.

In adulthood and in a world of real people, I know too much to be having fun. This isn't fun. But it is what I am good at.

Only in very small moments do I get scared.  Mostly, I am sad.  I'm sad for those suffering.  I'm sad about the loss of things we haven't lost yet but soon will.

The gymnastics community is my window to the wider world. It is unimaginable these young athletes are not in the gym training. The end of the Season without warning was shocking. 

I happen to have Beach's very last floor routine from her last night at practice. Right now, I am too sad to watch it. How they will pick up and go back, I don't know.  It will cost so many of them their futures in this sport.

I look at the kids, and I wonder what happens next for them. There are a lot of unknowns. What I hope for is that when we are called out from our hiding places, we come out with renewed hearts.

Life is beauty.  Good is winning. We just need to all hold on. Take turns breaking down and building back up. There are people among us who will not see the other side of this. It's important that we walk this path in a way we want to be remembered for.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. ~Robert Frost

waiting for my life to start

The thing about depression for me is the shift in the horizon line.  

It's like you are traveling along on flat ground with everybody else, and suddenly you end up alone at the bottom of a steep valley.  

Sometimes it's a canyon or even a cave, but mostly it's a simple, plain dark valley.  Silent, cool, windswept. Grey hillsides that slope upwards alarmingly around you.

I have learned not to stop walking. 

But if I had been running or skipping before landing there, well, that's all over.  

The climb out is slow, and it hurts. Gravity is harsh. The steps are over colorless stones around leafless trees and flowerless shrubs.  The ground is mushy and damp. Not slipper but stubbornly weighted. 

Each journey out is different.  Months, weeks, days, hours... as different as the reason for falling in.  

But there are commonalities.  Like the questions that float as storm clouds: "when is my real life going to begin?" "What is the point of all this" "nothing matters," "nothing makes sense anymore"...

It's that feeling of deep failure or wasted time or inadequacy, false shadows—a threatening storm to avoid getting caught up in. A sky of doubt distracting you from moving forward.  Dark, swirling weather not to be encouraged. Tornados, not to be crossed. 

Looking like you are standing still; you walk. Seemingly getting nowhere but working harder than you think yourself capable of doing.  Walking without reason. Walking without will.  Walking without true direction. And nothing seems to change.

Yet slowly, almost unperceivable light begins to leak in. Dark greys fade to watery blues.  Green pebbles appear. Finally, there is the spot where you can see the slope breaking, giving way to flat ground. 

One foot in front of the other over the edge into a place like the sunrise. Dark and light and color all at the same time. Then the beauty of it is gone.  Spread out across the day, diluted and mundane.    

You find yourself out of the valley, back where you started right before you fell in. Standing in the pieces of your life. Gathering them up, shaking them off, and moving on. Traveling with the world once again.

The memory of the valley and its darkness rolls with you.

For me, depression is the dark contrast that makes my world so sharply beautiful. Waiting for my life to start for the hundredth time. Born over and over from the valley of darkness into a world of light.  

I am a collector of moments.

The Best Gift- published 2/21/15

I was kneeling on the floor helping Beach carefully box up 3 medals made of glass. 

Beach was far more fascinated by the boxes than the awards she had won. As soon as they announced boxes were available she rushed to get hers. 

She showed me the silky interior, the indented circle for the medal face, and announced the color was the "best" blue. 

"Aren't these boxes just beautiful?" She asked me holding them up.  

I was kneeling at her feet looking up into her smiling face thinking how lucky I was to have this kid in my life when I heard a mom from the sea of people squeezing by us say, "No, you leave those on I want people to see them when I am walking with you." 

As the woman twisted to grab the shoulders of her child our eyes met.   

Practically standing over me she looked down on me and at the stack of boxes in my hand, and then to Beach. 

Smiling Beach. 
Smiling, struggling Beach. 

The kid fighting a 10-second pause on beam before her series- the series she fell on. The kid asking from the backseat of the car through tears, "When is my dad coming back?" Wonderful, funny, honest, sweet Beach.

The look on the woman's face gave me the feeling we were the last pair of people she would have wanted to have heard her say that.

Her daughter looked at Beach, passing a weak smile of recognition; they had been on the podium together. Then awkwardly under the weight of her mother, she was taken away.

At first Beach and I just stared at each, both us feeling almost guilty for them witnessing us being us, and us seeing them being them. 

In the wake of them, I didn't know what to say to my own child but she knew what needed to be said. 

"That was really sad, mom. I feel bad for that girl- and her mom. That must really suck."

I stood up and Beach asked, "Can I see one of the boxes, they are so cool!"  

the size of the fight

I'm not going to tell you a story so don't ask.  It's not that exciting anyway and you will live not to know the exact details.  

In fact, go ahead and insert any G-rated storyline you like- it's all the same for the purposes here. It's not the point.  It doesn't matter. 

What I am going to tell you is how proud of my child I am.  

Sometimes it is easy to stand up for what you believe in and sometimes it's not.  

Sometimes it will cost you something you have worked hard for; hurt for, cried for.

I have said many times that Beach is a fighter.  If she was in public school she would always be in some kind of trouble. That sweet smiling kid is more than she appears.  She has a strong internal sense of social justice. Constantly on the side of the underdog.  If she believes something isn't right, she won't leave it alone. 

She is innately good.  Kind, generous, thoughtful, and smart.  These things help because that much fight poured into the wrong type of moral character would be dangerous. 

This is why gymnastics works so well for her; most days you get out what you put in, gravity is fair to everyone, the equipment is predicable stoic, and you support your team no matter what. 

She also has a built-in drive to collect the herd- to team build and to belong. She sees her team and her friends as part of her and she part of them. 

Yesterday she did what she thought was right despite thinking her parents would both be mad. In fact, believing all the adults around her could possibly be angry. 

Remember a time you did that.  A time you made a choice (the right choice in your heart) and voiced it knowing it would piss off everyone you loved.  

Despite the price tag literal and metaphoric, she stood her ground. 

As she told me the events, her words, and her choice I realized I was listening to the words of a true Leader. 

Whether or not one agrees with her (or what she was fighting for) she stood up for what she believed in.  

She fought for someone else giving everything she could. Everything she had to offer. 

She didn't solve world peace or stop global warming. She didn't even win the fight. The issue will be talked through by the real parties involved and forgotten. 

What matters is the willingness to stand up and say your truth. To fight for what you believe in.  There isn't enough of that going around these days. 

Somehow I have returned to running and to writing. Those 2 things go together for me.  But so do the nightmares.  Running fuels them.  They feed off sore muscles and adrenaline. 

Last night after Beach spilled her story to me and left my bed I fell asleep to the old whispers.  Old dreams, old ghosts, old monsters.

Sometime in the night, I dreamt of a room filled with party-goers; a mix of prom and little kids at Halloween.  I asked a question and Beach answered, "Ask Wendi."  

I turned to see my sister sitting beside Beach on a stool.  A perfect 16-year-old Wendi.  The way I remember her when she was my best friend. Before all the boys and the beer and the drugs took her away. 

Wendi said nothing she simply smiled pastel and papery. 

"How did Wendi get back here?" I asked Beach.  Because it's been a long time since I have seen her in my dreams.

"Oh, she's with me, "Beach answered. 

I suppose she is now... perhaps that only makes sense to me. But like I said that sort of fight in the wrong hands can be dangerous. In the right ones, it will save us all. 

the things we do for love

I have done one and a half loads of laundry.  Changed the sheets on our bed including the duvet cover- what a serious pain that is!

Prepared dinner for tonight; an elk roast in a rich red tomato jalapeno broth with seeping garlic and heavy tones of black pepper, a side of creamy mashed potatoes for Beach and BC, and a dryish smashed yam for myself, green salad.

For dessert, a peanut butter brownie pie made with the following substitutions and/or additions: apple sauce, greek yogurt, oatmeal, and hand mashed black beans.

I have emptied and loaded the dishwasher twice, cleaned out the fridge, vacuumed three rooms, sorted the bills, trimmed and rearranged the flowers, fed the dogs and the cats, swept the mudroom, took out the trash, cleaned one of the two bathrooms, put a hundred things back where they go... and now that I think about it before doing all that I made breakfast, cleaned it up, and worked out.

The one thing I did not do was run Beach to work, BC did because he had extra time this morning.

While abandoning his coffee mug in the middle of the kitchen BC asked what the occasion was for all the work I was doing.  Well, it's Thursday... 

The special occasion is this is our one and only life.  

I do most of these things or things like them every day that I can. These are some of the last days for our little family to be together as we are now.  They are also some of the first days on the next adventure for each of us.

Beach is 16.  The closer she gets to a decision about her future in gymnastics the closer I see the end of this life and the start of something new.  Where and what that looks like I don't know.

All of her siblings are out on their own. Each took a different path. The talk of colleges beyond the idea of gymnastics is only now beginning. Driver's Education which had been on hold is now scheduled.

We have two years before she graduates from high school.  But two years?! That's not very long in the heart of a mother.

I am laying down the final pieces of a road that has taken us from where we began to where we are now.  A road that she will branch from to take out to the world beyond.  A road I want to make so wide and open and strong that she will always be able to find it again. No matter where she goes. 

Some of it I am repaving. The return of nightly desserts, family game night, and a family read-aloud novel.  Projects and Nova. Thoughts of spring camping and summer hikes.  Complex plans for the garden.  Our life as it was when they were all little.  Life slow and predictable. Well, as predictable as life can be with BC. Some of the stones are new. Adventures in Art and Fashion, a wild muddy Cowdog, and a woodshop with a big idea.

The smell of clean laundry, the memories of healthy homemade food, all the colors of the dishes put neatly away, and the sounds of childhood on newly swept floors.  There is a lot to do.  There is a lot that won't get done.  Dinners will burn, pies will not turn out but the love inside the work, inside the hours and the days that's what matters. The making of a home with open doors and sleeping cats.

Every day is a special occasion.  

Every day there is a reason to live your life as big as you can. 

Grandpa and Grandma Brown