My dear webmaster still hasn't loaded up on my site www.jkbooks.com so I appreciate you waiting for that first chapter read. It won't be long and I'll have a new webmaster (my niece with her five kids is moving on to other things!) but thanks for your patience until then.
On Tuesday, my newest book released! It's called A Mending at the Edge and there's a great review of all three books in the series at www.burlysue.blogspot.com written by Kim Ford. I hope you'll go visit it. Tonight I have a signing at Powell's Bookstore in Beaverton, OR. Powelle's is one of the world's largest independent bookstores. I won't be in the downtown store. My first and only visit there was two days after 9/11 and 125 people came, seeking comfort I think and because all the airlines were cancelled.
I had a great trip to Chicago at the quilt show and some other events there. But I was booked on American Airlines and was on the first flight cancelled out of Portland on Tuesday and on the last flight cancelled on Saturday night getting out of Chicago. They flew me to Dallas where THAT flight was cancelled. They found another plane, and we took the skytrain to the new gate and the skytrain stalled! People don't like to get behind me at the copy machine...but this time it wasn't me! Still, we formed a community we people trying to get to Portland and stuck in the world of transportation.
Today it's beautiful on this ranch, white fluffly clouds shadowing the growing alfalfa and the newly seeded sections of the fields. We're fortunate to be here yet another spring. I hope wherever you are today you are inhaling the goodness in your life. Jane
Friday, April 18, 2008
Friday, April 4, 2008
Italy and the next book
Italy was Bella! We had a wonderful time, walking everywhere (except when we took the bus or the train). On Easter in Sorrento, the church bells start clanging at midnight and ring on the hour with fireworks at noon. At the hotel, each room was served a lovely traditional Easter bread shaped like a cross (I didn’t eat it but my traveling friend, Sandy, did and announced it bella!). Behind our hotel a series of steps, hundreds, made their way up the steep mountain side and at different landings were the fourteen stations of the cross. Someone had placed a flower in a vase at each station and at the top there were bouquets of flowers inside the small chapel there. We could see out over the Bay of Napoli to Vesuvius (we could also see Vesuvius from our hotel room window, just lying in our beds!) and view the town of Sorrento with its red-tiled roofs and olive and orange groves throughout the city. Easter morning we kept walking up along a path that eventually took us to another road and there we walked another hour or more past olive groves and orchards where both oranges and lemons grew on the same trees. We carried our umbrellas that day but didn’t need them. It was truly a lovely day of newness all around and I felt so blessed to be spending Easter Sunday in Italy.
At the noon meal later, the hotel brought in a huge (the size of a five year old child) chocolate egg. They then cracked it open and we all got sheets of dark chocolate as dessert for our meal. In Sorrento, they also have a custom where smaller chocolate eggs (the size of footballs) are filled with trinkets, little bracelets or toys for children, and the stores the day before were filled with these presents wrapped like we wrap roses with colorful cellophane paper. Easter Monday is also a holiday there. And by the way, the lemons are the size of grapefruits. We learned that they’re on steroids, really, and people buy them for the novelty of the size but they also cut them open, take out the pulp and put in lemon sorbet that is then frozen and the dessert is served in that huge lemon half with a tiny piece of chocolate for color. I loved that sorbet! It didn’t have flour in it either the way gelato does.
Good Friday was a special day as well as most of the small towns held processions to the church carrying a statue of the crucified Christ. We arrived late on Good Friday and were caught in the traffic jams following those processions. Believe me, the streets are very narrow in places and our driver knew the back roads or we’d still be there waiting for all the little Smart Cars and scooters and three-wheel vehicles to make their way through the maze of alleys and roads so narrow I could stand in the middle and almost touch both sides of the walls lining some of them!
But it was the people and their dogs we loved the best! Of course we were meeting people from around the world, especially Europe, at the conference; but the community of Sorrento was filled with warm and helpful people too. No one every groused at us when we had to ask for directions or asked what something was. I ate gluten-free and only had one bad day (and that might have been from the excess chocolate!) We took some side trips along the Almafi coast, the Isle of Capri (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable, Cap) and into Rome and even there we figured out how to adapt when the bus we’d planned to take back to Sorrento decided to leave two hours before their printed schedule. So we took the trains and walked back up to our hotel after 10:00 PM feeling very safe (and escorted by some of the street-savvy dogs who show up often to check out the scrap-department. Sadly, we left them few!)
I told Jerry our next project should be to photograph “The Dogs of Sorrento” as they were many and varied but also well-behaved. And it would get us back to Italy!
Maybe I was thinking dogs so much because while I was gone our old lab, Brody, had another stroke and lost control of his functions and Jerry had to have him put him down. I’d said a good good-bye to him before I left thinking that at 14, he might not make it many more months. He didn’t. He was such a good dog and we’d had him at least three years longer than we’d thought we would by giving him what we called “Happy Pills” for his arthritis and other pains. He eventually stopped going on walks with me and with Bo, but before then, he’d walk as far as the two trees that were on the property when we bought it, hackberry trees, growing on the ridge below the house. He’d lie there in the shade and wait until we made the river loop and came back by to pick him up, often having to get the six-wheeler so he could just step in and ride back up the hill. Brody came to us when Mariah did the first time, when she was seven. She’ll be 21 this year so we’ve had a long and loving time with Brody. He’ll be missed.
My sessions at the conference went well. Talking about Enduring Stories or The Seven Thoughts that Hold us Back and how we can transform them, appear to be universal issues. The women from Qatar spoke to me afterwards (there were three of them attending the conference) about how fear and anxiety and unworthiness have to be addressed as their country undertakes an amazing commitment to education bringing six American universities in to provide degrees in medicine, engineering, architecture and more at the upper end while committing to extensive early childhood education and on up to stop what they called the “brain drain” of their countrymen and women who leave to study abroad and often don’t come back. They hope to educate their citizens there and keep them there to continue to advance this small Middle Eastern nation rich in natural gas reserves. The head of their ministry of education is a woman whom these women said was truly a model for them. It was a delight to discover that the material I had to offer, the material that is both a part of my mental health life and my writing life and homestead, too, can speak to people on the other side of the world, about changing how we feel and changing the lives around us by how we live our own.
The main presenter was Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind man to climb all seven of the world’s highest mountains including Mt. Everest. His presentation brought both tears and laughter along with awe of the power of the human spirit to dream big, to gather up a team of remarkable people (19 of the 21 person team also summitted, the greatest number of team members to do so on any expedition) and to learn to reach further and higher and to inspire those around them to seek greater heights as well. He also showed video clips of some of the challenges of the climb; but also of new technologies that showed that the brain continues to “see” even when the eyes don’t and he is testing a device where he holds a sensor on his tongue which is connected to a computer carried on his back that sends him messages where he can “see” to play tic tac doe with his daughter and see well enough to catch her cheating! He did have three O’s in a row before her three X’s! Ah, the amazing brain.
His story also spoke to me of the work I did with families challenged by developmental disabilities and several other presenters spoke about educational successes around the world in serving students with special needs. The head of the Perkins School for the Blind also presented and gave a horrifying statistic that over 6 million blind children world-wide are not involved in any educational programs because in many countries they do not believe they are entitled to education. Through Erik’s non-profit foundation, he took six blind Tibetan students on a rock-climbing expedition. Imagine the soaring of their spirit to know that they could indeed learn to do things that even sighted people (like me!) quiver at doing, climbing some huge rock, and be successful at it!
So this April, I hope you’re ready to see how eariler inspiring moments and beliefs of my life and Emma’s history got translated into A Mending at the Edge. It’ll be out in two weeks! You’ll be getting a postcard if you’re on my mailing list and there are a number of events where I hope to see you including the coast launch of the book sponsored by Time Enough Books in Ilwaco, WA, not far from where Emma and Christian lived their lives (at the Heritage Museum there, April 20th at 2:00 PM) and of course in Aurora itself on Mother’s Day at 2:00 PM. A new exhibit is opening that weekend as well “All About Emma” and I believe there’ll be tours of some of the museum sites including the house that Emma once lived in. So if you’re in the Northwest….come visit.
I’m scheduled for a number of blog tours during the next weeks. I just have to figure out how to let you all know that! Hmm, maybe posting them on my own blog? You think? I’m still getting the hang of all this!
We’ll be back on the Oregon Coast on April 26th in little Toledo, OR at 1:00 at the Methodist Church there. We’re (Jerry and me) invited back by the Serendipity Book Group that’s been meeting for many years and one of their members, Dixie McKay, is the mom of the woman who invited me to Sorrento as part of the European Council of International Schools. Her daughter is second from the left in this photograph (with new friends Fran (on the far left) and Adelle, next to me, also presenters at the conference). This was at the gala on Saturday night where we were serenaded by waiters who sang so beautifully they could have been on stage. Maybe during the day, they are! Dixie, the mom, rounded up close to a hundred people in that little church the last time we came. We hope we can repeat it!
Very soon, the first chapter of A Mending at the Edge will be posted on my website, www.jkbooks.com I hope you’ll be interested enough to want to read more and then this fall, will also want to see photographs both old and new of the quilts and crafts for which the Aurora colony was known regionally in the book Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt and Craft. We hope through the photographic non-fiction book to let people around the country (maybe the whole world!) know of this group of Christians who sometimes stumbled and fell but who picked themselves up and did their best to live out their Christian beliefs including the Diamond Rule, where they hoped to make others’ lives better than their own. It’s a worthy effort to pursue and this month of spring I hope to do something each day that just might make another’s life better than mine. It will be a challenge for I am humbled by the richness of my own life.
I hope you’re humbled by your own as well. Ciao for now!
At the noon meal later, the hotel brought in a huge (the size of a five year old child) chocolate egg. They then cracked it open and we all got sheets of dark chocolate as dessert for our meal. In Sorrento, they also have a custom where smaller chocolate eggs (the size of footballs) are filled with trinkets, little bracelets or toys for children, and the stores the day before were filled with these presents wrapped like we wrap roses with colorful cellophane paper. Easter Monday is also a holiday there. And by the way, the lemons are the size of grapefruits. We learned that they’re on steroids, really, and people buy them for the novelty of the size but they also cut them open, take out the pulp and put in lemon sorbet that is then frozen and the dessert is served in that huge lemon half with a tiny piece of chocolate for color. I loved that sorbet! It didn’t have flour in it either the way gelato does.
Good Friday was a special day as well as most of the small towns held processions to the church carrying a statue of the crucified Christ. We arrived late on Good Friday and were caught in the traffic jams following those processions. Believe me, the streets are very narrow in places and our driver knew the back roads or we’d still be there waiting for all the little Smart Cars and scooters and three-wheel vehicles to make their way through the maze of alleys and roads so narrow I could stand in the middle and almost touch both sides of the walls lining some of them!
But it was the people and their dogs we loved the best! Of course we were meeting people from around the world, especially Europe, at the conference; but the community of Sorrento was filled with warm and helpful people too. No one every groused at us when we had to ask for directions or asked what something was. I ate gluten-free and only had one bad day (and that might have been from the excess chocolate!) We took some side trips along the Almafi coast, the Isle of Capri (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable, Cap) and into Rome and even there we figured out how to adapt when the bus we’d planned to take back to Sorrento decided to leave two hours before their printed schedule. So we took the trains and walked back up to our hotel after 10:00 PM feeling very safe (and escorted by some of the street-savvy dogs who show up often to check out the scrap-department. Sadly, we left them few!)
I told Jerry our next project should be to photograph “The Dogs of Sorrento” as they were many and varied but also well-behaved. And it would get us back to Italy!
Maybe I was thinking dogs so much because while I was gone our old lab, Brody, had another stroke and lost control of his functions and Jerry had to have him put him down. I’d said a good good-bye to him before I left thinking that at 14, he might not make it many more months. He didn’t. He was such a good dog and we’d had him at least three years longer than we’d thought we would by giving him what we called “Happy Pills” for his arthritis and other pains. He eventually stopped going on walks with me and with Bo, but before then, he’d walk as far as the two trees that were on the property when we bought it, hackberry trees, growing on the ridge below the house. He’d lie there in the shade and wait until we made the river loop and came back by to pick him up, often having to get the six-wheeler so he could just step in and ride back up the hill. Brody came to us when Mariah did the first time, when she was seven. She’ll be 21 this year so we’ve had a long and loving time with Brody. He’ll be missed.
My sessions at the conference went well. Talking about Enduring Stories or The Seven Thoughts that Hold us Back and how we can transform them, appear to be universal issues. The women from Qatar spoke to me afterwards (there were three of them attending the conference) about how fear and anxiety and unworthiness have to be addressed as their country undertakes an amazing commitment to education bringing six American universities in to provide degrees in medicine, engineering, architecture and more at the upper end while committing to extensive early childhood education and on up to stop what they called the “brain drain” of their countrymen and women who leave to study abroad and often don’t come back. They hope to educate their citizens there and keep them there to continue to advance this small Middle Eastern nation rich in natural gas reserves. The head of their ministry of education is a woman whom these women said was truly a model for them. It was a delight to discover that the material I had to offer, the material that is both a part of my mental health life and my writing life and homestead, too, can speak to people on the other side of the world, about changing how we feel and changing the lives around us by how we live our own.
The main presenter was Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind man to climb all seven of the world’s highest mountains including Mt. Everest. His presentation brought both tears and laughter along with awe of the power of the human spirit to dream big, to gather up a team of remarkable people (19 of the 21 person team also summitted, the greatest number of team members to do so on any expedition) and to learn to reach further and higher and to inspire those around them to seek greater heights as well. He also showed video clips of some of the challenges of the climb; but also of new technologies that showed that the brain continues to “see” even when the eyes don’t and he is testing a device where he holds a sensor on his tongue which is connected to a computer carried on his back that sends him messages where he can “see” to play tic tac doe with his daughter and see well enough to catch her cheating! He did have three O’s in a row before her three X’s! Ah, the amazing brain.
His story also spoke to me of the work I did with families challenged by developmental disabilities and several other presenters spoke about educational successes around the world in serving students with special needs. The head of the Perkins School for the Blind also presented and gave a horrifying statistic that over 6 million blind children world-wide are not involved in any educational programs because in many countries they do not believe they are entitled to education. Through Erik’s non-profit foundation, he took six blind Tibetan students on a rock-climbing expedition. Imagine the soaring of their spirit to know that they could indeed learn to do things that even sighted people (like me!) quiver at doing, climbing some huge rock, and be successful at it!
So this April, I hope you’re ready to see how eariler inspiring moments and beliefs of my life and Emma’s history got translated into A Mending at the Edge. It’ll be out in two weeks! You’ll be getting a postcard if you’re on my mailing list and there are a number of events where I hope to see you including the coast launch of the book sponsored by Time Enough Books in Ilwaco, WA, not far from where Emma and Christian lived their lives (at the Heritage Museum there, April 20th at 2:00 PM) and of course in Aurora itself on Mother’s Day at 2:00 PM. A new exhibit is opening that weekend as well “All About Emma” and I believe there’ll be tours of some of the museum sites including the house that Emma once lived in. So if you’re in the Northwest….come visit.
I’m scheduled for a number of blog tours during the next weeks. I just have to figure out how to let you all know that! Hmm, maybe posting them on my own blog? You think? I’m still getting the hang of all this!
We’ll be back on the Oregon Coast on April 26th in little Toledo, OR at 1:00 at the Methodist Church there. We’re (Jerry and me) invited back by the Serendipity Book Group that’s been meeting for many years and one of their members, Dixie McKay, is the mom of the woman who invited me to Sorrento as part of the European Council of International Schools. Her daughter is second from the left in this photograph (with new friends Fran (on the far left) and Adelle, next to me, also presenters at the conference). This was at the gala on Saturday night where we were serenaded by waiters who sang so beautifully they could have been on stage. Maybe during the day, they are! Dixie, the mom, rounded up close to a hundred people in that little church the last time we came. We hope we can repeat it!
Very soon, the first chapter of A Mending at the Edge will be posted on my website, www.jkbooks.com I hope you’ll be interested enough to want to read more and then this fall, will also want to see photographs both old and new of the quilts and crafts for which the Aurora colony was known regionally in the book Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt and Craft. We hope through the photographic non-fiction book to let people around the country (maybe the whole world!) know of this group of Christians who sometimes stumbled and fell but who picked themselves up and did their best to live out their Christian beliefs including the Diamond Rule, where they hoped to make others’ lives better than their own. It’s a worthy effort to pursue and this month of spring I hope to do something each day that just might make another’s life better than mine. It will be a challenge for I am humbled by the richness of my own life.
I hope you’re humbled by your own as well. Ciao for now!
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
heart disease, children, Ghandi, good reads,
Some of you know that March, in the past, has often been a difficult month for me. Both of my parents died in a March. We survived an airplane crash in March of 1986. And then there are those Ides of March…I used to call it Murphy’s March for all the things that could go wrong.
But over the past few years I’ve decided that I gave March a bad rap. It’s really quite a remarkable month. We do our “bounty counting” in March now (preparing our taxes!). The yellow bells, first signs of fragrant spring, sprout, reminding me of a time I went walking with my dad and stuck that tiny flower in my dad’s shirt pocket. All day he commented on how good everything smelled and only later realized that it was that tiny yellow bell that gave the gift.
There are birthdays that are special in March. Jerry’s mom’s birthday was in March. So was my mom’s. Matt’s birthday is in March. Bo will be 22 months old on the 17th! A great niece, Sarah Hurtley, will turn 17 in March and her Dad will be…well, older in March.
Winter wakes up this month and finds itself transformed into new beginnings and treasures.
I won’t know for another week or more about my heart test results but while they were being done no one said “Oh my!” or “I think you better wait until I share these with the radiologist” you, know, those certain looks suggesting maybe things are worse than I’d thought. So I’m not worried. After all, I took my own advice and guarded my heart and it’s March when I’ll learn the results so I think things will be fine.
We spent a few days last week on the Washington coast not far from where Emma had spent some of her days along the Willapa Bay (my Change and Cherish series). We walked on the beach, picked up sand dollars, ate seafood (lots of it) and read. I finished Robin Cody’s Ricochet River a book that like Sweetness to the Soul made the “100 best books about Oregon list.” Robin is coming to Sherman County on March 3 to spend the day with kids and the evening with adults and kids at the library and he and his wife invited Jerry and me to visit Sherar’s Bridge with them and talk stories. What fun that will be!
I started reading The Florists Daughter by Patricia Hampl, a memoir about her parents living in Minnesota (where my mom grew up) and brought along to keep reading – depending on my mood – The Hardest Time, Dance of the Dissident Daughter, The Audacity of Hope, The Path, The Hidden Wholeness, Bring Warm Clothes i(That one’s about Minnesota winters) and Eat, Pray Love (it was suggested I read this before leaving for Italy in two weeks), and Lee Iacocca’s newest Where Have all the Leaders Gone? You never want to be without books.
And we rented movies on the rainy afternoons. We don’t watch many movies on TV and going to them is a 100 round trip so DVDs at the hotel works well. I could enjoy them more too because I’d finished the rough draft of my 2009 novel just before we left! My goal had been to finish it before I leave for Italy so it was a gift to have it this far along! Lots of revising will be done, editorial comments etc., but this phase is finished and it is a milestone I celebrated walking on the beach.
Anyway, the theme of the weekend and the movies seemed to be the importance of childhood and protecting children but also about the gifts of childhood. Maybe I was just being open to these issues this month thinking of myself as a ‘daughter,’ orphaned now but then we are all orphans in some ways, seeking to find our way home.
Robin Cody’s book was a moving story of teens and love and life and hope and trials, about salmon runs and dams, about small towns and Indians and the stories we tell ourselves and how the lives we live tell stories, too. It was a compelling read and without a doubt I easily set aside all the other books in order to finish Ricochet River. I highly recommend it from young adult on up.
Anyway, the most profound film we watched was called Water. It’s an East Indian production, subtitled, set in the 1930s. It’s about a young widow (age 7) being sent to live in the community of widows which is what happened for Hindu wives whose husbands died. They could die with them, be sent to this widow’s town, or if the family allowed, be given in marriage to the younger brother of the deceased husband. It was a strict caste system and the story suggests it changed with Ghandi’s influence but as late as 2000 was still practiced by some Hindu people. This is women in history month and I couldn’t help but note that women, young women and old women still struggle in many places around the world, even in my neighborhood though we have no widow’s community.
Into this mix came the 7 year old widow. There were women who had been there for many years, who had also come at the age of 7 or 8, some of whom had never known the husband whose death had sent them there. It was not always a bad place but the wrench of being left there by her in-laws and the way that lives changed there because she was being a child and because these widows had to find ways to survive, moved me deeply. I think the last time I’d cried that hard at the end of a film was at the movie “The Deer Hunter” back in 1979 and it was probably as much as the power of the film as the fact that Jerry was having cervical surgery the next day…life seemed so fragile and of course, it is.
But I was held by someone who loved me while I cried and our friend who was with us, who also shed her tears, reached out to touch my hand and I felt so grateful, so blessed at my childhood, my life, my choices, my chances to lead the life I do, loved as I am.
My admiration for Ghandi’s work grew, too. Such a profound weight Ghandi took upon himself to change a way of life, to make a small dent in colonial influences left by the British in that nation (who had certain advantages by these widows needing to earn money for food), by the weight of generations of Hindu tradition that accepted how these widows of all ages should be treated. His faith and personal conviction were never displayed in the film; it was all about this one child but it personalized how a single life and the lives of those around her were changed and needed to be changed by Ghandi’s listening to his heart, by people knowing he was out there moving to make life better for the smallest child. The law was changed but it was another widow’s act of compassion that truly changed the child’s life, her act of courage to defy the rules and order on behalf of a child’s need.
Or maybe I was so affected because I’d also just come from leading a Presbyterian women’s retreat and as a way to get to know them, I’d asked the women to share their name and share something they loved doing as a child. As I always am at these events, I was moved by the diversity, the range of happy and sad childhoods but also that each could name something they had once loved to do, lost themselves in doing, remembered with fondness what they’d done.
Several said they didn’t do that activity much anymore and I suggested that maybe we ought to. Maybe a way to celebrate the gifts of childhood, (which to me are wonder and passion, un-conditional love, easy forgiveness of ourselves, siblings and even our parents!) is to once again engage in roller skating, horseback riding, reading for pleasure, taking walks with our grandmother, “playing church”, singing, trying something new even if we look foolish. If we were fortunate enough to grow up with at least one person whom we knew loved us, would be there for us, to “protect, border and salute” us (From a Rilke poem), then maybe as adults we could salute those times by repeating them or better yet, giving a child a chance to do those things too.
Someone in one of those books I’m reading said that if we are engaged in parenting, teaching and healing, then we are engaged in meaningful living. So that’s my task and joy this month: to look for ways to enrich the lives of others by parenting, teaching and healing in the best way I know how.
It’s Women in History month and I’ll be speaking at a few events this month and traveling to Italy at the end of it. But I think I’ll make a little more time to go walking with Bo and urging the old dog, Brody, to walk a little further than the deck. I’ll read for pleasure and not just research or to meet contracts. And I’ll be a little more grateful that I grew up as I did running free on a farm protected not from all the tragedies that can affect a child but protected in ways that allowed me to dream and to discover a faith that sustains and urges above all in this world to “love kindness, seek justice and walk humbly with your God.” We are so many of us, profoundly blessed even in this month of March, even with struggles yet for women’s voices to be heard. I am blessed beyond measure and I hope to do a better job of remembering that. Have a wonderful month!
Note and update: The heart tests I had revealed an enlarged left ventricle probably caused by untreated high blood pressure (which is now under control) or from my having had rheumatic fever as a child. And my EKG was abnormal…but apparently it’s always looked like I’ve had a heart attack! At least the one done in 2002 had the same strangeness that brought the doctor back into the exam room saying “Has anyone ever told you about your abnormal EKG?” They hadn’t but now they have. I’m ok. I just need to keep my BP under control. There was no evidence of buit or stroke-like stuff so I’m back on the treadmill my 4 miles a day and heading for Italy on the 20th! Thanks to all for checking in with me. I’m sorry this hasn’t gotten posted on my website yet but my webmaster had some trials at her house. It’s what living looks like.
But over the past few years I’ve decided that I gave March a bad rap. It’s really quite a remarkable month. We do our “bounty counting” in March now (preparing our taxes!). The yellow bells, first signs of fragrant spring, sprout, reminding me of a time I went walking with my dad and stuck that tiny flower in my dad’s shirt pocket. All day he commented on how good everything smelled and only later realized that it was that tiny yellow bell that gave the gift.
There are birthdays that are special in March. Jerry’s mom’s birthday was in March. So was my mom’s. Matt’s birthday is in March. Bo will be 22 months old on the 17th! A great niece, Sarah Hurtley, will turn 17 in March and her Dad will be…well, older in March.
Winter wakes up this month and finds itself transformed into new beginnings and treasures.
I won’t know for another week or more about my heart test results but while they were being done no one said “Oh my!” or “I think you better wait until I share these with the radiologist” you, know, those certain looks suggesting maybe things are worse than I’d thought. So I’m not worried. After all, I took my own advice and guarded my heart and it’s March when I’ll learn the results so I think things will be fine.
We spent a few days last week on the Washington coast not far from where Emma had spent some of her days along the Willapa Bay (my Change and Cherish series). We walked on the beach, picked up sand dollars, ate seafood (lots of it) and read. I finished Robin Cody’s Ricochet River a book that like Sweetness to the Soul made the “100 best books about Oregon list.” Robin is coming to Sherman County on March 3 to spend the day with kids and the evening with adults and kids at the library and he and his wife invited Jerry and me to visit Sherar’s Bridge with them and talk stories. What fun that will be!
I started reading The Florists Daughter by Patricia Hampl, a memoir about her parents living in Minnesota (where my mom grew up) and brought along to keep reading – depending on my mood – The Hardest Time, Dance of the Dissident Daughter, The Audacity of Hope, The Path, The Hidden Wholeness, Bring Warm Clothes i(That one’s about Minnesota winters) and Eat, Pray Love (it was suggested I read this before leaving for Italy in two weeks), and Lee Iacocca’s newest Where Have all the Leaders Gone? You never want to be without books.
And we rented movies on the rainy afternoons. We don’t watch many movies on TV and going to them is a 100 round trip so DVDs at the hotel works well. I could enjoy them more too because I’d finished the rough draft of my 2009 novel just before we left! My goal had been to finish it before I leave for Italy so it was a gift to have it this far along! Lots of revising will be done, editorial comments etc., but this phase is finished and it is a milestone I celebrated walking on the beach.
Anyway, the theme of the weekend and the movies seemed to be the importance of childhood and protecting children but also about the gifts of childhood. Maybe I was just being open to these issues this month thinking of myself as a ‘daughter,’ orphaned now but then we are all orphans in some ways, seeking to find our way home.
Robin Cody’s book was a moving story of teens and love and life and hope and trials, about salmon runs and dams, about small towns and Indians and the stories we tell ourselves and how the lives we live tell stories, too. It was a compelling read and without a doubt I easily set aside all the other books in order to finish Ricochet River. I highly recommend it from young adult on up.
Anyway, the most profound film we watched was called Water. It’s an East Indian production, subtitled, set in the 1930s. It’s about a young widow (age 7) being sent to live in the community of widows which is what happened for Hindu wives whose husbands died. They could die with them, be sent to this widow’s town, or if the family allowed, be given in marriage to the younger brother of the deceased husband. It was a strict caste system and the story suggests it changed with Ghandi’s influence but as late as 2000 was still practiced by some Hindu people. This is women in history month and I couldn’t help but note that women, young women and old women still struggle in many places around the world, even in my neighborhood though we have no widow’s community.
Into this mix came the 7 year old widow. There were women who had been there for many years, who had also come at the age of 7 or 8, some of whom had never known the husband whose death had sent them there. It was not always a bad place but the wrench of being left there by her in-laws and the way that lives changed there because she was being a child and because these widows had to find ways to survive, moved me deeply. I think the last time I’d cried that hard at the end of a film was at the movie “The Deer Hunter” back in 1979 and it was probably as much as the power of the film as the fact that Jerry was having cervical surgery the next day…life seemed so fragile and of course, it is.
But I was held by someone who loved me while I cried and our friend who was with us, who also shed her tears, reached out to touch my hand and I felt so grateful, so blessed at my childhood, my life, my choices, my chances to lead the life I do, loved as I am.
My admiration for Ghandi’s work grew, too. Such a profound weight Ghandi took upon himself to change a way of life, to make a small dent in colonial influences left by the British in that nation (who had certain advantages by these widows needing to earn money for food), by the weight of generations of Hindu tradition that accepted how these widows of all ages should be treated. His faith and personal conviction were never displayed in the film; it was all about this one child but it personalized how a single life and the lives of those around her were changed and needed to be changed by Ghandi’s listening to his heart, by people knowing he was out there moving to make life better for the smallest child. The law was changed but it was another widow’s act of compassion that truly changed the child’s life, her act of courage to defy the rules and order on behalf of a child’s need.
Or maybe I was so affected because I’d also just come from leading a Presbyterian women’s retreat and as a way to get to know them, I’d asked the women to share their name and share something they loved doing as a child. As I always am at these events, I was moved by the diversity, the range of happy and sad childhoods but also that each could name something they had once loved to do, lost themselves in doing, remembered with fondness what they’d done.
Several said they didn’t do that activity much anymore and I suggested that maybe we ought to. Maybe a way to celebrate the gifts of childhood, (which to me are wonder and passion, un-conditional love, easy forgiveness of ourselves, siblings and even our parents!) is to once again engage in roller skating, horseback riding, reading for pleasure, taking walks with our grandmother, “playing church”, singing, trying something new even if we look foolish. If we were fortunate enough to grow up with at least one person whom we knew loved us, would be there for us, to “protect, border and salute” us (From a Rilke poem), then maybe as adults we could salute those times by repeating them or better yet, giving a child a chance to do those things too.
Someone in one of those books I’m reading said that if we are engaged in parenting, teaching and healing, then we are engaged in meaningful living. So that’s my task and joy this month: to look for ways to enrich the lives of others by parenting, teaching and healing in the best way I know how.
It’s Women in History month and I’ll be speaking at a few events this month and traveling to Italy at the end of it. But I think I’ll make a little more time to go walking with Bo and urging the old dog, Brody, to walk a little further than the deck. I’ll read for pleasure and not just research or to meet contracts. And I’ll be a little more grateful that I grew up as I did running free on a farm protected not from all the tragedies that can affect a child but protected in ways that allowed me to dream and to discover a faith that sustains and urges above all in this world to “love kindness, seek justice and walk humbly with your God.” We are so many of us, profoundly blessed even in this month of March, even with struggles yet for women’s voices to be heard. I am blessed beyond measure and I hope to do a better job of remembering that. Have a wonderful month!
Note and update: The heart tests I had revealed an enlarged left ventricle probably caused by untreated high blood pressure (which is now under control) or from my having had rheumatic fever as a child. And my EKG was abnormal…but apparently it’s always looked like I’ve had a heart attack! At least the one done in 2002 had the same strangeness that brought the doctor back into the exam room saying “Has anyone ever told you about your abnormal EKG?” They hadn’t but now they have. I’m ok. I just need to keep my BP under control. There was no evidence of buit or stroke-like stuff so I’m back on the treadmill my 4 miles a day and heading for Italy on the 20th! Thanks to all for checking in with me. I’m sorry this hasn’t gotten posted on my website yet but my webmaster had some trials at her house. It’s what living looks like.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Finishing Things
I've been remiss! I'll try to do better. My husband had a second surgery in January and I was busy trying to finish my novel due April 1 that will come out in April of 2009. It's based on my grandmother's life -- she was a photographer in 1910-1915 in Minnesota. I have a couple dozen glass plates that either she or my grandfather took and I've worked five of them into the story. Getting them printed was a treat and it was done by a local photographer so I didn't even have to travel more than 50 miles to get them. My husband is doing well!
I had line edits for a book coming out next month, A Mending at the Edge, last in the novel series due too this past month. That will be followed in September by a nonfiction book about the Aurora Colony in Oreogn that inspired my Change and Cherish series. That book is called Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt and Craft. I hope you'll look for it. My husband took a lot of the photographs and I just finished the line edits for it too. Now we have the photographic part to manage. The museum is quilting a replica of one of the original quilts done by Emma Wagner Giesy, the woman I've written about in my novel series, and there'll be a way for anyone to put their name into a drawing for that quilt come December...no purchase required!
In between I taught a class on writing with a mentor of mine, my first writing instructor, Bob Welch. That was pretty amazing, humbling and encouraging all at the same time.
What I wanted to say though is how good it feels to finish something. I know the novel comingout NEXT April is in it's first draft stage and I'm now doing revisions before sending it off to the editor. And I'll get to relook at it after she's considered it and makes suggestions. But there is something truly liberating about reaching for something I wanted -- like finishing the book before I leave for Italy next week for a conference I'll speak at but will also be a time of relaxation. For a lot of writers, that "finishing" thing is really tough. I try to remind them and myself that perfect does not mean "without errors" but rather "complete." Things that are complete are perfect. It helps me actually write "the end" and it helps me keep going even on the days when the Harpies sitting behind me are saying that what I've written is drivel.
I hope whatever your harpies are telling you that keeps you from feeling the joy of being finished that you'll put Duct tape on them. Someone gave me red duct tape and it really quiets those voices. But if you don't have real duct tape handy, just put a mental tape across their mouths and keep going until you've, well, finished! Stay well, warmly, Jane
I had line edits for a book coming out next month, A Mending at the Edge, last in the novel series due too this past month. That will be followed in September by a nonfiction book about the Aurora Colony in Oreogn that inspired my Change and Cherish series. That book is called Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt and Craft. I hope you'll look for it. My husband took a lot of the photographs and I just finished the line edits for it too. Now we have the photographic part to manage. The museum is quilting a replica of one of the original quilts done by Emma Wagner Giesy, the woman I've written about in my novel series, and there'll be a way for anyone to put their name into a drawing for that quilt come December...no purchase required!
In between I taught a class on writing with a mentor of mine, my first writing instructor, Bob Welch. That was pretty amazing, humbling and encouraging all at the same time.
What I wanted to say though is how good it feels to finish something. I know the novel comingout NEXT April is in it's first draft stage and I'm now doing revisions before sending it off to the editor. And I'll get to relook at it after she's considered it and makes suggestions. But there is something truly liberating about reaching for something I wanted -- like finishing the book before I leave for Italy next week for a conference I'll speak at but will also be a time of relaxation. For a lot of writers, that "finishing" thing is really tough. I try to remind them and myself that perfect does not mean "without errors" but rather "complete." Things that are complete are perfect. It helps me actually write "the end" and it helps me keep going even on the days when the Harpies sitting behind me are saying that what I've written is drivel.
I hope whatever your harpies are telling you that keeps you from feeling the joy of being finished that you'll put Duct tape on them. Someone gave me red duct tape and it really quiets those voices. But if you don't have real duct tape handy, just put a mental tape across their mouths and keep going until you've, well, finished! Stay well, warmly, Jane
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Edge, the unfamiliar, newness, mending, quilts
This morning Bo and I took our walk together. Instead of walking along the river I decided to instead walk up one of the ravines. The wind felt cold though it was only 38 degrees out, but in the ravine, it was still.
We walked a deer trail. We haven't had much rain but I noticed the deer had been on it when the path was wet because their hoof prints sunk into the soil. Rocks had tiny shadows perfectly surrounding them that revealed themselves as space; the cold ground moving back from the rocks. Or else those stones were shrinking!
Bo stayed closer than usual to me. On more familiar ground he ranges far out ahead of me and the other day dug up a hole and caught a field mouse before I could get to him, so this "staying close" was nice. Probably because the new place made him a little cautious. Me too.
I thought about my latest book coming out in April, A Mending at the Edge. This little favine felt like "the edge" with it's ups and downs of deer paths. When I arrived at the upper end of the ravine, it turned out to be the sharp corner where a few years ago the trailer sank over the side and four calves got a reprieve. Jerry opened the door and the calves mosied out to munch while we spent quite a bit of time getting the trailer out.
Last year about this time we were finalizing the title for the book that is coming out in April. After much thought, we'd chosen “A Mending at the Edge.” I like it. In part because it is a book about a woman’s healing, her coming to terms with the mistakes of her past while moving forward. I’m reminded of Acts 26:2 in the King James version where Paul says “I think myself happy…” I love the idea that we can change how we feel, that we can think our way into a better, more hopeful place. Mending involves that kind of re-thinking, pulling threads across the tears and making something whole again.
I like the idea of an edge as well because this woman was at the edge of her religious colony. She didn’t always see eye to eye with the leader and yet she found herself needing the security and comfort that the colony provided to a woman with four children in the 1860s whose husband had abused her. She was marginalized in some ways, at the edge.
But in backwaters -- as in little visited ravines -- it’s the edge that promises the most intriguing bits of flora and fauna. Rich life goes on at the edge of things and contributes greatly to the health of the entire river. I like the idea that this woman will find her way toward spiritual health and in so doing, she will bring good things to the rest of the colony as they make their way.
There are quilts in the story too, so mending and having a tight, well-stitched edge, just stands for quality, doesn’t it? And perseverance.
I've decided to take that route again, just to see if the dog stays close or if with one exposure to the new his confidence has grown. I'm pretty sure I'll see something new as I walk along too. Not a bad thought considering it's the new year soon....when all will be new if not unfamiliar. Walking into it with Bo will be a delight.
I hope your new year is filled with new things whether you're living at the edge or in the middle. Jane K www.jkbooks.com
We walked a deer trail. We haven't had much rain but I noticed the deer had been on it when the path was wet because their hoof prints sunk into the soil. Rocks had tiny shadows perfectly surrounding them that revealed themselves as space; the cold ground moving back from the rocks. Or else those stones were shrinking!
Bo stayed closer than usual to me. On more familiar ground he ranges far out ahead of me and the other day dug up a hole and caught a field mouse before I could get to him, so this "staying close" was nice. Probably because the new place made him a little cautious. Me too.
I thought about my latest book coming out in April, A Mending at the Edge. This little favine felt like "the edge" with it's ups and downs of deer paths. When I arrived at the upper end of the ravine, it turned out to be the sharp corner where a few years ago the trailer sank over the side and four calves got a reprieve. Jerry opened the door and the calves mosied out to munch while we spent quite a bit of time getting the trailer out.
Last year about this time we were finalizing the title for the book that is coming out in April. After much thought, we'd chosen “A Mending at the Edge.” I like it. In part because it is a book about a woman’s healing, her coming to terms with the mistakes of her past while moving forward. I’m reminded of Acts 26:2 in the King James version where Paul says “I think myself happy…” I love the idea that we can change how we feel, that we can think our way into a better, more hopeful place. Mending involves that kind of re-thinking, pulling threads across the tears and making something whole again.
I like the idea of an edge as well because this woman was at the edge of her religious colony. She didn’t always see eye to eye with the leader and yet she found herself needing the security and comfort that the colony provided to a woman with four children in the 1860s whose husband had abused her. She was marginalized in some ways, at the edge.
But in backwaters -- as in little visited ravines -- it’s the edge that promises the most intriguing bits of flora and fauna. Rich life goes on at the edge of things and contributes greatly to the health of the entire river. I like the idea that this woman will find her way toward spiritual health and in so doing, she will bring good things to the rest of the colony as they make their way.
There are quilts in the story too, so mending and having a tight, well-stitched edge, just stands for quality, doesn’t it? And perseverance.
I've decided to take that route again, just to see if the dog stays close or if with one exposure to the new his confidence has grown. I'm pretty sure I'll see something new as I walk along too. Not a bad thought considering it's the new year soon....when all will be new if not unfamiliar. Walking into it with Bo will be a delight.
I hope your new year is filled with new things whether you're living at the edge or in the middle. Jane K www.jkbooks.com
Friday, December 21, 2007
Trees and letting go
My friend, Sally Freeman, is a Park Ranger at Ft. Clatsop, the wintering site of Lewis and Clark on the Pacific Coast. This is her fine piece gleaned from the wisdom of trees. It's also a site where Marie Dorion, the subject of my Tender Ties Series spent some time in the winter and summers of 1812-14.
sally freeman <youngsriver@yaho o.com> 12/15/2007 08:48 AM PST During the Advent storm of December 2-3, 2007 in Clatsop County, high windsstarted late morning on Sunday and finally finished Monday evening (somegusts were 120-140 mph). This was the longest, strongest storm in memory.Many trees broke or fell and many did not. The following thoughts were given to me December 10 while carefully walking through a forest nearYoungs River.-
Don't be surprised by a gust from an unexpected direction. Not allstorms are predictable. Be prepared.- It is hard to tell who will stand and who will fall in a crisis. Many trees that look strong and beautiful fell, while many that appear weak had no damage.- Let go of your excess baggage before the storms come. Maple, oak, and alder trees drop their leaves in the fall so when the storms come, they suffer less damage.- A storm may break off sections that used to be vital to you; let them go.If you are still standing, you'll be okay and better able to endure the next storm.- If a neighbor falls, catch him/her if you can, but be prepared to hold them for a long time. If you fall, God might provide caring people to catch and hold you; don't resist their help.- If you are falling, it is useless to struggle to hold onto the earth.The world is not able to help you.- If you are falling, relax and let God catch you in His arms and set you down where your weakness will cause little damage.- If, after years of braving storms with God's help, you collapse, you are not a failure if you have provided shelter, fresh air, and beauty to those around you. Sally
Her line about the storm breaking off sections "that used to be vital to you; let them go. If you are still standing, you'll be okay and better able to endure the next storm" really touched me. How often we hang on to that which was once vital but has been damaged, perhaps compromised and yet we hate to let it go. It worked for us once so we hold tight. Letting go. Perhaps that is my lesson from this Advent Storm...
Have a good day, each of you. Warmly, Jane
sally freeman <youngsriver@yaho o.com> 12/15/2007 08:48 AM PST During the Advent storm of December 2-3, 2007 in Clatsop County, high windsstarted late morning on Sunday and finally finished Monday evening (somegusts were 120-140 mph). This was the longest, strongest storm in memory.Many trees broke or fell and many did not. The following thoughts were given to me December 10 while carefully walking through a forest nearYoungs River.-
Don't be surprised by a gust from an unexpected direction. Not allstorms are predictable. Be prepared.- It is hard to tell who will stand and who will fall in a crisis. Many trees that look strong and beautiful fell, while many that appear weak had no damage.- Let go of your excess baggage before the storms come. Maple, oak, and alder trees drop their leaves in the fall so when the storms come, they suffer less damage.- A storm may break off sections that used to be vital to you; let them go.If you are still standing, you'll be okay and better able to endure the next storm.- If a neighbor falls, catch him/her if you can, but be prepared to hold them for a long time. If you fall, God might provide caring people to catch and hold you; don't resist their help.- If you are falling, it is useless to struggle to hold onto the earth.The world is not able to help you.- If you are falling, relax and let God catch you in His arms and set you down where your weakness will cause little damage.- If, after years of braving storms with God's help, you collapse, you are not a failure if you have provided shelter, fresh air, and beauty to those around you. Sally
Her line about the storm breaking off sections "that used to be vital to you; let them go. If you are still standing, you'll be okay and better able to endure the next storm" really touched me. How often we hang on to that which was once vital but has been damaged, perhaps compromised and yet we hate to let it go. It worked for us once so we hold tight. Letting go. Perhaps that is my lesson from this Advent Storm...
Have a good day, each of you. Warmly, Jane
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Snow on Starvation Lane
It's been more than a month since I last posted here. Since then, I've mingled with some fine writers at the Women Writing the West conference in Colorado Springs; met with my editors there, flew home and the following day my husband developed severe abdominal pain. We ended up calling the ambulance and air life who transported him 160 miles to the medical center where he'd been treated for cancer. They discovered a blown colon and fixed it! Hallelujah! He's had some setbacks with bladder infections but we're hanging in there and we're back home. If you want the details you can visit my website www.jkbooks.com and click on the November Monthly Memo.
Yesterday I drove 52 miles to do the grocery shopping, run errands, mail letters and paid bills, take the dry cleaning in and made it home before the snow began. Today the canyon of the photograph is covered with fresh snow. I can barely see the tops of the breaks as the foggy horizon has blanketed the ridge tops. Only the rocks jut out like cold noses from the white hills. It feels warm and safe here at the moment. A refuge which is exactly what we had always hoped this place would be and so it's been these last 22 years.
So now I'm trying to attend to deadlines for books and commitments I've made. I did want you all to know about a writer's workshop I'm teaching with Bob Welch, winner of a Gold Medallion Award for several of his non-fiction books, winner of the Columnist of the Year award from Newspaper columnists (his peers) and a winner in my heart because he was my first writing instructor when I walked through the door of a community college with fear and trepidation and signed up for a creative writing class back in 1982. He was a sports writer for the local paper then (the same town where Jerry was recently hospitalized). I broke out in a sweat; hated it when he read my work out loud because I knew it meant someone would see me for the fraud I was. Instead he encouraged me, suggested I try to sell come of the pieces and I did and thus my writing career began. He's a fine man, great sense of humor and as our brochure says: we're doing this weekend workshop on the Oregon coast (February 8-11) "to help you write better, believe in yourself and realize that in small, bug significant ways, your words can change the world." I hope you'll think about joining us. For more information contact info@bobwelch.net. He can answer your questions. It's limited to 50 people so expect some personalized attention!
For now, I better give my husband some personalized attention. It's time for lunch and since he's been ill, he hasn't complained about my cooking, not once! Just one more side benefit of catastrophic illness! Stay warm and well. Jane
Yesterday I drove 52 miles to do the grocery shopping, run errands, mail letters and paid bills, take the dry cleaning in and made it home before the snow began. Today the canyon of the photograph is covered with fresh snow. I can barely see the tops of the breaks as the foggy horizon has blanketed the ridge tops. Only the rocks jut out like cold noses from the white hills. It feels warm and safe here at the moment. A refuge which is exactly what we had always hoped this place would be and so it's been these last 22 years.
So now I'm trying to attend to deadlines for books and commitments I've made. I did want you all to know about a writer's workshop I'm teaching with Bob Welch, winner of a Gold Medallion Award for several of his non-fiction books, winner of the Columnist of the Year award from Newspaper columnists (his peers) and a winner in my heart because he was my first writing instructor when I walked through the door of a community college with fear and trepidation and signed up for a creative writing class back in 1982. He was a sports writer for the local paper then (the same town where Jerry was recently hospitalized). I broke out in a sweat; hated it when he read my work out loud because I knew it meant someone would see me for the fraud I was. Instead he encouraged me, suggested I try to sell come of the pieces and I did and thus my writing career began. He's a fine man, great sense of humor and as our brochure says: we're doing this weekend workshop on the Oregon coast (February 8-11) "to help you write better, believe in yourself and realize that in small, bug significant ways, your words can change the world." I hope you'll think about joining us. For more information contact info@bobwelch.net. He can answer your questions. It's limited to 50 people so expect some personalized attention!
For now, I better give my husband some personalized attention. It's time for lunch and since he's been ill, he hasn't complained about my cooking, not once! Just one more side benefit of catastrophic illness! Stay warm and well. Jane
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