Of bushy brows and vision

I leaned my head back into the U-shape of a hairdresser’s sink underneath a bright fluorescent light.

Her busy hands rinsed my hair in warm water. I closed my eyes and sighed. Nice, I thought.

“So are we waxing your eyebrows today too?” I heard through my reverie as she worked soft conditioner through my strands.

“Um, no,” I said. “Just the color was fine. Thank you.”

My friend Lisa said, “Wait a minute.”

She wandered to where I reclined. By now my eyes were wide open.

“What?” I said.

“Oh girlfriend. You have a bush growing on your forehead. You’re getting a wax.”

So I did, but I really didn’t see the need. However, I could tell a difference when she was done. I looked polished.

A few months later I stopped by a place in a shopping mall at Christmastime to get my nails done. That’s all I had time for.

“You want pedicure too?” the lady asked as she filed away on my nails.

“No. No thank you. This is fine,” I said with a smile.

After a few minutes, she peered at my forehead.

“You want waxing?” She said with a concerned frown between her neat eyebrows. 

Good grief, I thought. Not again.

“No, I really don’t have time today, but thank you.”

“Hmmmmmm. One side is not even with other. You look lopsided.”

I just smiled and shook my head, “no.”

So I spent the rest of my self-conscious afternoon wanting to get home to a mirror and tweezers.

Are my eyes really that bad these days? I am older now, and I wear magnifying glasses to read. I wear contacts to see far away. As I age, I find that women of my decade laugh at ourselves and what we see and don’t see. Like whiskers and stray eyebrows.

The other night I sat around a table in a cozy dining room with a few new friends from church.

These women are my “home group.” We have a lot in common: tough upbringings, raising children who are adults and are now raising their own children, marriages that brought heartache and didn’t last, and the joy of finding ourselves amidst all of life’s stuff anyway.

During a discussion of things we have learned about God throughout our lives, it came about that we have learned a lot.

Would we do some things over again to gain the fruit we now enjoy?

Surprisingly, a lot of us said, "yes." Some had to think about it. Some experiences were too painful and raw to consider.

One woman said that she learned about God’s unfailing faithfulness in a way she probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and that she is grateful. When tough days come her way, she remembers. And she doesn’t worry; she has the benefit of hindsight.

I pondered this.

As we age, our physical vision wanes. But sometimes our spiritual sight becomes 20-20.

This morning I stopped on my life path for a moment. I turned my face backward and looked down 52 years worth of road.

So many twists and turns. So many branches that were side-roads, but ultimately led back to the main path.

I truly can’t say I regret everything. I’ve learned too much. My vision is clearer the older I get. God’s skill and wisdom at work in me is sharper. He worked for my good even though I was blind when He did.

There is a Bible verse that means more now in my older age than when I was young: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; but then we shall see [Him] face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know [Him] fully, even as I am fully known.” I Corinthians 12:12

I think this is true this side of heaven as well. I have learned where to keep my vision:

“…let us throw off the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith…” Hebrews 12:1b-2a

I realized, as I turned my face forward again and took another step on my path, that I am right where I need to be.

My vision is just fine, thank you.

Bushy eyebrows and all.

The dreaded black day

It’s just another holiday.

My son, and other men I know repeat like parrots, “Valentine's Day is a holiday made up by greeting card companies to make more money.”

Well, that’s not accurate. It's been around for quite awhile, as you can read from this Wikipedia excerpt:

The day was first associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished. In 18th-century England, it evolved into an occasion in which lovers expressed their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards (known as "valentines"). Valentine's Day symbols that are used today include the heart-shaped outline, doves, and the figure of the winged Cupid. Since the 19th century, handwritten valentines have given way to mass-produced greeting cards.

Greeting cards came much later, so there.

But I digress.

The point is, what holiday is not man-made? Similar to Thanksgiving and Christmas, this holiday with heart-shapes is about love of family and friends--and giving gifts to show that affection.

In typical American fashion, we swing like chimps on vines from holiday to holiday, often overlooking the “why” of it. We neglect to remember that some people are alone. Some people want to close their eyes and wake up on the other side of it. Some people act on their feelings of despair in harmful ways.

Those of you who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s likely remember Valentine’s Day parties in the classroom. We each decorated our paper “mailbox” ready to receive little cards from each of our classmates. After gorging ourselves on pink and red cupcakes and cookies made by room-mothers, we got to open our mail.

For some children it was the highlight of the day, especially if you were a pretty girl that pre-adolescent boys vied for. Other children were mean. They left out the undesirables or even went so far as to write cruel things—anonymously of course.

So, from an early age, it has been instilled in us that this time of year shows us whether we are loved and valuable to anyone or not.

Silly, huh? But it’s what we do.

I have two failed marriages. Neither husband was very big on Valentine’s Day. That’s why our marriages failed.

Seriously, though, it did hurt to make a genuine effort to make sure someone else felt valued by me, only to receive a half-hearted last-minute card and coffee mug. Another one.

In my single years between marriages, I referred to the holiday as the Dreaded Black Day. My boss made it brighter though. He bought red carnation corsages for all the women at the newspaper. Station by station, room by room, dressed in a dark suit enhanced by a red boutonniere and red tie, he asked us each, “Will you be my Valentine?” No small feat, considering there were only three male employees.

Last year. Four days before the Dreaded Black Day, I escaped my living conditions in Australia. Not only my heart was at risk, but my health. I spent nine months trying to get back home to America.

During that time, my eyes were opened.

Two families took me under their wing and roof when I had nowhere to go, and not a lot of money to live on. Two other families helped me in other practical ways, and made sure I had fun, busy weekends to give me a break from stressful things I dealt with.

When I landed at the Seattle airport, one of my best friends launched her tiny self at me and enfolded me in a great big bear hug. She took me home and tended my wounds.

Other friends and family inundated me with e-mails, text messages, phone calls and invitations to welcome me home.

I am surrounded by love.

Funny thing is, I always have been. For the first time in my life, I know it.

I don’t know why I was so blind before. These people have always been around. They have always loved me. I have always loved them.

I think of giant redwood trees of northern California. Their cones contain up to 200 seeds when they fall to the ground.  But it isn’t until a raging fire consumes the cone that seeds can grow.

Once set free, one seed grows to nearly 300 feet tall and 50 feet in diameter. Two hundred seeds make a forest.

This year, I understand. This year, I embrace the forest of love that has been there all along.

Which brings me to the most important Love of all that I finally understand:

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has born? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands…” Isaiah 49:15-16

And, “Fear not, I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are Mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. When you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. The flames will not set you ablaze…since you are precious and honored in my sight, and because I love you.” Isaiah 43:1-3

It’s not just another holiday to me this year. It’s one that reminds me that I am indeed, truly, always and forever loved.

Count your blessings. You’ll feel much better. You ARE loved.

Happy Valentines Day.

Grandpa, Jason and fly-fishing

Grandpa 1983.

Grandpa with 35 lb. King Salmon. 

The thin nylon cord sang as it whipped through the air to dance above shimmering green water.

I sat outside and watched him as the summer sun set in golden light behind towering Douglas firs. Deepening shadows turned the lake from emerald to forest.

Content, I sat nearby, perched on a cut-out tree round for a step, tucked into the side of a hill. Huckleberry and blackberry bushes' ripening scent hung in the warm air along with dragonflies.

We both loved the quiet at dusk, being outside, with the aroma of Grandma's cooking wafting downhill.

Grandpa worked as a mechanic at Boeing in Seattle in the 1960s and 70s. After his hour-long commute home to Monroe, he quietly walked from his home down to the lake to fly-fish. 

There was a large, round piece of plywood that he'd nailed to a fallen tree where it rested in the water. He stood on it, and cast his line about 15 feet from the muddy bank. 

From the age of eight through 11, I spent a month every summer with my brother Les at our grandparents' place in the woods. Most of our time was spent outside exploring or with Grandma doing errands. But it was my grandpa who fascinated me. 

As I grew older, I noticed his sense of humor was subtle. He smiled at me a lot, but wasn't much of a talker.

On the way home from trips to the big city, we passed pastures of cows and horses. He tried to convince me that horses were cows and vice-versa. I pretended to agree, mooing with him at startled horses. He grinned his close-lipped smile, nodded his head, and kept driving.

In their younger days, my grandparents lived in Lake City, raising my mother and her older brother in that busy suburb of Seattle.

Later, they bought the place I remember most;  a little house overlooking Lost Lake. The road was a dead end, enveloped in a wild, tangled forest of tall trees and thick bushes and deep shadows.

Their house was built on a steep slope halfway down to the lake.

Underneath the house on stilts with its wrap-around deck was a cave. When he wasn't fishing, Grandpa worked many years on that place, widening the hole to convert it into an extra living area and storage space.

To me, as I looked up at the house from the lake, it was a gaping monster mouth. For all I knew, Sasquatch lived in it. Many times I ran pell-mell up the hill to the house to avoid whatever I "knew" was hiding there. That was one place where I didn't follow Grandpa.

I knew Grandpa differently than his grandsons did. My other brothers, Marty and Jeff, visited for a month in summer as well, but my grandparents couldn't handle all four at once. Maybe it disturbed Grandpa's quiet too much.

I was the only granddaughter, and sometimes I think he didn't know what to do with me. Because he was so quiet and reserved, I didn't get to know him well at all. I was a silent watcher of him.

He taught me how to fish, and showed me around his smokehouse chockablock full of fishing rods, but that's about it. I mostly remember him fishing, or enfolded in a chair in front of a blazing fire encased in an orange, rounded pyramid-like, free-standing wood-stove while he watched television when the lake was iced over.

To remember my grandparents is to remember fish. Always fish. My grandmother was a fisherwoman.

I saved only a few black and white photos of the multitudes of trout and steelhead and salmon they caught, hung on lines by the gills throughout decades of fishing. 

Even now, whenever I travel in Washington I recognize river and lake names from seeing them printed in faded black or blue ink on the backs of those photos. Skookumchuck. Skokomish. Sammamish. Toutle. 

Although I never learned to fly-fish, I taught my own two children the joy of tying a hook, digging worms, the thrill of the red and white bobber popping up and down, and the adrenaline rush when the rod bent under the weight of a trout and winding it in on a taut line. 

My son, Jason, walks in his great-grandfather's shadow. 

He lives in Colorado, and travels to Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon with his wife, his friends, his father, and his camera. He is also a photographer of all things fly-fishing and is beginning to make a living at it. 

On a visit to a crystal clear stream in the Rocky Mountains one January, Jason tried to teach me how. As always, I just loved being outdoors. Pine-scented air, the sound of frigid trickling water over smooth stones, the ziiiiing of the line as it sailed downriver were enough for me. Good thing, as I never did get the hang of it.

I think Grandpa would be proud of his great-grandson. 

Jason took the elder's hobby to another level. 

Yet...

I know that he knows, as Grandpa did, that there is something soul-satisfying about casting a line at the end of the day while the sun goes to rest, trout leap for flies--real or fake--and there is silence all around.

Just for fun. 

Elmer Bruce Bartlett died in March 2000, age 82.

The times, they have changed

I can identify with Rip Van Winkle.

Since I arrived home from living in Australia since January 2007, I've had to re-establish myself here. 

New bank account. New (to me) car. New cell phone. Arranging for car and health insurance, living arrangements, warm clothes, a new hometown and more all had my head spinning in the first few weeks.

I liken myself to Rip Van Winkle, a fictitious character in the book by the same name written by Washington Irving in 1819. 

The Dutchman falls asleep under a tree with his trusty dog by his side in the Catskill mountain range of New York.

He awakens to find shocking changes. 

His musket is rotting and rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog has disappeared. 

Van Winkle wanders to the village and doesn't recognize anybody. He discovers that his wife is dead, and that his friends have died in a war, or moved away. 

Unaware that the American Revolution has taken place, he gets in trouble by proclaiming himself a loyal subject of King George III and is surprised that the old, mad king's portraits have been replaced in establishments by those of George Washington.

Like him, I'm trying to wrap my head around so many basic changes to the way I used to live and where I lived.

I wanted to have a look at my old home town, where I was a journalist/news manager for the local newspaper, which has since changed hands. Driving down a road, I anticipated a familiar intersection that had a stop light.

On my right heading into town, a well-known family-owned restaurant was boarded up. All the other buildings that made up that corner were gone. The gas station was gone. The bar was gone. The real estate offices were gone. It looked like a howling wasteland with nothing left but broken concrete, gravel and litter.

Rather than being victims of the economic downturn, the owners of those buildings had sold out in order to widen the two-lane highway leading into the city. All was bulldozed, except for the lone restaurant owner's holdout, who ended up with nothing except a useless falling-down building.

It was surreal.

Other changes were not as dire, but still surprising. 

Television is no longer free. One can't just plug it in and adjust the antennae. In order to watch live television, one has to have satellite, cable, or Internet access to a variety of, well, I don't even know what they're called. Services? 

Video rental places have all but gone out of business with the arrival of Red Box and Netflix. One is a drop-off station outside of most stores, the other is available via Internet for television at home. 

Banking has changed. Swipe your card at the teller station to deposit, withdraw, whatever you want to do. Cash a check? Take a picture with your phone, send it to the bank, destroy the check.

Banks also encourage saving accounts, and they didn't as much before I left. Mine is set up so that my purchases are rounded to the nearest dollar with the spare change going into savings. Likewise, $25 per month is automatically taken from checking and dumped into savings. I can move anything around at will via Internet. Or my phone. 

Using cash is rewarded at nearly every service station with a 10-cent discount per gallon of fuel. 

Hardly anyone has a landline telephone anymore. Long distance? No such thing. Almost. Get a basic cell phone plan and you can call anyone anywhere in the United States for free. It does cost to call anyone who has a landline, though. 

There are discount and service cards for nearly everything. My wallet is full: Costco, Burgerville, Safeway, Fred Meyer, Haggen, Sally Beauty Club, The Good Book, and various coffee shops. For good measure, I renewed my library card too.

The way Americans diet is newer too. There is more awareness of food intolerance, such as gluten. We are crazy about Greek yogurt, Quinoa, agave, and fructose. A huge craze right now is Paleo. What the heck is that? 

Home coffee makers now have pods for personalized tastes. Australia has that too, but in typical American fashion, we've taken it a step higher. There are three size settings; one, of course, fills the travel mug. 

My friends Lisa and Cheri grinned as I regaled them with my observations about how much has changed in seven years. They understood and remarked how people just go with the flow and don't really pay attention to new ways of doing things. It is what it is. 

I'm getting the hang of it.

At least I know who the current American president is. 

  

Home

After seven years of wandering around the Southern Hemisphere, my travels have brought me back Stateside.

I'm Home.

I feel like Dorothy in many ways.

It was a tumultuous, surreal, strange, sometimes wonderful, sometimes nightmarish experience in the Land of Oz.

I met a lot of interesting characters. Some were warm, caring and friendly people that will forever be part of my "circle." Some were astoundingly horrible and best forgotten.

However much it feels fantastic to be at home in the fold, there are bits of my roots left in that wide, treacherously enchanting country. Australia has a way of getting under your skin and enticing one to put down roots and stay.

I went there with the intention of making it my home forever. I believed people that I shouldn't have. Their masks were cemented in place, and they fooled a lot of my "circle" people too. It wasn't long after I arrived that the cracks started to show and the crumbling away began.

Reality was mind-numbing.

In trying to make it work, I nearly lost myself. A second time. Two failed marriages has a way at eroding whatever self esteem one has. In the end, it will destroy you if you let it.

When my one-way flight for Los Angeles left Brisbane for good on a sunny September morning in 2013, I gazed out the window. I realized I'd been holding my breath. In fact, I think I'd been holding my breath since I escaped my living conditions in February.

As Virgin Airlines' Boeing 777 cleared the coastline on my right, I pictured my roots, like tentacles, tangled in the land, attached to me and stretching, stretching, stretching--until all I saw was blue-green water under a cloudless cerulean sky--then they snapped. They broke off, doubling back on themselves and fell.

I know there is a long road ahead. A lot of healing is in my future. It's begun, slowly.

It's nice to be in a safe environment to do that. It's refreshing to my soul to have true family and friends who genuinely care about me, surround and soothe with the balm of their love, laughter, respect, kindness, generosity, and time.

I won't sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" anymore.

My pot of gold is here. Home. America. The land of the free and the home of the brave.

I am breathing again.

I'm writing again.

I'm smiling and can laugh again.

Most importantly, I'm living again.

 

Old man in fog

Solitary drives often clear my head enough to write.

During my 20-minute morning travels, sometimes I see him.

He's not always out and about.

Mostly I come across his bent back as he walks slowly along the side of a country road. He's usually hobbling along the un-busy, one-lane pavement between Scarsdale and Berringa.

He looks to be in his 90s; his face is rivulets of rubbery wrinkles; his hair is stringy and fine and sparse; his scalp is freckled with sunspots.

Although he looks old, I have learned that in Australia, faces age under dry air and harsh sun. Those who work land, be it mining for gold nuggets, ranching cattle and sheep or growing produce, age like a California raisin in the sun.

In this gold mining part of Australia, several generations have seen hard times and moved on. Some families have stayed and stuck it out, certain that better luck or better weather is on the way. Success depends on whom you ask.

At any rate, it's hard to tell how old someone is.

Stooping, this "foggy" man walks with a crooked cane made from a hardwood gum tree branch. The thin length of wood is skinned of bark and worn smooth with age.

In the tradition of blokes from an older, proper, era, he wears a suit-jacket, but it's worn-out, wrinkled and frayed. His grey jacket matches his grey, baggy trousers.

Hearing my sedan approach, he steps slowly to the side of the road; painstakingly patient in his pause as I pass.

Once I saw him surrounded by fog. He carried an armful's worth of kindling collected from the roadside. Spindly twigs were tucked into a bent elbow on a cold, frosty morning. His other arm used his cane for balance.

I wanted to get out of the car and help, but his eyes told me not to.

I found where he lives through asking the postmistress at the general store: a 150-year-old gold miner's house--a shanty of corrugated tin and plywood with front verandah posts bending under the weight of a roof. A tin water tank lists to the side of his home toward a shallow ravine where a creek may have run decades ago to provide water. When he's not wandering the roads in search of firewood, a thin string of dark smoke rises from an ancient, precariously leaning brick chimney. I wonder, is this ramshackle shack with dried-out land his inheritance from a gold-mining father in the area?

When I drive by him, I slow down out of respect. He never waves or lifts his walking stick, or even acknowledges that I have passed by, except for that "look."

But always as I pass, leaving him in my rear-view mirror, this is what surprises me:

He turns slowly. He stops. He stares, until I can't see him past the bend in the road.

When he does that, I wonder if he thinks about far away days
with horses and buggies passing through the gold towns, carrying women in finery and men in top hats en-route to the bustling Smythesdale Court House Hotel for dinner, or scoundrels to jail in Ballarat.

I wonder if he has or had a wife and children.

I wonder if anyone but me thinks of him?

And I wonder if he wishes I would quit driving on his road while I clear my head to write.

Magnificence

Rumbles, roars, crashing cymbals
drew me to the verandah.

Oppressive heat, humidity
acquiesced to storms on the evening of the third day of stagnant weather.

Springtime sunset behind black, ominous clouds;
gold and fuchsia spread across greening grass and black pine treetops.

Dusky rims of cumulus clouds light up with
paparazzi-like flashbulbs, circling my haven,
my home.

"The God of Glory thunders..."
"The Voice of the Lord is powerful, the Voice of the Lord is majestic."

"Out of the brightness of His presence, clouds advanced
with hailstones and bolts of lightning."

"The Lord thundered from heaven,
the Voice of the Most High resounded."

The scent of sulphur; sun-baked grass and
rain on hot asphalt, fills my nose.

God's display of His presence
fills my soul.

Lightning bolt after bolt
in quick succession draws closer to home.

A pulsing blue-white spear thick as a tornado hits the ground with a heart-shuddering crash.

Thunder shouts, crackles and rumbles
overhead.

My hair stands on end while I gape.

"From the throne came flashes of lightning,
rumbles and peals of thunder."

...Your Majesty.