An Anniversary

Every group has a social coordinator. Someone has to take charge and plan the activities. I’ve heard wrangling our group compared to herding cats. We didn’t typically follow directions well. But never-the-less, we were herded or wrangled or what have you into some of the most fun and creative events I’ve ever been a part of. I’m told it’s a rather exclusive and desired position to be a part of this group. I was lucky enough that my wonderful cousin Tyson was already in the group so I was just grandfathered in. Our social coordinator extraordinaire is Deela. I will never know where she comes up with her ideas.

Not six weeks after I moved to Anchorage I found myself at her house making a Viking-ess costume for a Halloween party. It ended up being an animal print skirt and top ordeal that took her about 20 minutes to sew together. (I believe Steph has proof of said costume though I strangely have no pictures of any of my Alaska Halloween costumes). That was only the beginning. In the years following we had crazy themed birthday parties (80’s, Chuck Norris, etc.), monthly gatherings of Wine Hoes, bachelor auctions, and to top it off a Pink Nugget Anti-Triathalon where we hopscotched and crabwalked our way from breakfast, to the spa, to mimosas at the Pioneer. And every event comes with it’s own custom made koozie and sometimes with T-shirts. Seriously, I defy you to find a social coordinator better than this.

Besides these events there was late night sledding and rented cabins in Girdwood. There were also Sundays at the Dahlstrom-Roe household. Family dinner we called it. One of us cooked and then we laid around watching movies or playing Wii. Instead of dreading Sunday as the last day of the weekend, it became a day to look forward to.

A year ago today I was honored to fly home to Anchorage for a week and be a part of her wedding. Even now, a year later, I think I’m still recovering from the festivities. It is one of the most fun weeks I’ve ever been a part of. And it’s even better because I got to see my friend so happy with such a wonderful man.

So, Happy First Anniversay to you and BRoe, Deela Dahlstrom Roe!! I’m thankful to you for taking me into your home and your life. Thanks for dragging me out of myself and making me live bigger. I miss you on Sunday and every day.

Knitwits

The air is getting colder here and night falls much earlier. There are more dreary days and less sunshine. Christmas music is on the radio and hot cocoa and marshmallows make an evening complete.

On these more dreary evenings, I find myself longing for Alaska. Not because Alaska is typically less dreary. We aren’t exactly known for our winter sunshine. No, I long for Alaska because of my winter time Tuesday nights. You see, in the deep, dark winter of Alaska a girl will find anything to help keep her sane. In my case, my friends and I decided that a knitting group would be a good idea. So, we called up Mama Ayer and told her we needed lessons. She happily complied and our little group was born. We met on Tuesday nights after work at Lucia and Jon’s house. Now, Nan in confined spaces is sort of like a whirlwind of confetti and sparklers. So, after being cooped up in an office all day it could be quite a show. Throw in a toddling Maverick, a Lucia whose been stuck inside with a toddler all day and an only partially-sane-by-the-end-of-the-day middle school teacher and we were quite the little group. Suffice it to say, very little knitting actually occurred. Despite that, Jon dubbed us the Knitwits and we faithfully met every week and we at least brought our needles and yarn with us to keep up appearances.


Instead, we laughed, we drank wine, we vented, we laughed, we knitted a few rows, we played with Maverick, we laughed, we ate, we ate some more (mmmm…rhubarb crisp), probably drank a little more wine and then laughed a little more. Winter is hard and it takes good friends to make it through. It’s sort of like life. And even from 3,000 miles away they’ve been there for me in this strange and difficult year. So, on this Thanksgiving week, I’m thankful for you. I’m thankful for your laughter and your smiles and the fact that I could count on you to show up every week. I still miss you every Tuesday night. I can’t wait until we can Knitwit together again.

Backpack

I have this backpack. It’s a Marmot; blue and gray with a little bit of yellow trim. I bought it right before I left for Scotland in 2003. That backpack has been all over the globe with me. It’s not very big but I’ve found I can easily live out of it for a month at a time. I love pulling that backpack out of the closet. I’ve said many times that I know when I pull it out good things are going to happen. Some of my best memories have occurred with that pack on my back; or at least in the car.

Tonight I watched “Up in the Air” (Don’t worry, no spoilers. I HATE!!!! when movies are ruined). George Clooney travels all around firing people. He also attends conferences and gives “Challenge” addresses. His talks are based upon the belief that the people and things in our lives fill up our backpacks and weigh us down to the point that we can no longer be effective. I started to think about my backpack and all the adventures we’ve had. We’ve been across the UK from Orkney to Deal. We’ve slept in Parisian hotels with crazy plumbing in the corner and accepted rides from strange men in Brussels. We’ve traveled the Alcan and the Inside Passage. There have been trips to Rocky Mountain National Park and Buffalo Creek. Treks to Homer and Ninilchik, Denali and Talkeetna, Otter Cove and Seward. I’ve trekked across the Great Smokies and sat by a lake in Georgia. I’ve hiked, camped, dip-netted, clammed, caught trout, caught salmon, caught halibut, and caught absolutely nothing. I’ve driven for days, almost hitting a wolf. I’ve sat on a ferry watching whales and dolphins and almost missed the same ferry because I got too busy seeing Ketchikan. I’ve almost run out of gas in the middle-of-nowhere Montana. I’ve been stuck in crazy thunderstorms and behind overturned semi’s and through all of this, my backpack has been with me.

But I realized tonight that it isn’t so much the backpack that’s been with me. It’s all the people that I’ve picked up along the way. Every trip I took included one of you. A gross Parisian hotel would have been just gross without a sister to laugh about it with and catching nothing in Seward would have been a waste of time without a few good-natured friends and their screaming baby to share the ride home. Being stung by a jellyfish in the Baltic Sea would have been just painful without meatballs and potato salad to follow and Pimms all alone is just depressing.

So, he’s right. A full backpack digs into your shoulders. It creates extra weight and makes you work hard. But the added work also develops a strong heart. So instead of emptying my pack I’m gonna keep filling it. Thanks for traveling the road with me.

Todd

This weekend was one of the hardest I've ever had. I flew to Montana to say a final goodbye to one of my oldest and dearest friends. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in May of last year and lost the battle on April 9. He was only 28 years old. He made a list of people he wanted to speak at his celebration service and I was honored to be among them. Several people asked me to post what I wrote so here you go. I hope that it will continue to honor one of the best men I've ever known.

I recently spent a day driving through the mountains of Georgia and North Carolina. I was struck by the old buildings still nestled in their hillside homes; remnants of the past, left to tell the stories. In the last few months I’ve also been struck by the remnants of my past and how often those remnants involved Todd. The number of stories that involve him amazes me. Todd has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. There are not very many memories of my childhood in which he did not play a significant part. From the time we could walk and talk he was my best friend. The goal of every summer vacation was to spend as much time together as we could manage. The Baar home was as much my home as my own was.

We spent our days building forts under every bush and tree and in every abandoned building on the farm. We took trips to the junk piles in the surrounding hills to return with chipped plates, cracked mugs and empty ketchup bottles and vegetable cans to line the shelves Todd rigged between uneven tree branches; a foreshadowing of his career to come. We swam in the canal and, having apparently watched Annie one too many times, ran through the fields as runaway orphans escaping from their evil guardians. And if we were really lucky Ely would be there, too. The three of us would haul out his old red backpack, pack a lunch and our swimsuits and head out across the fields for a day of adventures. We ate our lunch beside the Owl Tree or the Willows and alternated carrying the supplies and cooling off with a float in the swampy, but oh-so-cool water, letting the current carry us along. We ended the day with all three of us packed onto the fold out couch in the Baar living room giggling and talking until Ron was thoroughly fed up and would come stomping down the stairs telling us to be quiet “For the last time” for about the third time. We eventually outgrew the sofa bed and moved our slumber parties outside. However, not wanting to be woken by the car when Ron left for work we bypassed the yard and camped out in the cemetery on the other side of the fence. When I mention this to friends now they tend to find it a strange place for regular campouts but it was simply convenient and we saw nothing wrong with it.

There were Saturday night suppers at Grandma’s where the whole Westra family would gather for a big meal and then game after game of Beckon, Beckon, Capture the Flag or Moonlight, Starlight in the dark in which it always seemed to end with someone running into a branch of an apple tree or a full tilt collision. There were the Thanksgivings on the farm and then after, sledding in the draw and football in the snow. There were the weekends every month spent in Billings while Ron was in the Navy Reserves. With the bushes in the Anderberg yard off limits we were forced to build our forts using every available sheet and blanket filling the basement with linen palaces in which we hid out and watched movies and ate popcorn. Or the days where the floor was lava and we could only move around by walking on furniture, the results of which left me with ten stitches and a scar I carry to this day. Countless games of Blind Man’s Bluff and Twister on the playroom floor and always the plans for the months to come.

As we grew older schedules got harder and harder to accommodate. But he still came every month and attended youth group functions and school events. He came every year for the homecoming game and took me to dinner to celebrate my birthday. The summer trips to Ennis Lake to cliff jump and jet ski and Fourth of July pancake breakfasts out on the farm.

During my college years it was harder to find time together. School and work kept me busy and he was busy beginning his career. But the summer after I finished I spent 2 months in Bozeman working in the greenhouse and the Garden Center. I spent nearly every evening at his house having the privilege of getting to know the love of his life. I left that fall to teach in Scotland with the anticipation of having Erin just 100 miles down the road. But the love won out over the fiddle playing and instead of planning Scottish romps with me she returned to plan a wedding and a future with the man she loved. I in turn chopped several countries off my scheduled last European hurrah to return to Montana and be a part of the festivities.

My life has not been sedentary in the years since. The travel bug caught me and has never let me go. I don’t stay in one place very long. I’ve made and said goodbye to many friends in many different places over the years. I’ve not kept in touch with many, but Todd was always a constant. Their home was always open to me and time with them was always a priority on my trips home. It was always a place of rest because it was a place of shared memory. I looked forward to his smile, his laugh, and his hugs. He had very distinctive hugs.

The loss of that shared memory has weighed heavily on my heart the last few weeks. In our last conversation Todd spoke of his heartbreak that his kids would never have the opportunity of seeing all his favorite places with him. He asked me to take them to the Chalky Bank and tell them the stories of our childhood adventures. I consider it an honor and a privilege to share my treasure chest of memories with his precious children.

One of the memories that has been running through my mind for weeks is of walking through the pasture behind Uncle Dick and Aunt Hermina’s on our way to the back pastures and our days of adventure. The pasture was always full of cows and, being the city girl that I was, I was always afraid of the cows. Todd would tell me to wait, pick up his walking stick and run down the road yelling, scaring the cows out of the way. He would wait on the other side with an exultant smile on his face waiting for me to catch up. Running parallel to that memory is the ending scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle. There has been a train wreck and the children are once again in Narnia, standing with Aslan before the door to the new world and eternity. And as they pass through the door, the book reads, “But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever in which every chapter is better than the one before.” And I see a skinny little kid with a red backpack and a walking stick, exultant smile firmly in place, crossing through the door, ready for the next adventure, and waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

Overalls and Folding Chairs

Murfreesboro has not been the wellspring of southern hospitality that I somehow expected it to be. In an effort to feel more at home, I’m writing down the little things that happen day to day that have made this strange little city a bit more like home. Here’s the first:

If there’s one thing I’ve determined is a must while navigating the circuitous path that is graduate school, its large quantities of red wine. But hey, I kind of feel like that about most of life. There’s a little liquor store that is right on my way way home from school. It doesn’t have a great selection and the prices are nothing to brag about, but I love the men who run it. They are all older; 60 and above I would guess, and all fall, and again now that the warm weather is returning, they are almost always sitting in front of the store on folding chairs when I pull into the parking lot. They see me coming and stand up, hitch up their overalls, open the door for me and ask “How are you tonight, darlin’?” That phrase always makes me smile. I always leave feeling like I need the wine a little less than I did when I went in.

Candy Land

I remember as a kid how magical the first snowfall was. The drab browns of fall are suddenly turned into a wonderland of white possibilities. Thursday, the state of Tennessee went into a panic with the forecast calling for a possible 2-3 inches of snow. School was immediately canceled for the foreseeable future and all stores warned that they might close. All the bread, milk and eggs disappeared from the grocery stores. It seems that when bad weather comes, Tennesseans make lots of French toast. Friday came and though overcast, not particularly stormy. In the afternoon there were a few flurries of snow and finally about 3:00 it really did start to snow. The ground was even covered. It only amounted to maybe, possibly 2 inches. Then it started to rain. The rain made a hard crust on the top of the snow but it also started to coat the trees. When I woke up Saturday morning every individual branch on every tree was coated in ice. When the sun came out Sunday morning the whole world was sparkling and shining. We quickly got our shoes and went out to Stones River National Battlefield and walked. It felt remarkably similar to those mornings as a kid. Rather than being in the bleak, colorless winter of Tennessee I had been transported to a magical Candy Land with a sugarcoated forest. I kept expecting Princess Frostine to appear and send me back to the chocolate swamp. Oddly enough, a little snow here in this new land of mine made it feel much homier. It seems that it isn’t completely foreign after all.

Kentucky

This blog is incredibly delayed, but it’s still fun

Danielle and I try to get out of Murfreesboro as often as possible. This fall over our 4 day fall break Danielle was presenting at a conference in Cincinnati. It’s only a five hour drive so we decided to make a road trip out of it. We took the back roads and spent a day looking at the fall leaves. We stopped first at Cumberland State Park and spent a day hiking and seeing the waterfalls. After leaving there we just sort of stopped at all the historic sites advertised on the big brown forest service signs. One of the stops we made a cabin in the Renfro Valley of Kentucky that was built in 1791. It has been turned into a store with one of the biggest collections of “stuff” I’ve ever seen. When we walked in the man who ran the store was sitting in a rocking chair turning elk horns and turtle shells into musical instruments. We went upstairs and found a whole section of the store devoted to confederate flag paraphernalia; hats, shirts, beanies, you name it. He owns a fudge store in a nearby town and gave us directions to get there involving multiple stop lights and left turns but not right turns and don’t veer this way but go ‘round that little bend and apparently every wrong turn takes you to Walmart. If that isn’t enough to scare you off I don’t know what is. Unfortunately neither of us could focus on the 20 minute direction spiel because we were transfixed by the pipe curls that made up his mullet. At this point Danielle says she’s going outside to pet the cat, leaving me alone with him as I try to nudge my purchases closer and closer to the cash register so he’ll ring me up. Finally he starts to ring me up and the electricity goes out. Credit card machine has to reset. Now I get to hear about every time the power goes off in backwoods Kentucky. How there’s no reason, it just goes off. Sometimes electricity really just isn’t all that handy. Pipe curls bobbing the whole time. Somehow we’re back to directions to some place that I’m not sure where and talking about turns that go places I can’t remember. Pipe curls still swinging. Finally out the door rather dazed and definitely more confused than when I went in.

We managed to find the fudge store in Berea, Kentucky. His wife was working at that store. Here’s how the interaction went.

Her: Hi ya’ll

Danielle: Hi. How are you?

Her: Oh, ya know, middlin. Sunny day but a little too cold.

Me: We’re just happy to see the sun after all this time.

Her: Well, I guess you can’t have everything, can you?

Danielle: We just met your husband and he sent us this direction to get some fudge.

Me: We heard you have pumpkin pie fudge.

Her: We do. It’s my husband’s thing. I can’t eat it. I “foundered” on pumpkin pie once and its turned my stomach from it forever. I can’t even make it.

(At this point we are both having visions of bloated cows who foundered lying on their backs with their legs sticking straight up in the air and trying not to picture her like this.)

We go about ordering our fudge and as she cuts it and packages it she carries on a continuous dialogue all in a thick Kentucky accent. First she fills us in on all the news of her family. Apparently her sisters are fighting and her cousin is working on a family tree. It’s taking years and people are not being cooperative. Then,

Her: Did he have that dog inside while you were there?

Danielle: Yes, it was so sweet.

Me: Sweet. How do you know? The thing never even moved the whole time we were there.

Her: I knew it!!! He said he leaves that dog outside all day but I knew he left him inside to sleep. That dog stays up all night barking. Last night I probably got 50 maybe 60 winks and that’s all. I keep telling him to leave him outside so the distractions will keep him awake during the day. That dog’s a little confused. Sleeps all day and awake all night. Did he tell you the story of that dog?

Me: I don’t think so (remember, mesmerized by pipe curls)

Her: Well, that dog is 12 years old. He’d been feelin’ poorly so my husband took him down to Knoxville to the University of Tennessee vet school there and they took out a 12 pound tumor. No wonder he wasn’t feelin’ so good. Dog’s lookin a little skinny these days. Livin’ on borrowed time I think.

Well, you girls have a lovely trip and safe travels. Glad you like the pumpkin fudge. He’ll just be thrilled ‘cause I sure don’t eat the stuff and it’s his special thing. You be safe out there on those roads …

She continued talking as we backed our way out the door thanking her and saying goodbye. We walked to the car in a bit of daze trying to process all the information we had just taken in. It wasn’t until eating flourless chocolate cake in our hotel room that we really started to think about our experience with that odd couple. Truly pleasant, wonderful people who I am grateful I met. But boy did we laugh hard over our chocolate cake.