My father and I were both morning people. My earliest memory of him was a very early morning growing up in Virginia. I had wandered into the kitchen in my white T-shirt and he was there in a white T-shirt, too. I think my mother ironed our T-shirts because in my memory even though we had slept in them, they were very white and crisp, a nice contrast to our 1960’s tiled, pinkish-beige, cookie cutter kitchen. The light was entering the kitchen along with me, through a window above the sink, making prisms and shadows, and defining things as only light can do. My father was there, crisp and awake and no doubt on his second cup of coffee when he winked at me, saying “Good Morning, Good Morning”. He said this twice, in a lyrical cadence, a jaunty “the sun came up another day, let’s see what the world has to offer” intonation. He had a very deep and resonating voice. I will always remember his voice, reading to us, calm and intelligent, with a slight sprinkling of high expectations.

My father’s voice is with me in the voice of my brother, son, and nephew. If I had known my grandfather, it may have been his voice too. Voices come and go but words might stay and visit us a little longer than expected. Words can overstay their welcome. But a beautiful voice never stays too long, it’s more like a house guest you wish could stay one more day. The one who makes the bed, folds the towel, and says “please” and “thank you” without provocation. The world does not always appreciate a beautiful, polite, voice, but we usually miss it when it’s gone.

On this early morning, as I remember it, my father scooped me up and showed me the cuckoo-clock in the kitchen. Sleep was just getting out of my eyes, and I saw little black dots as I put the world back together from dreamland. He tried to see the dots with me and to “catch” them. I was very happy that he could see the little sleep dots too. My father could see things no one else could. He understood things that only an accelerator splitting an atom might know. He understood that the world was there for us to study, and if we were lucky and worked hard, to understand. My father was a detective of sorts, he taught us to observe, record, and to question just about everything. Except maybe him.

Years later my father is elderly and using a walker. I flew in the night before and awoke before him, one cup of coffee already into the day. I have a to-do list a mile long that I left more than 1000 miles away. Now our morning ritual is reversed. My father is shaking off sleep dots, trying to wake up. I am trying to slow down and see things from his perspective, to see the dots connecting his small, atomic world. He is wearing a very slept-in white T-shirt. Our mother is gone and there are no more ironed T-shirts, now the shirts have anti-wrinkle guard and the dryers do too. My father’s strokes have left him slightly disabled, but he is still sharper than a tack. His world is smaller now and he nods at me and smiles, pointing out the light coming through the window making prisms on the floor.

I open the curtains and walk over to the bird-cage where the little canary named after my father’s favorite scientist, Enrico Fermi, is sleeping. There is a sheet covering the cage and I remove it, one hand on the sheet and one clinging to my father’s PT belt as he unsteadily stands up with his walker.

My father squints, walking very slowly over to the cage. He peers in between the little green bars as the bird chirp-chirps back with the light of day. “Good Morning, Enrico”, “Good Morning”, he says twice to his little feathered friend in his rich and soothing voice. It is music to my ears.

(Author’s note:  This is a revised version of a eulogy I shared at my father’s memorial service, May 2014.)

A goal I have for myself as I age is that I turn out like the proverbial little old lady riding her bike to the grocery store. While this may be a distant and maybe even frivolous goal, it’s not a regular habit I have right now. Well, I tell myself, starting a new habit may indeed be “just like riding a bike”.

As a youngster, I was the very last kid on our block to master riding a bike. I had training wheels when the other kids were doing “wheelies”, spinning around on their sting rays, one tire in the air, showing off. How I envied their agility! For inspiration, I read the biography of the Wright Brothers. Most people thank them for their contributions to flight. I thank them for taking bicycles to the next level where you don’t have to be an acrobat to ride one.

After reading their story, I confidently hopped on the training-wheel-less bike, ready for a ride down our short driveway. The blue bike was used briefly by my siblings during their rapid ascension to riding Schwinns. I wanted a sting ray, but this was the “training wheels off” bike I had to master first. There was a car driving by slowly, a good citizen, smiling at me from their window. Or were they laughing? I clumsily turned the handlebars and took a dive into the prickly hedge at the end of the driveway. Maybe roller skating is a better option, I thought, looking at my skinned knees and running back into the house in search of motherly triage. Merthiolate in hand, my mother dripped the pink-orange stuff on my knees, applied bandaids, and told me to scoot back out there and try again.

By the end of that very long and frustrating day, I was riding my bike around the block “sans training wheels”, waving at my cheery mother while she looked out the kitchen window each time I passed by. I was free! I was independent! I was probably going to fall again, but right now, all that mattered was I had the wind in my hair, a bell on the handlebar and a spokes-whirling adventure! I could be Amelia Earhart on my bike, I could be from the Pony Express. I could stop and turn the bike upside down and fiddle with the pedals and chain, like an apprentice for the Wright Brothers. If only they lived next door, I would daydream.

We lived in a suburb in east Detroit and there were sidewalks and curbs everywhere. The roads were wide but pockmarked from snow, ice, and salt. Faux wood-paneled station wagons carried large families to Mass on Sundays, to Catechism on Tuesdays, and to get ashes on their foreheads once a year. I always liked that day because our family was Presbyterian and did not partake in Ash Wednesday services. To me it was the only day during the cold dark winter when I could ride my bike after school while there was still enough daylight to avoid the patches of ice. Never mind the kids who told me I’d go to Hell for not observing the ceremony. I’d be Hell on wheels.

The pavement was uneven and so were the social divides. Our street was somewhere between the poorest people in east Detroit and the ridiculously rich people living along Lakeshore Drive. The line of disproportionate wealth was quite clear as you drove along East Jefferson past bigger and bigger homes to the lake. Even Lakeshore Drive was pockmarked, the waves and weather relentlessly bashing the edge of the road and icing at the shore. Mother Nature didn’t seem to care how rich those people were, she was going to destroy that road one day at a time, one flake of asphalt at a time.

Sometime in this early block-by-block adventure of riding, I started having vivid dreams that I was riding my bike through neighborhoods and down very detailed, mappable streets. In one dream, I would be riding down our old street in Virginia, on a trike, because it was when I was little. I would be very careful not to fall off and into the storm drain. The hills there were hilly in a weird and exaggerated way, as if Grant Wood had painted them. In my dream I had to pedal fast to keep from falling off the hill and out of the dimensionless picture.

In my next dream we were all school age kids, riding and racing down the streets of our neighborhood. One kid was a bully and he strategically placed himself in the sidewalk where no one could get by without paying a toll. In my dream I stood up to him, pedaled really fast and flew over his head while he went crying home. In reality I think he took the nickels and dimes I used to hide in my shoes, and knocked me off my bike.

In the next stage of life I rode my bike everywhere. The little blue beginner bike became a stingray with a banana seat, and then I graduated to a pretty bright yellow Schwinn. I would ride past the palatial homes we called the Mafia Mansions to summer swim practice. I would ride twelve blocks to middle school, my clarinet and books fitting neatly into the handlebar basket. The basket was useful but a magnet for taunts and jeers. It eventually was replaced with a backpack and rack above the rear tire. My short hair became longer and flew in the wind. It was sometimes a pony-tail, sometimes clipped to the sides with barrettes, and sometimes under a stocking cap.

My bike dreams started again. The blocks and street signs would run through my head in a beautiful Detroit gothic font. Each block had a name, some French, like Cadieux, and some a slightly more pretentious and anglo, like Harvard. I could visualize the names, and I made up clever acronyms to memorize them. We learned everything using songs, phrases and poems. My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles, we would say in our heads before reciting the planets. Everything we learned was by rote memorization. If you had to memorize a locker combination, you came up with a clever saying or math equation that in reality was harder to remember than the locker comb itself. If you had to remember someone’s name you would make a rhyme and then you’d have to be careful not to call them the rhyme by mistake. There were twelve blocks to a mile, my father told me. And twelve was when we could ride in the street and not stop at every block corner to walk our bikes. Twelve street names were easy to remember if you divided by four and chanted everything in groups of three. I memorized the bike map of my childhood and to this day, it permeates my dreams.

My father, being mathematically inclined had bought the house because of its location, exactly twelve blocks from the middle school in one direction and twelve blocks to the high school the other way. That meant there were twelve new names to memorize along my high school trek. High School was twelve times the agony. I would try to avoid puddles in my nice outfit and keep my hair from getting tangled in the wind. My hair was shiny but I thought it was dull and problematic. In old pictures, I can see it was a pretty color, but at the time, I considered it more dirty blonde, too much brown, too mousy. When it was under a cap, I’d worry about how it would look when I took off my hat by my locker, near the popular girls. I would ride without the cap and freeze my ears before subjecting said ears to their snide remarks. I switched to wearing a headband. My face was as pockmarked as the salt crusted pavement beneath my tires. The cold wind felt good after a long day of memorizing things and taking it on the chin.

I packed up my bike and my courage and tried to leave my high school self and her bad-hair days behind. Off to college I went, all the way to Minnesota. The first week there it snowed. While the snow fell all night long, I dreamed I was still riding my bike past every street on the east side of Detroit. In my bike dream I was riding along East Jefferson, over to Chalmers and the Water plant, past the Chrysler plant and Belle Isle. The Uniroyal factory in my dream was not a burned-out shell, it was an iconic, cathedral-looking monument. In real life we would only drive down East Jefferson with the doors locked.

In this dream, the neighborhoods were all banding together, fighting a different war, my high school friends and I riding camouflaged bikes and watching each others backs. We would hop off and hide behind the red and brown brick duplex porches lining the streets. There we would fight on principal anyone saying anything negative or mean about us or our hat-hair. The dream ends with everyone okay, and our hair and bikes look great. We all head off to college in separate directions. In the Minnesota snow I would find a new gang. My face would be less shiny and my cheeks rosier, peeking out from underneath a scarf and a thick hat. I had found a new home, and everyone there had hat-hair.

After college, I lived west of Minneapolis and sometimes rode my bike to work. On the weekends I would ride south and then east across town to visit friends in St. Paul, winding down along Minnehaha Pkwy, past parks named Nikomos and Hiawatha, over the river, near Fort Snelling. Sometimes I would ride up Snelling or Lexington to visit Como Park, then take Como, Hennepin, or Lowry back across the north side to Minneapolis. There I had to make a wide arc north to avoid the one bad neighborhood in the city. I would sadly observe that a bad neighborhood in the Twin Cities might be better than a good neighborhood in Detroit. In my dreams I would be riding around Lake Harriot, on a treadmill of sorts, trying to get off the main path, the smell of lilacs permeating everything except for the chill in the spring air.

I followed a bicycle riding boyfriend to Iowa. He convinced me to stay there and trade my fading yellow Schwinn in for a blue Centurion touring bike. We trekked across the midwest and ducked into barns when the thunderstorms threatened to knock us over. In Iowa we’d ride with friends up and down real Grant Wood hills to small Amish towns where we would sit outside in a park eating fresh string cheese or ice cream and gulping down water, the air clear and our legs tired. In the springtime, a hint of manure permeated everything. The relationship didn’t last but I still have that bike, hanging upside down in the garage, waiting for the Wright Brothers to move in next door.

I married a guy who owned a canoe and we moved to Texas. About ten years into the new life here, I am teaching our kids to ride their bicycles and we are riding the trails near our house. My husband has surprised me with a maroon mountain bike for Christmas and we all go for a ride. Our daughter’s sense of direction works better than her map-maker Mom’s and she tells us when to turn right by that one tree or left by the fence, and the tunnel is over there. My son and his friends take their bikes over to the fake hill by the tunnel and see who can ride down the hill the fastest and jump off right before the crash. They skin their knees and we use Neosporin because Merthiolate had either mercury, or red dye, or both, and my generation was the chemistry experiment. Their generation has superbugs and predators who grab little kids off their bikes and I’m wondering when the idyllic bike ride dream will turn into my worst nightmare of potentially bad people and germs lurking about. I have trouble letting go of the handlebars as they confidently ride away.

Years later I am sitting in the kitchen looking out the back window past the mature house plants. There is my mountain bike, a little rusty but beckoning that its a nice day for a bike ride to the park. The park is still closed. A recent hurricane dumped more than fifty inches of rain in Houston and thankfully our house was spared. The subdivision less than a mile away was hit by devastating floods. The only way around our little temporary island is by bike, or by boat, as damaged cars and relief teams block the streets. I ride my bike over to help with cleanup. The neighborhoods are full of helpers, people bring in sandwiches and water, and there are many heroic rescues still underway across the city. A smell of wet carpet permeates everything. The streets are coated in muck and lined with water soaked furniture, refrigerators, pianos, mattresses and family photo albums drying in the sun. It looks surreal, like one of my war zone bike dreams.

I continue past the debris-ridden streets with suburban names evoking images of towering forests surrounded by tranquil waters. I ride along and run into a friend, she is out riding her bike to see if there are any stores open. While we stand there talking another friend rides up. We compare our trendy bike baskets, helmets, and hurricane stories. I have helmet hair from working on houses and riding around in the heat. All at once, we come to the realization that here we are, like those little old ladies, but perhaps not that old yet, who ride their bikes to the grocery store every day. We laugh nervously, shaking off the stress from the storm and pain we see around us, and head off our separate ways.

I pedal back home, soberly piecing together the past week, trying to avoid the glass and nails and storm debris. I realize that twelve or more years behind me, I was riding these trails with my school age kids, and twelve years in the other direction, if I’m lucky, I just might become that little old lady I secretly admire. Life is just like riding a bike, after all.

(lwr 01/24/2018 🚵‍♀️)

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. http://esv.to/Gal5.22-23

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you http://esv.to/Matt5.44

“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” A.A. Milne

Many years ago my husband was heading to a team building offsite for work. We both worked in the same industry and had grown accustomed to attending personal improvement workshops. We found them useful but had become a little cynical about the “Flavor of the Month” trendiness of them. What is the workshop on this time?”, I casually asked. He replied without missing a beat “Sensitivity Training”. Unfortunately I missed the wry smile that went along with this statement.

I was beyond ecstatic. I thought, “Finally!” They have decided that its okay and makes business sense to be “sensitive”. My husband could see my excitement and enthusiasm brewing for this training he was about to embark on. ” Ouch”, he said. “Do you really think I need that training?”. I said, “I think everyone in the whole mean world needs it!” “Oh”, he said, confessing, ” Well, I was just kidding, the training is not about that at all! I’m a little hurt you think I need it”, a fake pout replaced his wry smile. “Really? I think everyone needs it”, I repeated, glumly. “I can’t believe you would jest about it!”. He replied , “I’m sort of surprised you fell for it. I mean, Really?”

“Really?” had become code word for my gullible reactions sometimes. I would say “Really?” before believing something that might be a joke. I know sarcasm is supposed to be clever and fun, but it is often lost on me. I prefer people who say what they mean and mean what they say, to ones who say “yes” when they really mean “no” and vice versa, just to get a rise out of you. There are the people who make you laugh, and then there are the ones whose intent is to make you cry. I prefer to hang out with the first group and avoid at all costs, the second.

Sarcasm, it seems, is all the rage, and although I appreciate the irony and humor in life’s quirky situations, most people, especially me, don’t like being the target of sarcastic remarks. Sarcasm is usually clever, but not always well-intended. I found this handy acronym which sums up well the often hidden, mean-spirited intent underlying sarcastic put-downs: “S= it Stings, A = it Aggravates, R = it Retaliates, C = it is Controlling, A = it Alienates, S = it Shames, M = it Manipulates” (http://www.lifeway.com). It may be a fact of life that being edgy and sarcastic is a new normal, a growing trend in business, politics, and debate. Situational sarcasm, or finding humor in the irony of life, is one thing. Thinly-veiled put-downs most of us can do without.

I like to sit by a campfire and look up at the stars. Sometimes I will pick up a long stick and poke at the fire, watching the sparks fly up, imaging that they eventually touch the sky and become stars. I find this relaxing and fun. It helps me think when I am trying to solve a problem. I might be contemplating the wonders of the universe or thinking about a grocery list, it doesn’t matter. A nice campfire is a good companion. In this regard I can almost understand people who like to poke fun at others. I guess it is fun to see the sparks. Maybe they are solving a problem in their head, or contemplating the wonders of the universe. Or maybe they are just plain bullies? I wonder.

I have always been that “you are too sensitive” person. Not the bully. Not the fire-poker person. I am the loyal and unsuspecting campfire who has trouble controlling the sparks when someone pokes me. The person who complete strangers or waiters in restaurants or people waiting in line at the airport will say something sarcastic to, just because I am standing there, minding my own business. I have learned to wear headsets when traveling alone, whether or not I am listening to music. I simply do not appreciate the humor when I am the butt of the joke. These kinds of jokes are almost always followed by me getting defensive and the fire-poker saying: “Can’t you take a joke? Geez, I was just kidding!”

Most of us are decent people who try to avoid bullies and bullying. Every once in a awhile, even as an adult, I will encounter a bully, and often they get the best of me. I get very mad at myself when I let them destroy my inner peace. I think of the fruit of the spirit and try to emulate at least one of the nine traits. I think of Jesus’s instruction to “pray for your enemies”. Perhaps I am not sincere enough when I do that, my shallow prayer may not really want the best for that person. My mother’s advice was to ignore bullies, saying she felt sorry for people who lacked compassion. “What a sad way to go through life” she would observe. Somehow feeling sorry for the broken bully does help turn the situation around. Avoiding them altogether can also be a good tactical life skill.

I once attended a workshop, not on sensitivity, but on its distant cousin, criticism. We read a book called “Where’s the Gift?”. This is a useful little book about advice or criticism that comes to you in a form which is not wrapped very well. We were encouraged to look for “The Gift” or the positive amidst the negativity criticism was often cloaked with. Most people took this class, thinking, “yes, I could be better at delivering and receiving critical messages”. We were encouraged to thank the person who criticized us. The bullies who took the class did not get the message the same way. It reinforced their delivery of badly wrapped messages. “See, I told you so, it’s a Gift”, they bragged. Sensitive people like me can take all the classes in the world and still struggle with seeing the Gift when a message is delivered poorly.

I have tried to understand bullies. What is their Gift and purpose? What is their motivation? Why do we sometimes encourage them by laughing at their jokes? Are bullies, like sensitive people, just the way they are, the way God made them? Can they change? All of these things now go into my increasingly sincere prayers regarding bullies and my reactions to them. What about being “too sensitive”? Is this just the way God makes some people or is it simply a bad habit, like bad sarcasm? How many times do all of us, even sensitive people, take on bullying roles? Its easy to judge “them” from a distance, but are they really “us”?

The next time I find myself relaxing by a campfire or putting on my headset to avoid the sarcastic world, I will try to appreciate the gift that we are all different, made in God’s image, sparks heading upward to become stars. Some flaws are easy to understand while others are not. The broken bully, The overly sensitive person. The people who are glad they are not either one but laugh at the bad jokes anyway. We are all “too” something, “too much” the way we are. I suppose I could even try to see sarcasm as a poorly-wrapped Gift. I suppose I could pray for the person who seems to lack compassion. I could take off my headsets the next time I am trying to avoid the banter all around me. I could see it as a Gift, to be in that place, at that time, with those people, whoever they are, whatever their motivation.

At times, God or fate, if you prefer to think of it that way, has chosen to put “too sensitive” me in the midst of “not very sensitive” bullies. Jesus says “The meek shall inherit the earth”. I think about this at times when the world is telling me to be someone else, to toughen up. I think about the fruit of the spirit, many of which are considered weaknesses in this increasingly edgy world. Sometimes the only way to sum this up is to shake my head and think “Really?”. There I go being gullible again, crackling quietly, like a campfire, sending off sparks when poked, seeking joy, patience, and inner peace, while I furtively reach for the stars.

Look at the heavens, and see; and behold the clouds, which are higher than you. http://esv.to/Job35.5

The Flemish painters were known for painting dramatic clouds that took up three quarters of the canvas. Along the very bottom edge there were small and intricate depictions of what was going on with humankind. Below the clouds, little people were moving about, on a river, in a small city, or at the market.

One interpretation of this style is that the Masters believed God was in charge. Because God was large and humans were small, the artist’s focus was on the sky above. Whether intended or not, there is a humility in their paintings – they looked at the sky and captured the clouds with awe.

Similarly, the clouds in the Texas sky are awe inspiring. They look like giant billowing cartoon clouds one day and like wisps of hair falling in your eyes the next. The evening sky in the fall looks like a painting with yellow, pink, and purple streaks chasing each other to the horizon. The sunsets are long and low and slow just like the days. It’s as if God the Artist is mixing the colors right in front of you, on the canvas.

In West Texas you just have to step outside and squint. Pretty soon you and the sky will meet in a big way, as if the sky is tipping its hat and sayin’ “Pardon me, Ma’am” before heading away in a cloud of pink dust. If you sweat in West Texas, God will promptly whisk out a dusty bandana and wipe it off your brow.

By contrast, East Texas has more rain than can fit in a ten gallon hat. The clouds start in the Gulf of Mexico and bring along the ever-present humidity. The warm Gulf air envelopes you from the ground up. You try not to sweat. The bandana you carry with you is frozen and you wear it on the back of your neck.

Here I am driving along the lower edge of a dripping wet East Texas painting, along with thousands of other little people in our little cars and trucks, below a grandiose sky that takes up three quarters of the canvas. I see the storm clouds from atop a concrete overpass so high I feel like the top car on the roller coaster. There I am strapped into my car, just like I am at the amusement park. The rail connects and ready or not, ca-chink, ca-chink, up the giant concrete hill I go. Then it’s down with a “whee!” and I tumble into the merging lane below. Will anyone let me in? Traffic is at a standstill and we are all tiny little cars on a five mile long train, stuck in our seats. “Please wait here” says the amusement park Director, over a tinny loudspeaker.

I shake my head to clear my thoughts and think it might be a long day. I am stuck in traffic, under the clouds, on top of hot concrete. Humidity oozes up and makes the picture in front of me hazy. Now I am in an Impressionist painting of sorts, with cars and concrete, the paint holding too much moisture. The Great Artist up above is masterfully adding some dramatic clouds.

I am encased in a concrete sauna. I turn down the air conditioning and the song on the radio tells me: “It’s a beautiful day, don’t let it get away”. I turn up the volume – it is my favorite song. The clouds accompany me.

Now the clouds are moving faster than the traffic and entertain me with their shapes, like God has a talented sidekick who is hosting a hand puppet light show while we wait for the main speaker. I see the Gingerbread man in the clouds. He is running, running, fast as he can. I see a whale, and Jonah, terrified of being swallowed whole into a darkness so dark, in the belly of a whale. “Three days in the belly of a whale would be worse than thirty minutes in traffic”, I muse. Maybe it’s the same sort of being “stuck”. Three days in the belly would give a person plenty of time to think about their predicament. The song ends and I instinctively hit repeat. Even the sound track is stuck.

I have gone another mile. The concrete barrier next to me looks over, bares its teeth and and smiles grimly at my progress. I have made it past another section. I see grass and wildflowers peeking out from within the barrier, happy in the mist, a bird flitting and nestling in around them, unaware that they are all stuck in a concrete barrier. I smile at the incongruity of it. “Some things can grow anywhere”, I think to myself.

The pick-up truck in front of me has workers riding in the bed. Like me, they gaze upwards at the morning sky, watching the clouds. All except one guy who has a hat pulled down over his eyes, feigning sleep. Another sips a big gulp coffee, while the third talks to no one in particular. Or maybe he’s like me, singing along to a favorite song.

The humidity creates wavy lines between us. The men in the truck rode their bikes down dark streets to a corner, where they stood on one foot and then the other, waiting for someone to pick them up, jostling for a position in the bed of a truck. They look at me. They want my life and I understand, because I want theirs. In their world, humidity and sweat are okay, a mark of honor. In mine, sweat is a sign of weakness and I will fight it all day. They are overdressed for the weather, protection from the sun and the weeds. I am overdressed for an air-conditioned ride. They have bandanas to wipe the sweat from their brows and shield their faces from the fumes of traffic. I have tinted windows and air-conditioning and a nice sound system.

The clouds are still fantastic, filling the sky with broad brush strokes and filling my heart while they are at it. They remind me that the Artist woke up even earlier than I did, early enough to prep the canvas, to be with the men riding their bikes. We are all trekking along on the lower edge of the painting, small depictions of life, in awe of the majesty of the sky. The clouds are big and ever changing, light dancing off them, making shapes like gingerbread cookies, and whales, high above the traffic jam, higher than the concrete hill.

I look to the sky. The Gingerbread man has run off the canvas and a calvary of cowboys wearing hats and kicking up dust has taken over. The brake lights of the cars contrast with the picture in the sky. Little flecks of red, added at the end. The painting is incomplete without them.

I am tempted to follow those clouds right off the bottom edge of the East Texas canvas where the patterns and colors are painted so thick they may never dry. In my mind, I roam with the clouds all the way to dusty West Texas where the paint dries before it’s even on the brush.

We are all small depictions, bright spots along the lower edge of the world, of our world, with markets, and rivers, and towns, and traffic jams, and so many people scurrying about. The sky is large all around us, swallowing us up. We are so small, and God is so big. I am in awe.

The bird nestled on the barrier shakes off sleep and flies up to meet the clouds, politely moving upward, “excuse me, Ma’am”, says the bird, “Pardon me, while I go hang out with the clouds – it’s a beautiful day” he sings along with me. I hit repeat and start the song again. I look up at the clouds as they slow down and start to dry out, gorgeous and billowy and perfectly rendered. Clouds overtake the composition, leaving some space along the bottom for an accurate and intricate depiction of my little concrete world.

(lwr 11/14/2017)

“Life in the fast lane. Surely make you lose your mind. Life in the fast lane.”  Lyrics by The Eagles

If you drive in a big city that does not have a transit system, chances are, you have spent a good part of your life waiting in traffic. It used to bother me, being stuck in traffic. I would get very agitated and stressed out. I would change lanes looking for a better way. I took Defensive Driving class. It sort of helped. What really helped was taking the class again, and again, every three years whether I needed to or not, to get the insurance discount. It made me a better, more Defensive Driver.

After awhile, I didn’t mind being stuck in traffic anymore, but I did mind, maybe a little, being stuck in Defensive Driving class. The instructor was good, and tried to make it lighthearted and interesting. However, the irony of it was always bothersome. Here we all were, mostly responsible citizens, all of whom had car insurance and were probably decent drivers, maybe a few with minor driving infractions. We were all attending a class learning how to be better. Meanwhile, on the city streets were people with horrible driving records, no insurance, dilapidated cars with loads not tied on properly, old tires – accidents waiting to happen. None of those drivers were spending their evening  attending better driving school. We were spending our time learning how to avoid them!! The message is right, but the audience is wrong, I would think. “I’m a pretty decent driver”. I would still learn a lot in the class, and it’s probably saved me from some serious accidents. I know it has made me a better driver, and it was hedge against rising insurance rates, so I kept taking the class.

I was thinking recently – how church is a similar experience. Here are a bunch of people, most of whom are decent and respectable, going to church every Sunday focused on being better. Some may have received tickets, or wake up calls, and now want to do better. Some are told that while we are good drivers, we could be better. We are taught to love our enemies – are they the people in that overloaded truck carrying wooden pallets? We are instructed to dig deep into our hearts to look for inconsistencies and hypocrisy in our lives, to stay a safe distance away from bad drivers and temptation. Now all of this is good – we are not better than anyone else just because we go to church. But I will bet you that most of us at some point have sat in church thinking “I’m a good person”, just like we sit in Defensive Driving class thinking “I’m a good driver”. In both cases, it’s the other guy (or gal) who needs to be listening to this message, not us, we think!

Most people go to church because they feel it is important to hear God’s message, like Defensive Driving, it is good for the soul and you may need that someday. They get spiritual renewal, a sense community, an uplifting message, and maybe even three more years of insurance discounts, so to speak. But is the message reaching the people who need to feel God’s love the most? Like Defensive Driving, are we limiting the class to just those Christians who can afford to take it, who can spare the time, who care enough to be better? And does this really give us a ticket dismissal to the Pearly Gates?

I drive down the super-slab highway to downtown. There are four lanes. In the Fourth and Fastest Lane on the left there is an impatient person who is tailgating everyone. ‘Type A’, I say to myself – he’s got to be there before everyone and just get out of his way!. The Third Lane over has people like me – going the speed limit or slightly faster, trying to keep up, counting “1-1000, 2-1000,” staring at the bumper in front of us and trying to stay a safe distance behind, but not too far back or someone from another lane might butt in. The Second Lane over seems to have people with problems – we don’t want them in our well-behaved Third Lane, I think to myself. They are people with beat up cars, carrying loads too heavy, cars with dents or rust hanging off, people on cell phones, with crying babies in the back, older people who are leaning way over the dashboard to see, and giant trucks carrying pipes or towing cars. So lane two has mostly problems, and a few “helper” type vehicles. Lane One are people who are just entering or exiting the freeway, trying to figure out what lane to be in – where are they going and who do they want to drive next to?

So the people entering the freeway are like people who come to church for the first time – is anyone going to let them sit in Their Lane ? Who will move over to let them in ? Lane Two, the problem and helper people will usually make room for another. Lane Three people like me will sometimes let them in, if they look like a decent driver. Lane Four people just want everyone out of their way. Think about the analogy to church – have you ever tried to get on a crowded freeway and no one will let you in? There is no lonelier feeling, except maybe one – going to a crowded church and not knowing who is going to move over so you can sit down.

What about the people exiting the freeway? Do we cut them off? Do we zip in and out of their Lanes? Do we notice? Are we relieved that there is now more room for people like us? Do we change lanes when the traffic is at a stand still? Do we exit and take a different route altogether? Would Jesus be in Lane Two, or traveling a different road, or a lone Hitchhiker hanging out close to Lane One? Or is He like the Defensive Driving instructor, not reaching everyone, just the well-behaved drivers?

None of this is intended as judgement- we all have our roles, our Lanes. The Lane Three people are the ones who have spent their lives trying to drive better, to become better believers, better spouses, better parents, better employees. Lane Four fast track people tend to be self-sufficient, successful, and happier if everyone would just drive like them. Fast. Impatient. They may even cause accidents and not even realize it is their fault. They think more people should drive just like them. In this sense, they are role models, but many Lane Three people who sometimes venture into Land Four realize it’s not for everyone and quickly move back.

I think we have all been in any of these lanes at some point on the freeway, in our lives, or in our churches. We are either too busy to notice the problems of Lane Two, or too worried their problems, which seem insurmountable, might cause a problem for us. Sometimes we are too focused on getting where we are going on time. Some may be helper vehicles, already carrying a full load that we need to drop off before we take on something else.

When a freeway gets too crowded or too antiquated, or beat up, they repair it, or expand it or sometimes even build a whole new one. Are churches the same way? Do we expand to let more cars in? Or do we speed up just a little to make sure no one gets in Our Lane? Do we repair the pot holes? Do we preach to the good drivers about how to avoid being a bad driver? Do we preach to the good drivers about being better drivers? Do we welcome bad drivers at all or is it cost prohibitive? Do we assume we know everything about why the bad drivers are indeed bad – what their situation is, why they are driving badly, why they seem stuck in Lane Two? Do we let the “helpers” into Lane Three or are we worried about the load they are carrying?

I say “we” because we are all the Church. We steward the lanes of the freeway the same way that the transportation department does. We hold the Defensive Driving, or Defensive Believer Classes, the ones where we say “watch out for these kinds of people”. We train people to get on and off the freeway, and safely into Lane Three. We sometimes even encourage them to act more like the aggressive Lane Four people. But do we ever slow down and just think what it might be like if you were stuck in Lane Two, with a heavy load, ill-equipped to drive, no money for insurance, car and lives too full to even keep up, and have people racing by you defending their beliefs, and not letting them in? Do we move over in the pews to let others in? Some churches are better at this than others. I have experienced some that are like toll roads, open, but not for everyone. Lane Four Heaven. High Occupancy Vehicle and Express Lanes are full of people willing to pay the price for a nicer, faster, commute. There are some churches that are like crowded highways, popular, but no room for new expansion, and some that are like country highways, beautiful, but narrow lanes, and therefore lightly traveled. Some are like Interstates, very mainstream, covering large areas, normally dependable, until there is a Lane Closure.

So the analogy may or may not be apt but it got me to thinking.I confess to sometimes sitting in church the same way I sit on the freeway, safely guarded in Lane Three, counting “1-1000, 2-1000”, keeping a safe distance, thinking things like “I’m a good driver, but I could be better”. While I appreciate the message and the attempts by the instructor, I still look around, gazing in the mirrors, focused, but warily on guard to avoid collisions with the Lane Four and Lane Two drivers.  I am after all, content to be in Lane Three.

(lwr, 10/24/2017)

“Be still, and know that I am God” – Psalm 46:10, es

“Cease striving, and know that I am God” – Psalm 46:10, nasb

The problem with personal reflection is that it is personal. This topic is tough for me and I find myself wondering why. I think it’s because I equate “Being still” with not accomplishing anything. You see, I am coming down from years of being a workaholic. For many years I tried to cheat time itself. Lately, I am trying to replace “busy” with “focused and intentional”.
Some workaholic tendencies I believe were born of a bad economy. We graduated from college in the eighties into a terrible recession. For the next thirty years, corporations would be downsizing, rightsizing, outsourcing, insourcing, globalizing, and in general striving to do more with less. We were rewarded for our dogged and determined efforts, for our busyness. We were never encouraged to “Be still”, and certainly never uttered words like “Cease striving”.

We all need to sit and ponder, not just sit and achieve or produce. There are words like “hurry” and “busy” in our vocabulary and we have embraced them. They have helped us achieve another word, “success”. But is our success the same as God’s? What does success look like to God?  Does it look like overwork?  Work is important but so is rest and reflection.

Many people had parents who encouraged hard work and ambition. While this is mostly a good thing, it perhaps led to adults who valued activity over inactivity. A four letter word in our house was “lazy”. Interestingly enough, another four-letter word, “busy” was very much encouraged. We had a counterintuitive saying at work “if you want something done, give it to a busy person”. Often that busy person would be an overworked person who made every minute count. They would remind me of the movie “The Incredibles”, where the mom had arms that could stretch way beyond her living room.

“I’ll sleep when I’m old”, I used to think to myself, and even on occasion say out loud, to my untroubled slumbering mate. I would be ruminating about some problem at work or thinking through the details of household management and my husband would be sleeping like a baby. I was very jealous of his ability to shut out the world, rest, and not worry about today or tomorrow. “How does he do that?” I often wondered staring at his closed eyelids. I think one magic ingredient in my husband’s ability to sleep is that he has me, and I am not sleeping. One morning he cheerfully quipped, as well-rested people do, “The laundry fairy washed, folded, and put away all of my clothes while I slept!”. “Yep, the laundry fairy sure is a great gal”, I said sarcastically, as I wiped the four hours of sleep from the bags under my eyes.

Many years ago I heard Secretary of State Madeleine Albright speak at a women’s conference. She raised three children before returning to school and starting her career in her mid-forties. Her motto was, “You can have it all, but you cannot have it all at once”. Such sage advice from a very successful woman and world leader, and here she was talking across a crowded auditorium, right to me sitting way in the back, I thought.

Over the years we tried to build some relaxation time into our hectic lives and sometimes even succeeded. And on Sundays we tried to rest. I would go to church and I must confess, I would sometimes sleep during the sermon. It was a beautiful restful sleep, one without interruption, and one with a subliminal and hopeful message. “Be still and know that I am God”.

Today I am neither overworked nor too busy. Today I am procrastinating. I am putting off working on a project for art class. This is because it requires serious, focused attention. It requires that I sit still, and quietly concentrate on the details of drawing, maybe for hours. I will have to actually carve out a large chunk of time to complete this task. I will need to put off things like laundry, raking leaves, dishes. Even in retirement, and even for a single art class, I am having trouble with “busy”, with slowing down enough to complete something requiring this much time and attention to detail. You cannot rush art. So I am fondly calling my art project, a still life drawing, “Still Life with Procrastination”.

The world is moving at a frenetic pace and so are we. it is good to stop and read, to reflect, and yes, even to try something new like a drawing class, to shift gears and get into a different mode. To “Be still” and know that God is bigger than any “busy” tasks we might facing.

“Jose Feliciano’s unconventional pre-game singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” aroused considerable controversy, with the Tigers and NBC receiving thousands of angry letters and telephone calls about the performance. Lolich also blamed Feliciano’s unusually long rendition for causing him to get cold after his warm-ups and thus give up three early runs.” (wikipedia.org)

It is September 1968 and I am getting ready to walk to school. School is one long block up and three and a half short blocks over. The blocks in our neighborhood are rectangles and easy to navigate. We make the trek four times a day, morning, then back home for lunch, then back to school, then home again around 4 pm. Looking back it seems very inefficient, but the walking plus considerable recess time gives us plenty of time to play and talk. Our mothers alternate making us lunch, tomato soup and open grilled cheese sandwiches are our favorite.

Every house is different, some with red, white, yellow, brown, or gray colored bricks. Some are two story colonials, and a very few are more trendy – sleek one-stories with glass and sharp angles. Some have stone porches, some have shutters. The shutters wink at me as I walk past. One house has a large gnarled old tree that grew old with it. Inside that house lives an old woman, the same age as the house, perhaps. My sister who has a big heart and is very friendly to everyone visits her occassionally. The old woman still shovels her own snow. She eats grapefruit every morning and tells us to do that too. A few more doors down from her is the perfectly manicured house, where as my mother says, “every blade of grass is cut by hand”. The walk is always shoveled there, perfectly neat, with symmetric piles of snow or leaves on each side, depending on the season.

We walk to school rain or shine, sleet or snow, the proverbial “walking through inclement weather to get to school” story. Autumn is my favorite. We are back at school and fall is always fun, full of new shoes, new dresses, new teachers, and a different desk. We are just starting third grade and the rooms are on the second floor. We are bigger and more important now. We can read chapter books and write in cursive, and walk to school on our own. The air is cool and kind, the trees are shady and the edges of the leaves are starting to turn color. The neighborhood smells like fall, like dry leaves, pumpkins, and pot roast.

My best friend lives next door and sometimes other friends pick her up and they stop by my house to pick me up. There are more girls down the street we can group up with as we walk the first long block. Next to them is a family with ten children so we are never alone. There is always someone walking in the neighborhood. All of the streets except for one have crossing guards, fourth and fifth graders who have been safety trained.

Our house has a mud room. We call it the back hall and it’s a repository of sorts for all of our inclement weather gear. There is a bathroom and a closet where we keep coats, brooms, and potatoes. There is a long rack with hooks along one wall for hanging coats, hats, scarves, mittens. there are several boot trays. There are three kinds of boots: Lined, for winter, over boots with metal buckles, which are also known as galoshes and are unlined, and there are some that were called rubbers (which later made us laugh). They are black and slip on over our shoes to protect them in the puddles. Our back hall is a tribute to east Detroit weather and whatever the season, it is prominently displayed.

It is autumn so the back hall hosts sweaters, shoes, galoshes, and umbrellas. There might be some sweatshirts there too. Our father walks to the bus each morning. He uses the front hall and comes in and out of the front door. He wears a dress hat and a pea coat, which require special care and hanging. There is a little vestibule in the front for inclement weather gear too. Only three people use the front door, my father, my grandmother, and our great aunt. I suppose various other aunts, uncles, and cousins who visit will come into the house that way too. We use the back door, unless one of us is injured: skinned knee, hurt feelings, snowball in the eye, that sort of thing. Then we are allowed to enter the house using the most direct route. All outer footwear must live in either the front or back hall. Our slippers and indoor shoes wait for us while we are gone in case we forget.

My friends clamor up the back stairs to the back hall and I can hear them outside before they ring the bell. We are ready to walk to school. I don’t recall that we carried backpacks or heavy books. Sometimes we would have homework and I think we must have used book straps to carry our things. As we walk we break into pairs along the sidewalk. We don’t step on the cracks and we have a game related to the imprint stamp of the sidewalk squares, telling us when and by whom, each patch of sidewalk was made. 

The leaves are starting to turn and the air is cool and fresh. Soon the leaves will be bright and colorful, falling and fluttering all around us like butterflies. We will play tag football on the front lawn. We will help our Dad with raking and jump into the large leaf piles. We will help him bring down the screens and put up the storm windows, washing each one carefully. With the first frost we might start carrying mittens. With the second, we’ll pull out hats or earmuffs, and by November we will need scarves. The fall progression is predictable and comforting.

When we arrive at school we all play in the playground until the first Bell. Then we get in line. We have ten minutes or so to get to our class, hang up our things in the back and take our seats before the second Bell. We must be seated, ready, bright and earnest before the second Bell. Then we stand for the Pledge, and maybe sing a verse or two of “My Country ‘ tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty”. Some people have brothers who have left for Vietnam. One brother won’t return. We had all watched the 1967 riots unfold on small black and white TVs with rabbit ears and tin foil receptors the previous summer. Some of us saw the National Guard tanks make their way down East Jefferson towards the heart of Detroit which was on fire. It’s discussed in current events, but the discussion is guarded too. 

We are learning multiplication tables. My best friend and I are very good at math and memorizing just about any list in front of us. We have spent the summer memorizing the names of all the Presidents and Vice Presidents. Now we are working on the First Ladies. We have spent the summer playing and climbing trees, and riding with our families to the neighborhood pool. We have gone to lakes up north and stayed up late to catch fireflies. At the end of summer we were all glued to TV’s with pictures of Vietnam, discussions about riots, or the Detroit Tigers. Our parents deliberately keep the channel on the Tigers.

We have memorized the names of all the players and their stats. There is the main hero, Al Kaline. There is the slugger, Willie Horton. Another slugger who plays catcher is Bill Freehan. At Short stop is Micky Stanley, Eddie Brinkman, the smaller player who chokes up on the bat but makes up for it in speed and agility, will come later. There is our favorite, the handsome third baseman with the black glove, Aurelio Rodriguez. He arrived after Don Wert and Eddie Matthews who played the series. Dick McAuliff plays second. Sometimes Ray Oyler plays infield. We met him at our school the last year and I still have his autograph. The indomitable Norm Cash is at first, and Micky Lolitch and Denny McClain are the infamous pitchers. All eyes are watching, young and old, and all racial and socioeconomic differences in Detroit are momentarily gone. We are all united, rooting for the Tigers this year. Every car has a Tiger tail hanging from the tank.

My mother had been in the hospital for minor lung surgery. My third grade teacher asks me how she is. I think she is fine, I say. They have told me it is nothing to worry about and so I don’t. She is recuperating on the couch when I get home. Game three of the series is on. She is talking about Al Kaline, and the other heroes we see. I climb up next to her and we watch. “How was school today”, she asks? “The girls won at multiplication flash cards”, I say. My mother has a hard time with me because she wants me to act and dress more like a girl, and I prefer wearing a baseball cap and play clothes. So our mutual love of the Tigers has temporarily erased this issue and I can wear my cap all night long, I think I even slept in it.

The final two games of the series are so exciting and so important that they even wheel TVs with rabbit ears and tin foil into our classrooms. The teachers can hardly contain their excitement. It is all Tigers every day as we line up outside after recess. We stand in line for the multiplication contest. We’ve been memorizing factors of nine and we are unbeatable, just like the Tigers.

The day the Tigers won the series I was so excited to tell my Mom that I came bolting in the front door. She was so happy too, I think she got up and danced a little jig. I had watched her recuperating and something about the way my teacher asked me made me think she was sicker than my parent’s had let on. She was better now, and there would be no more worrying. The tumor was something called “benign”, they said. Our Dad took us to the small town center near our house to see the Tigers celebration. In Detroit there would be riots, and houses burning, but here in the suburbs it was more buttoned up – there were toilet paper rolls and Tiger Tank tails and hats and long strings of confetti being thrown into the air. The night was striped, blue and orange, just like the Tigers.

We walked to school the next morning through colorful confetti intermingled with orange and yellow leaves. We lined up for the first Bell. I looked up to the sky and noticed the clouds were lining up too, getting ready for winter and the second Bell. They were the long, skinny blue-gray clouds that come in the fall before the first snow. My favorite clouds. My little world with brick houses and rectangular blocks and grilled cheese sandwiches and predictable seasons was going to be all right. The world series win and the good news about my mother all lined up, reassuringly. I looked at the clouds, now marching in straight blue-gray lines across the sky like striped Tiger Tank Tails. The Tigers won, I thought, my smile big, underneath my blue cap. My mother had let me wear my baseball cap to school, just this once, this marvelous fall day, with leaves and confetti, the day after the Tigers won the ’68 series.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blessed: The soul, uneasy and confined from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.   – Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

We moved to Texas the day after we were married in Iowa. It was early May. My husband had already been in Houston for three months. He had one day of vacation to get married and we needed to fly back right away. We were broke graduate students and a job was more important than a honeymoon or locale or quality of life. We did not plan on staying in Texas. We had picked out Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana as our top three “after we are married” places to live. Numbers four and five were Minnesota and Michigan. We both liked snow, and winter, and wearing sweatshirts. “Give it two years”, said my brand new husband, swapping his flannel shirt for a white cotton one as we headed for Houston and a future in Corporate America.

I was close minded about Texas in a big way. Texas was a place with floods and hurricanes and oil barons, and industry. It had stolen jobs and people from my beloved and rust belted Detroit. It was greedy and evil and sprawling, and the antithesis of me. I had watched the movie “Local Hero” and did not like the traffic jam in the opening scene. I loved my husband, but this was a true test of just how much. In spite of all this, I also wanted a job, and I would have to park my pride and pre-judgment about the land of plenty somewhere south of Oklahoma. The job prospects in Houston would be better than anywhere else we could land.

We flew from Cedar Rapids, to the Quad Cities, to Chicago, to Houston. The first thing I learned to love about Houston was its two massive airports. You could go anywhere in the world and people did. Within a week my husband would be flying to New Orleans while I unpacked our wedding gifts, books, and boxes full of rock samples. The next year my husband would be flying over to London and France and I would be joining him after saving a week of precious vacation and comp time by working weekends. We planned a trip to Alaska once we had enough vacation. Until then it would be 18 months of heat, humidity and traffic jams.

Houston had been hit hard by the recession. People teased us, ” you know what they call a geologist in Houston?” “Waiter!” or “Taxi!”. The truth was, things were just starting to pick back up and we had landed in Houston just in time for the next big wave. Two years, I told myself as I stripped down to shorts and a t-shirt and turned up the AC. Two more years.

The moving van with our combined stuff from Iowa arrived. Then another arrived with some furniture my parents had sent down. I unloaded and unpacked while my husband left for his job down the street. We had one car. It was a gold Ford Torino, badly rusted, with snow tires and a faux black leather roof. It had “I’m from the rust belt” written all over it. His grandfather’s car, my husband had lovingly taken good care of it. They had nicknamed her Goldilocks. If I needed Goldilocks, I would drive my husband to work. Often, the police would follow me home, Goldilocks was as out of place in Houston as I was.

If I just needed to go to the grocery store, I would ride my bike. I learned that riding a bike in Houston means you will either get run over or die a slow dehydration death from sweating too much. I learned quickly to weave my way via the back streets, through pretty neighborhoods with single story brick houses, the live oaks and pecan trees providing shade.

I finished my final thesis and printed it out on a hot and humid summer day. I was crabby and could not get the hanging sentences from the last paragraph to print over to the next page per the strict guidelines of the nameless and faceless Thesis Office. I had completed my defense and first deposit before the wedding, but this last part was frustrating and I had no energy for my old life. I had a new husband and new temporary job, and a new rental house and was living in a new city. I finished the work and received my M.S. degree later that year, but not before throwing a stack of papers at my surprised new husband and shouting loud enough that the terns flying in the Gulf of Mexico were rerouted for a day. I hated senseless bureaucracy more than I hated heat and humidity. But I had finished and closed the Iowa chapter with minimal debt and a degree. I liked being married, but I hated being dependent on others for my livelihood.

I had given up my maiden name. It was hard, giving up my independence, and I left it on my thesis just in case I needed proof that I had a life before this one. I had given up my dream of living somewhere with snow and four seasons. From the looks of things, Houston just had two seasons, both requiring AC. One was summer, and it was miserable. The other season in Houston seemed to be Spring. Spring in Houston made up for all the bad air summer had brought in. Spring in Texas, it turned out, was delightful.

Spring starts in Texas around January. In some years, February can surprise you with a cold snap that pretends to be winter, but just one trip to Michigan for comparison will clear up that confusion. Springtime in Texas goes from February until just about Memorial Day.

It is a long, slow dance, at a 1/2 degree a day from the mid 60’s in February, to the 70’s in March, to the 80’s in April, to the 90’s in May. In the fall, the same long dance happens, 90’s in September to the 80’s in October and the 70’s in November. In December it might dip below 50, and there could be a day or two in December or January when you see white fluffy stuff falling from the sky that is not hail or a low cloud, but actually snow. The city shuts down. Most northerners find this much sunshine quite appealing. I had spent too much of my youth up north and was terribly homesick for a cold bitter, and stinging wind. This much sun was nice but not normal.

The snow and cold may last for a day or a week or even two. Then it warms up and the crocuses pop up, then the red bud appear, light purple and delicate, the opening act, with just a hint of spring. The apple trees follow. Spring. Mother Nature snaps her fingers and Texas wildflowers and azaleas enter stage right, and flowering cactii enter stage left, and the whole show lasts for months. You open the windows and spend the days outside, so excited that everything does well in the garden. The grass grows so fast you need armies of landscape crews just to keep the greenery at bay.

A drive to the Hill country rewards you with carpets of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. When those disappear you will see there is even more: Indian blanket, daisies, sunflowers, mountain pink, and wild rose. People write songs about Texas and now you understand why. There is just so much to say about Spring time here. Galveston beckons too and we head there next, light cool breezes accompany us. We fly kites and make sand castles.

Then summer hits. Like a ton of bricks you can’t breathe and the air is heavy and smells toxic. Ozone levels are dangerously high and the weatherman uses words like “oppressive”. Inside everyone is freezing and working their tails off, trying to make enough money to pay their AC bills. One more year, and ten months, I think. “Ugh”, I say out loud, every year, around July 15, here it comes.

My office mate would fly in from Colorado every week just to have a job. When I complained about Houston he’d say, well “You can’t eat scenery and Houston pays the bills”. He was right, I liked having a steady paycheck and apparently so did 5 million of my best friends who shared the road with me each day. I adapted. I had found a good job. We turned a corner and it was the next year. We had two jobs. We were saving money and paying off my student loan and buying furniture and before we knew it, there was Spring, all light and lovely and teasing us while the wind howled on our old stomping grounds up north.

We went to Sea World and saw people with kids. Lets have some kids, so we can take them to Sea World I suggested, looking at the happy families. So then it was summer, summer, summer, hot and oppressive again. By the next Spring, which started on a beautiful sunny day in February, our daughter had arrived and we had a brand new house, with new furniture and all sorts of beautiful trees and birds in the garden. It was Spring in Texas once again. Two years had passed just like that.

Two years later, our son would be born, in early summer. He spent the first part of his life with no shirt. Most of his birthday photos and birthday parties were at pools, at places like SplashTown, or at a lake. The only birthday photo where he has on a shirt is the one where we went to Colorado for his birthday and it was still snowing in the mountains. A summer Texan. I had given birth to Two Texans, and here they were, two more years down the road, wearing flip flops and happily playing in the yard. Maybe Texas isn’t so bad after all, I thought, as I sipped my lemonade. “Let’s take the kids to Sea World”, I said

Ten years into this two season cycle, I turned to my husband one hot August day and asked “Has it been more than two years?” His smug reply, “Yes and its been a honeymoon the whole time, hasn’t it?”. “Ugh – let’s move to Alaska next summer”, I say.

The heat and humidity notwithstanding. Texas has its good points. For one thing, if you are raising small children it’s easier to get them dressed. There are no hats, boots, mittens, jackets needed, except for the rare trips up north. Socks are not needed in the summer. Most everyone has a pool or easy access to one. You can count on the weather being nice in the spring, and most days, the sun is shining. The kids all participate in summer league swimming, and the boys get crew cuts that last 6 months. The only real negative is around August-September. that’s when the temperatures and air and moisture combine with back-to-school traffic jams. The pools close because the life guards go back to school. Its football season and the kids are sweating before they even get their helmets on. Everyone is crabby and everything gets very oppressive. As if on cue, there is usually a hurricane or a tropical storm looming. Your head and sinuses rebel at the thought of it. “Ugh”, I think.

On the bright side, all that humidity is good for the complexion, and there is no such thing as “hat hair”. But there is “humidity hair”. You don’t need a shovel to get out of your driveway, but you might need to carry a pair of chest waders in the trunk. Floods and heat are realities. I may never call Texas “home” the way I think of Michigan as home. However, once I had little Texans, and I raised them here, my love of Texas increased at least two fold.

Texas is a very colorful and diverse place. We have met people from all around the world here. We have traveled to other places in the world. These are opportunities we only had here. We have now lived here almost thirty years. Its been way more than two years, I remind my husband. I am still homesick for snow and cold at times, and I still hate the traffic, but I have found places to ride my bike year round, to sail, and to swim, and to soak in the ever-present sunshine. When we get off the plane it feels like home.

Best of all, Spring in Texas brings acres and acres of wildflowers, and beautiful warm days with cool nights. Hope springs eternal. Springtime in Texas is long and not fleeting. It is reliable like the job market and as bright and colorful as Sea World. It brings in Gulf breezes that are light and gentle, and hopeful, carrying us along, on the wings of terns and new possibilities.

(🌻 lwr 10/23/2017)

I graduated from college in Minnesota on a Saturday. I left for Colorado on Sunday. I had a backpack and a large box with my bicycle in it. My parents helped me ship the box, then dropped me at the airport, taking the rest of my belongings and my shiny new diploma back with them to Detroit. Meanwhile, they were happy because I had a job prospect – an internship doing field work for the summer. Who knew where it might lead? My sister prophetically observed they might lose me to Colorado. But I was in love with the midwest and my heart and my college boyfriend were going to stay there while I boarded the plane. “Follow your dreams, not your heart”,  cautioned my wise parents. “Let him follow you”.

I flew to Denver and took a city bus from the airport to the greyhound bus station near downtown. The city bus did not go all the way there, so I had to walk the last two blocks with my backpack. I had good hiking boots, clothes, toiletries, rain gear, a tent and a very small compact, down sleeping bag. My bike, boots, and my sleeping bag were my prized possessions. Denver was hotter than Minnesota in June. The sun was strong and warm and I remember having to squint and shed layers.

I was used to taking the train. Riding the bus was different. You had to watch your wallet and belongings. Some people looked like they lived on the bus. You did not want to share a seat. The trick was to sit in the aisle seat and pretend you were waiting on a friend. I put my backpack on the seat next to me. I was riding the bus from Denver to western Colorado, A rather pushy guy came up and wanted to sit next to me, and seeing that there was no other option, I said okay, moving my backpack to the overhead across the aisle where I could watch it, I slid over to the window. I did not tell him much except for where I was headed and that yes, someone was meeting me there. Even my young radar told me to keep my distance.

He talked and I nodded politely and looked at the scenery. The terrain got very dry and dusty and then we turned west and headed into the mountains. It was exciting to see the new landscape. The sun settled down, casting long shadows against the high hills. In the distance, the mountains looked to be a uniform shade of blue, like a construction paper cutout. Hints of pink light defined the edges. Then darkness swallowed the bus and all my senses drifted inward and I crossed my arms, edging away from the guy next to me in his heavy green coat, with his too many questions. I watched my backpack from the corner of my eye. We arrived at 2 am to the small town in western Colorado where I would be working. My new boss’s motorcycle boyfriend had been sent to pick me up at the station. I was happy to leave the bus with the sketchy seat mate, for this even sketchier one, handing me a helmet, and grabbing my backpack, he said, hang on, I’ll take you home.

Home was a trailer park. In an effort to not disturb my new and unknown trailer mate, I crashed on the couch which was short and smelled of formaldehyde. it seemed like seconds later and it was light outside, my roommate was standing over me, tall and confident, “wake up, we have to go now”.

From the start, Colorado was an adventure. I met hippies like my boss’s motorcycle boyfriend, and my boss, a lady who loved lizards and loved to flaunt her independence by dating guys who rode motorcycles. We attended a two day class on driving safety and mountain safety and had to learn to drive a stick shift the first weekend. They sent us out to the mountains soon afterwards with a map, a handyman jack, a truck winch, a two way radio, and some severe warnings about lightening and 4-wheeling on the montmorillinite clay after a rain.

It never seemed to rain. The sun would spend the first part of the day whittling away the fog that hung around in the valleys. The first few days I walked the two miles to work, waiting for my bike to arrive. We would check in and discuss our routes and territory then all be dispatched out to the field. The first week we would go out in teams, thereafter it would be solo. At the end of each day we would swap stories about the mountains, and elk, and birds, and plants we had seen. There would be stories about 4-wheeling pickles we’d managed to escape using the truck winches, and handyman jacks and our ingenuity.

My bicycle arrived and I reattached the handlebars and pedals. I was set. I lived in a trailer in a campground with other summer interns. My roommate was studying cactus and she already had fallen for the lead instructor. We didn’t get paid, but we had a per diem and free housing. I packed my lunch and rode my bicycle to work each day. There I picked up my government vehicle, charted my course, called the ranchers about access, and went out to the field. My job was to measure and map the water features shown on the map, and take water samples.

Water in western Colorado was, and is, and always will be, a highly sought after commodity. Ranchers would lease public lands and build structures to corral the water or divert it through private lands. They didn’t always like young government workers wandering around asking questions about water. We learned to cross our arms and keep our distance. If you hear a bullet zing past your head, said our lead trainer, you will be okay. It’s the ones you don’t hear that hit you. Hmm, I thought, maybe I should ask for a raise in addition to my meager room and board.

The first part of the day was driving. The first road was nicely paved with shoulders and passing lanes. The next road was paved, no shoulder, no white line, but customary to wave with two fingers at the top of the steering wheel to the rancher just in case he’s thinking about shooting you. There were cattle guards and sometimes you had to stop, get out and yell “Hi-Yah” at the cattle to get them off the road. The cattle were like groupies. They would come up and crowd around my truck, nudging the doors, and tires, looking for food. I would think maybe I should sign autographs, or throw them a piece of my clothing, like Madonna. But a simple ” hiyah” would scatter them. The next road would be dirt, the one after that rutted out gravel and rocks, and the one after that, a foot path. The trick was to drive as far in as possible, because the hike to water could be long and there was a lot of territory to cover.

We had 7.5 minute quad maps and some new false infrared images that we’d study back at the office. The cottonwood trees in particular would show bright red on the images. Where there is a cottonwood tree, there is water, said the lead botanist, explaining about their tap roots. We learned about PJ, Pinyon-Juniper. I learned to love the smell of sage in my tires. My roommate fell ever more in love with the lead botanist.

In the field I would hike along ridges to get my bearings. Then down to the pond I’d go, wearing a small field pack with my water bottle and lunch. The cattle were always hanging around the ponds. I’d have to wave and shout them away so I could get to the pond. Whether dry or wet, each water feature had to be measured. I’d measure and record the circumference, depth, and dimensions of the earthen dam. Then I’d grab water samples if possible and hike back to the truck. The nitrate and sulfate probes were in the back of the truck. The pH strips I could carry in my pack. Keeping the equipment clean and dust free was a big part of the job.

My day started around 6 am and at 6000 feet above sea level. Sometimes I’d go down from there, to the Uncompaghre canyon. If I went into the San Juans, I’d get just above tree line at around 10,000 feet, still surrounded by high peaks. Mt Sneffels and Uncompaghre Peak would gaze down their noses at us from over 14,000 feet. Grand Mesa was another amazing locale. The largest flat-topped mountain in the world. It was a mere 11,000 feet and hosted beautiful fishing lakes. There were whole cities for beavers and deer, and alpine vegetation just below tree line.  We worked in the areas near Dolores, Telluride, Ouray, Montrose, Delta, Crawford, and Gunnison. We’d measure the water, or at least field check the place where water was supposed to be. The terrain was wild and diverse, and lovely. Every day in the field was a new adventure.

One site required helicopter reconnaissance. For the first and only time that summer I walked over to the pay phone and called my parents. I thought they should know I was headed out into the middle of nowhere in a helicopter the next day. Our pilot had flown a chopper in Vietnam. He was not afraid of anything, except maybe the Vietcong and unmarked power lines.

On the weekends we would ride our bicycles up the road and wind our way up to the top of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. We’d eat lunch at the edge, wondering what it must have been like to be the first Indian who saw the magnificent chasm with the pegamatite painted wall, and told his horse, ” whoa!” We pedaled through soft hills and flat plains, then across a very flat grass knoll, and ” whoa!” there was a 2000 ft sheer cliff right in front of us. The road up was gentle and winding. Our legs were strong from days in the field. As we rode back down the hill, moving fast, flying, one of the pedals on my bike flew off. I nearly met my Maker in the pavement. Instead I got up, scraped and sore, retrieved my broken pedal and placed my foot on the metal stub. It was a slower glide back home, luckily downhill. I learned to ride my bike with one pedal. and my right shoe wore out on the metal peg.

One guy whom we all loved had a car, and he organized all of our trips. It was a station wagon of sorts. Dusty cassette tapes played John Prine and Greg Brown. Our driver played the hammered dulcimer. He was older and wiser and in danger of stealing my heart which I thought I had left safely back in the midwest. We sang along as we headed over Lizard Head Pass. One night we hiked to 12,700 feet and camped above Telluride. We were in a high hanging valley. A thunderstorm roared through and the hair on the backs of our necks told us lightening was nearby. I thought we might become a pile of ashes, scorched in our tents, fried by 12000 lightening volts in my prized possession sleeping bag. I put my backpack with its metal frame far away, behind a rock, under a latched-down tarp.

We awoke to sunshine and columbine and tundra, and marmots and pica chip-chipping in the distance. The ground was already dry and we walked down to the little creek and washed our feet and socks. Clean and dry socks were our other prized possessions. We dried our frozen toes in the sun and donned new clean socks for a new day of hiking. Weekends in Colorado. Every weekend we’d hike and camp and explore. We would sit around a fire at night and talk about nothing in particular, while trying to understand everything. We thought life would always be like this, working in the field, no money, but plenty of time for hiking. It was a Colorado Rocky Mountain natural high, no drugs needed. We were short on oxygen and money both, and it left us all a little light-headed and giddy.

On the fourth of July we drove to Utah and hiked in the Mante la Sal range. We came back down to a station wagon with a dead battery. Hiking and hitchhiking our way out we ended up in Moab, where we bought some food and a watermelon. We managed to grab the last primitive campground at Arches and sat around trying to eat watermelon in an area known for its windblown sandstone. The watermelon tasted of sand and grit and I still remember how great it was. I cannot remember how we managed to get the car running again. I just know the situation left us with two additional days to wander around Arches.

I suppose we were lucky. All of us were in our twenties with degrees and no job prospects. When we weren’t working or hiking, would work extra on the weekends, doing mop-up for the Forest Service fire crews, which paid a healthy $6/hr. My roommate and I helped paint someone’s fence for fifty dollars. We helped someone harvest their vegetable garden and took home armloads of free produce on our bikes.

As the summer wound down, I stayed an extra month working and looking for my next gig, while the trailer turned colder and the first snows in the high country made roads impassable. Some people were going to work the ski lifts in another month. I pounded the pavement in Grand Junction and Denver along with 10,000 other unemployed geologists. The bottom had fallen out of the industry in 1982 while I was busy being free-spirited, hiking, and carelessly riding around on my one-pedaled bike. I fell in and out of love on a daily basis – with life, with new friends, and especially with Colorado.

My midwest boyfriend flew out to meet me in Denver. We surprised my Dad who happened to be there on business, by getting on the same plane back. We sat with arms crossed, cordial and keeping our distance. I was not the same person and neither was the boyfriend. My heart and my next job might be back in the midwest but the mountains had given me independence and it was packed and coming back home with me, along with my tent and boots, and bike, and sleeping bag.

I returned to Michigan to live at home and earn money for a few months working in a department store. It was nice to have money and home might still be better than a distant mountain with no job prospects. I was in the best shape of my life – tan and strong, a little unsettled, but still very hopeful.

The bike box arrived, and I reattached the handlebars and fixed the pedal. I rode down the colorful tree lined streets of my provincial and flat home town, down to the lake which I had missed in spite of my adventures. I gazed out, looking across the water at the freighter making its way along the horizon. It was autumn in Michigan and no place is nicer. I stared across my hometown lake. Had it lost me to Colorado? Not yet. I had climbed mountains. I had survived close calls with lightening and riding my bike on treacherous roads. I had learned how to independently navigate every kind of situation. Like an old friend who had waited for me but not followed, the lake welcomed me back. I was happy to be back. I sat a long while, watching the water sparkle and the waves hitting the rocky ledge. I smiled and thought all about the mountains and the adventures, and the hiking boot print a summer in Colorado had left on my heart.

( 🚵‍♀️ lwr 10/22/2017)