Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

family

Slow {A series of S-words, Part 1}

I woke up this morning feeling like someone had pressed the fast-forward button on my life. I’m old enough to remember that pressing the “FF>>” button on the VCR made the movie speed forward at an unnatural pace. Now, we can just skip to the scene we want via digital technology, but I digress.

School starts again in 12 days and I’m feeling pressed on all sides. We have to shop for supplies. And groceries. The house is in a constant state of disorder made worse by kids deciding to do things on their own like make muffins for breakfast and orangeade for afternoon snack. The laundry is piling up and I have writing assignments I’ve been neglecting.

It felt like every person who needed something from me, both in my house and outside of it, decided to contact me all in one day and I literally screamed as loud as my voice could manage while standing in the mud room.

It’s too much. And I am not enough.

Photo by Charlotte Coneybeer on Unsplash

—

We’ve managed a mostly laid-back, steady pace this summer. We’ve squeezed in some fun outings. We’ve slept in and taken our time getting going in the mornings. We’ve unapologetically spent whole days at home. When our weeks have been too full, we’ve given ourselves permission to skip or say “no.”

We’ve long known that we cannot do it all every summer. When we make our list in late May, we remind ourselves that we will not cross everything off of it. This is a target, a goal, a wish list, not a mandatory to-do. I cannot do summer full-speed-ahead, even when the activities we plan are fun and good.

Maybe that’s why I was surprised to feel like life was revving its engine after a long idle. Maybe it’s because it feels like I’m in the passenger seat, needing to strap in and hold on as some unknown driver presses the accelerator and we speed off toward some destination not of my choosing.

This is not how I want to live life.

And yet some of these things I have chosen. Some of them I can control.

—

The school year brings its own kind of chaos, but order returns to my days. I function best with a schedule that is more or less predictable, so putting the kids on the bus at the same time every day and picking them 7 or so hours later works for me.

That time in between is both a blessing and a curse. I want to use it well, so I’ve begun planning how that time will look. Without a plan, I end up watching Netflix for a whole day and wondering why I can’t get anything done. (Judge me not.)

I notoriously over-schedule myself, though. I want to fill all the blocks of time because then I’ll at least look like I’ve been productive. Unlike this summer when I cannot measure productivity in anything other than jars of pickles canned or meals prepared and consumed. (Illustration: I just took a several minutes break from writing this post to help my kids finish making orangeade from scratch. My life.)

In the summer, I try to cut away all the extra I can because having two kids home all day is a full-time job. (And don’t let anyone tell you different. If people can make a living watching other people’s kids for a living, then I’ll forever believe that being a stay-at-home mom is a j-o-b.)

And the first thing to go in the summer is my writing because it feels like less of a job than being a mom is. It brings in almost no income. It is an art and therefore feels selfish. No one is my writing “boss” but me and if I’m not going to push me to work, then no one is.

I’ve managed to squeeze in more writing this summer than other summers, but it’s not been easy. (It shouldn’t be easy, really.) I have to choose it over other things and that is true whether it is summer, fall, winter or spring. (Also, can we take note of how often I am using the word “squeeze” in this post?)

It is a hard thing to describe to people, how me saying “yes” to my writing and “no” to other things like being part of a church committee or a school group or getting a “real” job is the best choice. It doesn’t make sense to me either but I know it is what I am meant to do.

Knowing and doing don’t always match up.

—

Photo by Daniel Monteiro on Unsplash

The faster life swirls around me, the slower I want to go.

My son has this habit of throwing himself on the ground if we try to hurry him along for any reason, which annoys me to no end but he comes by it honestly.

The more I am told to “do,” the more I want to “be.”

This is not a narrative our culture wants to claim. Even in church, the one place I want to take a breather and slow down, I feel pressure to do more and be more. I cannot keep up this pace for six days a week, let alone seven.

When I went to a writing retreat in June, I was confronted with just how busy my life was by the absence of busy-ness. Our schedule was so open I did not know what to do with myself. The weekend was slow, almost to a stop, and my mind could not handle it. I had to convince myself that pulling a lawn chair under a tree overlooking the mountains of Virginia was a perfectly good way to spend an hour. No one interrupted me. No one questioned my choice. It was the most relaxing hour of my summer, I think.

It reminded me of the one time I practiced yoga. I could feel my body resisting it from the beginning, as if to protest: “Sit here? For 30 minutes? No! We need to GO!” My muscles quivered and my brain tried to come up with any reason to get up and leave the room. It was hard work, telling my body to stop moving so fast, and by the time it was over, I was the most relaxed I had ever felt. (Why then have I not joined a yoga class? I, too, want to know the answer.)

Slow is not the coveted prize in our culture. (Try driving the speed limit or less and see how frustrated people get. I’m one of them.) Wherever we’re going, whatever we’re doing, we have to get there yesterday and once we’re there, we’re on to something else.

Where does it end?

I am not an expert on slowdown, nor do I welcome a forced stop (illness, injury, crisis) in my life.

But if I can choose fast, can I not also choose slow?

Note: I did not set out to write a series, but I’ve been thinking about a post on silence for a while. Today, I needed to write one about slowing down, if only to force myself to sit for longer than five minutes. Next, I’ll write that one about silence. That may be all there is to the series unless something else needs attention.

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These things I can’t forget

We’ve driven these roads dozens of times over the years, hauling children and their stuff back and forth between Pennsylvania and Illinois. They throb with the familiar, pulse with memories. The laughter, the tears, the twice-as-long-as-it-should-take trips, the smoother-than-expected ones.

When we weave through the mountains, my soul stirs at the beauty. We’ve seen them snow-covered and bare, shadowed in the pre-dawn light. Their beauty struck me anew this last time. Everything was so brilliantly green. The sun was already casting its light on the mountains. My breathing slowed, my mouth temporarily agape.

We know what we are in for when we cross the state line into Ohio. Mostly flatness, but even this has its own kind of beauty. As a child of the flatlands, acres of farmland stretching as far as my eyes can see will always spark feelings of home. The hours across Ohio are some of the most uninteresting of the trip, and yet my breath catches for a different reason.

I will never forget what happened here.

Photo by Rucksack Magazine on Unsplash

—

I’m not always good at remembering but when I am, I seem unable to forget.

The memories flash in my mind as if they happened recently or are happening now. Sometimes I can feel the same feelings. It is both a gift and a burden.

—

On this stretch of Ohio road, I remember the wind and the ice, the trucks traveling faster than was safe. I remember the third lane, the one I shouldn’t have been in. I remember the days leading up to this trip, how I wallowed on the couch, ill, taking sick time from work before taking vacation days because I couldn’t break my fever, couldn’t conquer the cough.

We persisted with our trip, though, because it was crucial, we thought, to our future. Sometimes I wonder what would have been different if we had given in to the obstacles and turned around. Or canceled. But try as we might, we can’t change the past, no matter how much we might want to step into the memory and give warning. Or permission. What would I say to the girl pressing through illness and snowstorm to please the man she loved? I don’t always know. Sometimes I am still that girl.

I remember losing control of the car, the one that didn’t belong to me. I remember Phil saying, “It’s going to be okay” as the front of the car hit the concrete median at 75, how we spun, I think. How minutes earlier we were being passed by semis and how a fleeting thought was certain we would die. I remember seeing the back end of a pick-up truck glance our car. I remember coming to a stop on the opposite shoulder. We were upright. Alive. I had hit my head on the side window. A gallon of milk in the cooler had exploded, showering the interior with a white substance we at first couldn’t identify.

A man pulled up and asked if we were okay. He said help was on the way. Traffic streamed by as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t believe we were alive. I remember the officer interviewing me about my speed. He handed me a ticket. I remember the tow truck driver and how we squished into the seat together. I remember the phone calls Phil made, to his parents, to our pastor friend who was waiting for us in Pennsylvania.

I don’t remember much after that except that we removed what we needed from the car. We got a rental. And Phil drove the rest of the way, through the snow in the mountains with trucks passing us. I remember being tired and terrified.

All of these memories flood my mind when we drive that road in Ohio. Whether it is January or June, I can’t ever forget. It feels important to remember that it could have turned out so much differently.

—

It is an annual fact that our kids spend a couple of weeks in Illinois with their grandparents. When I tell people this, most other parents are jealous, even though we go months without seeing family. I don’t always understand the jealousy but I’m thankful that we have the opportunity. It is life-giving for the kids. And for us.

—

Our hometown has a festival every summer, near the Fourth of July. It is one of my favorite things. Last year, I got to go home for it for the first time in many years, thanks to a well-timed class reunion I didn’t want to miss. There is a fair, and food, a parade, fireworks and all the people you haven’t seen in ages. The whole town, it seems, comes out for some part of it. Did I mention its central theme is petunias? There are worse things.

I’ve attended dozens of Petunia Festivals in my life. A few stick in my mind. Like the year my best friend and I decided to ride the Zipper for the first time. We screamed the whole time and afterwards, she threw up behind one of the concession stands. There were the years I was on some kind of official assignment for the newspaper. The years our summer softball team rode on top of a fire truck in the parade.

The pancake breakfast is always a highlight. Eating a stack of pancakes and a side of sausage under a tent near the river, shooing away flies, sweltering in the heat. It sounds awful when I describe it, but it’s a tradition. Last year, we took my grandpa with us. I sat across from him and smiled every time someone stopped to greet him. He was a teacher in the local school system, then manager of the Dairy Queen, then a pharmacy driver. He was a character everyone seemed to have a story about, quick with a joke, and with the kind of memory that surprised you for a nonagenarian.

When our weekend came to a close, we took this picture.

I didn’t know it would be our last. Our last group picture: my kids and my grandparents. Our last memories of pancakes in the park, of stories of Grandpa “babysitting” the kids (or maybe it was vice versa) and accompanying them and my mom on a tour of our hometown’s parks.

My kids are in Illinois right now and this is what I am thinking of. How this time last year, they were having a blast with all of their family and none of us knew that three weeks later, we’d be back in Dixon for a funeral.

—

Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash

I think this is how July will always be for me: joy in the beginning, grief lurking in the shadows, waiting its turn. Maybe this is how all of life is: seasons of joy and sadness, celebration and grief. Maybe all memories hold a mixture of emotions and not a single one can be classified as only “good” or “bad.”

Were the good memories all good and the bad memories all bad? I’m not sure anymore.