love
Letters from camp
When I visited my parents last week, my mom brought out a pile of childhood arts and letters she set aside as keepsakes over the years. The basement had flooded in a bad hailstorm and the construction paper and mimeographs and report-cards-on-cardstock of my sisters and mine were threatened by the damp air.
She encouraged us to take our pieces back home. I found some watercolors I did as a teenager that weren’t half bad. We stumbled on several long lost family photos. Mom and Dad got to re-read heartfelt Mother’s Day and Father’s Day wishes. But the most fun came after we unearthed two letters my younger sisters, Chris and Karen, mailed home from Girl Scout camp one miserable Wisconsin summer.
Michael reveled in backcountry trips he took around the Texas Hill Country with Mr. Joe and the rest of the Georgetown Parks and Rec team. Paige’s complaints the year she joined them on a kayak and camping trip to Big Bend pale in comparison to those my younger sisters made of Chalk Hills Camp in Wausaukee. Both Michael and Paige later worked as camp counselors themselves at Balcones Springs.
The next time the kids start telling stories about their “character-building” childhood experiences and Mark’s and my role in deciding that they had to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways — well, I’m ready with these little classics.
Mom doesn’t remember her reaction to getting them. “I think they were coming home pretty soon after that,” she mused.
From Chris:
Tuesday, Aug. 5
Dear all,
Everyone is pretty homesick here. Karen has been crying a lot. She hasn’t been feeling too well. The bug has been flying around; it got into our tent last night.
Monday night everyone in our tent was crying of homesickness and mostly of the “friendly” counselors. Ha! The only one I like best is Baters.
Monday for lunch our patrol, Baters “Twick suel Jayujayleys” went on a bike hike to the dam and had lunch there and swam for about 10 minutes. There, I got a picture of a chipmunk eating some of our bread we gave it. I was about 2 ft away from it.
I finally found out my part in the play of Mary Poppins. I’m Michael but I don’t want to be in a musical where the parts are favored. They tell us to be fair!
Just as I was writing this letter, yours & Peg’s letter came in.
Karen Hart got stung by a bee.
Today, Karen’s unit (or patrol) is going on an overnight. I made a nature stationery, so the next time I write, I’ll use it.
A guy is here with his cameras. He’s going to [take] pictures all afternoon.
Sue has got a letter for Peg you can send up to her. I don’t know the address.
I better sign off now for tent inspection.
The weather cooled off, rain, too.
Love ya,
Chris
P.S. Can you write separate letters for Karen cause we don’t see each other often. Thanks.
From Karen:
30/31
Dear Mom and Dad,
It’s real hot up here. It took from 10 to 10 [9:50 a.m.] – 12:37 with a 20 minute stop at Clintonville. We went on a dumb treasure hunt that took us around the camp when it was boiling out and we ended up with a free swim. That was yesterday.
For today, it’s been good except my shoulder and my ears hurt when I talk.
We went for a swim and they put you back 2 or 3 steps. Liz is going in junior life saving and [they] put her in advanced beginners.
The food is good except the cornbread is rotten. Later, after rest hour, we’re going swimming and canoeing. We won a cleanest cabin award for the cleanest cabin.
If you want, you can send me more fungus stuff. The medicine says to apply four times daily. If Dad could write it out, it [would] be good. If you want me to, I’ll send along the medicine. I think I have fungus on my neck and I have it all over my face.
We went canoeing and the swimming alarm went. Someone just didn’t turn in their tag.
Love,
Karen
8/2
Dear Mom and Dad,
It rained yesterday while dinner but after dinner it didn’t rain. In our cabin, we have Tricia, Susan, Laura, Connie, Judy, Elizabeth, Karen. We sleep good except Cabin 2 is our alarm clock. They wake you up at 6:50. You don’t even need to wake up until 7:30 when the bell rings.
I had hopper yesterday. You have to set the table. You have to have perfect manners or they yell at you.
There is nothing real fun up here. You just go swimming and go to the arts and crafts center. Once we got to go boating in Michigan and the lost swimmer alarm went off. It was our leader’s tag that somebody else turned.
We had patrol and I’m patrol leader. I don’t want to be it, though. I’d rather be home than up here because it’s so boring.
I don’t ache much anymore except my toe. I smashed it going over the troll’s bridge when we were playing a game when somebody was leading us all around Chalk Hills camp.
The only time I get homesick is when you write letters or I write letters. I guess Peg is coming to camp tomorrow.
Love,
Karen
Here is a little more information about Chalk Hills, which was founded in 1939 and closed after the summer of 2001. Apparently other scouts have much fonder memories of camp than my sisters do.
The sibling experience
I didn’t tackle the sibling experience in my book about the first few years of Sam’s life. I didn’t feel it was my story to tell.
Many siblings of people with autism are starting to tell their stories. Paige and, especially, Michael enjoyed one book I picked up for them several years ago, The Ride Together. Paige wrote an essay for her nonfiction class at the University of Iowa that she will workshop at the Mayborn conference.
This young man shared his heartwarming story on YouTube.
Paige’s favorite lines:
“They thought he reached his fullest potential. He proved them wrong.”
“I play the big brother in the way I look out for him, but I still look up to him.”
Purple joy
Always a reporter, never a source (except maybe once)
For about six months in 1997, this tapestry lay over the table in the breakfast room at our house as we worked with two other couples and a high school student to turn it from bits of amazing fabric to the beautiful design you see here.
It is one of the five large tapestries that hangs during the Easter season at our church, St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church in Lewisville. Three are conceived as panels in the main display, two more flank the sanctuary, and a sixth, smaller tapestry drapes over the altar.
For Easter season alone, we had to have enough volunteers to make the six tapestries. Multiply that by the many seasons of the church calendar — the bold red tapestries for Ascension and Pentecost (Sam’s favorites) hang for just two weeks — and you get the sense of what a barn-raising that was.
Mark announced in 1996 that he wanted to convert, something apparently he had been quietly thinking about for years. In the early 1990s, we’d found a good church home in Sacramento, at St. Francis, during, of all things, the time when they were retrofitting the sanctuary for earthquakes and Mass was being held in the school gym. Mark said he hadn’t known such a spiritual home when he was growing up, which always made me a little sad. I know there were times as a child I didn’t get what church was about, but there were times that I did.
The first year after Mark died, I came to help switch out the tapestries between Lent and Easter. There was a team of volunteers who did it regularly and they welcomed me. Once they knew I was part of the team that stitched it together, I got peppered with questions, as if they were historians that had just stumbled upon the best primary source ever.
They had a burning question. Was is true, that one of the Easter tapestries had a bit of a parishioner’s wedding dress on it?
Yes, I said, pointing to the tapestry that we had made.
Now, don’t get excited, dear Internet people, it wasn’t a piece of my wedding dress. Mark and I were such hipsters back in the day, I made our get-married-barefoot-on-the-beach-in-Kona clothes of a buttery linen. This tapestry is filled with bridal fabrics, but full of shiny silks and satins and sparkly lames and organzas.
Two Dominican nuns designed the work and set up all the volunteers with the patterns and fabrics needed. They included a little extra for errors.
Our team didn’t quite cut all the fabric at once, which we maybe should have, but we were also worried about losing track of some pieces. By the time we came to the very last piece, there wasn’t quite enough of the creamy white, rich brocade the sisters intended. We nearly panicked. No matter which way we turned the piece of remaining fabric and pattern, we couldn’t make it work.
Marcy, one of the volunteers, studied it closely. “It looks like my wedding dress. I bet I have enough fabric left,” she said. We were stunned when she brought the piece the next week. It was almost a dead ringer for what the sisters had given us to use.
We decided to sew it on and tell the sisters later. They thought it was a great solution, but the story still turned into church folklore. As my friend, Donna Fielder says, now that I am too old to die young, I see that’s what people do with certain stories.
Each Easter season, I get a little misty when I see this tapestry, knowing that Mark’s signature is on the back with mine and that of our friends and knowing the year the tapestry was started was the year he was welcomed into the church.
Random thoughts from the Possum Kingdom 20K
Running 4.5 hours of a 20K equals 17 miles, plus or minus. This proves that lesson from my parents that there’s a price to pay when you don’t think for yourself and just follow the guy in front of you. (But it did make up for the marked-too-short Easter 5K in Cowtown.) The wildflowers were many and the trail was varied, if you consider alternating between sand, rock and hills varied. The air was fresh and clear. Once it was filled the sweet, tangy smell of just-made cedar chips. Another time a smokey smell wafted our way, and then we realized it was just medicinal. Some runners wore “For Boston 4-15-13” shirts. When I got home, I started a batch of kolaches. And, let me say this: compression socks. 
UPDATE: On the way home from Possum Kingdom, we saw a dad helping his kid fly a kite. It was a great day for kite-flying and I remembered this video Mark shot with the kids one day not long after we moved here. Susan said kite-flying is a dad thing.
Again, this is something Paige rescued from the nearly magnetized tapes so it isn’t the best quality, but it’s nice to hear Mark’s voice. If you can hang out til the end, both bugs and more tennis shoes make it on screen.
Lullabies are the original love songs
If you are even a wee bit Irish, or Irish in spirit, this little gem — an old lullaby from the Emerald Isle — will grab your heart.
Recorded on the old Shakey’s Pizza Parlor piano via iPhone.
Can’t get more heartfelt than that.
Smart as a 5th grader #6
3-5-99
At the middle school gym, I made 5 shots. They only give you 50 tries. But 5 shots is OK. Jamie made 25 shots, that is good. It’s pretty fun at the basketball hoop shoot.
3-22-99
This spring break I went to Colorado and there was snow. I went to my grandma’s house. I stood there from Monday to Saturday. It takes about a day to get there from my house.
3-26-99
This weekend, coming up, I will probably go places tomorrow. On Sunday, I’ll rest. I might go a lot of places, but I don’t know, but both the days, I will watch TV. I can’t go a lot of places on Sunday because Sunday is a day of rest.
3-29-99
Jake is 11 years old. I’m invited to his party. I don’t know where it will be, but it’ll be a good place to have a party. I’m gonna have fun!
4-1-99
Yesterday, I went on a field trip. I went to UNT. I described animals and did a dig. I also did fun stuff and went to the sky theater.
4-8-99
My favorite relative is Don Heinkel. I call him Grandpa because he’s my grandpa. I love him a lot. That’s why he’s my favorite relative.
Parenting is a contact sport
Some people like to claim their gray hair comes from things their kids did. I see my scars and remember.
I have a long skinny scar that runs from knuckle to knuckle on my ring finger that came while digging in the garden with Michael. He felt so badly when he saw that his little shovel missed its mark and drew blood.
I was surprised how strong he was.
I’ve got a knot on my forehead from trying to help build a fence for the cashmere goats, a 4H project that lived here for 5-6 years. I got clubbed so hard by a round of woven fence wire that was hung up on a t-pole — almost spring-loaded, like a giant mousetrap — that it should’ve killed me. But the kids were all standing there, so I told myself to take the hit and keep on ticking.
Today I went to work with an odd-looking burn on my chin, like a permanent dribble of hot chocolate. I thought for sure at least Bj would say something, but no one asked.
Last night, Sam was determined to learn how to cook fish tacos. He dropped in the first battered fish strip from such a height, the frying oil splashed. Sam got a few splashes on his arm and I took one on the chin. But by the third strip, he was dropping it in perfectly.
Like Jason Robards character said in Parenthood, parenting is “like your Aunt Edna’s ass. It goes on forever and it’s just as frightening” and is unlike football, since there’s no end zone where you get to spike the ball and do your little dance.
Except he missed the part where parenting is a contact sport.
Another lullaby
Here she is. Jan DeGaetani singing Alec Wilder’s, The Seal Lullaby.
Ray Wright’s arrangement is amazing.
In the old days, they all helped my babies go to sleep.
Christmas Eve
No other holiday has a night before the way Christmas does. There’s this quiet that comes on Christmas Eve, if you let it. The more Christmases I celebrate, the more I like Christmas Eve.
Glass bulb, 2012
I try to make a lot of the presents we give instead of buy them. It forces me to plan ahead and, as a result, elevates the entire experience a little.
The kids and I have let some of our traditions evolve, too, so no one goes crazy trying to keep something going. When the kids were little, we made a gingerbread house and took it to preschool for the Christmas party. All the kids had fun picking it apart to take a piece home. When they got older, I made a one-dimensional piece for the mantel one year. Then I just made dough so the kids could make cookies. This year, Paige asked when she got home from the U of Iowa if there was any gingerbread dough in the freezer. There wasn’t, and we didn’t make any.
But on a whim, we stopped at the Russell Stover factory store in Terrell on the way to celebrate the season with Aunt Regina in East Texas. We bought a cardboard gingerbread house filled with peanut brittle.
New to the tree in 2012
We spent some time in downtown Kilgore, ate lunch at Nanny Goat’s Cafe, came back to Regina’s house and sang Christmas carols around the piano in the parlor. We played dominoes, too. We did cast a glance toward SantaLand on the way home (2.5 million lights strung along a driving trail in the East Texas woods), but saw the rush-hour-sized car line and took a pass. It had been a nice day. We didn’t need to spoil it.
Tonight, we are waiting for Sam to come home from work. He will help close the store. I had to work today, too. All that makes it hard to switch gears and make it to a candlelight service, but it doesn’t matter. We know how to do this. The serenity is settling in.
Happy Christmas everyone.
Great Hall, Wolfe House 2012