Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 78

Travelogue, Day 1: Headed Westward

We’re not even to the first stop sign in our neighborhood when Nicholas asks, “Are we in Kansas yet?”

For the first twenty miles, Julianna shouts every three minutes, “Hotel pool!” She only stops when the refrain changes to a pathetic, “Toilet! Toilet!” We have to make two bathroom stops in the first two hours, despite having put the kids on the toilet just before starting out. The third stop is at the home of some former neighbors we haven’t seen in five years. The kids play, we chat and snack, then get back on the road.

Five miles west of Topeka, the terrain changes abruptly, like the flip of a switch. Vast expanses of undeveloped land, sweeping hills, low grass punctuated by low shrubs. Then the switch flips again, and it’s like looking at home: uneven fields of corn and dense woodland. And then the prairies return, stealing my breath with the hazy green beauty.

For the first time I understand what it was that drew people to the frontiers, far from convenience and even safety. There’s a wild loneliness to the landscape that calls hearts overwhelmed by the chaotic buzz of urban life. To someone caged in by buildings and brick and mortar, all that open space looks like freedom.

West of Salina, where we stop for dinner at IHOP, we see a billboard advertising free land for residential and commercial use. Now that’s revealing. I didn’t think any land was free anymore, anywhere.

For twenty-three miles we drive through a wind farm–in one mile on one side of the highway, I count thirty-two. Hundreds of windmills, dwarfing more familiar windmills that sit spinning in the hot wind, even when there’s no farmhouse or barn anywhere to be seen. The terrain is not nearly as dull and unvarying as I remember.

Sat., June 22, 2013: Hays, KS to Estes Park, CO

My day begins, predictably, at 4 a.m. I lie in bed for almost an hour, trying to go back to sleep, but I can’t. Time to do some novel work by the sliver of light between the hotel curtains. We’re so far west in the time zone, it’s still pitch dark at 5:30, and the floodlight right outside the window is all the light I have to work by.

The bigger towns in Kansas seem to be at geographic break points. Leaving Hays, we see the first set of gates used to close the interstate during blizzards. And the terrain abruptly flattens out. But it remains greener and more lush than we expected.

10a.m. Mountain time, ten miles shy of the Colorado border, a crop duster and three semi trucks carrying blades for a wind generator (those things are so much bigger than they look! They made the semi look like a 3/4 size toy), we run out of distraction tools and have to pull out the junk food.

All morning, we have unfair amounts of fun at the expense of the world’s largest prairie dog, which sounds almost silly enough to get off the highway to see. Almost. We want to make it two hours without stopping for a change.

2:40 p.m.: It’s official! First sight of the Rockies! The haze is so thick, perhaps from the Colorado Springs fire, that we can’t see them until they are already looming over the power lines. They emerge from the horizon all at once.

We roll into Estes Park in the nick of time to attend Saturday Mass…but not in time to change clothes. I have never felt so conspicuous in my life. I am not only not dressed for church, I’m still dressed for hot plains weather, in short denim shorts and a tank top, and I spend most of Mass chasing a toddler who is equally inappropriately dressed and has been stuck in a car for two days. I could swear the guy behind us is giving us the evil eye. I take it as a lesson in humility and charity, my word of the year: a reminder that behind every judgment is a story you can’t know. It’s a reminder I desperately need, considering they sing “Colorado on my mind” by Merle Haggard as a Communion meditation–and half the assembly sings.

The view from our cabin window

After a dinner-and-breakfast grocery run, we arrive at our final destination: a cousins reunion at Overlook Ranch. It is perfectly still here, and the air smells vaguely sweet with the light scent of the ponderosa pines all around us. I know that however late I stay up this week, talking with cousins, I’m going to be up at 5:30 every morning to drink in the stillness. I’m already glad we’re here, even if they are warning us that there is a bear in the area, and it does visit the ranch.

Featured Recipe: Chrissy’s “throw-it-together” dressing for fajita salad:

1 part lime juice, including some pulp
1 part rice vinegar
chopped fresh cilantro to taste
2 parts olive oil
A “blob” of honey

Serve over a salad of greens, roasted  peppers and onions, grilled marinated chicken, black beans, avocado, cheese–whatever sounds good.

A Little Preview…

I’ll be back tomorrow for real, but today I wanted to share some thrilling news I received last week:

(Column is online here.)

Not only that, but a piece I wrote in Family Foundations, on vocations coming from NFP families, won second place for “Best Coverage of Religious Vocations to the Priesthood, Diaconate & Religious Life”. It’s been a very good week!

Going Dark

Rest (Photo credit: bobbybradley)

Since my reflections on stillness and busy-ness at the beginning of this week, I’ve been wrestling with how to make time for that important “emptiness.” I’ve decided to go dark for the next ten days or so. Blogging isn’t a huge time suck, but it’s forty to fifty minutes every time I post, and God willing, I can use that time to make room for a little soul food. See you in July.

DIY Project

I first saw these tiles at the home of a good friend of mine, and I fell in love with the idea immediately. So when I saw the image on Pinterest, I marked it for later use.  That pin has turned out to be far and away the most-commonly-repinned item on my boards.  Hardly a day goes by when it doesn’t get a pin. So now I’m creating my first original pin.

In any case, I had my eye on this project for Fathers Day, and the kids and I got it done, by the skin of our teeth. Needed:

Cricut machine
Cricut vinyl (it’s self-adhesive)
12-inch floor tile from Lowe’s

Most of the online tutorials recommend using Cricut Design Studio so you can create the whole thing on the computer and play with it until it’s just right, then cut the whole thing en masse and transfer it en masse. I do not have that program, so I muddled through the same way I do my scrapbook layouts: one letter at a time. However, I did rough it out on paper first:

I also did some test cuts on regular 8 1/2 x 11 paper first, to play with sizes, because I knew that this was a long quote with a lot of words, and it would be easy to cut them too big. As I got things settled in, I made notes on the paper about which cartridges and sizes to use when I started doing the real cuts. Incidentally, I used Storybook and Stone Script for the letters, and the shapes are all off Storybook. The kids did most of the button-pushing, but the transfer of the letters was all up to me.

(Challenge: right at the very end my Stone Script cartridge meandered into oblivion in the hands of one of my two youngest kids. It hasn’t showed up yet, which makes me very unhappy, but in the short run it meant I had to choose a different cartridge for one single letter that needed recutting. Can you find it? )

Finished project:

 

At The Edge Of The Field

It’s Friday afternoon and out in the country, the air smells sweet and cool. The sun has been disappearing, hour by hour, into haze and then cloud and, at length, a fully overcast sky. It’s Field Trip day. I’m parked along a gravel road with the windows open and a baby asleep on my shoulder while the boys ride with Grandpa as he finishes planting soybeans.

It’s been a good day. Low key for a field trip. Unstructured. We spent the morning running around the home place. The boys climbed on farm equipment; I explained how the seed drill works. An empty grain bin provided both a cool place to explore and an opportunity to learn something new: What exactly are all these augers and blowers and stirrers, and why are they necessary? On top of the combine Alex discovered a stowaway tree branch that snagged on the unloading auger on the way through a tight spot sometime last fall. Today, it became a gun, a sword and a baton by turns as we headed up the old cattle lot.

Nicholas, newly independent on the farm, tried to take the cattle guard at full speed and fell through. As an adult it’s easy to get across unscathed, and yet I remember how big a deal it was as a child, trying to get across those iron tubes without slipping between them up to my thigh. Nicholas was a-tremble and whimpery in the wake of his ordeal, but he recovered in time to play “drive” in the big water truck. Michael was so excited. A steering wheel! And a vinyl bench, covered with dust!

Meanwhile, the big boys found a scattering of gravel on the surface of a trailer. Nicholas started throwing rocks back out to the driveway, and Alex got a brain wave: he had Nicholas pitch rocks to him while he tried to use the stick as a baseball bat. I stood on the running board of the ancient water truck, laughing at how very “boy” my boys are, until it occurred to me that this was an inappropriate reaction, and I needed to stop the game before someone got hurt.

Then Grandma took us all for a ride around the “block” in the water truck, and as far as my boys were concerned it was a successful field trip as of that moment. We ate lunch, cut some lettuce to bring back home, and headed out to the field, beside which I sit now, enjoying an unexpected moment of calm. It’s not quiet, exactly, not with two tractors running in side-by-side fields. But there are no voices clamoring as they vie for attention. No top-of-the-lungs singing. Nothing being destroyed, rearranged or lost beneath my very nose. The only child with me is sleeping peacefully on my shoulder.

And it’s so restful. I’m thinking about taking a nap myself. I brought work with me: a column and the next scene from my novel, both loaded onto the NEO in the back seat. But right now it feels right to leave this block of time empty. There’s so little empty time these days. The last couple of weeks, my mind turns bedtime into a race through a maze of things left half-finished–and when you have four kids in the house, life is perpetually unfinished. The floor gets mopped, and an hour later there’s yogurt smeared on it again. The bathrooms get cleaned, and somebody flings toothpaste on the mirror by bedtime. Books awaiting repair after they got taken into the bathtub. Mountains of health paperwork to file. And a novel to rework. The work is never done, and I toss and turn for an hour at least every night juggling it all, trying to be prepped for maximum efficiency.

At one time, I had honed the art of stillness. But in the past three years, my weekly visits to nature have gradually tapered off; I go next to never now. The child care never works out, or some deadline pops up, or a shopping trip has to get done that simply cannot be done with children in tow (read that “new shoes, having been put off for over a year and my feet now hurt”), and contemplative time gets preempted. And now the skill seems gone. I cannot quiet my mind. Not for long, anyway. Three or four seconds.

I’ve been learning to accept that in this season of life, that’s just the way it is. I’ve been pursuing the serenity to accept that what I think I need is not possible right now, and figure out how to function without it.

But sitting here now, my brain warring between the need for rest and the compulsion to be productive, I wonder if this is one of those things you’re supposed to change because you can, not one you accept gracefully because there’s no other choice.

The tractor sweeps toward me. It’s 2:15 and time to get back home in time to catch Julianna when the bus drops her off after summer school. My interlude lasted fifteen minutes, but it was enough to wake me up to what I have lost, and what I must, once again, try to find.

Sunday Snippets

Joining up with RAnn and co. over at Sunday Snippets: A Catholic Carnival. Happy Father’s Day!

My “Catholic” post this week is about the sacrament of Reconciliation.

I also posted the façade of my refrigerator, because it so encapsulates my life, and in my 7QT this week I reflected on marriage and whether or not my youngest really needs speech therapy.

Messes, Marriage and Speech Therapy (a 7QT post)

___1___

I am beginning to accept an incontrovertible truth: if there is a mess to be made, Michael will make it. Wednesday morning, he turned over a cooler half full of water and ice, which we’d been too busy to empty after taking snacks to baseball Tuesday night (that was the end of a marathon day: 3 doctor appointments, a piano lesson, and baseball). It took two bath towels and a beach towel, all dripping, to clean it up. Then Thursday he found a bottle of bubbles and dumped it on the floor. I’m growing to dread the slosh of liquid.

___2___

My cousins are planning a get-together. There’s a zip line on site, but it has a 120-pound weight limit. I emailed: “Hey, is that the right number? I’m pretty sure none of us are under 120 pounds, even me, and I’ve lost weight. “

Another cousin wrote back, “I was thinking the same thing…but without the smiley face.”

(Turns out it’s a zip line for kids. Boo.)

___3___

Who’s in charge in your marriage? That’s a trick question, btw. I ask because we often come away from a family get-together with the uncomfortable sensation that each family thinks the in-law is the controlling force in the house. We think that probably means we have a pretty healthy relationship.

___4___

But I got to thinking: we defer to each other in situations and on topics that many couples don’t. Like the other night, we hadn’t had a chance to talk through the evening before I dropped Alex off at baseball, so I called Christian on his cell phone at 6:30 p.m. He was coaching at first base and answered his phone, and apparently got ribbed a bit for it. Last week we heard a “comedy” routine about women who give their husbands allowances. (It wasn’t funny at all; it was a bit nauseating, truth be told.) Then I think of women I’ve recently heard describe male behavior that would be unthinkable in our house. And then I think it’s a wonder that every marriage doesn’t implode, if that’s how women and men treat each other.

___5___

Smiley face changed (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, anyway. As I said, Tuesday was a marathon. Michael saw the ENT, who scheduled him for tubes. Despite the persistent ear infections, Michael passed his hearing screening with flying colors. But the ENT was unhappy with the fact that he has no words. “He’s eighteen months old and he’s at a twelve month speech level,” he said. “You need to enroll him in speech therapy.”

___6___

This kind of edict doesn’t sit well with me. I’m really not one of those moms who flips out when her kids don’t do everything exactly on time. I mean, I’ve had Julianna. I know a real delay when I see one…don’t I?

___7___

Then again.

I sat in that office with three children fighting over a the same chair and the fourth one trying to flip the switches on the $15,000 piece of equipment and thought, first: Whoa, I think it’s time to reconsider the “taking all the kids along to the doctor’s office” policy. Next, I had a little argument with myself about putting Michael in speech therapy at eighteen months old.

Pro: He is getting to the tantrum stage.

Con: But then, we haven’t taken the time to really make him sign.

Pro: It’d be lovely to get him talking a bit!

Con: all our kids have been late talkers, and now they won’t shut up. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with him. He just hasn’t had the one-on-one interaction the way some of the others have.

Pro: this would give him that one-on-one.

Con: the reason he doesn’t get that one on one is because life is already a zoo; how could we possibly add more?

Pro: I’d like him to talk ASAP.

Con: speech therapy really didn’t help Julianna much until she got into preschool; I can’t help thinking even she talked when she was ready, and all the therapy in the world can’t force the issue.

Net result: Need input! Thoughts?

Addendum: we’ve spent this week making Michael sign, and it’s amazing how much he already knows.

Wordless Wednesday: My Refrigerator, My Life

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Go on, click on them. I uploaded them full size so you could blow them up and read them. It’s another busy day, so off I go!

Free Write: My Bookworm (i.e., why I’m grateful for good librarians)

Open Book Gateway (Photo credit: srqpix)

I love having a real reader in the house. A bona-fide, chapter-book-devouring, one-third-of-the-way-through-summer-reading-in-seven-days reader. But you know what? If I didn’t put my foot down, he’d read nothing but superheroes. Graphic novels, picture books, chapter books–doesn’t matter. As long as it’s a Transformer or a or a LEGO Heroes Factory or a DC or Marvel hero, he’s all over it. Ask him to read Prince Caspian and you get The Look.

The second graders had a reading challenge in April. The top readers got prizes. Alex read three hours the first day, and then a few days later he got sick and had to stay home from school for a day. Another three hours. I thought he had this thing in the bag, but a couple of girls beat him by almost a thousand minutes. (Gnash gnash gnash.)

Anyway–in preparation for this reading challenge, I stopped one of the children’s librarians at the public library and asked her for suggestions. She gave me a whole list, and I took home four (non-superhero) books. The rule was: one superhero book, followed by one not.

See, I remember how I was when I was younger. Brace yourselves, I’m about to show the true extent of my geekdom. For about six years, I read almost nothing but Star Trek novels.

Yeah, I did just admit that in public. The first step is to admit it, y’know.

Now, I still like Star Trek–the new ones more than the old, I must admit–but I wouldn’t ever want any child of mine to be as myopic as I was. I missed so much good literature because I stuck with characters I knew and formulas I could count on to entertain. I didn’t want to branch out and take a risk. So I boxed myself in.

I love superheroes (though comic books and graphic novels make me want to hurl myself off a cliff; there’s way too much visual clutter in there; I can’t even figure out how to read them), and I’m happy to have Alex read about them. But not a steady diet. Let’s get some green veggies in there, too, boy. You might just discover you like them.

Since school let out, Christian has graduated Alex to some of his graphic novels, and it’s getting harder than ever to pry him away to something else. So this morning, we walked straight up to the children’s desk and accosted the same librarian who helped two months ago. She rose to the occasion beautifully, walking him all over the juvenile section to get him things that will feel like superheroes, but aren’t. Alex came back with a stack of ten chapter books. Ten. For an eight-year-old. And that works out, because the rest of the kids sure didn’t need to come back to the library after one week. Maybe this stack will last him two. Although he read three of them before bedtime. Oh well.

In the meantime, I’m just grateful for librarians who have a passion for their work. What would we do without them?

One for the Catholics: Talk To Me About Confession

Passiontide – Penance (Photo credit: Lawrence OP)

I have a question for you today, my Catholic readers. What is your experience of the sacrament of Reconciliation?

See, I have this vision of the sacrament, in which it can be so much more than it generally turns out to be. In my vision, it’s a back and forth, a conversation that takes the confessor’s training and wisdom and meshes with my questions and insights (such as they are) in order to guide my journey forward with a penance that helps to direct that journey.

In reality, Confession is usually awkward and perfunctory. I rattle off a list and am given a penance that involves a couple of Hail Mary’s or a prayer that requires basically no sacrifice at all, and thus seems inadequate for helping me overcome the habitual sins I keep bringing to the confessional.

As I write, I realize how much what I’m actually looking for is spiritual direction and not the sacrament of Reconciliation at all. I also know the grace of the sacrament is not dependent upon the level of my emotional fulfillment.

Still, I’m curious: am I the only one who wants more out of Reconciliation than I ever feel like I get? Is my problem with Reconciliation my own fault? Is it perfunctory because something about my approach makes it that way? Is there another way to present your sins than rattling off a list? Those of you who have a regular confessor, how did you begin and develop that relationship, and how does it work?

The floor’s open.

Related articles

My Side of the Confessional: What Is It Like for a Priest? (saintpatrickk.com)
Go to Confession regularly (supertradmum-etheldredasplace.blogspot.com)