Proud of My Family

Four Generations

Pearce and Cole were eating lunch at our dinner table and my laptop was sitting there as it usually is. The screen saver was going with all my pictures, they were watching and commenting, and one popped up and both boys exclaimed almost simultaneously: Wow, Mommy looks so pretty!

Uplifting Moment

In Walmart, I looked into the greeter's eye as I entered the store. You know the one who stands there tirelessly with a smile on her face and sees hundreds a day go by. I also watched other shoppers entering the store that never took even a first look at her but she still smiled and said hello. I decided to experiment and actually look at her, smile, say hello and keep eye contact until I was past her. She looked happier it seemed. I hoped so.

I was only there for one small item so came back through pretty quickly. This time she made constant eye contact like we had something in common and with a much brighter smile wished me a good day.

I was in there a couple of days later and she was on duty again. This time she stopped talking to the person who was occupying her time, asked me if I was having a great day, and looked really happy to see me. And so, since then, we have had many greetings, never conversations because none are needed. She felt uplifted because, as a customer, I recognized her as a human being and I'm uplifted because I learned how much just a small gesture can make a person feel more appreciated.

A Rainy Day

What I do on a rainy day, this being of no particular interest but me. When I was a young girl my rainy days consisted of cutting out recipes from my Nanis' torn-out-of-magazine collection. Then I would carefully glue both the picture and recipe on one page and put it in a notebook. This was the start of my all-consuming passion for cooking.

I would go through the Sears catalog and, having 4 brothers and 2 parents, with a counting system I can't remember, initial the product that each of us would get. Kind of like eeny-meeny-miney-mo. Out of the 7 products, whoever got the best, won. Anal you might say. This was the start of my passion for shopping on the internet.

I read the dictionary cover to cover. We had the kind that used the words in sentences so I also built a little bit of a vocabulary as well, not to mention learning to spell pretty well. This was the start of my passion for reading more interesting things, like fiction.

Flash forward to the present and in the same little house, I might add, I have new rainy day favorites. I now cross stitch for no one in particular, just the things that appeal to me. They might go in a drawer, or if someone likes what I've done, they can take it. I just finished a Christmas stocking for Cade, Dori's son; a ballerina for Claire, Derrick's daughter; and am doing an outside scene with a gold bird landing in a field of wild grass.

I still read fiction voraciously with my taste leaning toward action thrillers, same as my movie taste.

I plan trips on Microsoft Streets and Trips, both camping and bed & breakfasts. This I would say is my greatest passion and most probably comes from my childhood unrainy days. When we took trips to Minnesota, Washington and California with many states between, as we arrived at a gas station, we 5 kids would pile out of the car, into the office, and get a state map apiece (they were free). I proceeded to mark our course as we traveled along the highways (there were no interstates then) which is something I still do to this day. I have an atlas that I mark when I get home and there are road tracings in every state except Alaska of vacations I've been on.

I love rainy days! They are when all my passions crash together.

She Made Me Eat My Words

When we found out Dori was having our second grandchild, I preached to her, same as when Pearce was born, give them their own name. Don't name them Jr. or the III or just plain Frank, like what Pearce ended up with as a first name. And her Dad, Donald, preached the same thing. Give them individuality - even though we named both Derrick and Dori after Donald, his second name and theirs also. Derrick is Derrick Ray and Dori is Dori Rhea.

So they went about looking for the perfect name as all parents do and they came up with Cole, another really cool name like Pearce. But they couldn't think of a name to go with it, so on the day Cole was born he still did not have a second name.

On the third day of Dori and Cole's stay at the hospital, we went to visit and Dori told us she had signed the birth certificate. They had named him Donald Cole. I immediately gulped and broke out into tears, which in turn did Dori. She was crying because she thought I was upset about giving him just plain Donald as a name and once again naming him after someone. I was so absolutely blown away with love-abiding emotion and honor that the poring of tears was unpreventable and this has become a top 5 joyous moment.

Then this past spring break Pearce and Cole stayed with us for about 4 days and while Cole was here, for some insane reason, he told us he wanted to be called Donald from now on. We'll probably never hear that again because I think he was especially enamored with his Ada (all the guy stuff they were doing) but the joy goes on.

The Only Way to Go

There is such a variety of vacations people can take and most don't ever experience all they can because they just don't know what's available and just how to go about it.

To clarify, I'm only going to talk about my adult life vacations because my parents took my 4 brothers and I on many since my Dad's families lived in Minnesota, Washington, and California . . . with distant relatives at points in between.

My first perfect vacation is one that I suspect most mothers don't attempt. It was in the late 70s and Derrick and Dori were 12 and 6 respectively. Donald had a job that he thought couldn't live without him for more than a week at a time and I wanted to go see my brother in Washington which was going to take at least 2 weeks. This not counting our stops at landmarks like Mount Rushmore, Custer's last stand, Yellowstone on the way. And then on the way home, I couldn't pass up Las Vegas where Dori could stroll past the swimming pool at Caesar's Palace and pretend a great play (going on only in her mind but fun to watch.) It was Donald's suggestion that we take this trip without him, making him the most non-controlling, trusting husband a woman could want to be married to.

And that started the whole thing. Donald never liked driving for long distances and I was born and bred to wander, since I am from Viking stock. So my journeys have covered all 48 contiguous states many times and Maui.

I've been on perfect vacations where I took my kids, one of their cousins, and Donald's mother. I've been on perfect vacations where I took my parents and my kids. I've been on short vacations with just Dori and I and we've also spent lots of fun weekends in bed and breakfasts together.

And my most perfect vacations have been totally alone. I find that myself is the most interesting person for myself to talk, sing and laugh at. We've had many one-on-one conversations and come out with quite a few answers to many others' problems. I laid on a picnic table at the top of a mountain reading a book for an hour; I sat on a roadside watching children play on haystacks while their Dad pitched the hay into a wagon drawn by a tractor; I have had a glass of wine, eaten my dinner and read my book in a window seat at a restaurant next to a beautiful lake as the sun set; I've climbed a glacier; I laid down by a river in high grass and took a nap in sweet smelling wild flowers with the sun warming my face; I have walked trails that no one else would want to; I've settled for a bag of Cheetos for lunch because I was in the middle of nowhere with only a gas station that sold Cheetos and gas; I've stayed in little Route 66-style motels; I've driven only country roads or highways (the best being without shoulders); I've played games like stopping every 100 miles to take a photo no matter where that might be; and on and on. Alone is great because a companion wouldn't share all the time spent stopping to do nothing at all.

When I'm 100 and bittersweetly thinking about my journeys, the one that will stand out most will be the one where I took 2 weeks to wander driving through the Dakotas, Glacier National Park in Montana, and then picking Donald up at the airport in Bozeman with all of his clothes and flyfishing paraphernalia intact in the trunk of my car. We stayed in a mountain lodge, he fly fished, I read books, then he got back on that plane, flew home and I followed in the car, taking about a week to get home.

The Clock Winked

Daylight savings time just began this weekend. I don't get it. Donald and I argue about when it's time to get up and time to go to bed. For me it's like jet lag - if yesterday I went to bed at 10:00 pm and tonight I go to bed at 10:00 (which was only 9:00 pm last night) I can't go to sleep. Same as getting up in the morning - if I usually get up at 5:30 and now my inner alarm wakes me up at 4:30 because I think it's 5:30 isn't it still really early? He immediately adjusts. But here I sit typing out this blog at 10:40 pm when it's only 9:40 and he's sound asleep in the adjacent room in 10:40 time.

And those people in the next campsite who are still raucously having fun think it's only 9:40 pm and they have until 10:00 to be quiet - don't they know it's after 10? Daylight savings time is really confusing for a lot of people. However, I bet the horses, cows, sheep, birds and various other animals don't care what time it is because they are on the schedule set by God. I wonder what a bird who flies from one time zone to another feels - do they get confused by needing to be back to feed their baby birds by 5:00? I think we humans totally confuse our lives by all these rules.

Don't get me wrong, I love it when the day lasts longer into the night. But when you're already an early riser, the day is dark until much later into the morning.