First Snow

Nearly six years ago Beatha and Jameson experienced their first winter snow, in Pittsburgh, without us.  That's a long story buried in blog posts of past.  Today, though, I got to enjoy watching Jameson watch Bear experience his first day as a pup in the fluffy white stuff.  I know, I know, it's not even Thanksgiving, yet, and it makes a slushy mess of the yards and roads, and I realized that my younger daughter didn't own any boots that fit and we needed to buy some ice melt for the driveway, but there is something always beautiful to me about snow.  So, out in my jammy pants I went with the camera in tow.

Pouncing,

and watching it carefully.

There's more snow over there, and right down there.

Man, this stuff is everywhere.  Hey, look, it's falling out of the sky!

Can you see me?

Huh?  Watchudoin'?

J, take me in -- I'm wet, and my paws are cold.  

It's time for a warm, snuggly nap.

And then, I'm gonna tackle this again with Baylor -- eat it and smash it down.  I'll master it somehow.  This yard is mine to own, if only it wasn't so wet on my bare little feet.

Home (The Whimsical Installment)

Home gives us a sense of place, which I've come to realize is something I treasured about my old, brick Aquin High School, the truly historic buildings of Eureka College, the rolling hills of countless trees and mining towns in Cambria County, PA, the cityscape of Pittsburgh, and more specifically, the tight intimacy of the row houses in the Bloomfield neighborhood, as well as (blush) the Great Hall at Hogwarts, the quaint, winding Diagon Alley, and lived-in coziness of the Weasleys' Burrow.  So, in addition to the cleansing of some old stuff from the Cluver decor collection, the process of making our oldest house yet come to life, I cut loose with the new items I added and the arrangements I chose.  It's just stuff, but it makes me happy.

The large canvas on an even larger platform of distressed boards is an idea I stole from a magazine for this over-sized mantel, and I knew that as we moved into the benefits of small town living that a cityscape would offer a nice balance.  My choice, of course, is Pittsburgh, and where to go for the image -- my amazing cousin, Jessi!  

The addition of this lamp keeps the Steel City theme going in this living room along with the long-loved metal frames we moved from our Forsyth home.

And in those frames we've always had pictures of "home."  In these first two the seemingly dichotomous elements that informed my hometown of Freeport -- dairy farms in the immediate area and stretching far into Wisconsin and the trickle over from Chicago several hours to the east.

The bridge that, in our era at Eureka College, connected the residential side of campus to the academics and dining on College Avenue.

This frame had in it the smiley face water tower of Watseka, but now that it is a part of our daily lives, this frame is now for an image of our home of Forsyth.  This pic is a bit different than the others and may be replaced in time with a different image from there, but the kids requested a night time view of coming into town from Maroa, "like on all those nights coming home from basketball games when we were little."  So, this mama stood out along the highway lookin' like a weirdo or God knows what, walking and snapping pictures.

The storm windows we salvaged ten years ago when we had new windows installed at the Forsyth house moved with us, and they're now painted with mirror paint and lend some reflected light to the tall stairwell area, but with an aged, mottled look to the glass.

This unusual beauty I snagged from Hobby Lobby on an "all mirrors are 50% off" sort of day.  It's a nearly full-length mirror in the upstairs hallway, which is functional for checking the fit of one's attire, and it's a little whacky -- I half expect a wizard of eras past to appear within the wooden scrollwork to offer his opinion. 

With a bigger master bedroom, we splurged to upgrade from the 20 years in a double bed (yes, double -- not queen) to a king size cruise ship of slumber.  There are still a few more touches I will add in here (like a shelf running the width of that center wall, above the narrow closet doors and lantern...maybe for an owl cage and old books?), but it's got a good start toward cozy and interesting.

One never knows when a potion will be necessary -- to cure flesh wounds or 

to unpetrify someone who has seen a basilisk.  Bezoar has too many uses to list.  

Skele-gro for broken bones, Moon Dust, and then my two favorites  .  .  .

"Liquid Luck," about which one is warned "Giddiness, recklessness, and 

dangerous overconfidence if taken in excess."

Truth serum.  

Pinterest grabbed my attention, and I couldn't resist this for the laundry room.

We inherited this long, wonderful, enclosed front porch; yet, it posed, 

for awhile, a decorating challenge...

...until we broke it into zones, using beloved old furniture and the purchase of 

a new bench to create a sitting area,

and paired a wonderful library table left by the previous owners 

(thank you, Bramstedts!) with some of our extra chairs.

We found it a good place to put to use some of my many trunks that 

have been used in different rooms of our past houses.

A simple faux-grass wreath on the front door, a sea grass mat to welcome feet from outside, 

and a white-washed old crate to catch the mail.

Then the porch turned to fall with great fun had by me .  .  .

Additional, frivolous pics to come as I get the chance to punch up a few more rooms (and/or if the kids clean theirs satisfactorily enough to photograph).  In the meantime, happy last week and a half of autumn to you and yours as we approach the day of gratitude for harvest, health, and home. Then, it will be the season of preparation for winter holidays, and I'm thinking the porch trunks would look great with some "brown paper packages tied up with strings"...and black script inked upon them.  I haven't yet figured how to pull off, conveniently and effectively, floating candles for our hallway  . . .  Hmm  .  .  .

(P.S. To clarify, the "potions" are decorative elements inspired by Pinterest.  While the threat of being fed 

silver glitter and beads suspended in hand gel might scare the truth out of someone, 

that Veritaserum is unlikely otherwise to possess any efficacy.)

Home (Installment Two)

A mere three days after my chat with Archana (see below for the first installment of  "Home"), my daily email meditation from Father Richard Rohr contemplated the inner God.  As in the swami's "inner picture."  Woo-OOO-ooo  .  .  .  It's what the eight-year-old version of my sister would have called "psychic" (I say with sincere, nostalgic affection), and today she and I call it "the universe being aligned."  Call it what you will, it means I'm supposed to pay attention -- a Hindu swami and a Roman Catholic priest both speaking a universal truth about the good, the power, the innate wisdom, the God inside each of us.

Rohr's post began by quoting Leonard Baillas, "'The supreme achievement of the self is to find an insight that connects together the events, dreams, and relationships that make up our existence,'" and he then elaborated about our need for a personal storyline with integrating images to define us and to give our lives meaning and direction (original text paraphrased closely).  "A great story pulls you inside of a universal story...From that hidden place you are 'healed.'"

About that healing -- Rohr argued that our lives come "full circle, and we return to where we started, but now transformed."

It seems to me that in a new phase -- mid-life, empty-nest, new job, what have you -- we have the chance to start out "new," but knowing what we now know.  We have, in our best, luckiest moments and transitions, a more sophisticated clarity that sees through the noise that previously inhibited us from seeing that we've always been who we are, and that is, was, and always has been good and enough.

My storyline began as Sherry Ann Jones, born in Pittsburgh to a native (immigrant "native") of the coal-mining hills of Cambria County and one of Pitt's Bloomfield Neighborhood.  Many members of the extended Miller and Jones families still live in those respective homelands.  As for Little Sherry, she had been left behind in a past world prior to my parents' divorce, and from there emerged Sherry Finch, whose family forged a new life at 826 S. Park Blvd in Freeport, Illinois.  I obeyed and achieved my little heart to exhaustion and was accepted into the traditions and community of the Aquin Catholic School family.  Then, came Eureka College, where the Finch tradition was strong at the small, quaint campus of historic buildings and fabled rituals.  Being cut from the chain of ivy at college graduation left me to transplant myself in a seemingly amorphous adult world, and the steps forward left behind the veil of the past most of the previous phases and places.  

Remy, having taught in three different high schools, commented to me upon her family's move from Bloomington-Normal to her husband's hometown of Gibson City that some people grow deep roots and others grow theirs wide.  I understood what she meant.  We had Pennsylvania as well as Freeport and Aquin, and we had Eureka, and then she the twin cities (of Central Illinois) and I Maroa-Forsyth. We both maintained relationships and contacts in all of those homes.  Yet, certain aspects of those places appeared as beautiful autumn leaves on my tree that, when I looked up toward them, appeared to blow off the branch, swirling into the wind and out of reach.  The connection from base to stem tip was ever elusive.

Uncertain how successfully I might graft for myself a new branch, we set off on a new journey to live in my husband's hometown (as detailed in the prior post).  The surprise was -- bear with me for some more plant analogies -- that of pruning!  All of the heavy-duty as well as tedious work to sort, donate, pack, unpack, donate (more!), and attempt to arrange our overwhelming amount of belongings posed a lengthy, continuous task of deciding -- deciding what to give away, what to keep in storage because we just couldn't part with it or it might one day be repurposed, and which items gave us joy to see in our "new," old home (1872!).  It was exhausting and even a bit heart-breaking to realize that there were many items that I could only display if I cluttered the house.  Otherwise, it was off to the attic zone for "memory stuff that won't be out there":  some of the canvases the kids painted when they were younger, a portion of our Haiti artifacts, a couple of shadow boxes, the framed bass art (yes, as in fish) I bought for Chad early in our marriage as a promise that one day we'd buy our first house and he'd finally get his fishing-golf themed family room.  I know it was just stuff, but it was also a prolonged walk down 20+ years of memory lane and a process of focused discernment about which symbols our family wanted to witness in our new, daily lives.  The physical process created a metaphysical one.

The treasure chest of past lives was now in front of me as a singular, cohesive story.  It all had been here all along, and the perception of closed phases and "past" had been mere myth, connectivity obscured as the result of searching, achieving, and the ubiquitous distractions of keeping up with daily events and plans.  (Yes, the "trees-versus-forest" cliche.)

The very next day (10/9), when Rohr wrote on the precise topic of "Home," I was dumbstruck.  He discussed archetypal homes and connections to "mother," and referenced the soul as a "homing device," and continued with the idea that "what appears to be past and future is in fact the same home."

Later on that same afternoon, my TEDtalk email subscription came through, and the feature was a musical performance by Teitur:  "  .  .  .  Home is the song I always remembered.  Home is the memory of my first day of school.  Home is the books that I carry around.  Home is an alley in a faraway town.  Home is the places I've been and where I'd like to go  .  .  ."

From the inner God as meditation for managing a big life challenge to an essay and then a song about the particular challenge I was managing -- serendipitous!

Sitting in pause, letting these happenstances percolate through my mind, it struck me that I've played around with this notion of "home" my whole life.  The talk I shared with my fellow Aquin H.S. graduates at our baccalaureate breakfast twenty-four years ago was a cliche of naive proclamations about how fabulous I felt we were and the traditions I believed we fulfilled during the grand challenges of the high school years.  (Cue eye roll.  It was gross. Perhaps when I get my Aquin book project completed in a couple of years, I'll give myself a re-do in the epilogue.)   I was overwrought with emotion, I admit sheepishly; yet, I also admit that at a nest-leaving moment, the quote I borrowed from Oliver Wendell Holmes was actually fitting:  "Where we love is home -- home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts."

I revisited that notion decades later with a quote I framed in the mudroom of our Forsyth house -- from Maya Angelou, "You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right."  I just checked out the context of that quote and found that there is more, and it gets even better -- "  .  .  .  And yet it is innate in human nature to try to go home again, and it may in fact be what life is all about:  getting back to home, back to death, and then out of death and back to life."

Dr. Maya gives us a fuller and messier reality than that of soft nostalgia.

Gazing around my new home office, I see so much now collapsed into this space, carefully placed and deliberately chosen -- a bottle of beach sand from the last time I visited my first dad in his new Florida home before he passed away, one of the rosaries my mom wore in her years as a nun near Pittsburgh, a figurine from my Grandma Miller's house in the coal-mining Alleghenies.

The essay my Dad Finch wrote to my sister and I about us being his tiny "Christmas angels" and the Freeport murder-mystery novels he's recently published.

My diplomas from Aquin, Eureka, and Illinois State.

A pencil sketch of me drawn by college friend, Anthony Newlin, from our days in the art studio at E.C..

A can of  "Grow a Tree," which was an inside joke from Dr. Olsen to us, the students in her master's history class at I.S.U.

A canvas about motherhood from friend, Colleen Dale, who helped us raise our children.

There's the "bleeding, dying Jesus" with his message of grace, mercy, and humility, the meditating Buddha letting go of earthly desires, and Ganesh, removing obstacles.

There is a shelf of India travel books, a framed print of the Hindu universal "Om," and picture of two of my children in South Asian garb, and immediately above this collection is a shelf that contains a cheap, plastic box frame holding four dried leaves.  These leaves I gathered from the autumn ground on my last visit to my childhood home on Park Blvd before my parents moved to Winnebago nearly a quarter century ago.  This tree had been the object of many of my reflections while growing up.  There had been in my old bedroom a deep-silled window that swung open near my bed, and on summer nights the short, sheer curtain swept in the breeze; I could look out from my pillow to see the huge, old tree with it's canopy of leaves covering the sky, waving and rustling in the darkness.  I don't know that it ever gave answers to my adolescent worries, but it kept me quiet company in moments of doubt.

These leaves have moved with me five times, and this round I made sure to display them within easier sight.  Rediscovering the inner home  .  .  .

(Something whimsical is on the docket for next week...a bit of homesick to be admitted later...

and then some "Prairie  Home Companion" Watseka style.)