Manual Husbandry

My husband was unwillingly roped into posing so that I could make this drawing.




Let's just say he graciously lent me a couple of hands, and boy were they tired by the time I returned them.

We were both pleased with the product of his hand modeling gig.

It was nice to draw someone else's hands for awhile. I'm tired of the view I have of my own.

Pastor Jeremiah, I got your back.

Har-d-har.
Another church drawing from awhile back.


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Life is funny. Even when your Mom's dead.

Funny thing happened awhile back when sisters and I got together to divide my mother's ashes.
Wait for it, that wasn't the funny.

She died about a year and a half ago, and it still surprises me sometimes to remember its been that long.

After part of Mom's ashes were thrown into the wind (between torrential downpours on a Kansas highway) there was still a big bag of Mom left over. Carried from one daughter's house to another, (like Queen Lear) she eventually landed in my home office, all tarted up in a party gift bag since the funeral home's respectable somber black carrying bag had ripped. (I hope she liked polka dots. I do.)

We divided Mom between any family members who wanted a piece of her. That turned out to be three daughters, (Becka, Margie and me) one honorary daughter, (Becky S.) and three grandchildren. So, we split Mom seven ways.

I'm not squeamish, but the cremains (lovely word) bothered me. In addition to the powdery stuff one might expect, her bag contained large bone fragments, some a couple inches long and exposing the spongy inside structure. They gave me the willies. This was part MY MOTHER'S ACTUAL BODY of all things. Ewww.

Cremation is like turning a person into a bulk grocery item. Suddenly you need a scoop and a plastic bag to deal with them.

My first in-person experience with cremains was 14 years ago. My friend, Malin, held an informal memorial for her beloved cat (named Clubber due to a sixth toe on each foot). She scattered Clubber's ashes into Chicago's part of Lake Michigan, gently pouring the ashes into her palm and then tossing them into the waves, handful after handful.

I felt sad for her. Loss sucks. Looking down at my hands twisting in my lap, being all inwardly reflective about life and death, I discovered Clubber's ashes had blown awry and were now clinging to my black jeans.
Craptastic.

Just great. What do I do now? I wondered. Would it be offensive to brush off Clubber like so much stray dust?

Do I ignore the presence of her cat's ashes on my pants and just let him follow me home on the subway? Just let it slide that I was (technically) transporting a body on the Red Line train?

I don't remember what I did. (Sorry Malin! Sorry Clubber!) I just remember that suddenly cremains were not an abstract concept, they were physical reality, one that demanded some etiquette of which I was ignorant. As if I needed another area of etiquette where I could unwittingly display my deficits.

I thought of the Clubber fiasco yesterday as my sisters and I got down to the business of separating our mother's body into seven plastic bags. Does one pour out one's mother like dumping sugar into coffee, or measure her out like one is making cookies?

I went to the kitchen to find a scoop of some sort. I wanted to divide her as evenly as possible to avoid the inevitable sibling fights: "Hey, she got more!"

I grabbed a deep serving spoon. Becky S., the honorary daughter, held the bags while I scooped, leveled, and dispensed the ashes. Cookies it is.

Most of the time I was growing up, my mom was about 300 pounds (I think).
She never tried to lose weight. She had given up by the time I was old enough to be cognizant of the fact that she was considered overweight. The last few years she was alive she lost over a hundred pounds due to weird eating preferences and a shrinking appetite. But she wasn't trying to lose any, I don't think.

On the other hand, I've lost and gained back significant amounts of weight three times in my life.

She also smoked cigarettes as long as I knew her. Numerous times she tried to quit smoking, struggling mightily and failing each time. When she entered the hospital three weeks before she died, naturally she wasn't allowed to smoke there, so she declared she'd quit. She said that since she couldn't walk, all we had to do is keep them away from her and she'd be a non-smoker. So, at age 71, three weeks before she died, she finally quit smoking. When it no longer mattered.

Considering my mother's now in ash-form, that's kind of funny.

I thought of that as I scooped her cremains into a bunch of bags.

And to top off her list of late-coming efforts, after death and at the age of 72 and a half, my mother was finally on Weight Watchers.

You see, the serving spoon I had grabbed was designed by Weight Watchers to hold exactly a half-cup while disguised as a normal, if beautiful, serving spoon; no one would be the wiser that you were watching your portion sizes.
She'd been served.

It turned out that there was enough of her to go around the seven bags twice with my half-cup spoon. We each got exactly one cup of Mom.
See why I'm reminded of the bulk food section?

Worried that the big honking bone fragments would freak out the grandkids, we ran the ashes through a strainer and one of the sisters adopted most of them.
I strained my own bag of ashes too, since the bones were giving me the aforementioned willies.

But I sat there for a few minutes, just staring at the strainer full of splintered bones. This was Mom. She'd looked better, but I couldn't give away her bones just because I couldn't face what they really were: slivers of human bones. Maybe the creep factor will lessen. I just can't let go yet of what little I have left of her.

I put "bones" in the search box of my iPhone Bible ("Bible Bingo" for the 21st century) and came up with Psalm 51:8.
"Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice."

Mom's life was not easy. Her death was pretty hard too.
Her bones have been crushed.
I hope though, that they can now rejoice in the Lord, somehow teaching my own tired bones how to join in.

Classic Kind/Cruel scenario.
(Kitty, Jenny Kelly 2007)

You've got to be kind to be cruel. 'Cuz then they're not expecting the cruel.

When life hands you lemons, don't suck on them.

Sean, contemplating lemons, Jenny Kelly, 2008

I've come to see lemons as gifts with very annoying wrapping paper.
And now--since I'm so old and wise--when I get beaned by a lemon, I look out for God dropping a five pound bag of sugar. Okay, I don't know where the water enters this analogy, but ignore that. Oh wait, the water is my tears. Ha ha.
No--don't hit the back button! I'm not ususally that hokey.

Today I got hit twice with an old, familiar lemon.
I call it the Hill From Hell (HFH)
On school days my husband, Rob, and I walk our kids to school with a bunch of other neighborhood parents. It is like having coffee with friends, but without the benefit of caffeine and with a lot of huffing and puffing.
The elementary school sits on top of the HILL FROM HELL (H.F.H.). Any more steep and long and I would refuse to walk it. But altitude aside, we live close to the school so it feels pretty lazy to drive. It's the only reliable exercise the children and I get, and literally, I feel like I need to keep up with the Jones'. The neighbors walk right past our house, for gosh sake, I can't be a bad role model to my kids in front of them! (It's too late to impress the kids.)

Every morning for the last 5? 6? years I have dreaded the walk to school. I have taken every possible excuse to drive up or skip going up altogether. Rob ALWAYS walks. The kids don't need me to go too.
But I went this morning.

When we get to the HFH, I walk behind Rob and our son. Rob hikes up the H.F.H. without a drop of sweat, like a mountain goat on a stroll.
In contrast, I drag my butt up this tortuous topography, breathing harder than a horse in heat, my glutes complaining they never did nothin' to deserve this. My friend, Ash, walks up behind me and cheerily asks me how I'm doing today. I can't form words; I just turn to him with my tongue lolling out the side of my mouth, panting like my dopey dog after an hour of fetch.
I think "Can't talk--breathing!"

I look up the steep path ahead of me. It's disheartening how far we've still got left.
My daughter walks beside me holding my hand. She hugs my arm to encourage me to keep going. Not in an 8 year old "hurry up, you're embarrassing me" way, but a gentle, innocent "You can do it" sort of way. Her eyes say she loves me, believes in me, her hand pressed into mine says she values my walking beside her.
Fording the HFH says I love her.
Julia added her sweetness just in time to stop my bitterness. Okay, I'm gonna be frequently a little hokey in just this post.

After drop off, the parents, now fancy-free, gab as we walk back down the hill.
Halfway down the other parents stop suddenly, huddling around a young boy who's crying. He's adorable with red hair and a round face, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when that face is set with fear and embarrassment. By the time I get to him, my friend Heather (an amazing writer! http://livewithflair.blogspot.com/) has her arm around his shoulders and tells us he's having trouble breathing. He is one of the many students who walk to school alone, like normal kids. Like I did in from third grade on, after my sisters moved up to grades in other schools. (Uphill...but only one way. What is it with this town putting all its elementary schools on hilltops?)

We parents all gather around, clucking like concerned hens, and a parent asks if any of us can walk back with him to school. I turn around and start walking with him, realizing the rest of the parents all have jobs. Me being unemployed and without much ambition, I'm available. Yay, laziness! (And Yay, Rob, my great husband with a great job at a great company who makes my availability possible!)

The boy and I trudge up the Hill, me talking to him, asking him dumb questions to take his mind off the terror of not breathing well. Since the steep incline is probably making that worse, I offer to carry him piggy back; he declines. We keep climbing.

He glances sideways at me and says in a timid whisper, "You don't have to walk me to the door, I know the way to the nurse." He's not forceful about it, so I just figure he's embarrassed to have some kid's Mom walking his keister to school.
I tell him "You're important. I have to make sure you get to the nurse." Where that came from, I'm not sure. It slipped out and I'm reminded of the nanny in the book The Help telling the young girl “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” Sometimes you need to hear it, and sometimes you need say it, with both your mouth and your feet as you trudge the steepest part of the HFH with a kid you just met.

Now, I love doing good deeds. It's like money in the Lazy Bank. "I did my good deed for the day, so now I can lie around and read the rest of that romance novel." So I was pleased to get that deed done early.
I guess that's some sugar for the HTH lemon. But there's more in store.

People are so impressed with even minimal efforts, luckily for me. It's like the ultimate con. I walk an extra block and everyone's impressed.
Maybe it's just impressive because I'm not much of a walker.

I try to pass him off to the first school employee we come across, the parking lot crossing guard. I tell her the situation, but she asks if I can walk him the rest of the way so she can stay at her post.
"Sure." I say.
"You're so nice to walk back with him." she says.
See? Told ya! Ka-ching. Not only am I walking him back, but now I'm doing HER a favor by walking a few hundred more feet.

We get to the door, I explain the situation to one of the school employee posted at the door. Before leading the boy to the nurse's office, she says to me "Aren't you nice for walking all the way back here with him!"
Oh yeah, the sugar just keeps on coming.

The other school door monitor reiterates how nice I am for doing this, while looking at me with gratitude sparkling in her eyes.
Like I always say, the bar for kindness is set pretty low.
Even though I predicted her response, I get sheepish about it.
Because, really, I walked a block. That's it.
A lot of people, seeing a kid crying and short of breath, would do what needed to be done.
"I'm only human, I couldn't let him go alone." I say.

She smiles and here comes more sugar. She verifies whose mom I really am and says she really loves my kids. "I know we aren't supposed to have favorites, but they are sweet and wonderful. You've done a great job raising them."
Ha! Whatever, lady! You didn't see me yelling this morning for one kid to take our barking dog out to pee, and nagging the other one to put her shoes on. I probably threw in a snide defensive remark to Rob while I was a it.
"It's so hard to believe that," I told her.
"It's true," she insists, smiling like I'm a celebrity.
Thank you God, for sending me a lemon that positioned me to receive that heart melting compliment. I didn't even know her and she felt moved to tell me that.

When I get home Rob says how great I was to walk back with the boy, and says I ought to call Heather to tell her the he made it.
I call Heather and she repeats the litany of praise for walking.
Again, nothing to get so excited about!

Three hours later I go to hear my friend, Colette, lead a bible study of sorts at a christian prep school only a three minute drive from my house. I walk up to her and she says she heard I'd already been serving God this morning.
I give her a confused look.
"You know, the little boy on the way to school?" She added, eyebrows raised like I was being thick.
Heather must have told her. She cannot keep from publicizing a friend's good deeds. One of the things I love about her. But so fast?
She gives me a doe-eyed look and says "Thank you so much for coming!"

Now I'm being thanked for driving three minutes to get there.
I imagine afterwards she'll again thank me for coming, but by then I will have added the considerable efforts of sitting comfortably and passively listening.

God is crazy.

An interesting day today.
A handful of things went wrong and a handful of things went right.

Upturn:
Snowdrops Therapy




My first spring bloom sighting. Usually it's crocuses, but this year it's Snowdrops sighted next to a parking place at my therapist's office. It was a nice reminder of God's love. Pure, pretty, hopeful. I could think of no ulterior motive for God to put them there other than love or greetings. Thank you, God.

Downturn:
But seconds later in therapy I threw away that gratitude faster than a Great-Aunt's money-less birthday card. I ranted, complained, and fussed over stuff.
You know, therapy.

Upturn:
Right after leaving therapy I spontaneously feel like going (unknowingly) to the same place where two friends are meeting. I'm still upset, so they pray for me and encourage me. Among other things, they give me permission to let go of some of the tangled fear, and pare down unneeded obligations.

Downturn:
I cannot resist retail therapy; I blow a wad of my allowance on a beautiful metal raised filigree rollerball pen from the nearby Nittany Quill stationary and gift store.

Upturn:
I love my incredible pen!
I call a friend and tell her I can't give her drawing lessons anymore because I've discovered I get very anxious even teaching informally. She thanks me, sincerely, for telling her the truth.
Ha ha, now that I think about it, maybe the lessons stressed her out too!
But the relief is palpable, I can breathe, envision peace.


If I cut out all the blather in the middle, I can say Snowdrops = Peace.

Drawing up

Drew my hand last week during church.
Still like it.


Also like the fact that I'm drawing so much lately.

I finished a drawing today, one I started a couple months ago.
Goooood feeling.
Stay tuned!

Repetition is key in giving commandments.

So God said it a few times!




The photos are two different doodles I put on envelopes going to the church office. I do this every month now and I get a big kick out of it.




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