You Can Lead A Horse to Water

     
      Sarah has a Family Heritage project due in school tomorrow. She and I have spent some time together over the last week looking through family photos and talking about how her family came to be in Tennessee. My goal for her with this project was that she learn something about her grandparents and great-grandparents and begin to develop an appreciation for the people she is descended from. Last night around 7 o’clock it became evident to me that her goal for this project was to have more pictures on her poster than anybody else.  Under the pressure of our creative differences, we parted ways. She headed for the kitchen to watch Full House with her brother (and it’s not for nothing that part of my frustration is that she can tell me every plot twist for a show that’s been in re-runs since the mid-1990's but she still can't remember her Great-Grandmother’s name - which is CLEO!). A little while later she sent me the following text:

So, yeah - sort of. That is a historical fact* and her text message proved that she had learned something about her ancestors, even though it wasn't necessarily the something I wanted her to learn. There’s also the fact that we at Team Vallejo need to stress the use of more politically correct terminology (even though the historical marker in the photo that may or may not be included on the poster she turns in tomorrow does not say “Native American”). Suffice it to say that my family's complicated history is important to me and I want both of my children to at least have a basic understanding of it all.  They are resisting. This makes me sad.

         Although she probably never thought of herself as such, my grandmother was a great storyteller. On the many nights I spent at her house, we would go to sleep with her telling me stories about her childhood. If I were to write a Little House version of her life I could have a book with chapter titles like A Snake in the Springhouse, My Old Homeplace, Cousins from Middlesboro, and Decoration Sunday - just to name a few. In the years that I was in college and graduate school in Knoxville, she and I would sometimes take long drives through the country. Our trips always followed the same familiar route -  up Maynardville Highway and then a left turn onto Hickory Star Road where we'd wind our way back through curve after curve before turning right onto Hickory Valley Road. If the weather was nice (which it always was if we were out for a drive) we'd make a stop at  Beeler Cemetery (where all of her family is buried) before continuing on through Malone Gap, where her old homeplace used to be before it burned. Then we'd head up through Little Valley and make our way back out to Highway 33.  If we were feeling ambitious we'd drive across the Highway 33 Bridge and take a tour through Sharps Chapel as well.  On every drive that we took together, she would always say to me "Now you remember . . . ".  My grandmother, Cleo, would have turned 93 today.  I miss celebrating a birthday with her but I'm doing my best to remember the stories that she told me.

Cleo Hurst, 2007

  

Sarah at her Great-Grandmother's House

in Union County, Tennessee.

The site where the house once stood 

is now home to Paulette Elementary School.

Standing next to my grandparents house 

looking up the Old Highway.

I learned to ride a bike and drive a car on this road

and I  used to run through this field and pretend

to be Laura Ingalls.

Detail of the back door lock and key.

I have these at my house.

The key is hanging in my guest bathroom.

If I'd known the fire department was going

to use the house for practice I would have stripped

the place clean. The chestnut floorboards in the upstairs closets,

the 100 year old windows with bubbled glass, 

the ornamental vents on the gables,

I am heartsick at the waste of it all.

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*"Recorded History" is totally biased. I would love to read the historical account of the Native Americans who were on the other side of the 1780s skirmish that led to the death of a white settler along the banks of the Clinch River.  My guess is that if their descendants wanted to add their own marker to one of the two big boulders now located within the boundaries of Big Ridge State Park, they'd have to ship it from Oklahoma. 

The Blizzard of '93

     Way back in 1993 the media wasn't yet tagging everything as the next apocalypse, but if they had been I'm sure all the news stations and printed newspapers(1) would have been heralding the snow storm that hit Knoxville that March as "SNOWPOCALYPSE 1993!". A friend reminded me on Facebook this morning that it's been twenty years ago today that it started snowing (thanks, Tonya!) and from what I remember it didn't stop for what seemed like forever.  Joel and I were both seniors at UT that spring.  My roommate, Susannah, and I lived at 1824 Scarlett Oak Place in the Country Oaks Apartment complex and Joel lived at Sutter's Mill, a rival apartment complex a few miles away. The two of us (Joel and I) were still just friends that March - not even close to dating, really - but we were spending a lot of our free time together.  We talked on our land line phones several times a day and left messages tucked under the windshield wipers of each others cars in between classes (2). As for the snow storm, I really was trapped in my apartment (with heat and television and a VCR and running water but "trapped" all the same).  Things became dire though when I realized I was going to  run out of Diet Mountain Dew before the snow melted (I think I drank one every hour on the hour at that point in my life).  When I called Joel and informed him of my impending doom, he said something like "No problem, I'll be right over. I have a Subaru and I can drive in the snow."  I'm sure I scoffed at him and said, "I don't care what kind of car you have, you can't drive in this weather!  The roads are treacherous and impassable.  You will never make it here."   Several hours later there was a knock on my door and I'm sure it's no surprise that when I opened it, there stood Joel with a grocery bag full of my much needed Diet Mountain Dews. He also brought all the fixins to make cajun rice and sausage and I'm guessing he had a six pack of beer in there too.  While he cooked our dinner, he told a harrowing tale of slipping and sliding his way to Food City then helping other stranded drivers out of ditches and finally parking at the bottom of my apartment complex and walking up the hill in the blinding snow to save me from eminent caffeine withdrawal (and starvation). He really was a good friend. 

SNOWPOCALYPSE!  WITH ICECICLES!!

     At some point the snow must have melted enough that Susannah and I could make it out of town because by the end of that Spring Break week we were approximately 1100 miles south of Knoxville in Key West, Florida.  Why we drove 1100 miles to go to the beach is beyond me now, but at the time it sounded like a good idea.  Despite the rather touristy look of the photos I'm including here, we had a lot of good old fashioned spring break kind of fun on that trip.  (All photos of the actual fun are, for the time being, safely hidden away where my children won't find them (3) and (4). )

__________________________________________________________________

 

(1)  How strange it now seems that way way back in 1993 most of us still got our news from the actual printed newspaper and not from the internet because the internet had just been invented  and not all of us were tech savvy enough to have those dial up modem thingies (5) and so the morning paper was like a daily surprise of  "gee whiz, I wonder what happened while I was sleeping last night?".  

(2)  Notes left on windshields, this is how we communicated before texting and emailing were invented.  Most of the notes said things like "Meet me at O'Charley's after class." None of them said "I'm going to be in the library studying." 

(3)  All these years later, what I clearly remember about this trip (other than the many many many hours we spent riding in the car and the above-mentioned "fun") is driving through south Florida at daybreak and seeing mile after mile of devastation left behind by Hurricane Andrew.

(4) Please keep in mind that we were good Catholic girls (and I can say that without a hint of irony or innuendo) so our "fun" was less "MTV Girls Gone Wild" and more "What time does karaoke start?" 

(5)  Joel had a computer and a modem.  He was the first person I knew who had this new-fangled technology.  

Overalls

I've got five pockets in my overalls

      When Owen was about 18 months old he had this pair of Osh-Kosh overalls that he wore all the time.  Thinking that he was a kid who loved overalls, I went out and bought him two more pairs -  one blue and one red and both corduroy. I tried and tried to get him to wear them, but he only loved this one pair.   I loved these overalls too.  They looked so adorable on his little self.

   Last Saturday, Owen attended the Grande Ball for the Cotillion class he participated in this year. He did not wear overalls.  He reluctantly agreed to wear a tux. Once he arrived at the ball and confirmed that his buddies were dressed in a similar fashion he decided that maybe the tux wasn't so bad after all - which is pretty high praise from him where all things "cotillion" are concerned.

Not overalls, but there are pockets.

Cheers!

After the ball was over, all the moms and sons went to Chili's for dinner.  We tried to go to Ruby Tuesday's, but they were too crowded with early bird diners to seat us and to Ruby Tuesday's I just have to say - look at what you missed out on.  These guys were the best looking diners in the restaurant that night.  The boys sat in their own booth and toasted whatever it is that eleven and twelve year old boys toast with their mugs and bottles of apple juice and root beer and lemonade.  It was a good night.  On Sunday, Owen and I spent some time together packing his bags so that we could wake up not so bright but very early Monday morning and drop him off at the bus that would take him on his first extended trip away from home. He gave me a hug before we left the house (he didn't want to have to deal with all that messy emotional stuff in the school parking lot ) so the drop-off at school was just that.  He got out of the car, walked to the bus, stowed his bags underneath,  and told us he'd see us on Friday.   

     On the way to work, Joel said that after all of the events of the weekend it kind of felt like we were sending Owen off to college.  I told him to hush because I didn't want to think about it. And I don't want to think about it. It's been 10 years since he spent his days walking around in Osh-Kosh overalls, but we're only 6 years away from sending him off to college (knock on wood).

     Back to the overalls, I'm nostalgic about his sweet little eighteen month old self this morning because things with him are stormy at present - good, but stormy. He needs us, he doesn't need us. He's happy to see us, we embarrass him by our mere presence. He wants more freedom, but not necessarily more responsibility. He doesn't know everything (yet), but he's beginning to believe that we don't know much of anything. They're called "growing pains" for a reason, I guess. To that end - "Lord, grant me the serenity to accept my (moody) child for who he is today; the courage to hold my ground as his parent even when he hates me for it; and the wisdom to pick my battles with him judiciously no matter how effectively he's pushing my buttons." It's my new "Serenity Now!" prayer for the tween years. I'm buckling up too, because I'm pretty sure we're in for a bumpy ride.



On the day you were born . . .

    Happy 9th Birthday, Sarah!  Of course you were complaining last night because you wished you were turning ten today, rather than "just nine."   I've never understood why you're in such a hurry to do everything, but you've been that way since the day you were born.  In my first hazy memory of meeting you, you are laying on my chest and trying trying trying to lift up your head.  I was exhausted just from watching you persevere in the effort. Your arrival allowed us to include the words daughter, sister, granddaughter, and niece in our family conversations. We also added "brother", which is absolutely one of the sweetest words I know.  You've brought so much life and joy and energy to our family and every day that I've been your mom has been a blessing.  Every single one, all three-thousand two-hundred and eighty-five of them. 

DAY ONE

daughter   sister   brother

granddaughter   niece   goddaughter

Day 3,281

strong  creative  funny
energetic  athletic
artistic  determined  girl

Undertow

Orange Beach, Alabama

Thanksgiving 2012

     We spent Thanksgiving at the beach with Vic and Stacey and the nephews and niece.  It was a wonderful trip.  We stayed up too late, slept even later, napped whenever we wanted, ate well, drank some, and insisted that the children do absolutely positively nothing educational or productive over their Thanksgiving holiday. We did provide them with shovels and buckets so they spent most of their time on the beach digging trenches. On Saturday afternoon, we herded all the children down to the water at sunset in an attempt to take some photos of the five of them together, but our success was limited by the fact that poor Nephew Cooper was feeling decidedly under the weather so his stay on the beach was brief.  The photo above is the last shot I took of Owen and Sarah that evening.  The sun was disappearing fast at this point and they were both complaining that they were freezing (big babies - it was in the high 50s and only a little breezy) but they were laughing and having a great time. And then Sunday morning we woke up very early and drove back to Nashville and I kid you not, the whole way home I had this sense of dread that we were going back to "something."  I halfway expected us to be involved in an accident on the interstate or have a flat tire or some other malady on the drive home and Joel can attest to the fact that I was a lovely traveling companion for him that day. We made it home safe and sound and by late Sunday afternoon we were doing laundry and ordering dinner and getting ourselves organized for the week ahead.


Bright and way too early on Monday morning we all returned to work and school and then at 4pm my phone rang.  It was a call from school telling me that Sarah had fallen on the playground and they were requesting that we get there quickly.  We picked her up and took her to the ER hoping but not really expecting that she was more fine than not.  "Hoping" because as long as Joel was carrying her she said she was fine and that nothing hurt.  "Not really expecting" because she refused to put her foot on the ground and wouldn't/couldn't stand on the scale for the triage nurse to weigh her so she ended up sitting on the baby scale to be weighed.  We went back to "hoping" when she refused to take anything for pain because she said nothing was hurting really - she just didn't want to walk. The mind games we parents play when we want our kids to be fine and not injured.  After what seemed like forever, we were ushered to a "hallway room" where a very nice and very young doctor showed us the x-ray of Sarah's broken tibia, told us she'd be spending all of her upcoming free time in a cast that would stretch from her toes to way above her knee, then turned us over to two delightfully unconcerned orthopedic interns and one very wonderful nurse. The poor interns lost points in my book because they knew she hadn't had any pain medication but they started manipulating her foot and leg anyway and there was a moment there where I thought Sarah was going to pass out from the pain plus they had two packages of white fiberglass tape and two packages of black fiberglass tape and didn't think it was going to be a big deal if they mixed the two on her very long cast. And when I say "mixed" I don't mean in a fun stripey kind of way, but in a half and half kind of way. Um, no.  Bless the sweet nurse's heart who both listened to me and saw that Sarah was in a great deal of pain and had them stop casting her leg for a few minutes so that Sarah could take some very powerful medication and then made the effort to find two more packages of white fiberglass tape because she understood that no eight year old girl would want to be seen wearing a mismatched black and white cast.  And then we carried Sarah out of there and headed home.  The two biggest concerns I had leaving the ER that night were 1) will SG and her cast fit into the backseat of the car  (it was the first time I really missed the big blue minivan) and 2) how were we ever going to keep that white cast clean?  The answers turned out to be 1) she will fit in the backseat if you remove her car seat and have her sit sideways and 2)you can't keep a white cast clean.  You can, however, have it covered with a festive green layer and then have everybody in the universe sign it. And that was December and January. It was a long winter season at our house.

Big Green Cast

Hallway Room No. 3

First Steps, Part Deux

Sarah has been on the go almost since the day she was born.  She decided on Christmas Eve 2004 that she was ready to walk and no matter how much I tried to persuade her that at ten months and 12 days she was much much much too young to be a walker, she took off without me and never looked back. In the photo on the right she is moments away from taking her first steps.  She let go of the ottoman and took four steps toward the stairs which she then proceeded to climb.  The climbing - I'm pretty sure that's why I missed photographing her first steps. She was a fast and fearless climber long before she was an adventurous walker.  As a side note, we baby-proofed our house like crazy before Owen was born only to discover that we really didn't need to.  He was content playing with his toys or with us and never tried to do dangerous things like put his finger in a light socket or scale the cabinets to get into the prescription medications or open drawers and pull out sharp knives. By the time Sarah was born we had moved to a new house and after wasting all that time and money baby-proofing for our son, we assumed that we didn't need to baby proof the house for our daughter.  Oh sure, we put in the obligatory outlet covers, but baby gates and cabinet locks and bumpers? Not this time! We naively believed that those crazy safety precautions were for all those overprotective first time parents.  Yeah, we were wrong. See that photo below?  It was taken on Christmas morning.  Our sweet baby went from taking four steps on Christmas Eve to walking just about wherever she wanted to go on Christmas day.  It's not that she wasn't mobile before the walking - she was a crawling fiend - but the walking meant her hands were free to open cabinets and drawers more quickly and pull herself up on taller things and generally increase her range of mayhem. Mobility, thy name is Sarah.*

What's in here? 

Lucky for me I can 

walk over and find out for myself now.

Please don't offer to help me, 

it won't go well for you.

    Why am I waxing all nostalgic about Sarah's first steps this Christmas season? It's because at Sarah's orthopedic appointment on December 17th, the doctor told Sarah that with her new walking boot she could begin putting weight on her foot on December 24th - eight years to the day that she took her very first steps. It's made me more than a little bit sentimental.  And so it was on Christmas Eve, Sarah took her first crutch assisted steps on her left leg since "the incident" in late November.  She quickly went from slow tentative steps with her left leg to almost crutch running by Christmas Day.  She's now gotten so fast crutch walking that I have hustle to keep up with her when we're out and about.  A mobile Sarah is still a happy Sarah.

Christmas morning, climbing 

the steps with her 

American Girl Wheelchair

and broken legged McKenna doll in tow.

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* I've been looking through my journals this holiday season and I came across the following entry from December 28, 2006: "We have decided to try to get her into a gymnastics class after the holidays.  She loves to do gymnastic-like things like flip upside down, hang from the kitchen table, walk on her toes, twirl around, launch herself off the furniture and climb up the outside of the stairs. She has no fear! And when she sits on the floor she always sits with her toes pointed - it's very cute.  She just seems like she would love it."

Elfed

It happened again this afternoon.  On our way home from school Sarah regaled me with amusing stories of her friends elves who have marsh mellow fights and grow candy canes and leave cute messages on kitchen countertops in powdered sugar. And then tonight she wrote this note card and left it laying where Santa would be sure to find it.  The photo quality isn't great, but I think you can make it out.  

She is killing me with lines like "If the elves g0t lost our address is . . . "!?!?!?  and "I think our Christmas letters are on the table near the couch without the lamp - dumbass!" I know, she didn't write "dumbass" but you can't read this note and not see that it's totally implied.  Seriously, we have the worst. elves. EVER!!  And I feel really bad about it.  The guilt is kinda giving me insomnia which is why I'm awake writing this after midnight. When she asked me again tonight when I thought the elves might get here, I casually mentioned that maybe they were waiting until after Thursday when she gets her new cast.  Any guess as to what she said? Well of course she said  "how fun will it be if they sign my new cast!"  So now the elves have to find their way here and then somehow figure out how to sign her cast without either waking her up or getting permanent marker on my new couch (because my sweet girl is sleeping on the couch because she can't walk upstairs to her bedroom because she has a GIANT cast on her leg. AAAHHH!!)!! I have totally elfed myself again this year.  I'm hoping the elves can manage to make an appearance tomorrow night. Or maybe Friday. Or sometime before Christmas.  It would be really helpful if Sarah could give me the elves address, you know - so I can find them.  Telling me that they are at the "North Pole" is about as helpful as saying they're "hidden somewhere in one of those Christmas boxes in the attic." Crossing my fingers that this story is going to have a happy ending.