Happy Pioneer Day

Today is Pioneer Day.  I sort of idolize my pioneer ancestors, especially the mothers.  They were amazing or as Wallace Stegner famously said, "[those] women were incredible."  I want to meet all of them -- Polly Barber Child who took the dying David Patten in the back of her wagon so he could say his farewells to his family;  She had a gift of caring for the sick and would ride over to anyone who needed help even in a storm on their only horse (the mobs stole the other half of their team.)  I want to meet Caroline Smith who climbed in and out of the second story window of her employer's home to sneak away and be baptized in the middle of the night, only to be caught wet-haired upon reentry.  I want to meet Hannah Maria Child who never lost a mother or child in all of her years of midwifery sometimes guided by dreams about complicated procedures.  I'm fascinated by the heart of the Englishwoman, Elizabeth Gaskell Romney who supposedly never ventured beyond the gate of the old house after her Miles died.  Seven years later, her final words: "Thee's been a long time coming."   I feel for Catherine Petty who buried four of their little ones along the way:  Lydia and Eliza in Far West and Mary Ann and John Ralph at Winter Quarters.  Mariah Edwards also perished in Winter Quarters, and at the loss of his wife, Elisha didn't have the heart to continue on the valley just yet. He reportedly lent his team to Brigham Young's vanguard company and made the trek just a few years later.  I know they weren't all perfect.  I know that beyond the grave, they may be shaking their heads at all the superlatives we attach to them.  My Great Aunt Beth told me that rumor had it, Emma Crofts Criddle often grumbled and complained about her husband being sent away on his mission while she stayed home tending all the children.  Which is worse -- that she did that, or that the other women repeated that about her after she and her baby tragically drowned before her husband's return? Yes, they were all human. But that just serves to inspire me all the more by their grit, usual optimism, and ingenuity.  They made do with very little.  They maintained grace with the gleanings of civilization.  Caroline Anderson always kept a vase of artistically arranged wildflowers, grasses, and grain stalks on top of her chest of drawers.  Anna Williams made hats for her children from jettisoned wheat stalks.  She soaked them and braided them over a tin bucket. Both women were weavers and wove beautiful fabrics for carpets and curtains and clothes.  Mary Bommeli Eyring was also a weaver and the earnings from her work on her loom bought her way to America and helped support her young family in the early years. She made it independantly and despite obstacles such as spending a night in jail for bearing her testimony of The Book of Mormon when that was against the law in Germany.  These are my Utah mormon pioneers.  They didn't all stay in Utah -- they heeded calls to Old Mexico and the Canadian prairies.  They were medicine women and midwives and gleaners and weavers and writers and artists and scriptorians but most of all mothers.  They cared for more than their own, and because they cared so effectively, I have the gospel in my life -- which not only supports me in caring for my spouse and children, but gives us all something to care about more than life itself.        

Love life!

I'm not feeling insightful, but I am feeling inspired.  I recently reread from "Death Be Not Proud a Memoir" by John Gunther.  It is a sad, but beautiful tribute to this man's teenage son who lost a brave battle with a brain tumor.  In the end of the book, however, the author gives us a gift.  He doesn't drag the reader down with thoughts about the unthinkable (ie. surviving one's child) but encourages parents everywhere to love life and love their children more.  In fact he proposes that loving life more is the way to love your children more...but I will let him speak,

Today, when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their children, I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the wonder of that!  They may be a care and a burden, but think, they are alive!  You can touch them--what a miracle...Exult and sing.

All parents who have lost a child will feel what I mean.  Others, luckily cannot.  but I hope they will embrace them with a little added rapture and a keener awareness of joy.

I wish I had loved Johnny more when he was alive.  Of course we loved Johnny very much. Johnny knew that.  Everybody knew it.  Loving Johnny more.  What does it mean?  What can it mean, now?

Parents all over the earth who lost sons in the war have felt this kind of question, and sought an answer.  To me, it means loving life more, being more aware of life, of one's fellow human beings, of the earth.

It means obliterating, in a curious but real way, the ideas of evil and hate and the enemy, and transmuting them, with the alchemy of suffering, into ideas of clarity and charity.

It means caring more and more about other people, at home and abroad, all over the earth.  It means caring more about God.

I hope we can love Johnny more and more till we too die, and leave behind us, as he did, the love of love, the love of life.


So, I tried to love life a little more yesterday and on the spur of the moment took my little boys fishing.  I didn't really know what I was doing, but the lake is only a 20 minute drive and we found a shady spot on the dock and listened to the water and braistormed about birthday parties and saw some minnows and got our toes wet...We didn't have a single bite, and I'm sure I threaded the poles incorrectly because they wouldn't cast properly, but it was a lovely pause.  Two hours later, we stopped for frozen yogurt on our way back, and still got home in enough time to straighten up our messes, make dinner, and set the table before Carlos returned a little world-weary and hungry.  He felt better though after supper and an evening swim with the boys, and when family night was over and the kitchen was clean, I turned off the tv and broke open Jules Vern's Journey to the Center of the Earth which is finally picking up the pace for my boys' interest. Blake fell asleep in our bed, and I read to my husband the above quote.  Love our life, love our children...
A happy burden.  

Au revoir Chloe

It's been exactly a week since I dropped my oldest daughter, Chloe, off at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, UT.  I will not see her or hug her for 18 long months while she serves the people of Northern France. It's easy and it's hard to be sad.  Come on...Paris!  She has dreamt of a French address since she was a little girl and I taught her little phrases and we would act out scenes from Madeline.  I'd go along as Madame Clavel and speak in rhyme with a really exagerrated Parisian accent.  But of course Chloe is going to Paris! She's worn berets with her winter coats for years.  Also for years she carried around this little black poodle beanie baby we named Pierre who could only understand French.  I found loveworn Pierre as I was going through Chloe's old things yesterday; maybe he should go to Paris with her where he belongs. I remember when she and her little sister, Ainsley helped make a special french dinner and then decorated our kitchen like it was a French cafe -- "Cafe Pamplemousse" is what we dubbed it (it means grapefruit cafe, but we called it that just because pamplemousse is so fun to say.)  Ainsley painted on a moustache and was the "garcon" who waited on us.  Classic.  Ainsley wishes she could go too.  They both have been to Paris when they were young teenagers -- barely emerging the tween years.  All that sumptious visual beauty changed the way they viewed the world a bit.  I don't think it ruined them for regular life, but it increased their artistic vocabularies and by association, made them feel a little more beautiful themselves.  I hope.

So we commemorated (I don't know if celebrated is the right word) the news of Chloe's mission call in a few different ways.  One Sunday evening, we had some cousins over for a French dinner.  I didn't rename the dining room Cafe Pamplemousse or The French Laundry this time, but I did look up on-line Thomas Keller's recipe for cassoulet.  My newlywed niece and her husband who are early risers were my sous-chefs.  Tanner was in charge of cooking the kind-I-never-buy, really good, really thick bacon.  When he asked if he should put it in the big pot along with the other meats and good things beginning to simmer, I explained that the bacon was just a garnish for the top -- all that trouble for a garnish? his raised eyebrows seemed to say to me -- perhaps Tanner had uncovered a key to the french appetite for delicacies -- the effort spent on even the seemingly smallest details, probably makes it all taste better.

There's a french idiom that's slightly different than our counterpart in English.  It is -- ca vaut la peine. It essentially means, "It's worth the hardship." In English we typically just say, "it's worth it" , without really defining what the "it" is, but in French, they clarify, "Ca vaut la peine."  "La peine" can mean sorrow, grief, effort, trouble, or difficulty.  So...are finishing touches and beauty and good craftsmanship,...worth the sorrow, grief, effort, trouble, or difficulty?  That's the French way.   And does the effort, difficulty,...create or at least supplement the value of the object of our sacrifice?  I wonder.

As I was boxing up some of Chloe's old mementos yesterday, deconstructing her old message board and emptying desk drawers so her 14 year old brother can claim his new territory (ie. her old room) I came across an old scribbled assignment from one of her young women's classes probably years ago.  It was a personal written pledge of all the things she would do, penned in her 12 year old handwriting, so that she could make it to the temple one day -- the typical Sunday School answers:  pray and read, have pure thoughts, don't put herself in situations on temptation, clean media, clean language,...In today's world, she had to go out of her way to accomplish these goals.  She had to stand up for her higher standards in front of her classmates and her teachers and her employers who weren't always understanding.  But she did it!  Ca vaut la peine Chloe!  And she made it!  That's what we ought to truly commemorate -- not where she is going, but why and how she got there.  I am so proud of her!  Now she is going to testify to others that living the gospel is worth whatever hardship, whatever sacrifice.  The Lord compensates, and it will all be worth it. Even saying goodbye to your 19 year old hero for 18 months...but it still hurts.

Starfish for Breakfast

My mother, Jaroldeen Edwards, was an author and motivational speaker in the years after her twelfth child began kindergarten until she passed away almost five years ago.  She was and still is (in that her spirit and influence live on) a wife and mother first and foremost; but she had more to give than that, and what she gave and what she felt she received from her own parents were eyes to see the true prizes of her chosen life of selfless family centeredness.

In her personal essay, entitled Starfish for Breakfast, she reminisces about a sleepy morning after a day at the beach when my older brothers and sisters thought it would be funny to create a lovely table setting showcasing their inedible oceanic finds.  I'll let Mother tell the rest,

It was a splendid prank.  As I looked at each ingenious plate- tantalizing despite the pungent smell- I could not believe how resourceful the children had been.  I could imagine them as they came up with the idea, whispering and urging one another on until the joke had flowered into something unique and inventive.

All this work, all this creativity, all this delicious secrecy, just to make me smile, I thought.  And it did.  It made me smile from inside out, from top to bottom.

Such a delightful, intimate, unexpected moment as I stood there in the rosy dawn in that sparkling room and looked at a masterpiece of inventive love.

Then I looked at my plate.  At the head of the table, surrounded by a bed of kelp sat the treasure of the day.  It was a dead starfish that the children had discovered in a clump of driftwood.  They had thought that finding it was a triumph, and now it sat, squarely in the place of honor, in the middle of my breakfast plate.

This blog is my attempt to train my eyes to see as my Mother's saw -- to see inside my children's intentions and hopes.  To see a plate of stinky sandy seaweed and dead organisms as the unexpected gift that it was meant to be.  I wonder what my natural response to this scenario as a mother would  be; probably something like, "very funny, very funny, let's take a picture... -- now who's going to clean up this big mess!"

Fortunately for me, at the end of her essay, my mother outlined a formula (you could say) for at least starting on the road to having those eyes to see.  Her words:

It seems to me, if we believe in what we are doing; if we try to love and care for the people around us; if we fill our days with the best of what is in us and work hard if we learn to recognize and treasure what is wonderful and let the rest have no power over us; if we love children and beauty and this great flawed world, we will have these brief moments when everything will come together in a sweet and perfect harmony and in a sudden glimpse we will know it is all better than we could ever have imagined.

If we are wise enough to see them, such moments will be there.

I counted them and there are 6 if's. Now I'm not being like my Mother at all.  I'm being more like my Father, but I'm going to abbreviate the 6 if's as:

1. BELIEVE
2. LOVE AND CARE FOR
3. WORK
4. LOOK AND LET GO
5. ROLL WITH IT
6. PAUSE

I think in future blogs, I'll think about these 6 ifs some more.  It's true if I am a grumpy Mom I am probably in the act of not excelling in at least one of these areas.  I am lately getting better at catching myself and turning around the situation, however, I must say my mother eventually got quite proficient in them all.

Mostly in my blog, I want to share my "brief moments when everything [came] together..." and I knew that my family life was "better than [I] could ever have imagined."  Finally, I would like to invite others to share their "starfish for breakfast" experiences as well.  They are there, but sometimes there is a lapse or a dearth and remembering and sharing a past golden moment keeps us floating till the next one washes ashore.