adventure – gianna soderstrom

the accidental coffee hour

March 10, 2021March 10, 2021Posted in adventure, beauty, parenting, writingTagged coffee, motherhood, mothering, parenting, Peak Place Coffeehouse, toddlersLeave a comment

I’m not sure if it is worse to forget a dentist appointment, or to remember it a week early. Either way, I’d gotten a baby-sitter for little Em, and somehow presented our dentist visit to Erik with the right balance of enthusiasm and bribery to convince him it would be ok. And then the receptionist looked at me sympathetically and said, “Oh, I’d love to get you in today – we even have an opening! But your insurance…” and we all know insurance usually has the last word. We walked back out into the wind and sunshine and I decided that if Erik hadn’t earned his treat, I’d at least feel better if I had mine. And so we landed at a coffee shop, with one extra-large bar of blueberry crisp on a saucer and a small cup of coffee with cream.

Sitting in a coffee shop isn’t Erik’s ideal world. I find this forgivable in a three-year-old. We discovered the saving grace of a Little Free Library inside, complete with childrens books and a few toys. So we read. We counted the wooden blocks that he pushed up and over the curled wire frame of the toy. We took a bite of the blueberry crisp; then he decided he was done, and I took several more bites. He climbed on and off his chair and I watched him flip through the books and talk about the people around us and I took a picture because sometimes I forget to just sit with him and listen.

Yesterday we went for a walk, Em in the stroller and him on his little strider bike. And then half way through I saw the way he was crouching and I offered to raise the seat. I forgot for a moment how much he’d grown; how eighteen months ago when his sister was born, he wasn’t tall enough to even sit on the seat at its lowest. Here he is now riding a mile around the neighborhood.

We could go back further; once upon a time in my first springtime with him, we walked miles and miles with the stroller, or him in the baby carrier on my back, twisting around side to side trying to touch the trees and almost making me lose my balance. There was a summer that he learned to ride the tricycle and every time we went to the park after that I had to push him back up the almost imperceptible hill before our house. I was pregnant, no less, but he was cute and it was worth it. We spent a lot of those pregnant days playing on the footbridge across from the park. Peek-a-boo and chasing games, letting him run downhill and walk back up over and over. Climbing the bridge rails and holding his shirt to keep him safe while he leaned over and threw leaves into the water.

It’s been years and years since he was born. A million maybe. Almost four really. That’s how motherhood is. You love so big it could fill eternity but there it is all crammed into a body the size of a not-quite-toddler-anymore. It makes the time pass, and it doesn’t. Life as a parent goes by those contraries, and I forget sometimes to stop and look at the tiny boy who came out fighting on a quiet June morning.

But here he is in front of me, asking me to read the book we found in the little library one more time, and reiterating that he really doesn’t want even a tiny bite of the blueberry crisp. So I put my phone away and help him count the blocks as they go up and around, over and over. The Zebra striped square. The orange circle. The green triangle. And I read about the Monkey Marimba at the zoo. I take a bite of crisp and hold my coffee steady as he climbs in and out of my lap, and I take the time we didn’t spend at the dentist to be with my boy again.

Hey there – you know there’s a whole host of stories and essays I publish only by email? That’s also the place where you can really write back – join the conversation. Drop your email address right here. Let’s be friends.

how to level up – a story

July 30, 2020July 30, 2020Posted in adventure, courage, habits, parenting, writingTagged baby steps, Colorado, Colorado Springs, future, habits, hiking, just start, little by little, parenting, past, start small1 Comment

One morning this week, I pulled out my phone to check the forecast. Ninety degrees. Ew. Not abnormal for our city, but when we’re used to spending the summers up in the mountains at camp, it feels abnormal. And gross. I scrolled over to the next day’s forecast. Ninety-one degrees. More ew. I tapped on the “10 Day Forecast” tab, hopeful and a little bit desperate. More nines and zeros. Some nines paired with other numbers, not zeros. Numbers like four and five.

And in my attempt to leave the house while avoiding the heat while also not walking around Target spending unnecessary money – I determined to go for a hike. We were headed up in the canyon, one of those hot, winding roads where you wonder if vehicles are supposed to make this sort of noise. I packed up two water bottles and a baby-carrier for my back. I threw a toddler’s camouflage hat into the diaper bag because we lost the regular hat, threw in some protein bars to snack on, and in the sudden realization of what I was hoping to do, ate a big piece of chocolate while I loaded a three-year-old into his car-seat with cheerful promises of “a special adventure walk”. Seriously though – who expects a toddler to cheerfully climb a mountain, even if it’s a nice, moderate eighty-five degrees and there’s a cool bridge to cross?

I was not expecting much. We would happily eat the protein bars. That was a guarantee. (We ate them in the car, on the way. I can’t seem to hold out on snacks.) We could enjoy the drive up the canyon, since nobody is prone to car sickness and it’s a pretty, twisting little road. We might make it up the first one hundred feet of the trail to the bridge. We might not. I tried to prepare myself to be ok with this. I’m a vigorous hiker – usually I pass people more often than I am passed myself. Slowing down takes a bit of mental preparation.

We made it to the trail head, and the parking lot was full. Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe we shouldn’t even be doing this. I could be ok with just taking a drive this morning. And then I caught myself. I hadn’t put in all this work to turn around and go home. Maybe there’s a pullout ahead. There was a pull out. I ignored the steep, hiking access point from the pull out – it connected with another trail, no bridges guaranteed. We walked cautiously down the narrow busy road. I kept the toddler on the outside, hoping he wouldn’t choose this moment to fight my hand-holding policies.

And then we found our trail, and we started hiking. It was hotter than I expected. The trail was exposed and we took pretty frequent water breaks – Erik squatting on the gravel while I both refused to him sit too long, or to drink while he walked, wandering distractedly close to the edge of the steep trail. He took breaks to climb on exposed tree roots. I tried to explain that the purple flowers were called Showy Daisies and that the wild raspberries along the trail would be ripe in just a few weeks. To my surprise, we passed the bridge in mere minutes, and Erik took off running up the trail ahead of me. We hiked and climbed and scrambled and stopped in the shade and walked some more. He never complained. After about half a mile, we turned around. I was in awe of us. Emily was napping sweatily on my back and Erik’s face was red with heat despite his hat and frequent water stops, but we’d actually done it. We’d gone hiking together.

The mental battle to prepare for disappointment was over, and then suddenly when we reached our truck again I wondered Why haven’t I done this before? If hiking was going to go so well, why wait this long at all? Maybe I should have been out hiking for months before now. And I nearly let this thought begin to bother me, warm and sticky with the truck’s AC spitting out hot air before the cool. But then I stopped. No, no that’s the wrong question to be asking. And slowly the answer grew out of the questioning as we wound back down the canyon. I didn’t do this before because the before was preparing me for the now.

Before – all the months of effort learning first how to leave the house with two children and then how not to be late, and then learning how to plan time for a coffee stop – these were the moments that prepared me to go hiking all alone with two littles. The days of barely making out of our pajamas before 10 and the days of getting up and ready, stopping to get my coffee and a second cup for a friend, the days showing up with two kids and two coffees still five minutes early were the days that built into me what I needed to finally make it out and away for a morning of hiking. Sub in protein bars for the coffee and trade out the weight of pushing a stroller for the baby carrier backpack and the too-eager toddler running uphill on a hot day; I wasn’t catching up on lost opportunity, I was walking into a new challenge. Leveling up.

I think that realization in the truck as we drove into the city with our windows down at lunchtime was an important one. That wasn’t the first time I’ve beat myself up for not having tried this or that hard thing before. I’ve asked myself why I was so afraid to try water skiing that I refused for something like two whole summers, and I’ve wondered what would have happened if I had started writing more publicly sooner in my life. But the wondering tends to be a bit fruitless – I can’t go back and get up on skis sooner. And I think now I really wasn’t ready to share my essays any sooner than I have. I needed practice. The years spent writing in private are the years where I began to edit, hone, develop a voice. Those were important years. Those years were preparing me for these years.

So friend, don’t come down on yourself for only starting now. You’re starting, and that’s what’s important. You probably can’t see yet all the ways that your past has prepared you for your future, but it’s there and it’s working for you. Don’t beat yourself up.

Go forward. Take adventures. Hike on the days that seem too hot, and take the little people you didn’t think you’d be able to manage. They might surprise you, but even more importantly, you might surprise yourself.

the weather ski

June 18, 2020June 16, 2020Posted in adventure, courage, motivation, writingTagged Bemidji, Colorado, courage, encouragement, finding hope, hope, Minnesota, pandemic, parenting, quarantine, snow, spring, sunshine, weather, winterLeave a comment

It is not winter anymore, but I think this essay is more about hope and heart than snow, and maybe even in June we have things to learn about the cold.

When I was in high school, my family went on a ski trip to a town a few hours drive east of our home. It was a once-each-winter trip. Most years we’d drive there in the morning and drive home after they closed, unpacking the ski boots and snow pants on sore feet at midnight. This year, some friends who lived nearer the slopes were out of town, and offered us the use of their home. We accepted gladly.

In the morning, when we were cooking a big breakfast and slowly stretching out our legs, we noticed a single cross country ski standing straight up out of a drift in front of the kitchen window. It was blowing slightly in the wind. Mom chuckles at the kitchen sink, and points it out to Dad when he joins her. They laugh together, and the sound draws all five of us kids, pushing and crowding around their shoulders.

“Maybe it’s a Weather Ski,” Dad jokes, and puts on a radio announcer voice, “Yes, the weather ski is bent at just a ten degree angle, so light winds today. Keep a watch out for black ice.”

My brother chimes in: “Friends, the weather ski is at a forty-five degree angle; looks like a real blizzard out there!” We laughed together companionably and then scattered again, leaving Mom still washing dishes and the curved, colorful ski bobbing in the intermittent breeze.

Now it is springtime in 2020. I never planned to check the weather as part of my morning routine. Usually I just dress for whatever the day might bring. Jeans, a t-shirt, a jacket, a down vest over it all if it’s cold. But this year, almost the entire nation is under a quarantine. We’re fighting a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. And since I’m not getting dressed in a hurry to take my toddler to play dates and library programs, I’m slowing down to check the weather. That single app on my phone with its prediction of sunshine and temperatures is the indicator of whether we’ll even get outside. My mood seems to rise and fall with the weekly highs and lows.

Some weeks are warm and sunny. The highs reach for the 70’s for days in a row. I put on shorts and dig out 3T shorts for a toddler who still calls them pants and we find sun hats for him and his sister. We wrangle out the double stroller and head for the grassy spaces in the park. The weather has smiled on us. In weather ski talk, maybe the ski is fading and peeling in the heat – a warm one today folks!

But intermittently, cold days come. Back in Minnesota, the ski is probably bobbing lightly in the wind while its snowdrift takes on a new layer of white. Here, our red-brick patio slowly disappears under a steady film of flakes. So does my energy. The two-year-old runs from one part of our tiny home to another until he feels the cooped atmosphere too. Then he lags and droops like a wind-bent ski-tip, clinging to me when I let him and sliding to the floor in despondency when I try to get up, do the dishes, finish the laundry – anything to spur us into motion.

Sometimes it is cold for so many days that I stop checking. I don’t open the curtains in the morning. There doesn’t seem to be much point. Who wants to look at the tired, frozen pile of snow on the patio anyway? The little blue toddler truck that he pushes with his feet is as deeply buried as the real vehicles that we’re not using – that’s what happens when you stay at home for a full month I suppose. I take one look at the picket fence and see the snow in delicate heaps on its ridged top, and I lose hope for the day. The sudden mischief of a black squirrel brushing snow off in bursts, left and right, as he scampers along the rails is lost on me. I’ve already turned back inside to wonder what will become of our day, stretched long and white until the distant evening.

I forced myself out for a walk one cold day. “Won’t I need a coat?” I wondered out loud. “No, just a vest,” my husband reassured me. He gave me a searching look, as if he knew I’d already resigned myself to all the warm layers I’d wear to fend off the cold. “Well then I’m wearing a hat,” I replied in defiance of his optimism.

I felt like a stranger to the sunshine, walking down the sidewalk towards the park. The air was cool, but not as cold as I had anticipated. The snow had stopped. The sun was lowering towards dusk but miraculously still held some warmth. I let myself take big breaths of the air I hadn’t smelled in days. It was cold and unscented in the dust and impossibly fresh. It tasted like morning air, spring air. My soul seemed to tiptoe forward with cupped hands and shining eyes, like a shy child. I smiled at the masked strangers as we gave each other wide berths – walking off the sidewalk around each other when we passed.

I have never been the first one out into the snow on a cold day. Not when I lived in Minnesota and adored the “snow globe” days of large flakes coming down slow in the still world. Not when the pines were lightly adorned with picture-worthy white on their branches. Not when the neighbor plowed the drifts from our driveway into one large, snow-fort-worthy heap. But I was once more resilient. I remembered how to see past the cold to the beauty. Snow may be frozen but it sparkles in the light. Winter may be cold but laughter in the outdoors is warm. The weather ski anchored in a drift outside the kitchen window may be bending and dipping in the wind but it’s not waving a frantic warning – it’s just an indicator, like the snow on the patio tells me nothing more than that it is snowy outside. Snow can’t tell me if I’ll find joy when I go out, or whether the work of bundling two children two-and-under into thick snow pants for a short walk will be worth it or not. The weather can only tell me if I need a vest or a coat, not if I’ll find hope in the too-bright sun and air that’s still somehow fresh as a mountain morning.

It turns out we DO have fun outside, even if some days it’s just poking our heads out to see how cold it really feels. But at least I’m learning not to rely on how far out of the shade the patio snow drift is lying. The weather ski has been reduced again to just that – an old, slightly faded cross country ski nodding along to the wind and the drifted snow – not a needle on the gauge of hope that bends closer to zero as the wind speed increases. I check the app on my phone and plan which part of the day is best for a walk – when will the wind die down, when will the stroller find the least resistance in the snow? When can we get outside in the cool air and carve hope out of the sunshine? I check the weather and I think of the old weather ski, and I smile.

on being bad

March 12, 2020Posted in adventure, courage, habitsTagged blogging, consistency, Gianna Soderstrom, habits, music, piano, practice, repetition, tenacity, writingLeave a comment

You are probably pretty good at preaching this to your friends and really reluctant to hear it yourself, so let me be the one who tells you: being bad at this is part of the process.

We all understand why. I remember learning to play the piano when I was eight years old. I played silly little tunes with two or three notes repeated over and over. They were labeled with which finger I should use and the name of the key on the piano, and then there was a little diagram of the actual piano keys printed in the book and in case that weren’t enough, the ivory keys on the actual piano were marked with scotch tape. When my piano teacher came over for our second lesson I knew the song by heart and I had figured out a way to find middle C on the piano so I could peel the scotch tape off and display my knowledge. I got the wrong keys.

I was so impossibly new at piano that it took hours and hours of training before I could even play a mix of ten simple notes at one time. C-D-E-F-G with my left hand and C-D-E-F-G with my right hand, one octave higher. By then I could operate without the tape on Middle C and usually without the printed diagrams in my piano book. But the notes were still numbered for each finger.

I think as we get older, we begin to assume that this isn’t the process anymore. We’ve been impossibly new at living for so long, gone through so many years of elementary and middle and high school and maybe even a few years of general education courses at college that there isn’t much at which we think we have to start from scratch. But maybe we’re mistaken about that. Maybe just like those early months of piano, the only building blocks I had from my education so far were the numbers and the letters used to orient me on the keyboard. The alphabet A-G and counting to four didn’t give me a lot of skill on the piano; they just gave me the tools to sit down and start at the very beginning.

Darling, I get how embarrassing it is to work hard on a new project that’s been outlined and explained to death – and to realize the next week that you’ve actually missed your middle C altogether. You thought you had a better grasp of things than this. But let me remind you: you will only be this bad once. The very next week I knew exactly where middle C was and I’ve never forgotten since. I took baby steps. Sometimes I practiced longer than I needed to. I made progress.

It was the same way when I learned to water ski: first I wasn’t even sure how to put the skis on. Then I huddled in the water with my skis tied together so I wouldn’t accidentally do the splits – and I still couldn’t get up. And years later I finally tried to get up with one ski and I tried long enough and hard enough that I made it. That fall when the lakes cooled down I went back to piano competitions and music theory tests and memorized pages of music from composers like Bach and Rachmaninoff. I was in high school. Eight-year-old me had put in the time being a beginner so that teenage me could enjoy having a skill.

It’s like that with writing. High school me put in the time writing stories and essays and book reports poorly so that college me could be a bit better and adult me can write a manuscript. I didn’t start writing manuscripts in middle school. I started writing paragraphs – bad paragraphs. And even now in a lot of ways I’m beginning new things, willing to be bad at them long enough to become better. I’m new-ish at blogging and new at joining a writer’s group and new at sending my work out into the world. I’m baby-bottom-soft at fiction, though I want to get better one day (so I keep at it in secret, and hope.)

I want to leave you with a secret though – and maybe it’s one you’ve already mastered but it’s one I’ve always been a little embarrassed about, and I hope by sharing, we can mitigate some shame for each other.

Begin privately.

You don’t have to be brand new at something publicly. Start in the quiet. Begin small. Write a future blog post, and then another, and then another until you write one you think you can post. Post it. Write a bunch more until you’ve got another you want to share. It’s ok that this is a process. It’s ok to be new without being on the front page while you’re new. Sometimes I consider my blog the safe place, where I write without the severe editing I put my essays through. Sometimes I don’t even publish things there until I’ve reworked and edited them to my own satisfaction. Sometimes I write something just for the practice of it and I never go back to use it again.

But however you practice, however you learn, don’t give up being new at something just because you’re new. Remember what I said earlier: this is the worst you’ll ever be. Next week’s blog post will be more practiced. You’ll remember where the keys are. You’ll figure out how to number your fingers so habitually you’ll know them by instinct. You’ll learn to water ski so proficiently you’ll be dropping a ski, jumping the wake, getting up on one foot. Just remember darling: you’ve got to be terrible first if you ever want to be good.

go live first – letter no. 3

January 23, 2020Posted in adventure, camp life, habitsTagged blog, blogging, Eagle Lake Camp, Gianna Soderstrom, life instructions, parenting, toddler, writing2 Comments

I think it was Hannah Brencher who said that writers aren’t people who are good at writing about life; they’re the people who’ve gotten really good at living. There is a ring of truth to her words. You can’t write if you’re not living anything. We can all see how true it is for non-fiction; you can’t write what you haven’t experienced. But I think it’s true for fiction too. You can’t write about lives in any believable way if you’re not living in the thick of them. How can you create people if you don’t live with people, love people, mingle with them and celebrate with them and mourn and dance and eat and take long walks with them? There is a vibrancy and a grittiness to real life that we can’t ever write if we don’t ever live it first.

There’s a lot of reasons this is hard, but can we just talk about two of them for a second? 1. It’s easy to get caught up in our own heads, trying to write and stumbling against our own lack of experience without realizing it. 2. It’s also easy to swing the other direction, to get so caught up in trying to live a life we can write about that we forget to just live, to be present and unguarded, to be alive in the moments that will later become the stories we have to tell, without having taken notes on or wondered at them as they happened.

I’ve done both of those before: lately I’ve been living all in my own head, trying to write about life without sinking my teeth into the meat of it myself. It’s a cyclone of an existence. I think of John Green’s book Turtles All the Way Down where he opens up about his experience of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and how it becomes, for him, a whirlpool of thoughts spiraling tighter and tighter in dangerous directions that feel completely beyond his control. On a very different scale and in a manner very much more IN my control, that is what it’s like to live stuck inside my head, and maybe anyone’s head. When you close the doors and sit down to analyze what you have without letting in light, fresh air or new ideas, you spiral around and around in the same frustrations, fears, and failures.

I began to come out of that shell late this summer. One day during camp, I walked outside onto the sunlit deck and stood, soaking in the morning warmth for a moment. There were kiddos already running back and forth, but there were also mamas. And they were sitting. There were cups of coffee on the arms of their chairs. They weren’t just wiggling their toes in the sunshine before they walked back inside to do the dishes, they were sitting outside drinking deep from the cup of mountain air and children’s playtime and mama-friendship that life was holding up to them in that moment. And I had almost missed it. I had been missing it most of the summer. I don’t want to miss moments like that for the rest of my life; they’ll be the moments that come back in stories one day too. They’ll be the moments of conversation that inspires me, of wisdom that empowers me, of joy that refreshes me. Maybe quiet moments sipping coffee together won’t come up in dramatic retellings of the stories of my life, but they will influence and shape and nurture me as a writer all the same.

Learn to live, darling. Learn to look up from your desk in time to see a squirrel leap into the trees, learn to laugh at the weird, new, odd things your toddler does that could, if you’re not careful, drive you crazy. Learn to laugh so hard you pee a little and learn to cry when the people around you – your people – are crying too.

But I have a word of caution for you. As you learn to live, don’t think so deeply about it that you begin to spiral in on yourself again. Life is not a race to collect stories or a contest to acquire the richest material. There’s no prize to the one who’s lived in a tiny home and a mansion and also backpacked through Europe: you can live in a cul-de-sac and vacuum your split-level stairs every week and still be living the life that people need you to write about. Trust me on this.

When I moved to Colorado in my early twenties I believed that adventure was out there and I was going to find it. And I also believed that if I didn’t find it, I’d never be the writer I wanted to be. I’d never have the words or inspiration or opportunities that a writer needs if I wasn’t out there living the adventure that everyone wants to read about. It took me a very long time to realize how wrong I was. Adventure wasn’t just waiting in the wild aspects of a life few people get to live; adventure was waiting in the mundane, belly-laugh moments that everybody gets to live. I was given the adventure of a lifetime – the lifetime of one human being, which is always, always an adventure. I had no idea then how poignant, how rich, how write-able that one wild adventure would be. And wouldn’t you know it, here I am with two children and a tiny cottage where I can sit and watch the squirrels, where my toddler counts to ten and inserts “four” whenever he can’t remember what number comes next. Here I am with my one computer and the under-the-stairs bedroom that makes me feel slightly like Harry Potter, and the gallery wall of art complete with kitchen cooling racks that I use as photo grids. There is more adventure in my three red picket fence gates than in the life I thought I would have when I moved out here, single and hoping that a good story would find me.In all the advice that we give writers to sit down and write the thing, don’t forget to go out and live the thing too. I mean yeah, you won’t get far at all without plunking yourself down and opening a tab to your writing platform of choice, instead of streaming another episode. But you won’t get far streaming another episode anyway. You’ve got to be wildly, vastly, energetically present in this one grand life of yours. You can’t hope to write it if you don’t live it. So go live, darlings. Go live deep and real and hard and beautiful. Then we’ll write.

dandelion moments

June 14, 2019Posted in adventure, courage, habitsTagged blogging, flowers, Gianna Soderstrom, goodbyes, gratitude, hope, joy, parenting, photography, toddler, travelLeave a comment

I was standing down by the lake-edge, blinking back tears of goodbye and wishing this rich green Minnesota environment could be mine all the time. And then I turned and saw my toddler blowing a dandelion that had gone to seed, the magic of it as much in his eyes as in the wish he doesn’t know how to make yet. The almost-physical ache I had felt faded soft as the lapping lake water. I could be ok, with moments like this that slip in with unexpected happiness. I chased the boy around with my camera, instructing him to blow. Mom even grabbed him a new dandelion when the first one was out of seeds. I went inside with thoughts of dandelion hope echoing through the punchy grief of my goodbyes.

I have a tendency to let moments like this disappear into the humdrum of my days. When I curl up on the couch in the evening and my husband asks how my day was, these aren’t the things I think of first. My automatic response is to describe the lakeshore, the tears, the goodbyes, the ache I didn’t want to feel. And then I look forward to the next hard thing: I say words like, “And now we’re home and he’ll have to get used to not being the center of attention all the time; he’ll cry and hang on my legs, and ask for special treats like Larabars and his pacifier.” I forget the dandelion wishes until the very end: “There were a few good moments. Erik was so cute, blowing a dandelion with his lips all full and pursed. But I don’t know if I got any good pictures.”

I’d like to think we color our perspectives beginning with the best and happiest memories, but I don’t think it’s true. I felt joy just as strongly as pain but I focused on what was hard and hurtful instead of what was beautiful. It’s easy to do, honestly. Hard moments do make a strong impression on us. Hurt is real. Goodbyes suck. And just like that, the rain clouds that lasted for half-an-hour are all we can remember of our sunny days. It’s like a trick we help our own memories play. Like the movie Inside Out; let Sadness touch one memory and it all turns blue. No amount of scolding from Joy can stop the infectious touch spreading across a myriad of dandelion moments.

It feels like that’s an inevitable truth; the memories that sit strongest with you will color your whole day – maybe eventually your whole life. And what if your whole life, day by day, turns blue? But I don’t think that’s the whole picture, not quite.

I think we have a say in the process. I think we have a voice in the way these memories shape us – we give them some of their power and we can take some of it away. And maybe we’ll never be able to erase the hurting parts of our days. Goodbyes will always be painful, won’t they? But we don’t need to erase pain to feel joy. We just need to feel it, to really see it and honor it and give it the place it should have. And that might take some fighting.

I think we can turn our lives bright again in small but meaningful ways if we really pay attention. The deep, the real and the magnificent exist for each of us if we are willing to notice it and hold on. I can’t tell you how you will do this. There isn’t a prescription for joy because no two lives or circumstances are the same. No two people feel and capture and remember emotions the same way. Your dandelion wishes will look different from mine, even if you have a dandelion-blowing toddler trundling across the dewy grass, enchanting his aunts and grandma all together. But that said, I do have a few ideas.

Write it down. Sit with your thoughts and memories at the end of a day or early the next morning and just scribble a few notes of the things that made you smile. Dandelion blowing. The airplane ride with a toddler that actually went really well. Dewy grass on my feet for one last morning, before we returned to dry Colorado. Let these things grow into a habit and you will begin to find the permeating ability of joy.
Take pictures. Maybe only one in one hundred will be instagram worthy and honestly, isn’t that ok? Taking a photograph can help you remember. It may pop up in your memories, or maybe Google photos will throw it into a video for you. Or your mother will ask you for those photographs and years later you’ll find them tucked in a box or an album somewhere, and you’ll remember.
Ponder. When you have those quiet seconds, the waiting seconds when you could pick up a phone and scroll, just review your own hours. Look for the beautiful things. It’s there, it’s waiting – just hunt through your own memories and dig them up. Color your days in the in-between seconds. And maybe when you find yourself lying in bed at night, you’ll realize that even with the goodbyes and the long travel and the way he cried all the long drive back from the airport, it was a day of dandelion moments.

cliff jumping

August 3, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, courage, writingTagged blogging, cliff jumpers, cliff jumping, close friends, Colorado, courage, courageous, creativity, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, faith, family, friends, Lake Superior, Minnesota, north shore, truthLeave a comment

There is a cliche I’m tempted to use when I try to describe the passing summer: harder than I thought but better than I expected. I think cliches are better expressed in stories. After all, aren’t cliches just familiar sentiments that we’ve chosen the same, typical ways of expressing? But our stories are all different.

I was the girl who camped with her friends instead of going to parties with them. Once we all slept on the lakeshore after gazing in awe at a meteor shower. It rained on us around midnight but we just ducked under our covers and laughed it off the next day when we shook the sand out of our blankets. One July we packed up and drove to the north shore of Lake Superior. We left at 3 am because we didn’t have reservations and we were banking on being there in time to get two non-reservable campsites. It was a gamble, but we were all together in a too-loud pickup truck eating fresh donuts and trying to keep each other awake and we were willing to take the risk.

The nights were cold and the days were foggy and even so the next morning we girls walked up to the boys campsite to see Caleb striding confidently out of the tent in a swimsuit. The rest of the boys trickled out after him, swaggering a bit with their damp towels over their shoulders. The river we camped on was horribly cold for July and even so there was a definite wall of colder water where the river met Lake Superior and somehow all the same, Caleb planned to go cliff jumping.

Sheri calmly declined. There may be a moment when peer pressure has caused Sheri to cave but I have not seen it. Anni and I looked at each other with wide eager eyes. We had no resistance. It was cliff jumping or a slow death of shameful cowardice. We got our swimsuits and followed the boys. We could hear our hearts pounding over the crunch of our flip-flops on gravel so we sang Dive by Steven Curtis Chapman to pump ourselves up and drown our fear.

We hovered on the edge of the gravely ledge while the boys jumped in line. Once, twice each. I looked down; I shook; I wavered. I thought of how cold the water would be. Worth it? And I imagined the adrenaline-filled glory of coming up the steps to my friends cheers. Worth it?

And then I jumped.

The water was harder than I pictured. It stabbed the soles of my feet and stung the undersides of my outflung arms. I fell farther than I imagined: There were deep heavy layers of water above me when I tried to swim back up. The breath I couldn’t breathe in caught in my throat as I tried to push the waves aside, to resurface. But the glory overwhelmed me. When my feet left the rocky soil I felt the wind in my hair. I felt myself falling with helpless joy. I scrambled onto the rough shore visibly trembling; there was an overwhelm of laughing courage inside so strong I barely heard the offered cheers.

Our feet squeaked against our wet flip-flops as we walked back to our tents. We were cliff jumpers.

That is how I would describe this summer. The long, arduous hours I expected were longer, more painful than I thought. They built resentment and frustration. I’m exhausted when I wake up every morning at 6. The weeks of E teething have been impossible. The times I spend with Grant have been rare, interrupted, disconnected, frustrating.

But the beauty has been overwhelming. Our marriage is stronger. We learned that “being in love” can’t carry us; we learned how to fight for each other in cups of coffee and spontaneous sushi dates and saying I’m sorry. I learned to play with Erik more; we read books and play chase and sometimes seek out the other littles to give me a break. The woods that looked like nothing but a dead burn scar this spring have been washed with the magic of wildflower meadows and red raspberries and baby Aspens like a thick green blanket. The close community has shocked and warmed me like the adrenaline and applause when I climbed out of Lake Superior four years ago.

This summer has stung me like hard cold water on my skin and emboldened me like laughing courage shared with old friends. Here’s to the life we create at camp. Here’s to the hard things we couldn’t imagine and the glory we feel and cannot fathom. Here’s to being cliff jumpers.

^ Anni and I, at Lake Superior. 2014.

bird’s-eye view

July 25, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, courage, writingTagged birds eye view, books, come matter here, courage, gratitude, Hannah Brencher, hope, journal, mountains, mountaintops, reading, valley, valley days, valleysLeave a comment

My first memory of a valley was a deep, lush place near the home I was born in. We lived there until I was seven. I never knew when the route to our destination would take us through the valley; the rising walls of trees around us always came as a surprise, and always took my breath away.

This valley was a river valley. We wound down between the hills on one side and passed a tiny yellow house that was significant for some reason Mom can remember and I cannot. When I read about Anne Shirley’s visit to the home she was born in, that is the house I picture. As we slipped down towards this otherworldly place, Mom would sing Down in the valley, valley so low… We crossed a small bridge in the middle. I twisted around in my seat to watch while we wound up the other side. The first valley I met was magical.

I recently read Come Matter Here by Hannah Brencher. Chapter five is titled Walk in the Valley. Valley days are ordinary days. They are the opposite of mountaintop days. They’re days where you can’t see out the sides of where you’re headed. You just follow the running water up, up, trying to enjoy the beauty while you set your feet and heart towards the end of it all.

I loved my little valley growing up. I love the valley I can see now; I know exactly when I’ll drive through it. I look over the edge of the range and see it while I’m raising a trail of dust on the washboard-gravel roads.

I came through a season of metaphorical valley-days lately, just like the ones Hannah Brencher talks about. Somehow I’m living physically and spiritually and emotionally with a bird’s-eye view. When I look down past the grassy range towards the spread-out city in the valley below, I think of the openness of space I occupy, the openness of heart I experience, the open-handedness of God I see. It is helpful to see things from above once in a while.

My old journals give me hope. I’m not where I was those years in the valley. For years now I’ve been writing down the almost-insignificant things I’m grateful for. They’ve given me the hope and help I needed to trust God when I couldn’t see out the lush, green hills that were walls, no matter how pretty. I understand valleys differently now. Sometimes they’re just a place you drive through unexpectedly on your way somewhere else. Sometimes they’re places you live, in a little house woven about with dreams and stories you can’t remember.

I know those days will come again in a different way. I won’t be walking in the clouds forever. But looking down from above gives me courage. Mountaintops have their place too. Valleys – everyday ordinariness – can be lovely. Maybe it just takes a bird’s eye view to see it sometimes. Perhaps it takes the gradual descent through the hills singing all the while, the slow climbing on the other side, to recognize the beauty that the valley holds.

wild raspberries

July 16, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, parentingTagged Bemidji, berry picking, blogging, Colorado, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, earth, essays, family, learning, memories, nature, parents, raspberries, wild raspberries1 Comment

It was mid-July when I first learned about wild raspberries. We were camping, camping all together on our summer family trip to Bemidji State Park. The hot afternoons we spent out in the boat together, whipping the intertubes in circles and pulling the skiers in straight lines. Cool mornings Mom liked to get us out biking. There were mixed feelings about hopping on our bikes in the midwest humidity, but our motto was “Everybody gets a turn doing what they want.” Mom, Josh, me and sometimes Josiah all wanted to bike.

My parents took the lead and the tail. Mom biked ahead with Josh, competitive nature in full force. I did my best to keep up despite a slight nagging sympathy for Josiah and Kiara, younger legs biking slowly in the back with Dad. We went single-file down the winding paved path; Josh and I weaving side to side and attempting to break each other’s records of Distance Ridden With No Hands. Eventually our family caught up with us, all but Dad and Kiara. I turned around, volunteering to find where they’d gotten hung up. Sitting still at a junction in the trail galled me when we ought to be moving.

Dad was stopped by the side of the trail. Kiara struggled up a hill behind him.

“Dad! What happened?”

“Wild Raspberries,” he said with a sly smile, and popped a red berry in his mouth. His knowledge of the outdoors had identified for him a treasure we all missed; his voice identified the warm pleasure that filled him whenever he spent time in the woods.

“Really? Are they good?” I’d never harvested any fruit out of the wild before.

“Try some.” He handed me one, and bent over to pick more. They were good. I began to pick them with Dad, leaning over with my bike held upright between my legs, the front wheel turning heavily towards the trees. Kiara caught up and sat beside the road, eating the berries we shared with her. Soon the rest of the family trickled back and called us sly names for not telling them about the sweet gems we’d stumbled across.

Every year after that, I paid attention to what month it was when we camped at Bemidji. I found ways to quiz Dad quietly, asking him whether the raspberries would be ripe yet. If they were I hung back from my usual fast-paced riding. I’d race Josh across the bridge, attempt to ride with no hands between the vehicle-prohibiting metal gates on the trail, hold my breath to keep from panting while I tried to be the first one up the hills. But when we came to the large aspen grove, white trees in their haze of golden-green light stretching out between the ferns, I’d drop back – “to check on Dad and Kiara,” I’d explain with a shrug, perhaps just a little too innocent.

We’d spend a few minutes eating all the tangy plump raspberries we could reach from the trail, scheming quietly how long we could stay before the others would turn around to find us and deplete the amount of berries we could each eat.

Grant and I walked around the lake at camp one evening when we first moved up here. He told me again the story of how he and his co-counselors were told to weed the areas between the boulders of the damn, and then suddenly chided when the property manager discovered they’d pulled up not just the weeds, but all the wild raspberries. We laughed together comfortably. I looked down the sides of the damn at the small stiff bushes poking up between stones. The raspberries were certainly coming back well.

The longer I live at camp, the more raspberries I discover. They grow along the trail up to Raven’s Craig, they grow between the boulders that pile high beside the road. Raspberries bloomed in springtime along the walk down to the dining hall and behind staff housing and on the trail that led back to Halfway Meadow. Now they’re ripening.

We walk around the lake again, this time with little Erik on Grant’s back. I linger, slowing down Grant’s long strides across the open back of the damn. There are raspberries to pick. Nostalgia warms me; I put a raspberry in Erik’s mouth. He grimaces with the burst of tang, and then smiles widely around the sweetness. I shape a memory in the sunshine, saving it for us to taste again next summer.

Every time I find a dark red raspberry, ripe and ready to eat, I remember eating those first wild berries with Dad. I hear the excitement that crept into his voice when he taught us about the woods he loved. I remember learning about the trees from him. Mom quizzed us on our trees by tickling our noses with their leaves, making our homeschool learning fun. Dad taught us from the heart of him; there was no tickling, only a deep love of all things wild that made his knowledge gold and transformed the woods into holy ground.

It is mid-July. I try to remember all the places I’ve noticed the rough shapes of raspberry leaves over the spring. I wander back quietly, hoping to find and collect the sweet red memories before everyone else catches up.

breaking days

June 25, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, courage, parentingTagged beauty, blogging, camp life, camp wife, children, Colorado, Eagle Lake Camp, faith, God, Jesus, learning, marriage, nature, parenting, parents, truthLeave a comment

For nearly a week now I’ve been clinging to five-minute increments of quiet while E plays flips the stiff pages of a board book or gnaws contentedly on a toy. And in between those five minute spaces I’ve tried everything.

“Are you still hungry? Is it your teeth? Do you need tylenol again? You can’t be tired already… Shall we go outside for a bit?” Anything. Anything to stop the grunting, the whining. Camp is flexing its muscles, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race. The woods are wearing their Sunday best. Ocean Spray like lace spills from rocky outcroppings, Showy Daisies and Black-eyed Susans pin an emerald cape to the shoulders of the hills. The meadows wear lavender flowers of Columbine in their hair. And for a week I struggled every day; just don’t cry, just don’t cry.

I cry anyway. By the time he goes down for his morning nap I have been tempted to pull my hair out so often that if I had any follow-through, I’d be bald. When he wakes up, too early and still cranky, the angst has scarcely had time to settle. I try to remind myself of all that is lovely.

“You’re a sweet boy, and we adore you,” I whisper. He stares blankly while I spoon up more applesauce and attempt to smile around the despair I feel. I try to play with him. He only wants to be held. I try to let him play in the other room; maybe if I am out of sight he will be content. I only get one dish washed before he is crawling across the kitchen, wailing heartily with real tears in his hazel eyes. Forget the dishes. Maybe he needs another nap. Ten minutes of “cry-it-out” later, I reluctantly admit this is not the solution either.

All the camp is blossoming, all the hearts are reveling in discipleship and the study of God together. These are glory days, and these are breaking days.

Yet somehow, these days drive me deeper into faith, deeper into marriage, deeper into parenting. I pray nearly constantly, and God begins to answer. After nearly a week, the teething abates slightly, the smiling boy is back, recommencing his giggles. Grant digs in, buying me chocolate, telling me to set aside the dishes for when he’s home, changing the diapers. I get down on the floor instead of cleaning or scrolling or reading, and we play tag, tackle, chase. The beauty begins to shape out of the frustration. The glory of life grows slowly back up beside the brokenness. I take time to look at the hard edges of parenting a 1 year old and I ask God for eyes to see what he would show me; ears to hear what he would tell me, a heart to receive what he would give.

When we walk down to dinner, I point out the way bushes bloom out of rocky crevices. I chatter back to E’s cooing and we discuss all things wide and wonderful. I breathe deep and smile at the wriggling boy, and count the stars in the waving grass with the few minutes I’ve been given.

crazy days, lovely days

June 4, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, habitsTagged blogging, Colorado, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, earth, home, learning, mountain meadow, mountains, nature, photography, Pikes Peak, truthLeave a comment

The days are crazy here. I may look back on this conclusion someday and wonder what I thought was so crazy about them, but it still seems true now. I live more unplugged, since taking my phone out of the house means losing reception instantly. I play more with Baby E. We play hide-and-seek around and around the large comfy chair in the living room, or wrestling games, or chasing games. We play upstairs on the porch with the others, although Erik is a bit of a loner so far.

We walk downhill to the dining hall once or twice a day (which means uphill back and we mamas all groan the whole way.) When Erik naps I put the monitor on the front patio and walk laps around the driveway to staff housing, checking the monitor every five minutes when I pass through. Sometimes we all walk down to the beach together, or up to the gate to see Pikes Peak. If I’m feeling energetic and adventurous, we’ll hike the “mother loop” which feels 90% uphill, or walk out on the trail towards Halfway Meadow.

There’s a trail up to the Cross I haven’t explored yet, since it’s too steep to take Erik up, or to hike without a radio connection. There’s a trail to the Raven’s Craig where I’ve only discovered the trailhead and the first few yards of the narrow, winding track. There’s a bike track that stretches out past where another trail meets the road. The lake is surrounded by a trail that rides up over the damn. There are burn scars and wildernesses waiting at our doorstep. Overall there’s a lot of walking. I barely drive anywhere.

I’m learning to find beauty in the repetition. When I walk laps around the willow marsh during E’s naps, I look for new wildflowers blooming, or study the few aspens that rise above the willow brush more closely. There are new birdsongs to be heard, new shades of green to be discovered. I try to look with fresh eyes every time I walk around it.

I’m trying to see God the same way, new and deep and beyond what I could ever comprehend, yet always revealing more of himself. I try to look deeper and more closely at the scriptures I’ve read so often. There is more to be found, understood, absorbed, applied – if only I can learn to see it. God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow but his mercies are new every morning. I cling to these thoughts and passages and look for the new mercies of God in the old, old words he gave us, just like I look for the newness of leafy aspens and blooming wildflowers in the narrow marsh below our front door.