Embracing the Fall

Look around; Fall descends. Gathering in the rest of the garden's produce (three weeks ago), I realized that years have flown by since I last experienced the fullness of summer, fat and pregnant with life, with love. Over twelve years ago I remember visiting the Pacific Northwest, living in a summer daze of butter and banana pancakes--filling my thoughts with hazy July poetry, a daydream of sunlight resting heavily on leaves, as glinting glares and shadows played across my closed eyelids. Not even so long ago--nine or ten years perhaps--I rode motorcycles, climbed cliffs, filled my rooms with green, growing things, bathed in icy rivers, watched fireworks, and laid content in a twin bed I shared with Summer and the full August moon. I sighed, heavy with satisfaction those summer nights.

Years pass as I keep waiting to feel that same fatness, that same content-ment in the heat of July and August. Yet year after year, the warm weather burdens rather than relieves. I wonder now if the summer of my life will ever return--if fall and winter have become my permanent realities. Still, I've found peace in those non-anticipated months and seasons. I may no longer experience Summer as I once knew her, at least in my current time and space. Yet God has compensated with a fullness of fall and winter, unexpectedly so.

Can fall--a season personified by death and decay--truly be enjoyed? Can such a thing be embraced? Certainly. Most of my favorite metaphors involve food. When my daughter, Eden, spotted a chocolate bar last week, she remarked, quite frankly, "I like chocolate..." and after a considering pause: "Pickles are icky and yucky." She spoke candidly, with no pickles in sight. Life, as Eden has begun to observe, can be chocolate one moment and pickles the next. What reaction is more human than to desire the sweet, the summer in our lives, while dreading the bitter and acidic? Perhaps strangely, then, I've observed my own appetite for vinegary foods. Maybe my taste buds predestine me for sorrow; I have, after all, always enjoyed pickles, lemons, and sour cream. Fortuitously, the Lord called me to Romania, a land filled with sourness, and sadness.

Roman-ians pickle their summer harvest to savor through-out the fall and winter months. Pickled peppers, pickled cabbage, pickled beans and carrots, even a kind of pickled potato salad. In ways, we store the summer produce in our lives to feed on during winter months--even if the sweet has turned a little sour. The trick is enjoying that bitterness as much as we can enjoy a pickle, borscht, lemon curd, or sarmale with smantana. We can savor the sour even more than the sweet pepper when it's the only fruit available to put to our lips. The trick is to still eat, to still devour life, despite the current flavor.

So, rather than holing ourselves up at home, I bundle the beasts and head out to harvest mazes where we easily lose ourselves in the dark--and we embrace the cold, the unknown, the fear, if just for passing moments. I walk with young ones out to our frozen garden, tearing the last summer fruits from their vines. We mulch leaves and spread them over the now barren earth, hoping that some day in the future the dirt will bloom again with life. We venture out to barns together, taking candid shots of our new family, thanks to an extremely talented and giving sister (I love you Megs), and we walk as Adam and Eve--thrust into the stark realities of life. Still, we do so smiling.

I once believed the term "Fall" (as in the season) originated from the action of leaves descending from trees during the cooling period that precedes winter. Upon further reflection, however, I recognize tangible links between autumn, death, and the Fall of humankind. When God thrust Adam and Eve from paradise to tough things out in a dry and unyielding environment, they experienced a dramatic shift from sweet to sour. They descended, just as the leaves do, from paradise to earthen reality. As the melodic Danny Elfman croons, "Whoever said that life on this planet would ever be paradise?" I guess I never had that promise of paradise--none of us do. And that's the way life goes... everyone around us ends up feeling the same sensation of pain, sooner or later. At some point that pain will end; at some point spring returns. Apart from the seasons, however, it's an elusive, mysterious return. What do we do in the intervening minutes, months, years? As I await a return to the plump, heavy ripeness of summer--the easy joy and laughter, the days of skinny-dipping and sandstone hikes, when visions of dancing in a summer dress beneath swaying boughs of a twinkle-lit backyard tree could become a reality--I enfold myself in the engulfing, bitter wake.

Wrestling the Unmaker

Anyone who has ever spent a holiday in my presence knows how highly I consider food. Food--a basic necessity that sustains life but often offers more than just physical nourishment. It can, at times, feed our emotional needs. Food, like a good book, can be comforting. Today, for instance, over a bowl of yellow thai curry with potatoes, carrots and chicken, I remembered single days, working on a Master's thesis and enjoying the tenacious connection I had with my roommate, Kaydee. At a Vietnamese restaurant in Logan, Utah (a restaurant that no longer exists), we often discussed life, the future, and trivial bits, like what Pink was wearing in her latest video. Today, with a mouth full of rice paper, crunchy cucumber, shrimp and peanut sauce, I felt those bygone days reach down and swipe my face like a brush (Dillard, "New Name" posting).

So, there you have it. The sensory act of eating can traverse whole canyons in our lives--and food plays the part of bridge. When my former marriage counselor/current grief (relief?) counselor reiterates, "You are the most important person to you, so you need to take time for yourself!" I think, "Fine. Let's eat!" Seriously, though, I understand that I need to do something each day, and perhaps multiple times in that day, to rejuvenate my soul. Am I shallow if gardening and constructing something from the harvest does that for me? It's an act of creation, one where we get to fulfill our status of designers and architects, battling types of destruction that persist in the undoing all around us. I remember a book teaching the same principle (though not with food) years ago. In it, Orson Scott Card's prophet, Taleswapper, relates:

"War is the Unmaker's ally, because it tears down everything it touches [...] fire, murder, crime, cupidity, and concupiscence break apart the fragile bonds that make human beings into nations, cities, families, friends, and souls."

[...]

"Sposing I believe you," said Alvin. "Sposing there's such a thing as the Unmaker. There ain't a blame thing I can do."

A slow smile crept over Taleswapper's face. He tipped himself to one side, to free up his hand, which slowly reached down to the ground and picked up the little bug basket where it lay in the grass. "Does that look like a blamed thing?"

"That's just a bunch of grass."

"It was a bunch of grass," said Taleswapper. "And if you tore it up it'd be a bunch of grass again. But now, right now, it's something more than that."

"A little bug basket is all."

"Something that you made."

"Well, it's a sure thing grass don't grow that way."

"And when you made it, you beat back the Unmaker."

"Not by much," said Alvin.

"No," said Taleswapper. "But by the making of one bug basket. By that much, you beat him back." (128-29)

Alvin does with grass what I do with food. He creates. How do we contend with destruction in our lives? How do we wrestle those Unmakers who would tear down all we've built? We continue to create in whatever manner we can.

Therefore, I offer two dishes for your consider-ation, made with my own hands, with as many base materials as I could muster. The first I'm including because honestly, it took me the better part of a day to fashion into being. The taste, though earthy and hearty and satisfying, didn't last that long--so I have to show something else for my efforts: Mozzarella Pizza Bombs. Homemade dough, homemade tomato sauce, buffalo mozzarella, fresh garden basil, and hot oil to fry the delectable combination.

Every once and a while, the food that comforts is not heavy. Think of those times when your body craves water--something pure, something cleansing, refreshing. This was my latest experience with the neighbor's garden salsa. They hauled me into their home for dinner, after babysitting my three rug rats--and I'm so glad they did. I was still thinking about the nachos and salted cucumbers hours later, and since then, I determined to make my own salsa--no recipe.

Fresh, plump, sweet, garden tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, green peppers, onions and lime, salt and pepper. Heaven on a plate and beauty in your mouth. Wholesome, I could feel it beating back that Unmaker--at least until next mealtime. :)

Works Cited

Card, Orson Scott. Seventh Son. New York: TOR, 1987.

The EMP

Seventeen years ago this month, I listened to an ordained patriarch tell me about my life. Ever since that day (due to allusions of tumultuous times) I thought I would live through some horrendous last-days episode--you know, the ones you play out in your mind where bombs explode in open fields and you have to travel cross-country to colonize with other survivors, filtering your own drinking water, growing gardens and hunting to remain alive. For some reason, I always imagined myself as a widow, but with some older, protective son and a brood of children, battling through the physical trials and hardships of a telestial world together. In my dream-vision, I felt strong.

The feeling subsided as I began my own family in earnest. Why would I want to believe anything could harm them? I focused on the typical Christian goals: get married, have children, support your husband, nurture your family, serve--yet somewhere in the middle of all this, I lost a portion of my strength. Perhaps I just misplaced it. Then, nearly two years ago, my parents began re-implanting the final days' scenarios through talk of a church series aptly entitled, The Great and Terrible. Though the series delivered somewhere in the middle, only to take a nosedive near the end, one element intrigued us all: the EMP.

EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse, and in Chris Stewart's end-of-days drama, it takes out every kind of electric energy as well as cell phones and car batteries. Set off by a nuclear warhead detonated in the upper atmosphere, the EMP brings man back to the Dark Ages. Chaos rules from Washington D.C. to California. As power-hungry political players make grabs at the government of an already devastated nation, the average American is left to simply survive. Engrossed by the series, I told Duane we needed to bulk up and get tough, to be able to pick up one of our kids (as Johnny Depp once mentioned in an interview) and run for a mile while hauling them. Imagining highways full of abandoned vehicles and city streets taken over by gangs, I started running again--just around the block. I began lifting weights and reinvesting in the mile. At the urging of both parents and family, I stored more food, filling cupboards and the garage with powdered milk, soup and pudding mixes, flour, sugar, dried beans and peanut butter. We ordered dried fruit and dehydrated eggs for Christmas, along with flashlights that required no batteries, hand-operated wheat mills, propane burners, and water purifiers.

What I never realized in all of this planning was that the EMP I so feverishly anticipated was of quite a different caliber than the one described in Stewart's book series, and in some ways, more impacting. The EMP hinted at in my future was already living in my house. I had been sleeping next to it for years. I'd even been adapting my cooking to feed its peculiar appetite. How could I have been so stupid?! It had been giving off little warning signals--a ticking, a soft beeping--for the past seven years, like some type of active bomb... Finally, it exploded.

Now, instead of imagining missiles and tsunamis, I wonder how many of the battles and wars of the last days we will fight in our own neighborhoods and in our own homes. How many of us will lose friends, husbands, sons, daughters, parents, siblings in that struggle? And why do people like I wait for some catastrophic, physical event to occur, although the disintegration of society is well underway all around us? Still, one correlation between intimate EMPs and public--even global--natural disasters that cannot be denied is the inborn compulsion to survive, to heal, and to live again. When disaster strikes, and you raise your head out of the pounding surf, if you find the boon of friendly faces when you look about you, you take hold of those hands, you pull yourself up, and you begin again. If I've learned anything in the past couple months, it is to hold firmly. Hold onto friendly hands; hold to the things you know to be true--those things that remain throughout and even after the storm.

Works Cited

Stewart, Chris. The Second Sun. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2007.

Confession of a Humpback Mother

I live on a strict budget. It's true. I never spend more than I make, and I always pay off credit cards completely when the bill arrives. However, one simple website tempts me... and on several occasions, I've punched in the card numbers without knowing exactly how I would pay the bill. Lately, dear readers, due to circumstances I'm sure you're already aware of, I've been forced to come to grips with overcoming my pinpoint shopping addiction. And the first step is, of course, confession.

I am a Gymboreeoholic. Holding one of their coupons burns a hole in the coupon folder. Seeing a 60%-off sale message in my in-box quickens the pulse just a bit. Please, don't judge. Just give me this slight obsession without ridicule. Let me hang onto this cherished fault without seeking an intervention--yet. If confession is the first step, I'm not yet ready for what follows. And if I'm honest with my confession, I know I'm already planning a desperate look of what's new in the fall lineup when Gymbucks come due this Thursday. I know once I allow myself to click the link directing me to their front door, I've already caved, despite whatever justifications I tell myself: kids are always growing; the weather's always changing. Jeans get holes. Perhaps there is some truth to those reasonings, but if I'm really going to get help, I have to recognize that part of the hold Gymboree has is comfort.

When I slice open a freshly-mailed Gymboree box, crack open the carefully and individually packaged skirts, gymmies, sweaters, jeans, T-shirts, I feel comforted. At times, we all buy things we think will bring us peace, and how harmful can cotton really be? Ah... a knit jumper. Soft, striped leggings. Corduroy pants. They make me feel safe, like a favorite blankie, even if I can't wear the clothes myself anymore. Wrapping my kids in comfort, comforts me. Is this wrong? Is this perceived notion of safety and security misguided?

At the end of a long work day, once the family is wrapped in fleece or cotton contentment, I pull out another purchased luxury and I snuggle with the kids, in bed, to read it. Paper might not feel soft against your cheek; however, cut and printed with ink, it can also succor aching hearts. So here's my secondary, possibly not necessary, confession. Around two weeks ago, in a mangled and confused state of grief (while Duane had the kids), I visited Barnes and Noble and spent $100. Woah, I know--that might not be much to some of you, but to this mother on a budget, I had to suppress the numbers on the receipt to enjoy the simple satisfaction of the books. Ah... the books.

I like keeping shelves full of books in every room, including my kids' rooms. Just having them standing guard in my own personal library reminds me of something I once read in school:

We come to feel that the books we own are the books we know, as if possession were, in libraries as in courts, nine-tenths of the law; that to glance at the spines of the books we call ours [...] allows us to say, "All this is mine," as if their presence alone fills us with their wisdom, without our actually having to labour through their contents. (Manguel 245)

At times that physical ownership, the books on the shelf, the library, can make you feel empowered with knowledge or at least the promise of knowledge. And with that promise comes the hope that you can make it through today, tomorrow, and the months and years yet to come.

So, can money buy happiness or can books and clothes provide comfort, identity, direction? Is the promise of their support and sympathy misguided? I hope not entirely. They are certainly not the end-all answer to our grief, but perhaps they can give us a moment of peace to figure things out. Case in point: last night, half piled on top of each other, we read a section from The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Animals of the World (one of the Barnes and Noble purchases) on martens and weasels, nocturnal animals that hole up in hollow trees during the day and eat everything from berries and nuts to any meat they can catch, including both squirrels and frogs. According to author Tom Jackson, "They kill their prey with their long, curved claws and sharp teeth" (158). How can a ravenous and wild marten be comforting? Let me explain.

Sydney's new morning ritual--watching "Champions of the Wild" on Animal Planet--inspired the encyclopedia purchase. She wants to know where these animals live, what they eat, how they sleep, and where they fit into her world. Sydney is a child who doesn't bat an eye when lions bound on the rumps of antelope, biting and clawing their prey into submissiveness, nor when leopards tug their leaden dinners up neighboring trees, entrails exposed. I suppose she's seen plenty of pain at home, and I've come to realize that the animal world is less a horror and more a comfort, when you have the right perspective. Not all fathers stay with their children. Like humpback whales, many mothers in the animal kingdom raise their offspring alone. Others, like meercats, rely on the community. And weasels emerge at night to rip apart inattentive frogs. It's not a pretty sight, but that's life.

None of us want to sleep next to a weasel, yet there's comfort in knowing you're not the only absent- minded frog or lone humpback whale or any other number of bizarrely behaving animals in the world. You might be pathetic, but you're not alone. Ironically, when you've felt the rawness of life brush past you in your inner sanctum, there's comfort in seeing the crude and unedited as a real and natural part of life on Earth.

So, next time life claws you ragged, my latest suggestion is: pull on some soft gymmies, plump up the pillows, and snuggle down with a good book--one that doesn't sugarcoat the natural scenes of life. You don't have to spend a fortune, but sometimes even monetary purchases can provide consolation and insight.

Works Cited

Jackson, Tom. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Animals of the World: A Guide to 840 Amphibians, Reptiles and Mammals from Every Continent. China: Fall River Press, 2009.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1996.

A New Name

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose,

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd..."

according to Juliet, anyway. Her simple words are enough to convince the star-crossed lover to exclaim, "Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd; Henceforth I never will be Romeo" (II.ii.45-47, 53-54).

Ahh... if it were so easy. Are our names truly so insignificant? Would Juliet make the same argument mere days later when she became Juliet Capulet Montague, her name altered by that which she came so much to love? According to her previous reasoning, Juliet would be Juliet, regardless of Capulet, regardless of Montague, regardless of the alphabetical scribbles we take on that seem to define us. Could Romeo (the person) be anymore constant than Romeo (the name)?

I doubt the young Capulet knew that we shed skin cells like snakes. According to our own biology, by the time we are twenty years old, we will have replaced our skin cells nearly 200 times over (ASU, par. 10). So, by the time we are just coming to know ourselves, we have already worn 200 different skins. But do we ever really shed our souls? American author, Annie Dillard is always startled to rediscover the old self she had somehow forgotten. At every shocking realization she exclaims, "You again" (11).

At the end of living through hundreds of different skins, through seemingly hundreds of different lives, she notes:

Your very cells have been replaced, and so have most of your feelings--except for two, two that connect back as far as you can remember. One is the chilling sensation of lowering one foot into a hot bath. The other [...] when you feel the chill spread inside your shoulders, shoot down your arms and rise to your lips, and when you remember having felt this sensation from always, from when your mother lifted you down toward the bath and you curled up your legs: it is the dizzying overreal sensation of noticing that you are here. You feel life wipe your face like a big brush. (249)

I felt the broad brush stroke just last week, when the not-so-shocking realization came that my driver's license expired. Upon arriving at the Office of Motor Vehicles and handing the attendant my former driver's license, the woman curtly informed me that an impediment had been put on my record because of what else? My name. I needed my birth certificate. In Idaho, the court dictates what name you will be given--and they stick with birth names.

Rewind to that time when I was an infant, hurling downward into a baby's first bath. For nearly twenty-six years since then, my given name held true: Angela Heather McRae. Then, although I had already shed at least 200 different skins, I yearned for a new shape--to be called not just friend, sister, daughter, but wife. The updated social security card and Utah driver's license read Heather McRae Bosworth. Renewal. Why did I shed Angela, I ask myself now. Too long was probably the strongest argument--that and wanting to be defined by family, by history. Unlike fickle Juliet, we look for our names to define us. Still, I sat in shock at the DMV, greeting my long-lost self. Hello again, Angela. Where have you been the past seven years? I tilted my face upward. Swipe.

Romeo and Juliet got a lot wrong, even if you are part of that sickening romantic audience that believes they got one thing right. We cannot merely be who we have always been--without life's experiences marking us! Otherwise, what would be the point of life? We are composed of our given names and of more than our given names. We are made up of life. How else could Juliet exclaim, "Oh happy dagger!" (V.iii.169-170)? How else "happy" without the addition of Montague to her graphemic roll call? How else without first knowing and loving Romeo?

So, Juliet Capulet Montague was the same person and yet a changed person from just Juliet Capulet. Who, then, is this new person--this same person--on my driver's license? As I sat at Motor Vehicles, vacillating between the options of Angela H. McRae Bosworth, Angela Heather Bosworth, Angela H. M. Bosworth, I struggled to understand what happened to Heather McRae... and what happened to Heather Bosworth--without realizing, as I do now, that I am who I have always been, though changed. I settled with the office attendant for Angela Heather M. Bosworth (because anything longer wouldn't fit on the license), even though I still struggle to remember who Angela is. She's a vague, misty ghost--one that whispers memories of angels and another retired name: Sora McRae, who once lived in the Transylvanian countryside of Romania. Part of my consecrated mission as an eternal soul and as a human being, is living up to Angela, in ways too sacred to relate, if sometimes difficult to remember.

My latest trip to Motor Vehicles taught me that I

am still Angela, that I have always been Angela... but that (due to three angelic little creatures I grew inside this constantly shedding skin), I am also, and on some level always will be, Bosworth. Those two names, tacked onto opposite ends of my center, are no less relevant, no less a part of me. I am who I always have been; I am who I was at birth. I am. I remain. I persist. But my experiences shape me. I am member, teacher, spirit, daughter, cousin, niece, sister, mother, griever, guide.

As I legally drove back from the State offices last week, I couldn't help but gape at the expiration date on my new card: 2017?! Surely the world will end by then! And yet often life surprises us with the most unlikely occurrences. So, whether the world ends in eight years or not, I know this: the world will be a different place--and a vastly similar one. We embark and we arrive back home.

Works Cited

ASU. "Building Blocks of Life." Ask a Biologist. 14 Sept. 2009. 17 Sept

2009 http://askabiologist.asu.edu/research/buildingblocks/cellsdivide.html

Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. Harper & Row: New York, 1987.

Divine Polenta

There is life after divorce. How do I know? Yesterday night I devoured the smoothest, slightly salty yet also creamy--and most comforting--bowl of polenta (with braised chicken and vegetables) you can imagine. At everything else yesterday, I failed miserably... but the polenta was perfect.

After expressing my frustrations with the kids for waking up early, after throwing Eden's pee-soaked sheets in the washer for the up-teenth time, after Eden jumped into the baby's crib, awaking a very sick and tired Liam, after missing a counseling appointment because I failed to locate a babysitter, and after rushing through a relatively important online meeting, I took a deep breath, went out to the garden with Sydney to pick fresh cherry tomatoes and zucchini, went back inside with a clear head, pulled out a heavy-bottomed pot from under the counter, and saddled up to my stove to make the best polenta of my life.

What's the secret? Use regular corn meal--not corn grits (no offense to Bob's Red Mill)--and chicken stock in the place of half the water, for extra richness. Stir in a couple tablespoons of butter and some parmesan cheese at the end for both creaminess and saltiness. Have a garden-fresh broth, with thinly sliced garlic and bursted tomatoes to pour over the top... and pray for a little divine intervention.

That's right. I titled this post "Divine Polenta" for a reason... not just for the divine intervention in its creation. Remember I said that bowl of polenta (complete with the broth, of course) tasted unbelievably smooth and comforting? It was--and here's the key: Despite overwhelmingly unwelcome discoveries in life--(that you've been lied to for years by the person who committed to share his life with you, that you've devoted seemingly endless time and effort in a fruitless cause of choosing to love someone who skips out on work breaks to "meet with colleagues" behind darkened glass, that you have to answer heart-wrenching questions posed by wide-eyed four-year-olds and two-year-olds)--despite all this--death, disease, and decay--life also holds comfort. The divine smooths out our path, even when we should be stumbling over mountains of rocky terrain.

This may sound completely bizarre, but God spoke to me as I devoured that polenta: "Yes," he whispered, "life continues, and perhaps even a better life." I gorged on the thickened cornmeal like I hoped I could now gorge on life; I savored it with relish. Does passion still exist after divorce? Certainly. The polenta taught me that as well.

By the way, the kids did think this was Good Eats (better than the veggies, anyway)! And yes, Liam is wearing a pink bib. It was the polenta that worked out, folks, not anything else. :)