Prepping for a Weekend In Tucson

Left to right: Me; my son, Tim, as a pirate, and his significant other, Michelle, as Amelia Earhart.

The original intent of this trip was to see my sons, Lee and Timothy. It has become so much more. However immersing myself in visiting two offspring I have not seen for close to a year has been a much-needed beginning to the adventure! The first night in, Lee brought his new female friend, Anna, over to Tim's place in Mesa to play board games. I am staying with Tim and Michelle. Before moving on, I want to mention that I am impressed with Anna. It is early in the relationship, but both of my sons are hanging out with some very bright ladies - Anna is a National Merit Scholar; Michelle was her class valedictorian, and both had an alternative high school education. Hanging out with them all is awesomeness of a kind I did not expect to experience as a former single mom.

All of my children are avid board game players, to the degree that they have joined Meet-Up groups in their 20's. I have hosted such games in the precursor form as high school and college hang-outs in our home on several occasions. Apparently in Phoenix, there are enough Meet-Up board game groups that each day of the weekend, including Thursday, there is a group to attend. That first night fresh in from the airport, it was just the 5 of us though, and we played 7-Wonders and Word on the Street. 

Last night's Meet-Up was a dress-up Halloween party in someone's home. A man named Mark wore a name tag that said, "I don't do costumes." We divided into two groups. I am not sure what the primary group was playing, but it involved cards that looked like they had advanced from Magic cards to something possibly more complex, and it utilized miniature figurines. At our table, we played Celebrity Taboo and Ticket to Ride, the European version. I am not up on celebrities, so I was reduced to describing names such as "Pierce" with clues like "the first name is a synonym of 'stabbing.'" Amazingly, we got more points that way! My partner could not describe Tony Blair to me - one of the few names I might have gotten. We scored on Cookie Monster and Goldilocks. I've decided to buy the latter game though. Our host and hostess were the center two in the following picture: 

Today I am attempting to smooth out the weekend itinerary in Tucson. Things are becoming more serious. I have read some about the events I will attend, but the more I read, the more I realize I know very, very little! The walk tomorrow is to commemorate the 5595 total deaths, not including 2013 numbers of people who have died in the desert attempting to cross the border. 2012 added 477 to that number. These numbers come from the U.S. Border Patrol, according to the source, National Foundation for American Policy. 

The walk, or pilgrimage, is sponsored by "The Human Rights Coalition," or Derachos Humanos. It is the 13th Annual Día de los Muertos Pilgrimage /13 ª Anual - Peregrinación Día de los Muertos. I hope to finally meet Joel Smith, and possibly Larry Trent, who I've been talking with online for a few months. Anticipation is building.

Today I have been reading more about the Tohono O'odham, the nomadic desert tribe in southern Arizona. The walk will be on a part of their reservation in south Tucson, sequestered from the rest closer to the border. I have also been looking up statistics that I have read numerous times, to refresh my memory in case someone decides to ask questions. Timothy is not planning to come along after all. My oldest son, Lee won't go on the walk with me, but plans to drive in Saturday evening, and attend "The Presidio Walls Talk," a reenactment of the early days of Tucson with me, if his van is out of the shop. Or he may try to coerce his brother to bring him if his van is not out of the shop. I will get to visit with them more later, either way. On Sunday, aka 1st Day in Friends circles, we hope to attend Pima Friends Meeting. Amazingly, all of my children value Friends Meeting, kind of like they value board games. Some members of Pima Friends Meeting have been involved in immigrant rights activities locally. This looks to be a weekend of meeting many new people, and beginning to solidify some of the connections with people Robin has introduced me to via the internet!

More on the Rosary Beads

     Here's a little story. When Robin and I were in high school, at a Quaker boarding school, she came home with me one holiday. Long walks and hikes were popular in our circles then. We went for a long walk down into the village nearby, called Neffs, Ohio, and climbed up on top of some gob piles. Gob piles are the hills left over from coal mining. Neffs was 2 miles from home. On our way back, we stopped into a Catholic church at the bottom of the hill before climbing it. The door was open and the lights were on. I don't remember what inspired us to go in. Maybe it was cold out. There was a dish of wafers, and a bowl of water near the door. We called out to see if anyone was there, and nobody answered. Both Robin and I grew up as Friends (Quakers), so we were not aware of Catholic practices. Her family attended Sandy Spring Friends Meeting in Maryland, and my family attended Stillwater Friends Meeting in Barnesville, Ohio. We each tried a wafer. We knew they were for communion, and we knew the water was probably holy water, but we were unaware of the implications of doing anything with the water or the wafers. It was a spiritual moment between us, naive of the probable heresy or sacrilegious act we were committing. 

I have since realized that I knew people who attended this small parish, Sacred Heart. I was a very evangelical preteen and teen. At another time that year, I convinced Robin that her rock-and-roll albums were evil, and we broke them all together. She left Olney Friends School before our senior year, and we fell out of touch. We did get back in touch in our 40's, and one of the first things I wrote to her via email was that I would like to replace her albums. She told me she already had replaced them, and not to worry about it; that it had been part of our spiritual growth and path. By then, she had become a Catholic, and I had become disillusioned with much of religion. What a change after 25 years! Our spiritual connection remains, however. The exclusivity of Catholicism rubs me the wrong way. Friends do not do rituals and sacraments. But the part of Catholicism that is not judgmental or exclusive has done an awfully lot of good in the world; the part that requires service, social justice, and care for the poor. My sister came from a Catholic orphanage in Korea. I do not think I will ever leave Quakerism, but I appreciate what the Catholics do. 

On the day I mentioned in the first blog entry about the Rosary, my sister-in-law, Nancy, called to tell me what color the Rosary's were to choose from, and to ask whether I wanted my name added to it. I chose blue, and said, "sure." An hour or so later, I realized that I was taking the Rosary for Robin, not for myself. I called Nancy back, and the blue one was already finished with my name. Red and black were still available, so I asked for a red one for Robin, with her name on it.

For the past few days I have been reading about the prayers of the Rosary, and about the Hail Mary. I have also been trying to learn Spanish. Someone said that they would probably be saying the Hail Mary together during the walk, probably in Spanish. I printed out the Hail Mary prayer, and asked several people to read it to me in Spanish, so I'd know how it was pronounced. I had so immersed myself in learning about it, that it was easy to forget what I had originally obtained these for! Today I got into a conversation with the woman sitting next to me on the plane who had grown up in Arizona, and did not feel people attempting to cross the border should be helped in any way. At one point, I showed her the beads. She was very touched by the story, and I feel it was instrumental in tempering her opinions. She told me some profound stories about friendships, and about her recent experiences with life and death. She cried. She told me that I was doing God's work, not my own work, and that I should not let the politics of the situation, or her opinions sway me to one way or the other. She told me not to lose focus. She did not realize that so many people were dying in the desert, or were imprisoned for so long.

A Protestant and A Rosary

Some say that Friends are not protestants. That said, they are not Catholic, and they are not Orthodox. They certainly do not acknowledge the sacraments. To be blunt, I know nothing about the Rosary apart from where it has crossed my path in my nursing career. That amounts to hearing people bringing communion to patients or residents, saying the Hail Mary, and whatever else they say, and seeing Rosary beads pinned on bulletin boards or stashed under pillows. Occasionally I will witness someone handling their beads in some meaningful way and reciting things that rhyme or sound like an ancient chant under their breath. 

My good friend has asked me to take a Rosary with me on the All Souls Day walk in Tucson, and say a Hail Mary for her. 

First I looked up the Rosary. Then I looked up Hail Mary. It looks a lot more complicated than she made it sound. I've read a lot of the Bible. I understand Quakerism and Quaker history pretty thoroughly - enough to converse meaningfully with Quaker scholars. Catholicism has me stumped, but we seem to cross paths with social justice missions.

Today, I thought I'd run down to the local Christian bookstore in Martins Ferry and pick up an inexpensive Rosary. All the other local Christian bookstores have gone out of business. I looked through the entire store, homeschooled child with me, and did not find anything resembling a Rosary. So I asked the lady at the desk. She stated that they did not carry Rosary's. I guess it is a protestant Christian book store, or something that is not protestant, but is also not Catholic. They did have a 99 cent compass, however, that my daughter liked, and I bought.

The homeschool group we belong to has some Catholics in it, and is a Christian group. After returning to my car, I found that I had only put one member's phone number in my phone, and I knew she was not Catholic (or protestant) either. But I tried to call anyway, to see if she might have an idea of where I could by a Rosary. She has read a lot more about other religions than I have, although I think I've read more than most people. Since she homeschools, her answering machine took my call. I have to work 3 nights in a row beginning tonight, then have a day off, then fly to Phoenix the following day. There are probably Rosary's at the airport, but this was important. I wanted to have it taken care of. 

My sister-in-law has been education coordinator of the Upper Ohio Valley Presbytery, and is involved in a lot of nondenominational activities. So she was the second person I called from my car. She happened to be at lunch with some Catholic friends, and after a bit of phone-along-with-people in the background conversation, she told me that St. Mary's chapel had a small shop with Rosary's. I confirmed that it was the St. Mary's in St. Clairsville, and not Martins Ferry, and headed over there. The door was locked. I called her back, to make sure I had indeed gotten the correct place. They were finished eating, and she and one of her Catholic friends were heading there, because her friend had parked there. So my daughter and I waited, and ate our Burger King drive-through meals in the car. We all walked up to the door together. It was still locked. She also pointed to a sign I had not noticed, that indicated the office closed at noon on Fridays. It was Friday, and it was 1:30. If only I had gone there first. Nancy's friend had a key and could get one and take the money for it, but then she remembered, hand in purse, that she did not know how to turn the alarm off. 

Nancy had an idea. Her friend, Amy Brooks, made jewelry, and she knew she had seen Rosary's in her jewelry for sale. Indeed, I have a few of Amy's beautiful creations in my jewelry box, given to me by my mother-in-law and sister-in-law on holidays or birthdays. Nancy called her, and yes, she had four. I could not drive over to her house with my sister-in-law, because I had to work this afternoon. Her house was too far to get there and back, and pack my car in time to leave. But Nancy wanted to go right then, and her friend was willing to go with her. Amy's jewelry is, indeed beautiful, and is also popular locally. I gave Nancy some money, and came home. 

Meanwhile, in looking for, and trying to understand the Rosary, and why it was I would be taking it with me, when I was a Quaker, I had conversations with the clerk of the Christian bookstore, with Nancy and her friend, and with Amy. Also, Amy grew up in San Antonio, and I think she is of Mexican descent. It made perfect sense to the Catholics involved in discussing why a friend would want me to do this. They were touched. I still don't entirely understand it myself though.

While most of this seems trivial, it is not. The preparation for this trip is part of the process. I am not sure what the outcome will be. A lot of Mexicans are dying in the desert, or are being incarcerated, or are being deported and torn apart from their families, and there is nothing right about any of it. I'm not sure what I'm doing to help the situation. I am going to write about the process though. Later it will mean more, I think.

Mango vs Genealogy, with Kimchi

I have spent the last two days doing mostly nothing but genealogy. I've eaten a jar of radish Kimchi that I bought for a friend, numerous cookies, and have cooked two main dishes. My friend took a trip. I'll buy her another one. I have done no cleaning or dishes. This is the calm before the storm. I seem to do this before something big, like a trip. It is like I'm hoarding energy. I'll crash again afterwards too. But there are a lot of new Starbucks and Downings in my database. 

The two trips through the desert are relatively confirmed. My son has sent me links to computer game rules that I have not touched. I should have been studying Spanish rather than doing genealogy with all of that time, but am about to go to the Mango library link now. This time I will bookmark it! 

It is a rainy, cold day. This will be the first year I miss Halloween with my children entirely. I'm not in very good shape to walk 8 miles. We will let you know how that goes. The anxiety and excitement is building.

Quaker knowing

What an intriguing week. I've been in Columbus for nine days, and am back in eastern Ohio. 

After writing all of those nice things about the extended stay hotel, and about people, before that post was even completed, the screaming began. It was a child across the hall, in another room. It was loud, intermittent, and piercing, like a chipmunk cheer. I have raised four children, and they screamed some, but never like this. There was something unusual about this child. The screaming did not stop. It was not crying, but almost like a playful, or surprised scream, every 5-10 minutes, all day. It was unbearable for someone working nights and trying to sleep. It was maddening. It lasted until I left for work, and met me as I returned in the morning after a 12 hour shift. It went on all day, and continued the following day. I was so miserable, finally, that I called the management, and told them I was checking out. The problem with that, it was Sunday, and no management was in. On Monday, after trying to go to sleep, I packed all of my bags. I didn't care if they kept my money. The man from the front office told me he had put me on the quiet floor, and this was the first he'd heard there was a problem, but he'd check into it. He did. First, he was going to move the family. The child finally got quiet, and I collapsed onto the bed, in my clothes, things packed and ready, and slept, all day. 

That was my day off. I did not have to go to work for night shift that evening, and my husband had planned to come to Columbus with our daughter for an overnight. I called the front desk man back, and he offered to move me instead of the family. I decided to try that. He told me that the child was a 4-year-old autistic boy, and that the parents were also exhausted, and were waiting for an apartment to come available on Thursday. I felt guilty for being so upset, but at the same time, I was paying for this room, in order to simply have a place to sleep. The new room was cleaner, and much quieter. 

My husband, 7-year-old and I went out for dinner at Max and Erma's at Easton, and to a 9pm movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs II. We were the only ones in the theater. I felt self-conscious having a 7-year-old child out to a movie that late, but we homeschool. She was sleeping in the next day. She is doing well in school.

Being in a crowded place with so many Somalians present, then being in the same place when it was nearly empty left me feeling strange. This strange feeling extended into the next day, when we went out to lunch for Mexican, then to a park I had frequented years ago. It was also pretty empty. In a city with hundreds of thousands of people, I found this odd. I had brought my older sons to the same place 20-plus years prior, when I was a stay-at-home mom, needing to get out to someplace green. Our 7-year-old played on the playground alone, and watched the ducks in the pond, on a school day. Park rangers drove by us several times. Numerous times, in three different vehicles. We became a little uncomfortable with this, and went back to the hotel. We said goodbye finally, and my husband and daughter drove back home. I went back to work that night. It was wonderful to see them in the midst of this experience. They are a grounding center to everything for me.

The next two days, I took care of people from foreign countries other than Somalia. Two families were from places with rare dialects that our translation language lines did not have a translator for. I wondered what their stories were, to be in Columbus, in the hospital. There are so many people in Columbus. So many foreigners! Who are they all?

My friend, Debora, called the next to last morning of this stretch of work days. I don't even remember what all I said to her. She was trying to make final arrangements for my last clearness committee meeting. I just remember her telling me to get some rest, and that everything would make more sense, and I'd feel better after I got some sleep. I must have sounded delirious. The clearness committee would be Thursday, on my way home. 

Different people keep repeating those words over the past few weeks: "Get some sleep!" It reminded me of the first Easton movie I saw, Captain Phillips, when someone everywhere he went told him, "Everything is going to be okay!" And it never was. People keep telling me, "Get some sleep!" I must seem tired to them all the time. And I can't really ever get enough sleep.

Prior to this trip to Columbus, I had spent a good part of a day looking up the places I'd be going. Larry and Joel, two of the mission workers, just happened to be online that day also, and I asked them questions as I surfed the internet. How long does it take to walk the 8 miles on the All Souls Day walk? How likely is it we will have run-ins with border patrol when we are filling water tanks? Where do we meet, and when? My passport and passport card arrived 10 and 12 days after I applied for them respectively. We made tentative arrangements, and I put together an itinerary. I printed out Google maps for every place I intended to go, and one for how to get from one son's place to another, in Phoenix. I printed out web pages describing the places. I put all the print-outs in a folder, and put it in a file at home. I hoped to go home and pick it up before the clearness committee meeting on Thursday.

I was a little later checking out of the hotel and getting on the road than I had intended, so I called Bruce to ask him to bring these the folder to my clearness committee meeting, in Barnesville, at the meetinghouse. He is wonderful about things like this. 

The clearness committee is a living, breathing thing, all by itself. I have had life-long relationships with some of these people, and hardly know others. They had asked a lot of questions at the first meeting, and I needed to answer them at the second one. The hardest question to answer was proposed by the clerk of the meeting - that before they could write a letter of introduction, or a traveling minute, there needed to be a clear sense of purpose for the trip. What was the purpose? I decided in the end that it was a seeking/finding trip.

I could have brought a lot of baggage from the past into this, but during the time between meetings, I had given it deep thought, and had talked with several friends, both online and in person. The one I needed to speak with the most was a childhood friend who was abused. She did not fully understand the nature of my visit when I went to see her. I had not seen her for years; and in the time between our last time together and this one, much had transpired in both of our lives. But she has been a driving force behind some of what I have done in my nursing career, and is a strong influence on what I want to do. She will probably never understand the extent of this. I talked with her some about this influence on the phone, but when I visited with her, we did not discuss the trip at all. In planning the visit; the phone call; the driving to and from her place in the misty, dark, October night, down back roads far out in the country, where coal miners lived and justified in their minds why immigrants should be shot - during that in-between time, I gave this all the most thought. I did not even bring her up at the clearness committee. But my friendship with her summarizes all that is wrong, and also all that is right, with attitudes; with compassion for fellow humans; for regard for those close to us. It summarizes the dead space between bigotry and love. I don't understand how some people can be so loving, and yet so unloving, and I needed to sit with that, for myself. I needed to sit with her, in her living room, and feel all of it, before doing this; and know that I still loved her as my friend, despite everything. Somehow, this gave me the confidence that I needed to know that this trip was the right thing to do. I took that confidence, and the folder of information, with me to the clearness committee. 

My childhood friend, Debora, was nominated to be on the committee first, at monthly meeting, the First Day (Sunday) that my letter requesting one was read. In a Friends monthly business meeting, the first person nominated is the convener of the committee. She openly protested, but she was expected to answer the responsibility. I can't recall who jumped the gun after my letter was read, but they nominated her too quickly. This scared me, because, well, Debora knows way too much about me. And then someone nominated the clerk, and I'm not even going to go into the fear of God that put into me. Or fear of something else - something like ...scrutiny. These people know my skeletons.

Whatever my fears may have been, a conviction is a conviction. They are excited for me. I presented what I had, and they subtly, and humorously, in their Quaker ways, expressed their reservations, but not nearly as many as I expected. They want me to do this. They are going to write a traveling minute. 

Tonight was the memorial service of a good friend. The service was also at the meetinghouse. David was the ex-husband of Debora's sister. He accepted me into his group of friends after my divorce. He let me carve my name in his end table, something he had most of his visitors do. He designed the cover for the tape I made at a studio. He was my friend.  So I saw them, most of the people on the clearness committee, again, two nights in a row, because they were Davids friends too. My daughter and I made cookies today, and I went to Jebbia's Produce market in Wheeling, and bought vegetables for a relish dish. I also bought a homemade olive mix there. I should have bought more olives, because they went the fastest of anything on the table. I knew there would be too many cookies.

After the memorial service, I sat on the meetinghouse porch, and talked for a long time with a close acquaintance I would never have gotten to know if David had not brought me into the fold. She told me about a humanitarian trip she had taken to Liberia with the military, and how it had changed her. Then I told her about my planned trip to Mexico. She became excited, and happy for me to do this. I keep feeling like with all that has transpired in my career that has gone wrong in the past year, that I'm somehow not qualified to do something like this. Part of me feels like maybe I was supposed to do something like this all along; and maybe that is what has been wrong though. 

These posts are getting longer, but there is one more situation I want to address. That is about consciousness. I have always "known" things that I did not understand why I knew. Some people have called it ESP; others have referred to my experiences as astral projection. Still others have suggested that I can read minds, or have had other lives. Christians call it God speaking to me. I have always felt there was another explanation. In the past few days, at least two people have mentioned the kind of "knowing" that comes with Quaker worship. I don't feel this is entirely from God. I feel it is an entity of consciousness, from being more in touch, and in tune with our subconscious minds, through worship and meditation. We take in too much information to be aware of it all at any given time, but our mind puts together what this information means. We know more than we realize. When we tap into this deeper consciousness regularly, we learn to listen to it. We learn to be more in tune with it. I have noticed that many people who have lived their lifetime within Quakerism will refer to the "Quaker knowing" as if it is a given fact. Outside of Quaker circles, people talk about coincidences, and about God, and about miracles. For me, the knowing is an inherent part of me. I have learned to listen to it; but I don't always. Sometimes it is so profound, that it comes in words; not words I can hear, but in formulated words in my mind. "Take that book off the shelf." "Don't give that medication yet." "Turn around and walk the other way." And for no good reason, and feeling partially crazy, I listen, and do. Something not quite conscious knows something, and I need to listen to it.

One day in the hospital I worked at for 8 years, when I turned and walked the other way, a woman walked up to me and asked where her sister was. I knew her sister had just died. I knew there was no other nurse on the floor at that time who could have handled speaking with this woman because of what had just transpired. I was able to walk this woman to where her sister was. Maybe it WAS God. 

This is one of the times in my life, when I do not entirely understand what is happening, and I am going on faith, when the words, "Turn and walk the other way," have formulated in my brain. Now I will have in writing that my meeting is supporting me in doing so. And it is not crazy. They say they feel the same Quaker knowing about it.

About the Town Going Downhill

About a year ago, I made a trip to Columbus, Ohio, after years of being away. I was taking a Nursing Leadership and Management class towards my BSN degree, and we were required to attend a public meeting within the time frame of the class. I was working full-time, and that complicated matters. So I picked an Ohio State Board of Nursing meeting. The address stated it was in the Huntington Building downtown. 

Well, I knew where that was! My ex-husband had worked in the executive suite on the top floor back when we were married, in 1991-92. His office was in the north part of the highrise that symbolized the "H" in the Columbus skyline. We had watched Red, White, and Boom at eye level from his office on July 4th. The problem was, when I arrived, there was no Ohio Board of Nursing in that building. It was a really good thing I had gone early that day, because the office was in the OTHER Huntington building downtown. The old one. I managed to keep my composure through this disconcerting experience, and talk myself through the fact I was a farmer's wife now. It turned out to be an interesting meeting to write a paper on. A nurse practitioner was requesting a license reinstatement after rehabilitation, following misusing physician prescription pads to write herself scheduled substance scripts. 

A lot of people misuse drugs. Nearly every day I go to work, I have patients who want dilaudid. The nurses have knicknames for it, such as diLALA, or the only medication nobody seems to be allergic to. I have given so much dilaudid, in fact, that it is difficult for me to not be judgmental towards innocent homeless people on the street. I have this overshadowing feeling that they ALL want dilaudid, and sometimes I do a doubletake at what I'm wearing to make sure I'm not in scrubs. 

That day of the meeting, after it was over, I decided to take a drive through some old haunts, such as the J.C. Penny outlet, and Eastland Mall. The Max and Erma's off of Brice Road was all closed up. That part of the east end was like an enormous, concrete, corporate ghost town! 

A turn of life events has put me in travel nursing, only a year later. I have found myself back in Columbus, for the past 6 weeks, and will be here off and on for over another month, minus my trip to the Southwest. It is paying the mortgage. I have been renting from an acquaintance with a house in a subdivision, but decided to take a leap this week, and rent a pay-by-the-week hotel room, to get my feet wet for future trips. I can go back to where I was, but I wanted to try this.

Most people are not as bad as we assume they are. They have bad events in their lives, or runs of a bad time, but most people are mostly good. Someone told me recently that a part of Columbus I wanted to rent a weekly room in was now an "unsafe" part of town. Back in the 1980's, Morse and 161 between I71 and I270 was an area with nice clubs and shopping centers. College kids would drive up to hang out of the day, or for weekend drinks. I drove through, and it was like the east end, but on a different scale. Today, I rented a place anyway. I'm sure there is danger. Just like there are Mexicans who sell drugs, and who kill people. I am definitely the minority, as a tall white woman. 

I noticed something odd today. Once I moved in to this place, in a "bad" part of town, I felt a huge sense of relief. It was only slightly dampened by finding a lone roach in my room. A woman doing laundry pushed my floor's elevator button along with her own the second time I rode the elevator with her. A tall black gentleman paused before entering his room as I walked by, to greet me, and make short conversation. The housekeepers were discussing day-to-day news in the hallway with residents. I stopped into the Asian Market over in the Columbus Square. That shopping center was once a thriving place. Our dissolution lawyer had an office there. Now it houses a giant thrift store. The oriental check-out lady at the Asian Market had her young daughter with her. When I bought Kimchee and noodles, she told me it looked good, and asked the little girl, "Should we have Kimchee and noodles for supper tonight?" The little girl replied, "Yes! Yes!" The people in this part of town are ACCEPTING and FRIENDLY. I feel at home here.

Last night, I went out to a movie by myself. I went to Easton to see "Captain Phillips." It was too expensive. It was about an American cargo and food relief ship being hijacked by Somali pirates. Columbus, Ohio has become a refuge for Somalians. About 1/4 of the people in the theater were Somalians, probably because the film was about people from their country. I have been taking care of a lot of Somalians at work. It felt good to be in a theater with them, instead of a hospital. It felt good to watch a movie, where the main character connected with his captor, and even tried to help, and ultimately save his captors.  He was unsuccessful in saving them, because they were stubborn, due to their life circumstances. 

I want to think on that some more - how life circumstances make people stubborn. Circumstances don't just make criminals stubborn, but also those who oppress. 

Mission Trip - ME?

The spiritual nudge. To DO something.

It usually is not a trip though. In fact, it has never been a trip. This time it is.

A conviction - "a nudge" - is the essence of being a Quaker or a Friend. It is terrifying, sometimes. You want to say, "Oh, God! Again?" Conviction of the most raw kind comes in many forms, but a true conviction has the same elements for me. I feel the same way I do when my parents ask me to DO something. Groan. Sometimes I even want to do it. In fact I usually do. But I know it will be somehow painful, and probably also life-changing. The thing to do usually involves controversy and questioning by numerous people. With me, it often involves the questioning of my intentions or motives, because I don't live the most ...faithful Christian path. 

For some reason, some people do not think I am capable of having a conviction and following it. I have been questioned to the degree that I am wary of telling many people when it happens, and am likely to give them another, less comprehensive reason for my actions than the real one, just because others expect less genuine motives. The only people I really trust to believe me are members of my Friends meeting, and then not even all of them. I trust them to believe me, because they've been through previous convictions with me since my childhood. They know the side trails I've taken from my path. They know I loathe coming to them.

I wanted to be sure it was a true conviction, so I asked my meeting for a clearness committee. We've met once, and they are excited for this trip. I guess it is a true conviction. 

I was going to visit my sons in Phoenix. I wanted to participate in something that had to do with immigration. After reading article after article, watching video after video, and after reading prison reports and Amnesty International reports, I have come to the conclusion that my country, the U.S.A. is on the verge of an ethnic cleansing. I feel in my gut that we are committing atrocities. I feel in my bones that it is growing into something incredibly ugly, and this ...nudge... is telling me that I have a hand in stopping it, even if it ultimately takes my own life. 

So I asked some of the people concerned about the same problem if there was something I could participate in. They invited me to go out into the desert with them to fill water tanks. 

Me??? From Ohio? Really?

I've had fabric in my basement for months, and I still have not made flags for the water stations. I rarely show up for committee meetings. I haven't helped with the Plummer House Project, or with the Olney Farm, even though I was passionately involved in the initial committees that started those. I have failed in carry-through. I suffer from what my childhood friend, and fellow daughter-of-a-Quaker-minister dubs "apathy." Well, ....I was convener of the Peace and Human Relations Committee for a few years, and we did stuff. Actually, we did a lot of stuff. But I was having lots of convictions then. 

I have gone to nursing school, worked as a nurse, been the primary income earner of my family, put children through college, bought a house - can you see that I am attempting to talk myself into the fact that it is OKAY for me to go on a mission trip? It feels so arrogant and voyeuristic. 

Today, I spent a couple of hours looking up some of these places. Oh wow, the church at San Xavier, where the Day of the Dead walk ends is AWESOME! And it is on an Indian reservation. I don't really care about all of those casinos. But there is a Friends Meeting in Pima, and a year ago in November, according to the handy Google search, they hosted a discussion on immigration. 

I wrote to the clerk of the meeting telling them I was coming. I feel sternness and eldering coming my way, but perhaps I could stay in Pima overnight after walking 7 miles across an Indian reservation, and go to meeting-for-worship there. 

My clearness committee thinks I need to apply for my MSN in Forensic Nursing, even though I'm broke and have student loans the size of a house payment coming up in December. This nudge is turning into something kind of big. I'm hoping that I don't get shot. But Joel and Larry have been doing this for a long time, and they are still alive. My country does not need to live through an ethnic cleansing, and I want to tell them so.

Steubenville

It was 1997. My oldest child was in the 4th grade. I was in nursing school, in the pediatric rotation, and our class was giving sex-ed to 4th graders in St. Clairsville public schools. What an eye-opener! The girls were asking questions that needed to be taken into a private room individually. I was positive the school nurse would be doing some follow-up. I came home that day from my associate degree nursing program, and picked the children up from the after-school sitter's. We talked a lot after school, debriefing about the day. I was a single mom, on food stamps, getting ready to graduate with my ADN in a few months. After dropping their book bags inside the door, they plopped down on the couch, and I looked at the three of them - my two sons and my daughter, the youngest, still in preschool. I did not want to do this. But a sickening sort of knowing gave me resolve that I must.

I knew they were old enough now. I knew it was never too early. I looked at their innocent eyes, looking back at me, "Mommy," and I thought about the questions those children had asked - those children the same ages as my children. "What if your friend tells you her uncle is putting his hands where he shouldn't? Who should you tell?" "What if you're afraid to tell because they will hurt you?" "Can you get pregnant if you like a boy a lot?" "What if your step-dad is touching your little sister like that?" Yes. That telling.

I pulled out my biology book, a boy on each side, and my preschool daughter looking on. I opened it to the male anatomy; then the female anatomy sections. It was a long evening. They were fascinated. We talked about what kind of touching was okay, and what kind was not. Where was okay? Where was not? How was okay? How was not? I defined "molesting," and explained that it was a crime that someone could go to jail for; and that it was wrong. We talked about what to do if someone did that to them, or what to do if a friend confided that someone had done that. We talked about what to do if they felt threatened. We talked about bathrooms and what to do if they were approached when they were alone. We talked about when people grew up and met someone they wanted to be close to, that such touching was then okay, and only if both people agreed, but not until they were older; that children were not supposed to do that. My oldest son asked me, "Mom, how do the egg and the sperm get together to make a baby?" I stared at him. I said, "We will talk about that when you get a little older." Enough was enough, it had been a long day. I wanted my children to hear it from me, and to not have any misconceptions like the children in school did. But I just was not ready to tell my 4th-grade son THAT.

I did not want my sons to be molesters or rapists. That should be a mother's fear. Unfortunately, some mothers don't give it a second thought. There were stories in the newspapers about children molesting other children. I wanted my sons to know what that meant, and why. I remembered my youth, of little boys exposing themselves, or wanting to touch me. They are memories I dislike recalling, and are not pleasant.

When my oldest son was in 8th grade, he came home one day soon after school began, and had fear and tears in his eyes. He asked me if he could tell me something, and wanted me to promise to never tell anyone. I told him I couldn't promise that, but that I would do my best to help him. He was a geek, and he ate lunch with the girls. One of his female friends had told him she had been raped at Jamboree in the Hills while her parents were drunk, and that she thought she was pregnant. She had not told anyone else, and didn't know what to do. My son looked horrified and terrified with this information. This tall, skinny, lanky boy. I explained to him that I would have to report it if she did not. She needed to go to the school counselor or to tell her parents. If she was pregnant, it would not go away, and she needed help. I said that I would answer any questions he wanted, and we talked about her options, and what could happen with each one. I talked to him about girls who had not told anyone who had ended up in the news for different reasons, and explained that as her friend, he needed to make sure she got an adult to help her through this so it didn't get really bad. Later in the week, I learned that she had gone to the school counselor. I had never seen such a heavy burden on my son before that, and watching it lift when she got help made my heart swell with pride.

Years later, as I drove my daughter to college, one of her friends was along for the trip. She had a lot of questions about birth control. She said that it was a topic that she could not approach her mother about, because her mother felt she should not have sex. All through high school, there had been a lot of these girl discussions in the car to and from places. I think I have anonymously supplied the local teen population, through my children, with condoms, Today sponges, and pregnancy test kits. I perceive it as a positive investment in my community. If only some of them knew. Most of my friends and acquaintances were not virgins by high school graduation, and I thought it very naive of any parent who felt her daughter might be an exception. Advice and contraception was free-flowing, even for; no, especially for the Catholic girls. I was earning an income for a reason.

If only the other parents knew what their children weren't telling them. I have never regretted having that initial talk with my children, nor the subsequent conversations with them or their friends. I do believe, that if a drunk woman were disrupting a party, that my sons would take her home and tuck her in bed.

They would not urinate on her or digitally penetrate her.

After my own investment in my community, I feel very strongly that parents who have raised their children in a manner where they would do this; and school officials who would promote a community of people who would do this, do not deserve my sympathy or empathy in any way. Teenagers who would think to do this kind of thing are not safe in this society of teenagers, and teenagers who would threaten the girl that they did this to, when the boys were held accountable for their actions, should absolutely also be held accountable for their threats. 

There is never an excuse to abuse another human being in such a vile manner.
There is never an excuse to make them pay when such abuse is punished. 

When my oldest son was 21, we were working in the kitchen together one day. He stopped what he was doing, and turned to me: "Mom?" I said, "Yes?" He was quiet for a little while. Then he said, "You know, you never DID tell me how the sperm got to the egg." Our eyes met, and he burst out laughing.

Shall we resume blogging? How about in APA format? I have been missing, but currently, I am working two jobs and going to school.

I have been a cardiac nurse for 6 years now. It is surprising that I have stayed in the same place for this long. There was a short-lived experience of working in the ED on a temporary bid that never transpired to become a permanent one. At high school graduation, I was supposed to become a fashion designer and come to our class reunion in a Lamborghini. Or, per our class prophecy that a choice few members of our class wrote, I would be seen on stage with a huge crowd, as a punk rocker with multi-colored hair, along with Lori Schmoe, former boarding school roomie. Alas, Lori has been dead a few years. Her seizure disorder, and quite probably a pending divorce finally took her life and left two daughters. We were perhaps the most reserved of our classmates. I carried a Bible in 7th and 8th grade in public school and tried to convert nearly everyone I spoke with. At the boarding school, I not-so-discreetly left tracts about the school, but by my senior year, my peers had worked on me enough to have tried my hand on getting drunk on rum and Coke with then roomie Trisha. We succeeded in virtual alcohol poisoning and being babysat back to sobriety to two of our saintly schoolmates, Alys and Imi. My wonderful high school peers will never let me forget either the tract-pushing nor the statement, "One more time," which apparently meant that I needed to puke in every toilet I passed on the way back to my room. I have no recollection of asking repeatedly, "One more time." There were some punk rockers in our class. Lori and I were not part of them. We listened to ABBA and John Denver, and John Michael Talbot. I was going on to Ohio State to major in clothing design, and had won several 4-H awards for my sewing by the time I graduated from high school. Indeed, I helped the Home Ec department and OSU Extension service put on the fashion review the summer after my Freshman college year.

Who would ever have thought I would have become a cardiac nurse? But that is what many divorcees are doing these days. It is the window of opportunity that has been opened for those who don't want to be on welfare with children the rest of their lives. Our elderly population is growing, and they desperately need our care. The medical establishment is trying hard to use the latest research to provide the best care they possibly can. They often shoot themselves in the foot, but I believe that most people genuinely try, despite themselves. My father and grandfather were Masons, and believed in public service, and community building. Down deep, somewhere, I do too. I should have been in the shower 10 minutes ago, getting ready for work. This is the life I lead now. Frozen dinners, ordering out, working too much and recuperating from work. Oh, and attempting to do my school work in between. My grades have been pretty good so far. It is "the life."

The Need for Quiet Time

Reasons for not posting: working 40 plus hours per week, returning to school for a BSN, living on a farm, homeschooling a 5 y/o, getting a 20 y/o through college, and health issues. The latter category has included breaking my big toe in the middle of training for a 5K trail run, blood sugars creeping up and a little anemia. I have yet to see a doctor because I have been very disillusioned with the ability of my physician to help solve my problems the way I would like to. So these problems have been worsening over the past year. I like her as a person, but it is nigh impossible to find a physician who isn't on the bandwagon with the current philosophies of health care, most which I am not in agreement with. It is amazing how much a small dent in your energy levels can make an obsessive-compulsive (aka o/c), over-achiever feel as if the world has ended! It hasn't. It isn't depression causing it, as they would have me believe in their brief 1-hour-every-six-months assessments of my conditions. It is my bull-headed need to have so many irons in the fire, and my tendency to have to have my mind working on 100 things all at once, all the time, and the habitual, frequent but passing resulting discouragement with myself.

Now lets focus on returning to school. I graduated with an ADN in 1997, and have been working as a registered nurse from that August on to the current hour. After 14 years of direct patient care, I decided that I might be qualified to teach it, or maybe I just want to do something else. Like forensic nursing. But an underlying fascination with immunity (did I mention I was a little o/c - I think I did), illustrated by the raw milk debates involving infectious disease and HUS; AIDS; vaccines vs pitocin and their relationships to autism; and auto-immune diseases such as diabetes and lupus; also put me in mind to study cellular biology. However, attempts at brushing up on chemistry made me realize that 22 years was a little to long to go without a chemistry class, without using it. So I settled for going for the BSN, with hopes of continuing on to an MSN in either nursing education or nursing forensics. I've been using my nursing skills. In fact I've become somewhat adept at cardiac nursing and Advanced Cardiac Life Support, when someone decides to try to die.

My first term was difficult, but went well. I immersed myself in pathophysiology, and did well enough in nursing informatics and nursing transitions to receive an "A," for all three. This term is a little more bumpy. Behavioral health statistics is not my forte. The difficulty does not lie in that I can't do them as much as in the fact that the last time I took statistics, I received a D+ because I was going through some difficult life transitions. So every time I read about the standard deviation from the mean, I have a flashback about sitting on a picnic table covered with bird poop, under a tree on Ohio State University's campus, pregnant and trying to study, and wishing I'd never gotten married; or looking at my exam in front of me in a classroom and not knowing what to make of the Greek letters before me, feeling thankful for multiple choice questions. The D+ was an entity of choosing one of the middle two answers, or the answer that seemed the least ludicrous by and large. It is sad that a person can pass a class that complex in that manner, but it happened. Unfortunately the college I am currently in requires a C or better for transferring credits, as well as for degree completion, so I am repeating this course.

But now I have the added motivation of knowing I can acquire an "A" in pathophysiology when most other nursing students can't. I also would like to be able to decipher the nitty-gritty of reports of studies, and maybe even someday conduct a few of my own. An understanding of Statistics is required for this. I may even be liking the subject. At times I find myself considering taking another class in it, and dreaming of working for the World Health Organization. Now, that is an amusing thought. The other class I'm taking this term is Sociology of the Family. There is nothing like having to write lots of short papers, but not being required to use APA format like I was last term for my nursing papers. I've also been involved in social justice issues for a long enough period of time that the terminology on the tests is surprisingly familiar. There are a few studies that have taught me something I didn't know. I do feel that some of these classes, such as the Sociology class, are somewhat unnecessary after being a nurse for 14 years, and I feel like I'm simply paying the college for a degree, and jumping through a few hoops to get it. In the scholarly discussion forums, I sometimes feel like I'm helping the instructor educate some of the students who clearly did not read the same text book I did.

The one thing the Sociology of the Family class is doing for me however, is bringing up issues I already know about, closer to my current consciousness. We are on the chapters about social class structures and how they affect the family. Meanwhile it comes out that Bill Gates has invested in Monsanto's GMO seed production, that the President of the U.S. has appointed a former Monsanto executive to head the FDA; Harvard Law School is having a debate on raw milk, and Occupy Wall Street is just waning as a movement, in the wake of several states attempting to pass laws against collective bargaining. Both the Ohio Nurses Association and the American Nurses Association have come out in support of collective bargaining. It is funny, but nobody else in my class but me seems to know about the whole GMO thing, and I seem to be the only person connecting these issues with wealth in our country. This disturbs me.

I'm not a great blog-writer. I don't take time to incorporate nice links into my text and put pictures at the top. But if you google any of these topics, you are quite likely to come up with the articles I'm referring to. It is easier than looking for scholarly studies on CINAHL. At some point, I do hope to write in a more user-friendly fashion, and more often than one post every 3-6 months. That will come with time.

Journaling

Keeping some sort of journal is helpful. My mother taught us that, but she also taught it to her school students, and to children in her care at Christian Education Camp of our Yearly Meeting of Friends. For a child, it is helpful in creating writing skills. Journals help families determine what happened when events take bad turns. We worry about privacy and confidentiality in a world where people have ill motivations. But reading old journals takes a person back through their trials and helps them be reminded how they arrived at where they currently are. A journal can be written many ways with any focus. I am not good at writing down daily events. Sometimes I'd like to capture everything people say to me in a day, or everything that happened. But recording everything is impossible.

What made me think about journaling was returning to Phillip Gulley's fiction books about the town called Harmony. I have recommended them to a friend who is going through a difficult situation with a pastor.

http://www.harmonyseries.com/

What made me connect this to journaling was that even though we can write much from memory, there is nothing like having a detailed written account of events that affect our lives. We struggle through the trials in our lives, but when they are resolved, we move on to the next and virtually forget about the entire event and struggle until someone else's struggle reminds us of it. Some of these events need to be written down for all of us to remember. I think the struggle for immigrant rights is one of those topics where those involved in the struggle need to keep accounts and write a book about it in the end.

As much time as I spend on Facebook, and as much as I write here, it doesn't touch most of what happens in one of my days. Patients at work have life-changing traumas. Family members go through terrible events. I go places and do things that would seem inappropriate to write about. Maybe a better word would be insignificant. There are discussions and events that I simply can't put in black and white. I think about them. They affect me.

Today I have 3 big events. I am going to the Farmers Market in hopes of getting more peaches; hoping the chefs publicized as planning to be there (Yay!) won't buy EVERYTHING. But I can go to another farmer's place if I need to for peaches. I am going to go to a Stampin' Up party that my husband's niece is putting on for a fundraiser for their church's youth program. And then I am going to take my older daughter back for her second year in college, a 3 1/2 hour drive one way. That will be probably a 9-10 hour event.

My husband, meanwhile, will be building a small shelter for my sheep and putting up an electric fence for them with a new solar charger I bought a few days ago. I feel like I should be helping him.

This blog is decidedly rambling. It is an online journal. It isn't focused on one political project or one specific topic. There are threads of topics that are important to me. When people around me express interest in learning something about what I'm doing, I sometimes think I should make it a public process here and do a photo story. As the weather cools and my broken toe time draws to an end, my focus' are cleaning up this old farm house, setting up our small sheep herd at our new residence, homeschooling a 5-year-old and returning to work in a hospital during an economy when many people are losing jobs that support their livelihoods. I fast every Tuesday for those who are imprisoned for trying to make better lives for themselves. The locusts are still around but seem to be fading, and one of my old teachers noticed publicly on Facebook that her hummingbirds were beginning to migrate.

I was going to blog about breaking my toe 3 weeks ago. Maybe I will tomorrow. There is too much to do today!

The Big Farm Move

The moving of farms was actually pretty little by farm-moving standards. But it was big to us. It was huge to me. Life-changing. We moved 2 miles. We moved from 68 acres to 200+ acres. The responsibilities turned from primarily mine to not primarily mine. The decision-making also turned from primarily mine to not primarily mine. I knew this would be both good and bad and in-between. And it has been.

Last November, around Thanksgiving, my oldest brother's big Mennonite family came up from Virginia, and my youngest brother and his wife came from Iowa. We sat around the table and discussed the future of the farm, and the future of my middle brother. In this conversation were my mother, my oldest and youngest brother, me and all of our spouses. The family farm was falling apart, and I had been wanting out of it increasingly and with more panic as time went by. Boards were falling off the barn. Outbuildings needed painted. Siding and eves needed fixed on the house. My husband had been running back and forth for 6 years between two farms trying to patch things together. I had reached a point of telling my mother, "Sell it, I'm moving."

Where to, some might wonder? Why, to the old, falling apart brick house over at my husband's family's farm. The problem is, 2 people, one of them working full-time in a high-stress job, cannot fix up 2 dilapidated farms.

Embedded in my memory were comments my oldest brother had made to me years before. He was the farmer in the family. My father had wanted him to have the farm, but he and my father could never see eye-to-eye. My father was a control freak. There was always some catch; something held over your head for everything you were given. My oldest and youngest brothers had long moved on, leaving all the "catches" behind, and taking control of their own lives. But Larry had always WANTED the farm. He had wanted it without conditions. My father could never, in all of their dickering, let go of his conditions. My father however, at this notable Thanksgiving dinner, had been gone for nearly 2 years. My mother was not interested in the farm management at all, whatsoever. My youngest brother was not interested in receiving any financial benefit from selling it. It was okay with my oldest brother if my middle brother stayed in his trailer there so long as there was no trouble. I was banking on all of this.

It was a good hunch. My oldest brother, his wife and 7 children, ages 14 up, the oldest son already running his own carpentry business, went home to mull on it. Within the next 2-3 months, all the plans were made. I had begun cleaning out the attic before I had their word. I "knew it in my bones," that this move was going to happen.

No amount of preparation is enough to move out of a family farm. My oldest brother is a hoarder in some regard, but he is also a purger. As his sister, I knew just what kind of purger he was. I knew that whatever I didn't clean out, I'd never see again, most likely, as it would be lost, burned or dumped. It took a few bottles of wine, but I went through every single box that had been thrown into the attic in the midst of every "clean this place up!" frenzy or family accounting argument since 1976 - junk with old love letters, dusted up trumpet music, long lost Muskojuans from the 1950's, class picture books from every school throughout Ohio my parents had ever taught in, paired in boxes with broken glasses, long outdated camera flashes and mouse droppings. I cried, I laughed, I read, I groaned, and I drunkenly commented as I sorted things into boxes for my mother, myself and each of my siblings. My husband took out box after box of discarded papers and trash to be burned. We did not need to keep old inservices, curriculum evaluations and lessons plan from every school they had taught in. Despite everyone saying they had no interest in what was in the attic, they each went through their boxes like it was the best kind of candy store. I even found things to give some of my neighbors from their ancestors.

The move was in March. My deep freezer and my fleeces are still in their garage. It is mid August. We moved my sheep over last week.

There are more than 200 acres here. There is a herd of Hereford beef cows, and there are 3 horses. Now there are 11 sheep. I have a garden again. It is very weedy and didn't grow much, but it is hopeful.

I have taught my 7 nieces and nephews how to make cheese, how to spin, how to shear sheep, and today I will be teaching them how to skirt and pack fleeces for the woolgrowers coop. I'm kind of new to that myself. They dress plain, and will most likely be able to profit more from such things by the mere appearance of looking like "Amish." They have made a gardening paradise out of the garden I dumped manure on for years. They've fixed the barn. My brother, a finishing carpenter, is building a wood shop that is as big as his house. I want to be jealous of all of it, but it is a little difficult to be in my relief.

It was a good move.

How Can I Keep From Singing?

Yesterday was the 4th Tuesday I have gone on a bread and water (and coffee) fast. My friend, Robin, started the fast and matching Facebook group, "Starving For Justice! Human Rights for Immigrants in the USA!" https://www.facebook.com/groups/Starving4Justice/ with some acquaintances of hers.

At first her request of me to join made me feel hesitant. Did I really want to FAST for this cause? I roomed with Robin my sophomore year in high school for a semester, at the boarding school we went to. So we knew each other pretty well. She used to complain about my keeping the light on to read the Bible every night. I talked her into breaking most of her record collection because Rock and Roll was evil. Somehow by the time we got back in touch years later, she had forgiven me for that. In a change of life circumstances in the nearly 30 years we had not communicated, she became the pious one of the two of us. She is a P.A. working at a veterans hospital. She has no children, so diverts her energies into her dogs, and into helping the homeless. I didn't really want to read all those links to articles that she posted on Facebook, but I felt drawn to them. Prisons making profits for housing illegal aliens, and lobbying to pass immigrant laws to up their census? Was it real? Link after link, organization after organization, I read accounts of illegal immigrants being tortured and abused, and used for profit right here in our country for nothing more than crossing our borders. Most of them have no criminal record. They have no rights to legal council. If and when they get out, they tell of horrendous stories of people dying in these prisons.

One day around the time of Robin's request, another cause I have subscribed to news on, "Free the Hikers," for the 2 guys who found themselves imprisoned in Iran, was posting stories of an upcoming hearing that they were afraid would be canceled yet again. There were fasts and vigils; none of which I had ever taken part in. This time I wanted to fast with them. Were they not in a prison in a foreign country like all the immigrants here?

I have a list of favorite songs. One I like to sing often is "How Can I Keep From Singing?" It is about imprisonment, but it speaks to anyone who has felt persecuted for their beliefs. I played the guitar and sang this song among many others to my children as they were growing up. It has been cited most of my life as a traditional Quaker hymn, but a Wikipedia post credits it to Robert Wadsworth Lowry, an American Baptist minister, first published in 1869.

Today I am enjoying food more than I think I have enjoyed it for a very long time. I have a cup or two of coffee on my fasting days because I can't seem to give it up the rest of the week enough to not have a headache on the fasting day. The first week the headache was severe. I have tried different kinds of bread. I would like to someday do a complete fast, but I currently have too many responsibilities to suffer through the dizziness and shakiness that causes me. Though I permit myself a couple of cups of coffee, I do not permit myself lemon in my water. I did put a little vinegar in my water the first week when the thought of any more bread and water made me nauseated, and the vinegar helped a little. My mother had done a week long vinegar water fast when I was a preteen.

Following my first week of fasting, the hikers finally had their hearing after it being put off several times over 2 years. I felt like this was the right thing to do. I have posted about it on Facebook. Few coworkers or friends have commented about it to me. It doesn't feel like a great big showy thing to do. But it is a sacrifice. It takes commitment and concern. I believe it makes people think twice about their strong opposing opinions, that I would give up conventional food for one day per week for people I don't even know. However, it is my country that is torturing them, and I pay the taxes that support this. Fasting is a powerful witness, even if it is a very quiet, mindful, suffering one.

It is also a spiritual journey of a kind I have never been on.

Living on the Family Farm

There is something comforting about living in a house where your uncles, grandfather, father and brothers built the kitchen cupboards from scratch out of pine. We haven't always lived here though. My grandfather was the youngest of 9 children. He was born in this house he told me; just as my mother was born in the last house I lived in. He grew up here. But he had moved on, as had everyone else who grew up here, save two single uncles whom I never knew. Earl and Charlie faithfully kept the Jersey dairy until their health failed and they died. My grandfather had established himself elsewhere when he inherited the place. Many times, I heard stories about the boxes of overalls in the attic - that Earl and Charlie wore the same ones, never washing them, until they were unusable, and then stored them in the attic. And about the smell of tobacco spittoons. Grandmother tried to clean up the house, but they rented it for years. The farm grew over in multiflora rose bushes, a briary weed.

Until age 11, I grew up in a transient way. My parents were teachers, trying to advance their careers by moving from district to district throughout Ohio every few years. The summer I completed 5th grade, they decided to settle themselves on the family farm, however, and we moved here. We bought a Jersey calf, and my father set about attempting to restore the farm of his childhood. I spent Saturdays in the orchard crawling under rose bushes with a chain and wrapping it around the woody, thorny base so my father could uproot plant after plant with his tractor. I went to school in the fall after a summer on the farm with scratched, wirey, skinny arms from haymaking. My disco-happy 70's preteen classmates thought I was "poor." Until I had a slumber party in the hay loft, atop my pride and joy - the loose hay pile I'd helped put there. And then I was cool.

I didn't stay here. Like all kids who grow up on a farm, I wanted to get far away from the work; the yelling; the "oppression." I went to a state university and played too much. I got married, had children and divorced. Alas, my parents aged, and no longer wanted to stay. But they didn't want to sell it either. So I moved here to "keep" it for a few years. And I'm still here. After being out in the world - out where people tend to move every year or three and follow jobs around the country; where new houses are built; where food comes mostly from the grocery store, there is something comforting about being here. It feels like the responsible thing to do to keep such a place; like something sacred.

A Quaker Sort of Lent

Difficulty is created in avoiding the holidays. I've tried it. Years ago, I took on a somewhat sarcastic approach to Lent, but it was also a very spiritual one. After the dissolution of my first marraige and in the midst of intense counseling to regain my self-worth, I decided to give up meat for Lent.

The idea of doing this was centered around the exploitation of women. It all fit together in my complex mind. Where does exploitation stop? If men can justify the way they treat women, does that have something to do with our justifying eating meat, or even plants? It was a particularly spiritual time for me. It was sarcastic because I don't, and have never prior, cognitively observed Lent in any meaningful way. Lent was a convenient 6 weeks at an opportune time for me to delve more deeply and to concentrate on mulling over this new-found focus. Most Christians would understand without too much questioning, if I told them I had given up meat for Lent; even fish. Except Fran Taber, and other Quakers - they of course raised an eyebrow.

I came out of this time renewed. I slowly worked with my parents to take on the management of my father's family homestead so they could move to a retirement home, and embarked upon a somewhat idealistic and inexperienced path of attempting to raise at least some of my own food, including milk, eggs and meat.

After this entire spiritual process, the subject of raising my own meat comes up occasionally among coworkers in particular, in conversation. They most often seek to end the conversation with the statement, "Well, I couldn't eat something I raised." In the years preceding these inevitable conversations, I have learned to take note of who brings in carry-out or fast food from where, to prepare myself for this ultimate statement. And I never let them off the hook. While I understand the apathy of the American public, I will not accept, in my attempt to be true to my own convictions, a statement from a person who eats at McDonalds, that they couldn't eat an animal they had raised. If they must hold me accountable to ease their apathetic conscience, they too also must be held accountable.

In following years, I chose to give up New Years Resolutions, and to give up nontraditional things for Lent. Two years in a row, I gave up elevators. I work on the 7th floor of a hospital 4 days per week, so this was a significant sacrifice. I've NEVER given up chocolate, and don't think I ever will.

This year, I began Lent early. I devoted myself to an 18 week training program for a half marathon. Ash Wednesday came and left after I had begun, and so will Easter. I saw the ash on my husband's forehead when he came home from his Presbyterian church. There was a woman walking through the hospital with ash on her head. It reminded me of the year one of my coworkers took some dirt off her tire before coming in from the parking ramps and did her deed in her rearview mirror. I might not go quite that far.

My occupation these past 3 years has centered around taking care of people having cardiac events. My trips through the Burger King drive through have lessened. My apathy in worrying about what I eat has become uncomfortable. I still eat meat, but I make different choices about what meat I eat.

I'm not planning on winning the half marathon; not even close. The goal for me is to make it to the end of 13 miles with an average pace of faster than 18 miles per 15 minutes, so I don't get pushed onto the sidewalk. I'm 6 weeks in, and have just met that pace last week. I'd also like to be able to say I ran in a half marathon; maybe even a whole marathon someday. The choice didn't have anything to do with Lent. It had more to do with the fact that 4 of my girl cousins have already done this, and I felt left out and wanted to join them this year. And it had to do with my weight and my health. As people at work talk about the health improvements they are making for Lent, I have been feeling rather Quakerly in beginning in January and ending in May - if I do end it. I've come to like running. I'm doing a mega-Lent, at thrice the time period.

Responsible Only For My Own Actions

Many people surrounding me seem to think I am responsible for them.

My neighbor seems to think I have begun a feud with him, since we stood firm in disallowing 4-wheelers on our property. That rule has been widely known since 4-wheelers were invented. His son showed up one day unloading a 4-wheeler, and did not ask, but told my husband he was driving it across our property. My husband told him that he was not going to do that. This neighbor, his son, his wife and his mother-in-law, now seem to think they need to hold me responsible for their own actions in retaliation for this longstanding rule, and the ill feelings they now have towards me. They also are purposefully making my entire family less comfortable by disallowing us to park during winter weather at the end of our lane on what they perceive as their property, but according to the most recent 2 surveys I obtained from the county engineer's office, belongs to another neighbor who has given us explicit permission that we can park there. When the lane leading to our house was paved, my father and grandfather asked them to pave a small section at the top of our lane specifically for the purpose of parking at during the winter for those who lived at the bottom. I don't think this neighbor knows about that. I've been told that I "started this." Whatever "this" is.

My 18 y/o daughter has worked hard and made many accomplishments, but she has begun to make choices I don't agree with. I like to reward my children. I like to give them more than what I had. The privileges I have given her, that happen to cost me much money are not as easy to maintain as they used to be. Her child support is gone. The government feels that at the magical age of 18, or at the end of state-mandated education, that noncustodial parents should no longer be held responsible for financial support. Since we homeschool and her child support is her father's SSD necessitated by a course of events that would take another post to describe, her child support ended last month when she turned 18. I would continue with these privileges at a greater expense to myself without too much complaint, but for the choices being made that will be detrimental to there being an end in sight for my slave labor. Since it appears that nobody is accountable but me for her actions, I've decided to relieve some of my accounting issues until she makes some better choices.

My 18 y/o daughter is not happy. One of her friends joined a Facebook group entitled something like, "Parents are just grown-up kids with money." She herself joined a Facebook group with a bunch of teenage hedging answers that went something like, "Silent treatment: Yeah mom, okay mom, um, yeah, okay, BYE." So I must assume I'm on the receiving end of "silent treatment." And that my daughter may soon be telling me goodbye. I may be misreading that.

I planned and worked very hard to be able to have what I have. It wasn't given to me. When someone has no concept of what that took, to be able to provide them with what I have, I can give them the benefit of the doubt for young ignorance. However, when they begin to act like they are entitled to what I give them, and hold me responsible for their ill feelings that I will not give my blessing on certain things, I begin to feel taken advantage of.

Money doesn't just fall out of the sky. I'd say it doesn't grow on trees, if I didn't recall hearing that too many times myself. I was looking for some group on Facebook to join that was equally derogatory towards teenagers, and found VAST ill-willed cache of just more nasty teenager groups. The majority said stuff like, "Parents think they understand teenagers but they don't." Oh yeah? I'm laughing out loud. Parents have been teenagers. When teenagers try their hand at parenting, I'll be more inclined to consider the idea that I don't understand.

The best I could find was, "Support Group for Parents of Hormonal Teens." I came a fingertap's length from joining, but I stopped myself. I love my daughter, and I really don't want to insult her, although it is tempting. As with my neighbor, I'm going to stick to my guns. My actions are not vindictive; they are based on stewardship and concern for what is best in the long haul. If someone else is inconvenienced, I am sorry, but it was not to intentionally hurt or insult them - it is for the protection of what is good and right. Ethically I cannot condone certain paths that I have seen time after time change lives for the worse for so many people. I do understand, all too well. My resolve might not be so strong if I didn't have to tighten my belt so hard. But I just cannot carry myself and all that baggage across the deep river. If she wants to make choices that are going to cost me more money, she is going to have to shoulder the bill.

What others do about my choices is on their own conscience, and the consequences of those actions is on them, NOT me. I am entirely willing to give and to provide; to love and to support, but my back is only so strong. When it begins to ache from the weight, I am not taking on more.

Lazy?

I have been completely lazy this holiday season. I haven't cut any wood. I haven't even brought wood in. I haven't fed any animals. I didn't salt the drive so we could get out. And yet the wood got cut and split, brought in, a fire was kept going, and the driveway was salted.

Wait a minute though. I worked on Christmas Day, a 12-hour shift. There were only 3 of us nurses, and 7 patients. The person being charge nurse left early for a family emergency, and so I ended up being the charge nurse on the cardiac floor I work on for 4 hours while carrying a very light patient load. Then I worked the next 2 days, 12-hour shifts also. In the midst of this, I came up with gifts for Christmas Eve, even though I didn't shop for them. (We can be creative here). I motivated my family to get washed and dressed and to the church service on time, and went to my in-law's annual Christmas Eve late dinner and party. I took 3 vegan dishes so my vegan college son would have nutritious food to eat. I guess that means I spent most of the day cooking on Christmas Eve. Beans - garbanzo beans for hummus, black beans for Texas caviar, and Anasazi beans for stew and homemade veggie burgers. I got 3 hours of sleep that night, before working 12 hours Christmas Day.

I took care of two patients who were positive for acute MI's, and started both on heparin drips, and one on an Integrillin drip. I got heart cath orders ready for the doctors. I made the assignments for the night shift nurses coming on, and figured out staffing with the house supervisor, and called and gave two very happy nurses time off. We still had a lot of time to chit-chat.

The night before my 3rd 12-hour shift, our 3-year-old daughter awoke at 3am, and needed to pee. She has gone 2 weeks being night trained. I knew my husband was as tired as I was - feeding, bringing in wood, getting his broken-down pick-up fixed, helping his brother with cattle - so I got up and helped her to the bathroom. And then I couldn't go back to sleep. I ran on caffeine that day at work.

3 days in a row, or should I say 3 nights in a row, the most sleep I got on any of those given nights was maybe 4 hours. I awoke with a headache on Monday morning.

Monday, my brother came to visit from Iowa. He is vegetarian. After 3 days of work, most of the vegan food I had made on Christmas Eve was exhausted, and my mother was out running around and didn't know what to cook for dinner. So between tending my neglected Facebook farms (Farm Town and Farmville), I made some new Anasazi bean soup in a big pot and some fresh cranberry sauce. Some hunters came by and asked if they could hunt rabbits. They had family in town and wanted to spend the day out together. We heard a burst of gunshots once, and figured they were all shooting at the same rabbit. They left us a rabbit, just before we drove 20 miles with our newly cooked vegetarian food to my mother's, where we had a very nice and long overdue visit with my youngest brother and his family.

Yesterday, (Tuesday), I spent the entire day on the computer building my virtual farms. I guess I did spend a couple of hours playing school with Eilidh. I did manage to entice my teenagers out of their rooms to play elementary Bingo with lower-case letters, feigning excitement with each letter called out, a game of Flinch, and a game of Go Fish. That was all a 3-year-old could tolerate in one sitting. By Go Fish, the game board was being repeatedly disorganized with resultant giggles, and it ended before it was finished. The 17 and 20 year-olds had more fun than they thought they would though.

Today, I feel as though I've been lazy. There are no excuses for the things I haven't done.

Wish I Had A Camera

...when Eilidh, the 3 y/o kept closing the door, but Peanut, the new kitten, got in each time before she got it shut. She'd pick up the kitten, put it back out, and try to close the door again, only to have the kitten run in again before she got it shut. The kitten was happy to let a 3 y/o pick it up like a wet noodle and carry it out and run back in, over and over and over

...when the goats and sheep snuck around the other side of the house from me quickly, and entered the neighbor's yard, only to find their dogs were out

...when the 3 y/o made sparkly crowns out of the trim for the Grange booth at the county fair, as we were setting it up, and put one on the head of every woman there, and they walked around working with their crowns on as if nothing were odd

...when a patient at work laid with their body half out of bed sideways and refused to be moved because they said they were comfortable, then proceeded to fall asleep and snore before our very eyes, and they weren't faking it because they were in alcohol withdrawl and really DID fall asleep like that

...when the goat dug up the potato in the garden and ate it

...when the lamb chased one of the roosters around the pasture for some time, kicking its hind feet up with glee and popping in the air like popcorn every so often, and having a blast

...when the 3 y/o mimics the 17 y/o in every small way because she wants to be like her, and the 17 y/o isn't even noticing. For example, at the resteraunt table, 17 y/o picks up her fork and pokes her food in deep thought. 3 y/o watches her intently, then looks for her fork, picks it up and begins poking her food exactly the same way, whilst 17 y/o is still deep in thought. 17 y/o pushes back her hat. 3 y/o sees her, and pushes back her own hat. This goes on until the 17 y/o looks up, sees the 3 y/o mimicking her and the 17 y/o begins doing things like putting a spoon on her nose.

A Little Depression

It's been a rough month. Son #1 moved back to Phoenix in June, and I finally got his room cleaned. Son #2 returned from Kenya, stayed a little over a week, messed that room up entirely, then went for his senior year in college, begging to please let him stay in college an extra year after this year. He did post-secondary option and entered halfway through his sophomore year, so this, his 3rd year, he is well within the means to graduate. 4 days before the college return-trip to North Carolina, my mother informed me she would be getting remarried that Sunday, as in the day after my son was due in college 400 miles away, and if I got back in time, could I stand up for her?

Before the marraige date was set, the announcement alone caused enough inner uneasiness to motivate me to clean out the basement during my vacation. I have not cleaned out the basement since I moved here 6 years ago and my ex-boyfriend filled it with things from my previous home. I found that he even stacked newspapers up against one entire wall, and the rodents had made nests in them. So motivation for that required a lot of uneasiness. The wedding announcement came in the midst of the basement cleaning - the horrendous basement cleaning. I spent the entire next day doing geneology. 12 to 14 hours. The wedding was beautiful though. Fred's neice and I talked arrangements over the cell phone before and during our trip to NC and back. And my brother made 3 trips to the dump for me.

And then, I crashed. For several days I was glued to this computer. And, my pants are looser. In fact, some of them are downright baggy. I haven't gotten on the scale. I know I lost 10 whole pounds getting my son ready to go to Kenya. I gained a few back in the 2 months he was gone, but I'm pretty certain I'm losing again.

I have been immobilized more days in the past month more profoundly than I have been in the past 5 years. I've been downright depressed. For the past 5 years, I've been trying to lose weight - TRYING. I lose a little, and it comes back plus some. In the past couple of months, I have not tried at all. I think I'm down maybe 15 lbs.

Why? Well, for one, as rocky a relationship as we had, I miss my father. I had always thought that living on the farm would be easier without his interferance. But it seems very empty and lonely now. Just plain empty. Two, I've sort of lost my mother. I'm used to sharing her with an enormous number of emotionally and intellectually needy people, but I'm sort of emotionally alone myself right now where having a mother is concerned. She's very distracted, and it doesn't help her at all right now that I miss my father. Three, my children are leaving. I'm helping the third one apply to colleges, and I have to say, I'm just not into it. Four, the goats keep eating my garden. They're even digging up potato's now. I saw it with my own two eyes. And I can't get myself motivated to put up a fence around the garden. Five, after a week of basement cleaning, the house is out of my control. And six, I work full-time, and I have no money. Son #2 deserves it more than any child would, but I am not going to pay $750/month tuition for him to go to school for another year when this one is over, on top of paying for my daughter. I'm just not. I like my job. I like having it. It may be the main thing keeping me sane right now, because I have to focus, and I can forget everything else for 12 hours at a time. Plus, some of my coworkers have a lot worse things going on at home than me. But I just have started to feel selfish about the money I earn doing it.

So since I am still basically functioning, I'm suffering just a little depression.

Captina Friends Cemetery

Standing on the northwest corner of the cemetery, the north being closest to the creek. The creek is down over the hill to the left. This is looking back east, towards Ohio SR 26.

On August 14, 2009, I set out to go Cemetery Hopping. I prepared in the weeks prior by entering several years of geneology correspondance into Family Tree Maker, and printing out geneology reports, going to the Belmont County Engineers website to find out who surrounding property owners were for private cemeteries, discussing places I was going and people I was looking for on geneology forums and on the phone, and by printing out maps and finding general whereabouts on a Belmont County, OH map. I had 3 cemeteries planned, but visited 5 total. Since it was prime haymaking day for my dear husband, Bruce, I took our 3 y/o, Eilidh with me. I fully expected her to self destruct early on, but instead, she had A BLAST. She even posed for me to introduce one long researched and long awaited CAPTINA FRIENDS CEMETERY, found very close to the corner of Captina Highway/SR 149 and SR 26, not very far south of Barnesville, OH. It is known in military records as the OLD BROWN CEMETERY or locally in more modern times by the family who most recently lived on the property known to the locals as the BENSON CEMETERY.

The entrance sits within sight of SR 149, with public access technically from SR 26 along the small power lines. However, I found a trailer sitting right on SR 26 with a "For Sale by Owner" sign in front. It appeared to be a hunting retreat for someone. Indeed, when I called the number on the sign, the owner lived in Akron. He said it included 74 acres, and he was asking $130,000. I wasn't in the market, but seeing as how I knew several people very interested in this cemetery, and seeing that it was an old Quaker site, it seemed a wonderful place for a Friends retreat, or for some Friend to own, just for its spiritual connection with a Meeting of the past.

There is a connection most people don't understand about many Quakers who still practice after the silence way of worship. They are sometimes spiritually bonded with the past, and the places in which that past took place. Captina Friends Meeting quit holding worship in 1836. My interest in it originally arose when my Methodist paternal grandmother left handwritten notes that one of her great aunts was married to a Smith in Captina Friends Meeting. My mother (other side of the family completely) is a Quaker, and I know of many, many Quaker Smiths through growing up being involved in Friends circles. One of my childhood playmates came from a line of them. Captina Friends Meeting records have been lost, to my understanding. Losing records is an unusual occurrence for Friends. They take notes, keep journals and pass down to their descendants notes on nearly everything.

The records may be found someday, but who knows where? They could be stored away in someone's attic, or in a back corner of an archive at a college like Swarthmore near Philadelphia, PA, or Guilford in North Carolina. I've known a few Quaker scholars on forums who frequent such places and find such suprises. Or they may be ruined and gone.

There were only about 6 legible stones in Captina Friends Cemetery. They were all but one military stones, which in a Friends Cemetery is not unusual, but their legibility in contrast to other grave markers was, indeed. At that point in history, prior to 1836, Friends did not use gravestones as we know them today, if they used markers at all. It was considered worldly. I remember hearing stories of graveyard trustees removing gravestones. I have to deduce that either the family or the military has thus placed these stones. One person who gave me directions to the cemetery was a veteran.

The stones were:

Wallace Reeves, COL 186th Ohio Inf

Milton Reeves, COL 129th Ohio Inf

S Hoopes 186th Ohio Inf

Mary Ellen (was all I could read)

J.R. & L. Catton, Died (illegible) 1819 possibly

Simeon Breech, Shot and Killed in a gunfight, birth, 23 Aug, 1782, death 30 May 1849

Abraham Gray, PVT, 3 Regt, Ulster County Militia, Rev. War, 1754, 1846 (newest stone)

I did about 10 hours of looking-up today. Samuel Hoopes was mustered for the Civil War at age 22 on 2/21/1865, and was killed 3/23/1865 in Louisville, KY.

Simeon Breech was in a gunfight as law enforcement between two people, as the story goes, and neither one survived.

Abraham Gray was born to Louis M. and Loretta Marie Ann Gray in NY; married Sheryl Marie (uk last name) and had children John, Peter 18 Jun 1787 Ulster County, Benjamin 1788 and Samuel 1791.

I could not find any information on the Catton, nor the two Reeves.

George Wetzel, Lewis Wetzel's father, was buried at the head of Captina Island which sits in the Ohio River near the mouth in April 1782 after being hit in the chest with a bullet during a hunting trip with his two sons. "That Dark and Bloody River," Allan W. Eckert.

The Battle of Captina, according to Martin Baker, took place in 1794, a full account which can be found at the website of a nearby bed&breakfast:

http://strattonhouse.com/index.php?section=history&content=31135103

Sometime after 1794 to 1836 spanned the possible existance of Captina Friends Meeting. That was about 40 years. Walking through this graveyard on a sunny, comfortable August day in 2009 gave me a spiritual feeling, a bond with my ancestors and relatives who may or may not have been buried there. You can't tell where the meetinghouse might have once stood. But ginseng grew at the base of one of the illegible gravestones, in defiance of its once massive harvest. It is a beautiful place. I hope that whomever the owner sells it to will appreciate its significance in the history of this area of Ohio.