Worrywart

My mother, blessedly, is not one to give advice often. Her favorite piece is, “Only worry about things you can do something about,” which is something neither of us really succeed at. Occasionally, she will also quote the pastor of the church we attended when I was in elementary school. His adage, "Act, don’t react,” is excellent advice and fodder for another blog post.

On this glorious pre-autumnal day I find myself fraught with worry, consumed by it, almost devoured by it.

In between doing laundry and working, of course.

But the worry seems to be winning.

Fast forward to this not so glorious pre-autumnal day about a week later. Today I’m still worried about a myriad of things, including whether I’ll ever get another (decent) blog post written again. I just finished my walk (cut short because I was worrying about A. getting rained on B. everything that has to be done today) and it occurred to me I used to be so busy before we moved to the prairie I didn’t have time to worry. Oh, there was plenty of time to be stressed, overworked, and anxious but not a lot of time to fret.

Then we made a drastic lifestyle change, leaving jobs at a large university in the Mid-Atlantic region for life at a much smaller university in the Middle West, much closer to family.

One thing I never worry about is that we made the wrong decision to move.

And that alone guarantees peace of mind even when I’m stewing and stressing about… stuff.

Chores

If it’s Thursday, it must be Dyson day. Actually I don’t have a Dyson and only a vague idea of its merits, but I have a good friend who does…and I just like the ring of it.

The other day another friend and I were talking about division of labor, as in which spouse does what when it comes to domestic chores. This is a touchy subject in many households, and I remember buying a copy of The Second Shift at a garage sale eons ago.

This is from the product description on Amazon:

“Fifteen years after its first publication, The Second Shift remains just as important and relevant today as it did then. As the majority of women entered the workforce, sociologist and Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild was one of the first to talk about what really happens in dual-career households. Many people were amazed to find that women still did the majority of childcare and housework even though they also worked outside the home. Now, in this updated edition with a new introduction from the author, we discover how much things have, or have not, changed for women today.”

I’m a lucky woman. My husband took over all the cooking when he was diagnosed with diabetes more than a decade ago. But his culinary roots go deeper. He learned to cook over a campfire in Boy Scouts, worked in food service in high school, and ran a vegetarian on-campus restaurant during his senior year of college. He likes to cook; I don’t. Washing a pile of pots and pans stacked to the ceiling is far more appealing to me than dicing, slicing, and trying to get dishes to come out at the same time.

What’s more, I enjoy cleaning. Scrubbing toilets or dusting woodwork is my idea of relaxing. I know I’m an aberration, and I didn’t always feel this way.

Growing up, Saturdays meant chore day. My sister, Joan, and I took turns cleaning bathrooms or dusting and vacuuming. When they got older, my brothers joined the ‘fun.’ Joan and I also alternated doing dishes after dinner each night. She got odd nights; I was in charge on even nights. I can still hear her complaining there were more ‘odd’ days in the calendar than ‘even’ ones. We did get our birthdays off.

My siblings and I had it much better than my mom and her brother and sister did. My grandmother made each one of them dust the same pieces of furniture. Grandma Rock never got up and made breakfast for them either on school days, preferring to sleep in. My mom made breakfast for us every morning. Now it wasn’t until I was married that I knew oatmeal could be creamy and not lumpy (love you, mom!), but while growing up my mom’s younger sister got up before school and cooked breakfast.

My husband’s mom had a cleaning woman when she went back to teaching in her mid-40s, but my spouse and his older brother (big sister in college already; surprise baby sister too little) had to keep their rooms clean, do their own laundry during the week, and cook one meal a week. On my father-in-law’s night to cook, he took the family out to eat.

When my mom started writing romances full-time, my school administrator father started vacuuming and doing other domestic duties. He was always neat to a fault, sometimes tossing mail before my mom could even see it. And my mother is an organizer extraordinaire.

I grapple with organization, having married a man who leaves a ‘snail trail’ of paper. On the other hand, I can safely say I’ve never cooked a Thanksgiving turkey, which means I’ve never poisoned anyone.

I’m embarrassed to admit my own children never had the chore list my siblings and I did. Conversely, my sons did and do keep their rooms clean, their schoolwork organized, and their activities scheduled.

When people ask how I write with my mother, I always say it’s a symbiotic relationship. The same holds true for housework. I scrub toilets and sinks, my husband cleans the showers and tub, my mom folds laundry (a chore I find particularly odious).

We don’t keep a chart where we write down who does what. There’s just an ebb and flow of domesticity that usually works. My mom loathes dusting; I adore banishing those particles. If I were single, I’d eat cereal for dinner every single night. Seriously. My husband is color blind; I do the laundry.

Sometimes the system breaks down but not for long. And sometimes turning a blind eye to a floor that needs mopping just means it will look that much better when it finally does get cleaned.

All the time I’m glad Cheerios aren’t my usual dinner fare.

Home is where the heart is

Home is where the heart is…and the heart is a travelin’ thing.

Earlier this week, my husband and I returned from our sojourn from the prairie to the Appalachians. I went back to the best little writers’ conference around, the West Virginia Writers, Inc. annual conference held in the southeastern portion of that state at Cedar Lakes.

My husband met his friend Matt, a Lutheran minister, when we arrived and they motorcycled on the Blue Ridge Parkway to Cherokee, North Carolina. They met up with other friends in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

In just over three weeks my husband has gone nearly 5500 miles, via car and motorcycle. From Salt Lake City to Dolly Parton’s domain, my spouse has already covered enough miles to have criss-crossed the country, from San Diego to Jacksonville, Florida.

My journey was shorter in distance but longer emotionally. This was my 8^th summer at Cedar Lakes Conference Center, near Ripley, WV. I’ve written before how my friend, the late Mary Rodd Furbee, persuaded me to go with her that first time. When my husband and I crossed the Ohio River just last week, I was transported back to the return trip Mary and I made that first summer. We were chatting so much about exciting writing projects that we took a wrong turn somewhere and came upon that very same bridge. She and I made it home, but her time there was so short it makes me ache all over again for her and her loved ones.

The final night of the conference was bittersweet. Another friend who died too young this spring was honored for her writing. I wept and sniffled into my napkin.

Earlier that evening my eldest son, Erik, was awarded an honorable mention for a short story in the annual contest the organization sponsors every year. This is the child who professed for years not to like to write... until this year when the ‘bug’ hit him, and he has amazed me with his output and his burgeoning talent.

The time spent with old and new friends slipped by too quickly, especially since my night owl habits have flown the coop. Is that mixing my bird metaphors? Saying goodbye was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

On the way home, we briefly saw Erik, his adorable girlfriend, Morgan, and his friend Alex, an amazing artist who just finished his freshman year at Rhode Island School of Design. Erik is in Morgantown this summer spending time with Morgan and his friends, doing an internship at the WVU Press, and taking an on-line summer school class. It was strange to say goodbye to him in a Bob Evans in Parkersburg, WV. But he’ll be home in August, and West Virginia is not northern Germany.

And it was time to get home to Andrew and my mom, who got along swimmingly until the day we were due home. “I think we’re getting on each other’s nerves,” he told me.

Dorothy Gale intones my favorite movie line of all time when she lands smack dab back in Kansas: “There’s no place like home,” she tells the confused loved ones gathered around her now sepia-toned bedroom.

But here’s the thing about home. You can carry a little piece of your loved ones around in your heart, no matter where you lay your head.

Things I have learned being home alone for the first time in forever:

1. Do not watch a zillion episodes of Criminal Minds, with an emphasis on home invasions by serial killers like Tim Curry’s creepy stalker, the week before everyone leaves.
2. Do make a list of everything you want to accomplish when everyone (spouse, mother, both sons) scatters east and west.
3. Do not expect to get anything done on your list. Mmmm…clean the kitchen cupboards, come up with a brilliant new writing project, bag up clothes for Goodwill, and recycle old magazines or watch dozens of episodes of Bulging Brides and Last Ten Pounds Boot camp dvr’d from the Fine Living Network in anticipation of said alone time? Guess what I chose?
4. Do not think just because everyone is gone that you can lose the last ten pounds in five days, even eating your own (wretched) cooking. It’s just not possible.
5. Do know you can lose a couple of pounds by counting the calories of every morsel you put in your mouth and by walking excessively in your lovely flat neighborhood.
6. Do sit on the couch in the middle of the afternoon and read…and don’t feel guilty.
7. And these things I knew already: it’s truly a blessing my mother has lived with us for more than a decade; in addition to loving them, I really like my husband and children; friends are invaluable, in-town and out; and I am ready for my vacation!

Almost Heaven

Even though we lived in West Virginia for fifteen years, we aren’t from West Virginia. And, even though we moved to that mountain state from Arizona, we weren’t from the southwest either. My husband and I are Midwesterners, born and bred. Geographically, I’m not sure how the upper Great Lakes state of Michigan qualifies as the middle west, but it’s an attitude not a latitude.

After all those hilly years, the flatlands of the prairie still seem strange. Nebraska and her people feel, if not like home, at least familiar.

Our older son, who at age two-and-a-half was climbing 200 steps up to see Anasazi ruins just outside Flagstaff, couldn’t wait to see the world when he set off as a foreign exchange student to Germany at age sixteen.

Later, though the conversation details are fuzzy, I’m sure he told me he’d learned the lesson that you don’t really appreciate what home is until you leave it.

To me much of life can be summed up by lessons Dorothy learned in The Wizard of Oz. My sons never shared my devotion to that movie, watching it year after year as I did. I think it’s a girl thing, but I wouldn’t trade my boys for all the pink in the world.

These sons of mine grew up ‘back east.’ Someday I will ask them where they consider themselves ‘from.’

This week a tragic mine explosion rocked the state of West Virginia. The death toll is horrifying. In the last year, the company was fined a huge amount for safety violations.

Please pray for the miners and their families. We all have a little piece of West Virginia in our hearts this week, whether we’re ‘from’ there or not.