Liz's Wedding

Liz at cocktail party

Cousins

  My niece Liz was married to  last weekend at a winery outside of Charlottesville, Virginia.  I had a glorious time.  On Friday night my sons took me out to dinner at  a restaurant that served fine Southern food (no longer an oxymoron in my book.)  We went from there to a cocktail party where we met the bridegroom's family.   The Justus clan is large and welcoming and happy with each other.   They do interesting work.   Luke's father works with  a non-profit that runs a medical school in Tanzania.  His uncle is a minister who participates in the Moral Monday protests in North Carolina.

Before the wedding

Simone

More cousins

      On Saturday we hung out in the large suite my sister Florrie had in the hotel where we all stayed.  Most of my family was there, except for Judy, who couldn't make the trip.   We talked and laughed and ate cookies.  The little girls colored and talked about their roles in the wedding.   Maxine and Lucy took their jobs as greeter seriously.  Jamie worried that, as flower girl, she had to walk up the aisle with the two-year-old ring bearer, and what if he wandered off?  My cousin Deke brought old photos of our grandparents.  Florrie read a love letter that my our father had written to our mother three weeks before their wedding.  Some swam, or worked out, or went running.  John led the kids on a frog hunt at a nearby creek.  Meanwhile, the bridal party was out at the winery an the grooms' party went skeet shooting.
     We took three chartered buses for the 45-minute drive  to the winery.  It was raining, so the ceremony was held indoors, in a lovely room draped in white. Two of the nine bridesmaids sobbed throughout the ceremony.  The minister quoted Amos ("Do  justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God") as one one of the couple's guiding sayings.  The string quartet played My Girl as the recessional.    Then the toasts and the dancing began.

Bridegroom Luke (r) skeet shooting

   While dinner was being served, Maxine had the large dance floor to herself for ballet.  The groom's brother could not get through his toast without tears.   Abby, the maid of honor, told about being a scared in the night and racing across the hall and leaping into Liz's bed, wedging herself between her sleeping big sister and the wall.  This went on so often that Liz threatened to put a dead bolt on the door.  "Why would she put a dead bull on the door?"  asked Jamie later.

Maxine and Lucy

Mother and sister of the bride

    We danced and danced.  The rain stopped and the full moon shone over the Blue Ridge.   We lined up in two rows out on the lawn, holding large sparklers.  Liz and Luke ran out between the rows of sputters and sparkles.   Then we got back on the buses.  My sisters and I were in the front of one bus, and Luke's college friends filled the back.  They sang all the way home, starting with fraternity chants and ending with the Star Spangled Banner.  We laughed with happiness.    As we rode through the countryside in the bright moonlight, I thought about how fine it is to enlarge one family with another family.

Happy vows

 
 
    

Quiet times

Abbey chapel. Photo by Westview Products

    I was feeling like my inner gyroscope was twirling too fast, and was tilted wrong to boot.  Life was speeded up, and there was not much laughter.  Judy said, as she does every few years, "Isn't it time you went to the monastery?"
    As I drove out into the rolling hills  near Lafayette I noticed many more blue  signs announcing wineries.  Land that  used to be prune orchards and woodlots  is now used for vineyards, and the country roads are sometimes clogged  with Portlanders out and about tasting wine.

     At the Trappist Abbey I settled right into the silence.  It was hot, 99 degrees one day, but country heat is tolerable in a way that city heat is not.  I rose early and went to bed early, and stayed quiet in the afternoons.  I took long walks, wrote, and let my mind be still. I sat by the pond and watched the trees reflecting in the water.   There were four other women guests staying in the small guests houses.   We ate breakfast and lunch together in silence, and talked at dinner.   At intervals, we crossed the courtyard between the guest quarters and the monastery to sat in the serene chapel to  hear the monks sing their daily office.

Sheltered by oak

     The monks chant the Psalms five times a day, beginning with Vigils at 4:15 AM and ending with Compline  at 7:30 PM.  There are twenty -seven men at Our lady of Guadalupe Abbey, only four  of them under fifty years old.  Four are over ninety.  "It's geriatric city," Brother Mark told me.  But Brother Dominique is a singing teacher, and the men take  singing lessons  with him every week.  The sound of the plainchant helped me to quiet my spinning mind.

Reflection

     The Trappist's rule of life requires each monastery  to be self-supporting.  The men at Lafayette can no longer farm or log or build church pews as they used to.  They make fruitcakes, and run a large bonded wine warehouse to store their neighbors' wine as it ages.
     Most of the abbey's 1300 acres is in second-growth forest that rises up in gentle slopes behind the monastic enclosure and the guest area.  The area was once farmed, and then logged.  Thanks to a large  grant from the Bonneville Power Administration and a conservation easement, the scrubby woods is being transformed into an oak savanna.   They are cutting out the underbrush, the pines and the smaller trees, and leaving the large oaks towering over grassland.  Big piles of brush, pine, and smaller trees sit waiting to be chopped for firewood or burned.  Someday the hills will look like the Willamette Valley did when the French and American settlers first arrived.  The local Indians burned the underbrush to make the grassland hospitable to their food plants, and to make hunting easier.

Oak savanna

       There are farm roads and logging roads throughout the new savanna and the remaining forest.  I like to take long walks in those woods.   The last time I walked through the woods  at the monastery   I emerged from a path into a clearing that had once been a baseball field.  Imagine  I was at  home plate in the cleared ball field.   At around the shortstop position there sat a cougar.  We looked at each other quietly, and I began to back up slowly.  She walked away from me, stopping every once in a while to look back.
    This visit, when I hiked in the woods I  kept my eye out for cougar tracks.  I saw a few tracks but no cougars. I also saw what sure looks like a bear print, and I wished I had a bell.  I was nervous but still peaceful.

Bear?

   When I returned home after a few days of quiet, I was no longer a flibbertigibbet.  The quiet time at the monastery had worked its ordinary magic.
    

Post Labor Days

Old deck

     We might be retired, but we still work. We have to make things ready for the people we hire to do what we cannot.

Lumber delivery

Sam

      In July we replaced our 40- year- old cedar deck.  This involved preliminary research, and then finding a lumber yard where the salesmen  didn't make me cry.  Some would make me  cry  because they were 20 years old and pretending to know everything.  Others  were 50 years old and did know everything, but they couldn't or wouldn't translate into my elementary spacial language. On every trip to a "Home Improvement (yeah, right) Center " I carried vivid memories of the time in Virginia when I was driving home from the Fairfax County permit office. I hadn't been able to make the permit clerks understand that I wanted to build a porch, and I couldn't grasp anything they said. I cried so hard that my sunglasses fogged up and I had to pull off onto the shoulder of I-95.  So this summer I was relieved when the salesman at Parr Lumber worked with me until I selected deck materials and we had the measurements and the order correct.   Thank you, Damian.

Space to work

     The lumber was scheduled to be delivered  by Sam the following Wednesday.  How can one person carry all that lumber?  Damian assured me that Sam was skilled with the mini-forklift.  I hope that the delivery driver could drive a forklift though our carport to unload the  lumber in the back yard.  The carport was filled with random stuff, leaving only a narrow footpath between piles.  I cleared it all out in one day without flagging, thanks to a year of strength- training workouts.  Thank you, Herta.

Precise support

New deck

    Sam drove up in the delivery truck and I thought, "How can a young woman lift  that lumber?"  But she was skilled, and didn't have to lift a thing.  She maneuvered the forklift without a false move.
     The forklift was too tall to fit under the carport cover, but the newly cleaned space was well used.  Carlos, a smart and skilled handyman, used it as a staging area for tools and materials.  He built us a fine new deck, just in time for the relatives' visit.  Thank you, Carlos.

Repairing first scratch

    Garrison Keillor often signs off his radio show with the admonition,  "Be well.  Do good work.  Keep in touch."  Now that we are retired, being well and keeping in touch take up a greater portion of our time than they used to.  But work, physical and mental, is still a good part of our lives.  Sometimes  we have big projects, like a new deck.  Sometimes there are smaller tasks, like retouching the paint on Judy's new car.  Argh.
  
  

The relatives came

Is that puppy real?

Looking at animal web cam sites

    Before and after our week at Manzanita, the relatives came to  our house.  Late Friday night we had three little grandsons sleeping on air mattresses on the floor of my study.  What happiness to have their  presence in the house!
      The next morning I set Paul and Tina to the task of figuring out which of Paul's school photos came from which grade. Judy picked up the cousins at the train station.  After  basketball and tacos and lots of arranging luggage in trunks, everybody drove off to the beach.   Judy and I re-made the beds for David and family, who came in on Sunday.

Vonnie meets Arnie

Simone's special spot on the hearth

Cole and Bianca

Cousin Andy

     After our glorious beach week, we had another happy  coming- and- going Saturday.  Courtney and the girls were staying here.  Paul and family made a cameo appearance before we dropped them off at the airport.  Judy retrieved the cousins from the rental car place, and we sent them on their sightseeing way in our white car.  We took Maxine and Simone to the local aquarium, where  Simone fed sharks and Maxine stood very still while a parrot perched on her shoulder.

Paul

Dulcimer lesson

   The next day, Vonnie and Ernie and Cole and Bianca came in.  The Armstrong cousins joined us for dinner, along with the neighbors, who brought good dog Arnie. Vonnnie's family left early Monday morning.
     The Armstrongs came to dinner Monday afternoon.

Puzzle meister

 Judy taught Mary Ellen how to play the dulcimer.  Cousin Peter, who loves cars, began a detail job on the Prius.  Andy and Glen moved the armchairs back into my study.  That night,  I dropped the cousins off at the airport.  I returned to a house of just the two of us, and started missing everybody.
     Not for long.  The last relatives left on Monday night .  On Wednesday we drove  to the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle for Judy to consult with one of the top pulmonology researchers in the country.   The doctors in Portland hoped that Dr. Ragu would recommend  drug or management trials that might make Judy feel better and prolong her life. The options Dr. Ragu talked about are not appealing:

John off to the marmot count

1.  A drug trial sponsored by a pharmaceutical company in which you inject yourself with a mystery drug every week for three years, in order to discover if the drug is safe for humans.
2.  A study sponsored by NIH at the University of Washington, where you travel to Seattle in twice  a week for three months to inhale a small amount of carbon monoxide.  (Judy says, "I could just hook myself up to a tailpipe.")  It is a double blind study, so you could be driving to Seattle twice a week  to inhale air.

Kate and son Josh

    After Judy's appointment we took the ferry across Puget Sound to Rose and John's house in Sequim  for an evening with old friends.  John's brother Chas and Kris were there, talking jigsaw puzzles.  Kate, friend since high school days, was visiting from the east coast.  The next morning the house was filled with John's hiking buddies, as they prepared for four days of counting marmots in the Olympic Mountains.
     We came home and began packing up the toys and picture books to store them in the garage. I deflated the air mattresses and put them away.   I kept on my dresser top the puzzle Maxine and I had put together the night before she left.  She was singing the whole time.
    
  

Chariots of Fire

Racing against time

Lots of creatures

Wonders

     The morning low tides at Manzanita revealed hundreds of starfish, mussels, and sand dollars in the tide pools at the rocky end of the sandy beach.    Our crowd trooped up there in the early mornings, carefully timing their viewing for the lowest tide.   They came  back to the cottages with tales and photos of fabulous sights.

     A long walk across soft sand was beyond Judy's  ability, but we still  tried to figure out how to get her to the tide pools.  The evening before our last morning at the coast, we discovered that the town of Manzanita has wheelchairs available that have fat tires for using on the beach.  The wheelchairs are lent through the local bike shop, which opens at 9AM. Low tide that morning was predicted  at  9:11 AM.

Setting off

    The race against the turn of the tide began.  If we got to the tide pools too late, the water would come in and cover the creatures.  If it came in too  fast, it could  trap us amid the rocks and make it difficult to climb above the tide line.

Starfish sun

    John found the bike shop owner, who handed him a beach wheelchair at exactly 9 o'clock.  John stuffed it in his car and drove back to the beach in front of the cottage, where Judy and David and Paul were waiting. Paul pushed Judy at a run, with David navigating, up the sandy beach to the tide pools.

Judy at the tide pools

Tide pool jewels

     The starfish looked like soft jewels, covering rock after rock as far as we could see.  Mussels and barnacles made a crust on other rocks.  We didn't have long to glory in the animals before the tide turned and waves began to splash over the amazing sights.

Happy

 Judy scrambled back to the beach wheelchair, and  David pushed her  along the sandy beach to the cottage.

Mission accomplished

Beach LIfe

Nap time on porch

     I was sitting on the porch of the library cottage, rocking Simone through her long afternoon nap.  My sisters Rose and Vonnie came over to visit.   Down on the beach  I could see Jack flying his kite, Megan riding her skim board, and the little ones digging in the sand.   I  looked through the open door  into the cottage living room and saw the sunlight through Judy's silver hair. Beyond her, through the front windows, there was the  shining tide  running out to meet the clouds.  I was as close to heaven as I could imagine.

Megan on skim board

    My family has gathered at the shore in Delaware for over thirty years.  This summer, for the first time, Rose and I lured them to Manzanita on  the Oregon Coast.  They came from Boston, Chicago, Maryland, and Texas.  Four cousins came by train from Gettysburg and Baltimore. We rented five houses, three of them adjacent and two nearby.  The compound made it possible for the children to go from house to house on their own recognizance.   "You told Sam and Charlie that had to wait until 7:15 to come over?'"  I  said to brother-in-law John,  "I make them wait until 9."

Cousins 2013

Cousins 1983

     The chess board and ping pong table saw regular use.  Lucy and Jamie made an art gallery, complete with captions like "Put a bird on it."  Maxine and Sammy spent days pretending to be hunters. Judy gave Lucy ukulele lessons.  Lucy and Maxine sang songs in the hammock for hours, with Jamie rocking them.  Jack proved that he could stand on his head in the water.  Charlie, who loves babies, made Simone laugh.

Singing and swinging

Ukulele lesson

     There was a small  creek running hidden in the woods  behind Vonnie's house.  Lucy and Megan made fairy boats out of large leaves.  Jack led the  project of clearing a new path and building a bridge across the stream.
    We ate and drank well, of course, thanks to the next generation.  Jess made spaghetti, Tina cooked pork, David used a pound of bacon in his beef stew, and Cole simmered chicken in tomatoes and spices and served it over noodles. There was a fish and crab lunch al fresco that reminded me of European movies.

What's a good clue?

     Games went on all the time, but especially after dinner.  One night, there were 11 around the table playing Taboo.  Maxine kept score. Sam made buzzing sounds as the timer, and Taboo novices like Jack and Megan held their own against the mighty Jess.
     Bianca and Tina whizzed through several 1000- piece jigsaw puzzles.  Chas sent a wooden puzzle he created from a photo of the library cottage.  It is difficult, with no picture to follow and interlocking triangular pieces forming the edges.  We timed Bianca, who completed it in 52 minutes, 45  minutes faster than Chas himself had taken to do it.

Puzzzle ace

   John led a hike to the top of Neahkahnie Mountain.  Being a careful mountaineer, he made the four-mile climb in the morning before leading the very mixed group up in the afternoon. David, Maxine, and friend Christopher did the same hike the next day.  Later Maxine looked out the window at the mountain and said, "I walked to the top of that."

Mountaintop

Beach bike cousins

        One late afternoon the group congregated  at waters' edge, taking turns  racing around on beach bicycles. There were a few overturns.  Josh,  who cycled  450  miles across Iowa this summer, had no trouble on the beach.

Pretty happy

     On the last night of our week at the coast Paul and Tina built a campfire on the beach.  They made S'mores with marshmallows so large that they required special strategies to cook and eat them.

    Whenever I greet John with, "How are you?"  he replies, "Pretty happy."  We were all pretty happy in Manzanita.