childhood

Valentine’s Day in a Shoe Box

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It is that time of the year again when the store aisles are bleeding red with Valentine’s paraphernalia. At the local Walmart the other day I almost became a single person fatality when an avalanche of giant stuffed animals wearing Valentine themed shirts fell from the shelves. Rows of heart shaped boxes, perfume, cards, conversation hearts that, when strung together, create sentences more disjointed than a text from a 13 year old, and roses by the dozen all culminate to assault the senses and empty the wallet. The holiday seems to be designed to kill you with candy while providing flowers for the funeral.

All sarcasm aside, when I think of Valentines Day I am transported to Mrs. Grandstrand’s 1st grade classroom. My classmates and I are seated around a long scarred oak table like we are about to hold a séance. In front of each of us is a shoe box and in the middle of the table are stacks of construction paper, glue, old magazines, tissue paper, brightly colored plastic scissors, crayons, markers, and the ever adored pinking shears. With a word from Mrs. Grandstrand we are off like a flash. Art supplies go flying, scissors are snipping, and flakes of tissue paper saturated in glue are melting onto the surface of the table where they will remain forever, a testament to our efforts like the markings of ancient civilizations.

Back in the day (way, way, way before Pinterest, Etsy, and online tutorials) it was a tradition to save the very best shoe box from the whole year and spend a morning at school transforming it into a gaudily decorated receptacle for Valentine’s cards. We, as children, called upon every creative atom in our 6 year old bodies and, with brows furrowed in concentration, set about the task of wowing the teacher and our parents with our crafting prowess.

Then, the big day arrived. The shelf in the back of the classroom would be lined with our finished masterpieces ranging from the delicately decorated creation of my friend Sara who always did everything perfectly, to the giant men’s boot sized box covered in brown paper and a strategically placed ad for women’s bras that the classroom misfit found in one of the magazines. His reasoning behind the ad on his box was “They had lace on them Teacher, you said to decorate with lace!” The type of twisted logic which landed Patrick in the principal’s office in our strict private school on more than one occasion.

Once the commotion died down, Patrick’s “offensive” box was removed from the lineup and replaced with a plain Buster Brown one with Patrick’s name written across the top in the teacher’s precise hand. After a prayer to save Patrick’s soul we were finally allowed to commence with the festivities. We went down the row inserting cards into the slot on the top of each box. The cards ranged in theme from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Snow White and Donald Duck. Some were fancier than the dime store variety I could afford. Incased in ivory envelopes printed like fine lace were cards beautifully illustrated and decorated with velvet and scented with chocolate. These came from the dentist’s daughter who was not afraid to flaunt her wealth and who often times reminded me of Nellie Olson from Little House on the Prairie with her pug nose, blonde hair, intolerable disposition.

Fancy or plain, there was a certain thrill about opening each envelope and waiting to see if that boy in the second row sent a special card just for you. Ahhh, first grade romance. My dabbling in the subject amounted to a hug followed the next day by being pushed off the top of the slide by my beloved and breaking my nose. The next day I returned the favor by giving him a black eye and getting myself sent to the Principal’s office.

Then, suddenly I was not in the first grade anymore but in high school where Valentine’s Day took on a whole different meaning. Hormone driven boys appeared on the bus loaded down with flowers, candy, and wearing enough cologne so that if the gifts didn’t make their girlfriends swoon the Old Spice would!

Middle school and high school were awkward years for me. I was tall and clumsy with glasses and horribly curly hair that was the result of the perm from hell. So, I would sit on the sidelines and gag as my friends exclaimed over how sweet their boyfriends were on Valentine’s Day. I was bitter, I will not lie. Life had dealt me an unfair hand in the form a of a crooked nose caused by my one and only attempt at love, ugly glasses, and hair that made me look like a poodle had overdosed on acid on my head thanks to a beautician who was intoxicated every day by 9am. But, I digress. The fact is that I hated Valentine’s Day with a passion and let the whole world know about it.

Finally, in my 20’s, someone asked me out and saved me from becoming the first Lutheran nun in history. I got roses on Valentine’s Day that first year together and I got to see what the hype was all about. Too practical to ever be a hopeless romantic, I found it to be kind of nice getting wined and dined one day out of the year. (My expectations were pretty low back then)

Years passed and I soon discovered that I was not the only one being wined and dined. In fact, he was filling more shoe boxes than Nike in those 8 years we were together. So, my view on Valentine’s Day darkened to Ebenezer Scrooge-type proportions once again. I cursed the day and scowled at all the cutesy decorations and declarations of love. The holiday was forever ruined for me and I kept a box of goose loads by my side just in case Cupid dared to enter my “no fly” zone.

Then something happened to change my outlook on everything. I was working one particular Valentine’s Day when an elderly gentleman came into my office to pick up his wife’s death certificate. He looked tired and sad, his shirt collar had lost its starch and he had not shaved in days. I asked him how long he had been married and he replied “All my life!” I smiled and he continued “Now don’t go thinking I am some funny old man for saying that. My life began the day I married her.”

I left work that night humbled. Instead of going home to my mint chip ice cream, Hallmark movies, and my cats on the couch I went out and bought bouquets of flowers and took them to the local nursing home to hand out. I was met with love, kindness, and gratitude and I wondered to myself how I could have gotten the meaning of the holiday so wrong in the past.

One particular lady asked me to sit with her as she looked at her bouquet of flowers. She told me a story of how the day after her wedding her groom was sent over seas to fight the war. They kept in touch with letters and each kept a dog eared snapshot of the other close to their hearts. Then the letters stopped. She knew her husband was busy fighting a war but she was not expecting the knock at the door. Instead of her beloved, there stood a stranger. In a matter of seconds she went from being a wife to being a widow. She never remarried, never took off her ring, and never forgot how that once in a lifetime love felt.

That, my friends, is what it is all about. Sharing love with those around us. You do not need to have a romantic relationship to celebrate Valentine’s Day. All you need is a heart and the capacity to share love with others.

Need further motivation? Go home tonight, call upon all of you childhood crafting powers and make a shoe box Valentine container? Yes, I mean take a shoe box, cut a slit in the top and decorate it like crazy. Don’t hold back, make it yours. And then ask friends and family to fill it with paper hearts on which they have written special messages to you. Then write some of your own motivational quotes, Bible verses, prayers, sayings, sentences giving yourself encouragement and love, or plans on how to make the year ahead a good one such as going out and visiting people in nursing homes. Fill the box with enough hearts for the entire year ahead. Every morning open the box and remove one heart. Read it to yourself and let it guide your day. The theme of Valentine’s Day is love. That means to love others and to love yourself!

Hopefully my post gave you all something to think on for this Valentine’s Day. Like I said, all you need is a heart and the willingness to share it and you will never be alone on Valentine’s day or any day for that matter. Go on now! Spread the love!

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

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I spent the past week at home attempting to get through a bout of influenza. It began on Saturday night with a heavy headache and by Sunday mid morning I was on my way to the ER with a fever and the stomach turning effects of taking two types of cold medications too close to one another.

There is something to be said about the calming effect that a hospital brings. No, seriously! When you have been in the ER as many times as I have, the plastic crunch of a hospital mattress, the sterile smells, and the incessant beeping of various machines is comforting. You know, for the most part, that you are safe now. You know that you are in capable hands that will make you get better and if things get worse, at least you won’t die alone at home in the bathroom in that raggy robe covered in cat hair.

My first stint in the ER was at the age of 3 when my dad suffered a massive heart attack. Mom put me in an umbrella stroller and rolled me up and down the halls, not so much for my entertainment but to calm her own nerves. I remember the smells of bleach cleaner, hot food that had no flavor, and a slightly metallic smell that I have never been able to place. So fascinated was I by this world of people moving briskly and importantly down shiny halls wearing snow white jackets and speaking in tongues about charts and MRIs, that I failed to realize the seriousness of my dad’s condition; I thought that giant of a man was merely sleeping. Halfway through my dad’s recovery a nurse shot him up with 3 times the amount of morphine he was supposed to have and Dad went up to knock on heaven’s door for the second time that week. The nurse was later caught after a number of patients were killed as a result of her “mercy” Killings. Dad survived and after a bout of pneumonia he was released to go home.

Things changed ever so slightly after Dad came home. The shiny packs of Marlboros disappeared, Mom was cooking out of a book entitled “Don’t Eat Your Heart Out”and Dad seemed humbled in a way. He spent more time playing with me. I was able to convince him to turn a giant box from our new microwave into a boat in which we had many high sea adventures. I am sure that in that hospital bed my dad, like every one else who has ever looked death in the eye, made a bargain with God that he would change his ways if only he was given more time on this earth.

I have been on the sending end of many such prayers in my own life. At age 5 laying on the operating table before tonsil surgery as the doctor asked me if I wanted grape or bubble gum scented knock out gas I remember promising God that I would never get in trouble at school again and that I would not ask for another matchbox car as long as I lived. Then the grape scented gas filled my nostrils like that first whiff of a Mr Sketch purple marker. Oh how I coveted a set of those markers but my Mom viewed fruit scented markers as a gateway drug of sorts so I had to get my fix at friend’s houses and in the waiting room of the dentist office. Waking up from surgery I was an instant celebrity. The doctors and nurses could not stop exclaiming over how large my tonsils had been. They made it sound like I had been born out of nuclear run off and was able to produce monster sized useless organs that wowed the medical world. My hospital bed was covered in new toys, balloons hung from the tray table, and there was a never- ending supply of popsicles and ice cream. I had died inside a Mr Sketch marker and woke up in heaven!!

My subsequent hospital visits were never as lucrative as the day my tonsils were removed but in a way they mirrored each other. There were the prayers, the promises, the feeling of being safe and the belief that when I woke up everything was going to be better. Isn’t that what we all experience when faced with a serious illness or medical event? Laying on that lumpy bed as a haggard nurse attempts to poke us with a dull needle we are blatantly reminded of our mortality. We bargain with God and make promises to be better people and to never ever take our health for granted again. We lay there in a fit of self-pity and illness induced misery cursing all the days we wasted while we were healthy. We frantically write bucket lists in our heads of all the things we are going to do once we bust out of the hospital.

But, as is true almost every time, we arrive home, saved from the brink of death, go to work the next day and forget completely all the plans and promises we made to improve our lives. As with New Year’s resolutions, promises made on one’s near death-bed are quickly forgotten once life kicks in again. Like a bloodthirsty landlord, life is demanding to the point that we feel selfish when we try to work on ourselves and insignificant when we try to make a difference for others.

I too have failed miserably at following through with my grand plans but found other ways to make things happen. So many times I vowed to join a fitness club then look through the windows of a 24 hour fitness facility to see all those other women in their synchronized Fabletics outfits and I turn around, put on my boots and start hiking the hills and woods of my home. I plan to volunteer then run across a child whose family home burned down and I buy her a replacement for the beloved toy she lost in the fire. I take food to those who don’t have family, I help out the instant I see someone in need. Yes volunteer organizations are wonderful and necessary but sometimes you can’t wait for a group to find an area of need to work on. Sometimes you just need to go out into the world and help on your own with no coordinator or committee. Afterall, didn’t those who have made the most difference in this world throughout history start out with a single act of kindness?

The problem with life is we make things too complicated for ourselves so that the simplest of things turn in to major undertakings that require too much of our already depleted energy. We fail to get started and so we set aside our plans all together only to write them down again when some disaster befalls our lives. Hospital beds are a comfort but also that place where we are allowed too much time in which our lives flash before our eyes and we depress ourselves when we see how little we have accomplished. By what measure do we gauge the success of our efforts? A very inaccurate one I would suspect.

The point of all of this is that sometimes life gives us wakeup calls. Sometimes we are thrown against the wall and reminded of our mortality for a moment and then we are returned to our everyday routines. The choice is ours what to do with the extra time we have been blessed with because we all know that it could go either way. Our lives can be snuffed out in an instant with no second chance to make our mark on this world. I was reminded of this recently when someone very dear to me passed away suddenly. He was diagnosed with leukemia and within two weeks we had lost him. For a year he had battled pneumonia and diabetes then the leukemia. I watched him go from making plans to do more in the years he thought he had left to just saying “I cannot fight anymore.”

My plea to all of you is to do everything. Put nothing off until later or tomorrow or next month. Do not wait for a catastrophic event to wake you up to the reality that there is no tomorrow there is just right here and right now. Open that door for the lady with her arms full of groceries, pay for the order of the person in line behind you, make a child smile, cook something and share it with a neighbor who has no one to share a meal with. You do not have to be Mother Teresa to make a difference. Just shut off your mind and all its voices telling you to stay out of it or that you don’t have time or that you won’t make a difference. Wake up and let your heart do what it was designed to do, just love.

Ashes in a Shell Casing

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My first experience with cancer was at the age of 6 when 3 of my dad’s former coworkers came down with brain cancer. They had been sign painters in the 1960s in a basement paintroom with no ventilation. It was just a matter of time before breathing in those toxic fumes would catch up with them and it did, with a vengeance.

I remember going with my parents to visit one of the men. He went by the nickname of “Sparrow” a strange name for a tall, strapping, dark haired handsome man. When we arrived at the nursing home in Jordan, it was like something out of a child’s worst nightmare. A huge building of red brick built in the early 1900’s with the look of a horror story sanitorium. The halls were dark, ceilings low and confining, the paint was peeling from iron stair rails, and the smell of bleach, urine, and death filled the air.

Sparrow was in a room on the third floor. A dreary dark and silent room with only the gasp of a respirator to break the silence. The atmosphere was one of waiting. Waiting for this once strong and active man to pass or waiting for him to suddenly wake up from his morphine and cancer induced coma.

His hair was still dark, untouched by the frost of age. His skin was sallow but clear, his hands at his side’s were still massive and bore scars from years of hard work. A hose attached to his trachea took the breaths his lungs could no longer draw on their own. Before us was the ruin of a man I had once though of as a giant when we first met.

After years of lying unconscious, Sparrow died a day after our visit. It was as though he was waiting for that last conversation with my dad. To hear how his old workplace was functioning and to get the latest news about all his former friends before he was ready to give up the fight.

Jump forward 15 years and my junior year in college. I was a happy college student at the top of my class. I spent most of my time studying but had met a young man who became a best friend and someone I could see myself dating. A month after we met I went with my parents to a doctor’s appointment for dad to have his colonoscopy. Sitting in the waiting room I never expected the doctor to call my mother and I into his office to tell us that dad had colon cancer.

A tumor the size of a baseball and 13 inches of his colon were removed a week later and life was thrown drastically into perspective. My college friend was with me through it all in the form of daily phone calls and emails of support and encouragement. I fell in love.

Dad’s cancer was contained to that one tumor by the grace of God and he avoided the misery of chemo and radiation. He wasn’t the same after the surgery either. Fear and his own brush with mortality had aged him.

About the time we were getting the good news about my dad’s prognosis my friend back at college found out his grandmother had lung cancer. I had not met her yet but she had raised my friend practically from infancy to adulthood so this was a particularly hard blow.

The 8 years I spent dating her grandson, we saw Grandma Pat in and out of the hospital. She would get healthy then have to go in for more rounds of Chemo. In the end she was at home unconscious in a hospital bed. I could not leave her side. So I would sit up every night with her, holding her hand while her children squabbled over who would inherit what. I loved Pat with all my heart and even when her grandson and I were getting ready to break up the last thing she ever said to me was ” I don’t care what they say about you, you are a good woman and I love you!”

Those words coming from a woman who once owed 30 Arabian horses, drove all over the country by herself to show her horses, was married to a chronic cheater, and had to help run a resort that was not her dream, meant more to me than any compliment I could ever receive.

Pat took her last breath on new years eve 2008. The funeral was an epic event with people lined up outside to offer condolences well into the night. I gave the eulogy, and while the words I spoke are a distant memory I will never forget how my simple reminders of how great a woman Pat was, forced her family to stop their bickering if only for a moment and remember how blessed they were to have had her as a mother, wife, grandmother, and friend.

Finally, my most recent experience with cancer was the diagnosis of leukemia for the greatest man I ever knew, my “dad” Charlie. Charlie was the kind of man people pray to have as a father. He was selfless, kind, intelligent, understanding, loving, and most of all the kind of man who made me smile every time he walked into the room. From the first day I met him he took me under his wing and accepted me, flaws and all. Charlie believed in me, he believed in me when no one else in my life ever did. He encouraged my art, enjoyed spending time with me, and treated me like an equal. We conversed about everything from tools to guns to my goats of which he got such a kick out of. I loved him with all my heart and in his own gruff way I think he loved me too.

This past fall Charlie was diagnosed with Leukemia. A month later I was sitting with the family by his hospital bed as he took his last breath. Again, someone so strong, so full of life, so incredible, so loved was brought down by something that none of us have the power to stop. I remember praying over and over for God to let me take his place because he had a family, children. Grandchildren who needed him when all I was was a broke receptionist who would never be half the person Charlie was. But life and God don’t work that way as so here I am left behind with Charlie’s memories, some if his ashes in a rifle shell casing hanging from the rearview mirror of the truck that was once is and is now mine to remind me of a man I loved more than any man who has ever entered my life.

Today I went in for a cancer test of my own, I am writing this in the waiting room as a matter of fact. I will have no fear, no anger, no bitterness no matter what the results may be. I am ready for what life throws at me because I have faith on my side, the love of family and of friends, and the determination that nothing will get me down or try to prevent me from living life on my terms. I have been blessed 10 fold in my life and as they say “You only live once but if you do it right, once is enough.”

High Tea on the Farm

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Herb and Verna were my mom’s aunt and uncle on her father’s side of the family. They lived on a farm in Brownton, MN and were all but retired from farming by the time I was born. Their farm stood in a grove of trees amid endless acres of crop land. The buildings were ramshackle and a passel of rangy chickens that were more feathers and dirt than meat roamed freely in the yard. Each trip to the farm was like Easter to me because I spent hours searching the yard for brown, white, and blue/green eggs amid rusty farm machinery, old cars, and weathered buildings.

The house was a typical square farmhouse with a large front porch overlooking an overgrown yard. Through the parlor window you could see an old Buick crushed beneath the weight of an elm tree that had already started to crumble with rot. In the entryway between porch and kitchen stood a crate that once housed every generation of chicken to live on that farm. I remember peering into that box in the glow of a heat lamp with my 6 year old fingers just itching to pick up those peeping balls of yellow down, but I was always shooed away into the kitchen by Uncle Herb.

While the rest of the house was a hodgepodge of mismatched furniture and dusty clutter, the kitchen was Verna’s domain. A plump woman with glasses so thick they magnified her rhumy eyes and the gentleness with which they glowed. Verna was a woman of great faith in God and that faith was not displayed through loud professions but through kind deeds and the way she had about her of comforting all those around her. She had a calming aura born of strong faith and a gentle heart and I remember many a time clinging tightly to her while hot tears rolled down my cheeks. Then she would set me on a tall chair that folded out into a step stool and feed me one of her latest desserts with a thick coffee mug full of milk from Polka Dot Dairy.

Every morning at 7am, Verna would sit with pen in hand listening for the recipe of the day on the Hutchinson radio station. All of those recipes were kept in a tattered spiral notebook with pages so browned they looked like ancient parchment. Then, in her gleaming kitchen with white cabinets, a proud Monarch range in the corner, and her line of pink and white canisters, Verna would set to work on “trying out” the newest recipe. The final result was usually 30% recipe and 70% of Verna’s ideas on how to make it better.

Many of Verna’s recipes became favorites of my own mother to serve at family gatherings, holidays, birthdays, funerals, and to give as gifts to friends.

Creamy pistachio bars with a buttery crust and a slight tang of cream cheese, golden pineapple bars that tasted of the tropics with brown sugar that lent a warm Carmel flavor to the crust, ambrosia salad made with vanilla pudding, tapioca, mandarin oranges, pineapple and mini marshmallows, and pumpkin bars spiced to perfection so as to rival any pumpkin pie ever baked.

Rows of oblong aluminum cake pans would line the dining room table. Herb’s clutter of newspapers, magazines, seed catalogs, and the latest Billy Graham book was set aside to make room while I plinked away on an out of tune upright piano. I waited impatiently while desserts were cut into precise squares and placed without a single wayward crumb onto delicate plates decorated with roses. Fragrant Swedish coffee was poured from a chipped enamelware pot into translucent cups to match the dessert plates. A pink Depression Ware bowl held snowy white sugar cubes and the light of late afternoon played off of gleaming silverware. Chicken feathers clung to the upholstery of the padded dining room chairs yet the shabby scene took on the glow of the Queen’s high tea all thanks to one woman and the magic she created from simple ingredients laced with love.

Herb and Verna passed away when I was barely a teenager but every time I see a yard full of chickens I think of Uncle Herb with his striped overalls and squinty stare. And every time I prepare one of Verna’s recipes I am transported to her big bright kitchen where she stands waiting for me by the sink, a smile on her face and a plate heaped with her latest treats that have yet to meet my approval.

So that all of you can enjoy the flavors of my childhood, here is Aunt Verna’s pineapple bars.

Verna Jaekel’s Perfect Pineapple Bars

Crust

1/2 cup butter

1 cup flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

Combine and press into a 9×13″ pan and bake at 350° for 15 min

2nd Layer

1 cup brown sugar

2 eggs beaten

3 Tablespoons flour

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup chopped nuts

Combine and pour over the already baked crust. Bake 20 minutes at 350°

3rd Layer

1 cup heavy cream

1 cup sugar

1 1/2 Tablespoon butter

2 Tablespoons cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

Cook in a saucepan over medium heat until thick. Add 1 (14 oz) can of crushed pineapple that has been drained. Pour over the baked crust and refrigerate 4 hours.