Memoirous

 On Thursdays we open and close early—thus, I get home around 5:15 pm. These spring days there is still a lot of daylight; the sun doesn’t set until; about 8:20 pm. So after dinner I hopped on my bike and went out for a ride. At the moment everything is green and flowering. White and pink blossoms carpet the pathway. I feel like it has taken awhile—and still, there is a see-sawing of temperatures and seasons within a day/week. Whenever I point this out, folks reply, Michigan! And throw up their hands. On my 2-hour ride I saw a pair of swans on a wetland pond and a family of deer grazing right off the path in the woods. I’m not out in the countryside by any means; I’m right off residential areas where nature has been allowed to co-exist. This time of year I also catch a glimpse of turtles sunning themselves on logs and croakers and peepers and blarers (frogs/toads) at the various vernal ponds and wetlands setting up a racket. It is soul-soothing to get out and ride after dinner—I’ll...

One of the first things I had to think about when considering moving into an outbuilding on my daughter’s property was how to convert a she-shed (a former quilting studio) into a year-round living space. I would need heat/AC. Out in Eugene, Oregon there was a plethora of resources available through the public library. I think I checked out every book available about building a Tiny House. That’s where I first stumbled upon the term—mini-split. A mini-split is a unit to heat and cool spaces run off electricity. As opposed to traditional systems, a mini-split allows you to zone in on a space and efficiently control the temp. They are between 2-4 times more efficient than a furnace, baseboard or a boiler. Because I wanted to live sustainably this really appealed to me. The system uses less energy than my mini fridge. I actually have no idea of BTUs etc and had to read up. At first I wondered if the salesman had upsold me because I’d been reading about the minimum number of BTUs need...

A piece entitled Civil War Reenactment was accepted by Miracle Monocle out of the University of Louisville.   https://louisville. edu/miraclemonocle I was working one morning and had the radio on in the background and there was something about a Civil War reenactment on--and I thought: They're still doing these? Then I thought about how the term civil war can apply to so many things--difficult decisions, current politics, the internal war inside of us. So I wrote this piece, actually part of a much bigger project: a novel that is complete and in the drawer for now.  Interestingly, a query for the novel was shortlisted in a contest--still waiting for an agent to take on the manuscript.

Lost and Found In the film one of the women, at a very intense part, almost offered comic relief by telling a story of her beloved horses. Greta tells the story of driving in her buggy along a country road bounded by drainage ditches on both sides. Along the way there was an aggressive dog that scared the horses, who in the past had bolted and run into the ditches, upsetting the cart. So Greta learned that in order to keep control of her own fears, she had to not look to the left or the right but simply keep her eyes focused in the middle of the road and keep Ruth and Cheryl the horses going in that same direction.   I understood this lesson well. When on my cross-country road trip and other bike tours I’d been in a similar situation: When traffic got intenseon Highway 101 (t he Pacific Coast) or in the mountains of Norway on narrow roads without guardrails, where the sides sloped down precipitously. Any mistake and me and my bike could be at the bottom. I had to learn, despit...

Who am I? Still trying to figure things out   While watching Women Talking I had so many thoughts, I began to take notes. One) I was reminded of Corita Kent who left her religious community after 32 years and Two) myself, who left a religious community after nearly 40 years. I entered Jesus People as a single recent college grad, four years later I married and two years later became a mother. I also was a driven worker. I worked at Cornerstone Magazine and with the Cornerstone Festival doing advertising and PR. I networked with local and national media trying to generate stories about the festival which at its peak attracted over 20,000 people. I was used to doing TV and radio interviews and also setting up interviews for the festival director and press conferences with the bands. We also started up a book publishing arm called Cornerstone Press, which at its peak put out about 4 titles a year. In 2007 my daughter graduated high school and began trying to figure out who she...

Who Would She Be?   When Sister Corita contemplated a step away, she had to completely re-imagine her identity, who she was and who she would be. She had been a member of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for 32 years, since 1936 when she decided after high school to go into the order. Her devotion was such that she had to give her all. During her time at Immaculate Heart College she thrust her whole self into teaching. Many of her former students could testify as to the amount of work she piled on them as if her class was the only one they were taking. Her assignments ranged from visiting gas stations and grocery stores to observe signage to helping create installations for the New York World’s Fair and a walk-thru exhibit at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden. And, of course, there was the Mary’s Day Parade where the class printed banners, programs, etc for the ceremony. This last move would be a great leap. For so long she had been a teacher-nun, a si...

Change is coming, a time to leave   During the process of Vatican II, Corita and her community embraced change, not just for change-sake, but to become more relevant to the students and broader community they served. If change was needed to bring the message of Christ to their constituents in this turbulent time, then they were for it. The sisters voted overwhelmingly to pursue Vatican II renewals, such as eliminating the habit and compulsory daily prayer. Archbishop James McIntyre was not happy. From that moment on he sought to restrict the order and banned them from teaching. He gave them an ultimatum to abandon what he saw as leftist tendencies or dispense with their vows. Another vote. Three-quarters of the sisters left to form their own order, Immaculate Heart Community, an ecumenical community for both men and women of all faiths. Prior to this Sister Corita took a sabbatical at the invitation of a friend and spent the summer of 1968 in Cape Cod. There, away from the in...

 Stay and Fight?   The early Sixties would later be known as a hotbed of creative and artistic experimentation—indeed, ushering in an era of radical priests and nuns. Sister Corita had started a series of masterclasses at Immaculate Heart featuring some of the most ingenious voices in the arts, visual, literature, and music. The lectures and conversations of the Great Man series (notice how this was titled purposely not to stir up controversy) featured Charles Eames, John Cage, Alfred Hitchcock, Buckminster Fuller, and Father Daniel Berrigan. It is this enduring friendship with the Vietnam War critic and activist that doomed Sister Corita. Los Angeles Cardinal James McIntyre who served from 1948 to 1970 would later be described in a Washington Post obituary as “one of the Catholic Church's most conservative and controversial prelates.” He was a Nixon man, a John Birch supporter, a staunch anti-communist, and even his own allies and fellow priests had to kindly ask him ...

 Stay and fight or leave, it’s not possible to do nothing   I started this series of essays as a critique/review of the recent film, Women Talking based upon the book by the Canadian author Miriam Toews about an isolated old-school Mennonite Colony is a remote area in South America. In the film we’re not sure where the action is taking place. Suffice it to say, the women didn’t either. They have no road map, no knowledge of the language of the region, nor practical skills outside of husbandry. Of the three options, during a round of voting, stay and do nothing is ruled out, so the conversations revolve around stay and fight or leave. Contemplating this conundrum, I was reminded of Sister Corita. Sister Corita 1918-1986 was a member of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, a teaching order. She taught at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, California. This posh area of LA is not the first place one thinks of for a convent and Catholic college, tucked into the Holl...

Discerning and Defining a Calling A calling might be described as a “still, small voice” out of the whirlwind that despite the noise and chaos centers us. For Moses it was a burning bush, for Gideon a fleece. It is a sign or even an audible voice or our self-conscious/conscience guiding us onto a path we might not necessarily have chosen for ourselves. In fact, it might be counter-intuitive, against our best interests. Calling is the niggling feeling that something is right/not right. Some have confused “first love,” the euphoric adrenaline accompanying a new positive experience with calling. Calling is what gets us through the hard times, the dark nights, the hours of nitpicking a neighborhood child’s hair, of giving up one’s bed at 1 a.m. for a homeless person, for making sammies when one’s friends are out there getting great jobs and earning big bucks. It is understanding that this small, unobserved act of kindness is important if only for the person on the receiving end. It is ...

A Personal Calling, or Vocation Vocation—the difference between work and putting your passions into action. Yes, I labored, getting up early before the sun and sometimes working an overnight shift at the community’s magazine Cornerstone. Volunteering outside my other volunteer hours. You see, the work was not compensated monetarily. We worked together for the benefit of others and basically for room and board. It is a complicated kind of communism where ideology is supreme and we corporately strived to see that the greater whole grew, got better. It is a concept almost entirely archaic. No one does this except maybe a recent grad taking a gap year—except this was no grand tour or backpacker’s dream trip; we wanted to share Christ’s love in action by providing meals, housing, relationship. Ourselves. Outside of the practical work of feeding the community (sammies, kitchen crew) I did visitations to the elderly, in the form of light housework and wellness checks, taking them to the docto...

Finding Community, Finding Home, part 2 Community in Chicago at Jesus People USA did not immediately feel like home and it took a while for me to think that they “got” who I was. There were a lot of misunderstandings along the way. One of my first jobs was making sammies. Our work crews that went out during the day (comprised entirely of men) required packed lunches. I was on a crew that made sandwiches, slapping peanut butter and jelly between two pieces of bread. Not the most nutritious lunch for those doing hard manual work all day outside, but it’s what we had. The addition of chips and homemade cookies if you were lucky. A piece of fresh fruit was considered a luxury. I then got moved onto a kitchen crew where we literally worked ALL DAY, from 4 a.m. getting breakfast out first for the workers, then for moms and kids going to school. If you were late, then nothing. The day finished around 7 pm after cleaning up. At first none of these jobs were me; I could identify with hardly any...

Finding Community, Finding Home, part1 It took a while. I finished high school. I started at Wright State University. I dropped out of Wright State. I went to Maranatha Bible Institute associated with my church. Then there was a church split and I was excommunicated. Friends were told to mark, admonish, and avoid me—a sermon preached from the pulpit, as laid out 2 Timothy chapters 2 and 3, Scriptures taken out of context and perverted for power over others. I suffered a breakdown. I went back to Wright State while at the same time moving out of my parent’s house. I was struggling for clarity. I dropped out of Wright State—again—and traveled out West, getting a seasonal job at Yellowstone National Park. I extended my work contract, as I had no future plans. Late 1979/early 1980 found me in Athens, Ohio enrolled at Ohio University. I chose this school as I wanted to be close to a very solid friend, someone who would call me out and also encourage me: Keith Wasserman, who would go o...