#garage sale: some1 just bought one of my UV “happy lites” for her plants. about 16 hours ago via txt

Two weeks is how long it’s been from the moment when Shane and I heard the first rumblings that it just might be a good idea to look for a new place to live. Two weeks and tonight I started unpacking things into my new kitchen. I would say that my head is spinning, but I think I’m still in the stage just before that one, where I’m not even entirely sure what the hell just happened. Is happening.

I have WAY more cupboard space now.

#garagesale – was afraid books wouldn’t sell, but half r already gone. pagan books went 1st. pity, i wanted them 2 freak out my neighbors. about 16 hours ago via txt

The first day of garage sale was a roaring success. It was really hard for me and I ducked in and out the door a lot, but Shane was amazing. Giving deals, loading cars, helping little old ladies cross the street. When the potting stand priced at $20 and then sold at $15 wouldn’t fit in a woman’s car, he took her address and delivered it to her later. In the hubbub she’d forgotten to actually pay for it. He and I both draw a hard line on people actively trying to take advantage of us (cause that’s just yucky and not to be gotten away with) but we agreed beforehand that this garage sale was first about getting rid of stuff and second about making a little money. So neither of us were sad that a potting stand, 8 years untouched in the back of a shed, had been inadvertently donated to a good home.

#garagesale – lots of comments & general enjoyment of the atari 2600. some1 finally bought it for $20. about 16 hours ago via txt

And when there were two kids bikes priced at $30 each, the one with the flames being purchased by a grandma for her grandson when little sister, so adorable and wee, begged for the other boys bike (equally fierce in black and red) Shane gave them 2 for the price of one. This is why I love the man.

#garagesale – lots of people laughing at our CD collection, apparently garage-salers don’t take metalheads very seriously. about 16 hours ago via txt

And at the end of the day we still made enough to buy a new toaster, new coffee maker and new microwave for my new kitchen. (You can find the old ones at our sale tomorrow!) I LOVE the feeling of turning old things into new.

#garagesale – some1 just bought the dress I wore onstage as Agnes in Shadow Box. about 16 hours ago via txt

But no one would be terribly surprised to know that working a garage sale isn’t my favorite thing, ever. My home is my sanctuary and strangers give me hives on the best day, so inviting them to descend en masse and pick through my things doesn’t seem like the most obvious choice for me. And then you have the emotional factors – while I swear I was very good about not putting anything out for sale that I wasn’t able to honestly detach from, it was still oddly emotional at times.

#garagesale – day 1, made a killing, even with husband giving tons of deals. My hatred for garage sales might be upgraded to love/hate.

The worn out dresser that my Grandpa made himself – the one my mother painted blue to match my bedroom when I was 13 – now falling to pieces but bought for $5 by a fellow who looked like he would know how to fix it up nice. The woman who was so thrilled to find such nice yarn at such a good price – every skein chosen by my mother, some used to make afghans that I now own. So many yard tools that had belonged to my father and had already seen a lot of use when they were passed on to me when I was first starting a household of my own.

FEET HURT. But made enough in the garage sale to buy new toaster, new coffee maker and new microwave for the new place. Woot. about 2 hours ago via web

Onward and upward. And honestly, my spirits have been buoyed by the amazing people I’ve been lucky enough to have around me these days. There hasn’t been a day in the last two weeks that I haven’t been touched by someone’s kindness, a thoughtful gesture, an unexpected connection. I think, just lately, I’ve begun to realize what had always before been only the ghost of a suspicion – that I am a very lucky woman.

And OMG, the space I have in my new kitchen. about 2 hours ago via web

Another day of garage sale tomorrow, the kids will be off to Bend with my best friend, and on Sunday we move all the big stuff with the help of a lot of really generous people who weren’t smart enough to pretend to have other plans. And that will, for all intents and purposes, mark the beginning of life in a new home.

Two weeks later.

or How We Spent the Night at the Whim of a Squirrel Goat God

Joyfully we hit the road north to fetch back our girl on Sunday, though lack of sleep and a fever apiece kept us from losing our heads about it completely. Storm; our balance, our glue, the -function to our dys-, most days. Gone from us for two weeks while we pretended to be able to hold it together. Khy was at a friends house for a birthday, so it was either drag Nicky along (not much of a road warrior, my boy) or I stay behind with him at the house. We split the difference and bribed him to come. He would deeply regret it, later.

To be fair, there was the blinking light. But also to be fair, we’ve been here before. The check engine light has been on for seven years and several mechanics all with bright ideas, none of them successful. So we’re not really in the way of panic when something flashes at us on the dashboard, which is maybe a bad thing. Regardless, it was both a surprise and not a surprise at all when twenty miles away from our meet up, the van decided it didn’t want to go and so stopped going. Pulling to the side of the (busy, terrifying) freeway, imagine our surprise when we looked back and saw that we’d been merrily trailing rainbow-shimmering transmission fluid out our butts and onto the road.

Turns out that’s a really bad thing.

What I suppose you need to understand, though it pains me a little to expose us like this, is that Shane and I are nominal grown ups. I was a bit sheltered and he was a bit neglected, so even now our collective knowledge base in certain areas of self preservation in American life is pretty scanty. With both my parents dead we have no one to bail us out or guide us through the wilderness. We google and wiki our way through life when catastrophe strikes.

So stranded on the freeway with nary a search engine in sight, Shane got out and flipped up the hood so he could pretend he knew what he was doing while I stayed in the van pretending not to be panicking. I searched my internal mainframe for any scraps of information I might have about what happens on a freeway when Things Go Terribly Wrong, and discovered that a lifetime of action adventure and horror movie watching didn’t offer much practical advice beyond “get out of the car, it’s totally going to blow up” and “the guy who stops to help you is probably a cannibal.”

So I sent out a distress signal to everyone I know with a cell phone, potential text ability, and the possibility of knowing more about functioning in the world than I do. I got a little long winded and my message got cut off in some cases, so I did receive a few replies in the vein of, “Wow, that sucks. But, um, I live in Kansas, weirdo. Were you hoping I’d offer to come get you? Really? And how did you get this number, anyway, crazy pants?”

Meanwhile, the guy who very generously did stop to help us (for which we are very, very grateful. And I’m sure he’s never eaten another human being. Well. Pretty sure) was a Jesus freak who really did go above and beyond in trying to help us out, attending to the practical concerns of tow truck phone numbers and service stations before making a bid to free our eternal souls from enslavement to hell. Which I thought was considerate, really.

We got hooked up with a surprisingly sweet tow truck driver, and he hauled us (on top of the tow truck, ya’ll, which he tells us is actually legal in Washington provided you wear a seatbelt. I’m… not sure that it should be) to the perfect little hub for our needs (since by this time it was clear that being Sunday, nothing was open and we were well and truly stranded) complete with motels, convenience store, restaurant, coffee hut, a mechanic who agreed to see us first thing Monday morning, and even a Greyhound bus station which would become very important later on.

After hooking up with our daughter’s other family (as she wonderfully refers to them) and a much needed and enjoyed lunch with them before they headed back north, we considered our overnight options.

There were three motels to choose from, the first a no-tell in the grandest tradition, with hourly rates and a fizzling L in the neon signage. The second option was a bit of a walk and advertised weekly rates. The third and most likely looking option, then, was a giant step up on the motor-inn evolutionary scale but was still a bit sad and run down on the exterior. Of more concern, though, was the one lonely car in the parking lot, most likely owned by the clerk on duty. (Who, again, might or might not be a cannibal. Or in the business of selling guests to foreign parties for the purposes of hunting and torture.)

Also, it seemed to be guarded by a shaggy green squirrel/goat creature, a hedge monster run amok, I don’t know, but it was totally not natural to man or God. I wasn’t entirely sure that it wouldn’t demand the blood of a still-beating heart with the $89 a night plus tax. But we decided to take our chances.

So all we had to do now was survive a night in a motel room, trapped with a bored 9 year old in possession of a sticky hand and nothing on TV but Harold and Kumar, or the end of Australia.

Add this to my list of potential circles of Hell.

It was somewhere in here that it occurred to me that people seemed nicer in Washington than back home in Oregon. Shane pointed out that it always seems that way when you’re away, and I think that’s probably true. Kindness carries more weight when you’re far from home and feeling a little lost. Only after everyone else was asleep did the words and worries and fears whir through my head, tying up muscles in my neck and back, pounding anxiety up into my jaw. Sometimes I do wish I could be the girl for whom life is just one grand adventure. But even if I could trick my brain into going along with it, my body would never be fooled.

The next morning brought not altogether unexpected bad news – the poor old girl is kaput. The amount of money it would take to fix her just doesn’t make sense and certainly wasn’t in our pockets at that moment. So after trying and failing to find some inexpensive towing options, we left the van in back of the service station to be sorted out later, and Greyhounded home.

The ride itself was crowded and long but without incident. (Remember when some guy went crazy on a Greyhound and cut off the head of another passenger? These are the useful tidbits my brain hangs onto. But I have to look up how long to hard boil eggs every single time.) I sat behind Storm and Nicky, heart warm and grateful, watching as Storm tenderly pulled her little brother over to lay against her shoulder when he was doubled over uncomfortably, trying to sleep. I love the way that my children love each other, I’m always a little surprised by it, I guess. It’s so guileless, there’s nothing furtive or even self conscious about it.

And while I realize we were only displaced for one night and were never in any real peril – more inconvenienced than anything with a truly tragic bent – it was still enough of a taste to make me especially grateful for hearth and home today, for having my family back together and safe.

I’m grateful, too, for Greyhound and iPod. For a family that would take my daughter in as their own on a regular basis, and for Jesus freaks who will crawl around on a tarp underneath the van of heathens. I’m grateful for conscientious bus drivers who notice that the way the route is currently set will put a family with children outside a closed Salem station in the dark and cold for half an hour and changes things around for a Portland layover in warmth and with access to french fries. I’m grateful for pretty Welsh boys, who make the rattle and whine of the bus much more melodic with their conversation. I’m grateful that my kids are resilient and that while they might bicker, they always have each others’ backs.

I’m grateful for motel clerks that will let a family hunker down in the lobby for as long as they need to when they have no where else to go. I’m grateful for friends who offer support both moral and practical, and for the ones who ride to the rescue from out of the dark to drive us home from the bus station. I’m grateful for warmth, the kind that sinks into the bones after two days of walking around in the cold wet drizzle without a coat; for laptop and internet; for my very own shower and bed. I am grateful for floss. I am grateful for clean underwear.

And I’m grateful for you, too, Centralia. Thank you for the hospitality and the memories, as well. I dearly hope that I never, ever see you again.

This year for Thanksgiving we decided to break with tradition. Shocking, I know. So instead of the take’n'bake pizza we usually get, we went radical and had turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. Can you believe it?

I’ve worked very hard, since my father died and my family crumbled in the wind, to insulate myself from the holiday season. At least the part of it that involves other people. People that can hurt you, forget you, piss you off or die and leave you. So my husband and I with our children have developed a slew of our own traditions, many of them becoming very important to me.

Thanksgiving, though, has mostly fallen to the wayside. I’m not the kind of girl likely to put a lot of time and effort into cooking a turkey in the first place, but if it means getting up at 5am to start it, well, that’s a deal breaker right there. And while I’ve tried very hard to switch the focus of the holiday from that of celebrating the “First Thanksgiving” we all learned about in kindergarten (minus the epilogue where the friendly and thankful pilgrims slaughtered innocents, took their lands and said a prayer of thanksgiving for the small pox that killed entire families) into a general sort of day for gratitude, there’s something about having one day set aside to give thanks once a year that wasn’t really working for me when I’m trying to teach my children to be grateful every single day. (Or else.) And since we don’t really follow football, either, once you take away family, turkey, and pilgrims, what does that leave except pizza? That’s what I thought, too.

To say that my mother and I have had a bumpy road since my Dad died would be an understatement of the very grossest variety. I’ve literally had to learn to be an orphan, slog through the worst of my childhood, finish out the teenage rebellion that I never really got going back when it was supposed to happen, grow up all over again but for real this time, and become the adult and responsible party in our relationship, all in the last 4 years. And all of this while watching and occasionally riding along on the roller coaster that has been my mother’s life since she lost her husband. She’s hated me, she’s loved me so hard I couldn’t breathe, she’s blamed me, she’s pushed me away and then clung on too tightly, she’s disowned me, she’s lied, she’s laid guilt trips, she’s manipulated, she’s accused, she’s filled my garage with junk and then demanded it back again, she’s pushed every single button I have and a few I didn’t know about, she’s called me crying because she wanted to die and she’s called me crying because she believed she was dead.

And she’s grown old. And I’ve grown up. And somewhere buried down beneath the layers of pain and anger and ugliness is still the woman who is my mother. So for all of the Thanksgivings she gave to me, today I gave her a Thanksgiving.

And it was good. And for that I’m grateful.

Gwa! Gwa! Gwa!
Now the time has come!
Hear us, Lord of the Sky!
We are here to speak the truth,
for you do not hear lies,
We are your children, Lord of the Sky.

Now begins the Gayant’ gogwus
This sacred fire and sacred tobacco
And through this smoke
We offer our prayers
We are your children, Lord of the Sky.

Now in the beginning of all things
You provided that we inherit your creation
You said: I shall make the earth
on which people shall live
And they shall look to the earth as their mother
And they shall say, “It is she who supports us.”
You said that we should always be thankful
For our earth and for each other
So it is that we are gathered here
We are your children, Lord of the Sky.

Now again the smoke rises
And again we offer prayers
You said that food should be placed beside us
And it should be ours in exchange for our labor.
You thought that ours should be a world
where green grass of many kinds should grow
You said that some should be medicines
And that one should be Ona’o
the sacred food, our sister corn
You gave to her two clinging sisters
beautiful Oa’geta, our sister beans
and bountiful Nyo’sowane, our sister squash
The three sacred sisters; they who sustain us.

This is what you thought, Lord of the Sky.
Thus did you think to provide for us
And you ordered that when the warm season comes,
That we should see the return of life
And remember you, and be thankful,
and gather here by the sacred fire.
So now again the smoke arises
We the people offer our prayers
We speak to you through the rising smoke
We are thankful, Lord of the Sky.

(Liberally translated)
Chuck Larsen, Seneca