Creative Dubuque

Hail in April

Dec 222011

This is part 2 of my year-end synopsis of some of my memorable experiences of 2011.

A second climate related catastrophe was an April hailstorm that did serious damage to my roof. In a way, that was a blessing. When my ex-husband and I bought the house about 7 years ago, the roof was on the wanna-do list. The idealistic idea (at least it was my idea – he never tuned in) was to fix up this 1870ish fixer-upper little by little. A couple of windows here, a new roof there, etc. Getting divorced and being plunged into financial singledom, the pace of potential home repairs slowed to a crawl that was driven forward only by the most pressing necessity. God sent the hailstorm to enable even people like me to fix stuff.

The night of the April hailstorm, after the hail stopped falling and you could safely go around in the air without getting bonked in the head, everywhere you heard the excited voices of people outdoors with flashlights and yardsticks, measuring hail. I was out there too, with my camera. Yep, the average size hailstone was probably an inch and a half in diameter, with many measuring 2 inches. No lie, I took pictures with a ruler. For a couple weeks, we kept some of the biggest in our freezer.

I never imagined that I’d benefit from the catastrophe. After all, tornadoes had just blown through the south, doing tremendous and dramatic damage, with photos on the Internet showing far worse than a few blown away or disintegrating shingles. My house was still standing. Yet a few days later, I happened to be outside when my next door neighbor’s insurance adjustor was calculating damages. And politely he suggested that I call the office (it happened to be my insurance company too), because as he said, it was common knowledge that almost every house in the neighborhood had experienced hail damage. Continue reading »

The Long Winter

Dec 212011

This is part 1 of my year-end recollection of a few of my most memorable experiences of 2011.

When I look back through my 2011 calendar for the memorable moments of the year (those I recorded on the calendar, anyhow), I recall 12 months of dramatic experiences, many of them worrisome and difficult to face, with some crises overcome only because the act of living propels a person forward. Even when you think you can’t face something alone, there’s actually no choice about it, because life moves on, dragging you with it. Kinda like trying to walk a big untrained dog on a leash.

The Long Winter

We had massive snowfall the winter of 2010/11, with 2-3 feet blanketing the ground most of the winter. I’m not sure how people with dogs to walk got through the season. I remember more than one morning when I despaired of the heavy burden of snow to shovel from my driveway, even though I parked closer toward the street so I didn’t have to move as much to get the car out (where I didn’t fancy going anyway, with my lightweight, low-to-the-ground 4-cylinder car). My teenage son, always loathe to get out of bed on any morning, did not exactly spring to help. Sometimes I wish we could just stay at home as in pioneer times, stay snowed in for a couple months without the need to go anywhere.

One night’s snowstorm, in particular, blew so fervently that when I opened the doors in the morning, both front and back entrances had snow piled up between the screen door and the interior door. It had blown in the cracks. It took me a half hour just to clear a path from the back door across the small porch and down the few steps to the ground. The snow was waist-high in many spots and the front door could not be opened without strenuous labor.

I felt like I was living “The Long Winter” in Little House on the Prairie. You remember, where they have to twist wheat-straw for the fire, they’re grinding their seed wheat for flour, and after a while, Almonzo and a couple other guys are heroic and go off and try to shovel the train out of a North Dakota drift. Continue reading »

Focus your mind

Dec 182011

I’ve been saving this text snippet and intending to post it here, either because it seems so insightful or so beyond the horizon of my daily life:

Go into silence and hear the “silent voice within.”
Understand what it is that you really want in life.
Focus your mind, concentrate, and visualize success every day when you awaken.
Take a few steps each day toward your goal without being distracted.
Refresh your energies through spiritual practice.
When you become successful, give something back to humanity.

Who could take issue with the thoughts of a guy like Kambiz Naficy, a “poet, meditation master, and spiritual healer” whose curriculum vitae contains this pearl:

“It was then that Kambiz sold his company, traveled to the Iowa corn fields and retired into two years of deep meditation at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. There he began intensive study of the Indian Vedantas and also found striking parallels between the Vedas and quantum physics.”

Go into silence and hear the “silent voice within.”
Fact is, the advice he gives sounds good. I’m definitely there with #1 on his list since my internal voice is rambling along perpetually. I’ve got a busy “voice within,” and most of the time I’ve got a lot more going on inside my head than emerges, either verbally or on the page.

Understand what it is that you really want in life.
The #2 bitlet of advice is a bit trickier: to understand what you what… I’m thinking Maslow’s hierarchy here, where the basic needs take priority over conceptual “wants.” Sure, I want to write a book (or write anything for that matter), but I also place a priority on more mundane accomplishments like the ability to pay the electric bill. I want clean laundry too, and healthy, well-fed pets. Come to think of it, I “really want” a car that starts and runs. I think our guru is suggesting that we disregard the practical side of life and simply visualize a greater, abstract goal, a big idea instead of a small stepping stone to just getting by. Continue reading »

Thanks to a Thanksgiving Day spent with family, I learned a piece of my genealogy that had been a mystery to me for a long time. As a child, I was proud of one quirky fact in my family’s history: a smidgen of native American ancestry. I used to mouth off, “I’m one-sixteenth Indian,” as if it offered an explanation for the differences I felt between me and my same age peers. There is something about my response to life that does not quite mesh with the ethnic majority. A piece of coal in a gravel driveway, a splat of odd-colored paint in the homogenous whole.

I grew up in an enclave of mostly German Lutherans, the 4th generation to descend from the original pioneers who’d come from northern Germany to transform the fertile prairies and sloughs of northeast Iowa into farms. My great grandparents’ names appeared on the plat maps in the 1870s, and I studied the German language off and on since about 3rd grade, extended my college career by taking it for five semesters in college. My family says “ja” instead of “yes,” and all the old tombstones say “geboren” and “gestorben” instead of born and died.

Educated agricultural people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in my hard working German ancestry. My pacifist great uncle(s) escaped from Kaiser Wilhelm’s military by smuggling himself onto a ship for America. My grandma wore her hand-sewn dress and apron into a chicken-house full of squawking hens, reaching under feathers and their thorny toes for the eggs that waited in wire baskets in her basement to be candled for roosters.

That heritage is a part of me, yet there is more. Beyond the shaping caused by personal experiences, I feel a difference in hereditary temperament, and I see a little of that difference in my brothers and sisters. One that is rooted in the genetic dust motes that cannot be extinguished, the way fatal diseases can’t ever be entirely wiped off the globe, or rumors arise of animals once thought to be extinct.

For me, the difference involves a a type of quietness inside that’s not exactly spiritualism, but an ethereal link with the natural world, with the trees and earth and birds, an affiliation stronger than I sense other people feel, one that makes it painful when I walk by a tree trunk, once a living rooted creature, cut down by thoughtless ignorant coldness to shared life. Continue reading »

Tumbling to a stop

Nov 222011

Here’s an 800 word sketch based on a moment in time:

A long pink neon light, glowing and edged with dust, jutted from the cinder block wall, and a trio of ceiling fans swished in quiet unison above the warm hum of the dryers. A solitary purple baby sock lay abandoned on the floor, among the tracked-in autumn leaves and used static cling sheets. Maureen sat with her cell phone open, wondering who to text to pass the time.

A thin-legged black boy, about five years old, disrupted the solitary hum of the laundromat as he crashed a wheeled metal cart into the side of a washer. He’d come to a roadblock in his wild circuit around the room, to the booming disapproval of his mother. She and her entourage of laundry and offspring took up a swath of tables, where two daughters not much older than the cart masher helped to meticulously sort and fold clothing of every size and color.

Maureen watched the boy until she almost met his mother’s eyes, and then turned to the spinning dryers, whose round glass fronts exposed bits of clothing, tossing and dropping. Seven minutes of red digits on the timer and counting down. Every seat in the laundromat was located too close to the TV that perched suspended from the ceiling, and Maureen had surreptitiously turned the volume down. It showed two tattooed men, tree trunk necks, chanting insults at close range before their boxing match.

Nearby in his own world, folding clothes, with the telltale cords of headphones dangling from his ears, stood a twenty-ish man in a plain white t-shirt, his jeans gaping in a triangular hole at the kneecap. Maureen’s phone vibrated.

It was Joel. “You get that furnace fixed?” he asked. “I know a guy you can call.” Maureen appreciated Joel’s care-taking, but she guessed he might have offered similar advice to anyone. She needed love. Maybe not Joel’s, maybe the time was too late for his, but someone’s, some man’s. She ached every morning for the familiar skin-on-skin of having slept within the comfort of a heartbeat. That memory of pressing a palm to his lower back as he sat regretfully on the edge of the bed, pulling on socks. That going-to-work goodbye kiss. Continue reading »

Creative Dubuque

Hail in April

The Long Winter

Focus your mind

Speck of difference

Tumbling to a stop

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