Category Archives: 6 Looking Back // Memories!

I’m at that age where you have lots and lots of memories. When I am waxing melancholy…

The Case of the Misdirected Sunflower

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think, , , , ,

Facing est  

Dave and I met and married in North Dakota, where we both attended Bible College.   ’81 was our summer of love.   Our first date was 5.26.81 and we married on 7.23.81.  

The summers in North Dakota are spectacular.   It is a shame you can’t bottle that.   The sun takes almost forever to finally fall from the sky at night and is brilliant throughout the day.   North Dakota is a little, plain, shall we say, in some ways?   And flat.   Conservative.   And there are lots of white houses.

But one thing you see there that is better than anywhere else?   Fields of sunflowers, faithfully and brilliantly holding their gorgeous yellow-orange heads high and seemingly following the sun. True.   In the morning, their little faces facing east, then, operating in heliotropism, they would “follow the sun” until they were facing west by evening.   Sometime during the night, in anticipation of the next sunrise, they’d be facing east again.   A wonder to behold!

I threw a few sunflower seeds in the yard this year and have watched over the past few weeks as the unblossomed buds have heliotroped about, back and forth, east to west, daily.   But when the first 7-foot-high bloomer occured: nothing.   Nada.   It has faced the east and moved not one iota.   “What is wrong, tall flower?” I’d ask.   “Look this way, come on, look over here.”   No response.   It has fixed it’s gaze on my neightbor’s back porch and she rarely comes out.   True, her overly-zealous, fence-jumping  sprinklers do provide the needed waterings, which is why I decided to plant them in the awkward behind-the-pool space anyway.   Still, I am being ignored in favor of a woman who does not care.

Dave asked me if I planted the seeds backwards.   Har-dee-har-har.

In desperation, I Wikipedied this problem and am dismayed to  learn that sunflowers in the blooming stage (maturity, it seems)  are no longer heliotropic, but frozen in one direction, usually east, meaning all of my sunflowers will benefit some one else, as I will only get to gaze on their hinder parts.   This is indeed disturbing and so unlike, I am quite certain, their North Dakato fields of cousins.

But the case is solved.

I love the backyard, though…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:   Next year-Cannas!

Iowa Girl

6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think, , ,

My “home” state has had a hard summer.   Most recently it has been in a pretty severe heat wave.  

In June, though, much of Iowa was flooded and was declared to be in a state of emergency.   This photo was sent by my old junior high friend, Lorri.   It depicts a highway just south of Mount   Vernon.   The damage done throughout the state has made it hard on city commuters and farmers alike.

Iowa takes a hit with comedians as being a little podunk or backwards, but it is a beautiful state where things grow easily  in the rich, black soil and summers are sweet.   Kids enjoy a good educational system and  chase lightening bugs in warm weather.   Corn on the cob, in the self-proclaimed “Corn State” is the sweetest you’ll find and I have lots of wonderful relatives who live there,  all city folk!  

I was born in Des Moines and lived there until I was 10.   Then we moved to Davenport for about 3 years, then on to Cedar Rapids, where I spent 8th and 9th grades and a couple of months  of 10th grade.   After I married Dave, we lived in Sioux City for 2 years.   So even though less than 18 years of my life total were spent  in Iowa and my parents and siblings haven’t lived there for more than 30 years, they were important ones for me.   Does that make it my home?   I last passed through there on my way to somewhere else in 1997.  

I read an apt description in an Oprah-recommended novel once, that when you move a lot, “home” isn’t a place, it is a collection of experiences and stories and people.   Where I am “from” sort of changes each time my parents move.   Even though I have never been to Springfield, MO that I recall, they just retired there, so I guess that is “home” now in some ways.   But deep in my heart, I am an “Iowa girl.”

I  wholly and truly love corn on the cob, too…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF: Plan a trip to go back to Iowa.   Explore roots.   Remember.   Understand.

Blog: Three Hundred

6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think,

I started this blog on November 29, 2006 during a dark time when I just needed to be able to talk and was hoping I could find a place to tell the truth even when it hurt me or exposed my ugly side (as if it couldn’t already be seen). I wasn’t always forthcoming, it took awhile, but it was freeing to expose my darkness and hit “post”! There, done. Never to be retrieved. Freedom!

It took me me until September 26, 2007 to get to the 100th post, which was a full 10 months, but only a scant 6 months to get to the 200th post, for which no fanfare or mention was made and I can only guess happened on or about March 21, 2008. Here we are at number 300, just 4 months and some days later and I am barely hitting my stride! Ha!

I can make fun of myself as a blogger. I had a friend laugh that she actually got mad when people asked her how she was doing. She was like, “Well, haven’t you read my blog?” The nerve.

Bloggers realize they are graphomaniacal. We madly write a post with passion and gusto and then wait to see if anyone reads and leaves a comment. If no one comments, we think we will never write again. But we do. We cannot help ourselves.

So, I shall blog on -for the thousands and thousands of people who read my blog daily, hourly even, and just choose not  to comment, as they wrestle through the issues I have raised, are dumbfounded by the awesomeness of my thoughts, or must meditate on on the wisdom I share. Yes, I’ll continue on for all of them. Or maybe just because I know my mom wants me to. Could it be she is my only reader? Well, it matters not, tomorrow there will be another blog, #301. Tomorrow is another day!

NOTE: I am happy to report that somewhere between the beginning and now (and very recently, at that), my mom has learned to post comments.

Heaven Fest, They Came

6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

Heaven Fest thanks

“If you build it, they will come,” from the movie Field of Dreams, is one of my favorite lines ever.   We worked and labored, we sweat and even cried a little, we planned and double-checked everything we could think of.   But near the day you wonder: will anyone actually come?

Heaven Fest ’08.

The  gates opened at 10 am and the people started pouring in, and pouring in, and pouring in.   There were cars as far as the eye could see on the east and on the west and the south.    They just kept coming.   We ran out of wristbands and had to make a quick run for more.   By late afternoon, according to Front Gate, it looked like we had over 12,000 on the grounds.   And still, cars were arriving.

I am at a loss to know how to describe the things that happened.

Amazing ministry went on at 7 different stages.   Worship filled the air everywhere you turned.   Diversity, all colors and races, the straight-laced with hands raised next to the multiple-pierced and tatooed with giant spiked hair.   Urbanity and suburbanity seeking God side by side. It was a “field of dreams.”   It was built.   And God came.

Many made a decision to follow Jesus.   300 responded to the altar call by Seventh Day Slumber alone.   Almost 60 people were baptized.   It was very hot when an elder in the Body of Christ worried that people would burn and began to pray.   Soon, right over the festival grounds, but nowhere else, it seemed, a giant cloud-canopy showed up and provided protection.   People were in awe.

There is so much to say, I barely know where to begin, so I’ll let this be the beginning.   These are the three things I am praising God for today:

  1. For His favor on this event and for showing up.
  2. For all the miraculous provision – the stories of which are still pouring in.
  3. For the people with whom I got to work, the ones I knew before and the ones I met through this experience, but especially the staff, my ones: Dave and Tara, Luke and Tredessa.

There will be more, I assure you…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF: Recall, remember and write for posterity.

 

 

 

27 Years

2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

Dave, on his blog, talks about the 27 years of movies, but the very first movie, the one we watched at a place he was housesitting on May 26, 1981, the movie he invited me over to view on TBS – while I  was unaware it was a “date, but was without a doubt, retrospectively, a date(!) was “Man’s Favorite Sport.”   Rock Hudson, Paula Prentiss, silly romance, our beginning.

Not completely our beginning, I guess.   I had known him for almost 3 years.   We were friends with common friends and connections.   We met at Bible College in Minot, ND.   But I left for a time and he wrote to me and our friendship was sweet and very nice.   Naturally I thought he was sooooo cute, but he had a serious girlfriend, so I never let on that  I thought so.   When I moved back to Minot, I can remember sitting at a cafeteria table with some friends, one of which called him over to discuss something or another.   As he left, she said to the group, “Oh, Dave Rhoades is so cute, oh my gosh.”   All the other girls nodded and answered affirmatively, while I coyly said, “He’s alright.”

 

But on May 26, he stopped by my office and asked me to come over and watch a movie.   I thought it was just a “friends hanging out” thing, but wonderfully-it was not.

Our second date was the very next night.

Our third, the next.   I think you get the idea.

By June 8 – we both knew we were in love.   I know being “in love” takes a hit in Christendom, but crimenentlies people, being in love is FUN stuff!   I still like it!

June 16, 1981, Dave proposed to me.

We were married July 23, a Thursday night, at 8 pm in Wimbledon, ND. – slightly less than 2 months after that first date.

 

We were married 27 years ago tonight.   I didn’t have the wedding of my dreams (I blame my brother Joe for this, but that is a whole different story), but I married the man of my dreams.

Last night, we were at a small prayer meeting of about 40 or 50 people  at church, preparing for Heaven Fest and our kids were leading worship.   Dave was at the back videotaping the amazing music as Dave and Tara started leading a song they wrote that I love, “Jesus, Name Above All Names.”   The melody is sweet, the harmonies were full and there was  my beautiful husband looking at our kids through the camera lense.   From my vista, I  could see them all, including the grandkids who were now  running and dancing around my feet.   For a moment, I lost my breath and I am certain my heart skipped a beat.

We did this, Dave, I was thinking.   We fell in love, we gave our love to God, He gave us our children, we gave them back to Him, and the love goes on.   This is what we have to show for 27 years.  

You are still so beautiful to me.   Happy anniversary, Dave,   I would marry you all over again…J

 pictured: Dave when I first fell for him; me just before I walked out the door to marrry Dave; post-wedding – my officemate, Elaina, had just thrown a bunch of rice straight down my dress.

Thongs

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

No, not THAT kind of thong – I am talking about the the old-fashioned kind – the flat, very open and backless rubber sandal held onto the foot by a loose y-shaped aparatus that goes between your first two toes.   Now they call them flip flops, but when I was a little girl, they were “thongs.”

I just bought 2 pairs at Target for $2.99 each.  

And as I slipped a pair on to do some gardening the other day, I realized that the design has not changed  one iota  , except for the name change, since I was 4, because the first shoes I remember owning, the very first pair I can recall putting on and looking at admiringly after my mom purchased them for 47-cents at the five-and-dime, were little red thongs.   The dye wasn’t like now, though, so the color was muted,  like all polaroid photos from the early 60s are.   And I wore the life right out of those things, a humble pair of cheap thongs.

Of all the shoes I’ve  owned and those yet to come, will any ever be so sweet?   Maybe.   I am pretty fond of my Danskos now.

Remembering where the shoe love-affair began…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF: find a pair of muted red, buy

NOTE TO THE CONCERNED:   Fear not, I only call them flip-flops now.

pictured: a google image…I wouldn’t allow Dave to wear those

Regrets: I’ve Had a Few

6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

Stephanie mentioned that her mother-in-law’s birthday was yesterday.   Nosy person that I am, I asked, “Oh, how old is she now?”   And though I won’t print it here, but suffice it to say she just gently passed a number that contains both a zero and a five, I was like, “What?   Wow-she has good skin!”   Which Steph explained to me has been  protected, life long,  from sun damage.

I just had no idea that allowing myself to burn like a banshee back in the day  was going to be a problem at this age.   My poor children were never screened higher than an eight, and that was after years of ignoring warnings.   I came from the the-sun-gives-you-a-healthy-glow generation.   We were trying to soak every ray in, no matter the kind, not ban any!   We used baby oil to bring on the burn.   I even knew some one who Crisco-ed herself up, doggone-it!   It was all about the brown (which came from the fading burn)!   It was Bain du Soleil for the Saint Tropez tan, baby!

So, though this year, for the first time, I actually purchased an spf of 45, today, in the garden for a brief, but furious planting session, there I was: “naked,” sunscreenless, squinting my eyes to really ensure those wrinkles a place.

I wish I’d known…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF: Time for a big floppy garden hat?

Dear Mamala

2 Mi Familia, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

Happy Mother's Day to my Mom –

I love you, mamala!  I love you bunches.  I love you because you first loved me and gave a lot of your life for me (not as much as Jesus, of course, but a lot).

There are so many things about you I wish I had gotten:

  • your jawline and facial features…can you leave those to me in your will?
  • your ability to love church people, and churchy people even when and especially when they didn't deserve it.
  • Your refusal to accept offense and let it live in your heart.  You are, above all, the most forgiving person I have ever met.
  • your sense of joy at simple things, like a bird on the fence or a butterfly in your garden
  • your compassion and mercy and how you always, without fail, believe the best about people, even when the evidence says otherwise
  • You are guileless.  You are absolutely without guile.

But then are things I got from you I wish I hadn't:

  • fear that there won't be enough money for steak.  I laugh as I write that even now – remembering all the times I watched you struggling to balance the budget, telling me, "There isn't going to be steak for awhile."  And though we ate very well at every single meal, thank-you very much, I kept waiting for the night we'd come around the table to…nothing.  It never happened, but I have a really strong love of steak meals, which I think may have come from that.
  • your poor eyesight and EEE-wide feet
  • your penchant for inventing your own set of cuss words like "oh, crap-a-dap!"  When I now say, "Oh, blast!"  Or "boogers!"  People ask, "Why don't you just go ahead and cuss?"  To which I reply, "Oh-I am!"

But I am so glad that I got these things and I learned this stuff from you, mom:

  • the first 2 words I ever knew how to spell:  Bible, from the song, "The B-I-B-L-E," and salvation from the song, "Oh You Can't Get to Heaven without S-A-L-V-A-T-I-O-N"
  • my first taste of longing for heaven when I was like 3 or 4
  • country music, my dark secret is that I do love it
  • good family photos, the ones you've given me and my desire to collect and create more
  • lots and lots and lots of family photos – if one is good, 342 (of the same event!!) is better
  • how to be my kids' biggest fan (you are thoroughly enthralled by every single one of your children, honestly and truly head-over-heels-enthralled)
  • that a good letter, written by hand and sent in the mail, is a treasure from your heart to the recipient
  • your example as a wife
  • God is all, trust Him

The transition in relationship from the mom who raised me to the mom who is the woman I most admire and trust above all in the world came when I opened the card you tucked into my hand just before I boarded a plane in November of 1978, after coming home to tell you the hardest thing I ever had to tell you and I read this message: "I want you to know, your hurts and your troubles are my own."  I hold that thought in my heart.  It has en-couraged (literally put courage in to) me many, many days of my life since then.

I love you, mamala!  Happy, blessed Mother's Day to you, the best of them all!…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  Write and mail more letters to my mommy.

Soul-Gazing

6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

"What we call 'memory' is actually our spirit gazing at the substance of our soul…Indeed, the reason our natural minds cannot forget certain incidents is because those experiences have literally become a part of our nature…God, who is the essence of life, can reach into our experiences and redeem us from our negative reactions…through our worship of Him."

This is from something a long-lost friend sent me over 10 years ago.  I don't know who originally wrote it, but I came across it in a file folder the other day after I had posted "Redeemed Reactions," and recognized immediately how much this quote had impacted me. 

My Birthday Boy

2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

dave-born.JPG

Dave turned 49 yesterday!

On March 23, 1959, a young girl gave birth to “baby boy Bigham” in Topeka, Kansas and gifted him to a large family where, at 5 days old, he was adopted and became “David Allen Rhoades.”

I hadn’t been born yet, but I am so thankful to God for the twists and turns and dead ends and interstate highways that brought him into my life so many years ago.  With all my heart I believe God designed us for each other.

Yesterday I told him I couldn’t imagine my life without him.  I think I would be just like Mary in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” who, when George Bailey had been granted the wish, via an angel, of seeing what life would have been like had he not been born – saw that the wife he’d known as beautiful and vibrant and loving and playful, without him was an old-maid-librarian, afraid of her shadow, afraid of him as he tried to approach her.  So much of who I am is tied up in the love Dave has freely given me all our years.

copy-of-dave-college.JPG           copy-of-christm-2007-60.JPG

So-I thank God for His wonderful plan, for including you in my life.  But also, honey, I thank-you for choosing me above all others and for the times you have seen the best of the real me and coaxed it out of me.  I am grateful you let me be the mother of your beautiful children and that you trusted me with your heart.  You are ever and always my best friend, my lover, the one I desire.  As we enter the second half of this marriage, your birthdays will continue to be “happy birthdays to me!”

 

 

I love you, Dave…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF: Love him, cherish him, stay in his corner.

pictured: My oh-so-adorable husband as a baby; Dave at Bible College, where we fell in love; Dave-my-lover more recently.