Category Archives: making a difference

Navigating Life’s Turbulence: Lessons from a Country Walk

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Candidate signs and Halloween decorations needed clearing November 7th along the country road where I walked. My feet moved slower than my thoughts of how to accept election results. 

Five hundred feet ahead, at least a dozen large, wild, turkeys covered the road as well as both shoulders. They can be mean in a standoff. Future concerns fell to immediate safety. Should I turn around, my clap hands, swing a fallen branch to clear a path? Yelling and singing haven’t worked in the past. My walk was over.

Two deer bounded out from woods on one side of the road, gracefully crossed the asphalt, and entered deeper tree growth in beautiful synchrony. The turkeys scurried behind the white tails. Here, then gone. The walk cleared.

 “Awesome” I said out loud at the display of natural beauty. Unattractive turkeys had been swept into a brief glimpse of something amazingly natural on another day of unpleasant election rhetoric and deep discord.

Decades ago, St. Mary’s in Luxemburg, WI began my Christian orientation. Small towns, filled with relatives, made it easier to accept a set of beliefs and traditions. What I still carry is a careful relationship with God. Call it spirituality or faith, old-fashioned or unnecessary, I value the foundation. At the turkey and deer moment, I followed the spoken word with a silent “Thank you, God” for a reminder of good possibilities.

In November, regardless of voting on the winning or losing side, many people remain thankful for family, friends, freedom to have a public opinion. I dread how politics and powerful men with money will affect the quality of life. 

Fear feels like too powerful a word at a time when caution is critical. Fear was two years ago when I had major surgery to save my life. I knew what I feared that day. I could balance fear and hope. Today I can’t name what to fear beyond unpleasant changes. Fear and dread appear in definitions of each word, but fear has a more expansive description. 

I’d love to be one of those deer easily running through the woods. I can accept moving closer to the speed of the wild turkeys shuffling through fallen leaves or awkwardly flying up to their nightly roost. During the day I will keep looking for ways to move the threatening turkeys out of the way of my walk and yours.

Two years of thankfulness. More to come.

Being a Matriarch

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A big misconception about retirement is that it’s slow-paced and carefree. I’m busier than ever. Although I no longer fret about work problems, other concerns take my attention. Managing family dynamics and planning family get-togethers (like a recent baby shower) are the business of my days—where much of my mental energy goes. What matriarchs do.

‘Matriarch’ sounds grandiose, but the dictionary characterizes us as powerful older women in charge of a family, or female leaders. Respected. My definition is adjacent: we’re strong, influential older women who use our talents and love to strengthen our families, friends, or other groups. Not queens or rulers. Ordinary women. We may be grandmothers—the two roles can overlap—but women don’t have to have grandchildren to be matriarchs.

Examples come to mind readily. One friend juggles half a dozen complicated schedules to plan holiday celebrations. When her adult child fractured an arm, my friend stepped in with meals, groceries, and good cheer. Periodically, she has done daycare and shown up to care for a sick grandchild. Beyond child care and grandmothering, she mediates behind the scenes when adult children are at odds.

One woman regularly drives to another city when one of her married children needs help. She has provided relief post-surgery, offered support after a death in the family, and made getaway weekends possible for her adult children. She is wise and comforting, but above all, she shows up. 

Another matriarch I know focuses on maintaining ties among friends, former students, and godchildren scattered across the country. She writes the notes, makes the calls, sends the gifts, and organizes the visits that sustain those relationships.

For years, I have organized a yearly reunion with my side of the family, fostered connections with my husband’s extended family, and coordinated gatherings with my sons and their wives. In addition to the practical details of all those events is the need to consider participants’ feelings and circumstances. 

Matriarchs’ work doesn’t have to involve a crisis and it is often invisible. We operate in the background to care for and support our people: do shuttle diplomacy among various personalities, advise about jobs, and organize celebrations.

Being in the background means our efforts aren’t always obvious, but when I look around, I see plenty of matriarchs who are enriching lives within their circle of influence. There’s so much we can’t change out in the big world. Our focus is making a big difference in the smaller—but more important—world of family and friends.

Stuff’s Happening: FoodTrain

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Why is it so difficult to write about what happened in November? The month began with foreshadowing that a health issue would require treatment in a three-to-five-year window. Nine days into the month, tests shortened the timeline to available slots for more extensive surgery the next week. By the middle of November, I had had major surgery, my first time being hospitalized except for delivering babies.

There is a lot I could write about attempting to fill the freezer with food, set up auto-pay for bills, finish a grandchild’s Advent calendar and locate an adult child’s birthday gift within seven days. In retrospect some parts of preparation were successful, and some missed the mark. A hospital rookie, I packed a bag that included a hair dryer, curling iron, underwear, t-shirts, leggings and more than one book. Weak during that first shower I was very happy with clean, natural hair. Nurses didn’t want a t-shirt sleeve in the way of monitors, cuffs or iv’s. My attention span didn’t last through a comparison of humidifiers much less beginning a new novel. 

Returning home was great. Our daughter had stocked individual meals for a few days. She and our daughter-in-law made Thanksgiving dinner. My plan to fill the freezer had dropped off the earlier lists. Something much better happened: MealTrain, coordinated by friends, some from our neighborhood and some from other parts of our lives, created a predictable safe zone as we figured out how to get through each day. 

For two weeks the kindness of friends fed us one hot meal each day. Pasta, soup, quiche, chicken marsala, tacos, pork tenderloin, hot sandwiches, each supplemented with salads, vegetables, and breads. Sometimes homemade bread. Plus our friends believe in dessert. One Sunday brunch was delivered and served to our entire family, an incredible gift on many levels.

My husband received daily notices from MealTrain telling who was bringing dinner and what was planned. These wonderful friends gave generously of themselves showing up every afternoon with food and a few minutes of visiting. They saved Tom, who does not cook much, a lot of stress while making both of us feel supported and inching toward ‘normal’ as we sat at our table eating dinner. 

Stuff happens, some scary and necessary, some amazingly helpful and kind. To all involved, thank you. Take care.

Wishing and Hoping

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We know better. Outdoor party plans don’t guarantee sunshine and soft breezes. We can hope for the best, but best be prepared for rain and thunder. We can wish that just this one time, the weather gods will spin the right number so our guests can enjoy walking and talking in the gardens.

Feels like wishing and hoping might be what’s left as what regular people can do about more and more truly large decisions or actions that impact their lives. With masks and vaccinations, many hope to escape sneaky Covid variations.  Powerful men chose to scrape other people from the face of the earth although everyone hoped the threat was just that. Partisan hatred locks decision making amidst the people we elected hoping they might work together. They tie up the executive branch where folks are wishing things would start improving. Then what was once the most solemn of our nation’s institutions spits out a hateful decision on all those who hoped the laws of the land would be upheld or wished for a miracle from the stacked bench.

Sure seems like miracles have followed the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus to fantasy land. Appeals for contributions to protect the environment, protect freedom of speech, protect women’s health, or many other threatened values mostly keep people employed in the gigantic rat race called the great democratic experiment with no guarantee of positive results. 

So many groups stand outside, disenchanted and disenfranchised, hoping for a sunny day in Washington, D.C. when the politicians and policy makers might come out of their buildings, shake off whatever protects them from the stuff normal folks deal with and breathe in some real air. 

I’m wishing they would come live with regular people for a couple of months, sit in a public school classroom for a full day, plan two weeks of meals before grocery shopping on a budget, deal with the endless impersonal bureaucracy everywhere from making a doctor appointment to asking about a bill. That’s just a start. And hope they could walk city streets safely among those tired of disappointment in government and feel the strength and anger of their action. 

Not hoping for daily sunshine and soft breezes or wishing for more than our fair share. Just reminding those who govern that it is at the will of the people who expect some respect for what we hold as truth.

In Any Way You Can

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“The war. What is more opposite to music? The silence of ruined cities and killed people…Our parents are happy to wake up in the morning in bomb shelters—but alive. Our loved ones don’t know if we will be together again. The war doesn’t let us choose who survives and who stays in eternal silence….Fill the silence with your music. Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about this war on your social networks, on TV. Support us, in any way you can. Any – but not silence. And then peace will come.”

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Grammy Awards Speech

A hand in its winter glove. Shoes and ankles poking from the earth. Blocks of a modern city reduced to rubble. Couples saying good-bye. Mothers, eyes devoid of emotion, carrying babies and leading tiny children wearing bright snowsuits across miles of empty streets. Old women crying.

Baby Boomers grew up reading about WW II and the Korean conflict because fathers, uncles, or grandfathers would not talk about what their experience. Pictures from the concentration camps and what we were taught was so vivid, I thought Anne Frank was a contemporary. Evening news in the 1960s and 1970s carried pictures of body bags, scorched lands, a young girl running naked through chemical-filled air in Vietnam. While the first wave of Boomer males received draft numbers and one-way tickets to Vietnam, many of their generation took to the streets to demand no more war.

But men in power can’t seem to walk away from using weapons and terror to grab a piece of land, access to a bit more wealth, deny the right to life for people from different nationalities or faith. Their march of destruction and the death of innocent fellow humans screams evil. For the Greatest Generation and the Boomers, today’s television triggers memories of skeletal survivors walking Europe’s burned fields, of staggering death tolls on Pacific islands, a mushroom cloud over Japan, young vets missing limbs. I had not heard the language of genocide until watching interviews with Russian citizens who spoke about the need to wipe Ukraine and its people off the earth. I cannot forget it.

As regular people, we are played by the intellectual powers of all sides. Russia probably claims success for each person frightened by images from their brutality in Ukraine.  Our government probably balances the need to keep Ukraine’s misery in citizens’ minds while controlling fear. No matter who manipulates the message, the Ukrainians own it in their daily fight for freedom.