As spring unfolds and the days lengthen and warm, we took time out to travel to visit some relatives in Iowa. Then we drove to Ames, Iowa where Jon and I both went to college.
It was a quick trip
There and Back Again
in two long days. We were both thoroughly tired of riding in the car by the time we got home. But it was a great little trip. It was so good to spend time with my aunt and cousins. I was also happy to connect with a friend and roommate from college. We met for lunch in Ames and it was fun seeing her after so many years. In our senior year of college she and I shared the job of cooking for a small fraternity at Iowa State University. It was a strange and challenging adventure planning menus, shopping for, and cooking lunch and dinner six days a week for about 40 frat members, along with carrying a full load of classes.
Driving to Sioux City, Iowa, where my aunt and cousins live is an almost 5 hour drive across lots and lots of farmland. It felt a bit strange and also good to have far horizons on all sides in this relatively flat area of the country.
We ‘re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.
― The Invention of Wings
I made the photo at the top of this post from the car while we were driving across Iowa on U.S. Highway 20. We were just 20 miles north of where I grew up on a farm. Looking at today’s farms I realize how many things have changed so much in the years since I grew up and moved away from the farm. Still the land is as I remember and these wide open big sky spaces feed my soul. Though I love where I live now and wouldn’t trade it for anywhere else, I do love experiencing that feeling of spaciousness I feel while traveling in my native state.
Memories and Change
Driving into Ames I felt a wave of nostalgia and a feeling of coming home. But that feeling soon dissolved as I saw how much it had changed since we had left. It was disconcerting seeing the familiar juxtaposed with so much change. Parts of the city and campus were almost exactly as I remembered them but then we would turn a corner and be jarred by a huge new building replacing a remembered place.
I loved that the season in Ames was several weeks ahead of us here in the Minneapolis area. Crab apple trees, redbud trees, and even lilacs were in bloom there. It was heavenly to soak it all in knowing that I will have another shot at experiencing this part of spring here at home in a week or two.
Building in right background is the dormitory I lived in many many years ago.
Who We Are, Who We Become
It strikes me that these places that I visited this week are a part of me and a part of who I’ve become. But they do not define or limit me as they perhaps could have. I was definitely the “odd duck” in the small community I grew up in and even in my own family. I have long felt a kinship with Sue Monk Kidd’s book, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. I feel that I was a dissident daughter in my family of origin and in the community where I grew up. I was lucky to have extended family and friends along the way who accepted me fully and allowed me to spread my wings and even encouraged me to be who I am.
You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
― The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
But it was a long journey. And now as my body is aging (you should have heard the “organ recital” when I was visiting my aunt and cousins this week, we all had so many different things going on) the journey is changing and becoming something different. The trick I think, for me, is to stay curious and open and to keep choosing joy, while learning to accept limitations and deal with loss. I was inspired by my cousin whose husband is facing numerous health challenges. As she was preparing to leave, she told me, “I’m doing okay, I’ve become more spiritual—not more religious—more spiritual. I am learning to take life one moment at a time.” I can think of no better plan than to take life one moment at a time.
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling “betrayals” of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
―
How are you my friends? Are you staying curious and open? And are you choosing joy and taking life one moment at a time?
May you walk in beauty.
Students walk beside Lake Luvern in Ames
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