a scalloped edged coverlet of violet and green

My family steps out the door without me—without me!—and for the first time in two weeks I have a stretch of afternoon and evening to myself. Already I’ve entertained five different scenarios for the evening, playful options, necessary options. I dressed for gardening as they drew out the leaving process to an excruciating degree, spiraling louder and louder with the excitement of a minor league baseball game. I watered the plants in the backyard and on the porch, waiting for them to go and giving them distance. When they finally, finally leave, I tiptoe gingerly around the house for fifteen minutes or so, until I actually believe they will not return for something forgotten.

Then I exhale. It’s been a good beginning to break, with a five-day trip to Pennsylvania and numerous solo parenting days. Children have exhaled since school ended, sleeping late, lounging quietly over novels and baseball card collections, taking helmets to the parking lot for cycling and rollerblades. We’ve had a beach day and several beach evenings, plus several days too cold to consider being any closer to the icy Atlantic. I’ve done my online work for Ladies Home Journal in and around other activities. I’m preparing for grad school. They’ve let me do what I need to do for long stretches.

And now they need to go. Now.

I reach in the closet for my gardening shoes and look far into the top of the shelves: there sits my new floral coverlet, the one I hope to use as a bedspread. Except it’s too large, twice the size of my three-quarter width mattress on the Ginny Lind bedframe. I step back and consider for a moment. I don’t LIKE to sew. I know how, true, and that is why I bought a too-large coverlet on sale. The old-fashioned print of violet-colored roses and green leaves matches my vivid purple and white Signature Quilt, hanging on the sage green wall. I turn and look at the cheap shredded quilt on the bed—made in China of cotton so thin it will not hold up to four years of laundry, sigh. Underneath it is another heirloom quilt, too fragile for much more exposure to our kitty. Satchmo doesn’t claw the quilt on purpose—he just puts his claws out when he stretches, and that’s too much for the Star of David quilt my Grandma Mae crafted from scraps of favorite shirts and dresses.

I’d like the new bedspread I bought to actually fit the bed I bought it for. I step back in the closet and onto the step stool. It’s time to sew.

When the package is unzipped from it’s Liz Claiborne bag, I’m impressed once again with just how huge the Oversized King coverlet actually is. Measuring is easy—I place the right edge at the correct height from the floor, and smooth the coverlet over the bed. I fold it at the center wooden spindle of the footboard. The coverlet is edged with deep, wavy scallops. Three and a half scallops fall to the right of the center spindle, so I need seven scallops in all, across the foot of the bed. This leaves three scallop’s worth of fabric to be cut off one side—nearly a third of the blanket. I lift the coverlet from the bed and place it on the living room floor—the entire open space of the living room floor!—and fold it in half, at three and a half scallops.

Now comes the part where my mother would say to me, “you better go find a piece of chalk and mark that wavy cutting line before you pick up those sewing shears.” I glance left, and right, and my mother is nowhere to be seen. I could find the blue tailor’s chalk if I wanted to. I know where it is. Nah. I take a deep breath and plunge the scissors through the velvet bias tape at the edge of the blanket, and I begin cutting a large wavy line to match the opposite edge of the coverlet.

Does cut fabric have a scent? I swear it does, though I can’t imagine how it would. Is it simply the smell of something new, something that’s been sealed in a bag, in a store?

The wavy cut is completed and looks fine. Now for the tricky part—will the velvet bias tape tear free easily? Or will it shred when I remove the stitches with a seam ripper? I pull it apart a few stitches. It comes off the scrap of fabric perfectly, good. I will need it to cover the newly cut wavy edge of my blanket. I open every few inches with another snip and unfold the long strip of green velvet. It takes time. The time feels good.

An hour since the noisy crew left, I have the urge to lie down on the cut up pieces of blanket and listen to the quiet, smell the scent or non-scent of cut fabric. I think of my mother, the upholsterer, and all the practical skills I inherited, and how I miss her. I walk to the bedroom for my laptop—I’m getting accustomed to using it before my writing workshop in a few weeks—and bring the laptop onto my sewing project, on the floor. I type a few quick paragraphs, then tuck the computer away in its case again. The bias tape falls free. I admire the big strip of fabric left after all the cutting. My antique Signature Quilt is bold in color, and this fabric is so very subtle. They will compliment one another well. And there will be enough fabric for a few bolster pillows, a lucky bonus.

Back to the bedroom to unearth my mother’s old Singer sewing machine, and my daughter’s book of pins. For bias tape, the wrong side is sewn first, so I flip the coverlet to the all-white side, and begin to pin the velvet along the cut edge of scallops, overlapping the tape a bit on both ends. I switch on the lamp of the sewing machine knowing that smell will return me to my mother’s house once again. Lift the presser foot, position the fabric, just a moment’s hesitation to backstitch a half inch or so. Then push the foot pedal to the floor and follow the fabric’s edge. Done in a moment.

By now Garrison Keillor is hosting James Taylor at Tanglewood, on my radio, and I return to the floor to slowly pin the edge of green onto the right side of the coverlet. Somehow I’ve made no unforgivable mistakes in this process, and a song or two passes the time. One last set of backstitches and one more time remembering the “speeding tickets” I given to me in high school home ec class, rumbling along my dining table, also my mother’s, into the quiet night.

I finished the floral coverlet and quickly removed the tattered quilt and the Star of David quilt—one to the scrap pile and one to the cedar chest. Then I made the bed again, with the new delicate sprays of violet-colored roses and green leaves on a ground of white. From a distance no one can see the difference between my edge and the professional edge of the quilt. Up close, I still need to hand stitch two tiny sections of green velvet, so nothing can “catch” on each join and undo my work. Another day. I fold down the top hem of scallops and place a nest of pillows atop it, at the head of the bed. Nothing torn, now, and nothing too precious for the cat to rest on.

Back in the living room I fold up my scrap of quilt and tuck it away, then pour a glass of wine. The sun is still up, though the evening begins to cool. I sent them to the ballpark with jackets and socks, against their wills, but I’m sure they’ll return wearing the warm layers.

Just out of curiosity I walk back into the bedroom to find a project I planned two months ago, a handbag to be constructed of boiled wool from a retired sweater. The pieces are cut already, and the wide shoulder strap is embellished with a needle-felted vine of green leaves on the charcoal background. All that is left is to cut a lining from the block print pillowcase I bought just for this bag, and to sew. And my sewing machine is all set up, on the dining table, with no disruptions in sight. The light is on, the bobbins are wound…

I don’t like to sew, at least not as much as I like seeing the finished project in my hands. I like knowing how to sew, how to construct things, how to use what is easy, convenient, priced right to craft what is perfect, what fits, what pulls everything together. I’m a designer at heart.

With just enough know-how. And a beautiful bed, if I do say so myself.



Oh! The Signature Quilt was crafted to celebrate my great-grandparent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. Signature quilts were still a popular gift for special occasions when I lived in Farmland—each participant pays one dollar and signs a square of fabric. Each signature is embroidered onto the square. The fabric is then “pieced” into a quilt pattern—mine is in eight-pointed stars, surrounded by rings of squares, more diamonds and a few triangles—and then the entire blanket is hand-quilted at eight to ten hand-stitches per inch. The quilt is then given, along with the money raised, to the honored recipients.

My mother identified each of the 255 names on the startling purple-and-white quilt, including her own family’s block, with the names of her parents, her brothers and sisters embroidered in white on one of the purple “stars.” I never knew my great-grandparents, but I know many of the people named on my quilt—they must’ve been children, like my mother was, when the quilt was made. When I sleep under the quilt, I think of “the great cloud of witnesses” named in the Bible, and I think of the teachers who’ve told me “we stand on the shoulders of giants.” What giant’s names appear on this quilt, I don’t know, but my grandfather willed this quilt to me, and nothing, not a scrap of fabric to anyone else in my family including my mother, whom he loved a great deal. I saw him perhaps twenty times in my life, but we were similar, and we wrote letters. I loved God from the time I could think a single thought, though no one in my family told me my grandfather did, too. Grandma Mae was not really my grandmother, but she handstitched the rest of my quilt collection herself—a quilt embroidered with fifty state birds, and the Star of David quilt. I slept under those birds from the time my mother could trust me to treat it properly, in the Ginny Lind bed with the hand-turned spindles, in my bedroom under the eaves.

I think these stories through, all the cinderblock walls of all the apartments covered by these quilts over all the years of my adulthood, while I strategize the pockets and flaps of the charcoal wool handbag. The shoulder strap and the front flap are lined, and a pen pocket sewn in place by the time I hear footsteps rushing up the steps to my door. I feel like telling them I’ve been to Indiana in my mind, been singing with James Taylor through my college summers in Colorado, too, been to every place I’ve ever lived.

Instead I listen to an extended tale of a ballgame from one child, while the older child, less interested in baseball, must be pulled from the heap where she collapses, just inside the door. Five minutes later I find her in a similar heap on my new coverlet, on my bed. I whisper her out of the bed and through brushing her teeth while Brendan continues to talk at the speed of light, at the top of his small lungs, in the dark of the night. I made their beds while they were gone and Madeleine falls directly into hers. I find her lying across her bed crossways with her feet under the dresser, and lift her into her bed properly. I walk Brendan to his bed with a smooch, after he admires my new bedspread, and he tucks his autographed ball from the pitcher onto his shelf of special things. I unplug the sewing machine and wrap up the cords, placing it under the lower shelf in my bedroom, where the dust will gather on it until the next occasion. My wool messenger bag needs to be stitched by hand from here, I think, with a green yarn to match the vines on the shoulder strap. Away go the pins, the sewing shears, the scraps and threads, the empty wine glass. Scott will need to tell me stories, too, after the children are soundly asleep.

“How was your night?” he asks as he walks through his nightly routine.

“Quiet—deliciously quiet. Did you know I’ve been mostly alone with these two kids for two weeks? Until this break tonight. I’ve forgotten what this is like, summer with children.”

“Hey where’d you get the new blanket?” he asked. Time for the stories of my own. And time for sleep, next to the great cloud of witnesses, tucked under the scalloped edges of green velvet in the Ginny Lind bed, on a chilly night in June.

bike sounds

I am too tired to write—but the tired-er I get, the more my mind seems reduced to images, sounds, scents, some swirl of sensation that I can’t shake. My house smells too much of onions, and I’m wondering if Merry, who visits on Wednesday afternoons, lost some of the sprigs of wild onion she’d woven into her hair while gobbling down piles of potato cakes. Add now the scent of hyacinths, a better-smelling member of the onion family, atop my desk, and the aroma of coffee. We will burn the sandalwood and myrrh candle later, to add another layer and hopefully neutralize the onion.

As I was rushing back from the bookstore last night, my mind kept replaying the sound of my brothers pumping the pedals of an upturned bicycle, its rear wheel raised to eye-level with a couple of young engineers in training. Plaid shirtsleeves rolled up on two young towheads who might’ve been the prototypes for Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, dad’s tools and the brass oilcan and some reddish gray shoprags hanging from the upsholstery sawhorse.

“Hey Fuzz,” my older brother would greet me as I walked in with a popsicle from the freezer. “How’s the weather? Give me a hair, come on!”

“You leave my hair alone, greasy fingers. Who lost their bike chain today?”

My younger brother tended to treat me like a human being, so he chimed in, “Leave her alone—it’s a flat hair day. No rain.” My older brother learned that curly hair could be used to construct a crude barometer, from our very cool science teacher Mr. Zeigler. Curly hair shrinks into tighter curls with damp weather. Since I was a Walking Barometer, he at last found some use for a younger sister.


Anyway, there’s a story in there, or twenty, involving the texture of asphalt seen at eye level, the smell of a hot day in late summer, the sound a bicycle dropped to the pavement when there is no time to use a kickstand, the sound of the front wheel continuing to spin like a gyroscope after the bike is dropped—it’s a quiet sound. But what starts the story in my head is the whir of tires spinning in the air, the bicycle resting on its handlebars on the sawhorse in the cool cinderblock garage, the memory of straw-like lengths of plastic attached loosely to metal spokes making the clackity-clip, clackity-clip rhythm as the wheel turns. And the sound of a playing card, clothes-pinned to the wheel support so the card drums a motor sound as the bike is pedaled down the street—that is elementary school. Life was wheels. Life was imagining how far wheels can take someone. Roller skates, skateboards, anything that moved, but mostly bikes, chases, races, getaways and getting away from my house and my too-little life. I think of weaving back and forth to get the feel of a new bike or new tires. I think of speed and wind and a bandana to keep the sweat from pooling down my neck, riding my teenage-sized blue Schwinn four miles to my best friend’s house, my parents pretending not to notice I was breaking the rules of where I could ride and where I couldn’t. I was an A student, not too terrible, Honors Society kid, hard to scold too much. And I was crazy about motion, about the blue Schwinn and the hours to ride with no hands down the straightest flattest roads known to humankind. The sound of wind whipping the hair out of my severe ponytail, covered by a baseball hat to block the sun from my face.

I saw a photo of a retro-design bike, a little old lady bike, a don’t-have-to-stoop-and-bend to ride it girl’s bike, sigh, while I leafed through my stack of five juicy magazines at the bookstore. My escape. But the phone rang, an emergency, just as I finished the fifth magazine. Karen is not well. I flew back toward her house quickly, thinking of the blue Schwinn moving as fast as I can go, the sounds of travel as it used to look and sound. The blue minivan and the blue Schwinn are worlds apart, but not the experience of going, going as fast as I can.

conversational style

My mom’s life was so filled with fascinating stories that she could talk all day if the listener did not provide resistance of some sort—she saw her stories as an invitation for a matching story from the other party. Therefore she was absolutely deadly to polite people. Her signal for you to interrupt her stream of tales was a shake of the head and a “but, uh…” If you failed to take advantage of this verbal sparring opening, you’d be pinned to your chair for the next twenty minutes by her next tale.

Scott used to throw her off rhythm by summing up her story with a funny pun or wordplay, and she’d laugh hard enough to give him a breather, to think about what he would like to say or a story he would like to tell, or an interesting question to get that story to go someplace new. She flat-out adored him, and they spent many hours laughing at or about me. (I am Not Easy to Live With, at times, which makes for good story-telling. Thank goodness it’s good for something.)

My husband and I once saw Mom at work on a polite couple for hours, waiting for them to tell a story to interrupt her stream. We were just outside the room, taking in the sun on a warm day and laughing ourselves to tears before sparing them by inviting her for a walk with us. “They are so quiet!” she said, exasperated. “I couldn’t get a word out of them!”

Scott has not yet mastered the interruption-fest of the rest of my family, shouting and guffawing over one another. When an Italian-American friend told me, “in my family, if we don’t interrupt you, that means we’re not listening. Interruption is our way of showing we care. Interruption is participation. If we don’t try to one-up your story, that means you’re not trying hard enough. And if you don’t use hand-gestures, you’re not going to get a word in edgewise.” I nodded enthusiastically. “You don’t have to be Italian for that!” I find the rules of engagement for civil conversation are just brutal on me— waiting politely seems like spectating in a world where I’m accustomed to being one player among many. I’m working at it.

the bird grandma

By the time I knew her, she was a bird with wrinkled skin the texture of feathers. Everything about her was soft, her birdy chortle of a laugh, her words as she said, “My lands!” and slapped her soft knee. Her nose grew beaklike, too, and everything about her diminished except her bright, dark bird eyes, watching the world sharply.

My father’s mother stood upright in my youngest years, holding my fingers as I learned to walk on the stepping stones in her yard. As I grew taller time bent her spine into an archer’s bow, the invisible line of gravity pulling more taut each year until her body inscribed a letter C or a question mark. Then the C closed and she became a small tidy bird with her head very nearly tucked under her wing. Her arthritic hands were small letter Cs, also, with gothic knobs and twisted calligraphy.

It’s Satchmo who makes me think of Grandma these days, how my brothers and I loved to have Grandma as a babysitter. When we slept over at her house, she fed us stacks of Twinkies and let us stay up to watch Johnny Carson with her, playing rummy until we were all maniacally wound-up. So my mother thought to have Grandma babysit at our own house, instead, thinking we children would get more sleep. My parents would leave the house, exacting promises that we would take it easy on Grandma. As soon as she left the living room for the kitchen, my older brother would leap up on the couch and change the hands of the big clock, to put off bedtime by another hour. Then we would call her into the living room while Burl changed the kitchen clock, to match. And sooner or later she would settle in a comfortable chair, trying to figure out what to do with three rambunctious children. Immediately the cat would climb onto her lap and she would start the bird dance of shooing away a persistent animal. My brothers and I found this endlessly entertaining, as she grew more flustered until she shouted at us to get “that varmint” away from her.

Satchmo, too, is drawn to the family member who is least likely to want him, and that is Scott. Satchmo is not a lap-climbing kitty, yet, but meows incessantly at Scott until he is petted and scratched to his heart’s content.

Somehow I doubt I will ever hear the word “varmint” used again by a person truly at home with the word. In mountain terrain there is a large furry mammal called a “marmot,” which sounds enough like varmint in my mind that every mention of the animal makes me smile and think of my birdlike grandmother and her twinkling eyes, as sometimes, just at the right time, the cat would walk to her lap on quiet feet and sneak quietly in, and my varmint-hating Grandma would rest her c-shaped hand onto the warm cat until both were calm enough not to notice the passing of time.

“I think he likes you,” I would whisper.

“Well, I don’t like him,” she’d say, “but he’s alright for now. As long as the varmint is sleeping.” And if conditions were right she would fall asleep, too, in the big rocker, my tired old bird grandma plumb worn out by her grandchildren, her lap a nest for a wild varmint with a loud purr.

the grudge

Mary Ann Riddlebarger stopped me on the way into the gymnasium for my high school graduation, and she smiled at the funny badge on my robe, claiming I was a “Glad Grad!”

“You know, Denise, I always hated you for telling on me when I ate the popcorn instead of stringing it in Mrs. Shaw’s first grade,” she mused.

“I was actually in Mrs. Barkowski’s first grade, Mary Ann,” I bit off the words. “You’ve held a grudge on the wrong person for twelve years.”

“Isn’t that funny? I could’ve sworn it was you!” Her confident laughter filled the hall.

“It’s not funny,” I said, turning before I could grow too spiteful on such a good day for leaving. “It’s people like YOU, Mary Ann, people like you,” I stomped down the hallway, shaking my head in fury. Welcome to Farmland, Indiana, a place to gain a reputation for mistakes I didn’t even make.

She was my cousin—fourth cousin, to be exact—and in third grade, when MaryAnn’s father fell from a tall scaffolding, my mother asked me to be extra kind during his long recovery. So I was. I shared my handmade poncho during a particularly cold recess, two of us sitting side by side for warmth. I often invited her to play hopscotch, though her competitiveness meant she often beat me. A year later MaryAnn cornered me in the girl’s locker room after gym class, to say I don’t know why you are being so nice to me, but for God’s sake stop. “I don’t want people to think we are friends,” she said through clenched teeth. I didn’t look up at her, holding back fiery tears, but continued tying my shoes as if I hadn’t heard, as if I wouldn’t fall down against the lockers crying as soon as her footsteps were gone from the stairs.

“What did I ever do to you?” I thought, in that locker room. And now I know: I guess someone told on her in first grade, someone worth never forgiving.

But it wasn’t me.

I was a shy nobody with no sense of “cool” whatsoever. Telling on people could get you killed, as everyone knew, so that wouldn’t have been me. I’m big on eating popcorn. Regardless, would it have done her harm to continue being relatively nice to me, to just let it go, to say, “well, she is my cousin, after all, and she’s not so bad.” But what do I know? I never had fragile popularity to lose.

I hear MaryAnn is a city councilor in Farmland, Indiana, and my father tells me she is quite good at her job, that she takes no nonsense from anyone. She’s a real person with real responsibilities.

So now I’ve been gone from Farmland, Indiana more than 25 years, ruminating on why I could never live there, and it’s me who nurses a grudge over nothing. She is my cousin, after all, and she might have had some bad moments as a child, but I suppose she’s not so bad.

MaryAnn, I confess that I did not tell on you in first grade, that I wanted to spit on you at my high school graduation, that I was glad to leave you behind forever. I’m telling on you now, that you were spiteful when I was kind. I’m telling on myself that I was spiteful and superior, right back at you, when I was probably old enough to know better. I am telling on myself that I have used this illustration of small town life, at your expense, hundreds if not thousands of times.

Dear MaryAnn, let’s have a bowl of popcorn sometime and put all this behind us, next time I visit Farmland, Indiana. Let’s throw the popcorn in great handfuls, just a couple of cousins telling on everyone in sight, for old times sake.

You be well, and be good to my dad. I’ll see you next time I’m in town.

applying myself

I am writing scholarship applications and working on some stories that are tougher to write about, these days—and preparing for holidays.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d post my grad school application, which I really enjoyed writing. The application question asked “describe your development as a writer and a person of faith.” I used the same framing story as a previous essay, so the first and last paragraphs may seem familiar (sorry—the art of publication is re-publication, I hear), but the bulk of this piece has not been posted previously. If you didn’t already know too much about me…

Oh, and I got into the program at SPU—now “all I have to do” is locate scholarships to pay for it. I hope to begin in August.


Three years ago, I reached into a beach bag only to find I’d forgotten my journal—in truth, writing was the reason I’d packed all the gear and taken my two small children to the beach in the first place. Frustrated, I picked up a stick and wrote I AM A WRITER across the sand. This news surprised me. While I love to read and I admire writers, at that moment I’d not made any effort to “finish” the stories in my journal pages and letters. I applied sunscreen to arms and legs of wiggly children for a few reflective moments before pulling out the Tonka trucks for a beach day without a pen.

When a few hours opened between my parenting schedule and my work as a college writing tutor, I leafed through my journals to find narratives worth exploring. An article for a former employer’s online magazine grew into a monthly column, and a sheaf of finished stories developed into a blog. Initially, I wrote for the same reasons I’ve always written, to clarify my thoughts, to capture a moment, and to inspire connections between people. But something in the telling transformed my personal stories and transformed me. Writing calls me to be present, awake, listening to my entire life with one ear, and listening to what is happening this very moment with the other ear. When I stumbled into writing, it seems I stumbled into myself.

Years before that day at the beach, I proposed a memoir to two writerly friends when we were three nursing mothers with no hope of holding a pen. I begged them to consider The Great American Novel of my ragged little dating life, and I talked them through the stories, one after another. I even had a title: The Absence of Reliable Transportation, about boyfriends, broken cars and road trips. Neither friend accepted my challenge. Two years ago, I began writing essays for this book, one chapter at a time. In darker moments I subtitle it “47,000 words looking for a structure,” as I become evermore aware of my limitations and lack of training in the craft of writing. My craving for deeper skills often reaches a fevery desperation to tell this story better than I know how. I’m eager to join a committed circle of writers and readers to wrestle with plotlines and character development, to learn to do this thing that I am already doing.

While I chip away at this long project, a second online magazine recently chose an essay of mine for their annual print journal. An editor at Paraclete Press noted several pieces on my blog and requested a book proposal. I’m submitting short pieces to magazines and periodicals. I’m learning the profession via self-directed study.

I hear the phrase “spiritual path” or “career path,” or any kind of path at all, and I picture a favorite quilt pattern called The Drunkard’s Path, worked in yellow and white, held with wooden pins to a breezy line. At first glance, the quilt’s pattern is barely visible through the curves and turns, then the crazy genius of the seamstress becomes clear in the arrangement of quarter-rounds and squares. My history houses many labyrinthine strands that fall in a not-exactly-linear pattern. The “career path” strand includes stints in college ministry, student development, adventure education, motherhood, and now writing. Another strand is a progression of descriptors about faith: Methodist, evangelical, Mennonite, Presbyterian, reformational, sacramental, Episcopal. I could include “animist” for my childhood habit of talking to trees. On a good day, the strands fit together into one beautiful piece. Pray like an evangelical, cultivate like a Mennonite, strive for reformation, live sacramentally. The love of God infuses everything, and I still talk to trees. But these are vexing times to be a believer. On a less than good day, I need to speak to that drunkard quilt designer with some strong questions, as I read the puzzle of this life and ask where in God’s name this pattern is going.

As a spiritually sensitive child, I was something of an anomaly in my hometown of Farmland, Indiana. My parents’ disdain for religion heightened my curiosity further. I marveled that they felt no longing for God, and my longing seemed just as foreign to them. I joined a church youth group and sucked up Bible stories, hymn lyrics, Sword Drills and all the counter-cultural trappings of middle-American Christianity in the late 1970’s. Those trappings made sense to me in a way my home did not. Good families “took me in” when my own family life grew too broken. Their generosity defined The Church for me, and under their influence I grew less fearful and defensive, and more at ease in the world, like that quilt unfurling in the breeze.

Eager to escape my small town, I landed a summer-long apprenticeship in a Christian drama troupe. I began my earnest study of faith viewing Christians as joyous and “thinking people,” in contrast to my anti-intellectual family. What luck to be a curious seventeen-year-old, living among bright seminary students at a lakeside summer camp! It’s charming in retrospect, given the modern-day caricature of Christian “thinking” and given the hostile anti-intellectualism in some Christian circles.

I lived in a number of faith-based communities for the next decade, including Christian colleges and student leadership houses. After four years in the world’s best college ministry organization, I worked as a Residence Director at Whitworth College. I served smart, sassy Christians whose faith did not and would not conform to mine, as well as smart, sassy non-Christians who thought just as profoundly about issues of faith. Scathingly frank conversation caught me off-guard, daily, but once I adapted, I thrived. I found strange joy in teasing away the cultural trappings from the core of my belief. While campus ministry years helped me shed notions of “good behavior” as salvific, at Whitworth I gained confidence that God loved my favorite student heretics just as deeply as I did, and would not wipe us out in a fit of wrath. I want to honor the gifts given from all these communities, while continuing to seek what is real and true.

Other strands in this quilt include a Drunkard’s Path of friendships won and lost, places and jobs loved and not loved, and a fifteen-year path of culture shock in New England. My relationships, my faith, my joy and fury intertwine in this strand where I live. I knew myself to be an unusual character, but my oddness is highlighted in this corner of the world. My neighborhood is annoying and vibrant; my children’s school, quirky; my church, unlike any other. My marriage provides its own story line. Writing drives me beneath the swirl at the surface. I listen to savor words my children say, and to hear the bitter truth one neighbor offers another. I watch for nuances, juxtapositions. I’m not sure why these everyday epiphanies are important, but I sit down and write. Some of my writing is specifically spiritual in nature; much of it is not. I like the possibility the Seattle Pacific program presents to explore all of it, for the spiritual nature imbedded in every kind of story, and for the quality of story within spiritual writing, as well.

I am rarely without a pen and paper, these days, but even when my life requires pushing a Tonka truck, I am a writer. I don’t need a stick and sand to tell me so. Writing is the way I stitch together all the strands of my life into one varied and colorful fabric. Alongside my pen this interesting creation unfurls, in a pattern just barely visible, at first glance. I hold a deep affection for the twisty paths that draw all these pieces together, a deep respect for the questions imbedded, here. The pattern draws me forward, anticipating the joy of the next turn, and the next turn after that, too.

an un-quiet existence

I was a quiet kid in a quiet town, and all I wanted was a quiet existence, really. Would I have wanted something different if my parents hadn’t been who they were, then? Perhaps. I am not known as quiet, now, though I do need a sizable quantity of solitude. I am fearless and capable, bold and creative. It’s hard to believe how much I wanted to be unremarkable and to blend in, but that just wasn’t meant to be.

My hometown of Farmland, Indiana is a no-stoplight town, one mile long from end-to-end, and perhaps half a mile wide. Downtown consists of four beautiful blocks of Victorian storefronts, old-fashioned three-story brick confections with turrets and towers, and a few similarly old and fancy buildings on each side. Current census data indicates that the entire township weighs in at 1,212 occupants, 1,208 listed as “white non-Hispanic.” When I lived there, we all knew everyone else, and not only did we know them, but we knew who was related to whom, who had ever dated whom, and we knew long lists of successes and failures. It was not a good place to make a mistake, if you’d like to ever forget that mistake.

That’s the downside, though— I also felt the goodness of community support and care, even if it had to be borne alongside the weight of scrutiny and overinterest. It seemed then as it seems now, that people might be willing to take me in, given half an excuse, and I loved the feeling of safety in my small village.

My parents: how to describe them? Omer and Pat. My father’s contagious humor and laugh loosened people up and made them feel at home. He was tall and handsome and his younger pictures look so much like Lyle Lovett that I wonder if Lyle is my lost older brother, is dark shock of curls aiming up in the air and his angular face resembling my dad much more than I do. My father accepted the role of emcee of every town function, from the time that a microphone could be employed. He announced the floats at local parades, called the numbers for the cakewalks, read the winning raffle ticket numbers, and offered the sportscast at every Little League game, including mine. “That’s Denise Frame at the plate, folks, and this batter has requested that I allow her to bat in silence, and I will try, folks, I will try.” On quiet summer evenings I could hear my father’s voice booming across town from the baseball diamond’s loud speakers—I could hear his voice in the downstairs bathroom of the house on Plum Street. There was no escape. Not that I wanted to escape him, personally: my dad was impossible not to like.

And my mother was the perfect counterpart. Like Lucy and Desi, my parents were like an ongoing comedy team. He announced, and he teased people, including my mother. She did not hesitate to heckle, in response, to upstage him if she felt like it, which she often did. She was louder, bigger, funnier, and she was also more visibly capable of fury over injustice. My father served in the Lion’s Club, the American Legion, and the volunteer fire department. My mother ran ice cream socials, chili suppers, women’s auxiliary clubs of the same local organizations. She coached softball. They sold raffle tickets, served on committees, and they were simply everywhere and knew everyone. They were unpretentious and homey and looking for opportunities to be generous. They were loud, and just a bit bawdy, barely constraining their natural tendency to swear colorfully in every sentence. They hosted late night card games with shouting and laughing loud enough to wake us children: we would enter the bright kitchen light, rubbing our eyes to the cloud of cigarette smoke, the smell of strong drink and tears streaming from the corners of their eyes from laughter. My parents were local celebrities.

I grew up in a dream world, then, perhaps because my life seemed so un-dream-like. I lived the life of an escapist, hiding in my own skin. I tried to disappear, quietly, before people’s eyes.

And it might have worked, if it hadn’t been for my ornery parents and their general obnoxiousness. (I say this with deep affection and no small amount of admiration.) And if it hadn’t been for my head of very unruly hair, and my peculiar taste in clothing. And my excellent grades. And my constant reading. And my inability to soften the blunt truth about things. And my tendencies toward spiritual growth. I was an odd kid, made all the more odd by the parents I lived with. My parents lived entire lives as “black sheep,” even while doing good. In some ways, as the very opposite of a black sheep, I outwitted them, quietly and firmly. On the other hand, as a very serious child, I made a good “straight man” to their comedy, but I wanted out of the show, entirely.

In many ways, I became more “myself” the first time I left home for any length of time. There were no voices talking over me, no television in the background, no noise of expectation or reputation, not the same set of shouted swearing and back-slappings. I attended summer church camp, and I felt weightless, lighthearted, free. I knew I’d live the rest of my life that way, as soon as I could make my way “out.” People found me delightful, when unencumbered by memories of my childhood exploits and my parentage. I felt delightful, too, when I could stop reacting and adjusting to what people knew (or believed they knew) about me.

Last year I enrolled in a memoir course at a local school. After a few readings, one class member said she thought my stories “would make better fiction.” I blinked a few times and restated carefully, “Wait, it seems like you are saying it’s hard to believe these stories are my real experiences!” Yes, yes, she said, that’s it. The truth hit me later, that most people’s lives are populated with rather normal folk, most lives suffer a fair amount of boredom. But not mine, never. I grew up with characters right out of a John Irving novel, people uncowed by rules and expectations. My life would make good fiction. I wanted to argue that she should meet my parents if she wanted to know some candidates for larger-than-life tales. In many ways, I pale in comparison, or at least it seems so. I don’t give away my time and energy nearly so much. I feed myself, first, with writing and solitude, and sometimes there is little leftover for community involvement.

Reflecting from a distance of twenty years, I have new questions: when I made my way out, how much did I become like Omer and Pat? I share their social fearlessness, their confidence, their love to laugh with people. How much do I carry Farmland, Indiana with me? I long for community and I work to build it, to make connections between folks and to feel the goodness of being stuck together. How much am I a working class kid from the Midwest, wrangling with words until I think a factory worker could understand my big ideas? How much do I still buck against the norm of what people expect of me?

Lately I’m concerned for my children, remembering that parents can be so overwhelming. When my son was a toddler, he was the kind of guy who shut down when people looked directly at him, so I learned interpersonal stealth and cunning, to watch from the corner of my eye like a hunter working not to startle, or a photographer trying not to disturb her subject. It’s not easy to fade into the background, and it’s harder all the time: I still have unruly hair, peculiar taste in clothing, and I still have a hard time softening the blunt truth of things. I’m a know-it-all, and now I’m all these things with a strong dose of fearlessness. I’m glad for the training in stealth and cunning, but I know I’m prone to forget, and I hope somehow that these children find their own place to “be,” alongside me. I will make mistakes at this facet of parenting, perhaps every day. I hope I learn to apologize, to quiet myself and get out of their way, enough. Just enough.

My children don’t like it when they feel I am applauding too loudly, or when I heckle someone gently. They don’t like it when I am not a sweet mama, bending to their wills. And I balk against the weight of their expectations that I will try to “fit” better. It won’t be a quiet existence for them, either. “She’s not a tame mama,” my husband says to my children from time to time, claiming the words about Aslan’s still-wildness from C.S.Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Wildness and strength are good traits, even for non-fictional parents, and my hope is to be tame enough—just barely tame enough to give them plenty of room to grow alongside me, to find some Spirit-blown wildness and strength of their own.

sneaking snackery

My mother was a sneak when making snacks, and as a mother, now, I see the beauty of this method. If you say, “would you like popcorn?” what you get is a chorus of alternatives that family members would prefer, and no one is satisfied. However, if the aroma and sound of popcorn is allowed to speak for itself, who can really resist?

White popcorn. That is the tender kind grown in Indiana, the kind in bags labeled “Cousin Willie’s,” that is my favorite. I also like red popcorn and black jewel, but I’d rather go hungry than eat yellow popcorn (too tough), and I avoid microwaved popcorn unless I am simply starving. What is that stuff in the bag? White popcorn. I have been known to buy twenty pounds of it for the trunk of my car, when traveling home from the Midwest, before the local stores carried Cousin Willie’s.

My father loves popcorn, and I wonder if we actually ate a giant bowl or two of popcorn every single night, as my memory tells it, in my growing up years, or if I have exaggerated the truth. Coca-cola, popcorn, salt, television. Followed by vanilla ice cream, with chocolate sauce, and more television. That’s the way I remember it.

My mom would disappear into the kitchen, and then emerge with a silvery aluminum bowl, edged as if with pinking shears, brimming with hot white popcorn. My father’s lap was the aluminum bowl’s home base, and the rest of us filled and refilled our smaller bowls from Dad’s. Butter was nice, but not necessary. Salt was critical, in huge quantities. My father often stood at the kitchen counter, the next morning, picking out the good kernels leftover in the emptying aluminum bowl, and licking his finger to pick up the grains of salt.

I’ve tried a number of popping methods over the years, but I’ve returned to the same method my mom employed: the big stockpot, coconut oil if I can afford it, and lots of shaking. I believe my older brother owns the aluminum popcorn serving bowl, but we, too, use the dad’s big bowl method, with a wooden bowl.

My children, though, have come to love a special little twist: I take half the big batch of popcorn into a separate bowl. I melt butter, off heat, in the hot stockpot, then toss the popcorn in the butter. When I pour the buttered corn into the bowl again, I sprinkle the popcorn with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar, and a touch of salt. Not as sweet as caramel corn, nor as sticky, nor as complicated. And we eat popcorn without the television, almost always. What matters is the quantity, and the good company gathered around the one big bowl.

The secret ingredients are cinnamon, of course, and sneak-erie. I’m eyeing the stockpot right now, but very quietly, quietly…

my mother's tools

When angry, my mother liked to wield a tool. She rarely chose the tools favored by her feminine counterparts: my mother was most comfortable with a hammer. She always said a garden hoe allowed her to survive her first few years of parenting, while she and my father lived in a shack in the middle of nowhere—snapshots of my older brother and I playing near the crank-wringer washing machine in the backyard show a little hint of vegetable garden, well-weeded. She didn’t really care whether there were weeds between rows of beans, but she needed something to swing at.

By the time we were living at the house I remember, in town in Farmland, Indiana, my mother and father ran a part-time upholstery business, and they were good at it. My father handled the skeletal parts of the furniture, the wood and webbing, the springs, and he generally tore the furniture apart in a way my mother could reassemble it—if you have ever taken something apart into it’s elements, you know this orderliness is crucial. They were good at analysis, customer relations, expert craftsmanship. They were not good about charging a fair price, their only real downfall.

If Mom ran out of other peoples’ objects to hammer, she always had a few pieces of our furniture to repair, also. We would watch for her eyes to hone in on a chair or couch when she was restless, and we children would cling to our favorites, begging her not to take them. “It’ll just be a week!” she would say. But then a customer would walk into her shop, see the favorite wing-back chair on the saw horses, and make an offer. Mom would walk into the kitchen counting her new wad of cash, and we would slump into the living room dejectedly. More than once, she actually sold a couch from our living room, and we would arrive home from school to find an empty space and a freshly vacuumed floor.  

My mom probably saw her body as a tool, too, more often than not—something to be swung and wielded until it yielded the desired results. She ignored pain and small injuries, and eventually she ruined her hands and arms by simply using them too hard, yanking the webbing for the chair cushion just a little tighter, adding a little more fierceness to the pull of that button cording, until her hands began to go numb and she had no predictable strength at all. After hand surgery, my mother had to sell most of those upholstery tools because the temptation was too great for her to ruin her hands all over again.

So my mother started a new career—she went to work at the local hardware store in her early fifties, and she went at it the way my mother does, with gusto, her eyes big as saucers with curiosity and a good ear. Mom laughed about the ways the owners, half her age, and the male customers assumed a woman would not have the kind of good sense a man would, regarding plumbing and woodworking and ropes and door locks. She told me she learned something new every day.

When my mother contracted cancer in her final year of life, she moved to a small rental home from the property she had managed for fifteen years. She hated most to give up her tools: two five-foot tall cases on wheels, filled to the brim with every tool a homeowner and landlady could require. She argued bitterly with my brothers over the desire to keep those tools. “They only let me keep one hammer and two screwdrivers!” My brothers chanted in unison, “If it takes more than a hammer or a screwdriver, you need to call the landlord! That’s why you rent!” But somehow she snuck into her rented closet two entire sets of Drimmel tools, in case of any sudden urge to carve designs into wood. It was a little sort of insurance for her, her potential hobby should she find herself cured of cancer and with some time to fill. These toolcases made me sad, and they made me smile at the same time. Two full sets. Excess, until the very end.

I wish I had my mother’s force of will to bend the world into place, to hammer and hoe and carve it into what I need it to be. I wish I had her deep love for tools. In some small ways, I echo this—I love art supplies, office supplies, all kinds of fiber arts and all the sets of tools to manipulate wax, dye, fabric, paper. I have just a hint of my brother’s love for cooking tools—a handcrank pasta maker, an apple peeler, just the best food processer, the best camping grill. But my toolbox is small and easily carried, and I suspect, a bit sadly, that it will stay that way.

modern farmland

“If you’re traveling Interstate 70, drive north a ways and stop by Farmland, Indiana.”

“Well, what’s there to see?” asked Blair, a retiree who spent her summer vacations meandering by car.

“Nothing much. It’s a one-horse, no stoplight town. Grocery store has a great ham salad, fresh on Thursdays and made personally by Bob the Butcher, who guards the secret recipe.” Blair made a note: Thursdays, grocery, Farmland, Indiana.

Weeks passed and she returned. “Bob the Butcher says hi!” she laughed. “He introduced me to everyone in the store, AND he called your mother.”

“I know! If she had been home to answer the phone, she would have dropped everything to come meet you. She called me as soon as she got the message.”

“I couldn’t remember your maiden name, but that didn’t seem to matter. Only one Denise in Farmland, Indiana?”

“Two, but the other one moved to Farmland when I was in high school, so she would be noted as ‘the other Denise.’”

When I consider my small town heritage with any depth, I am still startled by my view of the world as a child. The first day of school each fall, my brothers and I would report if there was a new person in our grade level. The assumption was that a “new” classmate happened rarely and was a special event. The assumption was that we all knew who the rest of us were, and this new person would be exotic, rare, unlike anyone we had ever known. Small towns offer no anonymity, and the scrutiny must have been painful to newcomers. It was such an adventure to think of someone having a fresh start, of people forgetting mistakes of your kindergarten experience, that I was often jealous of new students. How nice it must be to be new!

Luckily for me, “uptown” Farmland now has a booming business district, right in the middle of what has been designated Historic Farmland, where new cobblestone walks and old-fashioned looking streetlamps have replaced the bland and broken fixtures of the 1960’s. The four blocks of three-story brick Victorian buildings have never looked better, and due to the upsurge of tourist traffic to this rural icon, the town still functions as a town. Shopkeepers chant the motto, “It’s the only Farmland in America,” as some clever marketer indeed discovered that there is only one incorporated town in the United States named Farmland. Farmland USA—buy the merchandise. Many similar towns in rural Indiana have barely held on.

My town has a boutique gift-shop with hand-dipped chocolates like my grandmother used to make for Christmas, but you can buy one any day of the year. A stained-glass window craftman moved onto Main Street while I was still in school, and we all shook our heads, “He’ll never make it. Where does he think he is?” At the time that store opened, the “Five and Dime” had just boarded up, and Bailey’s Corner Drug Store cut back its menu and serving hours. But the store displays gorgeous work, just as it has for twenty years, right on Main Street in a store full of sunny windows. Across the street is a florist. A florist, in Farmland! A “country store” filled with country-ish things a little cornier than the former “Five and Dime” would stock. It’s a little insincere, but I will cut them some slack. Bailey’s has been transformed into The Chocolate Moose, a full-scale ice cream and soda shop, which added even more twisty-barstools and removed the pharmacy and magazine rack, and all pretense of being practical for anything.

The crowning additions as of my last visit to Farmland are the Farmland Cultural Center, a gallery of antique photos of famous houses and people in Farmland, AND the freshest oil paintings of town landscapes by a Mexican-American artist named Angel Mercado. And Main Street Coffee, which roasts its own blends of coffee in the windowed showroom by the coffee bar. The store sports the original pressed tin ceiling and polished wood floors—a Bostonian coffee shop would be jealous of the space and light, the gallery displaying paintings in the adjoining room. And the coffee is amazing.

What all of this means to me is that people no longer must leave Farmland to make an income, are no longer consigned to bag groceries if they wish to stay in town. It also means that factory jobs twenty minutes away are not the only employment. Bob the Butcher is long retired, and he did not share the recipe for his ham salad, though the grocery store still operates, with its Red Gold Tomatoes mural adorning the outside wall.

I am not sure how I feel about all of this movement to “upscale,” to luxury treats and luxury experiences of small town life, versus the hardware store and dusty feed mill so necessary in the past. I am not sure how I feel that my dad had never been inside the coffee shop, though it had been bustling for a year and he does like coffee. He does not feel it is “for him,” but for some unseen wealthier class who must be visiting from somewhere. The gift shop with the hand-dipped chocolates—has he been there? I am glad there is a hip little group of adults there, my age and successful enough. I saw a DVD for sale called Fright in Farmland, a pulp horror flick playing on small town themes and inside jokes. It starred some men who had been popular in my high school years. Like my father, I didn’t buy it, though it intrigues me. It seemed like it wasn’t for me. But the coffee, now that’s for me, and the chocolate shop offers flavored iced tea samples that make me want to shop all day. For postcards of Farmland, at $1.50 per card.