The Next Chapter

                                   

Bassett Pond, Christmas 2018

    And we're off! It's been almost two years since the Quackmobile made it's way up from California, through Bend, Oregon (where we had our lovely family reunion) and on up to Woodinville to begin what Grandma Judy likes to call "the next lovely chapter." I wasn't with them at that time, I turned around and went back to Montrose from Bend and lived there for the year, but the others have been here in Washington basically since we landed back in the States after our Europe adventure. The others being Mom, Dad, Rachel, Claire, Jacinta and Irene. Rosie's been in Austria since, with a summer spent in California and two Christmases in Washington.
     Rachel, Mom, Dad and I have each taken one or more short trips back to California, but for Claire, Jacinta and Irene it will be the first time back on our home soil for quite some time, and we will all be coming home with the experience of three beautiful, challenging, and growth filled years of time away to enrich and re-frame our perspective on life and home.

     Irene has spent both these years at Cottage Lake Elementary School about two miles from our house. Every day she catches the bus at around 8:50 and rides it back at about 4. A week ago she had her "graduation ceremony," as she and her fifth grade class celebrated the completion of their time in elementary school. It was fun to hear the teachers reference in their speeches to the class various experiences or code words that were incomprehensible to the families gathered there, but which made the entire class of fifth graders (maybe 40 of them? I'm not very good at estimating numbers...) explode in sudden, loud peals of laughter or moans or shouts, giving the rest of us at least an emotional idea of what sort of experience they were remembering together.

"It's a ceremony..."
"It's psychotic!" 

They had a long and fun slideshow of their years there, (with everybody yelling out the names of the students as they guessed at the identity of the baby photos), and it was wonderful to see in the slideshow, and in Irene's experience in general, how smoothly and happily she became very much a part of the class in just two years. Her teachers always had praise for her, she was very involved in the events and was always visiting her various friends or having them over to our house, doing gymnastics with them at Cottage Lake or wherever she could get a ride to. Before I came up here, she helped organize and put on a theater production with her other then-fourth-graders of "The Tale of Despereaux," with a wonderful patient, fun loving and accepting spirit while surrounded by some less committed actors, and I hear the result was charming and successful.

The Tale of Despereaux.

     Although I'm sure there were many challenges to be faced and imperfections at the school (the "worst" that I heard of being that two children arguing over whether vanilla milk or chocolate milk was better were sent to the principles office because of the possible racist connotations of this disagreement...), I've loved to see how much happier she has been there compared with her year of school in Austria (where she was equally committed and successful but less happy), and to know that her year there must have primed her to enjoy these two very much, and to stand up to whatever challenges came her way. She is the first and last Quackenbush to "graduate" fifth grade, and has a unique and interesting, confident and goofy spirit; fitting in every possible sleepover with her friends before she has to leave them, while looking forward to the next adventure in California.

Wonderful, dramatic snow storm in February.  I was so excited
to walk the few miles in the dark morning hours to work, knee deep in snow!

She has also grown much taller in the last few years. When I first came up here I called her Jirene all the time because she had changed so much that my subconscious was always assuming she was Jacinta. She would not let me forget that for some time...
     Jacinta is also very tall, and very lovely. When I came in October, they were all just arriving back from their few months back in Austria with Dad who was teaching a block course, and I know it was difficult for Jakie and Rachel to leave their friends there. Rachel postponed getting a job right away, partly because of wanting to be home with Jakie more, and I've very glad she did. Those girls were such fun to watch interact, they kept each other on a workout regimen and stuck together like two peas in a pod. Both homeschooling, they spent a lot of time together and it cracked me up to see how Jakie made Rachel laugh.

Smile guys! And over topples Jakie...

     I don't know what they'll think when/if they read this, but Jakie's spacey sweetness and disarming goofy obliviousness would put such a sparkle in Rachel's eye and send her off into peals of such genuine laughter that I could see her reaction surprised and lighted her up as much as it did the rest of us to watch. Jakie has made friends up here too, although she began homeschooling after a few months (I think?) as the middle school apparently wasn't a very wholesome environment. She found herself a job for a few weeks helping a lady near by with her horse and garden, but after nearly freezing her toes off without proper shoes while working in the cold, and then the snow making yard work rather useless, she stopped. She loves to go visit her friend Jessica, and she and Jessica bike around Woodinville and meet friends at Cottage Lake, and "hang out at Safeway"-- a testament to the importance and power of a good friendship over a particularly thrilling place or activity.... They have fun there and on their adventures in the neighborhood.

On a hike with Jakie at Little Si.

Just the other day, Jakie biked and I ran a few miles to the little coffee place called "Common Grounds" across from Safeway and I got her a smoothie and me a coffee, and we walked home in the beautiful sunny summer weather, under the amazing number of beautiful pine trees and billowy clouds. On our way we passed a big field across form Bassett pond (another adventure area) and we passed this creepy scarecrow like figure that stands on two red poles in the grass, and she nonchalantly walked straight into the grass up to her shoulders, pushing away plants and braving the spiders and snakes (I told her I'd seen some snakes there) just to get a closer look at him. It made me think of reading about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and their adventures by the river, exploring what they see around them, and the stories that come from "normal" "boring" days.

And... the freaky inexplicable straw man.

I admire that spirit in Jakie, the ability to "see what's there" with no particular agenda. Curiosity and action in small things, which no doubt leads to an ability to live the same spirit in many other ways and situations. A few weeks ago Jacinta and I had dinner together at home, I guess everyone else was gone somewhere, and we decided to go for a walk. It only took us about an hour to gather ourselves, each going downstairs to get something, then to clean up dinner, then to get one other thing, then to get dressed, then to realize the mosquitoes would eat us and get dressed again, all with the happy awareness that with all our dillydallying the sun wouldn't go all the way down till about 9pm so we could keep dillydallying, and eventually we made it outside still in the sunlight and walked to Bassett Pond. That place changes drastically with the seasons, all the grass had grown about four feet since we'd been there, but we found our way to the water which was completely covered in duckweed (I had to convince Jacinta that despite sturdy appearances she should NOT try to walk on it). As we watched the "cotton candy sky" and the first star come out I climbed my tree and sat up high while she stood on a log, imitating with her whole self the ridiculous frog/duck squawk that we kept hearing in the bushes while doing an "Earth Dance."

Rachel and Claire enjoying a conversation with Betty after a match with
the High School tennis team!

     Rachel and Claire both played together on the Woodinville High School tennis team both years they were in Washington, and Jakie on the Timbercrest Team. I was able to watch Claire and Rachel play doubles together last year when I came for a visit, and although they didn't play doubles as much this year, they and Jakie were ranked top of their teams (of course) and had fun in their practices and matches and bus rides to away matches. Claire and Rachel had a new coach this year, Betty, who used to play tennis with Grandma, and she transformed the team and their experience.

They didn't win very many matches, but they had a new team spirit and sense of fun and camaraderie that hadn't been there for any of them before. She was always making them laugh and setting them at ease in situations that could have been stressful, and Rachel and Claire had a chance to express their appreciation for her when they were interviewed and photographed as the Quackenbush doubles team for the Woodinville Weekly Newspaper. She was another special soul who I got to see light up my sisters' faces and send them off laughing just by how she was. Loud, abrupt, charming, lighthearted and caring.
     Claire has been amazing us all with her dedication to her schoolwork and healthy diet, she's been doing something called intermittent fasting for a year or so now, and it's been a marvelous success for her. She is a whiz with her school and self motivated and interested, studying Latin with Jakie and Dad and already looking forward to next years homeschooling and eventually college at TAC in a few years!

     Rachel worked two jobs this year, McDonalds with Mom and Rosie (when she was here over Christmas) and Value Village with Claire, as well as homeschooling and prepping for the SAT.  I don't much like shopping so I didn't visit them too often at Value Village, but when I did it was a joy to see their confident smiling faces and cute little green aprons as they organized clothes and laughed with their coworkers. Claire often came home with new stories of old Mexican men asking her out for a date, and filling me in on her latest clever tactics for avoiding them. She describes these stories as new experiences that she takes in, thinks over, learns something new, considers the best course of action, and watches as it succeeds and she becomes more skilled in peacefully and cheerily rising above weirdos while doing her job and happy to have a new, usually comical experience under her belt. I also love to hear Rachel's very different way of experiencing and expressing her customer service adventures, in her "well that just happened" dead pan, sarcastic, seemingly apathetic way, which puts just the right cover over her wit and makes her stories hilarious to listen to because of her spirit that they reveal in the telling. And she has such a wonderful spirit. She describes to me the small talk that happens at the register at Value Village, and how she participates and smiles and laughs in the appropriate way, while usually enjoying a Rachel joke all the while. For example, she told me of a conversation and something resembling a "bonding" moment between her and a customer about the the hum drum of work "yeah, just another day" "you know how it is" and they said, "Well, just think, it could be worse, I mean you COULD be working for MCDONALDS! HA HA" And Rachel, embracing the moment by laughing with them out loud and at them inside "HA! You're RIGHT, now THAT would be EMBARRASSING. Ha, GOOD THING... Have a nice day."

   
I worked at Mercury's coffee for a while, quit because I didn't like it, worked at Hallmark for a few months until they found out they would have to close (not because of me...), and then for about three months I worked as a Baker at Safeway from 4am to 12:30pm, and then would drive me new shiny blue car to Hallmark (with my eyes sometimes trying to sleep a little on the way...) to help them close up. In March they finally closed, so I went down to my one job and continued working with an acting group that I got involved with when I auditioned for "The MouseTrap" with the Woodinville Repertory Theatre. Since we came back from Austria I had auditioned and gotten call backs for several plays, and still hoped to be involved in a show somehow. I auditioned for "Crimes of the Heart" and had call backs on Martis Gras, so I spent a rather lovely Ash Wednesday, deciding not to check my phone for the casting results but to put aside the whole question for the Holy Day, though expecting to have a "yea or nay" by maybe the next day.... I was very grateful for the coincidence of Lent and what was for me a very dramatic event, (auditioning and hoping to land a part), because it gave me a very good and peaceful perspective and ability to enjoy and live the drama without it being a reason for fear or worry. Those were some dramatic weeks for me however, because after that peaceful Wednesday they couldn't decide on the cast and didn't contact me for about a week, and then just to say they needed more callbacks. I was happy to hear that, having assumed they "didn't want me," and finally, after the second round of call backs I was offered the role of Babe Botrelle and began a very busy few months. I remember I was sitting in my car at home, no longer so worked up about the whole thing because they'd left me hanging for so long I think I'd burnt out.... Jakie had just passed by my car walking down our driveway to go to Jessica's, we said hello and she was all the way down at the bottom of our steep little street when I opened the email. My family had all been very involved in my hoping-for-the-part drama of the last weeks, so I opened my door and yelled out "Jakie! I GOT BABE!" And she ran up the street and I ran down and so I had a person to hug and squeal with with the longed for news! The show was a wonderful success, I made five new fantastic friends, learned a lot, and discovered I could function all right with four hours of sleep at night and three hour naps in the afternoons five days a week (I don't intend to make that a habit though).

     We had twelve shows, Grandma faithfully coming to about five and bringing everybody she ever knew, and I had a blast and even got paid for it. I had fun sharing my experience with Susan, my much-feared-by-my-coworkers but actually extremely sweet and funny and normal Bakery Manager, who heard all about my experience from "I like acting" to the audition, to rehearsals and shows, as we discussed (over donuts and bagels and cakes) whatever came to our minds, and who came to the show and brought her whole family along with her. Hjalmer Anderson, the producer and sound designer and director of other shows, knew Jeannie and directed her in several shows back in the day, so that was a wonderful connection and experience for him, me and Grandma Judy, and our final show was dedicated to the memory of Jeannie on her birthday, June 9th. Hjalmer has offered me a role in "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams, and another role in the play to my "lawyer" from Crimes, so he said whenever I can make it back we'll do the show. The tentative plan is in three years, when I'm done with school at TAC where I'm going this fall. We'll see what happens!

Celebrating after our opening show!

     Mom has stayed busy and wonderful, working at McDonalds, lecturing at Mass, taking Communion to people in a nursing home, making our delicious dinners and always having time to drop whatever she was doing and lie on my bed with me to help me talk or feel through whatever existential dilemmas are on my mind that day. There was a volunteer appreciation dinner at the church last week, and then a potluck to see our family off the other day, and so I've gotten to see a little more the effect she's had on people and how much she is loved and appreciated by them. On her last day at McDonalds she said she was working at the window and someone said "tap out for a minute," so she turned around to see her whole team standing with flowers and cards and cupcakes for her-quite the send off.

Visiting Lael and Martin at their new wonderful house!

She doesn't elaborate on those things of course, but she lights people up wherever she spends time. I see it on their faces when they talk to her.
     Daddy's been down in California the last few weeks, getting all the work started and on track, and visiting with family. He's home now, and just finished packing up the trailer and van and securing it safely so it's all ready to go. We're all packed up and most of us will ride in my car while he takes the van and the trailer (which we hope will stop when he breaks and go when he wants and such, but he's gonna take the trip a little slower just in case...)

     On my birthday Margaret, who's been stationed in Bremerton (a very wonderful thing for us because we get to see her more often!) married Alex Talbot, and we had a lovely ceremony and celebration. They are a beautiful couple and we all finally got to meet Alex and his family and enjoyed each other very much, with a wonderful birthday/Easter/wedding meal, and then singing and violin and music in the evening, and it went on late into the night. Thanks be to God!

     Grandma has been a steady example and support and beauty-bringer, and we are all so grateful for the home she's given us these years and the time we've gotten to spend with her. It's been a real treasure to stay long enough to discover the beauty she's put into her normal, and to see all the hard work and hard rest she puts into creating a full and beautiful life in so many ways.

Her home is one big work of art, and she still gives herself wholeheartedly to wherever she is and whoever she's with. I think we'll all do well if we can be a little like her all our life.

                     

Goodbye for now, Woodinville!

"You are being enriched in every way for all generosity, which through us produces thanksgiving to God."

2 Corinthians 9

 

God is Generous With Us!

                                                        Pervasive obstacle: "Oh, this won't do."
                                                                Notice, and say another thing.
                                                   

                                       Divine Contemplation as experienced by the Quacks:

     Mom and I were noting the indescribable richness and abundance of reality and bemoaning the fact of our complete inability to capture, retain, describe or understand it.
      Mom: "We have to just throw in the towel. It's too much."
      Mom: "No, actually, just give it entirely to the Holy Spirit and tell Him it's not fair. Tell Him He has to guide us and make clear what we are to do, and if He doesn't, then *brandishes a threatening fist at the air* we've got a bone to pick."
      Mom: “So now we see that we really can’t go to heaven because it’s just not even enough to say that it would blow your socks off and fry all your circuits.”

And here's a little Gemma background from the last few years, before I describe a tiny bit of Quack life in Washington...

For me, making resolutions usually backfires. I become wrapped up in my intense effort to make something happen, to change something, to “be better”, and either I drop it, or I do it extremely well and am miserable, feeling as though there’s a policeman breathing down my neck all the time. So when I think of resolutions, I think of the purpose of them for me: to be a better person, to improve my life and feel happier, thus improving the lives of those around me and making them happier, to wake myself up to live and experience more fully and be more what I’m meant to be. The most fruitful resolution for me, then, is one that I have to remake all the time, and it’s no good to have too many so I like to stick with this one. I watch it develop and change faces different years, and see how it guides my life toward those purposes in a more organic way. It’s sort of a commitment to an attitude, which makes it hard to explain and also easy to forget, and a constant challenge to live.

I loved to bike from Cesena to Cesenatico and the Sea.

I went to Austria with my family three years ago, was dating long distance the whole time, broke up two weeks before coming back. So I moved in with brother and sister in law, it felt like the beginning of a dreary time marked by my first big job, first year really away from my little sisters and parents, no community, no friends, no plans, no desires, just a lot of sad and a lot of fear of missing everything good and having nothing. A lot of fruitful silence. Counseling. Slowly learning to believe in patience, to not lose heart just because I had no prospects or plans or ideas. To let myself not have a plan, to be open and to explore, to learn to take risks. I flew up to visit family in Washington in April, celebrated my 21 birthday with them, feeling the tension between relaxing with gratitude for what I have and the awareness that I couldn’t stay forever with my bother and sister in law in California. I spent my birthday learning to see it in a new way, as a day for me to consent to seeing my life as good, to consent to the blessings that surrounded me, to thank God for all the experiences I’d had and to trust again that a life full of gifts is not, in fact, evidence that they’re running out. As obvious as that may seem to many of you, it’s often very hard for me to believe, and becomes a daily struggle as I look behind me and see things I’ve loved that have passed on.

Flowers in Massa

I woke up the day after my birthday and saw an email that my Dad had sent from a woman in Italy, looking for an au pair to help teach her family English. She wanted someone for a month, in a month. I emailed her back that morning, and thus began the planning of a trip to Italy. So I spent the summer in Italy, working as an au pair and then on to three farms I knew next to nothing about. I found out about a program in which you can show up at farms all over the world and work for your stay, and I thought that sounded really neat, so I paid $40 and joined the Italian group. Before I knew it, I was taking an uber at 4am to LAX to fly to Italy “for the summer”. I have a thousand little and big stories I could tell about this summer. But mostly I felt like I was plunging into one completely unknown situation after another, from the moment when my friend who picked me up with a taxi at the airport in Bologna left the next day to fly back to the States and I found myself alone in an elevator, in a hotel in Bologna knowing not a soul south of Austria or East of LA, to getting off the train and walking up the stairs looking for two people who I’d never seen in my life to pick me up and take me “home,” to getting on a train to go to a farm where I’d only communicated with one person with a short email in Italian, and hoping I’d have a place to spend the night when I arrived... These were not easy situations for me to put myself in. No safe place to escape to, (although I did get to have my own room for the first time in my life...) I didn’t even know which farms I’d be going to when I arrived as an au pair. As the time came, I began contacting them and a week or two before it was time to go live there for two weeks, I received a response and headed out to the opposite Italian coast, again with my one back pack to see where I’d end up and who I’d meet and what I’d see.

Solo hike above the farm in Massa

.

Sunset from the garden in Assisi

    When I was in Assisi, and suffering from caffeine withdrawal (because they didn’t really believe in coffee) I found myself a little (or a lot) more reflective/broody than normal. I was on my hands and knees in shorts because it was so hot, but trying to kneel on a tarp because the dirt was hard from being baked in the sun and it poked into my knees. I used a pick and my hands to dig with all my might for purple potatoes. I’d lift up the heavy tool, and try to break the hard ground, but gently so as not to hit the delicate potatoes. Once I’d broken it a little I’d go at it with my hands, soil up to my elbows, piling it into my lap and fishing around underneath until I had searched thoroughly and figured I’d likely reached the bottom where they’d laid the seed in the soft dirt months before. The thing about harvesting potatoes is, you never really know when you’ve got the last one, or even nearly the last. Some mounds have one or two, some ten.

What a rich harvest!

The pick was bound to nick a few of them, and then those have to be eaten right away, so the idea is to soften the dirt and find the potatoes without breaking their skin. This was no easy task because the potatoes were obviously completely covered and hard to see until you touched one, since they were only slightly purple on the outside. What I noticed while doing this for several hours by myself in the garden, the sun beating down and not much noise, was the discomfort of having to continually decide when to cover up the spot I was working in and move to the next one. “That’s probably all the potatoes here.” But there was so much dirt it was very hard to tell. So, sometimes, if I’d only found a few, I would keep at it, fishing and digging, or even take the pick to the hard bottom where I thought nobody had dug into for years, and would find a layer of potatoes and realize there were more than I had thought. Once, I accidentally cut off a chunk of one of the potatoes while searching, and what I saw amazed me. Inside was the deepest, most beautiful color purple I’d ever seen. The water inside made it shine in the sunlight, and the color was deep, dark and bright. I paused to admire this lovely surprise for some time before continuing. Over and over again I’d be doing “just one last look” before I gave up on the mound and moved to the next when I’d find one of these precious, purple, disguised treasures, and I’d notice that my first experience was an “aha!” immediately followed by dismay. I realized this dismay came from an automatic, subconscious thought and attitude: “I found one when I didn’t expect it! I didn't plan to find that one, my hand just happened to touch it as it brushed that side of the hole, and I was about to cover it up again! How many others have I missed?”

From my perch on the wall of
St. Francis Basilica in Assisi

This was a difficult time for me, I was lonely and the family I was with didn’t do a lot of other things I was used to, and did a lot of things I didn’t. And it’s amazing how impossible it can be to be open to other people and challenges when all you want in the whole world is a nap. Anyway, some part of me was able to watch and learn, even as I was angry and frustrated at various people and things. Simon, the father of the family, a kind, childlike, completely aggravating man, was unique and admirable. He cared for his family, he educated his sons in real life, thought, art, practice, responsibility, he loved nature and each day woke up with gratitude.

Hard workers harvesting lavender!

He would pause his work putting nets over the apple trees so the birds didn’t eat them all (my job was mostly to stand there with my pole while he clambered all over fitting it together), to stop and marvel at a giant bumble bee in a flower by his feet, like it was the first time he’d ever seen such a thing. Another day, a similar bee landed on his lip while we were outside cutting lavender together, and when he touched it it gave him quite the sting and his lip blew up to at least twice it’s size. After a short break, some comments on how silly he probably looked and how he was glad it had been him and not me since I would have looked funny taking the train, he would go right back to his work, cheerfully marveling at all around him and still looking ridiculous. I was kneeling in the dirt again one day, harvesting more potatoes and wondering why I was so angry at everybody, and no doubt dealing with my continual feeling of inadequate potato digging whenever I found another one, when he walked by and said cheerfully and peacefully, “Look at that! We just move the dirt and there’s a potato! God is generous with us.”

Collected from the garden in Assisi

    It was a continual work, with continual fruit, to remember to assume that I and what I had were enough, and to step across each threshold and say “I’m your new farmhand!” To a small family or agritourism business, and see if they understood my English and had a room for me. And to expect that what came, what I found, would also be enough, and would also be beautiful. And again and again, like finding that purple potato! I was surprised and given things I never ever could have planned, and again and again I’d be afraid I wasn’t living it right, seeking hard enough, planning and being sure to get the full experience. But when I was able to relax that fear and look around and live as though I believed in the goodness and generosity of reality, I was amazed at what I found.

As I flew back to LA, after a truly wonderful last few weeks of being surprised day after day with the beauty of the people I met and places I was in and simple, peaceful tasks I was given to do, I thought of how many lovely things I had just lived when practically all I had done was buy a plane ticket and quit my job in LA, show up and look around. I remember flying out of Denmark after a layover, hot tea in my hand, a lovely picture of wheat blowing in a breeze on the cup and a comfortable window seat with a beautiful view. It was night and I saw the lights of the Copenhagen clearly while wisps of cloud floated above us and then eventually below us as we flew higher, and I saw the outline of the ocean surrounding the island where the lights gave way to huge patches of darkness.  I noticed that I had once again left beautiful people and places I’d fallen in love with, and yet was already being given another new, unique, and beautiful moment to be in. I was on my way to I didn’t know what, past arriving at my sister’s apartment in Pasadena. I resolved, once again, to believe the evidence given me, and to look to whatever came next back in my more familiar, yet still unplanned life, with eyes like Simon’s: ready to see how generous God is with me.