Friday, July 4, 2025

Alternate Lives

Every now and then I think things like, "What if I'd just had two children? That would have been a normal enough thing for a person to have done. What would that be like?" 

It's just such a strange thing to imagine up different lives that one might have just as reasonably lived as the one they are living. 

Can you imagine that one for example? Just ... Abe and Daisy???

That phase of raising small children would have already been such a distant part of my existence. I'd just have two kids, who had long since moved away from home, in graduate school.

What would I have been doing these past years? 

It's like those choose-your-own-ending books I used to read in elementary. 

Some experiences and situations are beyond our control, that is true. But it's intriguing to me to consider how much of our life experience we choose and create. And how much we might have created very differently. 

It's boggling to me for some reason.

In any case, for good or ill (ha!), here I am, raising chillens, like I was 20-plus years ago.

My Mom at 89 and Such

A recent PET scan showed lumps on my mom's lungs and thyroid. 

We are still waiting biopsies and more information. But when I called her (to comfort her, ha, and then immediately burst into tears that needed comforting themselves), she shushed me calmly with an, "Well I am turning 89 this summer after all. With or without these lumps, I might drop dead tomorrow." 

Haha. My dear mother. 

I need to hedge that "89" business about with this though: It's the same thing I feel compelled to clarify when I tell people I have 10 kids. 

"I have 10 kids. But it isn't like TEN kids." 

It's true, you know. You hear "10 kids" and suddenly your mind is full of images of children swinging wildly about on ceiling fans, and children sliding down banisters, while other children sit--tied up and with gags in their mouths--at the mercy of some other siblings carrying tomahawks and making war cries; bags of flour and jugs of milk are spilled on every surface, windows are broken, and the cacophony of voices is deafening. 

Sometimes we might resemble that a little :), but mostly I think people find it surprisingly normal around here. 10 kids. But not like ... 10 kids.

I would describe my mom at 89 in the same way. "Sure she's 89. But she's not like ... 89!" 

Whatever you imagine up when you hear 89, it isn't my mother. 

She drives, and cleans, and gives sound advice, and knows how to work a computer better than I do. She trims branches and hauls them off, and makes Thanksgiving dinners. She teaches primary and plays the piano when needed for various church functions. She even shovels her driveway if one of the grandkids perpetually living in her basement don't get to it first. Why, just the other day I took her a skirt I needed taken in, and she deftly fixed it up. 

While she claims she could drop dead tomorrow, she could just as likely, with her genes, live another decade. And, while, as I said, we don't know anything about what these lumps mean yet, being confronted with even the idea of her leaving has been incredibly rattling for me.

I've been trying to make sense of what I've been feeling. My dad going nine years ago was a hard loss. But somehow, as long as my mom was still here, it felt like all my childhood--all of those memories and experiences, despite time moving me on from them, were still safely there and intact: in her, in that home she keeps safe for us. 

It feels almost as if her parting would blow forever out of my grasp all the last bits of all that joyful living that I cling to: waking on Thanksgiving morning to the smell of turkey, cuddled up on my top bunk listening to The Hobbit, waiting in the hall in freshly made nightgowns to go into the living room with the massive and colorfully lit tree on Christmas morning, General Conference playing on a radio in the kitchen--the voices always a moment behind the ones coming from the TV in the living room--while my mom peeled and cut potatoes for our in-between-sessions meal, sleeping out on the deck, coloring Easter eggs and carving pumpkins at the kitchen table, sledding down the "no-dump" hill, my mom at the kitchen closet sewing (always with pins in her mouth) or looking through her microfilm reader for family names, etc.

Anyway, it's all made me very sentimental about life.

My mom used to jokingly say that maybe Polk's End (my childhood home) could be ours in the Celestial Kingdom someday. Only now I am thinking it more seriously. Please, somehow, let that place, and every part of the living in it, be eternally ours. At the very least I need to be able to walk into my dad's office, lie on his couch, and listen to KBYU FM and his fingers typing away on his typewriter. I feel actually physical pain thinking of those things passing out of my reach forever. Somehow, they mustn't!
(Above: The stairway going up to the attic and my dad's office. Below: My dad's office as it looks today.)

Outside of the House

What is this? Power? Or, at least, a ditch where some sort of power cable will shortly run to the house?


Well that's exciting. Power is a lovely thing to have. 

For example: won't power on this porch at night be nice for welcoming people home?

And power in these rooms when darkness falls (and the windows won't cut it)? (I was there checking on some things as night fell recently. A little spooky.)


And wouldn't power (lights!) be nice for Mike to see by when he's looking around at how house stuff is coming (which is always late because of his long work hours)?


Speaking of how house stuff is coming: It's been exciting, yes. But also a bit discouraging. So often we go over and find work that was done sloppily or altogether wrong. Does this always happen with new builds? Windows placed incorrectly, holes in the cement (for wires to come up through) drilled in the wrong spots, closets done wrong, etc. (Recently an entire, huge, uninstalled window was left leaning in such a way that a strong wind blew it over and shattered it.)

Does nobody measure twice and cut once anymore? 

That part of building has caused us far more stress than I had anticipated. You hate to constantly be complaining, but even more you hate to pay every cent you have and will ever have ... for work done poorly on a place you hope to live in until you die.

But! 

Goodness.

Let's put things back in proper perspective, self.

Even if the entire house blows to the ground as easily as that first pig's house (you know, the one who built with straw). Well. ... We still have all of the farm's outside! :)

And that ain't nothin'!

(The frogs truly are in rare form just now. The kids only have to exert the most minimal effort to catch one.)
(We don't even keep the nets in the barn anymore. They are just permanently left by the pond since they are in use every time we are there.)
(But ohh the light by the pond! I can't believe I will soon be able to have such photos any old time I feel like walking outside.)
(Should you be curious: Those streaks that look like heavenly rays are actually just the stalks of yellow grass I was crouched in while trying to get these photos. I think bits of flowers, trees, or grass up close to your lens add something lovely.)
(Walking from the barn to the house presents you with this charming view. Should the house not end up blowing to the ground at the first wind, it will be a wonderful sight for years to come.)
(At some point we need to dig out the pond and put some type of aerator in it. It has gotten so full of ... whatever it is that grows in ponds that it's become almost impossible to paddle little boats around in it anymore. I just worry that bringing a track hoe in to dig it out will tear up all the lovely stuff growing around the edges and leave it a mess for some time. So. We shall see. One of many projects that we have in mind for the farm.) 
(Sometimes I pull out a little metal ring--maybe an inch long?--that Mike cut for me and take pictures through it. It makes the light reflect in crazy ways. It's too much for some people, I know, but I love the feel of light circling everywhere.)
(Karate Kid?)
(Penny took the camera and took a bunch of photos of me and Mike. Which I will add with abandon since I sometimes fear my kids will have no pictures of me when I am gone--as I am always the one taking them. Not that I plan on being gone any time soon mind. Hopefully by the time I actually do they will be so tired of seeing my face that they won't need any photos anyway. Haha.)
(Mike was not taking the majority of these pictures very seriously. ...)
(It's true that Goldie is sometimes living here (when not at EFY), and Daisy comes home fairly often on weekends, but these are the seven kids who have been living full time at home still these past three years.)
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