Back Porch Break

On Becoming a Mountain Mama

August 14, 2017 by Nancy 18 Comments

As of this month I’ve been a resident of Colorado for 40 years. As I thought about writing a blog about my transformation from a Tennessee girl to a Colorado mountain mama, I remembered a column I wrote for the Gazette on the occasion of my 20th Anniversary as a Coloradoan! So here it is again.

This month I’ve been a resident of Colorado for twenty years. Twenty falls gilded in aspen leaves. Twenty winters gazing at snow-covered mountains resembling pink cotton candy in the early morning light. Twenty summers of hot days under bright blue skies, and cool nights under a canopy of stars.

Although there’s nothing magical about the number twenty, it forces me to reconsider my status as a Tennessean just passing through. Tennessee will always be home. It only takes an instant to transport myself back to steamy Southern summers where the air is heady with honeysuckle as I sit on the back porch watching for the first lightning bugs to reveal their flight paths. Racing barefooted across the dewy grass to catch one of them in tiny, cupped hands is a memory every child should have.

Those are the summers of my youth, and I’ll always be able to recall them. But more and more frequently I find myself contemplating all I would miss if I couldn’t spend summer here in Colorado.

The Summer of ‘77, I didn’t care. I thought this was the most desolate place I had ever seen, and I couldn’t imagine being exiled here forever. The hot August winds blew through the house and threatened to blow the drapes right off their rods, so I closed the windows. Then, since there was no air-conditioning, I was just sure we would all suffocate.

But soon the fields around our house were full of Black-eyed Susans as far as I could see. I remember walking the dog through those fields and feeling like I was part of a movie set. Just that simply, the twenty-year courtship began.

As if to entice me into declaring Colorado my home state, the Summer of ’97 is especially enchanting. Due to generous spring snows, the roadsides are greener than I’ve ever seen them. On a June road trip, we saw fields of yucca so plush it looked like a marching band in plumed hats was parading toward us. We drove past newborn foals frolicking behind their mothers and sheep lounging in beds of wildflowers.

I think we all come to love what we know. It occurs to me that I know Colorado. I know things like where to buy night crawlers in Cotapaxi or copper pots in Frisco. I know where the picnic tables are on our favorite ski slopes, and due to Colorado’s coquettish, unpredictable weather, I know I’m as likely to be able to picnic there in February as in July.

More than anything, I’ve come to know and love these ever-changing mountains. I’ve seen the “purple mountain majesties” Katharine Lee Bates immortalized when she penned “America the Beautiful” from Pikes Peak. I’ve seen it “raining fire in the sky” in the Western sunset John Denver sings about in “Rocky Mountain High.”

Recently a young buck with fuzzy antlers chose to laze away his afternoon in our back yard. On assignment at an office building on the north end of Colorado Springs, I gazed out the window as a baby fawn on wobbly legs cavorted behind her mother. As I write this, two hummingbirds are vying for position at the feeder at my office window.

Great show, Colorado! It’s taken twenty years, but I’m ready to profess my love for you. Now I officially have two home states. If home is where your heart is, then this feels a lot like home.

May I just add, this is how much I love you, Colorado—times two now that we’ve been together 40 years!

Family Ties

July 30, 2017 by Nancy 24 Comments

Mid-summer brings farmers’ markets, and I can’t visit one without looking for the freshest green beans I can find. Not just because I love fresh green beans, but because of the memory of close family ties they always invoke.

A memory I have of my grandmother feels as if it happened only yesterday. She is sitting on our screened-in back porch with a big silver bowl in her lap and a big brown bag of what we call “string beans” in Tennessee on the table beside her. I am 12, and as I watch her snap, snap, snap I’m lulled by the rhythm of her pace and mesmerized by the sight of her gnarled 90-year-old fingers as she works. The method she used until it was second nature, and which is now second nature to me, involves snapping off each end, peeling down the string, flipping the bean around and giving two quick snaps between your thumb and forefinger. Snap…snap…zip, snap, snap. That’s the string bean symphony.

I remember wondering if the bowl fit perfectly in her lap because it was made to do so, or if her lap had just molded to the shape of the bowl over the years.

On those hot summer afternoons I had my best talks with Granny as I watched her snap. I would occasionally ask a question, knowing it could be quite a few more snaps before I got an answer. My questions were both trivial and monumental, but her answers always seemed profound and comforting.

My grandmother died two days after suffering a stroke on her 90th birthday. Through the years, each time I sit down with a bag of beans to snap I feel tremendously comforted and reassured that everything will be okay. It gives me a feeling of connection that transcends time and location. When my first granddaughter was two and visiting with us, I encouraged her to snap string beans with me. After snapping off each end, I handed the bean to her and told her to break it into little pieces, never dreaming she’d be able to do so without help. Her chubby little hands tightened down on the bean and she twisted it until it snapped. “Ouch!” she said, as if the snapping noise indicated the bean had been hurt. I handed her another bean. “Ouch…ouch,” she exclaimed as she gave it two perfect snaps.

The tears in my eyes as I watched her caught me by surprise. Now a new generation was snapping beans. Ninety-year-old, gnarled fingers…two-year-old, pink, chubby ones…we were all connected. The strings that hold us together can be as simple, and strong, and purposeful as those on the beans. With a lot of “ouch” when they break.

In his book Growing Wise in Family Life, Chuck Swindoll writes, “I know of no realm of life that can provide more companionship in a lonely world or greater feelings of security and purpose in chaotic times than the close ties of a family.” In Psalm 68:6 (NIV) we read, “God sets the lonely in families.” In the day in which we live families are greater gifts than ever. Encourage those you love to remember their family ties and draw strength from them.

If this sounds familiar that’s because it is excerpted in part from my first Back Porch Break newspaper column in 1995! Hope it still brings a smile or a tear–the good kind!

Summer Reading

June 29, 2017 by Nancy 13 Comments

Any book we read in the summer seems to have staying power. As refreshing as a cool glass of iced tea, it seeps into our subconscious and stays there. Reading outdoors in the fresh air may be part of the stimulation.

I just finished reading A Voice in the Wind and An Echo in the Darkness by Francine Rivers. These are the first two books in the three-part Mark of the Lion series. I’m dying to jump into the third book but have to pace myself since our summer book club won’t discuss that book until the end of August. Still, this series will always remind me of the Summer of ’17!

Maybe it isn’t really reading in the summer that makes the content more memorable, but the fact that we take the time to read a book in sittings long enough to absorb what’s being said. I’m in one of those “reading periods” right now, before all our summer visitors descend, and it’s glorious. Since the days grew longer and the television programming grew even less desirable, I’m loving making reading my pastime of choice. When I read before bed, it seems like the cadence of the author’s writing lulls me to sleep and dwells in my dreams. It just stays with me.

Our passion to read, and to read with the intent to retain and be changed, is what we hope to pass on to our kids and grandkids. You know the ones—the kids listening to their ipods while text messaging their friends. If only they could know the thrill we knew of coming out of the library each summer carrying a stack of books that went from our waists to our chins—and knowing we had two whole weeks to read them! Or waiting with bare feet in the hot summer sun to enter the air-conditioned bookmobile, where the cool air combined with the smell of leather-bound books was intoxicating. E-readers are wonderful, especially when traveling because you can take many books without adding weight to your luggage. But there’s just nothing like the smell and feel of a real book.

How well I remember reading as a child. If I didn’t have a library book to read, I would just start in on my collection of Nancy Drew mysteries and read them over and over. I would have loved it if a free lending library, the birdhouse-sized ones which have popped up recently in towns everywhere, had been within walking distance from my house.

Whatever else we lose, we must not lose reading. We have to pass along our passion for escaping with a good book and allowing it to educate us, restore us, change us, and so become a small part of who we are. Happy summer reading!

Where Have All the Hummers Gone?

June 20, 2017 by Nancy 14 Comments

As much as I love hummingbirds, the only ones in my life right now are the ceramic magnetic ones on my refrigerator. I knew moving east of town, farther away from the mountains, would mean fewer hummers at our house. Still, last year we had a slow but steady trickle of visitors. This year? Not a one so far.

I’m beginning to have hummingbird hallucinations. Was that the telltale sound of a hummer in flight? Nope. Probably a visiting grandson with his fidget toy. Was that a hummer headed to the feeder? Nope. Just a small finch hoping to peck at the holes with the sweet water and get an energy boost.

I haven’t given up hope. I know that there’s always an influx of the amazing little birds in July. That’s when the rufouses appear. Even if my only visitors are those rude and belligerent rufouses, I would happily settle for them during this hummer drought.

I’ve tried to figure out what might be detaining them. I put the feeder out on tax day as recommended. I change the nectar often. Yes, the cats hang out on the deck but that’s never deterred the birds before. I bought a fancy new feeder and wondered if they weren’t impressed, so I put up the old feeder. Still no visits. Just a forlorn feeder.

Now I’m beginning to imagine they met some ill fate on the trip here. Could they have been held up in customs crossing the borders in South America or Mexico? Their little tiny suitcases rifled through? Or maybe they were all captured and forced to join some hummingbird circus where attendees are charged sugar cubes to watch their aerial antics!

Wherever they are, I hope they are well. And I hope they come here soon.

Yardening

May 26, 2017 by Nancy 10 Comments

It’s Memorial Day Weekend and if local nurseries are any indication almost everyone is ready to get into gardening. Or is what you do really yardening instead? There’s a difference, you know.

First, the wardrobe differs drastically. Gardeners wear floppy straw hats, sturdy pants with big pockets and loops for hanging tools, and clogs. Yardeners work in the yard wearing a hat from Disney World, cut-off blue jeans, and the tennis shoes they bought the year they graduated from high school.

Then there are the tools themselves. Gardeners have tools with matching handles. Each tool has a special function—and a special spot in the wooden gardener’s bench at the end of the day. Yardeners are more likely to be out digging with an old serving spoon from the kitchen. They just toss it in the kids’ sandbox once they have the petunias in the ground.

Gardeners have a master calendar for all their gardening tasks, such as dividing seedlings, rotating rose bushes, whatever it is Martha Stewart finds to fill up her calendar even in the dead of winter. They wouldn’t dream of pulling weeds unless it was on the schedule.

Yardeners, on the other hand, may lapse into their yardening tasks quite spontaneously. I once talked to a freelance artist who explained she had missed her deadline because she went out to get the mail and noticed a few weeds growing by the mailbox. Naturally, she stopped to pull them up, and four hours later she was still out in the yard pulling weeds. I understood completely. That’s yardening at its best.

If you see people strolling their grounds, or setting up tents for a garden party, they are probably gardeners. Yardeners are more likely to be seen standing in their front yards on a Saturday morning drinking coffee, contemplating brown spots, and staring down the dandelions. The only grounds on their minds are the ones in the bottom of the coffee mug.

Of course gardeners don’t have to deal with dandelions because, you guessed it—they don’t have any. The anti-weed substance spread with their lawn fertilizer takes care of them. Yardeners, on the other hand, wield little spray bottles of environmentally friendly “Dandelion DOA,” and pop each stubborn dandelion root up with an old screwdriver. (The screwdriver conveniently fits in the back pocket of the cut-off jeans and is equally useful for setting the choke on the lawn mower.)

The aesthetic results differ, too. Gardeners carefully coordinate the shades of green they combine in any given area of the landscape, and are careful to plant flowers which bloom sequentially, clustered in color groups of cool or hot tones. Yardeners, however, are happy whenever anything turns green, and they’ve been known to water weeds for weeks before realizing they weren’t zinnias.

I have to admit I’m basically a yardener. Thinking I could actually improve my skills, however, I checked out a book on gardening from the library. Unfortunately it isn’t much help, as it was written by two perfectly lovely people in Pennsylvania who are completely spoiled by being able to plant with the assumption that whatever they plant will grow. The “casual gardens” in their yard, photographed for the book, could easily be paid-admission botanical gardens anywhere west of the Mississippi.

Gardener or yardener? Whichever you are, it’s time to get out there. And remember, those dandelions grow while you sleep.

Encouraging Moms of All Ages

May 11, 2017 by Nancy 10 Comments

“I can handle anything,” the T-shirt slogan reads. “I’m a mother.”

Certainly it often seems as if mothers can handle anything. Who else can talk on the phone while making the kids’ lunches, feeding the dog, and checking the newspaper for coupons? Moms who work outside of the home do all that before leaving for work in the morning—not to mention getting the kids out the door, picking up the house, and setting the pork chops out to thaw.

Is it any wonder mothers need encouragement? Even the most competent of mothers has moments in the middle of the night, or when she’s racing to pick up a sick child at school, when she thinks, “I just don’t know if I can do this any longer.” The truth is, she has to. No one can replace a mother.

One thing I’ve realized as my own kids have grown up and married is that while the role of mothering changes with time, a mother is a mother until the day she dies. Women in different stages of mothering need our encouragement in different ways.

More than anything else, the young mom at home with toddlers needs a sanity break. The most encouraging thing we can do for her is to give her time to restore herself emotionally, physically, or spiritually. Movie tickets, a gift certificate to a beauty salon, or just a coupon for “two hours all to yourself” are extremely encouraging as long as any offer we make is accompanied by babysitting arrangements. If you stay with the kids, when the mom comes back tell her all the ways you observe that she is positively molding the lives of her little charges.

The mother of a teenager may need more encouragement than anyone. One day everything is going great and she’s just sure her teen is going to change the world for the better. The next day a phone call comes, or a discussion explodes, and things look bleak at best, impossible at worst. The most effective encouragement for these moms often comes from mothers who have been through the teen years and seen their kids emerge on the other side stable and whole. (They really DO grow through the angst of being a teenager. And they really will tell you that they love you again!) If you know a mom struggling with a teenager now, write a note or call to say “hang in there” in an encouraging way.

Those blessed to still have moms in their seventies, eighties, and beyond know that these moms deserve and need our encouragement, too. They need to hear that they did a good job of rearing their children, and that they are doing a good job of leaving a legacy of love to their families. If we believe this to be true, we must never miss an opportunity to tell them so.

My mother was always encouraged when someone outside the family said something complimentary about one of her three grown girls. If you are acquainted with the mother of a friend, consider writing her a note and letting her know how much of her you see in the friend you love—or just thank her for rearing such a wonderful daughter.

“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children,” wrote William Makepeace Thackeray. Every mother knows that it’s only by God’s grace, and with His help, that she is worthy of the name and able to “handle anything.” Let’s give the moms we know and love His encouragement through us. Happy Mother’s Day!