Not long ago Len
and I recognized that we’d had little to no illnesses on our mission of which
less than four months remain. We
shouldn’t have said that. I have long
maintained that when you are young, something happens, and you get hurt,
but as you get older, you can just be standing there and you get hurt. A week ago Saturday our neighbor joined us
for a short walk after Len had already done his usual brisk half an hour. After a few minutes Len took an ordinary step
and suddenly his knee hurt. He
limped home and iced it, which he has been doing several times daily -- plus
using heat once a day, sleeping in the recliner, taking Tylenol, resting,
elevating it, and using a knee compression support. A project! It is improving but it is time to
have it assessed and find out what the cause is and what else might help so he
will be able to get back to his normal activities. It is true that the knee did give him a
warning within the last month by way of complaining when he arose from a
kneeling position one day at work. He
iced it a day or two and thought that was the end of it.
Len is getting
better at directing the young missionaries to do more of the lifting, and
planning smaller orders so book deliveries will fit on our two carts where they
can wait until some young elders are around to unload them. It appears that some recent changes will
reduce the need for as many big moves in the next few months. It will all work out.
FOR MOTHER’S DAY here
are some cuttings about becoming a mother from an article I read online today,
and liked:
I had just graduated from the
university and my husband and I were in limbo.
One night my Dad offered to let us move in to the old cabin built by his
grandparents. The offer was totally
unexpected and strangely enticing.
The cabin sat on 40 acres of woodlands
and pastures. The closest grocery store
was 30 minutes away. Just a month after
we moved in, I found out I was pregnant.
For me, the experience of pregnancy was one of sudden, overwhelming
confinement. For the first time in my
life, I was wholly accountable to my body, to an experience both inside of me
and yet unfolding entirely independent of me.
For the first time, I was truly restricted in what I could do, eat,
experience, and for the first time my focus was intensely, almost
suffocatingly, interior.
In a way the cabin held me just as I
held my baby. Constructed for harsh
pioneer life, it sat steeled and sturdy against the changing seasons. It got so little light that I could sleep
upstairs for 14, 16 hours straight, awaking dazed as if from another life. It created a stark contrast of interior –
home, incubator for family life – and exterior: wildness, a terrain for roving
and exploring and seeing. It taught me
how to come into my motherhood in quietness and focus.
The cabin reinforced that liminal
period of pregnancy, and then, when my baby was born, it strengthened the
surreal, otherworldly, extraordinary and boring experience of infant care. All mothers are at somewhat of a remove,
physically or psychically, during this period, and the cabin made this
manifest. I lived in my own universe of
milk and diapers and squalling and tall summer grasses and tiny breaths and wood
and blessed sleep in quiet darkness.
The cabin allowed me to blend with the world and to live apart from
it. I stepped outside and walked through
the woods with my baby snugged to my chest, listening to her little squeaks and
hums, and I sat inside at 3 a.m. and noon and 6 p.m. in the perpetual dim and
nursed, and all of it felt the same and utterly removed from any sort of life
I’d lived before. It was the most heady, distinct, beautiful, unique experience
of my life.
That’s it for this
week. With love as always, Len and Kit
