A Little Sweetness

Gypsy

On October 2nd we invited a new element of chaos into our lives.  We found her on a roadside pullout near our house.  It was raining hard and windy.  She was sitting there, soaked and afraid next to a kennel.  She growled at us when we stopped to check her out.  Within an hour she had a name.

Gypsy wouldn’t get in the car with us and she wouldn’t let us put a collar on her, but she was happy to follow us home on foot.  She did so twice but returned to the pullout and the kennel each time; apparently she had been there for a few days and in her mind it must have been home.  Once we brought the kennel to our house though, she stuck around.

She wouldn’t come in the house so we put a dog bed on our front porch and set out some food and water for her.  All night we wondered if she’d stay.  She did.

The front door was scary and she wouldn’t go through it.  On her third night with us Dillon heard her growling and went out to investigate.  A porcupine was walking through the yard so Dillon picked Gypsy up and brought her inside.  When we woke up she was pretty pleased with herself at being in the house, but the door was still very scary and she wouldn’t go out.  That is when her official training began.  It involved opening the front door and coaxing her with food.  In four weeks time the coaxing has gone from around ten minutes per door episode to a mere few.  This is good considering that it’s almost November and an open door can really cool a house down these days.

Sometimes Gypsy cries in the middle of the night and because she’s had a couple of accidents in the house I’m pretty quick to jump up to let her out.  If the door seems especially scary I end up pulling on my boots and running out before her, when she sees that the door hasn’t harmed me sometimes she follows.  Sometimes she doesn’t and I am outside standing in the yard in my shorts and mud boots calling her.  It’s been invigorating really.  I’ve seen beautiful night skies.  I’ve heard owls and coyotes.  Think of the things I would have missed had I been warm and asleep in my bed.

Fortunately, Gypsy loves Ripple, our older, much more mature dog (ahem) and the feeling seems mutual as far as I can tell.  They started out playing around the yard then figured that if they had fun in the yard they’d probably have a really great time roaming the neighborhood.  Dogs roaming the neighborhood is rarely a good idea, and even though they were considerate and brought us souvenirs from their adventures (one day a mutilated bunny, the next day a halibut tail) we’ve resorted to putting them out separately, which would be fine except for the fact that Gypsy had almost gotten to the point of being unafraid of the door when she saw Ripple going through it.  Our door time, as we’ve come to call it, was almost down to nothing but we’ve gone backwards now that she has to go through it all by herself again.

Have I mentioned that Gypsy is incredibly gentle? Aside from when we first found her, abandoned and afraid on the side of the road, she’s shown absolutely no aggression.  She seems genuinely thrilled to have a warm house, a soft bed, a dog friend and four people to dote on her.  Still though, it’s taken a while for her to entirely trust us.  She loves us but she still gets nervous if we approach her too quickly.  It seems like her previous people sent her mixed messages, affection one minute and something much worse the next.  It’s going to take a while, but she seems more comfortable all the time.  Sometimes we have a set back though, like this morning.

We got our first snow of the season last night and so this morning I had the notion that it would be nice to stay inside and enjoy a cup of coffee near the woodstove.  I made the mistake of letting the dogs out at the same time.  When they came back twenty or so minutes later Ripple had two porcupine quills stuck in her muzzle.  Gypsy had about thirty.  Dean brought out the pliers and I went to work removing them, but we soon discovered that she had them all over her tongue and inside her mouth.  A vet visit was in order.  Unfortunately all the things we’d been easing up to—the car, the leash, the vet—had to happen all at once.  All of her biggest fears were realized within an hour, along with what I imagine must have been an incredible amount of pain.

Aside from the bill, the vet visit was a good thing.  Gypsy’s got her shots now and after examining her teeth, Dots, our lovely veterinarian, informed us that Gypsy’s only about eight months old.  She’s just a baby.  There’s plenty of time to get over the silly fears, plenty of time for her to stop having accidents in the house.

Just the week before we rescued Gypsy we had started considering getting a second dog.   We’re kind of a two dog family and Ripple was seeming a little down after losing Nayak.  Although I will never understand what kind of a person would abandon a puppy on the side of the road in cruddy weather when the Homer Animal Shelter is such an easy option, I do believe the timing and the placement of that person’s bad deed was very serendipitous.  Now Gypsy is with a family that is willing to be trained and I’d say we’re doing a darn good job of meeting her every need.  In trade she’s giving us a lot of laughs and a fair amount of joy.  She’s bringing sweet energy into our lives—and in a household that’s busy and chaotic to begin with, a little sweetness can make all the difference.

Ready to Read

It’s Alaska Book Week.  And for the literary crowd it’s been pretty exciting.  The internet is abuzz with Alaskan book talk.  In the library I put together a display featuring books written by our local, Homer area authors and next week we’ll be hosting a reading of twelve of those authors, each reading for a few minutes from a piece of their own work.  An Alaskan, Debby Dahl Edwardson was even named as a finalist for the National Book Award this week for her Young Adult book My Name is Not Easy.

Tonight at the college there will be a panel and public discussion in which Nancy Lord, Tom Kizzia, Rich Chiappone, Miranda Weiss and Erin Hollowell will discuss the books that influenced their lives and their writing.  So besides being in awe of the fact that I live in the same town as all of these great authors, I’ve been asking myself that same question this week.  What books influenced my life?

Nancy Lord wrote an essay called On Rereading Siddhartha where she reflects on the impact the book Siddhartha had on her as a young teenager.  Over the past couple of days Miranda Weiss has posted the question “What books made you?” on her Facebook page.  We’ve got Anne of Green Gables and the Little House books.  People mentioned Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Edgar Allen Poe.  A lot of the classics were listed as well as a few contemporary wonders like one of my own favorites, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barabara Kingsolver.  I’ll be interested to see what others have to say tonight at the panel discussion and I plan on taking notes, mining the conversation for reading ideas.

My own reading history is one that is a bit embarrassing to admit.  While Nancy Lord may have been ready for Siddhartha at age thirteen, I was not.  I was consumed with worry about boys and my hair at age thirteen.  And while many children were at home reading the Little House books, I was watching it on television, along with other shows like Three’s Company and Welcome Back, Kotter.  I remember owning one book that I treasured, Heidi by Johanna Spyri, but I don’t actually remember reading it.  I did love the movie though.

I was encouraged to read the Bible as a child.  I would get these little pamphlets from church that would have a mapped out plan for reading the entire Bible in one year.  Every night I would read a certain number of verses and then mark them off on the chart.  As far as I’m concerned there is no better way to make a child want to go to sleep than to have them read Bible verses before bed.  I remember absolutely nothing of significance in all of that Bible reading.  No epiphanies, no moments of enlightenment.  I just remember trying like heck not to fall asleep.

In middle school someone was passing around Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume.  I may have read that one, I don’t fully remember.  I at least read the part about periods.  I learned more about menstruation from Judy Blume than I did from anywhere else.

In a high school English class we were assigned The Great Gatsby.  I did not read it all the way through, and I did not care.  I still managed to get an A in the class somehow, probably because although I was late to develop an appreciation for fine literature I was well ahead of the game when it came to bullshitting.

It wasn’t until about my senior year in high school that I came across a book that changed it all for me.  I don’t recall its title, but the author was Danielle Steele.  Oh yes, it got my attention.   It had glamor. It had conflict. It had SEX!  Aside from a few picture books as a young child, it was the first book I remember reading from cover to cover.

At the library I sometimes hear people complaining about the “trash” that kids read these days.  The other day I heard a father say of his son, “If it doesn’t have a dragon or a vampire, my kid won’t read it.”

I wanted to say, “At least he’s reading!”

Assuming I live a long time, and I’ve got pretty good genetics on my side, I will have time to read plenty of good books, some of them, thankfully, more than once.  I can forgive myself for being a very late bloomer when it comes to literature.  The good news is that it happened.  I learned to love really good books.  It happened at the University of Montana where I was exposed to authors that wrote about the very surroundings in which I found myself.  William Kittredge, Rick Bass, Richard Hugo, John Maclean.  They wrote about the West, which was familiar, but they made me see it in a new way.  They somehow validated my rural upbringing.

The biggest thing though, was that I was ready.  I was finally ready to read.

Something out of nothing

It’s October 1st and sometime in the next few days I’m supposed to turn in my second packet of writing for my MFA program which includes a short story and three reader’s response papers.   I’ve written most of this month’s short story and I’ve done all the reading that I agreed to do, but the hard work still lies ahead of me.

Finishing short stories is always the hardest part because I never really know what’s going to happen with my characters.  I start a story with an idea, an image or an event and I create from there.  It’s truly making something out of nothing and it’s always scary.  There is always the fear that for some reason it won’t work this time around.  It can also be incredibly emotionally draining, which is why I procrastinate like crazy at this stage of the process.

I’ll get it done, I always do, but all week I’ve been finding other things to occupy my time.   Last weekend I started a new knitting project.  I’ve begun reading two books that are unrelated to my MFA.  I squandered my one day off during the week to hang out with friends and play around on my new computer.  I’ve taken lots of photos. (see below)  I’ve written two articles.  I’ve done the dishes several times when I could easily have opted out with the ‘I need to work on my school’ excuse.  I changed the format of my blog.  I learned two new fiddle tunes!  Last night I even did two foreign language lessons (French and Spanish) on Mango, a new, free online offering through the library website.   And here I am now, writing for my blog when I should be writing fiction.

Kachemak Bay and beyond

Overall I’ve been very productive in my procrastination.  But the deadline is looming and I need to focus.  I need to sit my butt down in the chair, turn off the internet and find out what is going to happen with Larry, the simple, yet complicated guy that I made up.  I need to make him believable and interesting.  I need to find that thing about him that we can all relate to, something heartbreaking and funny and beautiful.   I need to bring him to life in a world that’s as real as yours and mine.   None of it’s going to happen though if I don’t stop putting it off.  I’ll get right on it after I take the dog for a walk and clean the house.  Really, I will.

More complicated than a lapel pin

I had not planned on writing about the ten year anniversary of the tragedy that befell our nation on September 11, 2001, but as I was out picking strawberries on this beautiful fall day I couldn’t help but revisit those days in my mind. September 11th was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten and in our stunned state we did our best to be excited with her. Inside though, we were horrified and on edge, not knowing if the attacks were over or if the terror was just beginning.

That afternoon I sat outside on the deck of a coffee shop with my sister. Usually on a sunny, calm afternoon Beluga Lake is busy with float plane traffic and the scheduled flights of the commuter planes taking off and landing within earshot of downtown. The quiet of that day seemed magnified. The horror of what it meant to the people in the twin towers, or on flight 93 hovered on the edges of our conversation, but it was too big to comprehend in that moment. It would take a while for the magnitude of it all to sink in.

Just a couple days after planes started to fly again I took a trip to Las Vegas to meet up with some family members for a mini-reunion. Las Vegas had never been a destination place for me, and it seemed like the wrong place to be going at such a time, but I had the tickets and it had been a long time since I’d seen my family, so I went. I was stunned at the sheer number of people there, although my sisters who had been there before assured me that it was quiet in comparison to their past visits. I was also stunned by the shops in all directions. Every single one had a display of United States flag paraphernalia for sale, from stars and stripes sun visors to Bin Laden Wanted Dead or Alive t-shirts. I was impressed and appalled at how quickly the marketers were in action, turning a national tragedy into an excuse to buy trinkets.

Within the first hour of all of us meeting up at the Luxor hotel and casino someone in our group bought a US flag lapel pin for each one of us. I couldn’t wear mine. At the time I couldn’t even articulate why it felt like the wrong thing for me to do. All I knew was that it felt too easy. I was in mourning and to me the lapel pin wasn’t a sign of mourning. It would have made more sense for me to wear black, or better yet be at home with my husband and children, holding them close.

Las Vegas isn’t my kind of place, so even if tragedy hadn’t just struck our country there’s a good chance that I would have been wandering around in a daze. But the noise, the gambling, the shopping, it all felt misguided. I fear that I wasn’t good company for those few days.

What I kept waiting for, and never got, was for someone to suggest to the United States citizens that we band together for the good of our country, not by consuming more, not by spending more money, but by cutting back. There was a moment when that message would have been received. Great strides could have been made on making our country energy independent or better yet on reducing our reliance on fossil fuels altogether.

All that happened on that day ten years ago still fills me with sadness. In addition to that though, I’m filled with sadness by much of what has happened (or not happened) since then. The lives that were lost on that day should never be forgotten. Neither should the lives of the Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have died in the aftermath. Who pays them tribute? Their lives are no less valuable that those of the American’s who died on September 11, 2001, or less valuable than those of our service members who have died fighting for the country they love.

The issues and emotions surrounding September 11th are infinitely complicated. They cannot be summed up with lapel pins or a special Facebook status. And I have to wonder, are we safer than we were on September 1st, 2001? Have the wars and the lives lost brought any resolution? Will they ever? Wouldn’t our money and resources be better spent on making our country healthier and more self-reliant than we’ve ever been before? Or, is that even the goal?

 

A Monochrome Day

Today was a monochrome day, the same from morning to evening with the sun never breaking through the heavy layer of gray. It was an unscheduled day that meandered around reading and writing and chores. It’s 9:45 pm as I write this and there is only a hint of light in the sky. I can tell that the bay is perfectly calm by looking at the still, orange reflections of the Homer Spit lights in the water. Night is back again, giving us permission to finally slow down.

Our dog Nayak died unexpectedly earlier this week. She was getting old, her back legs were losing their muscle tone and she was beginning to go deaf. Despite her signs of aging though, she still got beside herself with excitement when it was time for a walk and she still held her own when romping around the yard with Ripple, our younger dog. She was fine when we left the house on Tuesday morning and gone when I came home at the end of the day. The house feels a little hollow without her. She was notorious for being nearby her people, but never too close. She had one of the easiest temperaments of any dog I’ve known; she even left this world in the easiest manner possible. We didn’t have to watch a long, slow decline. We didn’t have to make any difficult decisions.

She came to us shortly after we moved into this house and lived her entire life here. A lot about this place has changed in that amount of time. The young trees in front of our house that survived the spruce bark beetles have grown so tall that they are beginning to obstruct the view from our front window. The greenhouse, once highly functional and the source of beautiful tomatoes and even a cantaloupe or two has been blown by a few too many windstorms and is now in a sorry state of disrepair. Our kids, who used to think we lived in the coolest neighborhood on earth, now wish we lived in town, with a regular house on a regular street. And our nearest neighbors, who used to be out working their property every day (except the Sabbath), are not getting around as well as they used to.

I keep thinking of the title of a memoir at the library that I’ve shelved many times but still haven’t read. It’s called A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas. It makes me think about the dogs we’ve had and lost, each one representing a certain phase of our lives. Nayak was with us during the raising a family era. She was with us in this place, on five acres of land thirteen miles east of Homer. She was with us in this house with its green carpet and funky linoleum.

Sometimes we talk about moving to town. Sometimes we want to leave Alaska and head down south. For today though, I was glad to be here. It was a good day to take it easy. It was a good day to wander around and let the memories of this place, this era, take me where they wanted to go.

Nayak
Nayak

 

 

 

Most Familiar

Last year at this time I was getting ready for a trip to Colorado.  The main purpose of the trip was to help my mom clean out my Grandparent’s house in Clifton, but it was about more than that.  My grandmother had recently died and Marla and I wanted to be near family.

We rented a car in Denver early on a Thursday morning and drove to Durango so Marla could check out the college there.  We were tired after flying all night, but coming from a town with only one road out we were fairly giddy at the opportunity for a road trip.  I haven’t spent much time in southern Colorado, so even though the drive was long, the scenery was new and having so much open road in front of us felt liberating.  We made it to Durango, spent one night and then headed over to Pagosa Springs the next day.  There we attended the Four Corners Folk Festival which was great fun.  The sky was that stereotypical Colorado blue all weekend and being beneath the ponderosa pines for a few days with no responsibilities gave me a chance to fill up some of those empty spaces that come from a scheduled life.  We played old time music with new friends, had some high quality sister bonding time and then headed north to see the rest of our family.  On the way to Craig from Pagosa Springs we stopped in Palisade for peaches and tomatoes.  If you’ve never had peaches and tomatoes from Palisade, Colorado you’re missing out, and since those flavors were a part of all of my summers as a child, every single bite seems to unleash a memory.

The trip last summer was especially nice.  I got to spend a lot of time with my Granddad Acree who is no longer with us.  He was frail and still shaken about losing his wife of 75 years.  When he wasn’t sleeping he repeated himself a lot but the words out of his mouth were always full of gratitude and sometimes even wonder.   He appreciated the tree in my mom’s back yard.  He commented often on the beautiful paint job of my step-dad’s pick-up truck.  He enjoyed the banjo and fiddle music Marla and I played for him, even joining in a few times with some singing.  He liked nothing more than sitting in the sun on my mom’s deck and at age 93 he still had an amazing appetite for those peaches and tomatoes we brought from Palisade.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing and it’s sometimes hard to separate out what I miss for real and what I miss in my imagination.  I know that each time I go back to Colorado there are aspects that I love and others that disappoint.  It’s changed a lot since I lived there.  But it’s the most familiar place I know.

Three times this week I’ve dreamt of peaches and tomatoes.  It’s harvest time and I’m missing the flavors of home.

Reveling in the mess

view from home
Moon above the pushki meadow by Dean Sundmark

I rolled into town last night after attending a twelve day creative writing residency. Today I’m wandering around my home taking note of what has changed and what has stayed the same while I’ve been away.

My nemesis plant, locally known as cow parsnip or pushki, the one that left me with burns all over my arms a few days before I left, has grown nearly three feet taller in my absence and is now in its full flowering stage. Looking out my window and seeing how it’s taken over the paths that lead to the chicken coop, the yurt and the garden, overwhelms me. I wish I could take a machete and start hacking away at it, make everything orderly again, but since I have such a strong reaction to the plant’s juices it’s best if I just leave it alone, surrender to its tenacity, maybe even find a way to admire its steadfast ability to reclaim more of the yard each year.

Trying to process all of the conversations, classes, insights and emotions from the residency has me feeling a bit overwhelmed as well. So much happened in such a short amount of time that making sense of it all isn’t an option. Yet I find myself wanting to write something that sums it all up, lines it all out and puts it in tidy, manageable rows.

When I look back on my experience of the residency and the notes that I took over the course of the twelve days, I can see that I was all over the place. I had moments of feeling confident in my writing, followed by languishing self-doubt. The sense of community that comes from being surrounded by like-minded people was palpable at times; so was the stabbing loneliness that I felt at night in my dorm room. At times I was moved to tears. On one occasion I struggled to contain my anger and ultimately ended up leaving part way through a reading.

I’ve always been of the mind that writing is a means for making order out of chaos and I still believe that to be true. But now I’m questioning that tendency within myself to always be looking for a straight way out of a jumbled up world. As a writer I might need to spend more time reveling in the mess. I might need to write all over the place, let the words and ideas take me places that feel overgrown and too big to manage.

It takes courage to dig into questions for which there may be no answers. I might emerge with nothing more than a bunch of burns and bruises. But I feel like being a part of this MFA program is giving me the freedom to go there for a little while. I might not have anything marketable at the end of my three years, but along the way I’ll learn to push myself further than I thought possible.

Creativity seems impossible without a certain amount of surrender. I’m wanting to use these few years to let my writing grow into something bigger than I’ve allowed it to be thus far. I’m wanting to resist the urge to hack it down into tidy little cubes. I’m wanting to get lost in the dishevel. Hopefully in my digging I’ll find what needs to be found. Hopefully it will be good.

Summer so far

Here it is the end of June already and as is common for this time of year, I’m feeling like summer is going by too fast. I haven’t gone camping. I haven’t been in our skiff and worst of all, I haven’t gone to a music festival. It’s been tricky to fit it all in, and although it sounds like I’m complaining I should mention that I’m in week seven of my first fiction workshop class in UAA’s low-residency MFA program and although it’s a lot of work, I’m having a blast. In less than two weeks I’ll go to Anchorage for a 12 day residency and I’m getting giddy with excitement.

I’m looking forward to meeting my cohorts. I’m looking forward to all the reading, discussing and critiquing. I’m looking forward to taking my librarian hat off for two weeks. I’m even looking forward to living in a dorm again for a little while. The last time I lived in one was at the University of Montana in 1988. I was almost twenty then, a couple of years older than everyone else on my floor, so I was the one that everyone turned to when they wanted beer. It will be nice to have hall-mates that are old enough to buy their own alcohol.

So far I’ve enjoyed most aspects of my class. BlackBoard, UAA’s course management system, has taken a while to figure out, but I’m getting it. Our class communicates mostly through a discussion board. It’s tricky though, for me to respond to readings and other peoples’ comments without feeling a little self-conscious. I think of all of these great ways to reply, (at least I think they’re great) but when I end up typing them down they don’t quite match my intentions, so I cut a bunch and end up posting these very shortened versions that just aren’t quite right. Sometimes I wonder if there is a secret discussion board, one that everyone but me can access, and its sole purpose is to respond to my ridiculous posts. I’m not normally a paranoid person, but this could really be going on. Really.

Even in my sleep-deprived, over-stimulated state that seems to come with summer in Alaska, I’m feeling happy and strangely energized. I know it’s because I’m doing what I love. By being an official student I have the perfect excuse to read and write all the time.  Well not quite all the time, but a lot more often than I had been before I started the program.

And I’m managing to fit in a few summery things here and there between working full time and graduate school. Today I sat on my deck and got a little sun-burned while I read my classmates’ manuscripts. I also spent an hour or so weeding my garden and while doing so discovered a gardening oxymoron: invasive strawberry plants. It turns out that while I’ve been neglecting my onion sets, the strawberries have taken over.

Speaking of taking over… We have a lot of chickens right now. Although I’ve had laying hens for several years now, we decided to try raising meat chickens. Dean built a chicken tractor and we moved the month old chicks in a few days ago. The idea behind the chicken tractor is that it can be moved around so the chickens always have fresh grass to scratch around in. Chicken watching is a great form of simple entertainment. I highly recommend it.

And since Dean only works part time in the summer, he’s been able to keep things in order at home while I’ve been so busy. Last night I came home to a meal that Dean prepared in his new Dutch oven. (Did I mention that with Adella gone to Sitka Fine Arts Camp it’s just the two of us here for two weeks and the last time that happened was nineteen years ago?) He watched a few Youtube videos to figure out how it’s done and voila, roast chicken to die for. He also learned that contrary to the Youtube videos regarding Dutch Oven cooking, it is possible to prepare and cook a delicious meal without wearing cammo or drinking PBR. He found that it’s alright to substitute tie-dye and red wine. Too much red wine though, can result in a burned picnic table. It’s good that he’s cooking outdoors.

Overall, month one of summer has been pretty great. If I can just add a little bit of old-time music, then I’ll be all set.

Onward

Last week on Wednesday my son announced that he was moving to Vermont. And today, nine days later, he called us from Boston. “I made it. My luggage made it. It’s warm here, and after flying first class I never want to fly coach again.” Then he said, “I miss you guys and I love you.” His decision to go came about quickly, but hastiness aside, I’m confident it was a good choice. He was ready to get out of Homer and see a bit of the world. He’s going to be with friends; people I trust. I’m excited for him. It’s all good. But dang, it was hard to say goodbye.

Skype and email and cellphones and Facebook; they make it so easy to stay in touch. Being across the country from your child is nothing compared to what it used to be. People used to venture out, move West, blaze new trails not knowing if they’d ever see their family members again. Their goodbyes really meant goodbye, not just see you later. Dillon moving to Vermont is not final or tragic in any way, but it’s going to take me a while to adjust to his absence.

You see, I’ve gotten used to seeing that boy nearly every day for the past eighteen and a half years. The energy he brings into the world has been a part of what makes our home our home. His stepping out into the unknown changes things for all of us.

I know it’s all a part of the plan with having children. You bring them into the world. You give them what they need. You love them and raise them the best you know how. There is nothing unique about a kid growing up and leaving home.

I know all of this, but still it was hard to say goodbye.

Post rapture day reflections

Thanks to Harold Camping, an eighty-nine year old Christian radio talk show host, the rapture was on everyone’s radar this past week. I noticed it mentioned in casual conversations. It was written about in blogs and newspapers around the country. On Facebook I was invited to both the post-rapture party and the post-rapture looting.

When I first heard of Camping’s prediction that the rapture would happen on Saturday I just laughed it off. What a wacko, I thought, thinking he can predict something that clearly is supposed to “come like a thief in the night” and take everyone off guard. Then I thought, wait a minute, I don’t even believe in the rapture anymore. I think it’s a bunch of bunk. I think it’s a ridiculous idea that goes against the laws of nature. I don’t think it’s going to happen at all, regardless of whether the rapture, in all of its hypothetical glory, is predicted or a total surprise.

If I say I don’t believe in it, and I don’t, then why does the mention of the rapture still fill me with a sense of dread like nothing else? Why do I have a hard time joining in the mocking and ridicule of the notion that all the true believers will be carried off to heaven while the rest of us, the non-believers, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Jews, the Pagans and anyone else who doesn’t make the cut, get left behind?

There are a few reasons why all of this rapture talk disturbs me more than it amuses me. First of all, it draws a clear line of distinction between groups of people. There are those who believe in the rapture and those who do not. As I’ve already mentioned, I’m not a rapture believer, but lots of people that I love are, and they believe, seemingly without a doubt, that there will be a moment when the great separation will occur. And according to their standards I won’t make the cut. Nothing feels good about that.

Another reason all of this rapture mania makes me uncomfortable is that I spent a lot of years of my life thinking that at any moment my family could be whisked away. If I had been good; no lying, no swearing, no doubting the Word of God, then I could be included. But if I lied, say, about eating all of the leftover chocolate cake, or if I wondered secretly whether Jesus really did come back to life after three days of being dead, then I might get left behind in which case I’d be left alone to fend for myself in a hostile world. That’s enough to make a young girl feel a little jumpy, a little worried, a little confused. And afraid, nearly all the time.

So all of this rapture talk hits me on a personal level. It reminds me of the uncertainty of my childhood. I mean, it’s hard to really grow as a person when you’re scared all the time. It also reminds me that there are a lot of people looking forward to being swept away from all of this hardship here on earth. In that regard, belief in the rapture is the perfect antidote to the hopelessness that is sometimes felt when big things are beyond our control. –We don’t have to worry ourselves with these wars, they’re all a part of the plan.– or – This world is just our temporary home, any damage we might cause won’t matter in the long run.–

So I guess I would be able to laugh about all of the rapture talk if not so many people (people who vote, people who get elected) believed in it. To them it’s more real and of bigger concern than climate change, or crippling inequality, or social justice. And in that regard, the idea of the rapture scares me as much now as it did when I was a little girl.