Jenyfer Matthews

Considering just how much I hate to say goodbye to people, I seem to do it with great regularity.

Goodbye to friends and family in the US when I leave for Egypt; goodbye to friends in Egypt when I come to the US for a visit (or an evacuation!). Goodbye to friends in one place when I go to another. You get the idea.

Most of the time I can jolly myself out of the poignancy of the farewell by focusing on the good time ahead. It doesn’t always work so well when you have children who hate to say goodbye as much as their mother does or when you aren’t exactly sure what you are supposed to be focused on next.

Life is still uncertain.

Ah well, I have nothing to complain about really. Just feeling a bit blue because summer is once again over and we are still adrift.

Today we’ll focus on enjoying the beauty of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan – a relatively easy task given what I’ve seen so far.

Summer is definitely on the wane here in northern Minnesota. It was 47F when I woke up this morning… brrrr! Time for me to head a bit further south – back to Ohio (at least for now). I am glad to say that in spite of iffy weather forecasts, we were able to have one last wonderful weekend before I leave tomorrow.

I take my children to the Alpine Slide at Lutsen Mountain once every summer – I am so lucky I have children to use as an excuse because I might look a bit odd spending the day out there zooming down the mountain on my own! It is such a fun thing to do. It had rained on Thursday night and was looking pretty cloudy and gray Friday morning but we lucked out because it was clear in Lutsen. The only thing we had a little trouble with was wind – they shut the ski lift down a few times because of it. It didn’t slow us down for long though. I always mean to count how many times we end up sliding and I always forget to do it when I’m caught up in the fun. We were there for a little more than four hours = LOTS OF SLIDES.

Saturday morning we headed out to an inland lake to play in the water. It was another beautiful day, though it was a bit chilly when clouds would pass by. I finally tried out the paddle board my step-mother bought this summer. I was doing pretty well standing and balancing on it until I tried to be cute and do some yoga poses on it. I’m lucky that she got pictures of the poses and not of the splash I made as I slipped off and fell in the lake!

Sunday’s weather was looking iffy again but we decided to go back to the lake anyway. Why not? It was cool enough when the clouds blew past that I wasn’t inspired to swim however – I stuck to my kayak and wore a fleece pullover!

The clouds rolled in thicker and thicker throughout the day, but we never felt even one raindrop.

What a beautiful end to a wonderful summer.

For anyone keeping track, I’ve gained at least five pounds this summer and the children have NOT finished the math workbooks I purchased for them to do for practice. So much for self-improvement. Oh well… there’s always tomorrow!

The summer has zoomed by… where does time go? We’re here in Minnesota for just a few more days before make our return trip to Ohio and then… well, the “then what” portion of my life is still up in the air.

So, instead of worrying about things I can’t control, I am distracting myself with fun stuff.

This week we stopped at a place I have passed countless times on my way up and down the North Shore: Kadunce River. Now that I’ve been, I can’t imagine why I waited so long to investigate.

There is a nice trail along the river that eventually connects up to the Lake Superior Hiking Trail system. We didn’t go that far, but you can believe that I’ll be back.

The children were more interested in playing in Lake Superior where the Kadunce River empties into it – it was a windy day and the waves were impressive.

I know it looks more like the Atlantic Ocean here, but you’ll have to take my word for it – this is actually Lake Superior. A man who arrived as we were leaving, wearing his wet suit and carrying a surf board! I can only imagine how frigid it must have been on such a windy day, but that didn’t deter my children one little bit. I had goosebumps just sitting on the shore watching them!

Have a great weekend – I intend to…

One thing I have really, really missed since we left Egypt so abruptly in February are my twice weekly yoga classes. I did eventually buy myself a yoga mat but I am just not disciplined enough to use it as frequently as I should when left to my own devices. I not only had a wonderful yoga teacher in Egypt, but she actually used to send me text messages demanding to know where I was if I ever missed class. As a consequence, I rarely did.

So when the urge to do a little yoga struck the other day, I decided I didn’t actually need a mat. Apparently a large rock will do in a pinch.

Good to know I can still do the stretches, though I doubt I could make it through a proper class anymore!

I don’t look too bad here but don’t let it fool you: I was doing pretty well on the whole gain-weight-in-the-summer issue until this week. It was the raspberries that did me in. I’m going to have to do a lot of rock yoga to peel off the pounds that have crept on…

My husband ran out of jam late last week and was reluctant to pay $$ for a small jar of organic jam at the local whole foods cooperative. Instead, I suggested we go pick some raspberries and I would make some.

It’s been a very good berry year – we spent nearly four hours picking berries in the brush and there are still tons to be had. It was hard to stop actually! It was only the mosquitoes and my aching muscles that forced me home. Just look as this bounty:

Who knew that picking berries could be such a good workout? The Warrior I yoga position (an extreme lunge) is a very good position for picking berries growing deep in the brush. You also get to practice good balance while doing the lunge on a rotting log lest you end up face first in the bushes!

Did I say it was a good berry year? It was really hard to make myself stop picking when I kept finding clusters of berries this big, so ripe they were practically jumping in my bucket!

I not only got a jar of jam out of our harvest…

We got a fantastic pie as well.

If I ate too much dessert this weekend, I have no one to blame but myself!

One of my favorite summer pastimes is haunting the local thrift stores in the town closest to where my father and his wife live. There are two: one only accepts slightly higher quality items and charges accordingly and the other is attached to the local recycling center so you just never know what you might find in there – some times you really have to wonder what people are thinking!

So far this summer I’ve found some real goodies in the recycling center shop: a snuggly pair of fleece pajama pants, a pair of new red leather sandals, a couple of vintage table cloths, and two ceramic tiles from Turkey (marked 1971 on the back) to name a few. All of those items cost me less that $5 together and I get a real warm, fuzzy feeling when I find something that I like for next to nothing. Talk about recycling!

I had a somewhat different experience this past week however. I went in to snoop around, just to see what treasures were there, and came across several bags of afghans. It’s no surprise to see a couple of afghans at a thrift store – you always see them. But this was four bags stuffed full which I could only assume came from the same donation. I started to wonder about the person who made the afghans. I knew an older lady in town who was a crocheting fiend and was always making afghans. Had she died? And if that was the case, did her family think so little of her hobby that they just gave away all of her hard work without a thought? Several of the afghans looked totally unused. There were two or three adorable baby afghans in the bags as well.

I was standing by the afghan bags, wondering what to do. I hated to leave them there but then again, I am not exactly in a position to start adopting afghans when I don’t have a home at present. I ran into a friend and I pointed them out to her. We started to dig and in the process I also found a full sized, handmade quilt. We pulled it out to look at it and another lady paused and shook her head. “That’s why I don’t give my quilts as gifts. If I made a quilt and it ended up in the thrift store for $.35 I would die.”

Happily, my friend agreed with her and she not only selected several pretty afghans but took the quilt as well. She probably paid $2 for all of them.

The incident disturbed me for several days and I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. I’ve often noticed groups of purses that seem similar in style and wondered if they’d been donated because someone died and it hasn’t bothered me the same way. I was simply thrilled if I found one I liked for next to nothing. I think the afghans bothered me because of the hand-crafted nature of these items. I too would die if one of the quilts I’d spent hours, days, months making ended up in a thrift store one day.

I suppose it boils down to a question of appreciation. It doesn’t really matter if the afghans end up in thrift store if they ultimately end up with someone who does appreciate them, even if they do only pay $.35 for them…right?

A friend of mine who teaches English as a second language has been recommending a book to me, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, for years. I trust her judgment and her taste so why have I resisted her suggestion? I guess it’s just perversity. I’ve been disappointed many times by books and movies with mass popular approval so I tend to resist or at least approach such things with extreme skepticism.

I still might not have ever read the books if my father hadn’t had a stack of them which had belonged to my grandmother. I had already run through my own stack of summer reading so I gave them a try.

As my friend so wisely predicted, I loved them. I’ve read seven of the series in just over a week.

Imagine a book that is a cross between the commonsense of Agatha Christie’s character Miss Marple and the cozy, slice of life portraits of English village life written by British author Angela Thirkell – only set in Botswana. Beautifully written, the books are much more about the “traditionally built” character of Mma Ramotswe and life in Botswana than they are about any serious mystery plot and I gobbled them down in short order.

(Apparently they appeal to lots of people the same way because when I looked on Amazon for the link to the books I see there is also a TV series and a movie tie-in book. Glad I didn’t know that before!)

Now my only problem is that I am out of fresh books to read and I still have a few weeks left of summer vacation…

I have taken many fewer photos of wildlife this year than in previous years. There are as many if not more deer and foxes in the yard as ever and while I do enjoy watching them, I haven’t been in the mood to take endless pictures of them.

Instead I seem to be in a more industrial mood.

This old truck has been sitting in the side yard next to the garage for a few years now. In fact, I can’t count how many times I’ve done my best to take a picture of something in the yard and angle my camera in such a way so that the old truck is not in the frame. Then I looked out the window and saw the truck in the afternoon light and just had to go take a picture.

Is this not a picturesque truck? I played with the photo a bit and it looks really, really nice done in sepia tones – and why not? It’s halfway there in real life! It’s easy to make a wildflower or a deer look nice and it’s been easy enough to overlook the rusting hulk of metal until this year.

Once I saw the raw beauty in this truck, I was seeing great old trucks all over the place. There was another not quite as old Chevy sitting just next to the old timer.

How many times have I tried to take pictures of hummingbirds and been frustrated by the old trucks in the background? Much easier to make them the subject of my pictures instead!

This old truck was parked on the side of the road across from my step-mother’s brother’s house and it immediately caught my eye. Look at the colors!

My father is amused by my sudden interest in old trucks and has suggested a few places I might go to see more old trucks. Now I’m feeling a compulsion to go crashing through the brush to find them…

It has been a L-O-N-G and busy week, most of which I seem to have spent in my car. I think I must have put close to 800 miles on it just this week!

Monday I had to drive my husband to the airport in Duluth so he could nip over to Michigan for a job interview – 280 miles round trip. I left the house at 6:30am, dropped him at the airport, turned around and drove back – arriving just in time to pick up my daughter for a tennis lesson which was back 25 miles back the other direction!

Tuesday I had to pick my husband up again. I didn’t mind the drive so much, though it is long, but his plane was due in at 11:30pm which meant I had to drive the two lane winding highway in the dark while keeping a lookout for nocturnal animals. His plane was delayed by weather and did not actually arrive until 1am. At this point it would have made sense to spend the night in Duluth and come back the next day, but my daughter was schedule to participate in a local tennis tournament which was scheduled to start the next day of course. We drove back in the dark and arrived back at 4am Wednesday morning.

We slept for a few hours and then went to the tennis tournament and then took the children to the beach. We were asleep on our feet, but sitting on the beach watching the waves of Lake Superior was a pleasant enough way to spend the day. We did have an early night though since my daughter’s second tennis match was at 8am on Thursday morning.

We had to get to the courts 30 minutes early and it takes 1/2 hour to get to town so we had to be up pretty early again. I didn’t feel sleepy for long though – the tennis match was intense and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time! My daughter just turned 11 and was playing a 14 year old girl. She was 4 games down in the first set and was looking frustrated but she managed to rally and ended up coming back to win the first set in a tie breaker match, 7-5. She then went on to win the second set 6-4. The match was all the more exciting because both girls fought so hard to the end. I was exhausted by the end of it so I can only imagine how she felt!

This post is lame and all of that is just to say thank god it’s Friday. Today I’m going to be lazy. My car is having a much needed oil change and the kids are out fishing with their grandfather. I’m looking forward to sitting quietly and reading a book this afternoon… possibly in a hammock…

I’ve gotten quite used to having instant internet access, all day, every day – which of course means that I’m constantly checking my email, Facebook, looking up random facts / recipes. Whatever. It’s a little embarrassing to think of how much time I spend in the virtual world as compared to the real world around me.

Not at present however. My father’s house only has dial-up internet and it is painfully slow. I don’t even bother to try and look at email from his house. Instead, I’ve been driving a few miles to a nearby convenience store / restaurant to use their WiFi once a day.

No, it’s not as convenient as having internet access whenever the mood strikes to send an email or check something online, however the situation has been illuminating. It’s not as if checking my email umpteen times a day makes any more of it come in. I get the same amount if I only check it once and now I can quite clearly see how much of what I get is spam and nonsense. I don’t miss that much on Facebook either.

Hmmmm….

Keeping up with my blog is a little more challenging but so far I’ve managed. I may actually have to rethink how I spend my time. Imagine what I could get done if I weren’t constantly clicking on my laptop?

My cell phone doesn’t work out here either. I called a friend the other day from my dad’s land line and she was busy – she said she’d text me or Facebook me when she would be available to talk. I told her that she’d just have to do it the old fashioned way – call the house and if I was around I’d answer the phone (which incidentally is attached to the wall with a long curly cord).

It’s kind of liberating to be so “disconnected”. You should try it sometime…