Jenyfer Matthews

That’s how fast life can change.

My husband has been looking for a job back in the US since this spring. I haven’t talked about it here because it is a long, uncertain process – also, I didn’t want to jinx anything. I’m not generally a superstitious person, but why take chances?

He went for an interview at the beginning of the month that he felt went well. Then we waited, and waited some more. His summer vacation ended and he had to head back to Cairo and we still didn’t know whether or not he’d gotten the job. I didn’t know what I was going to do because I didn’t have airline tickets to go back to Cairo, but the children were going to have to start school somewhere, soon.

It wasn’t until I was driving back to Ohio, on the highway just about to arrive at my friend’s house, that my step-mother called to tell me that my husband had sent her an email saying that he had been offered and accepted the job. I finally have a course of action: we are moving to Michigan!

It’s been a long and stressful year and it will likely get a bit more stressful as we try to coordinate an international move, but at least now we have a plan. This will be the first time in a little more than a decade that all of my stuff will be in ONE place (my fascination with glassware, dishes, and purses is about to be exposed in a big way!). Exploring the contents of the storage unit we locked up and left behind in 1999 is going to be like opening a time capsule!

I started this blog in January 2007, a few months after we’d moved to Cairo and I’ve spent much of the time since sharing the things I learned about Egypt and all the fun, frustrating, and interesting experiences I had there. Now I’ll get to share the exodus.

I’ll be in Michigan this week looking for a rental house and I hope getting things set up so the children can start school on time. Wish me luck!

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.

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…

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?

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…

I’ve always thought that one of the keys to aging well and maintaining a youthful attitude was to keep trying new things. It’s also a great way to gain material for writing. I goad myself into all sorts of goofy activities with this argument.

I’ve jumped off platforms into freezing springs and jumped on trampolines with my children and hiked through the jungle of Thailand in this spirit (though I did decline to eat a fried cricket or the frog curry). Not only do I get a momentary rush of adrenaline and a warm glow from knowing that I’ve tried something new, I am usually taking notes in my head for possible inclusion in future story writing.

I come to Minnesota for the summer nearly every year. When my children were quite small, I learned to drive the 4-wheeler – you haven’t lived til you’ve navigated an ATV through a boggy spot filled with stumps or gotten one hung up on a fallen log. Last year was the first time I’d tried kayaking and I fell in love with it. This year’s new activity? Shooting.

My father and step-mother, both being hunters and living in the country, have a collection of rifles. They wisely started us out with the rifle with metaphorical training wheels: a .22 caliber.

(click image to enlarge)

After a talk about firearm safety and a demonstration of how to work the safety, they let us shoot. We were only shooting at plastic water bottles but it was strangely satisfying to see them jump in the air and fall over and die when you hit them. It’s also amazing how quickly you can use up a box of ammunition just messing around!

I filled up one half-gallon milk jug just because we had it, and simply because it refused to fall over it was the one target that was everyone wanted to knock over. I counted about a dozen holes in it at the end of the session.

My daughter was particularly determined and said she was going to shoot the cow’s face. I couldn’t see the cow’s face from that distance but she obviously could!

She got him between the eyes and in the nose!

I’d like to say that no plastic bottles were harmed in the process of this activity, but clearly that isn’t true. I also predict that my son’s Santa letter is going to include a request for a BB gun this year. How this experience might end turn up in my writing remains to be seen…

I haven’t written anything new in months. Soon enough it will be almost a year since I’ve written anything other than emails and blog posts. Where does time go?

This year has been full of disruptions, of periods of brain-frying anxiety and also downright dull moments. But I’ve come to the realization that I need more than just time and quiet to be creative – I also need a considerable amount of head space.

When my brain is full of worry and stress and my heart is full of sorrow, I can’t write anything no matter how much quiet time I have on my hands or how much I might welcome the escape. I can hardly concentrate enough to read in times of stress.

My latest manuscript is set in northern Minnesota. I took a break from writing back in October because I felt like the story line was going adrift and I wanted to mull things over before I went too far off course. I entered a writing contest about the same time. The results from the contest were encouraging and I was all set to get back to work when my life started to unravel.

My life is still far from settled, but being in northern Minnesota is making me want to get back to writing the story. The essence of the story itself hasn’t changed appreciably in this downtime, but I have gathered all sorts of wonderful details I can’t wait to weave into the prose.

Now, if only I could find three hours a day – I’d even settle for ONE hour – that no one else was awake that didn’t also interfere with my own sleep!

For anyone who cares, this is the first summer that I haven’t gained five pounds immediately upon walking through the door at my father and step-mother’s house. I guess I teased my step-mother publicly on my blog enough – she’s had the usual ice cream bars and cookies around but hasn’t made any special desserts to tempt us all. The baggy jeans I left here last summer are a bit too bit. She did tell me to remind her to make a blueberry pie this weekend however so there’s always time to fall off the wagon I guess.

I’ve had lots of people asking me what we will be doing next, after our summer vacation is done. Short answer: I don’t know. My husband is still working on finding a new job in America and what I do will depend on how that works out. If he gets one, we’ll all stay; if he doesn’t then we’ll have to quickly regroup and decide out next move. I’d like to know more for the sake of the children than myself, but right now I’m doing my best not to think about it too much – I’ve had more than enough stress in my life in the last few months without stewing about situations I have no control over.

In the meantime, we’ve all just been hanging out and doing the things you do in the summer in the north woods: skipping stones on the lake, hiking, and berry picking. Not a bad way to pass the time actually…

My reading habits have changed somewhat in the decade or so.

It used to be that when I read a good book, I would gobble it up as fast as I could just to find out what happened. When I reached “the end”, I would almost immediately turn back to page one and start reading all over again, more slowly. Secure in knowing the storyline, I could savor all the details the second time through. I read almost every book I liked twice, back to back. (Hmmm…Sounds a little compulsive when I describe it now)

I still read books that I like twice, only now I’m usually content to put it aside for a while and revisit it at a later date. Sometimes a much later date. What’s changed? Sometimes it has to do with how many other books I have on my nightstand waiting to be read, but more often it’s just me. There are fewer books that I enjoy enough to get swept away in on even the first read that want to read them again at all – now or later.

Would it surprise anyone to know that I used to make myself finish books that I wasn’t enjoying, simply because I’d started them? I don’t do that anymore. The only reason I can think of to finish a book you don’t like is if the book is for a class or a job – there are too many other books out there to waste time on something you don’t like.

Some of the difference in my reading habits I put down to doing my own writing. Like anything else, the more you know about how to do something, the better someone else has to do it to impress you – or so it is with me anyway. I can’t look at a quilt and not see the pattern and the workmanship that has gone into it. I can’t read a book and not see the story structure, plot, and word art. People I know who don’t write seem to enjoy a much wider range of books than I do – even the same books sometimes. I can only assume it is because they aren’t being constantly distracted by the mechanics of the writing. It’s hard to sit back and enjoy a story when you are editing in your head.

(I recently pointed out a writing quirk of an author my sister and I both enjoy, much more hit or miss on my part. Since I’ve done that my sister can’t not see the quirk and it’s making her crazy now too!)

I’ve read two books recently that I plan on reading again in the future. The first is a historical fiction book I bought called Lily of the Nile by Stephanie Dray. It’s a fictionalized account of Cleopatra’s daughter Selene after they were taken to Rome as political prisoners after Cleopatra committed suicide. I bought it because it appealed to me as a sort of sequel to The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel which I read on my trip to Thailand last year (was that only last year???) The author admits that the actual historical record for her account is pretty thin and hugely Roman biased, but it was a fascinating story all the same and I’d like to believe that her account could have happened. (Mostly I’d like to have seen Octavian get dragged through the streets of Rome in defeat and humiliated but that’s another story all together). I’ll also be looking out for the sequel to this one.

The second book I just finished this weekend drifted into my life during a book swap. I picked it up because I liked the title: Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson. I read it in big chunks and when I reached the end, I had that old impulse to just turn back to page one and start over again. I have a stack of other books to read just now so I’ll probably just let the afterglow of this one simmer in the back of my mind for a while instead, but it sure is nice to know there are still books out there that grab me that way, even if they are harder to find now.