With a Shield on her Arm....

Last weekend I was in Missoula, Montana, making one of those frequent trips to see the grandbaby. My elder daughter - would she cringe at that description? - is a city planner for the city.


Missoula is the city where The River Runs Through It - yes, from the book and movie of the same name. Indeed, this photo was taken downtown. It has names like Hellgate High School, and the University of Montaners call themselves Grizzlies.

Jennie may have felt California cities were beyond planning when she left Berkeley for Missoula. Now she works with a people who didn’t have a speed limit until recently, when threatened by the federal government to take away their highway funds. Not that Montanans are into speeding. They just feel the individual is best qualified to determine the best speed for the conditions of the moment.

Ted Kaczinski wrote his Manifesto on runaway technology and industrialism in the woods of Montana. Not that Montanans would support his methods. They just feel he made some interesting points.
While I was visiting, the issue for debate was whether these historical buildings from the late 1800s could be torn down to make way for a development.

The original farm acreage has been subdivided among descendants, the barn sitting on property just across the fence from the original homestead and more modern family homes. Two sets of cousins taking opposite sides, the city planning office, lawyers, and the developer are involved in court battles over whether the barn can be torn down for the housing development. In fact, when I went to check out the site, the roof of the barn had been taken off the day before. To his credit, the owner of the demolition company was taking the time to take it apart piece by piece, labeling so it could be reconstructed on another piece of the farmland rather than destroying the buildings should the situation be resolved to preserve the buildings. He didn’t have to do that, but that’s how Montanans are, I guess. The developer was from Idaho, and that always makes for interesting interactions. When I left, the city and a set of cousins were still going to court to stop the tear down. Well, it's even more complicated than that, having to do with county and city jurisdiction and permits.

My daughter is in the middle of it all. She e-mailed me this week to say she had been called the Che Guevara of the planning office. She said she didn’t know much about Che but she thought that would make me a proud mama.

Damn right I am.

Haikus from Kelly

I'm cleaning my office at home today. It's quite a project - I started yesterday and got so involved that I had to ask Pennie if I could take today off to finish!

What usually takes me so long is all the distractions..."I'd forgotten all about this!" or "Wasn't she cute?" or "Hm, wonder what I can use this for now". The treasures I found today are below, written originally by Kelly back in 2004 when she was a senior at Bishop England.

worker bees lay their nests
they work all day
and come home to crazy kids

dogs are super cool
they come in all forms
Kel really wants one today

Mustangs are even cooler
yes, they sure are
please get one for Kelly

Poor kid. She's still waiting for the dog and the Mustang. Hopefully, the crazy kids never materialize (kids - yes, crazy ones - no).

Inertia

Other than a few good days here and there, I’ve felt a little under the weather since my shoulder surgery a few weeks ago. It’s not that my shoulder isn’t getting better, but rather that I’m just tired and out of breath a lot. I hear it’s not unusual to feel like this after having general anesthesia, and I am getting older - or so my children constantly tell me. :-) Yes, Kathie, I have been to my internist who concurred with the post-anesthesia “yuckies” diagnosis. (Obviously, that last was in Pat-speak.)

In the meantime, I seem to have lost my blogging inertia. Oh, I’ve been reading other people’s blogs a lot, especially some written by a group of friends in England. (I especially enjoy this one.) I feel a bit like a voyeur reading these guys’ posts about their lives and their opinions about what’s going on around them, but fortunately they haven’t told me to butt out – yet. I find that they write well and with astuteness, and the comments they write back and forth, teasing and supporting each other, are genuine and clever. And I guess I’m just starved for intelligence from beyond Charleston...

I have to get back to my own writing, however. Sometimes, just making a simple decision reboots my motivation. So today I decided to drop the “My Friends and Family” blog. It was a nice idea, but for the most part my friends and family are just not interested in blogging. I did want to preserve the following post, though, written by my sweet and brilliant daughter, Jessie.

On July 11th, she wrote:

The Job.
I work in the NNICU: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I've only been here for 2 years. I was hired straight out of nursing school. So this is all I know. And I'm slowly starting to wonder what am I doing? Why am I participating in prolonging agony for my babies and their families?!?! What does God have planned for me? I became very close to two families in particular. And each case ended in a funeral. Our dark outcomes outweigh our miracles. We have NNICU reunions to celebrate these miracle babies. But what about the ones that don't make it...or rather we save and then they don't make it. They were never supposed to be here in the first place. My job has become just that - a job. I don't want to save them...I want them to go home to the angels.

No sooner had I tidied up my eye makeup after reading Jessie’s post than the following comment from Kathie appeared:

Hanging on my wall for the last twenty years is a photograph of a pigtailed girl wearing her AK's oversized white tee shirt. She is sitting on the ground of my garden, watering a young tomato plant with a watering can almost as big as she. The expression on her face is total concentration and devotion to that plant.

Well, that plant's days were numbered but the care it received that day made its life more bearable and it knew it was being taken care of by someone with a lot of love and devotion.

I am so proud that little girl has grown up into a fine young woman who gives her love, devotion and energy to these babies. Some will make it, some won't, and some will have challenges in life, but all will have had the honor to receive care from an extraordinary person.

Sorry, I’ve got to go now and find another box of tissues.