My Miracle Year: A Connection

Unlike the hesitancy I’ve experienced, Sandy’s email in early June is exuberant and loving. She says, “It is such an exciting joy to find my family!!!!” She ends with “I would love to talk to you. Love your long lost cousin, Sandy.” I reply the next day, “Wanted you to know I got your email and am thrilled…. We will talk soon.”

(To the left: from the left, my father, Sandy's father, her mother and my mother) Still I stall – partly because I always stall when it comes to picking up the phone for any reason. It’s like I have a ‘beware of phone’ gene wired into my DNA. And my husband and I are getting ready for a well-deserved weekend in Santa Barbara. And then I am preparing to drive to Portland to spend some quality time with my BFF and her daughter, my goddaughter. And then my husband is flying up to Portland and we’re driving to Seattle to see my stepson and his new girlfriend. Busy, busy, busy, eh?

Finally, mid-July, I get off my butt. Another miracle, due to the Internet, is that Sandy foumd out in 2007 that she has 6 half-brothers and –sisters from her mother’s second marriage. This is the week that Sandy and her newly found half-sister, Jeanie, are flying to Montana to visit some of Jeanie’s brother’s and sisters (Sandy’s half-siblings), none of which she has met.

(To the right: baby Sandy and her mother) I begin digging into the family pictures – the ones taken when we were kids, most of which I got when my father passed away in 2000. It’s been probably that long since I looked at any of them. I am amazed. I didn’t even know it but I have a bunch of pictures of Sandy as a baby with her mother. I have many many more of her mom and my mom together. I doubt whether she has or has seen any of them.

So while she is in Montana, I scan and email some pics, like of her parents wedding. I get an email back the day she is back from Montana. Do I know who the wedding attendants are? Yes, I reply. They are my mother and my father. I realize that she has never seen a picture of my mother.

The following day Sandy calls. We talk for 3 hours. A couple of days later, Jeanie calls and we’re on the phone for at least 2 hours. Then Sandy and I talk for another 3 hours. Never a fan of delayed gratification, I decide I can’t possibly wait. I’m flying to Sioux Falls the weekend before the reunion. She and I can’t catch up on 55 years while my husband, brother and 3 dogs are present as they will be on the roadtrip to Minnesota. I purchase my plane ticket.

To be continued...

My Miracle Year: A Long Time Ago

"People come and then they go, and

That's just the way it goes.

Listen to what we know - like water

We shall flow back to the ocean in

The body of the Lord.

Welcome home. Time to reap what

You sow. Time is overwhelming.

I just hope there's time for everything."

Kan'Nal: Dreamwalker, Time

(To the left: back row from the left, me & Sandy, front row, baby? & my brother Steve) The last time I’d seen Sandy was at my brother Steve’s 3^rd or 4^th birthday when we were living with my paternal grandparents in Minnesota. At the time, Sandy lived with Grandma & Grandpa Husom and they brought her to the birthday celebration. That’s the night Grandma Husom sprained her ankle badly sliding on an icy step. We didn’t know it then but she had very little time left. That might have been the last time I saw her.

A couple of years later, Steve and I moved back to the West Coast after our father’s third marriage. He preferred that we have no ties to my mother’s family. We didn’t know why. And then Sandy’s father kidnapped her; she was never to see her mother again or have any contact with her family. Our grandparents mortgaged their farm trying to get her back. They were unsuccessful.

And now I was looking at Sandy’s email. Through all the moves Steve and I made growing up on the West Coast (I attended 14 schools in 11 years), the one constant was my mother’s picture albums of her family and the few additional pictures of family that had been taken after she died but before we left Minnesota.

One of those pictures was Steve’s birthday. I’d always point and say, “That’s my cousin Sandy. Her mother was my mother’s sister. She is the oldest of the cousins and I’m the second.” And that was pretty much that.

To be continued…

My Miracle Year: Sandy & Me

"We're on the verge of something,

Something greater than we know.

Something that will rise above the ashes

Of the old, old where all things change.

Where no one, none of you are ever

Going to be the same."

Kan'Nal: Dreamwalker, All Things Change

(To the left: my Aunt Rhoda on the left, my mother on the right) Two sisters, best friends and confidants, each had a girl, the first of the Husom cousins, Sandy, daughter of my mother’s sister Rhoda, was born first, then me 10 months later. Technically, I guess, we’re really #2 and #3 as my mother gave birth to a baby boy in 1947, two years before I was born. My brother Arthur William, a “blue baby,” only lived 3 days; the technology that allowed blue babies to survive wouldn’t be invented until 1952. My mother’s heart must have been broken.

(To the right: me, Great Grandpa Butler & Sandy) I think it must have been several years before any of the brothers -- several still in high school and one in grade school -- had children. So it was just Sandy and me. Me ‘n Sandy. Doted on by our Husom grandparents, we were also the darlings of our great Grandma and Grandpa Butler who hailed from Bristol, England, birth place of Grandma Husom.

Things kind of went south for both Sandy and me around the same time.

My Aunt Rhoda left Sandy’s abusive father and Sandy ended up living with our Husom grandparents for a while. And my mother died, my father left with a 2 ½ year old and a new baby. Shortly after, my father moved us to Washington where he had sisters, then to Oregon where he also had a sister.

(To the left: back row, from left - my father, Grandpa Husom. front row, from left, my brother Steve, me & Sandy) Dad remarried, a hurried affair to “provide a mother to his children.” Of course, it wouldn’t last. My brother Steve and I ended up back in Minnesota, living with my paternal grandparents.

To be continued…

My Miracle Year: A Reunion?

"Welcome to the doorway. What is on the other

side? It's not for you or me to say, because the

blind keep leading the blind until the end.

Now here's where all things change. Where no

one, no one's ever going to stay the same again."

Kan'Nal, Dreamwalker: All Things Change

For several years I’d been telling my brother Steve that we should take a trip to Minnesota. I had been back several times as an adult: when my grandfather died in a plowing accident in the 70’s, a couple of business trips in the 80’s, the wedding of a cousin on my dad’s side in the 90’s. So I’ve had several opportunities to visit my mother’s grave, something my brother Steve – born shortly before our mother died -- had never experienced. I had always thought it might give him some small amount of closure.

Although we talked about it early in the summer for several years in a row, somehow I knew it would be this year. My art shows – where I’d either been accepted or waitlisted -- were spaced in such a manner that it was feasible. We had the will, the time and the means.

(To the left: my mom's family - sister Rhoda and 6 brothers including twins Neil & Harlen the same height. Is my mother the one taking the picture?) So when my cousin Steve emails me and leaves his phone number, I still think a while about calling. I have absolutely no idea what I’m playing with here, no point of reference. Cousin Steve’s a complete stranger, my mother dead several years before he was born. I’ve lived a long time without any communication from ‘the other side’ and it wasn’t necessarily bad. I think, maybe, don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, eh?

A couple of weeks later, after a nice glass of California Pinot Noir, I decide to call. No answer. I leave a message. A few evenings later, Steve calls me back. It’s not a chatty ‘girl conversation’ (how quickly we gals can get into those) but not awkward either. Steve tells me about his dad’s last days and that one of the original siblings is still alive -- Neil, his dad’s twin. I share with him that my brother and I have been talking about heading to Minnesota, maybe in July. Winding down, he says he’ll put me in contact with some of the other cousins.

(To the right: My Uncle Don (Connie's dad), my brother Steve and me) A day or two later, I get a short but welcoming email from my cousin Connie. Her dad, my mother's brother Don, had been my favorite uncle when I was little. Tall and handsome, always ready to pick us up and throw us in the air, he made me gasp and giggle.

And then, OMG. I discover Connie's masterminding the first ever Husom family reunion, scheduled for August 23, 2009. Will I be there? I say I think I’d walk if I had to.

The following day or two I get an email from my cousin Sandy. Another OMG.

To be continued...

My Miracle Year: Google Me This...

"I'm on the verge of something, something bigger than I know

Something born of nothing, infinite and whole.

At the place where, where all things change.

Where no one, no one's ever going to stay the same."

Kan'Nal, Dreamwalker: All Things Change

(To the left: my dad holding me and my mother) Sometime this spring, Googling my way around the web – a favorite way to spend waaay too much time -- a totally random thought came to me. I decided to Google my mother’s maiden name, Husom, which is Norwegian and also the actual Norwegian village her father’s family came from (but spelled Husum).

I remember thinking I probably wouldn’t find anything -- but what the hay… Other than a treasure trove of pictures, I don’t really know much about my mother, who died in childbirth when I was 2 ½, or her family. My father, who didn’t get along with many people, didn’t like her family either so I had little contact with them growing up. And then there was the fact that they were mostly in Minnesota, around Long Prairie – a small town right smack in the middle of the state -- and after the age of eight I was raised on the West Coast where most of my father’s family lived.

(To the right: David Husom's picture of Husum, Norway) Googling the name 5 or 6 years ago, I came up with zip, nada. But this time was different. I found a bunch of links. The first one I followed turned out to be the renowned photographer, David Husom. We discovered we are 5^th cousins: our great grandfather’s were brothers who came to the US from Norway around 1875.

I continued searching; many links were dead ends. But eventually I found a one with the name Harlen Husom; it was an obituary site that allowed one to leave a message of condolence. I knew that among my mothers 7 siblings, two were twins, Neil and Harlen. So I composed a note of condolence as well as a tentative message identifying myself and my mother. I left the rest to the Universe.

A month later, I received an email from Harlen’s son Steve who identified himself as my first cousin.

To be continued…

The Giant Bamboo Explosion

One day far into the future, archeologists and botanists will pinpoint the epicenter of the giant bamboo explosion that threatened to overrun Northern California as originating from the side of my house.

At my house, we love bamboo. We have about 5 different kinds, all of which are clumping, save one. If you didn’t know there’s a difference, according to Bamboo Garden,

“Clumping bamboos can be planted without fear of them spreading beyond their assigned territory. Their rhizomes, the underground stems, are quite different than than those of our timber and other non-clumping bamboos. Instead of a horizontal spreading rhizome, they are u-shaped making new culms next to the original plant, spreading only a few inches per year, hence the name clumping bamboo.”

Then there’s the other kind. Running bamboo. The kind that’s in a permanent marathon, 365 days a year.

When we bought our ‘runner’ -- to create a privacy wall on one side of our house -- we were told that its aggressive rhizome systems must be contained within a physical barrier, such as a brick or concrete planter or a specialized plastic rhizome barrier.

We went for the specialized barrier. With our black clay soil (hard as brick when dry) this was not a trivial job but we did it. It didn’t work. Our runner did an end run on us. Now we’re making bets on how long it will be before it snakes under street and sidewalk, appearing in our neighbor’s yard across the street.

Partners in Adventure

One of the things my husband and I pledged to each other when we married was to be “partners in adventure.” I think at the time we actually thought that this vow was about adventure – we both loved to travel and had each spent a fair portion of our lives having great adventures around the world. So we planned to be partners in, well, more adventure.

How little we knew that this vow would be one of the more practiced ones in our daily lives.

I’m a great fan of the concept and practice of positive ‘reframing’ and how it can empower one’s life. The central principle behind reframing is that there is no good or bad in life -- there is only our perception of it. So, reframing refers to our ability to take a negative situation, and make it positive in another context.

"The art of reframing is to maintain the conflict in all its richness but to help people look at it in a more open-minded and hopeful way." -- Bernard Mayer, in The Dynamics of Conflict Resolution, p.139

Every marriage, no matter how healthy, has its share of tense moments, impatience and frustration – that’s just modern life. But what my husband and I have found is that we can be in the hairiest of predicaments -- like nearly running out of gas in the middle of the Mohave Desert or having a flat tire on a narrow shouldered highway at the beginning of a 900 mile journey, or unplugging a backed up toilet – and then look at each other and say “Partners in adventure!” And suddenly, we are having an adventure, of our own making.