WHAT WERE WE THINKING?

           

              That married life would be a bed of roses, since we'd pledged our vows in the Idaho Falls Temple of the LDS Church and covenanted to one another an eternity together?  I think we knew better, but...we did it anyway!  45 years ago today.  Like all married couples, we've been through our share of trials and tailspins, heartaches and heartthrobs, exhilaration and humiliation, but eight--counting Debbie, our adopted daughter-children, seventeen grandchildren, and four greats, debts, job losses, illnesses, tragedy, comedy, pathos, highlights and lowlights later, we've come through the 45 years with flying colors--ready to tackle the come-what-mays of old age with vim and vigor, fear and trembling.
             

                 Our introduction to the new experiences that await us with the coming of old age began March 29, when Tom had a little tightness in his chest and slight pain between his shoulder blades while we were walking along the River Walk.  In the early hours of March 31, doctors performed triple bypass heart surgery on the man who'd been proclaimed "the healthiest 77 year old that he'd ever treated" by his doctor just a few months before.  Many of you reading this post have been there-done that, and I don't care to repeat the gory details.  However, I do want to express deep gratitude to God for the countless tender mercies which He and others bestowed upon us throughout the surgery and recovery period.  There are so many stories to tell of kindnesses large and small, but I'll only share a couple of small ones and one great big one.

                Hospital staff seemed surprised that two people could be married so long.  "How do you do it?" they'd ask.  Not an easy question to answer.  In our case, we've always loved each other and wanted to be together.  The first minute I saw Tom as he was lying in ICU linked to multiple tubes and machines, white as a ghost, I wanted desperately to touch him, to hold his hand, to remind him how much I loved him.  The ever-enthusiastic nurse kept exclaiming, "Doesn't he look great?  He looks wonderful!"  He certainly didn't look great, but I took his limp hand, whispered "I love you," and heard garbled whispers which I knew were "I love you too."

                 On another occasion, Tom was suffering because he just couldn't tolerate the inpalatable "heart healthy" hospital fare.  I thought long and hard about smuggling in some contraband for him from the hospital's cafeteria, but I'm an obedient servant and couldn't bring myself to disobey the law.  A nurse, sympathetic to Tom's plight, winked at me and said, "Have your sweetie here bring you something from the cafeteria.  We don't mind."  No goodies but...

                   Our children rallied to our cause.  I certainly learned how to use the group discussion part of my cell phone service.  Texts flew as each child checked in, offering prayers, sympathy, and pledges of love from Saudi Arabia, Hawaii, etc.  Tom's biggest concern was that our dining room was filled with all of the furniture and furnishings from our study because he had been remodeling the study.  He wished there was someone to haul all of the paraphernalia back into the study before he got home, and we had company.  Darla and Vale were asked to do that job, but they'd been so busy driving back and forth to Portland to run errands for me and see Dad that they put the job off until the night before Tom was to come home.  They figured it may take them all night to haul all the heavy furniture back in that Dad had single-handedly taken out.   However to their rescue came a whole SUV full of cousins who had stopped by.

      A few weeks later, while Tom was recuperating, our knights on white horses came to help, not only Darla and Vale, but sons Tom and Mark.  Tom, our youngest, came from LA, and Mark, the oldest came from Saudi Arabia.  What a fun two or three days with at least half of our children at home for a while, and the other half cheering them on.  Darla and Vale were in the early stages of their move to Oklahoma and got lots of help with their packing, cleaning and mapping out the trip.

         Mark and Tom are half-brothers--15 years apart.  Tom was a toddler when Mark went off to college, and, for Tom, Mark was one of the adults, and he knew Mark's children better than he did his own brother.  These two men worked like demons for three days:  painting, putting in a beautiful wood floor, cleaning, and assisting in the re-wiring of the whole house and BONDING.  I heard conversations ranging from Who do you think Mom and Dad will vote for in the upcoming election to bugs, lizards, and creatures who inhabit the Saudi Arabian deserts.  I call the wood floor in the study, the MarTom floor because, between Tom's artistic flair and Mark's precision, the floor is truly a work of art.

         Truly we are blessed.  We're still together--hanging on to every moment with each other we can have, enjoying our wonderful children and their posterity, doing our thing.  I've always remembered this little quote which I underlined years ago as I read Mark Twain's Diary of Adam and Eve:    "Wherever she was, there was Eden."  I am in Eden.

"The constant smell of smoke from the wildfires has been replaced by an aroma that is quite familiar in our rural area--the bouquet of wood stoves burning.  Because  we can, a large number of us heat our homes with wood heat.  For years now, the most familiar sounds of the new day--from October to early April anyway--are the sounds of Dad stoking up the stoves with wood.  The squeak of the stove door handle, the crack of the ax making kindling, the rustle of newspapers remind we grasshoppers that there's activity afoot.  While our ant labors away, we enjoy the luxury of lying in bed under our warm covers until we hear the crackle of the fire and Dad's "Time to get up."  Too cruel--that reminder that we all have promises to keep when the warmth filling the room is sometimes more of an invitation to snuggle down and go back to sleep."

Although I wrote that entry three years ago in another blog, the familiar ritual is still the same!!  We've enjoyed the fall season this year.  


                                        Kobe had a pumpkin-carving "date" with the sister missionaries.  While they carved "pretty" pumpkins, Kobe's was more scary.  I had to rescue a number of my kitchen knives from the poor pumpkin.  

The week of Halloween was also Spirit Week, and Kobe had a ball dressing in a different costume each day.

Halloween is not my favorite holiday, and we seem to have a tendency to eat all of the Halloween candy before Halloween.  We never have trick or treaters, since a walk down our driveway in the black, sleeting rain is a rather formidable trek for even the most intrepid ghoul or Vampire.

                          My favorite story of Halloween is one I found concerning my paternal great-grandmother, Ann Jane McCowan.  

Jane's family were Welsh, and they immigrated from Wales as members of the Mormon Church.  The small family came across the plains without their father who had died of consumption earlier.  Concerned members of the party gave the family a large pumpkin as they began their journey.  Never having seen a pumpkin before, they assumed the large orange object was given to provide an extra seat in the wagon.  Finally, just before the pumpkin had completely rotted, someone explained that it was food to fill their empty stomachs.

All is well with us.  

Yes, that's Dad up on the shed, adding a lean-to shelter to house the snow blower and other equipment.  No, he will not listen to me.  That shed is also stacked full of wood, as is the back porch, and the far corner of the lot.  He's at his happiest puttering around in the yard or the house which also includes various trips to some of Astro's favorite places:  SDS lumber yard, Home Depot, and the dump.  I cannot convince Dad that he's too old for the work he's doing, so all I can do is sit in the house and alternately cuss him out and pray for him!

I am still doing my mission, of course.  In January, I'll have been on the mission for two years, and I've signed up for two more, since we've decided to stay where we are and do what we love in our own home.  I continue to have wonderful experiences with the mission work.  Since most missionaries are in their late 60's to 70's, we're all from the same era and most from many, many years of Church service.  It's not uncommon to see a missionary checking out after 3 or 4 hours on chats or calls, to go work a shift at the temple, or teach a class.  I love the patrons, and we have very few "mean" callers.  Most often, the callers are, if anything, terribly frustrated.  You'd be surprised how fiercely loyal our patrons are to the long-dead ancestors they're trying to find or have found.  Many are very reluctant to admit that an ancestor may not have been the saint they had thought him to be, in spite of definitive evidence to the contrary.  One patron asked me if I was from a foreign country because he felt I was not understanding what he was asking.  I've taken up hand-quilting for our evening tv blitzes.  As you can tell by the picture, it's often a very warm experience!  

It's a wonderful life.  Hope this blog finds all of you feeling that way too!

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” 
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

WHY AM I DOING THIS?

WHY AM I DOING THIS?

              For some unknown reason, a few weeks ago, I referred back to a blog that I started in October of 2007 which I called Avis La Fin--the Kennedy family motto--"Consider the End." (avislafin.blogspot.com.)  I abandoned the blog in October of 2012, thinking blogs were out of style, and quick little f/b entries were easier and faster.  I enjoyed the Facebook rage until February of 2014.  Not sure why...  Then, I realized how much I missed writing--real writing...thinking...creating, so here I am again.

               Today is September 1.  Our lives have changed since I wrote that last entry in 2012.  Vale no longer lives with us; he's now a southern California resident, senior in high school, and a budding musician.  Great-grandma, Margaret Kennedy, lives with us.  At 99, she's actually in fairly good health and, every day, muses over plans for her 100th birthday next May.  Our son, Steve, and his son, Kobe, are the residents of our basement apartment.  I'm serving a part-time, online mission for the Mormon Church, as a support person for FamilyTree.  I'll share more about that in another post.  Tom has finally started achieving a long-time dream of his--to have a "garden-like" yard.  Walk with me through what is fast becoming our garden-like yard:

                Here is the Before picture taken of our backyard about a year ago by our neighbor who did a panorama shot with her camera to try to capture the wildfires you see in the background..  Ours is the house with the rock wall and gazebo.  

             

  

The trees on the other side of the gazebo are an old abandoned cherry orchard.

UPDATE to the UPDATE:  October 25, 2015:

                   The panoramic view of the backyard has changed very little from the birds' eye viewpoint of the picture, but most other aspects of our lives, of course, have.  Grandma Kennedy passed away two weeks after her 100th birthday after teaching us a great deal about service to others, sincere gratitude, and true grit.  Shortly after Grandma's departure, Steve completed his captain's licensing and got himself a job at the University of Hawaii in the Marine Biology department on Hilo.  He is now Capt. Steve Kennedy, Marine Science Boat Program Coordinator.  Kobe is here with us, attending 7th grade at Henkle Middle School, and will join his dad in December.
                  We've been laughing a lot lately about our current "state."  We'd begun to notice that we are now some of the "older" members of our Church congregation and are being treated with dignity and a tad bit of deference.  We hear those "Dearies" and "My dears" so often that we began to re-examine ourselves.  We looked like we felt--completely exhausted and overwhelmed and, yes, we had to admit, a bit doddering.  So we began to take afternoon naps, changing our fix-it fast and on-the-go diet, and taking early morning walks along the river.  We both feel better.

                Tom is always happiest when he's outside puttering around in the yard or working on various and sundry projects, and, with renewed energy, he's winterizing the grounds and grubbing out an area that we've wanted for a long time to develop into "Annie's Garden," as a tribute to all of our children, but more specifically to our deceased daughter, Annie.  We haven't ever returned to a yard filled with squirrel feeders because we were setting the poor things up as prey for our dog, Astro.  However, Tom couldn't resist the lure of feeding unfortunate creatures, so he's affixed bird feeders in the gazebo.  Here's what he found a few days ago:

  He's also decided to spend his evenings doing his own genealogy.  We're quite a sight in the evenings, scrunched in front of his laptop computer, as I teach him the fundamentals of research.  He's doing just great and is beginning to branch out on his own, looking for elusive ancestors.

                     As for me, I'm still doing my online Church mission as a support specialist for the Mormon Church's genealogy site, FamilyTree.  The question I'm asked most often is:  "How's the weather in Salt Lake?"  So funny because I'm in my own living room looking out at Mt. Hood when I'm taking calls. Everything is done online--our meetings, our service, any friendships.  I answer calls, chats, and emails from English-speaking people all over the world who are using our site to research their ancestry.  It's a wonderful opportunity for me, being able to share a hobby that I've had since I was 12.  I recently had a very poignant call which will stay with me for a while.  A man called from Virginia and asked if I could help him find his birth father.  We don't usually give that type of service; our site is for research on the dead not the living, so I was hesitant until he said, "I'm 78 years old, and I want to find out who my father is before I die.  I am told that you Mormons are good Christians and won't scam me."  How could I resist?  He had at one time found his birth mother, who further rejected him by saying, "I gave you away for a reason."  Sadly, he had a list of four men who had been given to him over the years as "possibilities," and each of the four was either dead or could not be found.  He was so distraught, and I badly wanted to reach through the computer screen and give him a hug.  Finally, he gave a tearful sigh and said, "I have loved God all my life, and He has loved me.  I'm going to take Him at His word; He is my only Father now.  God bless you for helping me."  Indeed.
                    Our life is so good and so full.  We are grateful for nearly 45 years together and good health.  We wish as much for all of you!!  Love from here.  Mom