life in this town (part one)

It’s hard, sometimes, to live in this small hometown where we grew up. Not because of the external, which is a beautiful place filled to the brim with kind people, but because of the internal, my heart, which is still processing the years of my life which have happened here.

My parents moved here nearly thirty years ago, outsiders from big cities in the East and Midwest, with my dad’s dream of mountain living and peaceful self-sustainability. They lived in a teepee and then a camp trailer while they cleared brush from their land, had a baby, and built a log cabin. It was years before they had running water, and they never had electricity. My dad labored with vision and passion, fighting against the onslaught of narcolepsy and poverty, hitch-hiking to jobs in his trained field of forestry when he could find them, taking whatever else he could get when he could get it, and working diligently to make a farm for his family. My mom labored too, trying to overcome her innate thirst for more sociability than a mountain cabin provided, returning to work when I was two and taking jobs in forest fighting, flagging, and eventually carpentry.

I have hundreds of memories of my early years. I’ve read that trauma causes children to remember more; I don’t know if that was my case, but I remember much of those years from ages two to six, the time that my parents tried to make it work in a cabin with no electricity and in a town with few jobs. They loved me, but they weren’t the best match, and with no money and no Jesus, they found it hard to love each other, although I think they stuck it out as long as they did because they loved me so much.

We had rabbits, and my mom would put my hair in “bunny ear” pigtails when I went to feed them. We had chickens, everywhere, and they were constantly being eaten by hawks; the sound of a chicken screaming was terrifying to me. We had dogs, and puppies; my dog Lilly, who we had for seventeen years, would have her puppies under the woodpile. We would bring them in the house and one by one, most of them would die. I don’t know why. We had turkeys, and one was my special pet until she was killed by a friend’s dog as I was watching. I received a kitten, White Mittens, for my third birthday which we had for a few years until he ate antifreeze. Another kitten, Cowboy, starved when we were away one time. All of our animals eventually died tragically. I’ve shared my first memory before, of when somebody gave us an orphaned duck, and having watched a show about how mama ducks cared for their little ones, I put a pillow on it and sat on it. My joy in caring for it for lovingly and then trying to understand why it wasn’t cheeping anymore is the first thing I can remember. I was younger than Rilla.

I had friends whose parents were like mine, trying to make a way for themselves before they too eventually split from the pain and poverty. We hauled water in huge blue containers from their house, and we played games in our cabins. I had a rope to climb up to my bed in our cabin; they had a rope to climb up to their second story, where their room was, as the stairs were not built; when I came to their house, they had to tie knots in the rope for me, as I was not so good at climbing it as they were. At my house we would play in the couch, which was an ancient hide-a-bed; the springs were so worn that we could climb inside the back of the couch. I loved that. My parents would hook up a generator or car battery to the outside of the cabin and we would have electricity for a few hours, thanks to my dad’s wiring job on the place. It wasn’t perfect, but my friends and I loved it because if we jumped just right on certain places in the floor, we could turn certain lights off, and then on, and then off. Way more fun than playing with light switches!

I have many good memories of these years too. We had neighbors whose home we would go to in the thick of the winter so that we could warm up before hiking up the snow-laden, quarter-mile driveway to our house. I think they were retired, sort of, and they lived in a trailer that to me seemed luxurious, as it always had electricity and running water, and tasty things for me to eat. “Aunt” Zella baked amazing treats; fudge, cookies, sweet breads, and pies abounded in her home most of the year. If those supplies were ever exhausted, I was given white toast with butter on it, another novelty for me as we had no toaster. She gave me the kinds of trinkets that little girls and old ladies love: cheap necklaces, little toys, a ceramic statue that I still treasure. “Uncle” Walt had a shop and would do mechanic work in it on the few dozen vehicles that lined the creekbed by their home, or maybe on other vehicles too. He would sit on his couch, spitting snoose into a peanut can and watching old westerns, sometimes teaching me card tricks, while my mom visited with Zella. If my dad came, they’d visit for a bit and then go down to the shop like men do. They were like grandparents to me and so dear to my heart. Zella always called me her first granddaughter. Once, when I was being teased in school, she told me that she had been too, and that she had memorized the alphabet backwards and the other kids had been so in awe that they stopped bothering her. I memorized it too.

Going home after those visits was hard. In the snow of winter or the mud of spring and fall, my parents would rev whatever beat-up vehicles they were driving at the time and race them up the hill, trying to overcome the steep part before slipping back the long way to the bottom of the hill and trying again. There was usually some cursing involved, especially if the trip could not be made and if we had groceries to carry up. In the winter I was often pulled uphill in the sled, and sometimes I walked in the footprints of a parent who I am sure tried to make their stride shorter so that I could follow more easily. I well remember the comfort of the moon as it followed us up the long driveway.

We would arrive home and I would always, for some reason, expect it to be warm. It was not, as the woodstove would have died out long ago, and my tired parents would need to rekindle the fire and it would be hours before our home really warmed up. The cabin was dimly lit in the nighttime, as there were few lights even when we had the generator hooked up, and it was dim in the day too, as the high ceiling, dark walls, and relatively small windows simply couldn’t let it enough light. I would go outside in the daytime whenever I could, reading or swinging, playing with the dogs and listening to the meadowlark which I was sure said, “Hi, Jaa-mie.”

It was always easier for me than it was for my parents, of course. They made sure I was warm and fed, even if the food was sometimes canned commodities from the local Indian reservation, given out to families like ours that would not have enough food otherwise. I still remember what the corn flakes boxes looked like, what the canned peanut butter tasted like, and how I detested the powdered milk. But with no refrigerator, cold milk was a rarity anyway.

I was babysat often, sometimes in this community and sometimes in the surrounding ones where my parents would go for a time to find work. I remember each babysitter’s home, although not their names, and the other children who would be there. I went to a Christian preschool for a while in another town; my mom would bundle me up at 5 am, drive fifty miles to work, be there when the preschool opened, work as a flagger all day, and pick me up at the end of the day. I was always the last to leave. I think there were seasons when she didn’t work but overall, I was used to missing my parents. Once my dad camped up the river for a few months while he was working there. Another time I lived with a different family while my mom was fighting forest fires. One time we went to California for a few months so that my mom could paint houses with her sister; I have memories of a preschool there, and Sea World, and the ocean.

It took me years to begin to process and truly acknowledge these parts of my childhood, as the happy times were interspersed with the hard times and once my parents divorced, they each wanted to move on and I knew even as a child that they weren’t able to work through it all with me. But I am here again, in this town where they went to church for a time, where there were some people who reached out to them and others who did not. It is the same church building where I went as a new Christian as a teenager, where Keith and I were married, where we attend services now; these are the same church people who were there twenty years ago.

I haven’t blogged about this before or shared certain elements with my past because it is my parents’ story too, and because they are still living, and because there are ways in which they are still wounded from the years that they lived here, the formative first six years of my life. I realized recently that I have held back in some ways from healing, because to enter fully into my story is to enter largely into the hard parts of their story too, and to protect their privacy, I feel like I can’t completely do that. But I do need to process it, and to recognize that these are the events which shaped me. Even in the small ways. I hated peanut butter for a few decades after eating that canned stuff; I love light because our dim cabin could never be filled with it; I want to cry every.single.time that I am splashed with cold water, because the cold baths in that cold cabin were miserable.

And this too is why I have a heart for children in difficult or abusive situations. I was not abused, but the loud, angry arguments were rampant. I know what it is to be poor, and even if we were not so poor as some, I get it. I was sheltered from many of the effects of poverty because of wonderful grandparents who lived far away and showered me with gifts... not to spoil me, but because I needed them... and by that I always felt loved and cared for and provided for. The needed, beautiful provision of clothes and toys and books and games by my grandmother on the other side of the country is why I delight so greatly in giving gifts to others.

I think that my parents did the best that they could for as long as they could. It wasn’t until only very recently, when Rilla was born, that I really began to wonder what would have happened if they had found the Lord in those years, if He had stepped in and if they had allowed Him to save their marriage. It was the first time I really began to grieve what was lost. As much as I love the families created from the splitting of their union, I do wish they had come to know Him then. God has redeemed my life, and yet the scar of divorce still rests deep on my soul. And on theirs.

They split up the day after Christmas when I was six years old. My dad, with his already-graying hair and beard, went back to college and lived in dorms for a time, escaping completely from the hard cabin lifestyle. My mom and I lived on in the cabin for two more months, of which I have no memory, until we moved to an apartment in another town, to which my grandfather, her father, had just moved to from the Midwest. We had electricity, but I missed my dad.

This is part one of a three-part story. Please click here to read part two.