Community

Last night I was filling out a survey for some research on VCFS and its effects on the person, the caregiver, the family, and the community. When I'm asked to fill out a survey on homeschooling, I nearly always refuse to participate. I don't think it's helpful to have research that "proves" homeschooling is okay, because after all, what makes homeschooling okay is that God put children into families with parents, and children don't belong to the State. It's not the good results that make homeschooling okay (even though there are good results), and such research silently assents to the idea that homeschooling rights exist because we can measure up on the academic playing field. However, when a survey is about VCFS, and the experts know so little yet, and our family is one of the oddballs in that we homeschool and, well, "handle" the VCFS so differently than is normally advised, then I'm more willing to participate in the research studies.

Anyway...
There was a section in the survey that was asking about our family's acceptance in the community, and whether the community cared about our child's VCFS, and whether the community supported us as we raise a child with VCFS, and how involved our family is in making the community a better place, etc. I was thinking that the community doesn't care much. That's not an indictment against anybody; it's just that we haven't lived here very long and don't know too many people, and certainly don't know them well enough to be talking much about VCFS with these near-strangers.

But as I continued in the "community" section of the survey, some of the questions specifically asked about our "faith community" which was described as our church or mosque or synagogue. I answered the questions about church very very differently from how I answered the questions regarding the overall community. But the way the survey was arranged made it seem like church was part of the "community." I never thought of it that way before.

What do you think? Is church part of the community? Or is church something very different from our "communities"? Is this an "in the world but not of the world" thing? Or do I have an inadequate definition in my head of what "community" is?

Indiana 2

Driving through the country is a lovely, luscious, restful thing!

My plan on Friday was to drop off Maggie with my folks, having met south of the Chicago-metro area, and then head northwest to Valpo, entirely skirting the metro area by driving on Indiana 2. It was BEAUTIFUL! Fields and combines and even old old tractors hauling obsolete hay-rakes. Elevators dotting the landscape. (Why is it that it's so comforting to see fields upon fields, with the elevators popping up on the horizon periodically?) The trees were still changing, so the colors added to the scenery.

And then the detour which sent me back north to the metro area, and the construction zone on the detour, full of Friday afternoon Chicago drivers. Boy, that can suck the joy right out of the drive!

But now that I'm here, wasting oodles of time just watching Alia be cute (oh, so cute!) instead of working on my editing, the stress of driving through busy areas has faded, and I'm again able to remember the gorgeous part of my drive across county roads and state roads in Illinois and Indiana. Y'know, one of those people who wrote songs like "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" should write a song about elevators.

Tractor Pun

Driving Paul to college last Friday, we happened to see a road sign for "WARNING: Deer Crossing."



Sitting between the road sign and the cornfield next to it, was an orange tractor (aka an Allis-Chalmers).  I laughed!



(For those of you who need an explanation, an Allis-Chalmers is NOT a Deere.)
And then I laughed at myself. Because, really, how many people would've been amused by this? Probably the kind of people (like me!) who enjoyed Beer for My Horses.

Robins' Return

Back at the parsonage, we've watched the annual robin wars. The males come back in spring a few weeks before the females. The males have to duke it out for their turf. There are several days after the fellas come back, prior to the territory being settled, when we could watch HOW the sections of the backyard and the trees were being divvied up. It is immensely interesting to watch.

A few weeks ago, Gary was at the parsonage on the weekend of the robin wars. I didn't get to see it. That was kinda sad.

When I said something to a friend about missing it, living in some subdivision, he told me that we're not really in a subdivision, but we're still in a rather countryish area. I tried to look on the bright side. I tried to appreciate the undeveloped areas around the ski hill nearby. I tried to remember how little yard and grass and meadow I would see if we had settled even more "in town." But I still was missing the country.

Today I had no laundry to drop off at the laundromat during matins. So I took a different path to church this morning. Oh my goodness! What a difference that made! Instead of heading south and then east, I headed east and then south. Usually I drive through a whole neighborhood full of $400,000 homes and then past a two malls and a Kohl's and a McDonalds and several banks. Today I drove past a cornfield and a horse pasture and two big patches of overgrown tree nursery.

Ahhhhhhh, that's good for the soul!

In Town

I love the picture book The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. It's a story about a little house in the country, surrounded by daisies, watching the sun rise and set and the seasons pass. The little house wondered what the far-off city was like. But as the city grew, and the little house first became part of a village, then part of a small city, then a big city, then in the midst of a huge city, the little house decided it missed the country and the daisies and the sunsets and the birds.

Down at the old house yesterday for church, I heard and then saw many many V's of migrating geese heading north. Now, I'm not too fond of Canada geese, but they weren't coming to live here -- they were passing through -- and seeing them was still a happy harbinger of spring. Later I heard and then saw V's of sandhill cranes migrating too. That always thrills my heart! And I wonder how I'll do in town, not being able to see the horizon, not being able to measure time by which wildflowers are in season. I fear that I may become the little house who ended up longing for her rural life back.

And yet...
on Friday the car's "check engine" light came on. And the new mechanic is only 8 minutes away instead of 33. (That really adds up when you have to make two roundtrips for each repair!) And yesterday I injured my neck helping to carry furniture up from the basement at the old house, and it's only 6 minutes to the D.O. instead of 70. So I'm finding there are definite benefits to living in town. Now, to focus on the gains instead of the losses....

Stuck But Unused Stamps

At the post office today, I learned something new. If I had an unused stamp that was attached to a self-addressed stamped envelope that a business had sent us, or if I mistakenly attached a stamp to an envelope with the wrong address, I used to snip it off and glue it onto another envelope. The postmaster today wouldn't accept it. He told me that it is fine to bring in the envelope with the unused stamp attached, and they'll refund the money or give me a new stamp. But any stamp going into the mail must be attached to the current envelope and cannot have been stuck onto anything else first.

Okay. That's good to know for future reference.

But today it took all my gumption not to burst into tears in the post office over that 82 cents.

So I proceed to the welder's place to pick up my pots whose handles had fallen off last week. When his assistant fetched my order, I asked her how much I owed her. I expected somewhere between $5 and $10, and I really have no clue if I was anywhere in the ballpark. But Denise told me I didn't owe them anything; it was "a donation to the cause." Overwhelmed, I thanked her. Granted, it was probably no big deal to them who fix great big honkin' pieces of machinery. A little handle on a little saucepan maybe isn't any more to them than sewing on a button would be to me. But it meant a lot to me that they did the repairs out of kindness, without cost to us.

And a few minutes earlier I was stressing over 82 cents.

Big Boys, Big Toys

They're building a huge new subdivision in the village near us. It is adjacent to Andrew's paper route, and we've been watching the piles of rock, the new roads, the machinery, etc. But this morning when we went to town for paper routes, they were right there, where I drive and where I have to walk for my route and where Andrew has to walk.

Oh, the coolness of it all! The huge graders and the huge backhoes and all these other dirt-movers that I don't know the names of! They're massive! And they're moving huge piles of dirt and rocks! (And this is probably bad because they're turning perfectly decent farmland into houses with yards that are going to be overly spacious.) It is fascinating to watch!

Because of the road being entirely ripped to pieces, I had to park and walk quite a ways to the apartment building to deliver papers. I passed so many men out there ogling! LOL! It was so cute! Men all over the neighborhood, standing outside, some with cameras, all of them watching the life-sized Tonka trucks in the massive sandbox!

Past the Boundaries

When I was a little girl, there were places I could go. Places far far away from home. There was the playground: it was three blocks away! Then I got older and went to school: it was five blocks away! The two good buddies I made at school were girls who lived (pretty much) between me and school. In the neighborhood, we just didn't play with kids who lived more than a half-block away. So having friends from five blocks away was really stepping out into the big wide world!

Now I live in the country. I drive two miles before I even come to a stop sign. Four or five miles to the nearest little villages.

We're visiting my folks for a few days. Having skipped three out of the last four days jogging, I knew I couldn't allow myself to skip it while out of town again. So today I jogged down to the playground, and [gasp!] kept right on going past it! I usually jog two miles a day, and when I got to my grade-school, I had completed only 1/4 of my jog. So I had quite a ways to go yet before I could even turn around and head back home.

It's a funny feeling to go past the boundaries. It gives an odd feeling of being all grown-up, and yet the amazingly fresh memory of how "far away" those places were -- places that were once off-limits because of being a whole mile away. It's a funny feeling to be halfway home from my old grade-school, and see the intersection near my parents' house up ahead, and realize that if I were at home, traversing that distance wouldn't even take me to the next-door neighbor's house.

I can't even imagine how it must be for Texans and Alaskans to find themselves in a small midwestern city where everything is so close by, where the FAR end of town is about 15 minutes away, where that 15-minute radius can offer nearly any store or restaurant or entertainment you could wish for. Being from a place with low population density, in my hometown I now feel like a gawky tourist.

Big, Bad, Scary Neighbors

Last night Gary and I watched To Kill a Mockingbird. I had an ADD attack and noticed something that's somewhat beside-the-point in the movie: the kids had a big, bad, scary neighbor who wasn't really bad.

When I was little, we had a neighbor across the street that scared all the kids. We were afraid to walk on the sidewalk in front of her house. Some of the kids said she was a witch. I can't remember if she ever actually came out and yelled at any of us or threatened any of us, but we were convinced that she would. I was afraid of getting hit by her broom. Because of the fear factor, it was considered the height of bravery among the children to go do something pesty to her -- like walking on the sidewalk by her house AND making a lot of noise while you did.

I asked Gary if he had neighbors who had a similar reputation. He did.

Is this something common to childhood? Or maybe it WAS common to childhood. My kids grew up without neighbors (for the most part) so there was nobody to be frightened of. It could be that children are allowed outside on their own so little these days, and they have so few friends in the neighborhood these days, and even grown-ups know their neighbors so little these days, that maybe such fears are confined to a bygone era.

But now I wonder if those big, bad, scary neighbors were just nice, normal people who were annoyed by children stealing their apples or berries, or throwing rocks at their roof. Maybe the big, bad, scary neighbors weren't unreasonable at all, but just gained the reputation. I don't know. I guess I'm wondering if I'll grow up to be a big, bad, scary neighbor myself.

Podunkville

The doctor needs me to go to the hospital for some tests. She couldn't get me in to the local hospital today. But tomorrow I have to be at Children's all day with Maggie for speech pathology, x-ray, and ENT. So I floated the idea of having me take the tests while we're at the big medical complex in the city tomorrow. Doctor thought it was a great idea. She called to make the appt. They laughed at her! The first appt available is in two weeks. She needs test results sooner than that, so she called around the urgent care facilities in our county until she could find someone who could fit me in today. Goodness gracious, the big city sounds like the Canadian health care system: you better not need anything right away. Emergencies are not permitted because they weren't scheduled in advance. ;-) It sure is different out here in Podunkville where there aren't so many people to fit in.

Podunkville

The line in the bank yesterday was long. I'm not used to being there on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, and the crowd there then always surprises me. While I was waiting, one of the clerks was cooing at a customer's baby, and chatting at length about planned Caesareans versus emergency Caesareans. Shortly thereafter, someone pulls up to the drive-up window and asks about ordering Girl Scout cookies from the daughter of one of the tellers. The cookie order was scribbled down, with name and cookie choices, and I was still standing in line.

I wasn't really irritated or anything. But thoughts were flitting through my mind that this isn't the way customers should be treated. The socializing and the non-work activities should take a backseat to waiting on the bank customers.

But then I realized something. People here know each other. They're interacting like people instead of like automatons who are cogs in the Human Resource Department. If I go to a different branch of our bank, I have to show ID and jump through all the banking hoops that most of the rest of y'all live with regularly. I don't have to do that at our bank.

For example, yesterday I needed to get into the safe deposit box to look at savings bonds. (By the way, for those of you who have to fill out college financial aid forms and need to find the value of savings bonds, the government's online Savings Bond Calculator makes a breeze of that job!) Did I have to show ID to get into my safe-deposit box? No. Did I even have to tell them my name? No. I just said that I needed to get into it, and the girl (the NEW girl who's hardly ever waited on me) went to fetch the box and the paperwork. The girls at the bank all know our names, where we live, that our kids are connected to us and not somebody else's kids, what my husband's job is, etc etc.

There's information galore available on protecting one's identity. But the bad guys can be sophisticated with their forged documents and their slick way with computers and ID numbes. But actually knowing people is safety in a whole different realm. There ain't nobody who could get by with going into my local bank and cashing one of my checks, taking money out of my savings account, or dipping into my safe-deposit box.

Lots of times, the label "Podunk" is used in a derogative manner. But to me, there's something dear about Podunkville. The guy that I used to sub paper-route for lived in the nearby big city of 60,000 people. He said that coming out here to do paper routes was like visiting Mayberry. Hooray for Mayberry!