Thursday, July 30, 2015

Effrontery and Stamina


I get these weird feelings of guilt when I (don't) blog. It goes like this, "I want to write on the blog, but I really need to post about our beautiful trip to Canada before I write about anything else. But actually, I should post the pictures from the week before Canada first. And I really should talk about how awesome having Celiacs is for a while."
But I don't  want to write those things, I just want to mindlessly babble. This Internetplace is a beautiful place for mindless babble.

As E.B. White once ingeniously stated, "The essayist blogger is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist blogger, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays a blog."

There you go. Pretty darn self-center and self-liberated, am I.
(We've been watching Star Wars a lot at our house. Beginning to speak like Yoda, am I.)



The truth is, our trip to Canada was beautiful and amazing and lots of beautiful and amazing things happened before and after. Including, but not limited to:

Travis' Grandpa is so wonderful and I love him. I haven't gotten to spend a lot of time with him since we got married and he lives so far away. It was so sweet to spend time with him and talk to him. He is very like his son, my father-in-law, and I love that my boys have such wonderful men to look up to and learn from.



We are buying a house! A REAL HOUSE LIKE GROWNUPS. It is charming and sweet, and the yard is big and it's less than a half an hour from our driveway to all the fancy ski resorts, and less than 10 minutes from our house to the mouths of several canyons. So we've been hiking a lot. 
And I've been getting out the graph paper to sit down and map out exactly how big of a garden I'm going to plant and figure out how many square feet should be taken up by pumpkin vines.



The weather has been perfect. So perfect. Amazingly ideal! And I've been relishing it and thinking about how I'll be in my new house by fall, and then planning Star Wars Halloween costumes for the whole family. Guess I'll be Leia... There don't seem to be a lot of options for me. (We're old-school Star Wars only at this house. For now.)



I started reading Heidi and it's beautiful. I weep in every chapter. I always thought it would be kind of boring or heavy, but it's not. After a particularly hard hike up into the mountains recently, with the hillsides covered in wildflowers, the lakes reflecting the clouds, and the mountains looming green and blue in every direction: I just wanted to sit down and read beautiful literature about children, love, God, goats and mountains. And Heidi was exactly perfect. I want to do the hike again this week and read while I'm up there, pretending to be in Switzerland- but I'm too absorbed in my book. I'm sure I'll finish it before I get the chance.



Oh, hey. Did you see that I said that having Celiacs is awesome? It is. Being sick all the time for my entire life was not awesome. Having Celiacs, a solvable problem that I can point at and then work around? Amazing.
I got really, really sick in the last year. So when I was diagnosed with Celiacs, I assumed I would cut out gluten and go back to the "normal" state of health that I'd been my whole life.
Only now that I feel so good, I am realizing that I've felt sick my entire life. Forever. I have always been tired, always been nauseous, always been sore, always been gassy, and I just assumed that was how everyone felt all the time. It's hard work being mortal, right? Except I don't feel that way anymore.
I seriously wake up early in the morning and think "Maybe I'll go for a run! Let's go on a hike! I got stuff to do!"
I have to remind myself to slow down- I want to force my kids on a morning and afternoon hike and need to work to remember that it's nice just to be home and be still for a while, too.
People love to ask me, "What do you miss the most about gluten?" and the truth is, I miss the convenience and ease of it.
I'd like to pick up regular graham crackers at the store. I'd like to eat the cookies our new neighbors promised to bring us when we move in. I'd like to go to any ol' restaurant and order whatever sounds good.
But I can't. I would end up on the toilet for the rest of the week.
But specific foods? I don't miss anything, I can just make it all. Sure it's pain to make all your own food, but I did that before anyway. Because I like it.
Although... I did spend DOUBLE our grocery budget in July.
Oops. Okay. I'm reining myself in.
Gluten free foods are EXPENSIVE, yo!





Did you notice that not a single one of these pictures had anything to do with the words I wrote? I know. I just really wanted to show these pictures to you, before they got lost in the files.
My favorites? Travis taking an iPhone picture of my baby in the river.
A group of five women and their 12 respective children, justing hanging out in a waterfall after a (tiny) hike together. And thoughtful Grey, looking away. Just life, you know. It looks like this.
And inside my brain, it sounds like this, too.

E.B. White would be horrified to think that I consider this to be an essay.
But don't worry. I know it's not an essay. Just the absurd ramblings of a reader, writer, picture-taker.

1 comment:

MARCIE said...

I'm sure I told you that Heidi was my favorite book when I was a child. I wish I still had my copy. I may have to borrow yours. I'm happy that you love to read and write. I always did too, but you are much better than I have been. Your EB White quote is so perfect--for you!
What is this rock tub the children are in? It reminds me of Rub-a-dub-dub!