On Being Little

When I was little I didn't have a favorite color. My favorite color changed all the time. Some days it was purple. Some days it was green. One day I got a yellow towel because that's what I thought was my favorite was. When people would ask me what my favorite color was I would either tell them that I didn't know, or I would make up a color that sounded good and really convincing.

But I didn't have a favorite color. It was devastating. Life-threatening. I must've been the only kid without a favorite color, I thought!

It's funny how little kid minds work. Obviously I wasn't the only kid to not know what her favorite color was, but I sure felt like it.

And when I was six we were selling my mom's car because our little family had outgrown its spacious five seats. We would run errands around town with a black and orange For Sale sign in the back window. I was absolutely petrified that someone was going to come and buy our car while we were out and we would be forced to walk home.

I remember going on vacation to a resort where we got to stay in a cabin with my father's parents and his sister and her family. My cousin and I were sharing a room, and it was really hot in our room. She insisted that the window be open to let in some cooler air, and I insisted that the window stay closed lest a bear pop up out of nowhere and gobble us up! I think I was about nine or so.

Also, I played a lot of pretend when I was little. Other kids have memories of all these movies they watched and all these video games they played and I have memories of pretending to be a little Indian girl. I pretended to be Fern from Charlotte's Web and bring my momma a basket of 'eggs.' I would periodically ask her "Where's Poppa goin' with that ax?"

Some days I was Laura Ingalls Wilder living in a cabin in the woods. I would run around outside barefoot doing all sorts of things that I thought Laura would have done. I pretended my bike was a horse. I even gave her name and rode her around everywhere.

I absolutely loved to pretend I lived on a ranch. I would run around the backyard completing invisible chores like feeding horses, mucking stalls, collecting eggs, herding cattle. Life on my ranch was so busy! I had dogs and cats to take care of and chickens to feed!

My old neighborhood was filled with children around my age and TheKeeper's age. We would do all sorts of outrageous things. We fantasized about starting a neighborhood newspaper until my mother called that one to a screeching halt by asking who was going to pay for all the paper and the ink we used? Thwarted, we moved on to bigger and better things. Like starting our own band.

And by band, we meant 'singing group' because none of us could play an instrument besides faking the keyboard like the good elementary schoolers that we were. We even got in a fight about it and formed two 'rival' bands. We were going to put on concerts the same day and whoever got more people to show up to their concert won bragging rights.

We were going to hit it big for sure.

We climbed tress and hay bales from the farm that lived at the end of our street. We used to feed their cows grass too. But now the farmland is all houses and subdivisions, no little kids riding bikes on the old dirt road and wreaking havoc and running amok.

And by the way, my favorite color is blue.

Finally Friday

My aunt uploaded a few older pictures to Facebook in her "Memories of Dad" album. I promptly stole this one for my own. Not only is it a picture with Gramps, but it's also a picture of Goose Dog. And we're camping! And seriously, what's better than family camping? 

Unicorns.

But that's it. 

(I'm the baby)

An Ending

Sunday night I found out some horrible news.

I talked to my dad on the phone, knowing something was wrong but not sure exactly what. I thought about his cancer. Maybe something had gone really wrong?

Until he said these words "Grandpa died today"

I didn't understand. Grandpa wasn't supposed to die. Grandpa was supposed to live forever.

I had heard that it was bad. Our trip down to SoCal for Christmas was because my dad really felt like this would be Grandpa's last Christmas. His dementia was worsening. His health was deteriorating. Still, I didn't want to believe.

I wanted to think that my grandpa would make it to see me graduate college. It's just a couple years away. I wanted him around when I finally got married, to see how beautiful I will look on that day. A big part of me knew that he would never make it that long, but still there was that little part of me that hoped beyond hope that maybe, just maybe, he'd still be around.

It's hard. It's so hard to look at pictures, taken just a year ago. To think about Christmas, just a couple of months ago. It's hard to do that and not tear up at the thought of never being able to wrap my arms around him again.

I'm so far away from what's going on, that I feel like I will be able to fly down there and he will be there, ready to hug me when I walk in the door. We can go for a walk around the neighborhood like we used to.


I loved the sound of my name from his lips.   

My grandpa was an amazing man. An awesome husband, a good dad. He was a rowdy kid. A rolled up newspaper out one side of the car on the morning paper route and a lit match out the other.

I've heard his mother broke a broom over his backside on a weekly basis. 

He taught my dad to drive in a time where manual transmissions were the norm and I've heard the man could make gears sing. I've heard my dad tell stories of driving advice when he was having trouble keeping the car in the lane. "This isn't a sail boat, you don't need to tack into the wind."

He hated mushrooms.

I remember feeling like his disease had robbed me of getting to really know him. To know the him that was happy and active and didn't stutter when talked. But even though I felt like I wasn't as close to him as my cousins were, I could still hug him. I could still talk to him. He still loved me. 

I was his pear thief when I was little. He used to eat a lot of pears. Before we moved all the way to Idaho I would crawl up in his lap and steel bites of his pears. I still like eating pears, though these days they are the canned variety and not the fresh. Unfortunate.

Everyone keeps asking me if I'm okay. And to be honest, I have no idea if I'm okay or not. I feel like if I don't think about it, then I can't be sad. But then in quiet moments, or when I see a picture of him (because on FB we've all changed our profile pictures to ones with him) and it's hard to imagine that he's gone.

It's hard to imagine the severity of someone's gone-ness. We say goodbye, but we never really say goodbye. Our farewell's are much more in a 'I will see you again later' form and less in a 'This is the last time I will see your smiling face' manner.

Which is for the most part how we operate. And we do see each other again. So wrapping my brain around the fact that my grandpa is missing? Not something I'm too keen on doing.

I'm missing a man whom without I wouldn't even be around. He's been a big part of our family. He was my grandma's best friend. They were married for over 50 years.

It's hard to write about him in the past tense. It's hard to know that next week sometime I will be making a fast trip to San Diego for a funeral. Funeral is such a HARD word to think about. My mom told me that if I want to say a few words about him I'm more than welcome too.

I may or may not write anything. Who knows.

But one thing is certain, he's with his Maker now. And probably the happiest he's been in YEARS.

Today it thundered. It's been a joke in our family that the thunder happens when the angels go bowling and get strikes. Well, I choose to believe that he's up there bowling with them and playing a perfect game. Because everyone knows that that old man could skunk us all at bowling, even with Parkinson's disease and he grinned like a little boy the whole time he was doing it.

I just can't believe he's gone.

Time Warp

This is me when I was a junior in high school. I thought I was pretty cool.


And these two beautiful girls were my best friends. We were crazy in our own right and caused a lot of trouble. We thought we were pretty bad ass.

And then the almost unthinkable happened. We graduated and spent our last summer together apart. I visited Germany right after graduation and then traveled to Utah a few weeks later. But we still managed to celebrate 18th birthdays and shed goodbye tears before college.

I got to college and experienced SWEET FREEDOM! I celebrated by piercing my nose, much to my father's dismay.

In October, I met this cutie who wowed me with his love of art and music. I was smitten.

After freshman year ended, I was job hunting all the local coffee shops. And then Prince told me there was still an opening at camp, and I semi reluctantly applied. I got the job, and haven't regretted it whatsoever.

I also made some new best friends, since things weren't really working out with Belle and Ariel like I'd hoped. (We've since reconciled, but it was a tough second semester of college.)

And then I entered my first semester of my sophomore year. You know what they say - you can tell a sophomore...but you can't tell 'em much.

Only this time around, this kid joined me at school, along with a new major.

So now here I am, in my second semester of my sophomore year of college and some people still think I'm stuck back in high school because I look so young. But you guys know different, right?

Right.

It's been a long journey. It's not always been pretty. A lot of life around me is completely different than when I started this little blog. And we're not even done yet!

Wordful Wednesday - a first attempt

I've never taken part of MamaKat's Writer's Workshop. I've never participated in the Wordful Wednesday at Seven Clown Circus. But I suppose that it's never to late for a first try, so here it goes. There is a theme this week I suppose, but I don't know if there's a theme every week.

However, today we are supposed to talk about a trip we've taken. I've traveled a lot in my 19 years, which I absolutely love. I enjoy visiting new places and going back to old ones again and again. I've been to Canada, Mexico, Germany and a variety of other states, including Alaska. But today I feel like posting pictures from my Germany trip because it was oh so deliciously entertaining and awesome.

There are a lot of pictures from my trip because we spent over two weeks there, traveling around Southern Germany. We started in Frankfurt and visited a TON of smaller towns. I absolutely loved it there and I want to go back some day.

So here are a few pictures of the whole of the trip – minus Dachau because even though Dachau is meaningful, it’s slightly depressing and I kind of want to make this a more upbeat post – if you know what I mean.

Frankfurt - the start of the trip.

Our first German beer - jet lagged and drinking. :-)

This is the majority of how we traveled. I love trains.

Inside a castle courtyard.

A tower in Ulm.

We climbed over 400 stairs to the top :)

This is the Breitachklamm. It was very beautiful.

A sign we found at the Breitachklamm gift store that we thought was hilarious. It says "only small brains need orer, a genius understands chaos!"

This is in Munchin (or Munic if you want to get all American on me). It's at the Hoftbrauhaus which is where all the American tourists go. I didn't actually drink that - it was Jurgen's. But he let me borrow it for a photographic opportunity.

This was outside a museum, but I can't remember what town we were in. It was totally epic though and one of the better rides I've been on. You move the blue paddles up and down to simulate flying. We spent the whole ride trying to flip ourselves upside down.

From there we went to Dachau and a few more towns, such as Baumburg to visit Frau's family. Then we went back to Frankfurt to fly home. I missed it before we even got on the plane. :)

I'll Be Home For Christmas

Parkinson's Disease is my least favorite out of all the diseases that I know of. I've done some research on the subject - but not near enough to make me an expert. As I've gone through school I've written a few papers about it, done a couple of speeches, but that doesn't really mean anything other than I've gained some knowlege about the subject.


One thing about Parkinson's Disease that I absolutely hate the most is the Parkinson's dimentia that consumes the mind of the infected. Actually I really hate the entire disease as a whole. Mostly because I don't have the opportunity to know my grandfather simply because his body is riddled with the disease.


My dad's dad has had Parkinson's since before I was alive. So his better years were when I was too young to remember and all I'm left with are pictures of him pulling me around the backyard of their SoCal house when I was two years old before we moved to Idaho. My cousin's have a better grasp of the truly amazing person that my grandpa was than my siblings or I can even imagine.


The last couple of years have been hard. Hard on everyone. The disease is progressing and now I don't really know how much longer he's going to be here - I just know it's not going to be an incredably long time. I know it's ridiculously hard on my oma. She lost her own mom to Alzheimer's and now her husband to Parkinson's.


I told my own dad that he simply isn't allowed to contract Parkinson's Disease. Simply not allowed.


My dad said today, in only the third time I conciously remember him tearing up, that he's known for a while his dad won't be here long, but seeing it in print the other day (I think in an e-mail, but since I don't live at home anymore I'm not completely sure) is what rattled him the most.


He said he wants to go home for Christmas.


That struck a chord with me.


Home to me is Idaho. That's not where I was born, but it's where I've been raised. I don't think I'll live here forever, but for now this is home. But Dad was raised in California. He jokes about leaving as soon as he could because he doesn't want to live here anymore, but then today he called it home.


Home.

I didn't really think that my dad considered California home. I always figured Home was here. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that home is where your parents are. I live in Moscow when I'm at school and I live in Rathdrum when I'm at work over the summer - but home is here where my parents live.


They talk about moving to Montana and when they do, I'm not sure where home would be for me then.


I saw a sign once that said home is where the heart says 'Ahhhh'


So where is that?


I just know that this disease has taken more than it's fair share of heartache on our family. It's robbed me of a grandparent. It brought out a side of my father that I don't see at all.


And as I sit here in the family room of my parents' house with The Keeper and Cinco as they play Halo 3, I'm a little excited at the possiblity of going to Cali this winter for Christmas and I'm a little sombered because I don't know how much longer my grandpa is going to remember who I am...

Grandpa trying to whistle. :)

Grandpa and me at Balboa Park


Smile :-)