New beginnings

Hard to believe we have been here 10 days. It has been a whirlwind!

We arrived last Saturday at 6:40 a.m. and Anne picked us up from the airport. When we got to the house Jonny and Thorsten were bouncing with excitement; I think I managed a big grin. We slept until about 1:30 and then Joe, Shannon, and Anne met at our house to exchange vehicles and for Joe and Shannon to meet us. Anne stayed and had a bite to eat with us and then we toured Walnut Hills until about 4:30. At 6:30 Ben W was at our door to take us to dinner with his awesome family.

Sunday was a great church service followed by lunch and a trip to the corn maze. It was nice to spend some extra time with a few of the children I will be involved with for the next year! Ben W's car broke down on the way so we ended up split in two groups of around 12. I had a paper to finish for my one of my master's classes so the guys fixed supper. It was really good! That night we had the pleasure of having Laura and Annette as house guests! That was a true blessing for me. I was exhausted and just needed listening ears, thank you both!

Monday was a day of exploration for me. I went through my new office and tried to stay busy as much as possible. That evening I went to Kroger and while I was there Laura called to say that she and her mom were going to a larger store and wanted to know if I and/or the guys would like to ride along. Thorsten and I went and it was a useful and productive trip. When we got back Anne was already at the house to give me the computer files I needed for my new responsibilities. (I did not budget my time quite right.)

Tuesday I had a welcome visit from Laura and Annette and we talked for a few minutes. Then I had my first meeting with Ben W at a local restaurant called Parkside Cafe. It was a great meal and a useful meeting. Ben dropped me at the post office and I walked home. That evening I made dinner for Jonny and I (Thorsten had to work late). We watched The Guardian and it was nice to relax.

Wednesday I took a tour of the neighborhood starting with the Post Office. Then I went to the Church of the Advent where I will be helping serve a community dinner this Wednesday 10.27. My final stop was at the local library branch to see what opportunities there might be for the children. That night I spoke to Anne on the phone about some more logistics of the party and we picked our Cincinnati Symphony ticket dates. Then the guys and I went downtown to T.J. Maxx. It was interesting getting home because the bus we took there had stopped running by the time we were ready to head back. Thank goodness the guys have experience with public transportation!

Thursday I spent the majority of the day working on the Halloween Block Party that is this coming Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. (10.30.10). I sent an email to the church for the supplies that are needed. I also discovered there is an opportunity to organize waiting for me at the church! That evening Joe was kind enough to take us to another area. Jonny went to Best Buy and Thorsten and I went to Wal-Mart. I don't know when I have been so excited to go to my favorite getaway! (For those of you who may not know me as well this is not a joke. I am a simple girl!)

Friday was pretty much a loss for me. I do not know what came over me but I was an emotional wreck all day! Thankfully my grandma took the time to talk to me and remind me that I'm a child of the King and He has a plan and a purpose! That night Anne took me to Newport on the Levee and we went to see Waiting for Superman and had amazing pizza! It was a fantastic girls' night out!

Saturday I woke up and decided to pull my bootstraps up. The guys went on a bike ride so I had the house to myself again, but I made better use of it than a pity-party. I worked on devotions and Bible reading. When Joe came to get the guys I decided to ride along and they dropped me at a Panera Bread while they went to an electronics store. Shannon and Joe have a fabulous home and it was amazing to spend the evening with them. The food was phenomenal and the time in fellowship was just what I needed! We even got to experience Graeter's (a Cincinnati ice cream shop that has been in business 140 years).

Yesterday was a superb day! Church was fun! Then the meeting with Anne, Parker, and Katie was completely enjoyable. We had a wonderful house meeting! Then the guys and I went shopping for our food for the week and that was an economic success. Finally we came home and fixed supper. Then I got to watch The Amazing Race! I stayed up to post to the discussion board for my class and got to bed about 1 a.m.

Well, not sure that every time I post it will be like a journal, but it was just what I needed to do this time to know what all has gone on since we arrived. I hope people enjoy reading about what is going on in our lives. Please keep the Halloween Block Party in your prayers!

Jamie

What we leave behind

Way back in late spring I started working on trying to get a garden put in at our house. There wasn't a lot of space, most of the available space was sorta shady, and the soil wasn't exactly ideal. So, after a small plot was tilled up and a meddlesome tree branch mysteriously disappeared all I needed was dirt.

Umm, hey, dirt... Dirt?

Dirt ended up being way up on the north side of Cincinnati, barely within the city limits. Laura had located it with some help from the Civic Garden Center. There was a dump site at a small park where the city deposited their leaf debris. As the years rolled by the pile turned into a super duper mountain of composted leaf dirt that was free for the taking. Great!

Well, mostly great. How the heck was I gonna get it down to our house? We didn't have a car at the time and I couldn't think of anybody that would have been particularly excited to let me borrow their car so I could haul dirt. Who did I know with a truck...? Umm, not a whole bunch of people. I had one offer from my co-worker's husband but it ended up that he double booked homself with a family get-together. Drat.

Finally I got a solid hit. Our good friend, Bethinary Bekah, was in town for a few days in late July. She has a car - score! In exchange for some gas money and Graeter's ice cream she drove me up to the park to get dirt. Since there was no truck bed we had to put the dirt inside the car. We filled up 2 trashcans, 2 recycling bins, and 5 five gallon buckets - not too bad for her little Saturn Ion. There was a similarly sounding story replayed a few weeks later with Laura and her equally diminutive yet dependable '85 Camry. I had dirt!

Unfortunately, I had dirt at the end of July. For those of you who know a thing or two about gardening, that's not exactly the ideal time to be planting your garden, especially if it's something that takes a little longer to grow. Tomatoes would be a good example of this. Most of what I had to plant was tomatoes courtesy of Laura having extra starts from the community garden. Oh well; I took a shot at it anyway.

We had tomatoes in the front flower bed, the raised bed that I built from random lumber, and the in-ground garden in the not-as-shady-as-it-used-to-be backyard. There were other plants that went in as well - peppers, beans, potatoes, zucchini - but the tomatoes were the the most plentiful and one of my favorites. I was super excited to see them grow and produce lots of tomatoes. I had dreams of having so many tomatoes that we would be giving them away to people at church and in the neighborhood, meeting more neighbors in the process. We certainly had enough plants for it to happen, but would they mature in time to produce?

It was a rough summer for growing anything due to the heat and the lack of rain that went with it. Cincinnati collectively turned a dried-out yellowish brown. Our garden hose at the house didn't really reach to any of the flower beds or gardens (seriously, who picked that one?) so all of the watering happened by way of a doctored-up-with-duct-tape watering can. I didn't really mind lugging around the watering can; it was sometimes rather therapeutic at the end of a long day at work. The unpleasant part was the massive amounts of mosquitoes. In a drought? How did that happen? I really don't know, but it happened. ALL. SUMMER. LONG. Ugh. Stupid mosquitoes.

Sometime around late August, maybe early September, one of the tomato plants in the front flower bed gave us our first tomatoes. They weren't huge but it was a start. As the calendar crept toward the end of September the one single plant kept producing while the dozens of other plants just kinda hung out. Nada. Not even one single bloom. Finally, one day I went to water them and there were blooms. Yes, blooms! It wasn't just one plant, either; four or five plants had decided they were gonna get in on this whole "producing fruit" business. Better late than never, right?

It might have been too late, though. Our Indian summer took a break and the temperatures plummeted with the daytime highs struggling to get into the mid-60's. The tomatoes stopped growing and just kinda hung out, content to remain in whatever state this chillier weather had caught them. I wanted to scream at them, "Hurry up! Don't you know we're on a timetable here?!? I'm leaving soon and the first frost will be here before you know!" Sadly, tomatoes don't have ears so they were not persuaded.

The weather warmed up finally and the tomatoes went back to turning their little yellow starbust flowers into tiny green tomato orbs. I knew it was too late for me, though. The clock had ticked far enough past the point of hoping to see any of those little chartreuse promises turn into the reddish ripe fruits that I'd envisioned months earlier. I had known from the start that it would have been a close call as to whether or not this garden would produce anything before I left since it got started so late. Despite the one tomato that had put forth it's plum-sized bounty for the past month, I felt defeated. You can't win every time you gamble.

I kept up with watering the gardens anyway. Like I said, it was mildly therapeutic and even if I wouldn't get to see the end result I had still enjoyed the process and watching it all happen. In a way I felt like I owed it to the plants to see them through to the end of my time in Cincinnati since I had put them in the ground in the first place.

Finally I arrived at my last day in Cincinnati. Katie had already left and Laura was back in Nebraska for the week. Anne and her mom were out and about getting Anne's new apartment ready. I had the house to myself; you could probably count on your fingers how many times that happened in the past year. I needed to finish (read: start) packing for my train out of town that night but first I had something else to take care of - there was a garden that needed to be watered one last time.

As I wandered from one garden to then next I enjoyed thinking about how much these beds had transformed in the past few months. A few of the plants had never really taken off and thrived but a good number of them looked like healthy, happy flora. The sky overhead was darker than usual and the wind had picked up from earlier in the day but you couldn't smell any rain in the air. On one of my trips to fill up the watering can I stopped to talk to Carla, our neighbor, and let her know this was my last day in Cincinnati. We talked a bit about the year and what was happening with our house.

While we were talking a thought crossed my mind. I ran around to the front of the house and gathered our last six tomatoes from the one plant that had produced for us. There was also one solitary pepper on a very sad looking pepper plant around on the side. I snatched that up as well and took them around to the side fence, presenting them to Carla. It wasn't much, but it was all we had. She was receiving 100% of our pepper harvest that year and possibly the last of our tomatoes. Carla said she was looking forward to having the tomatoes on her salad the next day. I mentioned that since we were moving she could help herself to anything else that might still come in after we left. This seemed to please her as she talked about possibly making green tomato salsa or relish.

We said our goodbyes and I went back to watering the gardens. There was plenty on my mind as I was processing moving, my last day of work, what was coming next, packing, and life in general. As I emptied the last can of water on the last row of tomatoes the wind began to pick up. It was dusk and there was a slight glow in the air as the setting sun tried to push through the clouds that blanketed the sky. The yellow leaves from the thornless honey locust by Laura's window began to fly off the branches by the hundreds and the leaves from the Bradford pear joined in the dance as well. With the wind came the smell in the air that I had been missing so much: rain.

It was on its way. I put down the watering can and stood in our backyard with my arms outstretched, letting the wind and leaves whip themselves around me. As the first raindrop hit my right forearm there was a sense of reassurance that came over me. I hadn't really acknowledged it too much until now but I was worried about what would happen after I left. Would the next volunteers work out as well? What would happen to the raised bed on the side of the house? Would anybody water the plants at our old house if the frost stayed away? Who would be the back-up piano player at church for when Saundra was out of town? What if nobody at work wanted to sing with Jeanne or whistle for Georgine or remind Eve to water her philodendron?

With that one raindrop I was reminded that Cincinnati would continue on without me there. Everything would be okay. The new volunteers would learn the ropes and bring their own gifts to the house, congregation, and their projects. There would be music in the church, someone would sing with Jeanne, and the rain would come when it was needed. The four of us may have been leaving the house and our projects, but we had left plenty behind for those who were coming next. After a few minutes I picked the watering can back up and heading inside to get back to packing.

Good-bye, Cincinnati. Thanks for a year I won't forget anytime soon.

Also, thanks to anyone who followed along on our year-long venture in Walnut Hills. What a ride it has been.

Peace to you on your journeys.

Joyful Girl

Joyful Girl By Ani DiFranco

i do it for the joy it brings

because i'm a joyful girl

because the world owes me nothing

and we owe each other the world

i do it because it's the least i can do

i do it because i learned it from you

and i do it just because i want to

because i want to

everything i do is judged

and they mostly get it wrong

but oh well'cuz the bathroom mirror has not budged

and the woman who lives there

can tell the truth from the stuff that they say

and she looks me in the eye and says

would you prefer the easy way

no, well o.k. then don't cry

i wonder if everything i do

i do instead of something i want to do more

the question fills my head

i know there's no grand plan here

this is just the way it goes

when everything else seems unclear

i guess at least i know

i do it for the joy it brings

because i'm a joyful girl

because the world owes me nothing

and we owe each other the world

i do it because it's the least i can do

i do it because i learned it from you

and i do it just because i want to

because i want to

Between work, studying for LSATS, problems at home and the general chaos that occurs in the ending of things, I realize I have not been taking care of myself properly. I've made myself so sick, in fact, that I landed myself in the emergency room of Jewish Hospital this past week.

Have I learned anything from this experience? Yes I have. All my life, I have taken on other people's problems and made them my own cross to bear. I am the one suffering for it in the long run. I get disappointed, mostly with myself , when people I care about (and who I believe care about me) fail to live up to my expectations. I am beginning to understand that I soak up the good and the bad equally, like a sponge. I need to be able to filter what is and isn't important. I have always been sensitive, and this has been looked upon by others as a fault or a weakness. Maybe these people are right.

Then again, maybe they don't deserve to know anything real about me. I have shared so much of my life in the hopes of being able to meet somewhere in the middle, yet more often than not, I am standing in the middle of nowhere with not a soul in sight. I want so much to say that I'm going to stop trying to search for that elusive meeting place, but I would be lying to myself. I think that one of the most beautiful parts of me is that I am not afraid to care. I want to always be able to state for the record that I did everything I could do. If things don't go the way I hoped they would, I am going to try to accept this fact with a nod of my head. Time to move on. May the book of my heart always be open on the table for those who genuinely want to know me.

I won't forget the experiences that I have had here in Cincinnati. I have some wonderful moments to cherish, as well as hard lessons to learn and grow from. I don't want to think that being sensitive is a weakness, but rather a strength not many possess nor appreciate. A blessing and a curse. A tear and a smile. I couldn't have done the work that I do without truly caring about the lives of the women I have come in contact with. I thank God for it. Would I have done so last week? Probably not. I was in a different place then. It's amazing how just a week of experiences can profoundly impact one's outlook on life. I have been rewarded with a wonderful project and I will fondly remember the people at Talbert House/women I have mentored for the rest of my life. In saying goodbye to the women's collaborative at our last workgroup meeting today, I hope that they realized how much they have helped me to become a joyful girl in the work that I do. The world owes me nothing, but we owe each other the world. I do it because it's the least I can do, and because I learned it from my mother. Most of all, I do it just because I want to.

Washington, D.C. is waiting for me to come back, and I am ready for it. Next week when I leave this city, I hope it is a bright and beautiful autumn day. Can you imagine it?: A sky like glistening sapphires. No clouds to be seen. Well...if there must be clouds, I hope they are the soft and fluffy kind. The ones you feel like you can curl up and read a good book on. A gentle breeze to ruffle my hair. Leaves that will loosen their hold on tree limbs to dance in the wind just for me. A cup of coffee in one hand and the other waving goodbye. I want to say farewell in style. Getting on the interstate, I know that I will turn my head around, maybe even lean out of the window, for one last glimpse of the softly fading city. Yes, that's me. I've always had a fondness for last glimpses.

Your friend always,

Katie