Tag Archives: extended family

Hope In a Bowl of Soup

Posted on by under Guest, Hope and Place

Every year, we ate Christmas dinner at Grandma’s house. Driving there in the car,  I’d pull my nose out of the book about the time we’d hit the big hill on her gravel road. A few minutes later, we’d see the small, white house – her closest neighbor.

I got a lot of reading done in the 45 minutes it took to get from our house to hers.

As we slowed down to turn into the long lane that was her driveway, I wondered which of my cousins were already there. Was there still enough daylight to go exploring in the barn? Would we get in trouble if we climbed on the roof of the pig-less pig pen? Would the roof cave in under our collective weight? Regardless, I knew just up ahead was an evening filled with cousins, presents and good food.

I’m not sure whose idea it was, but at some point we got away from our traditional holiday meal of ham and cheesy potatoes. Maybe it was because, as grandma got older, the adults wanted to take some of the responsibility off her hands. My aunts started offering up soups-usually chili, potato, and vegetable.

It’s the vegetable soup I remember most. As a kid, I wouldn’t touch the stuff. At home, when I started smelling a roast cooking in the oven, I became disappointed, rolling my eyes and hoping Mom would at least remember to cut me some raw carrots. I couldn’t stand them cooked. Until I discovered ranch dressing, I didn’t like the potatoes prepared with the roast either. Pot roast was definitely not my favorite meal. To make matters worse, I knew the leftovers from this meal would end up being vegetable soup.

My mom and her sisters liked vegetable soup though. In our family, it was a tradition all its own. Grandma liked hers with a can of Brooks chili beans in it. Most of the men didn’t like diced tomatoes in theirs; but at Christmas dinner, the women put them in anyway because the men gravitated toward the chili. A little cabbage, carrots, corn, green beans, potatoes. Celery was optional. Is it any wonder I didn’t like this soup as a kid? It was downright healthy!

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While the soups simmered on the stovetop, we’d dig into the appetizers. One of the many hunters in our family usually offered up venison summer sausage, partnered with squares of cheese on a round Ritz cracker. Someone would have picked up a cheeseball from the local grocery store deli. It was my favorite, the perfect balance of cream cheese and shredded cheddar. Years later, I’d write one of my aunts, asking if she could get me the recipe.

Long before Pinterest came on the scene, the women in our family served up trendy appetizers and sides. I remember ranch-flavored oyster crackers, apple salad with Snickers whipped in, marshmallow cream fruit dip, Chex mix and Puppy chow. Every inch of counter space and the entire kitchen table filled to overflowing.

Grandma always mixed up a pitcher of Kool Aid. One of our aunts would stand near the disposable cups, ready to hand off the Sharpie marker to ensure we’d only use one – our own – the entire evening. The adults always had coffee. Cup after cup of coffee.

If us kids ate all our soup – as if any of us were still hungry by that point – we could move on to the dessert table. One of my aunts shares her birthday with the Christ child, so we’d sometimes have cupcakes or a birthday cake. Also cheesecake, Rice Krispy treats and pecan (pronounced puh-con) pie.

I know what love is if it can be offered up on a platter of cheese and crackers. If it smells anything like a stovetop full of soups. If it looks like my grandma and her adult daughters bustling away in her kitchen. If it tastes like cherry cheesecake. If it can be heard in the uproariousness of thirty-plus people in one single-story farmhouse.

I know what love is. It’s these very tangible things giving me hope that love will always emerge victorious. Love looks, sounds, smells, feels-and tastes-like Christmas dinner at Grandma’s house. Like home.

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Traci Rhoades lives in southwest Michigan, somewhere in a triangular section connecting Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids with all things Lake Michigan. She and her husband parent one daughter. They have dogs, cats, ducks, pigs and chickens–a number that is always changing, as farm animal counts tend to do. She enjoys watching sports, reading, cooking and all things Bible study. She is  a writer. When she first started blogging, she wondered about what unique voice she could bring, eventually landing on this one line: A country girl goes to church.

Rescuing the Past at a Run-Down Motel

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

Two years ago I set off for an early morning walk along the Wildwood, New Jersey boardwalk in search of the most significant landmark from my childhood. It was the point around which my year revolved for a decade for our extended family’s annual vacation.

The sun was already blazing in the sky. The boardwalk narrowed, and then it stopped altogether, giving way to an asphalt walkway behind the dunes that seemed no match for the roaring ocean nearby.

After rounding a massive hotel that looked a bit more run down than I remember from over twenty years ago, I saw the familiar lit up palm trees on the horizon and the snack bar deck peeking out. I thought that the massive rock jetty nearby would tip me off that I was getting close, but the jetty was far smaller than I remembered. In fact, everything seemed smaller now: the beach used to feel like an endless desert, the tiny dunes had once appeared to be immovable barriers, and, most importantly, the Aloha Motel now appeared far less impressive and imposing.

boardwalkThis (apparently) rather small and simple motel was the destination of our family vacations every summer during early July. To my young mind, this motel was a palace of sorts. We set off for the beach each morning, making the “arduous” trek over sand dunes and across “scorching” sand in order to swim in the “freezing” ocean. At the end of the day, we’d return to the Aloha for a dip in the pool and then showers, before setting out for a night on the boardwalk. If our vacation coincided with baseball’s All Star Game, as it often did, my cousins and I would eat a late dinner huddled around the television.

Now, standing on the sea wall as an adult, with the Aloha before and the ocean behind, I imagined my grandfather shuffling along the first floor walkway in order to make our reservations for next year, wearing his large “Quinn” family hat. Pop was not one to be outdone in the planning department.

As I shifted from the magic and wonder of the past to the stark, underwhelming present, I found the magic of my childhood creeping up on me. My own child, back at a different hotel with my wife, was experiencing his first vacation in Wildwood. Just a year old, he couldn’t enjoy any of the rides or games that my cousins and I had experienced with pure joy, but just having a child of my own made my childhood seem more present. Everything was amazing back then.

Back then, every day felt like an eternity of waves, sandcastles, and beach games. Every dinner out for fried seafood or greasy pizza a culinary wonder topped off with Kohr Brothers custard. Every amusement pier promised an exhilarating rush.

That day, 20 or so years later, I could see the run-down Aloha Motel, the kitsch of the boardwalk’s games and rides, and details I don’t remember noticing as a kid, like people hauling coolers full of beer to the beach to get hammered while they tan. Left to my own devices, the present overwhelmed the magic of my memories that had all but washed away. Now that I had my son to consider (these days we have two sons), I couldn’t stop myself from filtering everything through his perspective.

On the one hand seeing the shore through my son’s eyes was a delightful delusion, but on the other, my son gave me a part of myself that could have been lost forever. The memories of the past roared back stronger and with greater clarity because I didn’t just see the pictures in my mind—I felt them.

I already could imagine him one day tearing around in bumper cars, zipping up and down on the airplane ride, or spending hours on a massive sand castle that won’t survive high tide. These weren’t just happy moments—these were the thrills that, in part, defined my childhood. As open as my eyes may have been to the more disappointing elements of the shore during that trip, through the lens of fatherhood I regained a childlike clarity that had once been my own.

Who’s to say which version is the better or truer one?

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EdC200“Rescuing the Past at a Run-Down Motel” is by Ed Cyzewski. Ed writes at www.edcyzewski.com about prayer, writing, and the ways they intersect. He’s the author of Pray, Write, Grow: Cultivating Prayer and Writing Together, First Draft Father, and A Christian Survival Guide. Find him onTwitter or Facebook.

90 Miles

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

I have the full lips of a good Cuban woman, wide hips that twitch at the sound of a Latin beat. I am red hot passionate, with an eyes-flashing, arms-waving temper. The sea is the only place I feel blood-rushing peace.

Yes, Cuba is inside me, whether I like it or not.

We flew through the skies one late July night. Surrounded by lightning and carried by turbulence, our entire California family landed in Miami well past bedtime. It was a journey of cultural homecoming for some in our group, and a first exposure for the rest of us. There in our two-star motel with its questionable swimming pool and a not-great view of the beach, I first understood just how wide are the borders of Cuban familia. We welcomed a parade of relatives, long ago friends, and friends of friends–categories that might as well cease to exist at the table a Cuban abuelita. Familia is familia. Everyone’s in.

Two weeks of all-day swimsuits and every morning breakfasts at IHOP are a blur in my memory now. I was only nine-years-old and not sure what to make of this place so different than my white-bred, dry-heat California hometown.

One half of a morning stands out in importance and recollection, however. After travelling to Key West, we found ourselves staring into the leaves of the southernmost tree. When a black cat darted from behind a bush, my cousin joked, “There goes the southernmost cat.” Just ahead of us stood a chain-linked fence, with the wide waters of the Atlantic splashing on the rocks below.

Attached near the top of the fence, a sign reads: 90 Miles to Cuba90 Miles

This is what we came to see, and so we stood silent for a moment. My dad slung his arm around his sister’s shoulders and she smiled through her tears. Thirty-ish years back and ninety miles south–that’s how far away their minds traveled in those few minutes. As children and with no notice, they left their island home with their parents, abandoning memories, dear friends, all the treasures of their childhood.

While the grown-ups reminisced in choked-up Espanol, my cousins and I, along with my little brother and sister, ran wild in a game of tag, hopping on and off large rocks that topped the cliff we were gathered on. Laughing and running, we blinked our eyes at the Florida sun with our feet pounding the ground of freedom that has always spread beneath us.

When I was sure no one was looking, I strained my eyes out over the forever expanse of water, searching for a piece of driftwood or the black ridges of a tire, signs of a refugee almost to shore. These were the stories I’d grown up with, stories of desperation and hope. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they were picked up by the Coast Guard. Sometimes they sank.

Standing at the edge of our country, I felt like I was at the edge of something else, but as I was only a little girl, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly.  I was overwhelmed. The gratitude I was supposed to feel, the imaginings of a childhood built with the brick and mortar of communism, language barriers so steep I feared I’d never break them apart, the constant volume and prattle of all these people who shared my blood, or at least a piece of my history, it was just too much.

Frankly, these Cubans of mine were too much.

We shared a gene pool, but we didn’t fit together easily. So when my dad walked out the door a few years after our Florida trip, filing for divorce and affirming all the discord I’d sensed, I erased them, mi familia, and Cuba itself from my very identity. 90 miles was too far to go.

But roots pull and roots dig.

All grown up now, I see it all with gentler eyes. As a wife and mother, I look at my babies and my husband and I see the dark eyes of my Abuelita. I wonder at the cost of her sacrifices, I wonder what it does to a woman to leave the way she did, to gather her children and pray that a far away land will be the answer she’s hoping for. I think of my dad’s childhood memories, and then I dream of sugar cane fields and a baseball soaring high above them, the exultant cries of a passel of Cuban boys.

I wince when I think of guns, suitcases, desperation and my dad as a skinny boy with enormous ears standing with his big sister decked in a white dress, helpless. I lose my breath when I think of my freedom-loving Papi in a cell all those times, his dream of a free Cuba still breathing, but losing color.

My heart edges close to what it all means, and sometimes that’s as far as it can go. But every now and then I stand in that place long enough to see the big picture–the mistakes, the desperate shots in the dark, the guts and the fear, the stubborn hope.

I know now that the edge I felt all those years ago was the edge of loss and anger, language barriers and picking sides. It was the sharp shatter of family, connection. It was me, trying to keep hearts safe and the coming realization that I can’t.

As I turn my gentler eyes on this this cast of characters in a complicated and sometimes devastating tale of a fully Cuban, fully American family, it is so clear that we all have scars of place and relationship. These Cubans of mine, and me. And if they are mine, and they indisputably are, then I am theirs and their Cuba lives inside me too. 90 miles is closer than I ever could have imagined.

Maybe in learning to make peace with a memory, I’ve learned to love a place and a people that I can’t escape. And the truth is, I don’t want to escape it or them anymore. What I want is to  step beyond that chain link fence, to slice through the self-imposed invisible line between here and there. I want my heart to cross the Atlantic and finally say, “Estoy aqui y te amo.”

I’m here and I love you.

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profileBio: Sarah Torna Roberts is a writer who lives in California with her husband and four sons. She blogs at www.sarahtornaroberts.com where she digs around her in her memories, records her present, and is constantly holding her faith up to the light. She snacks at 2 AM with great regularity, is highly suspicious of anyone who doesn’t love baseball (Go Giants!), and would happily live in a tent by the sea.

 

90 Miles.jpg is a photo by Kay Gaensler, available for public use.