Tag Archives: vacation

Tankini

Posted on by under Gender & Place

I’m flat on my back, soaking up the luxuriousness that is Day One of vacation. My beach towel is freshly laundered and fluffy, my skin free of sunburn, and my bag packed with iced tea, still-crunchy Cheez-Its, and some deliciously unpretentious books.

Version 2For awhile it feels good to just lie here, relearning how to do nothing, but soon I begin to contemplate rolling onto my stomach to crack open a book. To roll over or not to roll over? That is the sort of question you face on a true vacation.

It’s not like shifting from back to tummy is such an ordeal, but it does involve a certain amount of resolve and strategic sand resituating. The butt-shaped hollow I created with a horizontal booty-shake when I first stretched out on my towel will need to be filled in with some sand, while new, boob-shaped divots—much harder to get positioned just right—will be called for. But that iced tea does sound good…

I decide to go for it. One, two, three…I engage and shift muscle and bones, my loose belly coming along for the ride, lagging just a split second behind the rest of me, as it does. Settling myself face down, with a wiggle of my hips to reposition the sand, I say a silent prayer of thanks for whomever invented the tankini.

Since having babies, the tankini has been my swimsuit of choice. The concept is simple, yet genius: the ease of a two-piece in wet-swimsuit-bathroom-scenarios, with the coverage of a one-piece for stretch-mark-riddled tummies.

It’s been nearly two decades since my body underwent the enormous transformation that resulted in the birth of my first daughter, and I’m just beginning to accept that no amount of cocoa butter or yoga or time will erase the marks pregnancy left behind. Time, in fact, seems to be hurting, not helping.

I suspect I’m not alone in this predicament. What else could have inspired and sustained the existence of the sensible tankini? At least the one I’m wearing is somewhat hip—chocolate brown with a sexy halter style top and retro ruching at the hips. Most importantly, I feel comfortable in it, even while rolling from back to tummy, where I now lie, popping Cheez-Its into my mouth.

I look over at my teenage daughters with their bikini-clad, impossibly toned skin, and wonder, “Did I really look like that 30 years ago?” I’ve earned my age, of course—I don’t expect to look 16 again, and I certainly don’t want to be 16. But there is a small tug in me—part vain, part nostalgic—that wishes I was wearing a bikini rather than its modest cousin.

My enlightened daughters tell me what many of you are thinking: I can and should wear whatever I want. It’s a topic that even gets my youngest daughter a bit worked up, and my firstborn goes so far as to proclaim, “You would look so cute in a bikini!”

I love how liberated and affirming my girls are—much more so than I was at their age. I grew up in the 80s, an era of many thin models and very few voices questioning the cultural expectations being set in the pages of teen magazines. Body shaming was both everywhere and nowhere—everywhere in the air we breathed, but also nowhere because “body shaming” wasn’t a phrase anyone used. As a teen, I didn’t hear voices of opposition, calling it what it was.

Now, in my middle age, I’m as troubled by my faint desire to wear a bikini as I am by my hesitation to boldly wear whatever I damn well please. What does it all mean? I suppose it means at least two things: my desire to wear a bikini isn’t all that strong, and being a woman at the beach is a complex thing.

My daughters give me hope, though, for a new generation of women. I marvel at their comfort level, both with their bodies and in standing up for issues. As I watch them get up off their towels to go test the temperature of the lake, I muse, “Where did these amazing girls come from?”

Oh, right: from my puckered belly. It all comes full circle.

That there’s a link between my pregnancies and my stretched-out tummy is no secret, but for years I had somehow isolated the two realities in my mind. That all changed the day I casually complained about my saggy skin to a friend, who suggested plastic surgery.

My anger was immediate, and with it came a burst of clarity: The physical record of my childbearing was not a “flaw” to glibly erase!

Ironically, it was the realization that I could take surgical measures that led me to accept my belly as it is, not as culture dictates it should be. I began to see the excess skin below my belly button, and the rays of scars emanating around it, as a history—a Curriculum Vitae of my body’s experiences and job descriptions: the once-home of my babies, the still-home of my aging self.

That doesn’t mean I’m rushing out to buy a bikini. I’m just feeling a fondness for what is tucked comfortably beneath this trusty spandex: the stretchy first-home to two remarkable young women, whose bodies are on their own journeys. Toned skin and flat stomachs are just the beginning.

I look over at my daughters, reading books on their own towels, and decide to turn myself over once again, taking with me my pouchy, ribboned skin: this record of miracles.

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Kristin bio YAH

The cost of playing cowboy

Posted on by under Money & Place

“It’s like a resort for rich Christians who want to spend a week pretending to be cowboys.”

This was my standard explanation of Deer Valley Ranch when I told college friends where I had spent the summer working. There was really no better way to describe in a nutshell the wonderful yet bizarre place—especially from the perspective of someone like me, who had grown up solidly middle class, taking budget vacations that involved sleeping in a tent and eating Mom-made sandwiches at scenic overlooks.

My upbringing in the Midwest also fueled my fascination with Deer Valley Ranch. While several of my friends lived on farms and had horses, no one seemed particularly intent on embracing the romantic charade of playing cowboy. Maybe Michigan’s wooded trails and country roads just didn’t provide the sort of Wild West backdrop necessary for getting in the cowboy mood.

18908034673_9961758d39_bDeer Valley Ranch, near Buena Vista Colorado, definitely has the right backdrop. The ranch is nestled in a range of mountains known as “the fourteeners,” with Mt. Princeton’s Chalk Cliffs rising dramatically behind the lodge and horse stables. The whole setting suggests the work of a talented stage crew under the direction of God (with a very large budget). The actors in our theatre were the staff—the other Christian college students and I, in our Wranglers and cowboy boots and hats—and our drama relied on “breaking the third wall” by inviting  guests to participate in the action.

We took the cowboy narrative pretty far down the trail at Deer Valley. I quickly learned it was what the guests were paying for—good-clean-Christian-family-cowboy-fun. Each week started off with an all-ranch hymn-sing led by Cowboy Dave, an event that served to set the tone and to begin drawing guests together with their common beliefs (not to mention their shared vacation proclivities).

Those of us working as servers in the dining room completed our Wranglers-and-cowboy-boots costumes with a red or navy gingham checked shirt and a contrasting bandana around our necks. We carried large trays filled with plates of authentic Western food, like beef brisket and whole trout. (Sometimes the cook prepared the very fish that had been caught earlier in the day by the guests. You have to pay good money to catch your own dinner.)

Square dance nights on the deck called for full staff participation. It was our job to urge hesitant guests out onto the dance floor unders the sky to learn the line dance moves, or to succumb to the lively two-stepping spins of an eager old cowboy in need of a partner.

4812123590_c50fae710e_zBut the Cowboy Breakfast was the Deer Valley act that topped all others. A couple of times a week a handful of staff got up at the crack of dawn to travel off-road in an ancient pickup truck to our wilderness breakfast site. Once there, we started a cooking fire, letting it get nice and hot before adding cast iron skillets of bacon, to be joined later by scrambled eggs and grits. Big pots of “cowboy coffee” were added to the grate, ready to pour into tin cups when the guests arrived.

Even at the end of my summer at the ranch I still fought a bemused smile when Cowboy Dave and his crew came rounding the bend on their horses, each rider in full cowboy attire. We greeted them with a boisterous “Good mornin’!” as they dismounted and walked over on stiff bow-legs to grab a tin cup and load up a plate at the fire.

How could I not inwardly chuckle as I slopped grits on someone’s plate and Cowboy Dave swung his guitar around from its perch on his back to begin playing suitably-mournful cowboy songs? The guests were sore, cold, and sleepy after getting up before the sun to sit too long in the saddle. The plates I spooned grits onto weren’t those nice, speckled blue enamel sets you buy at camping stores—they were dented dull grey metal. And the coffee we served was full of grounds. As someone who had grown up roughing it on the cheap, I found plenty of irony in people spending significant sums on such an experience.

But there were those incredible mountains reaching up behind the guests as they crunched into another piece of bacon and their horses munched on some feed nearby.  And I had to admit, my feet felt good in my cowboy boots, and there was something energizing about a deep intake of that high-altitude air. I even began to understand that having things like shiny plates and gourmet coffee would ruin the charade these folks had paid good money for. And what’s any expensive vacation, after all, if not a charade to help us vacate reality for a handful of days?

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Kristin bio YAH

Photo of Mt. Princeton’s Chalk Cliffs by Wongaboo. 

Cowboy and horse photo by Just Too Lazy. 

Where I Came From: 5,000 Miles and Back Again

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

When I was a little girl with two brown pigtails and bangs cut straight across my forehead, home was a grey-blue ranch-style house situated in the middle of Michigan’s palm. It was also a musty-smelling blue canvas tent, the sweaty brown vinyl backseat of a station wagon, and the open road, always leading to someplace new.

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If “home” is defined as a specific place, then my answer to “Where are you from?” is clear: I’m from St. Johns, Michigan, a town of about 12,000 people with a two-stoplight Main Street that’s anchored on the south end by a classic Midwestern courthouse. My parents still live in the house they bought when I was just five, and when we visit today, my own daughters sleep in my childhood bedroom.

All the kids who went to my elementary school lived in town like me, but by the time we were in middle school, our classmates were pretty evenly split between “town kids” and the “country kids” who grew up on surrounding farms. (My best friend Rhonda was a country kid with horses we rode on the weekends.)

Besides sleepovers and football games, there weren’t many parent-approved things to do for fun, at least not until we were old enough to drive the half hour to Lansing for date-worthy restaurants, movies, and malls. But St. Johns was a good place to be a kid. Growing up in a sheltered town meant plenty of freedom to bike everywhere—the city pool, friends’ houses, the library, and the bakery for custard-filled long johns. We didn’t wear helmets or lock our bikes—the only requirement was a wristwatch so we wouldn’t be late for dinner.

But even with such deep roots in a single place, I also grew up with an understanding of home that was nomadic: Home was wherever you stopped and pitched the tent when it was time to cook dinner. bluetent

My parents were both teachers, which meant summers offered more time than money. Flying from Michigan to visit relatives on the West Coast wasn’t in the budget, so each summer we packed up our wood-paneled station wagon and hit the road for about six weeks.

I was prone to carsickness, so there were just two ways I rode in the car: sprawled asleep across the backseat or awake and perched dead center, leaning forward until I was almost as much in the front seat with my parents as I was in the back. Luckily, my big brother was never the sort to draw a line down the middle of the seat and enforce it with punches or pinches. Besides, I think he was happy to let me chatter away to my parents, leaving him in relative peace with his books.

The ultimate destinations we drove toward—a visit with our grandparents in L.A. or our favorite cousins in Portland, a week spent hiking in Glacier National Park, or a few days exploring San Francisco—were well-worth the 5,000-or-so miles we covered each summer. But so many days were devoted to just getting there, driving through endless-seeming states like Nebraska or North Dakota, only stopping for gas, bathroom breaks, and to eat the sandwiches Mom had made at the campground that morning.

After a full day of driving, as the sun was lowering in the sky and Mom’s voice was hoarse from reading aloud Little House on the Prairie books, we pulled out a thick campground guide and chose a place to stay—with a pool, if my brother and I were lucky. At the campground, Mom pulled out the camp stove and started dinner while the rest of us got to work setting up the tent and filling it with sleeping bags and pillows. The next morning it all came down again, was packed back into the car, and we drove some more—to the next place we would call “home” for a night.

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Now, when I think about where I come from, I still envision that ever-present grey-blue house, first. I am very much a small-town Michigan girl. But it occurs to me that my rootedness in that place has always been filtered through an understanding of other places—of treeless plains and impressive peaks, of rugged beaches with magical tide pools, and of Chinatowns and subways, operas and contemporary art. I knew where I was back home in Michigan because I also knew where I wasn’t.

And in that sense, I come from places that protected me as well as places that exposed me—from a small Michigan town and big Montana mountains; from the inside of a station wagon, where my entire family was always close enough to touch, to a crowded San Francisco sidewalk where strangers pressed in as I absorbed glimpses of the world.

stationwagonPhotographs by William E. Tennant