"You have no idea what my life is like."

Over the past two weeks, which have included some fairly dramatic family drama, three people have said that to me.

Three people I love and thought I was close to.

Or closer than I really am, I guess.

In the TV show Grey’s Anatomy, they use the term "person" in a specific way. People either have or are trying to find their "person," who isn’t necessarily their spouse, but the one person in the entire world who really, truly gets how they work. In my life I’ve found that my "person" hasn’t ever been one specific individual. Instead, I’ve had "people," each of whom have known how one specific part of me worked. And even though it’s fragmented, if they all added up their knowledge about me, there would be a fairly true image of me between them.

In that strange twist that life takes, though, before all the drama started I’d been thinking about people being close. I thought about something rough one of my "people" has been dealing with, and how she didn’t tell me about it for months—I didn’t, in fact, have any idea about what that portion of her life was like. And when she did tell me I felt all sorts of things: sadness, anger, and frustration for her. But also a little bit of shock: why didn’t she tell me before?

So after I found out about this person’s hard thing, but before the drama exploded, I was already thinking about closeness. About, for example, how much I love, adore, and need my friend Chris. Except I hardly ever see her. And there are reasons of course: our work schedules are opposite, and we live, what, thirty miles apart, and then there’s the guilt that inevitably surfaces in me whenever I think, OK, tonight I’m going to do something with a friend. But how pathetic is that—that my best friend ever, my friend who knows everything about my past but loves me anyway, my friend with whom conversation starts the second we are together and doesn’t stop until the very second we leave—that we live a mere thirty miles apart but haven’t seen each other for more than a year?

She’s one of my people but I don’t try hard enough to be close. Even though I want to.

Or my family is another example. One of my sisters lives less than two miles away from me, and another is just one county north. My mom lives fourteen miles away. But we don’t see each other very often, except for holidays and family parties. We never, ever get together for a quick lunch or shopping or anything casually on-the-spot. We are family and we love each other, but how close are we?

 "You have no idea what my life is like," we could all peal at each other.

The same goes for my nieces and nephews, on both sides of my family. I know them and I love them but I have only varying degrees of closeness with them—and yet I have knowledge (as the old Auntie) that might help them. They have (some of them) babies and toddlers and little kids I could love. They don’t live very far away either.

And yet I content myself with Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and a summer get together.

Part of closeness is the willingness to make an effort. Part of it is the ability to be open. To let that cry of "you have no idea" slide out of us. But it is easier (and far more socially acceptable!) to keep it bundled up. To hide behind the smooth blandness of the word "fine." To keep our heartache shuttered.

Our happinesses, too.

On Monday, I went to a funeral. It was for my cousin’s husband; he committed suicide. As I sat in the church, I looked at the family members around me: my two uncles who were my dad’s big brothers (oh how I missed my dad that day!), my aunts who have each divorced my uncles, my cousins whose lives I only know in broad strokes: the trouble they got into in high school, who they married, how many kids they have. I don’t know anything about their small, everyday details. And yet, I look at them and I see all of our physical similarities. (This also made me miss, with an ache that forced me to walk out of the luncheon for a few moments, J.) We are related by blood and by memories, by our penchant for going grey early and by baggage (I wonder if the rest of them have grown immune to feeling unloved by our grandma Elsie), but we aren’t close. Even though most of us live within a twenty-minute drive from one another.

I don’t really have an answer. I don’t really even have a question, except for why. Why is it that I think I am close, that I have my "people," but at any given moment I could, if pressed, admit (in one of those high, pinched voices that comes out around the lump in your throat) to a deep loneliness?

What it makes me want to do, this knowledge I’ve gained about myself and my "people" over the past few weeks, is draw my own family closer. It has made me weep, thinking about the (very real) possibility of the same thing happening between me and Haley. That we would look like we were close but we would really not be. We should be each other's person in a certain way, but I'm not sure we are. Not even the future but the right now, when we talk only if I call, when she is out in the world doing so very well without me. Which is good, which is how I raised her, but there is still that tiny voice wishing she missed me just a little.

She’s one of my people but I wish we were closer.

It’s always a risk, assuming that one of your people really is a person. Is someone who gets some part of you, is someone who wants to be in your life not just because you’re related but because they have true affection for you. Right now I am in this place where I nearly regret making those assumptions. I’m actually sort of embarrassed that I did. I feel like the drama and the thinking and the funeral have given me a knowledge which I can’t yet name because I don’t know even its parameters yet. Its basic shape. But it is about closeness and being open and trusting my people and being a better person back.

(I don’t want to learn what this knowledge has in its dark parts, which is to turn away, to shutter myself off, to say, "you’re right, I don’t know anything" and let that failure cause more distance.  I can’t make anyone want to tell me their stuff. I can’t make anyone else be open, and it is my gut instinct to pull back. To feel embarrassed for relying on the idea that my people are my people. To assume that by being open I have been a burden, and in that assumption draw myself away.)

I don’t want the illusion of closeness. I want the realness of it, the guts and gore and also the brightness. I want to have what it might look like I already do have: real, true relationships. Not new ones, but with the people already in my life. The dust from all the drama, though, is settling, and in the clearness I find that I am only doubting myself even more. Knowing this: everyone has stuff they need a person for. But also knowing this: I am less and less confident in my ability to be anyone's person, because look! Look at the people I thought were "people," or who should be "people," but aren't.

I feel absolutely without the knowledge to fix this.

Last week, my sister Becky and I started the seemingly-gargantuan task of finally cleaning out all the stuff in my mom's house so that she can sell it. It seems insurmountable because she's lived in that house since 1976. Almost forty years of accumulated stuff, and it doesn't help that she's a keeper. I mostly understand this impulse to keep things (see my recent struggles with cleaning out our toy room). It's mixed in with the fear of forgetting, because if I don't have every single everything that anyone in my family ever loved still in a box somewhere in the basement, then I wouldn't have the chance to come across it one day and be flooded with that memory.

It's hard to disconnect the memory from the thing. It's hard to believe that the memory really will stay around, even if you don't have the thing. Especially considering all we mourned while we watched my dad suffer with Alzheimer's.

But when you want to go from a home that once held six people to one that's comfortable for a widow to manage, you have to get rid of some of the things.

On the first day of the project, Becky and I started on the sewing room. One wall is lined with cupboards, where my mom kept the fabric for all the projects she was working on. Some of the cupboards stored food instead of fabric. As my mom was one of those domestic-goddess types who bottle green beans, beets, salsa, tomatoes, apple-pie filling, and various other stuff (one year she canned pinto beans for quick—and seriously delicious—refried beans; another year she did pickled cauliflower and carrots which I don't think were quite so good), the shelves were filled with old food. Like: really. old. food. Do you know what beets cut into strips look like thirty years later? Little piles of mummified cat poop in the bottom of a jar. And we'll skip the details of the mixture of macaroni, mouse droppings, dead mice, spilled Italian seasoning, and dust that coated the bottom shelves. Other shelves held cans and cans of a mix of old-ish and still-good products, soups and mushrooms and tomato sauce.

As we worked in the sewing room, I thought about how my mom used to call my dad "ol' gonna-do." Meaning, he was always making plans for things he was gonna do. (Lose fifty pounds, eat healthier, paint more, start his own business, fix the brake lights on my Torino...) That sewing room was full of gonna-do's. In the cupboards of food, which my mom fully intended to do something with, make dinners, feed her family. In the cupboards of fabric, most of it decades old, which she was going to make into dresses or quilts or pants or pajamas.

All gonna-do's.

I so understand the lure of the "gonna do."

I fight it every time I find myself in a scrapbook store. Surrounded by patterned papers and embellishments and alphabets, I start thinking about what I could do with this or that product. How I would use it on a layout. Then I bring it home and I realize, oh, yeah, I could've done the same thing with any of the other 20 million supplies I already have. (Really. Say I died tomorrow. Someone would have to go through all the supplies I own and I'm pretty sure my ghost would be hovering, scarlet with blushing because of the excess.) It's a thought process that sometimes leads me to question what I'm doing with scrapbooking anyway. Does it have any value, really? Or is it like the petrified beets, important at the time but pointless in a few decades?

The second day of operation let's-get-Suellen-out-of-her-house found Kendell fixing Mom's lawn mower while she and I worked on the room opposite the sewing room. Which we've always called the junk room. It's the only room in Mom's house that isn't finished—cement floor, no sheetrock, a naked lightbulb. It's where we've put, over the years, quite a bit of the things we didn't have a use for but didn't want to give away, either. (Like our very own Room of Requirement.) In the framed-in closet was a clothing rack, which held a whole row of ancient clothes. Once we'd worked our way through the junk (bags of flour and sugar as old as Kaleb, boxes of fabric and yarn and old patterns) to the closet, we started going through the clothes.

I wish I'd snapped a picture before we started.

Nearly every piece of clothing had a story to go along with it. The black and white floral dress was the one she'd bought at a store in Salt Lake to wear to a dance she went to during her years at BYU; she'd been sure she'd be the only one wearing it but when she walked in she immediately saw another girl in the same dress. The pink fitted dress and jacket was the going-away dress she made for the day she married my dad. There was the going-away dress she wore for her first wedding. (I told her she didn't even need to look at it, just toss it straight into the donations box.) (Plus: who knew that going-away dresses were such a big thing in the 1960's? I think after my wedding reception I put on a pair of black pants and a sweater!) A purple sundress, lined with white rickrack, that I remember my grandma wearing. The dress Mom wore to Michele's wedding and the one she wore to mine.

And not just dresses. Two coats of Grandpa's and his favorite flannel shirt. My dad's brown wool coat that I remember him wearing. A beaver-fur-lined coat that was my grandma's which Mom couldn't decide what to do with.

Every item had its story. She told me the stories, unbidden, unstructured. Then she'd decide if it should go into the D.I. (the Utah version of the Salvation Army) or to the second-hand clothes store downtown. It was one of my favorite moments I've ever had with my mother: I handed her old clothes, she handed me old stories.

And just like seeing all of those dessicated beets was sad (so much work for nothing but dust), seeing all her dresses being sent away was sad. Whomever buys them won't know the stories. They might make new memories in them, but my mom's connection to them is broken.

Later, we found a box with pictures stuffed inside. I managed to contain my ire about photos being stuffed into a box by remembering that's just how they did it back then. Luckily the mice hadn't gotten into it, because many of the pictures inside I'd never seen before. Random pictures of all of us.

(This is Becky at about 7 or 8 years old, wearing ringlets. There didn't happen to be a ringleted photo of me in that box...but they are still out there. Oh how I hated the ringlets!)

My mom with her date, in that black and white dress.

As we sat on the floor and sorted pictures, I thought about my gonna-do's. The projects I've bought the stuff for but haven't yet actually made. There are still a lot of them—a pink and black quilt, a hand-pieced quilt, quilted tableclothes for every season. My tall pile of library books is a gonna-do. My unwritten novel is, too, and the essays I've written but never submitted anywhere. The list of hikes I want to take is a list of gonna-do's.

And definitely, my scrapbook supplies are simply gonna-do's.

I thought about the dress, the elegant black-and-white dress. I thought about the photo of my mom in the dress. I thought about my mom in the junk room telling me the story of the black and white dress. And I thought about scrapbook pages.

It's so simple to lose your focus in this hobby. It's a quick switch, the lure of something new and pretty. It's almost completely about, in fact, pretty. Or it can become that way. About the supplies. About the outcome—a pretty page.

But what I continue to learn, especially in the past year, is that the pretty doesn't matter. The design doesn't matter, balance and composition and visual triangles. Because what if sometime, in some fashion, my mom had written down the story of the black and white dress? What if she'd put it with the photo?

The design wouldn't matter. Embellishments wouldn't matter. The pretty wouldn't matter. Just the story would.

So there on the floor of my mother's basement, surrounded by photos and newspaper clippings and funeral programs, I reminded myself again: the stuff doesn't matter. Even though it's pretty (or elegant or stylish or hip or just-so-perfect-I-can't-ever-use-it). The thing that gives scrapbooking its value isn't all the money I've spent on stuff. It's just the stories, paired with the pictures. Written down, kept somewhere safe and mouse-free.

I want less gonna-do's in my life. Not in the sense of doing less. But in accomplishing more. I want to finish that black-and-white quilt I've been buying random quarter-yards for. I want to snuggle underneath it and make it a real part of my life instead of a thing that's still unformed, in pieces.

I want to write my novel and publish my essays.

I want to use my stuff so that when I am in my mother's shoes I won't have a bunch of unfinished gonna do's.

The autumn General Conference of the LDS church is coming up in a couple of weeks. Conference is when our church leaders present ideas to the entire church congregation, via radio, TV, or Internet. Or you can go to the Conference Center in Salt Lake City to watch the conference live (if you have tickets, which is something I’ve never attempted to obtain).

Lately, whenever there is a general conference (there are two every year, one on the first weekend of April, the second on the first weekend of October), there is an upswing in people discussing their issues with the church. Topics such as gay marriage and the timing of a wedding versus a sealing are hot topics right now, but the biggest issue is whether or not women should be ordained with the priesthood.

The issues surrounding this topic are both central to the LDS faith and, because of the structure of the church, exclusive. So I write about this hesitantly because I’m certain not all of my readers will know the cultural references and why they run so deep.

For example, last December there was a loosely-organized movement for women to wear pants to church. I’m pretty sure that the world at large would think really? Why wouldn’t women wear what they want to church? The women who support the male-only construct of priesthood ordination argued that they wear dresses to church to show their respect for Christ, Heavenly Father, and the spirit within the house of God. The women who support the priesthood-for-all construct pointed out that it is mostly men who’ve been telling us that a dress is a symbol of respect, and that clothing itself, as well as what we associate with it, is a social construct.

Someone (and I confess: I cannot remember who, except for it was someone at church) said something during that time to me. "I’m guessing you’ll be wearing pants," she said, which gave me one of those internal chuckles. It made me wonder about how I project myself while I am at church, but it also made me wonder why she thought I would be so certain as to where I stand.

Because, I confess, I am not certain.

I will readily stand and call myself a feminist. Some of this comes from the things I learned from my mother. She taught me that gender should never be a thing that held me back. Sometimes she taught me the harsher side of feminism; I remember entire conversations about the weaknesses of men. Part of my feminism comes from my education, which some might find ironic considering I went to BYU. But I’ve always been drawn to women writing about women’s lives, and when I dug deep into my literature courses, that was the perspective that drew my attention. A few of my professors made snide comments about this tendency of mine, but my favorite professor wrote on one of my essays about the value of my perspective, especially within the LDS culture. (I still have that essay with his comment.) I do have to work hard at not spouting the man-hating side of feminism, and there are many, many men whom I admire. I don't think women are better than men, but I believe without restraint that women should have the same opportunities as them.

Labeling yourself as a feminist within the LDS culture tends to raise hackles. Members are swift to point out what the Proclamation states: "gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." But believing that people should have the same opportunities and choices, regardless of their gender, doesn’t refute the idea of gender as an essential characteristic. Part of being a feminist is that I am a woman and is that I have a belief in and an undeniable affection for women. (Wait: did that sound strange?) What I mean is that I think women can do amazing things by the traits of their gender (which, by the way, I see as being a balanced creation between identity and social construct) (and by which I don’t mean simply motherhood and cleaning the house) and that men have historically limited women’s abilities to carry about those amazing things.

So that is the perspective I bring to this discussion: I am an LDS feminist. Which means I do struggle with the constructs of patriarchy and I do see them. One example of this comes from an article I read last spring, in which Elaine Dalton (as the president of the organization for young women) said "I think that if people could sit (in those councils) and realize how into the details our brethren are, how aware they are of individuals, of issues, of trends, of things that are taking place that really affect families, women and children, they would be absolutely astounded as I am." I have not the smallest doubt that this is true—but I still think it is wrong that so few women ever actually see this happen. I believe that there is a difference between men making decisions in behalf of women and women making decisions in behalf of women, no matter how true and righteous the men’s hearts are.

But I am still not ready to say that women should have the priesthood. This is not because I think women would use it incorrectly, or would somehow taint it. I think that if women had the priesthood, they would wield it just as humanly as men do. (Meaning: not one of us will ever use it perfectly.)

On one side, I believe that men need the priesthood in a way that women don’t. Not because women are mothers. (That argument always makes me shake my head.) But because the ordination and the structure of the priesthood force men to act in certain ways that they might not otherwise. I believe that men are made into more nurturing, kind, and thoughtful men through the power of the priesthood. I believe that men need the priesthood for the way it changes them as much as their actions carried out with the priesthood change the people around them. I think that if women were to hold the priesthood, many men would feel like they didn’t need to work as hard to use the priesthood—and so they wouldn’t be changed in the positive ways that they could be.

On the other side, when only men are given the priesthood, there is a door added to women’s access to that priesthood. I know many people would disagree with me and would be swift to point out that women have access to the priesthood power through the righteousness of the men in their lives. This is true, of course; the power of the priesthood isn’t diminished because it came through a man’s work.

But it means that to gain access to the priesthood, a woman has to have access to righteous men. And despite what many people believe, not every LDS woman is surrounded by righteous men.

Let me tell a story to illustrate. Imagine a young couple who both hold the LDS faith. They get married in the temple. But through time, experience, disappointment, negative experiences, or a general falling away, the husband—the priesthood holder—stops being active.

The woman still loves her husband. She wishes, hopes, and prays that he will find his faith again. But until that happens, if she wants to have access to priesthood powers such as a priesthood blessing, she now has to go outside of her home to find them. She has to ask some other priesthood holder to do for her what her spouse cannot or will not.

She has to find a way to open the door that is closed to her by patriarchy. It has also been closed by her husband’s choices, I know. But it hasn’t been closed because of her choices. (Unless you want to question entirely her marriage to this particular man.)

It is a door she cannot open by herself because, as a woman, she doesn’t have the key.

The point of the story is that in an ideal world, a male-only priesthood works perfectly well. In the real world, it doesn’t. Families are imperfect, people make difficult choices, everyone experiences trials of their faith. A priesthood that is held by only one gender necessarily limits the other gender's abillity to experience that priesthood; I have to rely on a man's righteousness rather than my own. In an ideal world full of righteous men, perhaps that wouldn't matter. In the real world it does. 

And also, there is this: Men get to experience things with the priesthood that a woman without it never will. Namely, the experience of giving blessings. This was a power that women in the early LDS church held, but it was taken away from them. And I confess: I do wish I could experience that. I don’t want the priesthood because I want power. I don’t want it out of a desire to rule anyone else, or because I dislike men, or because I don't believe in the prophet. I do want that piece of it, though, the ability to give a priesthood blessing, both because I would like to bless my children in that way (a mother’s blessing as opposed to a father’s blessing) and because I would like to know how it feels.

I would like to go through that doorway.

But honestly, it's not philosophical or religious or gender-specific ideas that bothers me the most in this topic. Instead, what disturbs me (deeply) when the female ordination discussion gets started is just how cruel women are—to each other. "I will wear a dress on Sunday to prove to those women that I’m following God’s law" and other statements are things I read on many a Facebook status update. Derisive statements about how those women discussing ordination are less faithful members of the church. Women placing themselves above others because "I am going to listen to the prophet, unlike some people." And my always-favorite comment, "I don’t need to have the priesthood because my husband has it."

That frustrates me because who has told women that they only need access to the priesthood through men? Men.

But even more frustrating is the assumption that many women make—that because she doesn’t feel the need to wield the priesthood, then no other woman should. Which is why, ultimately, I cannot say what my opinion on the matter is: because my opinion only applies to me. Because whatever cutting comments I could say to "those women" who think women being ordinated with the priesthood is pure __________ (silliness, pride, stupidity, vanity), I cannot say for them in their lives what is best.

I can only speak for myself, and for myself I will say this: I refuse to judge or look negatively on people whose opinions are different than mine. If you think that women should have the priesthood I don’t think your testimony is weaker than mine. If you think that women shouldn’t, I don’t think your testimony is stronger than mine. What I do think is that creating an us-versus-them dichotomy is just as damaging as anything else.

I wrote this earlier: I think women are amazing. We are capable of so much greatness. But we are not one sided; we are also capable of great cruelty. A specific sort of cruelty, even. (Both of my sons have, as soon as they started junior high, noticed and come to talk to me about the same thing: why are girls so mean to each other?) We judge each other—for weight or dress or opinion. For wealth or education or testimony (or lack of them). We like to think we grew out of it, that we left it behind in our ninth-grade gym lockers, but really: we didn’t. You need only read a blog post or an essay about, say, women being ordained with the priesthood. Read the comments that adult women make to one another and that is all the proof you need for our continuing capability for meanness.

Who am I to conjecture? But maybe that’s why men have the priesthood and we don’t. (Not that men are immune to judging others, but they are, let’s face it, far less likely to be mean to each other or to women in the way that women are mean to women.) Maybe until women learn to love—really, truly, unconditionally love—each other, like Christ wanted us to, we will never achieve our truest potential, whether that includes the priesthood or not.

• on Sunday morning, Haley came home. She spent most of the time with her boyfriend, but she did come to the family party we had at my sister's house. I was glad she could be there and see everyone! It was a usual party...good food, kids swimming, and grown ups talking. But it was something I didn't know I needed. I love seeing my family! I made a chocolate cake and a coconut cake; not many takers on the latter because it doesn't look very appealing—just sort of a dry-ish looking bundt cake. If you take a chance on a slice, though, oh my: delicious.
• on Monday, Haley and Adam took Kaleb to Seven Peaks. I went for a long walk while Kendell worked out at the gym, and then we all went home and just sort of vegged. We got our carpets cleaned a few days earlier and I was still working on getting everything put back together. (Who am I kidding? I'm still working on it!)
• on Tuesday I tried to console Nathan. He neeeeeeeeeds new jeans desperately, but holy cow: it is HARD to find 28 32 jeans! I finally ordered some online, but who knows if they'll really fit? Tall and skinny: good, until you have to buy pants.
• on Wednesday, I did one of my favorite things: went shopping for fabric. Now that the kids are all rearranged into different rooms, Nathan needs a new quilt. I still have two others I need to finish before I start his, but I couldn't resist the shopping once I figured out what I wanted to do. I love picking out patterns and coordinating colors for a quilt—it might be my favorite part of the process!
• on Thursday I ran a ton of errands, including meeting Kendell at the mall. They'd had a barbeque for lunch at his work, so he brought me a half of a hamburger, a half of a hot dog, and a scoop of potato salad. Which sounds like I was eating off his leftovers...and, ok, I was, but they still tasted good! Later that afternoon, we did some other errands together, and everywhere we went there was a new rainbow. Kendell was a little bit annoyed that I kept on insisting we stop so I could photograph (with my cell phone!) the rainbows, but they were making me happy so I didn't care:
  

  This was my favorite rainbow, as it stretched from Buffalo Peak, across Squaw Peak, over Rock Canyon, and then ended at the Y Mountain summit. All of which are places I love to hike!
• on Friday we went to dinner with some friends. We sat at our table at Red Lobster for nearly four hours, just talking. It was great! (We left a big tip to compensate.) Trips to Red Lobster for all-you-can-eat shrimp (for Kendell, I think seafood is disgusting): a sure sign that fall is here!
• on Saturday, I had this post up on Write. Click. Scrapbook. That morning, there were no kids in the house. Jake was at a meeting for work, and Nathan and Kaleb went to the ward campout with some neighbors. A house without any kids is becoming a more regular occurence lately and it's just so strange! I realized at 8:30 that the baby shower I still needed to make a gift for actually started at 10:00, not 1:00. Luckily I can whip out a simple baby quilt in three hours, including the time to wash and dry it! It was in Salt Lake, so Kendell went up with me and then we went to lunch at Lone Star Taqueria. They have the most delicious tamales! When we got home that afternoon, the clouds were starting to gather, and about 5:00 we had the most awesome rain storm hit. The wind was ferocious and the rain poured. Two hours of rain is so uncommon here in Utah! Our power went out; Jake went to work and then Kaleb & Nathan went outside to play in the rain. I sat by the window and re-read the first Harry Potter novel.

Funny...when I sat down to write this, I didn't think there was anything to note about this week! Guess there's always something.

You know what happened four days ago? Like...on Tuesday? I'm certain the rest of the world was as excited about this as I was:

Margaret Atwood's newest book came out.

She has been my favorite writer since I was in eleventh grade, and the universe manipulated my life to make sure I was in class the day my English teacher had us read a short story by her. I'd been a lover of reading and stories and words all my life up to that point, but I will never forget how that reading that day felt: how I didn't want to be in class at all but Jennifer had talked me into it, how the sunlight sparkled and beckoned through the windows behind me, how my new (black it hardly goes without saying) sandals were giving me a blister on my little toe, but mostly how I was still caught up in my heartsick and heartsore experiences and all I could hear in my head was the endless internal monologue of retelling them so that maybe they could make sense or just stop hurting so {cussing} much.

Then I started reading about this girl named Elaine and what her friends did to her in a snowy ravine.

And my internal monologue silenced itself. I forgot my sickness and my soreness. I inhabited the story but not in a way I ever had before, because it was the story but it was also how the story was told, how the writer didn't use any words about emotion but she still made me feel exactly how Elaine was feeling, and in a sense I never left the snowy ravine.

That short story changed me forever. It gave me a new relationship to reading and it taught me what words can really do. When I finished reading it, I had two thoughts:

One day I want to be a teacher so that I can save someone else like that

and

One day I want to write that well.

I became a teacher. I don't think I ever saved anyone, but I hopefully taught my students something about trying to write well and to value words and to love stories. That words can save.

I'm still working on the writing part, although I know enough about it to also know I'll never write like Margaret Atwood; I can only write like myself.

I even go to meet her once (WHY didn't I bring a camera? And my copy of Cat's Eye so she could sign it?) and I told her it was her fault I was a teacher and she told me a story about one of her English teachers and then I wanted to die out of sheer, exhausted, triumphant fangirlyness.

I've never stopped loving her writing. And for the very same reasons: the story, and the way she writes the story so that you feel every thumping bit of it—without the story ever telling you what to feel.

I've bought every new book she's written since that afternoon in my 11th grade English class. Yes: even the essays. Of course the poetry. (I desperately want to buy THIS edition of The Handmaid's Tale but, alas: $65.) And even though I know not everyone loves her books like I do (my friend Paul read Cat's Eye only because I told him to and he hated it), and then there's her snobbishness about the genre label "science fiction" being applied to her post-apocalyptic novels and the hints that she's sort of a diva and all her praising of Twitter I still, gah:

I'm still a fangirl.

Today at work I was pulling new novels to put on the New Novels display and guess what I found? A copy of her new novel, which had been released on Tuesday. Just sitting there on the shelf! I held it and admired it and flipped through to read just a few sentences here and there. Then I called one of my librarian friends who is probably not as big of an Atwood fan as I, but with whom I could share my excitement. I confess that I even gushed about the cover.

Then I put it on the New Novels display, which shocked and surprised another librarian friend, who wondered why I wasn't taking it home.

Who, me? Read Atwood in library book? No thanks.

I need my own copy. I will fold down corners and annotate like crazy.

Once I buy a copy, that is. Because here's the thing: I need the perfect time to read it. And in September I have a whole bunch of crafty stuff I'm trying to finish. So that I can leave for 10 days in October for Italy. (That sounds like all sorts of fabulous, doesn't it? Fairly un-Amy's-life-like fabulous? You'd be right, it is, but also, true: I'm going to Italy in October.) And after Italy there will be Halloween to worry about.

I have to pick the right time, and it might not be until November.

Because it's not every day you get the chance to read a new Margaret Atwood novel. I want to be able to both savor it and read it as fast as possible. This only happens every once in awhile, and while the first reading of a new Atwood will never be as powerful as my first reading of Atwood altogether, it still will be an experience.

In fact, as I put the library copy of Maddaddam on the New Novels display, I had this thought: Margaret Atwood is old. I mean, holy cow: Seamus Heaney died last week, and if he isn't the embodiment of literary immortality then no one is, and he died. There will be no more new Heaney poems.

And one day there will be no more new Margaret Atwood novels.

So someone needs to tell me: What will I do when she dies?

(Or, alternatively, once you've stopped rolling your eyes over my appalling excitement—because really, she's just a person after all—you could tell me: who is your favorite writer?)

This morning I used my sweet cinnamon pumpkin body soap for the first time, which is a sign that fall has started. Before summer slips away, though, I wanted to jot down a few of my favorite summer moments of 2013. This was the summer of working: Haley had two jobs (she nannied for a friend of ours and then worked at Zurcher's for about six weeks before college), Jake worked at the Pizza Pie Cafe, and Nathan took over Jake's old job doing yardwork for one of my librarian friends. Sometimes it was a challenge to get everyone where they needed to be! The summer of Tuesday trips to the water park, of Jake becoming the grilling master, of Nathan mowing the lawn. The summer we took down our old swing set and put in a tramp and so the summer of back flips and front flips and 360 flips (and this momma worrying a lot). The summer that Kendell and I didn't hike together even once. 

The summer of accidents (Kendell and I were rear-ended in June and Haley was hit by a bike).

The summer of, mostly, transitions. The last summer we were all here together—but only very rarely were we really all home at once.

Some other moments to remember:

• Kaleb's eighth birthday party. We don't do friend parties every birthday, so he was in heaven. It only could've been better if ALL the friends he invited could've come.
• A few days away in Logan with Haley. In July she had her university orientation. We drove up early the day before, so she could put in resumes at every pharmacy we could find near her school (we're still hoping she finds a pharm tech position, even though her current job is awesome!), went to one of the famous Cache-Valley dairies, and even stopped at the public library. I didn't get to see much of Haley this summer, between her jobs and her boyfriend, so I am so, so grateful that we got to spend those few days together.
• Talking with Sophia. My friend who lives near Logan was so gracious to let us spend the night at her house (she was in the middle of a busy summer and things hadn't even gotten REALLY BUSY yet). After Haley went to bed we spent another two hours sitting in her front room and talking. I love friendships like that, when you can not see each other for a long, long time but immediately pick up where you left off, with the chatting and the laughing and the little bit of crying.
• Speaking of friends, one of my favorite moments was sitting on a boulder in a canyon at Zion, talking to my friends while we ate our sack lunches. It was perfect!
• Filling up the camelbacks with Jake. When we were on our youth conference weekend, we had a moment when we were out on the porch of one of the cabins, filling our camelbacks up with water from gallon jugs. Maybe that's a weird moment to love? But it was just him and me out there, and I felt like we were taking care of each other, and it was one of those moments when it hits you so hard just how awesome your kid is. He's an awesome kid.
• Visiting Mesa Falls in Idaho. The beauty of the world is just so...good.
• White water rafting down the Snake River. I have zero photos of this as I didn't dare take my camera, and honestly: I'm glad I didn't, as I would've been worrying about it the whole time. I might've even hesitated and not jumped into the river when the water slowed down, and missed the highlight of summer highlights: floating on my back in the ice-cold water and feeling so...free, I suppose. So exactly in the right place. So connected to my dad, which is strange because I'd never been there with him, but his memory flooded my heart. So joyful to be there with my sons and husband. So rested in the grace of the world.
• Walking with Kaleb. Because of my ankle (which I still need to blog about!) I did a lot of walking. And Kaleb came along for quite a few of them. He'd ride his scooter and I'd walk; keeping up with him helped me to go faster and plus he talked the whole time.
• Learning to longboard. Jake taught me how on Mother's Day (OK, technically NOT summer yet, but still, I got my first sunburn that day so it counts). I was cackling with laughter the whole time, it was so fun!
• Lunch with Haley at Noodles & Co after our annual trip to the Nordstrom sale. The shopping was disappointing this year but I loved our lunch. That was one of my this-kid-is-so-awesome moments with her.
• Walking while Nathan long boarded. One day Nathan and his friends decided they wanted to long board down the canyon. So I drove them to the top of the trail, then drove myself to the bottom of the canyon. They road their boards down, I walked up for a while and then turned around and met them at the car. He looked so happy!
• Kendell and I fell in love with the new Lindt chocolate bars they have at Target. "Having a square" is a nightly thing we do together now.
• On the fourth-of-July week, we went to the little pioneer village they had at one of the parks here. The Bigs were NOT excited about going but in the end everyone had fun looking at all the old stuff. I mean, how could this not be fun:
• The quail family. I hope I never forget that.

There are moments I wish I wouldn't have: something between Haley & me that made it feel like everything was OK...I never took the kids to Seven Peaks...I didn't read out loud to Kaleb like I wanted. Actually I'd better not start on the list of regrets. Because despite what I didn't do, despite the strangeness and the accidents and the many times I cried: it was a pretty good summer.