Kissing Cousins? Oh my!

The past two days I have spent working on our family tree. It's a fun, obsessive activity for me, and it can take up hours at a time, allowing me to avoid the other things I should be doing. I've been in something of a crash mode since getting back from the old house for the last time on Tuesday afternoon. I know I have to go again tomorrow or Saturday, so I am sort of checking my brain into other things for a while, with the full knowledge that I need to start up with some other important things on Monday.

Well, once in a while I discover something kind of cool in my family chart digging. Today, what I discovered was a bit shocking. I found an interesting wrinkle in Dan's family: a man married a woman whose grandfather was his own father! I think that would be a bit more troubling these days, but I guess marrying close relatives was all the rage in bygone eras.

But there's more! You see, Daniel and I are cousins. Before you call the civil and church authorities, we're something like 20th cousins 4 times removed, so I think we're legal in all 50 states. That's my very inexact calculation, and someone who understands the whole cousin calculation situation better than I can correct me if they like, but it's clear that we're sufficiently distant.

In any event, Daniel and I are tied by blood in jolly Olde England -- Elmley Castle in Worcestershire, to be precise -- in the early 13th century, in the person of one William de Beauchamp, Lord of Elmley.

Now, I have known for many years that I spring from a long line of Beauchamps, as I had the dubious distinction of being of the Beauchamp bloodline through an all-male line of descent for 19 generations, broken only when my Beauchamp great-grandmother married and surrendered her Beauchamp name. What I didn't know is that while I descended from the Beauchamps of England, I narrowly missed descending from what I will refer to as the "cool" branch of the family that Daniel, lucky son-of-a-Beauchamp (sorry), managed to descend from, even though his line didn't keep the surname alive for such a long time.

Why is that the "cool" branch? Well, while my part of the family was busy keeping the name alive through various and sundry 5th-born sons and the like, Dan's line was busy surveying their newly-inherited Warwick Castle, which his part of the family would hold for 5 or 6 generations, until a Beauchamp woman in his direct line married her way out of the name and the Castle inheritance. (The Beauchamps only held the castle for one or two generations after that anyway).

So, why is this so cool? Warwick Castle just happens to be the only castle in England that we have visited together! It's a bit of an amusement park now, with the pricetag to match, but it is also beautifully preserved. When we were in the town of Warwick and visited the church there, we spoke to a docent of my Beauchamp forebears... but little did we know that Dan had some of his own, and that they owned the castle! I'll dig up photos from our time there eventually, but in the meantime, I offer this one in public domain:


See, William and Isabel (our mutual great-great-etc. grandparents) had at least two sons. Their son William (Dan's great-great-etc.-1 grandfather) managed to inherit the castle from his maternal uncle. Their other son, Walter, (my great-great-etc.-1 grandfather) didn't... but he did manage to keep the bloodline going in my direction! *sigh*

Ah well... as they say, time heals all wounds. I have now married back into distant descendants of the cool Beauchamp line. What I couldn't do by birth, I could do by marriage... and by accident!

Ah well, castle or no castle, this is one cousin I intend to go right on kissing!

The elephant in the blog

In a recent post, I mentioned that I anticipated making several blog posts to catch up on what's been happening in our lives because I would have time on my hands. Hahahaha. I honestly intended to, but the circumstances of our lives have become more complicated rather than less so, which has meant, on balance, that I haven't had time to blog. The biggest news is that, effective Sept 17, I have been laid off. In the meantime, I haven't been working. Instead, I have been shoving the tangible expressions of our home-life and history into boxes and moving all of our belongings into storage, patching walls, painting and scrubbing the mostly empty surfaces of the place we called home for a little over a year.

I don't think -- my departure from the family home at 19 aside -- that I have ever been so sad to leave a place, but with Dan still only working on contract and my job no more, we couldn't hold on to our little house any longer. The decision was made quickly and the majority of the move itself was accomplished in about a week. It reminds me a bit of when Dan and I got married... when I decide to do something, I can often be incredibly efficient. Once I settled on the groom, I had lined up a church, dress, caterer, band, and just about every other large detail of the day in about a week. :D Similarly, this move has been a whirlwind of just doing what must be done.

The job loss is a mixed bag, as you might imagine. The bad parts should be rather obvious: financial worries, doubts, feelings of failure, worries about finding a job when unemployment is at record highs, fear of starting over again. *sigh* I'm not immune to those things by any means. However, what I find more interesting is the rest of my reaction ... The reactions of the parts of me that remain hopeful and look forward to new opportunities. I guess this means that there is some degree of relief, some degree of resignation, even though I might not have chosen to leave on my own. There are three main things that come to mind that are positive factors in the midst of the worries and fears:

1. I've been missing working with people. That's not to say my coworkers were inhuman :P -- I mean with people I can see in person with cubicles or desks I can show up at. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the deepest of them is what my past work habits had meant. I tended to work insane hours. I spent so much of the last year connecting to California via the internet that I have didn't get out much. As a result, I made only 2 or 3 friends or acquaintances (of varying degrees) in the entire time I've lived in North Carolina. The lack of local friends makes it easier to relocate 2 hours away... but who wants it to be easy that way? I mean, if you know me well, you know I am more social than that. It's been difficult to feel so isolated, and I am definitely ready to get out of the house...

2. ... which brings me to the another good aspect: the ability to potentially leave work at work and have a home that is a haven from work's stresses and worries. I worry excessively anyway, but I found it incredibly difficult to not carry all of my stresses with me all of the time, because work was at home and home was at work.

3. Finally, if I am honest, I have to confess that over the past year or so, I had gotten to the point where I was deeply dissatisfied. The best way I can describe the "why" of the matter is that I didn't like the person I was at work anymore. I don't meant that I am inherently incompetent or anything, it was just that all of the particulars of the work setting and my personal situation, I think, brought out some of the worst in me. Rather than feeling the joy of the things I did well, most of the time I felt uneasy and worried. Again, this isn't a criticism of the company or the people I worked with, I think it was just what came from the convergence of difficult circumstances surrounding me during this most trying year.

Of course, I can also derive some comfort from the certainty I have now. I'm certain that I won't have the same job in the matter of days. I'm also sad about that and can't help be feel at times that the change represents my failure, but it's really kind of nice to know what the future holds: options I would never have considered otherwise.

I can't help but feel the timing is kind of bad... but there's never a good time for these things. I recall my Dad's job loss right about the time he had to bury his own dad. Now THAT was bad timing. Timing for us could be better, because Dan's job is still a non-permanent contract, we have huge expenses because of our transition between cities, and our benefits will run out with my job. In another way, though, the timing is great, because in the next few weeks Daniel's job will either solidify into something permanent in this area or not; the way that works out may influence where we choose to live now where I (or both of us, for that matter) ought to look for a new job.

So... I will update the blog. Among other things, I have lots of pictures from our visit with Steve and Jayne and the boys that I want to share. I did, however, want to name and talk about the elephant in the blog. It's name is "Change", and it's charging at me again.

On a lighter note, I thought I would thank two of my faithful helpers during the move process: Monte, who can be seen here on box security patrol, and MooMoo, who is pictured testing the suitability of a box for carriage of delicate contents. Monte kept the burglars and mice at bay, and MooMoo snuggled with me and with the boxes to make sure that she remained well-rested and ready for whatever the day might hold. The kitties also, when they were there with me, helped me not feel quite so very alone in the world. That was their greatest mercy.

I'll end on a musical note... We plan to attend our first rehearsal with the Choral Society of Greensboro tonight. I'm looking forward to that very much. There's no audition to weather, so we'll just show up and sing. Sounds like fun to me. :)

Memories and Old Salem

Sometimes memories come from the strangest of places. Yesterday I stood at the counter of a rented townhouse in central North Carolina cutting green onions for a salad. For a split second, I was transported back to California in the 1980s. I was just a child, in the kitchen or on the back porch of my grandparents' Whittier house -- I wasn't quite sure where, exactly -- and I was watching my grandmother cut green onions... probably for a big family dinner, in the days when my grandparents were both alive and our extended family had a thread, my grandfather, stitching the various parts together. I don't know if it was the smell, the texture, the crunch of the blade through the crisp green stalks or the dull thump of the knife on the cutting board, but the onions awakened a deep memory with surprising force and freshness. This was no cherished memory of a special moment; it was a long-forgotten ordinary moment, but when I lived it again, it became a treasure.

There are places that serve to sort of jog our collective memories, and this part of the South seems full of them. So many houses sag, in various stages of decay, where they proudly stood decades ago. There's a sense of connection to the past here that is missing from the orderly streets of California's gleaming new master-planned communities: a scent reminiscent of another time and place wafted on the winds over the fields once soaked with blood, or the sound of an old grandmother singing as she lays the laundry out to bleach in the sun.

Some of these places leave the memories to the imagination, where memorial plaques are absent and tour books are silent; others bring the past to life so vibrantly that you feel you were somehow there -- that you will leave remembering the faces and places alive with the life of another era when life was simple and hard. Old Salem is one of those places, and I found myself wandering its streets and shops and houses twice in the last week: once with Steve, Jayne, Thomas and Paul, and again with Daniel, Erik and Robyn.

Old Salem -- the birthplace of the latter half of what is now Winston Salem, NC -- was settled in 1766 by the Moravians, a protestant sect with German heritage who came from what is now part of the Czech Republic. They call themselves the first protestants, and they may be one of the earliest groups to break from the Roman Catholic church to have a continuous modern presence. They founded Bethlehem, PA, before moving in 1753 to "Wachovia," the nearly 100,000 acres they would call home in North Carolina.

Salem became the center of the Wachovia settlement, and it's location was settled by drawing lots. When God said "yes" via a piece of parchment (after saying "no" in other spots over several years), ground was broken for the new civic center of Moravian life. The town's buildings have since been lovingly restored and the streets and shops are peopled by costumed historical interpreters who demonstrate the way of life in the town from 1766 to the 1800s.

I'll let pictures do most of the talking from this point. They should tell you that Old Salem is a fascinating look at another era, and the sort of place where we can jog our human memory in individual ways, as it did for Robyn when she stood in a garden burgeoning with flowers and bustling with bees and said, "There's a smell here reminds me of my grandmother," and as a people. Ultimately, almost all of us have grown from foreign roots transplanted in American soil. And in Old Salem, we are reminded that those who came before us are not so far removed from us that we cannot touch and taste and smell their world.

Desayuno Chapin y Cumpleaños Felices

I plan to make a series of posts this week: partly because I am rather unexpectedly in possession of more time than usual for blogging and the like, and partly because this last week has been incredibly full. To recap in brief, Steve, Jayne, Thomas and Paul (Daniel's oldest brother and family) came to visit for much of the week. That was a wonderful time, and I promise to cover it in more detail in future posts. However, I plan to work backwards a bit, starting with some of the most recent events.

This weekend, Erik and Robyn came over to observe two birthdays: Daniel's 39th on Friday and Erik's 32nd, which is today. One feature of the weekend was Guatemalan breakfast. Daniel called Guatemala home for 14 years, and so when we managed to find a Guatemalan brand (Ducal) of refried black beans (volteados) in a local store here, he bought them and introduced me to the wonder that is Guatemalan breakfast. I think it will become a favorite at our house. Our version featured volteados, tortillas de mais (corn), chirmol (a sort of roasted salsa that Dan made from scratch), queso (Mexican cheese, in this case, because Guatemalan cheese still evades us), huevos con cebolla (eggs with onion), Crema Guatemalteca (a mixture of sour cream, cream cheese and heavy cream), fruit and coffee. We would have added fried ripe platano (plantains) had we remembered to buy them.
As for the title of the post, Guatemalans refer to themselves as "chapin" and "desayuno" is, as you have probably guessed, breakfast. The second half of the title, of course, refers to happy birthdays, and so, with that, I proceed to part two of the post.

Robyn and I made birthday cakes this weekend. It was a collaborative effort in the kitchen, but I did most of Daniel's cake, and Robyn did most of Erik's. I, at least, had a lot of fun working on them.

Daniel's cake was a "giant ding dong", complete with devils food cake, cream filling and a chocolate glaze. I prefer, however, to think of it as a giant hockey puck. This puck featured something like the emblem of the team that still, in his heart of hearts, has the most pull for Daniel. I got the team emblem close enough that Dan said he recognized it immediately, which was all I aspired to, given that I was decorating free-hand. However, to Dan's great feigned sorrow, I was unable to put the official NHL logo on the underside of the cake. I'm just not that good.

Erik's cake was vanilla with a sort of chocolate chip crust on the bottom and whipped cream frosting and filling. It was very light and tasty (not death-by-sugar like the puck) and was decorated with the brightly-colored emblem of his favorite Swedish fotboll (soccer!) club: Djurgårdens I. F.; where the D. I. F. would ordinarily have been on the crest, Robyn put his name.
On Sunday, we each had a small slice of each cake, offset in part by some cheese and crackers. Robyn and Erik then returned home and Dan and I collapsed into a sugar coma for a couple of hours. It was a fitting end to a very long week.
So, allow me to end with wishes for a very happy birthday to my beloved husband Daniel, to our good friend Erik, and a very happy belated birthday to our darling niece, Talia, who celebrated her first birthday last weekend. I would invite you to visit her family blog for photos of that joyous event, which we, sadly, could not celebrate in person.

Many years!

Before and After

I don't feel I can really write about what's going on in my life at the moment, and I am not much for writing poetry (at least not of the sort that gets shared), but I found myself up at 4am scribbling these words as I thought about regret and time and opportunity, and in the lack of anything else to say, I offer this jumble of sleepless thoughts.

There is the moment before,
and the moment after.
In between comes the moment of transition, as dying lies breathlessly moaning between the twin moments of dead and alive.
It is that middle waiting place; the moment whose long-anticipated passing makes the possible actual, whose flight leaves after behind, in its crashing, tumbling wake.
After having arrived, drenched and dripping with the waters of change, the mind and heart still clamor for what was. Before.
Disbelieving, yearning to plunge back under the surf and emerge where the waves have yet to pound the shore,
I flirt with the time before...
before the death
before the diagnosis
before the darkness
before the loss
before what is done cannot be undone
and after...
Now. This moment after when once again what is just is. No longer becoming, but become. When the after settles in for a nap on the rug, just there on his well-worn patch before the hearth, impervious to the frigid stone and the gray smoldering remains of my extinguished heart-fire.
There, in the bone-cold and bitter silence, it is hard to remember that after is itself simply the before to another moment...
Before whatever is next.
before the birth
before the cure
before the daybreak
before the gain
before what is yet undone is done.
After is where what is becomes what could be.
The place where the heart aches as it thaws from its arctic freeze,
its nascent smoldering flame exploding into beats of life.
The place where ashes give birth to the blazing Phoenix, and the light of hope bursts anew on the world of before.

If ever...

Six years ago today my beloved and I were "really married" in the sight of 400-odd witnesses seen and untold numbers unseen. It was the moment that my little girl dreams came true, right down to the princess dress!

In retrospect, the most amazing part is that I was given a husband that I can and do truly love and respect. What? That doesn't seem so amazing? Well, I spent several of my formative years thinking -- once I was too practical to continue to think that I would grow up to be a princess or Amy Grant -- that God's plan for me surely meant marrying me to someone I wouldn't love (or possibly even like), since God was a jealous God and I was certain I needed to be taught a lesson. While I dutifully composed lists of godly traits I wanted in a man and prayed for the safety, health and happiness of my yet-unnamed someday husband, wherever he was in the world, from the time I was a young teen, I didn't really have exalted hopes. I think I thought I would be lucky to get someone who would put up with me, let alone care deeply for me, and I entered my 20s still believing that was true. Given that my expectations lowered my standards a bit, and that I probably could have married badly a couple of times over before Daniel and I met, the fact that I was unmarried and not 100% sworn off of men when God brought Daniel into my life seems nothing short of a miracle.

For his part, Daniel once told me that his abiding fear was that God would make him a missionary in India, and later in life he had resigned himself to becoming a monk if the right woman didn't show up, and she didn't seem to be in any hurry to get there. Clearly, Daniel is not a missionary in India nor a monk, and I am not in marital misery or divorced. God knew better, it would seem.

I was right about one thing. I needed to be taught a lesson. I needed to learn that the man God had planned for me was far and away beyond my expectations. More than that, he was what I needed: kind, devoted, talented, intelligent, patient almost beyond measure and a perfect fit in so many ways. I needed to learn something about love. I needed to see that love was neither a fairytale gooey feeling (though I have been blessed with some of that), nor was it the lashes of a taskmaster for my own betterment (though I have needed some of that), nor was it something that I could never experience in a way that enlivened my being (though I despaired of that)... No, love was, as promised, patient, kind, not envious, bot boastful, not proud, not rude, not self-seeking, not easily angered, not keeping record of wrongs... it protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres. It never fails. In my only slightly imperfect husband, I glimpse perfect love, and I am completely overwhelmed.

I may fail to love him as I ought. We have and will face all manner of challenges. There is, however, nobody I would rather face them with.

And so, in awe of God's graciousness and overwhelmed by the gift that is Daniel in my life, I come to the end of my post and I haven't words of my own to say what I wish. And so, what Anne Bradstreet said of her beloved, I quote in honor of mine:

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

A Mountain and Mayberry

In our temporary home, we're a little over an hour from Pilot Mountain, which we were introduced to this weekend, thanks our friends and weekend guests Erik and Robyn. It's a very lovely place with miles of trails to wander. Sadly, there was a bit more excitement than usual while we were there--EMTs and forest rangers were busy rescuing a 26-year old woman who fell while rock climbing. The good news is that Daniel was told when he asked that she was expected to make a full recovery. The mountain is lovely. Trails lead around its base, and there are gorgeous views in just about every direction.





Nearby is also Mt. Airy, which claims to be "Mayberry" of Andy Griffith show fame, since it is the place where Mr. Griffith grew up. We noticed upon walking around a bit that it seems to be the perfect place to enjoy ice cream and knick-knack shopping. There must be half a dozen little hole-in-the-wall restaurants with ice cream offerings and three times as many stores with Lord-only-knows what in them. We didn't browse much, because, as one might expect, the town had begun to shut down at 5 pm!