Montana Sky

"Ya hafta be real quiet. Make your voice quieter than the stream."
The pink sky glowed overtop us on some warm July evening in Montana. The long wild grass rustled with the breeze. I ran my fingertips over it, spinning circles so quickly that the Bridger mountains and Dad and the irrigation tunnel and the farmhouse were just a blur.
"Settle down, Lissey."
I stopped spinning and fell to the ground in dizziness, but the world kept passing by me from right to left.
"Come, I'll show you how ta do this."
Dad's big steady hands looped fishing line through a lure and hook. "We call it a fisher's knot." He continued to wrap the end of the line around and around until he pushed it through all the loops. "Pull." So I pulled and the knot tightened.
"Dad, are the fish here today?"
"That's what we're going to find out."
"Dad, what's the biggest fish you ever caught?"
"It's the one on our livin' room wall."
"Oh." It seemed he had answers for everything.
I plopped down at the edge of the irrigation tunnel and leaned far over to study the soft ripple of the waters. Dad's cowboy boots shifted from time to time next to me. I stretched my pink boots straight out, studied them for a moment, and let them swing back over the tunnel edge.
"Dad?"
"Yeah."
"Why not a bobber?"
"Huh?"
"Why aren't you using a bobber?"
He puffed a cigarette as he spoke. "'Cause you only use a bobber in a lake."
"Oh. Are we gonna eat fish tonight?"
"Maybe."
I slapped at mosquitoes and with a stick dug shapes into the dirt.
Suddenly there was a straining sound on Dad's line. One boot moved back, he gave some slack on the line but reeled quickly just after.
"Did ya hook him?"
"We'll see."
He reeled a small trout to the grassy shore and there it flopped and wiggled.
"You got one! You got one!" I ran to see it. Its little mouth opened and closed, trying to breathe, I thought. Dad maneuvered the hook out of it's throat, and soon I saw blood surround his fingers.
"Are you killing it?"
Dad replaced the hook in his tackle box and the fish in a cooler and fished again.
I stayed there by the cooler a while and watched its little mouth open and close, open and close.
I slapped away a swarm of mosquitoes. "They're infesting me!" and again I moved up the bank to the field and turned in a circle. Dad. Stream. Bridgers. Farm house. Dad. Stream. Bridgers. Farm house. My pink boots pounded the dirt, and my arms flailed again slapping the grass as I turned and turned and turned underneath the fading pink Montana sky.

Three cheers to DeMotte: Wait, what am I saying?

Is it possible that I like where I am in life? This very moment? Whoa, no way. Laurissa and contentment? Whaaaaaat?
Right now on a Saturday I'm somewhere in between washing the sheets, reading a bit of a Sarah Dessen novel (assigned to the Book Club students), vacuuming, and of course writing this blog. In another hour or so I'll go for a weekly walk around the neighborhood.
Living. That's what's going on.
Six or seven months ago, I wrote about all the anxieties and pressures of the post-grad life and how time never ceases to keep going. My next step in life was to find a job teaching English somewhere, though I had little idea of where I wanted to be. The goals were simple: find a place to live, buy used furniture, find a few friends, and join a church.
And now I'm there.
When I wrote that last blog somewhere in May I had been student teaching at a middle school in Sioux Falls. My world had changed since leaving Dordt in December. Friends had been whittled down, unlike the gregarious Dordt that had been my life for four years. They are the kind of friends you carry throughout the rest of your life, Lord willing.
At that point in May, I had found some kind of complete separation from the life my family lived and the life I anticipated living, whether that was good or bad, I'm still not sure. At that point in May I knew I would be graduating college, and what an accomplishment! But then again, so what? People have been graduating from college for hundreds of years now, and I was moving along in the milestones of life. It was another step.
I rented a movie called Post Grad. The girl has potential. She graduates second in her class (which I did not), and she attempts to apply for the perfect job. Needless to say she is turned down (where else would our story be if she hadn't been rejected?) she moves back with her parents ( I love you, Mom and Dad, and thank you for raising me, and for rocking me to sleep at age four, and for brushing my hair, and for teaching me to light a fire in the fireplace, but after being away for so long, it would be difficult to come back) and anyway, the girl meets a random good looking older guy in the community who was dealing with issues of his own, and she becomes a suitcase saleswoman. Yeah. The movie instilled a great deal of fear in me, along with Leah Zuidema's "You should probably get those applications in tomorrow." Suddenly everything I did seemed a day too late, and Facebook told me about my 100+ "friends" whose new statuses (stati?) read "Got a job!" But for me Saturday mornings grew to 9am and 10am and 11am before I'd talk myself out of sleeping the day away. Comical and strangely parallel to the Alexis Bledel character, but thoroughly frightening.
People were moving in so many directions, but there was nothing guaranteed about my future. Just completely unknown. So my sister heard a new life goal each day: "I think I'll move up to Alaska." "This morning I'm going for a 3 mile run." "Japan." "South Korea." "I'm going to quit everything and hoof it across America like Alexander Supertramp" ( 2 points if you know who I'm talking about ). Kudos to Kearsen for putting up with my antics. Those poor-me antics.
My great-grandmother and my grandmother had feared this time. I would soon be graduating. No job, of course, but no summer job? And "Still no boyfriend?" and "Not even a little bit of a one?" For them it was high school, work for a little bit until you found a man to support you and then get married. It was simple. And it was the way the world worked. Maybe they weren't so worried that I didn't have a boyfriend, but rather no leads on life. Where to go? What to do? I am one person with a whole life-time to fill.
I wasn't sure about much, but I had God.
And as shady as my personal devotions life was then, I knew my heart was His. First and foremost. "So do not fear for I am with you, declares the Lord. Do not be dismayed for I am your God..." But I worried all the time. I think God had provided me a strange fascination with things like my family ancestry (my polygamist great-great-grandfather), like literature, like getting together with people to laugh and play games and steal style trends and music and to inspire others, and like the simple "I get it" looks that students give. And so even in a time that seemed so dark, God gave me more than glimmers of hope.
It was a time, a whirlwind rather, of discovering downtown Sioux Falls on a bike, Starbucks, Dunn Bros Coffee, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker, Elizabeth, SF URC, my sister's "We're going to have a baby!" and crying pure joy tears, Grandma, She & Him, boots, flats, bills, pictures, hiking-trip planning, Jessie's phone calls, candles, Betho, Monique e-mails, Mike's Hard Lemonade, Tina's interspersed texts, The Office, my brother-in-law Josh who is beyond words cool, the Nyenhuis family and The Bachelorette and ice cream bars.
It wasn't useless. Rather, it shaped me. A lot.
And then.
I skype interviewed to teach at Covenant Christian High school. And I got the job, and I made plans, and I said goodbye to Sioux Falls and posted on Facebook, "I got a job!"
I moved to DeMotte and hated and loved it in increments during the first semester and wanted to run away a lot. Met Tera, Bekah, Heidi, Bethany, and more.

And now life is here.
The Lord has blessed me.
So I sit here, laundry folded, and I'm two chapters in to the Sarah Dessen novel (I needed some breaks from writing this chunk of a blog), plainly saying that I'm thankful. I don't "need to go to Korea" (well, maybe I do, but not for right now). I don't "need to hoof it across the country" (someday I will but for right now I don't need it). I need DeMotte. I need to plant some roots. (Yikes!)
God is doing his work right here for me.
I hope that he is shaping you, too. Right where you are.

**Sorry for all the "I" and "me" words. That is all.

Frosties

Let it be known that Wendy's Frosties are difficult to eat (drink?) with a straw. After so much struggle and after so many inuendos made, a big question remained: Why does the employee hand out spoons AND straws through the drive through window?

I concluded the reason is because somebody was capable of sucking the Frosty through a straw. Somebody with really strong cheek muscles. Somebody who was practiced and skilled in the art. Somebody who thought the spoon was for wussies.

Tera and I are quite a boring duo. She with her love of things like knitting and Disney Channel and I a fascination with things like crocheting and argyle socks, we can make almost anything boring. Normally we have Bekah, a spitfire click-your-boot-heels-on-the-floor-you're-so-excited kind of girl, to balance this dynamically boring duo. But it was just Tera and I.

What I was thinking as we pulled through the drive-thru at Wendy's was that I was driving and would need to drink the Frosty with a straw. How else do you eat (drink?) one with only one hand and while driving?

Upon sucking the chocolate ice-cream texture Frosty about 30% through the straw, I sat back in exhaustion exclaiming, "It's so difficult!"

"Thaaaat's what she said."

My head snapped over to Tera, who was smiling. And then the inuendo's and Michael Scott-isms came full force.

After all the commotion settled down, Tera said, "I really need to watch The Office." (She has never seen it before.)

Pretty impressive moment for a couple of boring girls.

One last thing: sometimes the best way to eat a Frosty through a straw is to wait a little while for it to melt and then suck, cheek muscle force free. That is what I have learned. And spoons are for wussies.

And also, Tera isn't as boring as she thinks.