Saturday Afternoon Chat and a Cup of Something Warm: a hard loss, weird weather, and homeschool gatherings

/ Lisa R. Howeler

Hey there! Come on in. I’m just heating some water for some tea. I also have coffee (made in the Keurig), milk (lactose free only, I’m afraid), orange juice, and, well, water. Let me know what you’d like.

I was out of honey most of this week, so I tried sugar in my tea.

Ew. That was seriously gross. I haven’t had sugar in herbal tea in years. My taste buds have no idea what to do with all that sweetness anymore.


I’m still only drinking peppermint tea. I’m so boring. I am going to look for some new flavors soon.

This has been a tough week emotionally so I hope you don’t mind if I have some chocolate with my tea.

My dad’s sister, my aunt Doris, died last Sunday. She passed away a few hours after my husband drove my dad up to see her.

I’ve been trying to pretend I’m not sad all week for the sake of the kids. This didn’t work well and yesterday The Boy and I pretty much fell apart under the pressure of trying to be fine with it all. When a person who is 90 dies people shrug their shoulders as they offer you condolences. They say things like, “well, she had a good, long life,” or “she’s in a better place.”

My aunt didn’t have a great end of her life as she was forced from her home of 50 years or so into a nursing home. Her family fought very hard to keep her out of that home but in the end, they all ran out of funds and she ran out of health.

It isn’t the ending I wanted for her but I had no control over that and it’s been hard to admit how little control I have over things lately. I feel, in many ways, that my life is spinning out of control around me and I have no say – not even, “stop this thing I want to get off.”

The passing of Doris in combination with a difficult diagnosis for a family member, plus upcoming oral surgery for Little Miss, due to what I feel is some incompetence on the part of local dentists, has left me clinging to all the wrong things. Here on the blog I remind us all to look to Jesus and cling to him but in real life I am clinging to feelings or to forcing feelings or happiness that simply aren’t there.

Pray for me this week that I can practice what I preach.

I should mention that I was typing this part of this post on my phone when the following verse popped up on my Bible app at the top of the screen:

 And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. 

Hebrews 12: 1-2

Timely, no?

I’ll write about my aunt in a future post. For now, I’ll try to move on to some happier topics because there are days we have to choose joy when we do not feel it.

Today I was going to take Little Miss to gymnastics class but woke up and Old Man Winter had decided to vomit an inch and a half of snow on us when I thought it was going to be a dusting.

I decided not to chance driving the roads since the road to get there is a stereotypical rural road that twists and winds around curves and under trees. Instead, I braved the cold temps for a few photos and then Little Miss decided she wanted to go out in it for a bit even though it was only 23 degrees and 13 degrees with the windchill.

She was suited up in a snowsuit, winter coat, thick gloves and boots, and I was not, however. I didn’t last as long as her. While we were out there she wrote a note to Aunt Doris: “I hope you are happy in heaven.”

It made my mom and I cry but it opened the door for us to talk about her feelings about all of what is going on.

Tomorrow she has her first home gymnastics competition. We have to be there at 8 a.m.

Eight.

In the morning.

Ick. Not looking forward to that, but it should be fun for her at least.

Off to a new topic —

Our weather was so seriously bizarre this past week.

Its bizarre behavior made my head feel weird, my ears fill up, and my anxiety rise for some reason. Maybe because the barometric pressure was going up and down, up and down, all week.

It was like it was its own personal yo-yo.

On Tuesday the weather started out with freezing rain, then moved to the sun, then to rain, then to sun, then our lights flicked off and on and I looked out the front window and there were dark clouds. Within ten minutes the outside was a swirling mess of white snow and the wind was blowing trees so hard the tops of them were practically touching the ground. Ten minutes of that and the sun was shining again. So strange.

Then the next day it was freezing rain and some snow and yesterday it was sunny but breezy and only 32 degrees out.

I feel like our weather is very schizophrenic and I’m really tired of trying to get the fire started in the wood stove, so this year I’ll really be happy when spring comes.

There are daffodil shoots coming up in my neighbor’s yard but they may have been frozen in the deep freeze we had last night. Not sure because I forgot to look.

Yesterday the kids and I went down the street to the library in town to attend a homeschool gathering I found out about earlier in the week.

There were about ten other children there and apparently it is a gathering that happens twice a month. The kids and parents gather together, share information, participate in a craft, and read a book to the younger children. There are teens on down in age who attend.

Little Miss really enjoyed herself even though she didn’t talk to the other children too much during this first meeting. Maybe that will change in future meetings.

We are in a very small town so it was nice to find a homeschooling group that is right down the street

I’m looking forward to this next week because I have nothing scheduled except one event for Little Miss which I still call Awana but is actually called Kids Club now. Oh, and I might have an appointment for Zooma the Wonder Dog to get her nails trimmed. That is often an all-day thing because we have to drive 45 minutes away to the vet where we used to live. Actually, I’ll probably do the grocery shopping that day too. So I do have things scheduled but not until later in the week at least.

How about you? How is your week shaping up for next week?

And how about what you are drinking? Hopefully, no booze to get you through. Ha! Luckily all I’ve reached for during this craziness is a cup or two of hot cocoa!

17 thoughts on “Saturday Afternoon Chat and a Cup of Something Warm: a hard loss, weird weather, and homeschool gatherings”

  3. Sending you love, and prayers for peace and comfort over your Aunt Doris.
    Love the verse you referenced. In all things we must “fix our eyes on Jesus”… but like you mentioned it’s sometimes easier to speak these things for others but bypass it for ourselves.

    I’m hoping spring-like weather would come quickly and I’m sure you are too! Sweet snow pictures though! ❤️

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  4. Now I know why I felt prompted to pray for your family last night. It’s hard to let go of that older generation of family. I felt that way when my last aunt passed. Crazy weather? Yep, here too. Warm one minute, freezing cold the next although we only got a bit of snow flurries, nothing to stick. Glad you found that homeschooling group – sounds promising. I’m gearing up this week for the Bible study I hold in my home and guess what one of the scriptures is? You guessed it, didn’t you? Hebrews 12:1-2.

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  6. I’m so sorry for your loss! It’s tough to lose someone no matter how long they lived, and I hate how our culture prefers to push aside the elderly and just forget them in a corner. They lived storied lives and should be remembered for them and paid attention to. There’s so much we can learn from them.

    Ugh, the weather is just crazy everywhere this year, I guess. We’re emerging from one storm just to have another jump on us on Monday. It was fun, though, to see snow on the mountains near me because I can’t recall them ever getting even a dusting, so that was quite exciting for my kids, even if it is practically impossible to go see it due to all the roads being closed.

    And, ew, I don’t know how people can put sugar in tea. I can only stand a healthy dose of honey in my black tea.

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  7. My great-grandma Mayme was 95 when she died, and she was one of the sweetest people I ever met. She was charming in her sweetness. I don’t think she’d ever been a very big person, but by the time I knew her, she was tiny. I remember my family taking her on a short trip one summer – she had to have been around 89 – and we stopped about 2/3 of the way up in this little town in Minnesota. There was a shoe store there, so she decided she wanted to go in. She went in, and there was this girl who was quite young – maybe 20 – helping her find a pair she liked. Oh, but my great grandma was just so sweet, she was irresistible, and even though it took at least a half an hour of trying things on and having sizes checked, etc., but the girl was very sweet and patient herself. My great-grandma chatted on and on, making jokes (sometimes at her own expense) as though she had known the girl for years. At the end of all of this, my great-grandma ended up with these pale pink 1980s “modern” ankle boots – and she liked them so much, she got two pairs! I remember it so much in part because it was so funny, but in part because she just treated people like they were family. She grew up with a lot of tragedy in her life – she was the youngest of 10. Her dad died when she was 2, her only sister when she was 8, a couple of brothers in the next decade, and her oldest son when he was 19. She as a young mother during the Great Depression… I could go on and on. Despite it all, a room filled with sunshine when she walked in…

    Due to family issues, I didn’t see her in the last 5 years of her life, and nobody bothered to let me know when she died. Years and years later, I went to the cemetery where she’s buried and once I found the headstone, I just burst into tears. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Yes, she lived a good, long life, but she was still someone really special at 95, and someone dear to a lot of people.

    May the memory of your Aunt Doris be eternal.

    The kids didn’t get Presidents’ day off, but they had a scheduled day for a teacher retreat and then two snow days because of ice. And we had 10 hours without power in the middle of that, but thankfully, the kids were sleeping through most of it.

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    • Oh gosh that is the sweetest story. She sounds so awesome. I’m sorry family issues kept you from seeing her, though.

      I gave the kids Presidents’ Day off just to kind of have a light day while we grieved Doris.

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