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Posts Tagged ‘California’

  1. Seeking Story in Tradition

    November 21, 2012 by admin

    Tradition.

    It’s an idea we all find ourselves coming back to this time of year. Be it falling into the comfort and warmth of old traditions or seeking joy in starting new ones, we all crave the same thing: something to celebrate.

    I find it intriguing the way years come and go, how some holidays are busy and exuberant and bouncing with life while, in other years, they are quiet and mellow, low-key. One only has to map the ups and downs of life through a single holiday to see how time works: how people come and go, how places transform, how we, ourselves, grow up.

    My strongest Thanksgiving memories will always center around my Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Wyoming, the place where, for so long, Thanksgiving took place with no questions asked. I write about it in Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood, this way:

    “Thanksgiving has happened at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s every year for as long as I can remember. The tradition runs so long and deep that no one questions it, even with the family tensions that ripple quietly just beneath the surface: Grandpa’s reckless ways and Grandma’s bitterness – driven, I think, by loneliness – the way he and she seem to like each other less every year, the fact that neither one of them has ever shown up for a school play or a band concert.

    Grandma and Grandpa sit at opposite ends of the table, paying no attention to one another, while my parents and I and my great uncle John fill the spaces between them. I scoop up big helpings of my mom’s turkey and her Swedish corn pudding. I pass on Grandma’s mashed potatoes and gravy because the gravy is an awful brown, and like every other year, I fear she has salted it with a rabbit carcass. She served fried rabbit on the first Thanksgiving my mom spent with them – no turkey. Mom, a wholesome girl from the Midwest, cried.”

    The memories are rich, but so, too, is the story.

    This is a story of tradition. What is yours?

    Later on in this piece, I share what still hangs on as one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories:

    “A cozy quiet hangs in the Thanksgiving afternoon: the ancient dishwasher hums through its cycle, the coffee percolator brews weak Folgers coffee for my mom. Soon, my grandmother will call for a game of hearts and we will gather around the Formica table, pie in hand, for a long game of steering clear of the Old Biddy.”

    I want people to see themselves here. I want them to resonate: with the tension, with the details of tradition, with the desire to bring the familiar to life.

    This Thanksgiving, we will celebrate in a new way, with a family that is not ours in a state where our roots are only temporary. It will be my oldest son’s fourth Thanksgiving, my youngest son’s first. Still, I will make Mom’s Swedish corn pudding in the CorningWare dish. I will bring it to the house we have visited only a few times, an act of both sharing an old tradition with new friends and hanging on to something familiar for the holiday. Will we eat cranberries out of the can? Will there be sweet potatoes? A card game after the meal?

    I don’t know. But I do know there is plenty to celebrate, from the warm memories of the past and the people who are no longer with us to the new friends we’ve made, the new life we’ve created and the new traditions that will blossom from it.

    This holiday season, I encourage you to seek the story in tradition, whatever that means for you.

     

    Category Family, Family History, Feel-Good Stories, Home, Inspiration, Life, Life Stories, Place, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,, | 1 Comment

  2. Beacons

    October 17, 2012 by admin

    There is something beautiful about a power plant lit up at night. A fixture so strong and sure. We fly past the Long Beach plant – solid stacks straddling a canal that leads to the ocean. Yellow light glows from high up, like halos overlooking the city.

    So much about this place feels foreign to me, I have thought time and again in the 15 months that we have lived in California. The coast and the sandy beaches. The lack of seasons. Freeways that never sleep. That feeling of foreignness is heightened now, having returned from a two-week stay in my Wyoming Rockies. That age-old question arises like a deep yawn: What is home? And where?

    But then there are moments like this: pure, raw beauty that tussles us up, reminds us to treasure the present even as we wait on God to direct our future. We know we don’t want to be in California forever. But what gifts are here that we can live in and enjoy while we do call this place home?

    That beckoning light glows. The waves crash against the shore, and I ask a friend who lives on the beach if he sleeps with his windows open at night.

    “You bet,” he says, and I can only imagine.

    When I pull my three-year-old son out of the car at the end of the day, we turn west to a flaming pink sky. “Look at the pretty sun,” I say, and he agrees: it is pretty.

    A new baby and a changed-up work schedule on my husband’s part means we have lost our rhythm for a while. A schedule of any sort is hard to come by, and in the listlessness I have to remind myself of what truly matters: happy and healthy kids, a happy and healthy family. That rhythm will return. This is only a season.

    I watch those sure lights glowing high in the air. It is a beacon of sorts, a landmark by which to stay grounded, oriented. And in my prayers I ask for a beacon for myself, a guiding light to keep me pressing on: as mom, as wife, as writer.

    Like that light, I want to glow, too, strong and sure and unwavering.

    Category Creativity, Inspiration, Life, Motherhood, Place, Writing, Writing Life | Tags: ,,,, | No Comments

  3. Memorial Day: Sparkling Memories of Cold and Color

    May 24, 2012 by katemeadows

    Memorial Day. I remember camp trips and snow. I remember pulling out the tents and mattresses, dusty, dirt-covered belongings that had hibernated in the garage for many long months, soon to make their debut seasonal appearance on a weekend that we in Wyoming always willed to be warm but that rarely was.

    Copyright 2009, Kate Meadows, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

    I remember Mom planting flaming orange and yellow magnolias in the flower boxes near the house. Then, I remember her saying a prayer that those sunshiney plants would survive any remaining cold nights.

    I remember talk of frost – when would it finally go away to give reign to true summer? I remember staying glued to television weather reports, trying hard to discern whether to attempt a weekend camp trip or forego it.

    I remember treating the long weekend as wild adventure, loading up the camp gear and heading for the low mountains, packing plenty of wool socks and long underwear. I remember pitching tents in snow flurries. I remember the pure goodness of hot meals over the weekend – goulash in the Dutch oven, Bear Creek brand soup.

    We slept in snow storms. On cold Sunday mornings, we rose and brushed the feathery white snow off the firewood, the cooler (why did we stock it with ice, again?), the bed of the truck. Then, we would assess: Do we stay in this wilderness another two days, or do we go home to hot chocolate and  movies?

    Sometimes we stayed. Sometimes we returned home (though never without a good story to tell).

    I remember the painting I created in art class, Karly Konicek and I roasting marshmallows around a bright orange campfire with neon blue mountains spiking up in the background. The picture came out of a Memorial Day weekend memory. It is still propped up against an aspen bookshelf in my dad’s study.

    This Memorial Day weekend, we look out at the hazy mountains of western California. A trip to San Francisco with a toddler and another baby on the way was in the works. But it got too hard, too expensive.

    Now, we are revising our plan. Still creating an adventure – just one that won’t require quite so much walking for me at seven months pregnant, won’t include a boxy hotel room with just one double bed (a Priceline flounder), one that will allow more freedom and ease on our pocketbooks.

    The weather looks grey and borderline chilly – in the ‘60s. (I smile at that, thinking of ‘60s as “chilly” coming from such long Wyoming winters that so often extended into May.) We still look toward adventure. It’s just an adventure of a different sort.

    This morning, as I drove our son to daycare, I noticed city workers mounting American flags to light poles. Red, white and blue. It is because of our hard-fought freedom, the selfless acts of so many servicemen and women, that we even have the opportunity to consider such adventure in the first place.

    Flag image credit: www.us-flag.net

    Let us not take that for granted as the long weekend opens up before us, whatever adventure (or non-adventure) is headed our way.

    Find me back here next Thursday, with the adventure report. In the meantime, tell me what adventures you and yours are up to in the coming days.

    Category Family, Home, Life Stories, Nature, Outdoors, Place, Writing | Tags: ,,,,,, | 5 Comments

  4. 10 Simple Ways to Harness the Creative Spirit

    January 27, 2012 by katemeadows

    Yesterday I wrote about the spectrum of creativity, how creative abundance arrives to us in seasons so that sometimes we are overflowing with ideas and other times our wells are dry. Regardless of what season you find yourself in right now, I think it is crucial that we always remain on the look for ways to tap into our creativity. Here are 10 ways to harness your creative spirit, whether you are in the blooming summer of the creative mind or the dead of winter:

    1)      Take a walk. Keep your pace slow, if possible, and allow yourself to notice every small detail around you. In what direction are the flowers pointing, and how is the light hitting them? What makes that dog across the street unique? Do you pass anyone speaking in a language other than English? Allow your mind to wander as you walk, and see what surfaces.

    2)      Go for a drive. In California, where I live, we have the luxury of being surrounded by such varying geographical features it is easy to be at the beach in 20 minutes or the mountains in 30. While not every place is as geographically diverse, the landscape – city or country, residential or rural – always promises new sites and perspectives, if you’re willing to look. Has a silo recently been painted? Someone’s Christmas decorations finally taken down? What do you notice, and how does what you notice inform the way you see the world?

    3)      Listen to music from your past. Recently, my husband and I (on a trip in which our young was absent) put in a CD of songs from high school and had a blast belting out the lyrics. Okay, maybe that’s not being creative exactly, but listening to those songs unearthed so many memories for me: standing in the high school parking lot after school talking about the afternoon football game, lunches with girlfriends at the deli in the local grocery store (because our town didn’t actually have a fast food restaurant), long-ago crushes and moments that made my heart speed toward space. All from one little song by L.I.T.

    4)      Take pictures. Not a photographer? So what? You never know what unique angle you might capture if you allow your camera to tag along with you wherever you go. What sorts of stories or poetry could you make up with the preserved images of a little boy playing with a red ball in the park? An old man sitting on the curb? A park bench that advertises for divorce lawyers?

    5)      Schedule a coffee date with a friend just to chat, and see what topics come up. If you feel absolutely useless when it comes to generating new ideas, get out of your own head for a while and allow someone else to do the talking, or at least to take the reins of a conversation. Recently I was talking to two women about deals at craft stores – a sort of hum-drum topic for me, until one woman mentioned a stash of assemble-yourself toy corvettes she had snatched up at 80 percent off and was looking for ways to get them into the hands of children who might use them. Genuine conversations are made of stuff you can’t make up.

    6)      Visit an art museum. Take a notebook or sketchpad with you. Take your time going from room to room, and see what speaks to you and even what doesn’t. When something moves you, ask yourself why. When something turns you off, ask yourself why. Art museums promise the potential of whole new discoveries.

    7)      Keep a notebook/sketchbook with you at all times, so you can scribble any idea that pops into your head at any given moment. Inevitably, the best ideas seem to strike during those moments when we are completely unable to follow and develop them. Having some sort of tablet to capture those gems when they show their first flash is one solid way to keep them preserved in that raw form until you have time to come back to them. (Note: I have started using my iPhone for this, too, whipping out the “Notepad” feature whenever inspiration bites.)

    8)       Allow your mind to wander. If you find yourself thinking about a particular project you’re working on or want to work on, allow that act of thinking to take its own shape. I have composed whole paragraphs of essays in my head while in the shower or out for a walk. If the idea is solid enough, I can come back to my computer or notebook and watch my hands fly through the words that have already been created. Man, is it empowering.

    9)      Read a lot. Writers, and history itself, have proven over and over that reading stimulates the brain in a way that nothing else quite can. By opening yourself up to the words and ideas of others, you open yourself up to new ways of seeing the world. You give yourself a chance at experiencing an energized perspective, and that’s always fun. See my post about Reading Resolutions here.

    10)   Do something new. Push yourself out of your comfort zone to see the world in new ways. Last fall, a friend of mine invited me to go kayaking along the beach. I could pass, explain to her my lack of fondness for the ocean or my complete weakness when it comes to water that is any way, shape or form cold. Or, I could say, “Count me in,” and see what adventure awaits. Even if I get wet, at least I’ll have a story to tell.

    Category Books, Creativity, Ideas, Photography, Place, Writing Life, Writing Process | Tags: , | 2 Comments

  5. Home, Part 1

    December 16, 2011 by katemeadows

    When I turned 18, I couldn’t wait to escape the confining, small-town life of rural Wyoming. I applied to college at a small liberal arts school in Minnesota – Gustavus Adolphus College – got accepted, and never turned back. Since then, I have married, followed my man out to his home state, Indiana, and lived in three other states, none of which is Wyoming. We are all over the map, in fact: Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, and now the one most foreign to us: California. In the five years my husband and I have been married, we have endured five moves. One move per every year of our married life – that’s how it works out.

    All of this transitioning and traversing across the country continues to beg a crucial question for me: What/Where is home?

    It’s not a new question. It’s just that as life keeps happening, I revisit the question in many different ways.

    This past week, I returned to a former home of Kansas City. Our dear friends there and the cold punch of a Midwest winter gave me all the welcome I needed to feel like I was in a cozy comfort zone. I thought of southern California, so many miles away, and my stomach knotted up. Save for the one gigantic family that my family is there right now, I didn’t want to go back. The thought of returning actually made me a little sick.

    Why? I asked myself.

    Because right now, California embodies everything unfamiliar to me. Nightmare traffic. Sunshine in December. So many languages spoken you hope your hairdresser speaks English. Plastic surgery. Christmas lights on palm trees and blow-up snowmen on sparkling green lawns.

    Being in Kansas, I craved what was familiar. Longtime friends – the kinds you can share poop stories with. Peacoats. A basic knowledge of the layout of the city. A first snow.

    Being there drudged up that huge and looming question once again: What, or where, is home? I missed my family fiercely in the week I was apart from them. My family – son, Will and husband, Bryan and dog, Gracie – is home. My gracious and compassionate friends – the Coles with a brand new baby boy, the Pranns, and the Macleods with a boy who just turned one – are home. And Wyoming, where I was born and raised and where my mom and dad have lived practically since it was declared a state – will always be home.

    I was overwhelmed with a type of homesickness I have never experienced. I started to think, is it possible to be homesick for more than one place at once? The answer came easily. Of course.

    *Stay tuned for Part 2, coming Tuesday, 12/20/11

    Category Home, Place | Tags: ,,,,, | 2 Comments