Dear Planet Earth

Dear Planet Earth,

Hello, how are you today? I understand that you are due to deliver the 7 billionth inhabitant today, according to U.N. estimates. That's about double the global population since I was born, a few years ago in 1962. Evidently, there's a bit of concern how you will sustain all these people. How will they all eat? How will they all stay warm? How will they all get from point A to B? How will they all not fight over things such as water and oil on your crowded space?

If you don't mind, I wanted to offer up a simple 10-point, 10-word solution to ensure sustainability for you, dear Planet Earth. Let's call it the 10-10-10 plan. Here goes:

10 ways to ensure global sustainability, in 10 words:

  1. Women.
  2. Women's rights.
  3. Women's safe healthcare.
  4. Women and girl's education.
  5. Women in key leadership roles.
  6. Women who vote, women in charge.
  7. Women empowered to make their own decisions.
  8. Women who make choices over their own bodies.
  9. Women who are not beholden to decisions men make.
10. Women working in tandem with men for a better world.

You're welcome. Happy 7 billionth birthday!

With love, T

P.S. Dedicated to my husband, who gets this. (Love you!)

For my parents' 50th wedding anniversary

Yesterday we celebrated my parent's 50th wedding anniversary, hosted by the fabulous folks at United Methodist Church in Dexter, a small farm town in SE Minnesota. My mom asked me to give a little speech and here it is:

Today we’re here to celebrate 50 years of marriage of my mom and dad. Five decades of two people being together. If I did my math right that figures to 600 months of patience. 18,250 days of forgiveness. 26,280,000 seconds of commitment. One half century of ordinary days and extraordinary events. A golden anniversary of love—for better and for worse, as they say.

So what was it like 50 years ago? How many of you remember 1961? (show of hands) Was anyone born in 1961? You know, 1961 was a great year:

President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps.

Barbie’s boyfriend, the Ken doll, made his first appearance.

The number one song this week in 1961 was “Hit the Road Jack” by Ray Charles.

Pampers disposable diapers were available for the first time.

The cost of a first class stamp was 4 cents.

The academy award for best movie went to West Side Story.

Fellows styled their hair in crew cuts and ladies styled theirs in bouffant.

Minimum wage was $1 /hour.

A baby named Barak Obama was born.

And two teenagers in a small town in rural Minnesota decided to flirt.

It was a town called Pine Island where a couple of youngsters, 17-year-old Milford Edwin Mork Jr and 16-year-old Diane Pauline Stromback, were hanging out with their friends one summer night in front of the Rainbow Café on main street. These two crazy kids, Jr. and Diane, ended up crammed together in a carful of friends and road tripping to Rochester to buy a jar of pickled eggs. (Not recommended, by the way, for all you 16 and 17 year olds in the crowd! I'd definitely go for the deviled eggs.)

I’m using words like “teenagers” and “youngsters” and “crazy kids” but in reality, even at this tender age my dad had already taken on serious responsibilities of a hard working adult with the full time job as a truck driver. My mom was entering her senior year of high school.

They kept seeing each other to the backdrop of the music of Elvis Presley and country and western. Dad had a ’49 Ford with pin stripes and no reverse so he had to be careful where he parked because there was no backing out. And there was no backing out of this thing he had with my mom. I think it was one of those junctures that happens without even realizing it happened; no one knows exactly when it was decided but during the next months as they spent more and more time together, they just knew they’d eventually be married.

But the day it became real was into the next year. My mom had graduated from high school, finished beauty school, and worked as a stylist in Mantorville. One day my dad brought over an ad for Goodman Jewelers in the Cities. Apparently engagement rings were on sale – and so that was final proof that getting married was their destiny.

One “Starbright” diamond and one payment plan later -- Pine Island had themselves a newly engaged couple.

The wedding was at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Pine Island, Minnesota. The bride wore white. And the groom was late. I mean, getting married isn’t any excuse to skip out on your grain haul. It was October for pete’s sakes, a grain hauler’s busy time, wedding or no wedding, as my Dad’s strong sense of work ethic was already firmly set into the fabric of his character. (Invite crowd to view gorgeous wedding pictures and memorabilia.)

In what surely was the most romantic honeymoon on record, Mom and Dad took off in the truck for the destination city of Oneida, South Dakota, population 37. The truck had no heat but it mattered not to my Mom because she knew there was a special addition to this honeymoon – her father-in-law. Yup, that’s right, they honeymooned with Grandpa. The blissful threesome headed west and when my mom got cold, she ditched my dad and rode with my grandfather, whose truck had a mighty fine heater. This seemed like a pretty strong indicator that this family was going to last.

And so this marriage was off and running . . .and so was my dad in his truck, and so were the babies that were to be forthcoming, and so was my mom in her amazing way of running a household often times on her wits and grits and guts alone.

So, how exactly does a couple stay together for 50 years? I asked our resident experts, my Mom and Dad, and they had some pretty good advice for the rest of us.

Mom said it’s important to keep your individual interests yet to also develop common interests. For example, she nurtured her love for growing flowers by becoming a master gardener and starting her own greenhouse. My Mom enjoyed her yard and her house and her swimming pool and her friends. Yet she also made a specific effort to spend time with Dad by doing things together such as enjoying Nascar and wintering in Arizona. And we all know that she literally learned how to drive one of those big old trucks herself so they could go on the road together.

When I asked my Dad this same question – what advice he would give to a couples – his answer was quite a bit shorter. He said it takes “a lotta love, a lotta dedication, and willingness to compromise.”

Mom grows things and Dad delivers things. Petunias and lily’s. Potatoes and apples. Children and puppies. Humility and hard work. Now here we are in the year 2011, 51 years after that magical night in front of the Rainbow Café, 50 years after that lovely day at St. Paul Lutheran Church – we can see so much of what they grew and delivered.

Gratitude is one of those things that we often don’t think about until we miss something. It’s hard to be thankful for something that you don’t know you have. The air you breath. The legs you walk on. The house you live in. The people around you. For some reason it seems far too easy to focus on the things you don’t have – a better job, a nicer car, more money, more time. It seems that most often family and friends get together for sad occasions, such as funerals or tragic events, and then they wish they had spent more happier times together, or even just more boring times together. For anyone who’s experienced tragedy, you know that boring times are a blessing.

But if you can turn that around and take stock of all that you have, then it’s hard not to be grateful. The old fashioned way of saying it is “counting your blessings.”

And that’s why we’re here today – to count the blessings. 50 years of marriage brings a lot of blessings. Mom and Dad do see what they have. When I asked them about the things that they’re grateful for they listed so many things that I can’t even mention them all, but I’ll tell you a lot of them.

Mom used the word “respect” and how thankful she is that she received so much of it from my Dad and from us kids too. Mom is grateful that she is given the freedom to be creative with her yard and her house, to make it the home she’s always dreamed about. Mom is grateful that Dad was home for every birth and every Christmas – which is quite an amazing feat given the merciless demands of the truck driving industry.

When I asked my Dad about what he’s grateful for, he mentioned work, the fact that he’s had constant employment all these years. And indeed, even now pushing 70, he’s still at it driving truck coast to coast. He mentioned being grateful for good health and for a lotta luck. He said that he’s thankful for his wife, and I quote: “I think I got the best.”

And of course, Mom and Dad see their blessings whenever look at their children, their grandchildren, their greatgrandchildren. And if you’ll bear with me, I’d like to name us all of and ask if family members could please stand when I say your name.

Children - Tom, Trey, Russ, me

the ones who gave them grandchildren – Jennifer, Amy, Julie, Bob

grandchildren – Priscilla, Danielle, Brandee, Mackenzie, Mallory, Ashley, Paige, Aaron, Amanda, Aidan

great-grandchildren – Kylee (Kyle) and Hunter (Jake)

the Strombacks

the Morks

the friends and neighbors

And my parents see their many blessings when they see you all, their dear family and friends. As we look around this room and we see just small part of what Mom and Dad grew and delivered in their 50 years of marriage. And we give thanks for all the blessings.

Thank you. You’ve been wonderful. Please stay. Eat more food.

Before the mommy blogger there was Shirley Jackson, the mother of horror.

Life Among the Savages

By Shirley Jackson

Farrar, Straus and Young 1953

An Annotation

Life Among the Savages is s sweet mommy-memoir by Shirley Jackson, the same author who wrote a story that has terrified me since sixth grade, “The Lottery.”

As I read Life Among the Savages I couldn’t help but to wonder how her life experience of raising kids in a small town informed her creation of the horror masterpiece, The Lottery, set in a small town with a ritual of annual human sacrifice. Even the title begs the question, who does she mean when she refers to the “savages?” The kids? The townspeople? The parents? And what kind of writer includes the word “savage” in a sweet mommy-memoir title? But then again she titled her second sweet mommy memoir “Raising Demons” so there you go.


The book is full of stories of how it is to raise children, the tender, the frustrating, the funny, and the futile. As one who likes to write about the chaos of my children, I could easily relate to her setting. She opens by describing their house:

“Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily a half million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.” (1)

She uses the word “and” over and over instead of inserting commas, a stylistic choice that emphasizes the chaos. As the book unfolds she often refers to the white house, its rooms, its pillars, its characteristics; almost as if it were an entity unto its own. She often places household elements as the subject of the sentence, and the people as the object, for example, when describing how the family moved into the house Jackson writes: "One bedroom chose the children, because it was large and showed unmistakable height marks on one wall and seemed to mind not at all when crayon marks appeared on the wallpaper and paint got spilled on the floor" (19-20). Focusing on the house itself is an effective way to tell the story of the people who live inside it, and it inspired me to consider writing my own mommy memoir centered around our big white house, which is a source of as much joy as incredible frustration. Think money pit meets the American dream.

But the other consideration in Jackson’s choice in lifting up the house as a character is knowing that she also wrote a famously frightening book, "The Haunting of Hill House," which I have not read yet but I’m curious if there is a connection in Jackson’s creative process. (This book has been sitting on my shelf waiting for me for months. It's first up after December graduation. :-)

While funny and sweet, Life Among the Savages seems to hint at that part of Jackson’s brain that can concoct the scariest tales ever. For example, she describes her search for a paid mother’s helper, recounting all the reasons why this or that household helper didn’t work out for the job. The mother’s helper, Amelia, who baked a batch of almost evil cookies helps show Jackson’s skill at blending funny and sweet with the slightly eerie:

“Amelia had but one major failing. The second day she was with us – which turned out, coincidentally, to be the last – she made cookies, spending all one joyous afternoon in the kitchen, droning happily to herself, fidgeting, cluttering, measuring.

“At dinner, dessert arrived with Amelia’s giggle and a flourish. She set the plate of cookies down in front of my husband, and my husband, who is a nervous man, glanced down at them and dropped his coffee cup. ‘Sinner,” the cookies announced in bold pink icing, “Sinner, repent.” (98-99)

In this short passage alone, Jackson manages to artfully join words like cookies, joyous, pink, nervous, sinner, and repent. I count her as one of my main influences.