Photographs of Hope

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spent a year there and engage in business and make a profit." Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for awhile and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that." James 4:13-15


Sunday evening, and I am listening to my father tell stories about my grandmother. Listening in the cavernous sanctuary of Bethany Community Church, with a few hundred others, as Dad describes a picture of Grandma Nadine, when she was not a grandmother, or even a mother, yet. The newly-married, twenty-five-year-old Nadine, who had followed her husband to where he was stationed in Colorado during World War II, is ice skating in the photo. On a grey pond, surrounded by white snow, she is alone and skating, one blade lifted gracefully above the ice.

I can't know how everyone else hears this story. Though I am often able to listen to my father's sermons on basically the same plane as the friends who surround me, tonight I am aware of the deep difference in perspective. Because they are hearing about their pastor's adoptive mother, whom they might have seen once, from a distance, a long time ago. She is important because she adopted him, raised him, encouraged (and continues to encourage) him in his ministry. It is inevitable, I suppose, that she is a somewhat ghostly figure to them, her outlines sketched by anecdote.

But I can see the picture. I have seen it, many times, pored over the photograph and tried to imagine my grandmother as a young woman. Her hair is dark, short and curly. Her sweater something I would probably wear now. I would stare at this picture and realize that it must have been strange for her, daughter of California's Central Valley, to be on ice at all. I used to wonder what she was thinking, wonder who she was before she took on the names of Mom and Grandma, the names by which I know her.

Yet now, as I listen to this sermon about the unpredictability of life, the refuge in God's faithfulness, I am closer to knowing the picture Grandma than ever before. We are nearly the nearly the same age now, the long ago her and the today me. Just married, what did she think her life would be? Dad paints pictures of hopes so beautiful, hopes that I know well because they are mine, too. And then losses are falling from him, as he recounts a stillborn child, an early widowhood, and the death of her oldest daughter. Each mars the stillness of her skating-day expectations, wrinkling and distorting them like pebbles on a pond surface, until I see Grandma as she is now. At 88 years old, the grandmother whose wry voice sounds over the telephone, whose handwriting angles elegantly across birthday cards. Yet, Dad reminds, she is still the woman who is praying for him, for us all, every day. Whose Bible is filled with notes and landmarks. The one whose hopes have changed, perhaps, but who has never lost hope in the refuge, the constancy of her Lord.

As the sermon concludes and some of my favorite musicians begin to play one of my favorite songs, I remember a hopeful photograph of my own. Taken two years ago by a friend, while we were on vacation in Italy. We are reading by some train tracks, waiting for the train that will take us back to England. After an idyllic weekend of sun and beaches, we are returning to our studies, reading Shakespeare and Graham Greene and Bruce Chatwin. Casie is staring at the ocean. The rest of us are waiting. I got a teaching job two days before, and am resting in the confidence that a new life is beginning for me as this chapter--that of the wandering literature student--draws to a close. Did I have expectations, that day, of what my life would become? Of course.

And not everything has gone as I expected. Or hoped.

I'm beginning a new school year full of grand hopes, and today I feel like my grandmother ice skating, or like the 2006 Kristi in Italy. But I'm pondering, even now, the inevitability of disappointment for those of us who hope, and wondering why we continue to do it. In my classroom this year, how many times will my students or I begin the day trying to piece ourselves together from the scrapes of the unexpected? How many of my students, these still-strangers who are wrapping up their summers as I wrap up mine, have already lost more than I ever will? And what does it mean when I ask them to face the year with open hearts and minds? How can I best embody the hope of Christ when I, too, face the certainty of suffering, along with them?

Hope is more beautiful than apathy, of course, but also more dangerous. May God guide us on this hopeful adventure.

Haunted

Olivia: Why, what would you?

Viola/Cesario: Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out "Olivia!" O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me.

-Twelfth Night (I, v, 268-77)

It is a while before I notice that the actors are difficult to hear. Several friends and I are sprawled on blankets on a lawn in Seward Park, attending a free outdoor performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I've never one before, though I've heard that these performances happen several times each summer. Attendance is sparse today; perhaps forty people are scattered across the grass, most of us huddled in the shade, far from the stage. It's almost ninety degrees today--the hottest I've experienced all summer--and outside activities are by necessity very sedentary, languid affairs. We sip soda, nibble on string cheese, adjust purses to be more comfortable pillows, and watch Shakespeare. But all of it slowly, lazily. In combination with the varied tones and pitches of the acting company, who have the unenviable task of acting on the hot, sunlit stage, this summer torpor has confused most of us.

I realize after a while that I am not listening, either. Not to this. I am not listening, but I know what they are saying. I hear the speech above and know what words are coming next, like they are lyrics to an overplayed Top 40 song on the radio. I know this play, know it better than I thought.

As I continue watching, the story unfolding as it has dozens of times, conversations, voices, faces rise to the surface of my sun-soaked consciousness. I remember explaining love triangles and mistaken identities, remember the in-spite-of-themselves engagement of the kids with the ridiculous mishaps of the plot. Their final projects, scenes from the play (was it only two months ago?) come to mind, as I hear, in chorus, their voices mingling with those of today's actors. We tried to relate to it, to understand it, to make it our own.

Today, two months into the summer, I see that this play has become a part of me, at least. But not just the play. Twelfth Night is haunted with extra characters, with words spoken and heard and added to the mass of the literature. Like any book shared, this silly comedy is greater than itself. And only important to me because they--the critics, the students--stay with me now, as I start again.

From Austria

The three preceding posts were written this summer in Austria, on a farm which lacks Internet access. Enjoy!

Ingredients

These are without a doubt the worst-looking cookies I have ever seen. And I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of cookies, and those are only the ones I made myself. I shudder every time I look at them, the two-dozen pale, grainy cookies lurking flatly on a ludicrously fancy crystal platter in the pantry. The chocolate chips have melted down completely into dark holes, like caverns encrusted with onyx or, more grotesquely, like dead eyes, glaring at me, their creator, and swearing vengeance. With such horrors associated with the sight of these dreadful cookies, I try not to look them. After partially hiding them under a scratched blue plastic bowl, I return to the kitchen and consider what went wrong.

I have been making chocolate chip cookies since I was ten years old. Though I don’t remember the exact day of my first independent baking venture, I can re-create the circumstances well enough. It was probably in the summer, when our mountain chalet and five log cabins would fill to bursting with pairs and families of tourists or the more interesting hordes of high school and college students on retreats. My mother—the receptionist, housekeeping mistress, concierge, coordinator, registrar, and chef of the retreat center, Alaythia Fellowship—was probably hidden behind a mountain of potatoes. She would have been washing them and then dressing them in aluminum foil jackets, preparing for the baked potato bar lunch that everyone would eat in a few hours, when they came back from the high ropes course in the forest back up the highway.

As two families of tourists checked out and crunched their way down our gravel driveway, back to the city, Mom had probably realized that between cleaning the now-vacant cabins, readying them for the next guests, and finishing the lunch, she would have no time to make dessert of any kind. And high school kids love dessert. In this realization of her own finiteness—despite a superheroic ability to multitask—my mom probably turned to me, the ten-year-old daughter who could both read and operate a mixer.

“Kristi, can you make a double batch of cookies?”

I probably shrugged, then nodded, then pulled the gigantic Betty Crocker cookbook down from the shelf above the oven, and flipped through its grease-stained pages until I found a recipe. I imagine that the first try was fine, aided by the mythic luck of first times, simply because I made more afterward. Still a cooking novice, I think I would have moved on to another recipe if the first effort had been less than satisfactory. But they were good, these cookies, so I kept making them.

Since then, there have been flat cookies, puffy cookies, cookies that I forgot in the oven for half an hour, cookies with oatmeal, MnMs, raisins, and peanut butter. I have probably made chocolate chip cookies about ten times a year for the last thirteen years (more during high school and in the last few years, and significantly fewer in the kitchen-less years of college), so I am in my second hundred batches of cookies. This number feels significant for a young and non-professional baker, who has been during this time also a musician, student, athlete, youth leader, barista, accounting assistant, student leader, and teacher. At home, I toss a few ingredients in a bowl, the measurements of which have been stretched so far beyond Ms. Crocker’s original that I call the recipe “mine,” and less than an hour later I am munching on warm, buttery cookies fresh from the oven. The results are pleasant and entirely predictable.

Which is why, slightly homesick one morning in Austria, chocolate chip cookies were the first thing I tried to import from home. The first batch, I confess, was not great, made a bit too crunchy by sugar that was coarser than I expected, but the neighbor boys liked them so much that they copied the recipe—odd metric conversions and all—and tried to recreate them the next day. The second batch, for which I chopped up two and a half chocolate bars and used powered sugar, turned out better. Neither, however, lived up to what I liked and made at home, so I sighed mournfully as I crunched my way through undissolved demerara sugar, wishing for better cookies and blaming the ingredients.

The ingredients, I scornfully remind myself, were also the problem this time. This time, I was wishing for real chocolate chips instead of crumbly chocolate bar pieces, and so I set out to make my own. I melted down a big chunk of baking chocolate with other sweets that my hosts donated, like jewelry to the golden calf, to this effort. After an hour or so I was covered in chocolate, sickened from licking my fingers too often, and the proud creator of two parchment sheets’ worth of little brown dots. These, I thought, will be perfect.

Sadly, the Kristi-made chocolate chips were not perfect, melting into blackish potholes in the pale ground of my cookies. Furthermore, I must have put in too much margarine, because they are flat and floppy, sinking into one another gooily and looking worse by the hour. I curse margarine and its associated evils, demerara sugar that is not the same as brown sugar and, redundantly, the wretched chocolate chips.

I feel humbled and ashamed of these cookies, a little cast down from my excellent-cookie pedestal by this less-than-appealing display. So easy to make the same cookies, time after time, when I purchase the same ingredients, use the same oven and same cookie sheet and even, nonsensically, the same bowls and spoons for each baking venture. But take me out of my own kitchen, toss me into a foreign country with foreign ingredients, and I am just a lost little baker, grappling with strange sugar and missing my chocolate chips so much I try to make my own.

I morosely consider how often other things in life happen this way. I drive in the same circles every week, my car appearing at predictable intervals on the same roads. For ten months of the year, I enter the same room at the same time each day, prepared to pursue the same basic goal. Even the evenings are rather methodical, mostly recurring engagements with friends, family, church. All so precise. If this were cooking, I would have perfected it by now.

But the ingredients have a way of changing on me. Roads are wet or dark or closed. Classes are jungle-wild or stone-silent. Students are angry, or encouraging, or brilliant, or in jail. Friends graduate and fall in love, change jobs, cities, houses; each tries so desperately to stay on top of their own recipes. At the very least, I am changing, an ingredient in my own life that is constantly growing and learning and falling and hesitating. In the shifting of ingredients, it is no wonder that the things I do—those small spheres in which I am responsible for creating or managing or maintaining—seldom turn out the way I had expected. Sometimes, everything turns out so differently than I had hoped that it all looks unbelievably foreign, and I cannot imagine how what I have done or said or created can be of use or good to anyone.

I am interrupted from my grim consideration of botched life recipes by the presence, center-stage, of the most recent one. Guests have arrived at Schiestl Farm, for coffee and cake, and Irmgard has retrieved a plate of my awful cookies from the pantry. I am embarrassed, immediately. Put them away! I want to beg her. I can make better ones. I promise! This is not what I wanted to make at all! But, for the millionth time this summer, I don’t have the German words with which to defend myself. So I laugh uncomfortably, shake my head and shrug my shoulders.

The guests halt their conversation, which I have long ago ceased following, to stare at the cookies. The cookies, with their melted brown eyes, stare back. I avoid their gaze, and the guests keep staring.

“Was ist das?” asks the lady guest, still peering.

“Schokolade…” I fumble for a word for “chip,” and find none, “Chip kakes.”

Irmgard nods with encouragement, and the guests break into expectant smiles. They reach for cookies, take bites while I go limp, undefended, and all baking pride leaks out of me onto the sad plate. For a moment there is only crunching, and these cookies aren’t meant to be crunchy. Another mistake.

When I look up at the guests again, they are reaching for more cookies, all smiles.

“Sie sind gut!” they are laughing. “Chocolate Kristi kuchen! Sehr gut!” And the effusions continue, to my amazement. In the background—the part of my mind that stays in English while the other part is madly translating German—my protests (The real cookies are so much better than these!) begin to grow quieter. Because it is these cookies, despite their ugliness and despite my declaring them a failure, that have been a point of interest and enjoyment for a few minutes of the afternoon. Even though they weren’t the way I wanted them, they are exactly what everyone else needed. Despite the changes in ingredients and the stubbornness of their creator.

In the Kitchen

The kitchen is the social center of Schiestl Farm, which for all its virtues and wonders— balconies laden with geranium-filled boxes, rattling showers, secret passages between bales of hay—has no living room. There are no couches on the farm. Just benches surrounding the tables in the guest dining room next door and here, in the kitchen. The dining room is pleasant and spacious, with plenty of room for normal-toned conversations and three tables to the kitchen’s one, but here in the kitchen is where we entertain neighbors and sisters and special guests. It is also the fascinating world that draws our smallest guests, who watch wide-eyed as we prepare supper and wander in and out as we carry small trays, full of tea and coffee, out to the dining room in the morning. Home to the white, tiled monster of a wood-burning stove, its flat top strewn with steaming teapots, the kitchen is also the warmest room in the house, at least ten degrees warmer than the pantry across the hall.

Midmorning, and I am contemplating color as I slice apricots. I have spent little time with apricots in my life, so these do not take me away into memory as cooking so often does here. With childlike delight I marvel at how easily the stones fall out of the center of these tiny fruits (“Really from Lower Austria!” Annemarie exclaimed as she purchased them from a farm stand two days ago), having expected the battle I so frequently wage with the hearts of stubborn peaches. Now, as the pile of wedged apricots builds up in the Tupperware bowl, I pour syrup over them and thirstily drink in the tropical sunset orange that practically glows up at me.

It’s been a summer of color. Dark green, on the feathery straightness of the evergreen forest across the pasture; in the spicy, eye-watering scent of the leeks that I chop up and leave to dry on top of the stove. The pink of flowers so numerous that they splash a red hue on the hillsides as we walk up and up, through valleys and over passes, to waiting bowls of soup in the Alpine huts. Blue-black berries stain hands and clothes blood red, leave purple bruises on enamel pots and cake plates. And the greys (not really a color, I know, but to me it is the most important one): grey of the smooth, dirty cows down the road; grey of skies, a thousand greys in every cloud; grey that today reminds me that autumn approaches quickly, bringing a low and early snow to these mountains, bringing me back home to English, friends, the city, and a paucity of hours for baking.

Irmgard has come in now with a pot full of meat. I’ve asked already what it is, to which she replied, with mock defensiveness, “Ein gut fleich!” A good meat! She then jerked the raw meat away from my sight and disappeared into the pantry. Now, as she drops the pot on the hot stovetop and begins slicing vegetables, I remember the mystery of the meat.

“Was machst du?” I ask. What are you making?

Irmgard, who speaks virtually no English, replies with a long German word—or perhaps a few words—that I don’t know, and I shrug in ignorance. The question, answer, and shrug of non-comprehension are the elements of many of our conversations, especially about food.

Irmgard: Was machst du?

Me: Um… tuna melt.

Irmgard: Tunafisch?

Me: Ja… aber... melted.

Irmgard shrugs, trusting that whatever it is, it will be fine. This is the shrug I give her now. Or, rather, this is the half-shrug of my reply, for with my shoulders raised to my ears, but not yet dropped down again, I recall a familiar word in part of the long title.

“Wait,” I say. “Hase? Rabbit?”

Irmgard shakes her head, not knowing the English word.

“Hase?” I repeat (pronouncing the two syllables, HAH and seh, with teenaged insistency), putting my hands to my head and pointing two fingers at the ceiling.

She laughs and nods. “Hase!”

I glance into the pot, half expecting to see two ears, like the top of a chocolate Easter bunny, draped over the side. But there are none. No ears. No tail. Just some meat. A good meat. With a reciprocal laugh, another shrug of confidence in the rabbit’s tasty potential, I return to the pantry for butter.

Pie-making is a complicated affair here on the farm, given the lack of familiar tools. The tools are absent, I was told shortly after I arrived, because in continental Europe no one makes pie. It is apparently a strictly British inheritance, and even they seem to have mostly the small and savory variety, none of the gigantic fruit pies to which I am accustomed. “As American as apple pie,” I’m learning, is not just a phrase. And as I am spending a great deal of time here concocting desserts from the mounds of fruit grown and purchased in the fertile Austrian summer, it was inevitable that I would eventually come up against the pie problem.

Now, on my third attempt at pie, I am experienced. I know that there is neither a pie pan nor a pastry cutter. I unfold a huge block of margarine into a pile of brown and white flour. Estimating that it looks like just shy of a cup, I slice a bit more off of another block. Now is the time to cut, and I start pulling two knives—one sharp and one less so—through the flour-butter-salt. It is awkward, this kind of cutting, nothing like the pleasant childhood chore, with the pastry cutter and a bowl of mostly shortening. What it is like, actually, is my Grandma Nadine’s pie-making. Her routine with the knives on Christmas morning, preparing the pie crusts for Mom to fill with apples or pumpkin, always seemed like extra work for me, a graceful and dangerous trick she was playing to avoid the clumsiness of our newfangled gadgets. How a pastry cutter was newfangled I never understood, since I was the one that was busily chopping up the other pie crust with my own wrists and hands, working plenty hard. But now I see.

The butter and the flour, which I’m shaking to mix it up, occasionally stirring with the not-sharp knife, once in a while cutting a stray clod with the sharp one, is nearly as it should be.

And I never leave home behind when I travel. Everywhere I go, part of me is still there. Or part of there is still here with me. I’m not sure which. Because even now I am thinking about how the forest across the pasture reminds me of another forest across another pasture, one so dark and green, when we would watch each winter the line of snow creeping down and down, tree by tree, until it filled in all the way to the pasture and to us. Remembering how once I unknowingly ate rabbit, in some kind of stew prepared by a guest at our home in the mountains and, contrary to all predictable endings, I didn’t die or throw up when I found out what it was. And of course recalling, just in time, how Grandma Nadine taught me that the making of flaky, buttery pastry required nothing more than two ordinary kitchen knives.

Guttenberghaus

Sunday morning, 6:30 AM, Central European Time. I wake up hesitantly, peering through the floral curtains of my bedroom on Schiestl Farm. This is the beginning of my third week in Austria; the third week surrounded by mountains that tower over me like heads in a crowd; the third week of quietly cooking and cleaning; the third week of madly sifting through the shifting sands of vocabulary for the correct German words; the third week of writing letters and taking pictures with no people in them.

I’m waking up so early, so nervously parting the curtains, because I am supposed to go hiking this morning. Up to a church service in the mountains: Kirche am Berg. If the weather looks promising, we will go. If it’s raining, or threatening us with the violent thunderstorms that have punctuated many of our afternoons lately, we will go back to bed and wake up again at a more Sunday-appropriate hour. A great deal hangs on this weather.

The weather, actually, controls me more here than I could ever have imagined at home. A few weeks ago, I mentioned to one of my hostesses that it was easy to forget about the weather in the city, where everything important can happen under umbrellas, hoods, and roofs. “Not here!” she laughed, as we feverishly tossed hay with pitchforks in the dim, sweet darkness of a hayloft, then again glancing over our shoulders at the black clouds gathering themselves into a fierce scowl, threatening the proceedings. Here, we wake up every morning and listen to the weather report on the radio, then watch it on TV an hour later, and then read the five-day forecast in the newspaper when it comes with the mail. Weather is everything: growth, life, work, future. All in the hands of weather and—they remind me—God. “If God wants us to get the hay in, we will,” she remarks with a placid shrug. “We just need to trust.”

Curtains pulled aside, I see a mountain shrouded in fog. Unsure what this means, I plod down to the kitchen, where Annemarie is building a fire in the huge and ancient stove.

“So, what’s the deal?” I ask, curling up in a chair.

Annemarie takes a cursory glance out the window. “Looks good,” she decides. “I think we go.”

There they are, the words I have been dreading. Because I will never disagree with them, the words that urge me forward and upward and into the hills, though inwardly I am complaining and my heart is sinking. I know this hike, you see. One thousand meters elevation gain of unrelenting steepness, up and up and up, to a pass with a brown and white lodge. I’ve been there once, and though I remember it as spectacular, it is the thousand meters that I’m thinking of. I know this trail, and I know that I am tired and it’s early and that perhaps I would rather stay here, warm and dry, with a cup of coffee, and really isn’t the Sabbath supposed to be about just that? Rest?

But Annemarie said we’re going, and I have always been too proud to admit my own penchant for the sedate, so we go.

The trail is just as I remember it—grey and steep and rocky—as for a few miles we ascend through a forest and then an avalanche chute. I stare at grey pants and grey boots on grey trail under grey sky, and consider, with each breathless step, how I came to be doing this. Me, the one who as a little girl would have been mortified to list “hiking” as an interest or even an activity. I wanted to be a ballerina, then a violinist. Where did I learn this?

And the path is haunted with memories, not of the one time I have been here before, but of all the hikes, a whole life of them, the times that I have grudgingly swallowed complaint and followed someone up a hill. I think of fire lookouts in the Cascades, lingering in the panoramic views of the endless breaking waves of stone and tree. The time my parents and brother and sister climbed a small mountain near our house, bringing a stove and pancake batter and preparing crepes while the sun set. I flip back through hikes with friends, hikes with kids, hikes with Dad and me and the mountains. Yes, he was the beginning, my hiker father, shouting “Isn’t this glorious!” while I caught up to him on the trail. I followed him first.

The grey trail narrows, and we come out of the trees. We’re looking up now at a green wall, still perhaps four hundred meters below the lodge. The formidable green slope, grassy and dotted by sheep and stones, looks pathless, as if we will need to crawl, on hands and knees, straight up and to the pass. Yet the path keeps appearing, as if by magic, as we keep walking along. The path I couldn’t see from the bottom of the green slope has taken us halfway up. Now three quarters, unwinding like yarn along the emerald carpet. We never see more than a few yards of it, though. I am deep into the land of metaphor—a habit inherited from my sermon-illustrating father—before I realize it, considering the ways in which life is like this trail, never clear until it absolutely needs to be.

I’m distracted again by memories, now turning to mountaineering adventures during high school summers, again embarked upon at the urging of my dad, who coaxed me into coming with a nonchalant, “Come on, you’re not doing anything! You just finished track season! It’ll be fine.” No training for him. Just get out there, dripping with ropes and carabiners and claws for clinging to icy paths. Use your head and your ice axe, and we’ll all be OK. And I’m hopping from step to step across a glacier, following a string of lights, reviewing French history to pass dark summit-morning hours, and watching the long-awaited sunrise over row upon row of mountains dressed in ice and stone. Every summer for the last eighteen, at least, I have spent several days walking up trails, between trees, in the shade of great mountains. Sometime it became part of me.

Which part? I ask myself, as we wind back and forth across the slope, following the string of the magic trail. (The German word for this is Serpentine, I learn; so much more elegant than the English switchback, a sharp word that seems out of place in the calm silence of days in the mountains.)

The part of me, perhaps, that knows that many things in life won’t be easy—and some things won’t be fun at all—but that these things may still be good. This hike is not easy by any stretch, I think, legs aching from the walk, head aching in anticipation of the German message I will soon be trying desperately to understand. But I know that it is good. Good to be out here in the cool grey morning, looking down and back on checkered Austrian farmland, spotting the roof of the very farm where I have been living. Good to be in fellowship with believers from the other side of the world, reading the same scripture, praying the same prayers, repeating the same creed, language the only fragile barrier between us.

We reach the pass, blown by winds so strong that we can lean back into them, and turn around to face the valley. Neither easy nor consistently pleasant, this journey—like all of those others—has been stunningly beautiful and overwhelmingly good. And I am glad, now as then, that I came.