Stone-cold sober, she was more free in spirit than most people are three sheets to the wind.

I won’t be able to be at her memorial service today, but as my family has gathered photos and stories back home, I have been thinking about all my grandmother has given to me over the years. I cherish the days of learning to make blackberry jam in her kitchen at Chimney Cliff, but the intangibles that I’ve discovered in my heart as I’ve sat for a couple of days in a world she no longer inhabits are almost more precious than my scribbled recipes.

She taught me how to be an artist.

She actually taught me how to paint, but more importantly she set an example of a life as an artist that is important for me as a writer.

The fourth of five children, my grandmother grew up on a farm in Kensett, Arkansas. She decided early on that she was an artist, a calling that took her through many seasons of learning, ultimately becoming an accomplished painter of landscape watercolors. Determined to find ways to pursue her craft, she trained to be an elementary school art teacher while her brothers were working the family land and fighting wars.

She kept a world wholly unto herself by holding onto her art and relentlessly making time for it. It was a world that she opened up and shared with others, teaching art in school, giving lessons at her house and later on a public television show, Miss Polly’s Paintbox, bringing her gift of art to whoever would tune in. But it was still her world. There were paintbrushes only she was allowed to touch, and a revered easel where her current work in progress waited.

She often joined a group of traveling painters to spend a week away with other artists. They set up their easels in front of mountains in Colorado, red desert rocks in Arizona, many-colored bungalows in Mexico City and even the heather covered hills of Scotland. When I think about how she had to scrimp and save to make these trips possible and then try to sell her work afterwards to pay for the next one, I am in awe of her belief in herself as an artist.

One of the hardest parts of being a writer for me is the part where I market myself, either to a company or even to you, my reader. The part where I ask you to come over here to this little corner of the internet and read what I write makes me cringe every time. But Mama Polly was unabashedly proud of her work. She was constantly entering competitions and trying to have a painting included in an exhibition. She displayed her art all over her house and if you came over for a party (of which there were many) and you had your eye on one of her paintings, well, she was always ready to make a sale. Unashamed, she would pocket your money and put it towards her next holiday.

She taught me to follow my husband with blind faith. And to enjoy the ride.

My grandmother fell so hard for my grandfather when she met him that she hardly came up for air in the seven decades that followed. Even last week if you had showed her my Daddy Bill’s photo she would have told you how he was the best looking man in all the world. Her schoolgirl love for my grandfather, who was a giant of a man (in both stature and personality), caused her to chase him to California. She married him in a borrowed dress before he was shipped off in the navy during World War II.

Later they settled in North Little Rock, Arkansas where they had four sons, the third of which was my daddy.

My grandfather was a difficult man to cross, and my grandmother was happy to let his word be the last on most subjects. I wonder at how her spirit was not crushed by his personality but then I remember the small ways she maintained a world unto herself.

The family of six lived in a small house in a much loved North Little Rock neighborhood called Park Hill, and they did not have air conditioning. One summer while the boys were gone with my grandfather for a week of scout camp, she bought a window unit air conditioner against my grandfather’s wishes. When the boys came back from camp, nothing was ever said about it.

Years later, my grandfather quit his steady job, grew his hair out and started building a cabin in the woods.

My grandmother never missed a beat. She followed him in faith that he would continue to provide for them and soon after he finished building their dream home, an A-frame overlooking the river that she named Chimney Cliff, he opened an art gallery in the nearby town where she could paint and teach art lessons. He started a framing business in a back room of the gallery.

Every August, they would close the gallery and head out on the road somewhere. She went wherever he drove, camped wherever he wanted to stop and followed him into whatever wild plan he came up with. One summer, after he heard that senior citizens could ride the ferry boats for free in Alaska, they boarded a boat with only their backpacks, sleeping on the decks of ferries and staying in hostels of small Alaskan towns. My grandmother carried little sketchbooks that she filled with her memories of their summer days. New friends they met, a berry farm near their campground, a crawfish boil in Louisiana. There was no dance, drink or shindig that my grandmother would not have a go at.

When their first grandchild was born, my grandfather said he was not ready to be a grandpa, and so my grandmother named them Daddy Bill and Mama Polly, to the grandkids and to all our friends.

She taught me to make do with what I have, and that I have more than I think.

Sometimes we think the lesson of “making do” was a gift from an older generation that only involves money. And my grandparents definitely understood some important things about money that it seems like we are quickly losing in the modern world. Living within one’s means, staying out of debt, eating from the earth and only consuming what we need are some of the simple truths that were second nature to my grandparents.

But lately I have been struck by how my grandmother applied this lesson to so much more than finance.

As a mother of boys, she let go of them with grace when they each married. She welcomed their wives into her world and lapped up the time she got to spend with her children and grandchildren, but she did not make a lot of demands or have a lot of expectations. She was always glad to see you when you came and she would open her heart and her pantry to you while you were there. She did this without making you feel guilty for how long it had been since your last visit, but instead delighted in the moments she had with you.

It is worth noting that all four of her sons doted on her endlessly, until her dying day, and that her oldest son and his wife, my Uncle Steve and Aunt Sherry, moved her close to them at the end of her life so they could visit her daily. I have three sons myself and I wonder at the paradox that maybe the way to keep them close is to hold them so loosely in their adulthood as Mama Polly did.

Mama Polly made the most of the time she had with each of us.

She was not present in my life the way my other grandmother was. I’ve talked loads about my mom’s mom, my Grandmother with a capital “G,” who was my closest grandparent in proximity and an almost daily part of my world. When I step back, I think that Mama Polly could have let my relationship with Grandmother keep her from feeling like she could also be “grandmother” in my life.

But I don’t think she ever even thought about that. She was “grandmother” in her way, with what she had and in the time she had to work with.

Every summer she had a week at her house called “Cousins to Chimney Cliff.” My parents would drop us off for a week of peach-picking, swimming hole diving, art lessons in the garden and afternoon siestas, during which Mama Polly would make us all lie down and be quiet for an hour while she sunbathed stark naked on her deck. I. Kid. You. Not.

And in spite of the fact that my grandfather drove us around in his hotter-than-hell windowless, benchless cargo van with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, we had the time of our lives.

It never bothered Mama Polly that I came home from her house with bruises and chigger bites and from my other grandmother’s house with new school clothes and shoes. Mama Polly gave the gifts she had to give, and as it turns out, they are too many to count.

The post Lessons from my Grandmother appeared first on Alison Chino.

I was new in town, living on the south side of Seattle.

Renton, to be exact.

We had lived less than a year in a relatively uninspiring mint green townhouse.

I was new to motherhood, new to staying at home, new to leaving the house with everything but the kitchen sink.

I hadn’t really met any other stay-at-home moms.  I was enjoying hours and hours of staring into my baby’s eyes and I talked on the phone to my mom and sister every day, but I was also wishing for a friend.

I tentatively joined a daytime Bible study to try to get out of the house and meet people.  I don’t love to walk into a room full of strangers as it is, but there is something about being  a new mom that makes you feel so incredibly vulnerable and alone.

I was pushing past a lot just to be there, but when I arrived, I had to hand my little pookie over to a stranger and wonder if he could possibly survive without me.  I wasn’t sure.  I walked upstairs and found a seat in the sanctuary, near the back.  A girl sat down in same pew as me.  She left some space between us and kind of waved, like Hi I’m over here but neither of us said anything.

A lady stood up at the front to welcome us.  She was very dressed up.  She began to talk about how wonderful it was that this study was available this fall and that people from all around the Puget Sound area were driving to it.  Then she started naming places,

There are people here from Bellevue, from Mercer Island, driving across the bridge from Seattle and all the way from Kirkland and Woodinville. 

She named a few more nicer suburbs on the East side.  As she was talking I thought to myself,

I’m sure there is no one here from Renton.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I don’t have much in common with anyone in here.

As I think about this statement, it strikes me as amazing how very easy it is to convince yourself that you are the only one in the world who has ever experienced what you are experiencing.  And how very wrong that is.

The lady said some more stuff and then she dismissed us to find our groups and the girl next to me said,

Hi I’m Laura.

Oh, hi, I’m Alison.

Where do you live?

Renton.

Me too!

How long have you lived there?

Less than a year.

Me too!

Do you have kids?

One little boy.  He just turned a year.

Me too, I have one little boy.  He’s 8 months old.

And just like that, a friendship.  A very precious friendship was born.  A gift from God.

Over the next years, Laura and I exchanged recipes, babysitting, books and stories.  We quickly discovered that we were kindred spirits.

We both missed our extended families, our sisters, our familiar traditions.  So we made up our own together.

We spent Thanksgiving and Easter together.  We went to see the tulips every year in Mount Vernon.  We had a picnic on the first day of spring in the courtyards of the University of Washington while the cherry blossoms were in bloom.  We joined the zoo and the aquarium together.  We picked berries in the summertime.  I taught her how to make jam and she taught me how to use puff pastry.

By the time we finished our first year of Bible study, we were both pregnant with our next babies.

Both of our families saw Seattle as home for now but not forever, so the day came for one of us to move away and then the other.

Now she lives in Oregon and I live in Arkansas.  We see each other very rarely.

But whenever I hear from her her, I am reminded of God’s goodness.  Her presence in my life when I was a young mama and when I was not apt to make a friend on my own was a timely treasure.

Have you ever moved to a city far away from your hometown?  A place where you knew no one?  How did you meet friends?

The post Meeting Laura appeared first on Alison Chino.

Over the last few years the Lord has richly blessed me through my sweet friend, Diane.

I’ve known her a very long time, but recently, our friendship has evolved.

The best way I know how to describe it is:

I can not live without her.

Healthy, I know.

Let me tell you how this happened.

When Cole was in the fourth grade, I began to be desperate for some outside help with my responses to him.

He was angry.

I was angry.

I had a newborn.

Plus those other two.

Cole’s anger made (makes?) something well up inside of me that is scary.

His anger is a reflection of my own.

I was beginning to see that if I did not deal with my own anger, not only could I not help him with his, but we might kill each other.

There is so much parenting advice out there in the world.  There’s even a lot available specifically on the issue of anger.

Don’t bottle it up.

Don’t rage.

How do you reconcile those?

My dad always says that if you’re wondering where to go to church, find someone who you like, someone who is living a life you can respect.  Ask them where they go to church.  Then ask them if they will take you with them.

I employed this same advice in looking for parenting strategies.

David and Diane Heffington have five of the most precious children I know.  Two have come all the way through our youth program at church and three are currently in it.  There’s not a one of them I don’t adore.

Diane also oversees our children’s ministry.

So I began to grab her on Sundays and in the moments between services, I would pour out all my questions.

I would write down whatever answers she gave me, order any book she recommended and try to put in practice any suggestions she mentioned.

I did this week after week, and she is so nice that she did not even start hiding when she saw me coming.

She actually wanted to know how it was going.  She had prayed for me over the week.

In the summer of 2007 I asked her if she would actually walk through a parenting book with me.  She agreed.  We invited a couple of other gals and began meeting early on Saturday mornings to discuss Scott Turansky’s book Good and Angry.

Which, I believe, changed my life.

That book.

That meeting.

That group of women.

And specifically,

Diane.

We have continued to meet for the last several years.

The books change.

The issues change.

Even the group of women has changed.

But Diane has remained constant.  As has my habit of unloading all my parenting questions on her.

And her response to me is always gracious.

She is a problem solver like me, so she always has a new suggestion, something to try this week.

But she also makes feel like I’m not crazy.

She reminds me that everything I go through has been experienced by a parent before me.

I’m not the only one.

She understands what it’s like to have a lot of children.  She gets straddling adolescence and toddlerhood.  Nursing and driving to soccer.  Staggered bedtimes.  Shared rooms.

She faces the same problems as me, only a few years before me.

Right now the Heffingtons have six members of their family who are driving.  The transportation needs are staggering.  I am watching closely because we will be right where they are in six or seven years.

Also, sometimes, if I am at my wits’ end and Taido is out of town, she will say,

I think Cole just needs to come home with me today.

Then she will come and get him, and he feels like he has won the lottery.

They live on land.  Where boys can roam free, doing the things boys do.

Cole can hang around her boys for the day, shooting BB guns at targets instead of ugly remarks at me.

Even though Diane’s life is full to busting with kids, responsibilities, sporting events, church events and chasing runaway animals,

she always has room for one more.

One more person in the group.

One more child in her car.

One more name on her prayer list.

One more life on her heart.

A person like Diane is so incredibly special that of course I am not the only one who feels this way about her.

So when her fiftieth birthday rolled around this spring, many of us wanted to make it an extra special time to return all the love she pours out day after day, year after year.

The entire weekend of her birthday was a wonderful celebration of the gift that she is to this world.

A group of us managed to get her away for a girls’ night, completely surprising her, which made me very, very nervous.

I am not a surprise person.  I couldn’t talk to her all week for fear of having to lie.

But her husband made sure all her many tasks were covered while we had her away, and others of us are much better liars than me, so we pulled it off.

We got away to a cabin in the woods.

We hiked through the woods, splashed in a waterfall, had fun pictures taken,  cooked yummy food and treats, laughed ourselves silly and shed tears of joy.

At dinner, we took turns sharing one word that we would use to describe Diane.

Grace.

Partner.

Light.

Honest.

Friend.

Mama.

Consistent.

Gift.

Welcoming.

Wise.

Mother.

Those words represent such a rich treasury of what we all feel about Diane.

We cried as we shared them.  And she cried as she gathered them in her heart.

And then we laughed some more.  My sides about split for laughing that night as we played games.

And we just danced.  Which made us laugh even more.

We stayed up very late, and then we had a lazy morning on the back porch drinking coffee before we headed back to real life.

Just soaking up the last minutes.

And then we took her home.

We told her goodbye and Happy Birthday and We Love You.

And then we helped her husband surprise her again!

The extravagance of the weekend will always remind me of God’s even more extravagant love for us.  How it never ends and it just pours and pours without tiring.

No one got tired of celebrating Diane.

To me, she remains a constant extension of God’s extravagant love.

The post Meeting Diane appeared first on Alison Chino.