My Grandma

I was wearing her earrings when I heard. The diamond earrings the jeweler set from her engagement ring. My Grandma gave them to me on my 18th birthday, because she said every young lady needs a pair of diamond earrings — especially if it were her birthstone.

I only wore those earrings on two occasions: my senior prom, and for my wedding. She always said she liked the way they sparkled on my ears.

When she went into the hospital on Wednesday night, I felt compelled to wear them. I wanted a part of her with me somehow. This wasn’t her regular tune-up she had done when her blood sugar crashed.

Part of me didn’t think this day would come. If any of you ever wonder where my stubborn nature comes from, you don’t need to look any further down the family tree than my Grandma. She climbed into our tree house when all the adults thought it was a bad idea, she jumped into a boat because she didn’t want to wait for a foot stool and broke her leg at 65, and refused to ask for help most of the time. Tyler joked that this behavior was what he had to look forward to when I got older.

But all of that made her a strong woman who I looked up to. She spent much of her childhood in Egypt, earned her math degree and taught, and then moved to Alaska with her husband and three kids when the Al-Can Highway was gravel.

Around 4 a.m. (2 a.m. Alaska time) my mother called me. Grandma past on.

It’s always hard, even when you know it’s coming. There’s something about the finality of it all that’s hard to deal with. Maybe it’s just waking up and knowing for the first time in your life that someone isn’t there.

I love you Grandma, and I’ll miss you.

The Hansen mobile

The search is over: we bought a truck.

Many of you might know this story, but for those who don’t I’ll fill you in. We’ve been through three cars since the Pathfinder met its demise last year.

Car 1: The Subaru we owned for about three weeks. It couldn’t tow our belongings out to Vail, so we sold it to Steve and Karen the day we left Bellingham.

Car 2: The Dodge Dakota we bought from Roger the day we left Bellingham. It got us out here, but when winter started falling the two-wheel-drive truck wasn’t great in the snow.

Car 3: The Land Rover. We bought it for $500 so we could have a vehicle that wouldn’t get stuck driving around town.

The car saga became Tyler’s obsession, so last Thursday we decided to end the madness. We drove down to Denver and managed to find a GMC Sierra that should last us for a long time. I’m happy to only have one vehicle again, and to have my husband’s sanity back.

In response to my buddy

After reading Liz’s blog post “Masters in Indecision” (she’s great with headlines), I started thinking about my own growth. Like Liz, I did not like school that much, and was more than happy to be done. I do think I graduated with a useful degree, but the field I thought I loved turned out to be something else entirely.

I just started loving writing again, something that took me more than a year to get back. It’s hard to reinstate a former discipline when you’ve gone without it for so long — much like getting back in shape. The first two weeks are always the hardest.

But it’s like an old friend: very familiar, comforting and always there. Similar to a friendship, it takes a lot of work and effort to remain intact. And I need to put more effort in so that it doesn’t slip away and become a memory of something I used to do. I need to start making writing something more than my early morning routine before I go to work.

That means drafting query letters, sending in submissions and dealing with a lot of rejection for a while. And after enough casts, something will bite. It did for my friend Jeremy, and he’s already talking about his next project.

The last book I read also gave me some encouragement:

“As to why anyone embarks on the adventure of writing, which is that you write in order to find out not so much who you are as who you are becoming.” - Bernard-Henri Levy citing Michel Foucault’s idea in Public Enemies

I guess I see where this all takes me.