Happy Spring Greetings to you. Wherever you live, I hope by now you are seeing some signs of spring to encourage you onward. I lost my mom, Charlene Haug, to cancer forty years ago. During her 10 months of illness, finding a way to negotiate the peaks and valleys of that experience and loss with our brand new baby and a three year old seemed to have drifted completely out of my consciousness. Maybe forgetting painful experiences is our mind’s kindest way of helping us to survive and keep living in the present. But two years ago, when my dear Dad, Melvin Haug, turned 92, he took a bad fall while out cutting a tree with a chainsaw, and fractured a vertebra. Only then did he slow down enough for us to begin a regular look-through the old picture albums stuck away in his basement.
Mel has outlived two amazing wives, and is now married to another great women. He has expressed to me during our weekly visits, that “each marriage just keeps getting better.” I’m grateful to have time now that I’ve temporarily stepped away from teaching and art shows, to be present to listen to many of the stories my Dad remembers. At his request, I’ve been compiling some of the stories into two family books. Dad turns 95 this June, and I hope to have the third of four volumes done by then.
Now Dad and I are working on the book about his “Second Family” in which my brother and I will enter the story. I never dreamed I’d ever have this opportunity to learn so much about my parents and grandparents. I’ve also had the opportunity to work through some deeply painful experiences because of my Dad’s openness to going back in time. The result is being able to objectively look at obvious trauma in my life, but these events are now detached from the inevitable tsunami of emotion. It only took forty years folks! Don’t give up on yourselves. I’m learning it’s really important when one looks back to have compassion for your younger-self. Compassion for being young and overwhelmed as life spins off its axis. Compassion for doing the best one can in their twenties, with a baby and a toddler. Compassion for all those around you doing the best they can. It took me forty years and my Dad’s help, to realize that in the same year I lost my Grandma Vera, who lived with us all the years as we were growing up, whom I adored; I lost my awesome mom, Charlene; and two days after Mom died I lost my best friend in Indianola, Marsha, and her two month old baby, Natalie, in a car accident. Sorrow helps one learn to have compassion for others. In my case, the desire to heal led me directly away from the medical field to a life of weaving and art-making with plants. For that I will always be grateful, because it kept me close to my children, my grandchildren and community, and it led me on a wonderful journey of being able to share lessons of plants and fiber technologies with thousands of young people over these forty years.
I’ll be catching you up soon with some of the meaningful things happening in my part of the world. Here’s a bit of what Spring looks like in the PNW.
