Bright Idea Outdoors Weblog

You Were Never Taken for Granted

As the last hours of the weekend slide by, I sit here, watching golf, Kim taking a nap on the couch beside me and the kids out and about still, supposedly playing tennis.  A strawberry cake sits on our kitchen counter, something we thought might be a good idea; today would have been my mom's 65th birthday.

I mentioned to Kim this morning that I felt guilty that I hadn't written some eloquent blog post about Mom.  I feel like I'm neglecting her in death, just as I often felt I neglected her in life.  Did I take her for granted?

No.

You see Mom, you were just always so unselfish, so interested in everything about me, and so devoted to your family, that I guess I forgot to talk about you sometimes.  But I did not, have not and will not ever take you for granted.

I know that without you--and all the sacrifices you made--I never would have made it this far.  You lived for your children and your family, and we carry the gifts you gave us and the things you taught us with us every day.

We love you Mom and just wish you could be here today.  .  .

A Long Week

Whew, it's been a tough week!  

No, nothing really bad happened.  I've just been trying to function on my own with my family out of town and four horses, two houses and a dog to take care of.  

But tomorrow's the week's last day of work, and then it's up on the mountain for the Evergreen Church Good Friday Service.  Finally, on Saturday, my family will be home.

Can't wait; Happy Easter!

Final Post of 2011: In My Mother's Words

I'm not going to bother with a Year in Review post this week.  You all know my mom died, and that pretty much sums it up.

I had thought about writing a review of the 2011 Deer Season--which was a lot better for my family than the year as a whole--but the season doesn't end until January 7.  So I'll be optimistic and wait on that.

I will, however, leave you with something I found in my basement yesterday.  It's a poem my mom wrote.  I'd seen it before and actually wanted to read it at her memorial service back in October, but I couldn't locate it at the time.  So that this untitled work doesn't get lost again, I'll preserve it here:

Travelling west toward the Blue Ridge,

In traffic, slowing,

The fading light in a narrow strip of pink and orange,

Behind the bare tree branches,

Sharp and lacy against the delicate cold sky.

 

NPR on the radio, All Things Considered,

A voice begins to read Goodnight Moon.

Not from Goodnight Moon,

You understand, but the whole book,

To commuters in their cars.

 

I was one of them, enthralled,

Lulled by the quiet well-known words,

Once read to us, or by us,

To our children.

Goodnight to the mouse, goodnight to the house,

Goodnight to the stars, to the balloon,

Goodnight to the moon.

Goodnight to the world.

Quietly we moved westward toward home.

 

Listeners were angry.  They sent curt letters.

Wasting our time!  What were you thinking?

We expect substance, not a baby story.

That doesn’t even make sense.

 

But how quietly we moved westward,

Toward Home.

Judy Coughlin; April 8 1947-September 26, 2011

A Christmas Letter

Dear Friends and Family:

We got a very nice Christmas card from one of our best high school teachers yesterday.  It included a Christmas letter, and she mentioned how much she enjoyed the one that I wrote last year.  That made me a little sad.

We didn't send out letters with our Christmas cards this year.  Letter writing is my department, and I didn't have it in me.  Last year I sucked it up and wrote the letter as a difficult year came to a close.  But this year, with the death of my mother still at the forefront of my thoughts, I just couldn't do it.

And in truth that wasn't the only reason I was having trouble getting into the holiday spirit.   Some demons that have been chasing me for a long time had caught up with me again, right about the time I should have been writing that letter.

Luckily, I've once again given them the slip.  Maybe this time, if I focus on  what I know to be true, I can leave them permanently in the dust cloud of the last three years.  

This is what I know:

The reason we're celebrating is that Jesus Christ came to Earth a couple thousand years ago.  He came here to save us--that means you and me--from the sins and sorrow that can keep us from doing the things we know we should.

I know  that my family is due for a run of good luck after the rough few years we've had, but I know too that being due something doesn't mean you're going to get it.  If there's one thing I've learned since 2009, it's that nobody is entitled to anything.

I know, however, that whatever happens my family will prevail.  Jake, Nick, Brett, Kim and I will take what God gives us and say goodbye to whatever He takes away.  Come what may, we can't lose as long as we're together.

Finally, I know that I'm looking forward to Christmas and that right now I'm eagerly awaiting the end of one of the longest nights of the year.  Because I know that one of the greatest gifts God has given us is the Promise of a New Day.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Sincerely,

Matt

HuntingLife.com Joins Blake Landscapes in Effort to Help Feed the Hungry

Thank you so much to all who have joined Blake Landscapes in our efforts to help the Loudoun Interfaith food pantry by "Liking" our FaceBook Page. For each Like we get, we're adding three dollars to a donation we will make tomorrow, Tuesday December 20.

Kevin from HuntingLife.com got in on the project over the weekend when he posted this on his blog.  Thanks Kevin!

Help Blake Landscapes Help the Needy This Holiday Season

In this prosperous area that we call home, it is easy sometimes to overlook the poverty that grips many individuals and families in our region. The truth is though that, not only will many families not have presents under the tree this Christmas, many of them won't even have enough to eat!

 

Interfaith Relief is a Leesburg food pantry that lends area residents in need a helping hand by providing nutritious food. The organization needs our help all year long, but this time of year can be particularly difficult for people struggling to make ends meet.

  

Please join Blake Landscapes in our efforts to help during this season of giving. Interfaith relief needs donations of food and money, but all we're asking you to do is click a link on our FaceBook page. For each FaceBook user who "Likes" our page, we'll add three dollars to a donation we will make on December 20.

Just go to the page, click "Like" in the upper right hand corner, and we'll do the rest. Happy Holidays and thank you for your support!

A Tree Stand Composition

We held a memorial service for my mom two weeks ago at Loudoun Funeral Chapel. Pastor Chip Geissler of Evergreen Church officiated and Julia Kasdorf provided the music. My sister and I both got the opportunity to speak about our mom and were later asked for copies of what we said. I figured the best way to give someone a copy would be to put it on the blog, and I guess my sister did too. Here's what she said.

My comments, which had been composed in a downpour while I sat in a tree stand the evening before, followed a rather heroic Bible reading by my eight-year-old son Nick, who read Matthew 6: 28-34.

"Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own," Nick's reading concluded.

I started then:

Thank you Nick. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. That's how the last verse of that Bible passage reads in the King James Version of the Bible.

My mom favored the King James, and she gave me a this copy 31 years ago. Some years later, when I was going through a rough time, she printed those words, 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,' on a little card and gave it to me.

She later explained that when Jesus said that he didn't mean that we shouldn't plan or shouldn't prepare. But he did mean that we've got plenty of work to do today, and that we should focus on that and not let ourselves be consumed with worry about tomorrow.

This became my favorite part of the Bible, and my mom and I shared some discussions on it during the final weeks of her life. Later, when I was going through my mom's stuff a few days ago, I found at least four references to it on her computer.

Psalm 121 was another Bible reading that my mom and I focused on during those last weeks. She told me it had been read at her own mother's funeral and asked me to read it to her, which I did, first from the King James and later from a newer version of the Bible so that I could understand it better.

When I asked my mom why she liked Psalm 121, she said that it brought her comfort and made her feel like God would protect her.

I was not with my mom when she died on September 26, but I did spend the night of Saturday September 24th with her in a hospice facility in Arlington. A couple times that night I thought the end was near, and I dropped to my knees at my mother's bedside and asked God to protect her, to fulfill that promised that he'd made in the psalm.

Mom rallied that night, woke up and talked to me. She was very sick and confused and not everything she said made sense. At one point she asked me to help her.

"Help you with what Mom?" I asked.

"To get through the door," she said. "To the guy with the truck."

At the time I thought maybe she had had lost track of who I was and that what she meant was to get her out of there, so she could get in her son's truck and go home.

But later I thought about a story that Chip and I and some other friends that are with us here today read once in a Bible study. It was about a guy who went in his truck to pick up day laborers. If you're from here, just picture 7-11 on Plaza Street.

The guy went to the 7-11 early in the morning and said he could take all the workers who would come. He was vague about the pay, but he told them their reward at the end of the day would be great. Some of the day laborers jumped in the truck, but many of them stayed behind, holding out for something better.

Later that morning, the guy came back and said the same thing. Some more guys got in with him but others continued to hold out.

The truck came back at lunch time and again and again throughout the afternoon. Finally, just as it was beginning to the dark, the truck reappeared at the 7-11 a final time. A few workers were still hanging out, and they decided that they had nothing to lose and jumped in the truck.

When they got to the nearby job site, the day's work was almost done. The new guys helped clean up, and when they finished, they got paid. Funny thing was though, that the guys who came at nightfall got paid just as much as the guys who started working at sunup.

The driver of the truck, of course, represented God, and the story illustrates how, now matter how long you wait, He always has room for you in His truck. So I wondered if maybe what my mom wanted help with was to get through the door of the great 7-11 of life, so she could catch a ride on that truck.

But in reality, I don't know what she meant. What I do know though is that in an Earthly sense, even though my mom drove a little car with a funny license plate and Obama stickers all over it, to me she was always the guy in the truck.

No matter how crazy I acted or what kind of bad things I did or how long I refused to accept my mom's advice, she always took me back. There was always room for me in the cab of the truck that was her home and her heart. And the reward--unconditional love--was always the same.

Thank you all for coming today. I wish my mom were here to see and speak to all of you. But since she can't, I'm going to close by reading some things that she wrote herself. The first was written after Jake was born and concerns my mom's first go-round with the cancer that eventually took her life.

"In 1996, at 49 I learned that I had breast cancer. After the surgery, a volunteer came to visit me. She was older but had been my age when diagnosed. She showed no self-pity; she led an active life. She decribed her decision to have reconstructive surgery. We didn't know then what my prognosis would be. 'Whatever you go through,' she said, 'it will be worth it when you hold your first grandchild in your arms.' And on December 20, 2000, I held my grandson and I knew that she was right."

Finally, her is something that Mom wrote about her mother and facing her own mortality.

"My mother isn't here.

"I'm almost 8 years older than she was when she died.

"I felt that all her worries lifted from her when she died.

"'I feel so much better,' she said.

"Though she was leaving my 14-year-old brother, her 3 daughters and 3 grandchildren behind.

"I'm not afraid to die for myself--I think it is the end, and all that we worry about will be no more.

"But I think and worry now--I worry forward.

"What if a grandchild gets sick?

"I won't be there to help my own children.

"And what of their own illnesses, old age, death, pain?

"I won't be able to help them.

"How can I leave them? And yet I have to.

"We need to get used to that."

An Important Place

I probably live about 25-30 miles away from Arlington, Virginia but to me growing up it was almost like a mythical city. 

Or was it a county?  I'm still not sure of that, but I always knew that it was the place where many of our nation's greatest heroes were laid to rest.

I also knew peripherally that the Pentagon was there, and those two things made it, in my mind, a very important place.

 My mother and father had lived in Arlington for some period of time while they were in college, and I worked with some guys early in the last decade who made the reverse commute from that mysterious locale to work  with me in Leesburg.

In 2005, and again in the winter of 2009/10, my work took me to Arlington frequently, and I got a chance to learn my way around that county or city or whatever it is, particularly the northern section.  My knowledge of the streets came in handy over this past weekend, which my family and I spent most of at the bedside of my mother, who had been transported to a north Arlington hospice facility on Friday.

This move came after a year-long battle with cancer.  I say "battle," but it was more like a decades-long war with a 15-year cease fire.  My mom didn't care for war analogies though, so enough of that.

We lost her this morning.

Judy Coughlin was scheduled to come home today, and she and I both probably would have preferred for her to leave this world via our home in Leesburg.  But if it had to be someplace else, I think the mythical city of Arlington was as good as any.

My mom devoted at least half her energy in life to keeping me out of trouble and much of the rest of it to the general duties involved with raising me and my sister.  But of the energy she had left, a lot of it went to causes she believed in, especially supporting freedom of speech and information through our libraries.

My mom didn't much believe in wars, but she had a tremendous amount of respect for the people that fight them.  She loved this country and, especially during the final months of her life, kept a constant vigil on news impacting our nation's future.

Judy Coughlin will be laid to rest at home in Leesburg, but I like to believe that, if Arlington was the first thing she saw when she looked down from her ascent to Heaven, she felt just a little pride at leaving this world from such an important place.

Judy Coughlin: April 8, 1947-September 26, 2011

Goodbye Mom; I love you...

Sad News

Sad news today, as I learned that my great Aunt Emy passed away earlier this morning.  We'd known this news would come soon, but it's never easy when it does.

Emy, 91, was my grandmother's sister, and she grew up in the Mississippi Delta along with my grandmother, whose name was Lucy, and my great aunts Jean and Ann.  My great uncle Jim lived on the same plantation with them and went on to marry Aunt Jean.

Emy was married to my Uncle Joe, a WWII veteran who died many years ago but whom I still remember as one of the nicest guys I've ever known.  Emy led an interesting life and saw this great country and the world change quite a bit.  

She and Joe lived all over the world, and Emy had one of those jobs where she couldn't tell you what she did.  We'll probably never know what her true profession was, but speculating on it may be more fun than the reality anyway.

My Aunt Emy was loved and will be missed.  I hope to write more about her in the coming days and weeks.

The Things He Carried

Dear Dad:

This Saturday would have been your 65th birthday.  I didn't talk to you on your birthday last year.  Jake called and left you a message, and, when you hadn't called us back in a couple days, I finally picked up the phone.

That's when you told me you were sick.

Two Fridays later, I went to your house, and, that Sunday, I watched you breathe your last breath.  Yeah Dad, it's been almost a year. 

I'm not going to write about this again on April 11.  Instead, I'm going to celebrate your birthday today by  telling you about what I've been doing with some of the things you gave me.

I mean, you didn't exactly give them to me.  Most of the stuff was in your truck, Boss Blue, when I drove away from your house in it about three weeks after the memorial service.

If you were here, I'd ask you if the truck is named after this little guy or if he was named after the truck.  He still rides around with me wherever I go. 

So does this can of snack mix.  You left some crackers in the truck too, and I ate those, but I haven't eaten any of the barnacles.  Just can't bring myself to throw them away.

I haven't worn these socks either, but they're a good thing to have in the truck.  You never know when you might need an extra pair of wool socks on a cold wet day.

 

This rain suit I have worn several times.  The first was when I had to go in a crawl space the day after I got back with Boss Blue.  The rainsuit is perfect for crawl spaces, which are often wet and are always dirty.  I didn't go in very many more after that though, and I hope I never have to go in one again.

I've also found the rain suit to be the perfect apparel for hoisting a deer into the bed of Boss Blue.  The blood washes right off. 

These homemade ramps have come in handy for dragging the bigger deer into back of the truck.  You didn't carry them around with you, but I found them when we cleaned out your workshop; extremely handy thing to have.

So are these ratchet straps.  You had a bunch of them in the truck, and I've used them all at one time or another.

This little organizer on the passenger side visor I haven't used.  I can't.  It's too full of your stuff. 

Here are some other things you carried, and that I still keep in the truck, just in case I ever need them.

 

I've even got some of your change left.  I only use that in emergencies...

 

"I'm sorry."

That was the first thing you said to me when I got there on that Friday in April of 2010.  That confirmed my longtime suspicion that you also carried with you a certain amount of pain and regret. 

I've been carrying those around for the last year too.  They're heavy, and I can't carry them anymore.   And I know you don't need them where you are, so let's just leave them behind.

I'll see you again when my time comes Dad.  Until then, I've got to travel a little lighter.

Love,

Matt