It's a gorgeous warm fall day, and I have tons of work to do, but Jeff and I just went out and enjoyed an ATV ride up into the back country behind our road.  Later, I plan to take a walk up the longest, steepest driveway around (and that's saying a lot) and drop in on neighbors who have lived here for thirty years.  Remind me to tell you about them and their vintage jeep sometime. 

Now that the warm, green days are slipping away and the girls are back in school, I wanted to set down some of the pleasant summer moments I enjoyed.   The summer went by so fast, and I was extremely busy, so it wasn't as if we went to a lake two afternoons a week and lolled on the shore, but if I manage to clutch at some of the particular rhythms of life and events that can only happen once in exactly the same way, I'll accomplish closure.  The girls are rapidly growing, and they will only be seven-and-a-half and nine for one summer.  

1. Danielle and the trampoline: The trampoline that Jeff's parents bought for the girls is getting probably more use than any other trampoline purchased from that store.  For Danielle, the jumping and flipping took the place of riding her bike in circles as she did last year.  Somehow, the physical motion inspires long stories that she tells herself for good chunks of the day.  Because "there's something nice about getting up early," she got up around 6:30 am all summer long and went straight to the "tramp" to begin jumping out her nervous energy.  Our couch is getting a break from the somersaults it endured after school throughout the winter. 

2. Danielle's obliviousness: There will come a day when Danielle will take very much care that her face is clean and her hair is neat.  Okay, scratch out the "very."  Danielle will always have some degree of obliviousness to her appearance.  But she won't be walking around with a smudged nose and stained forhead from constant jumping up against the netting around the trampoline.  I guarantee you she'll avoid getting tree sap in her bangs. (Tree sap in bangs is incurable--one must amputate the affected locks.  I let it go for several weeks before I realized it was not going to wash out).  She also converted her pants to shorts in the course of the day.  It would start out cool, so she'd have long pants or leggings.  Then she would roll them up as it got hotter and wind up with shorts.  Somehow, the shorts looked cute, too.  Oh, she began fixing her own hair and proudly wears a ponytail.  But that ponytail isn't always the most well-groomed hairdo . . . though we try to be patient with each other when I tell her that she needs to pull out the hair band and try again.

3. The girls' swimming: The girls had half-hour swimming lessons for the second year in a row, and I wasn't sure that they would make much progress.  But I noticed that on the last day of the two weeks, a play day, they were jumping off the diving board and swimming to the side themselves--no more coaxing swimming teacher in the water needed.  They're not ready to be in the deep end unsupervised, in my mind, but they can swim. 

4. The girls' enjoyment of Lake Powell: The girls had a wonderful time with grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins on the houseboat.  While the boat was moving, Danielle hung around the Jeff and helped the pilot spot buoys with a pair of toy binoculars.  Annika hung around the cousins and made up absurd nicknames for them--"Johnny Appleseed," etc.  When the boat was moored at a beach, the girls played quietly for hours, wandering the shore and paddling around in their lifejackets and tubes.  Ahnie cried about leaving everyone once we were packed up for our drive home.

5. The wedding: Time at the parents' house, shopping with Mom, breakfast outside with Mom and Aunt Lynn, hanging out with my sister, meeting Sophia again, the dress rehearsal, the ceremony, the reception, the girls' hair done by my mom and aunt, Ahnie and Danielle taking pictures on their disposable cameras, dropping by on my wonderful friends in my old San Diego neighborhood--a blur of rich experiences.  The girls put their pictures in the frames and album Michelle got for them and display them in their room.  They snapped all the adults at crooked, unflattering angles, and recorded some odd subjects, but they never had such fun putting together their own souvenir.  

6. The mailbox: Our mailbox is about a ten-minute stroll from our place, and somehow it has become a treat for the girls to go down there with me.  Ahnie usually rides her bike, and I remember the thrill of speeding downhill as a kid when she coasts ahead of me with the tires humming.  We take Laz and make him stop and wait under the apple tree, because there's a dog that barks ferociously tied up by the house with the mailboxes.    Danielle and I hold hands and we talk, often about humorous things, usually absurdities surrounding the dogs.  The girls laugh about the "look Mom, no teeth" joke every time I tell it.  Usually, there's nothing exciting in the mail, so a new Family Circle or National Geographic is a big deal.  Personal letters create a buzz, and the mass-mailed postcard in response to the letter Danielle wrote to Beverly Cleary was a highlight of the vacation.  The girls have begun reading my Reader's Digests and Family Circles (or is it Women's Day that I have?). 

7. Family Camp: Our church had family camp toward the end of August at a beautiful site overlooking a lake.  It reminded me, because of the dining hall, the evening meetings, the dorms with porches, and the afternoon swims, of the yearly conferences we had at Pattaya beach with other Thailand missionaries.  The girls loved every minute of it.  I got a chance to really get to know some people that I hadn't truly talked to before.  Somehow, in that casual context, it became so easy to talk to people in a way that went far beyond "hi-how-are-you." 

So what were the most pleasant things about your summer?  You might have been busy, you might have been working and needing to juggle having your children home from school, but what was delightful about those ten weeks?

Only in Montana--there was a bearspray demonstration tonight at a neighbor's barbecue.  The demonstrator runs the Center for Wildlife Information and is my neighbor's friend.  He had a stuffed grizzly staring at him during the demonstration and emptied a lot of cans of a bearspray stand-in.  With the props and the clarity of the speaker, it was vivid.  I learned a lot:

1.) Don't wait 'til the bear is up close.  Spray when he's fifty feet away still.  Wait too long, and the bear will take you down.  I had no idea.  I thought that I should make sure the bear really means business before spraying.  I mean, still only spray if he's charging, but the spray should make a cloud twenty-five feet in front of you.  Here I've been carrying this stuff around on my walks and had no idea. 

2.) Spray for about six seconds and move the spray back and forth for a good cloud.

3.) Take a powerful stance while you spray and say "GET BACK!"  Don't look wimpy and cowering.  I kinda assumed I would be wimpy and cowering if it ever came down to using my bearspray, but I'll have to pull myself together. 

4.) The idea is to use the spray as a powerful distraction.  While it goes off to clean itself and try to figure out what's going on, you slip away.  The irritation and pain of the spray are not the point.

5.) When bear attacks were studied with the human behavior in mind and not the bear's, researchers saw that most of the time people were going off the trail after the bear, hiking alone at the wrong times, having food in their tent, etc.  It's rare that people who are minding their own business and following guidelines get mauled. 

Anyway, I snagged a hike with the speaker's group.  I would love to hike with a bear expert (who met with Timothy Treadwell on several occasions).  They go in September and see a lot of bears on every hike, whereas I've hiked a lot and seen only one while walking, in Glacier.  Woo hoo! 

Annika had run across the word "discipline" in a Hank the Cowdog book and wanted to know what it was.  The girls told me that they didn't even know how to pronounce it.  To my surprise, probably with the help of the can of soda I had just drunk, I gave them a definition: discipline is having a plan about what you want to accomplish and  basing your choices, both big and little, on that plan. 

By that definition, am I disciplined?  Sometimes.  Not enough to accomplish my plan, though.  For example, I was planning to write this entry forty-five minutes ago, before I started working on my job, and got absorbed in reading an article and the comments.  So the small choice I ought to have made was to work, and I was sidetracked.  My overall plan I want to accomplish is to caught up on my job.  So that this summer, I won't have to do my job on the weekends, I can organize the house, do a serious study of Hebrews, and get to spend time in the outdoors, hiking.  I might be starting on a second job, too.  At this rate, I'm not going to fulfill my plan.  Going to bed at midnight several nights in a row doesn't help either.   

Hmm.  I don't think I needed a definition to enlighten me on my lack of discipline.  I think I already suspected . . .