Like no sleep...

I'm going on like no sleep.  For a few months, I've had problems falling asleep, then problems staying asleep, and also problems waking up too early and not being able to fall back to sleep.  That pretty much adds up to no sleep.  

Today I came in to work 2 hours late because I did not sleep during the night and could not get up in the morning.  I couldn't make my brain work, so I dozed for an extra 2 hours, during which I also did not really sleep.  

This sucks.

I had the worst insomnia my whole life.  It got better for a while after I got married, but it sucks again now.  

The Dump

This morning was my first trip to the Athens/Hocking Reclamation Center.

On Saturday afternoon, Ben helped a friend of ours who lives way out in the sticks pull scrap metal and tires out of the muck in his yard. I wasn't there, but I hear it was quite an ordeal. Ben put our truck in 4 wheel drive and tried to get out of the yard, but ended up burying the suspension up to the axles and sliding sideways so that our truck was resting against our friend's house. By the time our friend's sister hauled our truck out of the mud with her gargantuan diesel one million horse power truck, the dump was closed. When I saw that the load was not very large, my first thought was, "Oh, we should just throw that into the woods behind out house," but the eco-friendly part of me overpowered the trashy part and I didn't suggest it out loud.

So I drove our truck full of half a tractor tire, the back half of a TV, a spare tire, long strips of jagged, rusty metal, shards of glass, and a tattered seat from a small car to the dump this morning. Jenny came along, as I am currently her ride to work and class. I confessed my blue collar desire to start a dump of my own in our woods. She laughed.

Let me say, I grew up next to a junk yard. As in, I could see the junk yard from my bedroom window. My dad is a mechanic and we took regular trips there together in our galoshes, work pants, and flannel shirts. I am perfectly at home in a smoky trailer that serves as an office. I used all my junk yard skills this morning.

The dump was like the worst parts of the junk yard times 1000. Even with a small load, they have you drive straight back about a mile, right up to the edge of the pit that used to be a hill. There were two enormous bulldozers pushing piles of garbage into the pit, and one normal sized bulldozer trying hard to keep the 5 t0 10 inches of mud from becoming the kind of disaster that swallows men whole. I couldn't believe the size of the pit. It looked like someone had ripped a hole out of a huge hill, and was slowly but surely filling it in. Amazing. When I pulled up, the only instruction I got was from the man in the closest giant bulldozer. From my truck, I gestured to ask if I was in his way, but he just pointed at a small pile of trash (maybe 10 by 10 by 30 foot), as in, drop your crap here.

So I backed up to it and heaved my garbage onto the pile. Jenny was full of horror at wonder at the whole mess. I felt at home. I'm not sure what the dump is reclaiming. I know eventually, my garbage will be covered in a few dozen feet of soil, and grass will be planted on it. Eventually, people will forget it was a dump, and they will build houses and plant trees there. Garbage is different when you think of it terms of what you want your grandkids to build their house on, or what you want the hills on the countryside to be made of.

The Tragically Cloistered Homeschooler's Guild of Athens

Last night I was supposed to speak about poverty at an event that a servant-hood-based Christian student group had planned and promoted. Chapters of this groups exist at many different schools, and I've had excellent experiences with one or two others, so I was glad to do it. The student I spoke with on the phone said they were planning for 100 people, and that the dress was "business casual." He said he may wear a suit. From his voice and plans to over-dress for the occasion, I thought perhaps he was a go-getter business major and that I was maybe a rung or two below the quality of speaker he was expecting. It especially made me nervous when he asked me if I required payment for coming. I wondered what I had gotten myself into with this very professional young man.

The answer, as it turns out, was a club of people who had been severely sheltered from life by their hard-core home-schooling parents, who now had found one another away at college. These kids struggled to converse with each other and with me, and I could have a conversation with a tree stump if you told me it was lonely. I realized immediately that our conversation had not been formal, just awkward.

When half an hour went by and no one had arrived for the event, I asked how they promoted it. He said, "Oh, we facebooked the international students. Word of mouth, mostly." He pointed across the room at a woman of ambiguous age wearing a black dress, "She put up flyers." I later talked to the girl in the black dress. She said she didn't really like being around people her own age, and missed "all the little kids and grown-ups."

It was sad.

There was one diamond in the rough, though. An Indian student named Bobby, who I talked with for a good 15 minutes. It was great and he was great, so I'm glad I went. But, it did leave me wondering how on earth you help a person who is now an adult learn to compensate for only ever having conversations with parent and aunts and uncles growing up.

The Holler

This is Salt Gum Holler, as recreated by Google Earth. This is the land my great, great grandfather Simon settled when he immigrated to Ohio from Germany. His son John built the house that my grandfather, father, and brother lived in at different points in their life. My aunt and uncle live in it now. My dad's aunt and her brood live in the branch of the holler that leads off to the right--they are the rebellious drunken side of the family. My aunt's (the one who lives in the homestead) inlaws live down the left fork. My dad's brother lives at the bottom of the picture, across the street from his cousin. My cousin lives in one of the trailers at the top left, and his aunt and cousin live in the other trailer.

The fields just above the fork in the road are fields my family farmed and plowed for generations and generations, only ceasing in the last few decades. My great grandfather built the barn on the homestead with logs he pulled from the Muskingum River during the great flood in the 1920s. Down the hill there is a machine shop where my grandfather kept an ancient lathe, as well as a root cellar, and a shack that has housed a nanny goat for I don't know how many years.

This is where I spent my summers growing up. My parents worked, but my aunts and grandparents didn't, and I would spend all day with them on the front porch swing of the homestead, looking down into the valley out over the beautiful countryside and going for walks.

This piece of land and the people who live on it are an awfully big part of who I am. They are the reason I love country music and listen to it when I'm alone. They teach me what faithfulness and loyalty mean. They remind me to treat poor people well, and to take care of people you care about. This place is everything that holds us back, and everything that comforts and defines us. This has been home for 200 years.

Characters

My life is full of characters. And by "character," I mean, interesting, wily, one-of-a-kind people who stick in your mind.

Our newest resident is one such character. I met her when I was 19. I was visiting Good Works in the spring of my sophomore year of college and spent an evening hanging out at the Timothy House. I was pretty wide-eyed and felt a lot like a tourist. I ate dinner with Mindy (not her real name), who I learned was an alcoholic. She seemed really nice and put me at ease. When it was time for me to go back to the Hannah House (where interns stay) that night, Jessi, the staff member who was driving me gave Mindy a ride to work on the way. I remember being really surprised that Mindy had a job and also being full of wonderment at riding in a car with a homeless woman. I thought something like, I'll bet my life will never be the same after this! Wide-eyed, like I said.

The next time I saw Mindy, she had dug her way out of the cycle of alcoholism....

and fallen straight into the cycle of domestic violence. 2 and 1/2 years ago, she showed up at the shelter escorted by a short man with no fingers on his right hand, mean, clear blue eyes, and white stubble on his face. They were looking to get some kind of reference letter from us. He spoke in clipped words and only gestured with his lesser hand; every bit of his communication was an attempt to intimidate. I was working with my friend, Rosenna, and we both knew immediately that he was a wife-beater. They did not get what they were looking for.

Neither of us was surprised when Mindy called for shelter a year later. She was still sober and was on the run from the short man with the missing fingers. She did OK at the shelter, but left to return to her abuser.

Now, she's running from him again. During our meeting with her today, she said something about guns and alcohol not mixing well. We all agreed, and were cautious, but happy to move her back in, but most people who are the victim of such problems move in with a few of their own. Mindy has already accused everyone in the house of stealing a pouch of tobacco from her things, as well as a cigarette roller. She's asked the staff to rip the house apart looking for it. We said no, so now she's trying to start fights with her 2 roommates. I wished my night shift guy good luck refereeing the cat fight.

Welcome back Mindy. Sincerely.