Crazy Adventures in the Life of a Redhead

Packed and ready to go! The first sign that I am ready to depart is my packed bag, but the fact that my heart and affairs are in order makes for an even more seamless exit of this country. Leaving my home for an elongated period of time has been a tiered effort, peels of necessary bullet points I wanted to accomplish for peace of mind. The only thing I regret having failed to do was dust my room at my mom’s house. That dust might haunt me as I fly tomorrow! I am ready to leave the country after one year of anticipation. In favor of full disclosure, I did not handle this whole preparation process as I should have and yet I am at peace with my madness. My cousin, Claire, who is traveling and working in New Zealand for 11 months with her fiancé, completed a textbook exit. I greatly admired how she so neatly folded and arranged everything she needed for proper inspection before cramming it into the iconic backpacker’s backpack. Instead of order and organization, my room looked like th...

Work hard and play hard: this has been my motto since last August when I started working with the intensity of one who knows her time limit will arrive sooner or later. I would work without sleeping for a couple or a few days before collapsing from fatigue for a few hours, only to rouse myself to complete more rounds of work with the old folks. In the end, it was all worth it, for I achieved my goal of making money and remaining flexible to travel as I pleased. February, March and April all blur into one, except for the birth of my nephew (see last entry). But May was the calm before the storm—the tornado of June’s ceaseless shifts and sleepless days and nights and July’s tempest of emotional goodbyes and back-to-back double shifts. I cannot believe that I am already beginning a new chapter. On Memorial Day weekend, I was fortunate to take a trip to California to visit a dear friend, Lisa, from high school and to meet up with two friends from college, Esther and Sindy, for a weeke...

This entry has been a long time in coming, but I really feel strongly about putting into words my observations about the similarities between the people for whom I care at two nursing homes in Jefferson, WI and Dousman, WI and the life of my dear nephew, Bennett, who graced us with his presence more than four months ago. How time flies, especially in reference to another individual who changes rapidly with each week! The birth of my nephew, my eldest sister’s baby boy, Bennett, has profoundly affected my life in an unequivocal and irrevocable way. A miracle at once simple and utterly bewildering, Bennett awed and perplexed his family with his perfection and his infant predilections for constant attention and care. Psalm 139 says that all of us were knit in our mother’s womb and are fearfully and wonderfully made. To understand this about yourself renders a sense of peace and gratefulness that God was so active in knowing you and preparing your way into the world. But to envision the re...