troll weather, post op: days 9 & 10

family stuff! off the grid! fifteen straight minutes of steep unpaved mountain road that you feel every second of in ur tits!

so the vague 'family stuff' was a ceremony held by colleagues of my father's departed parents at an environmental institute they helped build. my father is the youngest of four sons and it was nice to see everyone. almost everyone in the immediate family made it, the only one who didn't was my oldest cousin who's seeing dead & company's final stint in san fran. if ur not gonna be with the fam, where better to be? the ceremony was really nice. it was also probably the longest i was consecutively awake the whole trip. 

we arrived at the environmental institute in the mid afternoon (painfully. it was so rough.) one of those situations where my dad stepped out of the truck and "i haven't seen you since you were a teenager" comments began from some old environmentalists who treated him like the teenager he was when they had last seen him. when we were packing up this morning, my dad joked who had the keys and his eldest brother (8 yrs his senior) looked so gleeful and told him 'oh shut up, freak!' it made me see the commonalities between my younger sister and my dad, they are two of the most stubborn people i know.

my sister and i were woken up saturday afternoon in time for the ceremony where a bowl was passed around and we were each instructed to say a few short words about one person we were honoring, then the next, and then about them together. about my grandfather, i mentioned a feeling of finding him in lulls of larger family gatherings and having shorter conversations with him where he'd make you feel like everything you were doing was important. someone else shared this sentiment and described him as "never too busy to meet another person" which was very sweet.

about my grandmother, i recalled knocking on her cabin door every sunday at the older girls' area of the summer camp where she worked and i was a camper at the younger girls camp (sunday service was the one of two times during the week there was any official travel between the older girls camp, with the younger girls walking through the woods and through some of the older girls' lodging cabins and to a large hall. my grandmother's was the first cabin you saw turning into the entrance to the girls camp if you went through the beach). if i was lucky, my grandmother would let me grab a couple friends and she would take us out to ice cream afterwards.

about them together, i stared at the bowl and struggled to think. i said something about them being so supportive together. my sister thanked them for being good grandparents. our other cousin said the best holidays were held at their house and i nodded from across the circle. i said supportive in the moment and that's definitely true, despite them seeming like hugely influential figures of authority in stories my dad would tell or the turtlenecks i was forced into for visits up to their large house, it never felt like there was some kind of right way to make them proud of me. their place always felt fancy and classy, but they were such kind and casual people.

in a story about them together, an activist friend of theirs in the circle described a visit of hers to their house in baltimore where dinner table conversations involved my grandmother hatching plans to bomb something and my grandfather talking her down. that made all of us crack up. they were funnier than i knew, but i think that's true of most grandparents. we knew some of the hijinks they got up to (our grandmother's more since we attended the summer camp with her for a couple of summers).

i think, a day and some change on, i'd use composed to describe them together. it is hard to put into words the balance they struck with doing their own activities while pursuing interests in the same field (something pointed out by activist friends who brought up their refusal to teach an outdoors course together at any time during their running of the program (which my father and one of his brothers admitted was most likely their doing because they were known to be such menaces)). or how nothing seemed like it was too small to ask their opinion on. my grandmother was an environmental activist and my grandfather was a lawyer who did some pro bono work on the side for those same causes, it's something that my sister, cousins and i have grown up knowing and feeling a debt to nature for getting to experience. it was something to us that they always had been. natural as they would breathe. but what struck me was getting to meet a lot of the people in that circle that had nurtured those feelings of love for the environment for them both. embarked on the mission to build the place and bring students to learn in the green rolling hills of west virginia.

it was such a wonderful place. after dinner i went back to bed feeling nauseous but not guilty. i missed out on a slideshow of photos and some songs along with a walk in the morning to decide where we, as family, would like a bench dedicated to them and to scatter some ashes. when someone's presence is so concentrated there, i knew i did not have to worry about proving any kind of mobility, of walking on the uneven gravel that i was wincing walking too far on. it would have been worthless and painful to prove. i laid back and rested, assured that i would be back one day.

this morning, the rain was on and off, misty and cloudy. in a short exchange, i passed someone while i walked through some light rain to pack up, and as we walked by each other she said "it's troll weather". what a fun saying :) thank u west virginia, let's close it out utah phillips: