A String of Pearls

Grand Junction to Crested Butte via Kebler Pass. There’s a church camp along this road, County Road 12, tucked down on the right somewhere. Neither the sign or where to turn is real obvious. I know; I brought my girls to camp here several years ago and had to go back and forth, back and forth along this section of the road until I finally saw the small wood sign perched barely a foot above the wild flowers along the road:  ID-RA-HA-JE.

I happen to notice the sign, however, this trip, on our way to Crested Butte for a few days of camping, without even looking for it. It immediately sparks a memory, a not so good one, about my oldest, Addy.  “Aw, remember when you and Amy came to church camp here?” I say to Addy. Amy is not with us on this trip. She is, in fact, at Young Life camp for the week. “It was your first time to go to camp.”

“Yah, I remember alright,” replies Addy, in a way that lets me know she doesn’t mind if I talk about it, even though her friend, Sasha, is in the car with us. Addy’s got a well-developed ability to laugh at herself, a quality that everyone appreciates.

Addy and Amy with their cabin leaders.

“You were only there for a day before the camp nurse had to call me.”

“Mom, I was in so much pain! I could hardly walk.”

“She was constipated,” I clarify for Sasha.

Addy knew what was happening with her body because she had dealt with it before at home, but the nurse had no idea. All she knew was that she had this small child on her hands who was clearly in distress and wanting to go home right away.

I asked the nurse if I could talk to Addy and she put her on the phone. After several minutes of blubbering and crying, she calmed down enough for me to be able to understand her and for her to be able to listen.

“You know you have to take care of this on your own,” I remember saying.  “No one else can really help you with it.” It was true, what I had said to her, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t on the threshold, halfway out the door and on my way back up there to… to… to what? To just be there for her.

“Oh my gosh, Mom. I remember when I finally got my poop out. I thought Jesus had healed me!” I laugh. The girl is a hoot.

“You must have been so relieved,” I say. (I know I was, when the nurse called back a few hours later and reported that Addy was feeling much better.)

My funny girl Addy in the wildflowers on Kebler Pass. She approved this blog.

“Oh yah,” says Addy. “And I remember thinking, ‘That is some legit shit!’”

I laugh, loud and hard and long, not only at her spontaneous, hilarious, grand conclusion with its unintended double entendre, but also because I’m envisioning this cartoon image of a little nine-year-old staring into the toilet with a speech bubble above her head with the words THAT IS SOME LEGIT SHIT!

I’m sure, by the way, that she had no such thought at age nine.

We continue climbing and switching back up Kebler Pass, chuckling again every few minutes, leaving behind the 94 degree heat as well as our music source, Pandora. They are replaced with a glorious 64 and the one and only CD we have with us, The Pineapple Crackers. The wildflowers sway as the Polynesian tunes drift out our windows.

Wow, I think. That memory—about a time when my child was hurting and I made a conscious decision to not come to her aid, with the hope that, in the long run, it would end up helping her—has always been a bit painful. But retelling it today, years later, with Addy’s good nature and off-the-cuff remarks and all the hardy laughter, well, now the story will always be a funny one, a happy memory.  And that, right there, is some legit shit.