The Joy of Christmas Catalogues

(Warning: some product placement may follow!)

It's that time of year again, the time of year when both companies that we love and companies we have never heard fill our mailboxes with glossy pictures of things we simply can't celebrate the holidays without. I love looking at holiday catalogues. I like looking at the pretty things, the novel things, the useful things, and the absurd things that nobody in their right mind really needs but that look neat anyway.

I especially love the way the products are set up in this semi-glorious light which implies that by buying this product, I'll be satisfying a deep psychological need, protecting the environment, feeding starving children, and reaching Nirvana all at once. I look at those pictures, and I get a "queer ache," as Anne Shirley called it, right in the middle of my chest. And all the while my brain is saying, "It's just a pillow sham. Granted, it's pretty and made of organic cotton, but you have absolutely no use for pillow shams. In fact, you hate pillow shams. Turn the page."

It's only the second of November, and we've already gotten three holiday catalogues, not counting the weekly circular from the Navy Exchange. The first two were from companies that we use regularly, but the one that came today was from a place I've never heard of -- Garnet Hill. Apparantly they sell decorating knick-knacks, linens, and specialty clothing.

It came just in time. Today is a duty day. I've been feeling blue, and there is no better way to kick a blue feeling than to pour a bubble bath, grab a novel for back up, and spend a half an hour flipping through a holiday catalogue. I mowed the lawn, washed the baking dishes, went to Bible study, got Boogaloo to eat both lunch and dinner, and dealt with two nasty messes (Today, Boogaloo learned about painting with poop. Tomorrow, she is going to learn that this makes Mommy unhappy.). I felt like I deserved a little indulgence. So I ran the bathtub full of hot water, poured in a little "Twilight Woods" from Bath & Body Works, grabbed an L.M. Montgomery novel, and "prepared myself to be happy," as Elizabeth Bennet would say.


Or not. Sakes alive! Have I been out of touch? When did cotton t-shirts (granted, organic cotton) become $40 items? I know some people can afford to pay that much for their clothes, but aren't there reasonable limits on the prices of basic items?$238 merino wool sweaters. $90 sneakers. $68 bedsheets -- flat or fitted. Granted, some of the stuff was cashmere (sigh, cashmere), but some of the stuff was flannel! And when I pay $50 dollars for a 250 thread ct. sheet, I expect to get both of them with pillow cases and the monogramming thrown in. I don't care how well it goes with the gorgeous octagon quilt. I'm sorry. I can do better at Walmart.

It was truly a wonderful catalogue. I found something to "ache" over on every page, and if you can afford to pay that much, do check them out at http://www.garnethill.com/. They have cocoa cup bedspread patterns and Christmas tree sheets and handmade afghans in cool natural colors (I could have made that last myself if I had the pattern). They have cable knit sweaters and cashmere tunics, ruffle-edged wool trench coats and Christmas longjohns for kids. But my gosh, who pays that kind of money for those kind of things?

Needless to say, I didn't find my bubblebath as relaxing as I thought I would. With seeds of regret, discontentment, and inferiority germinating in my soul, I put my catalogue down and picked up "Anne of Windy Poplars," and within about ten minutes all was right with the world again. But I still feel a little stung. The feeling harkens back to high school when I got caught wearing someone else's handmedowns. I didn't mind handmedowns in general, but they did seem to imply (at least to my adolescent mind) that I operated on a different tier than the people who could buy stylish things new. I envied them. Oh, how I envied them.

If only the styles now weren't so gorgeous! Belted sweaters. Pencil skirts. Long, elegant trousers. Sweater dresses. Flowy, cape-like cardigans. Capes! Actual capes! Exactly what I've always pictured sophisticated, practical fashion to be. Then that if only leads to other if onlies. If only I could afford this to go with that. If only eco-friendly were also budget-friendly. If only I could be professionally lit and standing dramatically outside a log cabin on the tundra while my perfectly highlighted hair blows in a soft but not too cold wind that doesn't make my nose red. (I wonder how much make up it takes to keep a red nose from showing. If they shot on location, those models must have been cold.)

Yeah. Okay. Then the fact that the life I'm living is mine and whatever I happen to be wearing, that life isn't going to be professionally lit, arranged, and retouched settles onto my brain, and I come back to reality. Life is good, and it's even picturesque at times, but those pictures are live and organic, unlike the picture of the woman wearing a knit-lace dress and holding a sled dog on a rope leash or the picture of the woman cross-country skiing in a silk-trimmed cashmere cardigan, fine-wale corduroy trousers, and cascading bauble necklace. I mean, don't we all don cashmere and baubles when we want to participate in rigorous outdoor aerobic activity? Sheesh.

So I've learned a lesson today. Coveting can be hazardous to my peace of mind. That's probably why God told us not to do it. And really, do not worry about what you will eat off of, what you will sleep on, and what you will wear. Is not food more important than platewear and sleep more important than sheets? And isn't Christmas about something totally other than reindeer flannel and snowman pajamas anyway? Plus the Exchange has sweater dresses for $15 next week, so I can have my cake and eat it too. But I think I'm going to throw that catalogue away. Why put myself in the way of more temptation?

Tada!

Oh, by the way, I finished my first quilt! It is all stitched, stuffed, and quilted. I even did some of the quilting and all of the binding by hand because my sewing machine broke. So now I have two more to do, and unless I figure out what I did to my sewing machine this time, I'll have to do them by hand. Oh well, sometimes I think it's better that way.

The quilting is in the shape of a spiderweb, which I thought was rather clever given the material in the quilt. I'm sure it was much easier than actually quilting a pattern into it. I get to do that with the next one. Does anyone have a good idea for a quilting pattern to go with cartoon ducks that wear capes to fly?

Beginning to regret it.

Seth has duty tonight, and I'm beginning to regret all the anxiety I cultivated over his impending separation from the Navy. I had forgotten how lonely one gets, how stressful it can be, when one's husband works 36 hours at a stretch, comes home to catch a good night's sleep, works another 12 hours, comes home to sleep, and then disappears for 36 hours again.

For those relatives who haven't heard the explanation yet, duty means standing the night watch on board Seth's submarine. Every position aboard the sub must be manned by at least one person at all times just in case something goes wrong. Seth watches over the nuclear reactor which is a very technical piece of equipment. Even when a reactor isn't on, it has the potential to go wrong. Nothing ever happens, but many things could (what, I don't know, and I don't want to know. Those are Navy secrets, and I'm sure being in on the loop wouldn't help my peace of mind.).


The number duty days that a person has in a week depends on the number of people in a division or department. Some stations have five-day watch rotations; others have ten-day rotations. On carriers, they might go as many as 13 days between duty days. We've done three days or four. Once every three nights, instead of coming home after a twelve hour day, my husband stays on the boat and works at least six hours in addition to the full day he has already put in. He packs some leftovers with him when he leaves in the morning and makes sure he has his Kindle(tm) and his laptop. He stashes a blanket and a pillow in his bunk. He stands at least six hours of watch between the time when the other guys go home and the time they come back again in the morning. And then he goes back to work. I see him again when he comes home the following night. I'm not used to this.

For the past three months, Seth has been on "off-crew." (To all Navy wives who do not have off-crew, I bow my head and beg that they would please put up with my whining.) All Trident class submarines have two crews: blue and gold. Having two crews keeps the boat in constant circulation. "Off-crew" means that Seth's crew (gold crew) has been engaged in training exercises while the other crew (blue crew) has been handling the boat. The guys generally regard training periods as a waste of time, but training has the advantage of normal work weeks. They leave home at a reasonable hour. They come home at a reasonable hour. Sometimes they come home before noon. There are no duty days while we are on off-crew. I guess I got spoiled.

This past weekend, Seth had duty on Friday. According to custom, he should then have Saturday and Sunday off as in any normal work week. That's one of the perks of Friday duty. Weekends are still weekends. But Seth's chief is anticipating the birth of a child soon, so he wants to get as much maintenance done before said baby comes as possible. I appreciate his motivation. Seth would feel the same way. However that means that instead of coming home on Saturday, Seth worked another twelve hour day. Just before dinner, he called me and confessed that he'd forgotten his keys on the boat and he did not want to go back. I put Boogaloo in the car and drove down and picked him up. He nearly fell asleep over dinner.

Then we dropped him off the next morning at 6 because the Chief wanted to get a few more hours of work done. Boogaloo thought we were dropping him off for a deployment, and she was hysterical the whole way home. He didn't make it to church like we'd hoped, but he did stop at the store and get lunch. We drifted in and out of football all afternoon, and this morning, after a few hours of extra sleep, he went back to work for Monday duty. Over the past four days (102 hours), I have seen, held, spoken to, and slept next to my husband perhaps 24 hours total. Over the past week, he has worked seven days and three nights. It's been a hard week. Schedules like that weigh on our health, our happiness, and our home maintenance, and they don't do much for our sex life either.

As the command would be quick to point out, even those 24 hours are more than I would have gotten if the boat was gone. However, as the command also acknowledges, sometimes these maintenance periods can be worse. There's no period of adjustment or time to build up emotional competence. There are just nights without my husband and the emotional whiplash of uncertain schedules. I know some women who look forward to duty days. They say they get more done in a duty day than in the rest of the week combined. I really can't identify. I also know women who look forward to deployments. They say they have "a good Navy marriage." As soon as they get sick of their husbands, the Navy takes them away for a few months. Nope, not me.

When we first moved to B-town and were assigned to the boat, an experienced Navy wife told me, "Oh, don't worry about duty days. You might actually want a night to yourself." That was nearly five years ago, and I can safely say that the night hasn't come yet. Maybe I'm not as independent as my friends, but I miss him even when he's only gone 36 hours. I start listening for him to drive in around four in the afternoon, and I don't stop listening until six when he would reasonably be home. That feeling that I get when I've made myself remember that he won't be home tonight is one of the lowest in the world, at least in my experience. It's not a feeling that I'm going to miss when Seth is out of the Navy.

Fall in the NW.

A couple of you have commented that I seem sad and lonely in my last two posts. I'm not really that sad all the time. I just save my blog posting for nights when Seth is gone. After a day of chasing Boogaloo around, a dinner of leftovers, and an absence of husband to look forward to at night, the blog gets me at my lowest, and so do you.

I confess that for whatever reason, I've been awfully tired these past couple of weeks. I blame the receding sun, the activity level of my two-year-old, and the constant presence of political ads. Seth called from the boat tonight to tell me that he will have to work tomorrow morning, so instead of sitting in church together as a family, I'll come home to my exhausted husband at lunch time for the third Sunday in a row. After he hung up, I was so miffed that I just had to get out of the house, so Boogaloo and I went for a walk between rain showers to admire the puddles and jump in the leaves. Our perpetual canopy of cloud and rain have only just set in on us for the year. The last month has been absolutely gorgeous. We've had sunshine nearly every day and the fall colors have been spectacular. I've only just noticed the colors this fall. The last few years I've been disposed to complain because we really don't have enough red near our house, only dingy yellows with brown edges. This year, as the dark clouds rolled in, I noticed that a yellow tree can really light up a skyline. In fact it can positively eminate energy. On a cloudy day, surrounded by dark conifers, a red deciduous tree is a torch (this picture comes from the Catholic church parking lot), and a yellow one is a veritable sunbeam (this one is in our neighbor's yard). The tree in the background of this picture has been my saving grace these past few weeks. It really cheers me up when the rest of life gets me down. Every day, I pull into my driveway and drink in this radiant bundle of leaves. It acts like a sun on a stick. My eyes get wider, my pulse gets slower, and I take a deep breath every time I see it. As the weeks go by, it gets progressively brighter, bolder, and redder, even as the leaves get fewer. I wish I knew what kind of tree it is. When I get to a house I expect to stay in, I'm going to plant several.

I wonder if autumn foliage could really serve as sunshine during the fall. Does the eye respond to color like the eye responds to sunshine? Could autumn foliage lessen the effects of Seasonal Affect Disorder? Could the brain process the colors of leaves into more seratonin during these winter months? Light therapy, the most common treatment for S.A.D., involves sitting near an intense light and absorbing light through the eyes (don't look directly at the bulb). A tree in autumn foliage reflects more light than its greener counterparts or a cloudy sky.

Who knows? It would be interesting to find out whether places with brilliant autumn colors have fewer or briefer episodes of Seasonal Affect Disorder and depression, all other things being equal. Perhaps that's why we enjoy looking at autumn leaves so much. We get back some of the sunlight that has been stored in them.

Other kinds of trees I'd dearly like to plant include maple sycamores and poplars. They are the sources of our most brilliant colors around here. Near the highway, where the conifers have been cut back and let other trees in, is one of the most spectacular autumn sights I have ever seen. I would back my trees against Vermont or New Hampshire or any other place that is famous for its trees. We have maples, maple sycamores, birches and beeches, all breaking through the deep green branches of firs and lighting up an otherwise dismal charcoal-colored sky, and occasionally a vibrant golden poplar towers above them all. I love driving up the 3 to Poulsbo every week, but alas, I can't share the feeling with you because there's no place to pull over and take a picture, and I wouldn't expect to capture it if I could. Some things just have to be seen for themselves.

Facing Change.

The other day, as we were driving to church, my husband turned to me and said, "As you might have figured out, I actually like change." The context for his statement was a loop the Navy had thrown at us. Seth is set to separate from the Navy toward the end of next summer. The Navy had decided, for various reasons and purposes, that it might possibly separate him at the end of this fall. The key words were "might possibly." The military doesn't deal in definites, at least not in advance.

Seth was excited. When the personnel people told him that he might no longer be 2nd class Petty Officer Atsma by Christmas time, he immediately began thinking about what his new job would be like. He began picturing himself tearing down nuclear reactors at the Hanford Nuclear Reserve or flying out to Hawaii to fix submarines and coming home within a week or writing software for the healthcare industry in Madison, Wisconsin. He saw only possibilities. Okay, that's not entirely fair. He saw difficulties too, but for him the possibilities easily overwhelmed the difficulties, questions, and confusions. He was confident that everything would work out. He always is.

I saw things differently. I could see his possibilities, and I like them, but the most present thought in my mind was "What do I do now, and what should I do first?". I could see a million obstacles between how things are for us now and how things will be when the Lord provides. We have a house which we just re-sided and refinanced. Said house is not ready for sale; it needs new paint in almost every room and cleaning of every carpet. Because of said residing, we have no savings to speak of either. We have no job at the present. We will have neither health nor life insurance once we separate, and we have no experience finding health or life insurance either. The Navy took care of that. This is what I saw in my mind when Seth came home and said, "Oh, by the way, Love, the Navy told me today that they might let me go at the end of November."

I think my panic disturbed him a little. In his mind, he takes care of the necessary, and God takes it where He wants to go. So he put his resume out on job engines and began applying to the few jobs in his field in our area. He was completely calm about the whole thing, but the whole time, my mind was racing, and in spite of a strong sense that God was going to work everything out smoothly, I couldn't help but say to myself "What if . . . . what if . . . . what if . . . ?" I wasn't questioning Seth's ability to get a job or his competence in taking care of our family, but let's face it, there are a lot of people like us out of work right now. These are frightening times, and I respond to those fears more than he does. I think he understood that that's all I was doing, but I could also see that he was hurt that I couldn't join in his excitement at the prospect of something new.

Remember premarital counseling, when you both sit down with the pastor who is going to marry you, and he goes through all the questions that help you figure you if your marriage is going to last. (My pre-marital counseling sessions were conference calls. That's what happens when one's fiance is in the Navy.) Our pastor asked us questions about spirituality, our relationships with God, marital headship, love languages, attraction, money, and expectations in life. No one thought to ask, "How do you approach change? Are you comfortable with the way your spouse approaches change?" I wish he had. It's an important question, a question that should be thought out ahead of time. A time of big change is a time of big stress and uncertainty. It is not the time that someone wants to be blindsided by systemic marital misunderstanding.

Seth and I were prepared for it for a disparity of feelings on this subject. If the Navy has taught us nothing else, it has taught us to be open with each other about our feelings in trying situations. They've pulled premature separation on us before, but never with this much probability that it would actually happen. I know that Seth has been looking forward to civilian life almost as long as he's worn a uniform, and he knows that I would rather put up with anything than face uncertainty. But I can face when I remember that Seth is by my side, and God has us both in a very strong grip. And Seth can put up with a few more months in the Navy for the sake of my sense of security.

As it turns out, the Navy has decided that it will keep Seth until the end of his enlistment. I could see that he was disappointed. He comforted himself by saying that at least he'll be able to go to Guam and eat at his favorite restaurant one last time. Poor comfort to a man who thought he'd be a civilian in a few weeks, but he hid his disappointment for me. As for me, I did my darndest to look less relieved than I felt, but I don't think I was very convincing. I know that sooner or later separation will come, and it will probably come smoothly, but I'd like time to meet it. We still expect to get out in August, and until then, life goes on. After that, well, life will go on too, and somewhere deep inside of me, I'm learning to be okay with that.