Quilt with pansies, hand-stitched

Every year we lived in Siloam Springs Allen Canning would plant pansies in the beds outside of their corporate offices along Main Street. They would do this in November, and the flowers would seem to last well into January after snow and ice blanketed them in the early winter months. “They are generally very cold hardy plants surviving freezing even during their blooming period,” Wikipedia says of the plant.

In light of this, I have a hard time understanding how “pansy” became a derogatory term referring to “a weak, effeminate, and often cowardly man.” Seems like a misnomer to me.

Which is why I have no problem with the new quilt hanging in our bedroom, hand-quilted by my mother-in-law. I wonder if they would survive a Nebraska winter?

We chose instead, just after graduating, to serve in mission mobilization with Mission Data International, which we’re still doing. So from the get go we had to raise money for my own fairly frugal salary. My wife became editing manager of our small town newspaper while we raised support, but she quit as we had planned when my student loans were paid off.

I don’t remember exactly what triggered the desire to seek out suburbia this week. It may have been seeing that happy family driving down the road in their newer car, combined with the chaos of moving into a very small house in neighborhood I don’t know anything about.

And now I’m wondering — not for the first time — now I’m asking the question “What is the appeal of suburbia?” Is it merely social pressure or is there more to it? Could it be there is something about the suburban space that hearkens to our subconscious? Is there something in us as humans that yearns for more open spaces (Yes, I know I’m posting this just after suggesting I miss downtown living.)? In recent years I’ve become a little less of a critic of the American suburbs, realizing we can’t just summarily do away with them and wondering, as already stated, if they came into being and proliferated with some substance beyond the greed of speculative developers.

My wife and I certainly have our reasons for intentionally standing outside of the typical pursuit of American suburbia, keyword here being pursuit. Our own interests, passions, point our time and efforts towards ends that, while still personal, attempt to look beyond our own comfort. We hope to be a counterculture for the common good. While this can be done — and should be done by people who feel called to it — in the context of the suburbs, it’s not where we’re at.

As an aside, another aspect of this week’s enigmatic desire to have a suburban life — which the wife very accurately pointed out has enough problems of its own since it’s also populated by people — might a sense of isolation I’ve had over the past few months. Working a more or less full time job away from the computer (along with still working my part-time M-DAT job mobilizing, breaking in a puppy and moving) has taken more getting used to than I expected. I miss blogging, being able to read blogs, being able to read substantial articles on the arts or theology during the week. I’m not a news junky by any stretch of the imagination, but I was disappointed to learn just this morning (in an email from M-DAT HQ) that there was a volcano disrupting air travel for mission trips. We also miss our network of artistically inclined friends back in Northwest Arkansas.

How any of this relates to a desire for a suburban life, which is typically associated with isolation itself, I don’t know. But my mind seems to want to make some kind of connection to it at the moment.

You just don’t know how connected you are to a place until you leave it.

When we moved to Siloam Springs I didn’t expect to become attached to such a small community, in Arkansas, nestled into them thar hills.

What I learned is that it’s easier, in some ways, to become a part of a smaller community. And that it’s the people that make the community what it is in large part. This is no revelation to me or anyone else who’s considered the topic, but living in Arkansas was my first adult experience, so to speak, far apart from a culture that I knew.

Granted, there were some ups and downs in our relationship with the place, but the same can be said for every relationship. And there is a little more to it than just the people, especially to a visual geek (what’s the visual equivalent of “audiophile?”) like myself. For Siloam, it helped greatly to have a liberal arts university, a quaint downtown in the midst of restoration, centrally located parks with a creek running through them etc.

So at this point I’m wondering how quickly a person can become an integral part of a different — and larger — community and by what means. I have an advantage here in Grand Island having lived here for a couple years during high school, but the same could be said for the move to Arkansas, going back to the town where my wife graduated from college. However, we’re not all that convinced we’ll be here for much more than a year as we wait for certain doors to open (or not open).

What we are convinced of is that we miss Siloam Springs — with the exception of the allergens.

From our roof it was probably the most photogenic storm of the year for me. I didn’t watch it all that long though. Low hanging clouds crept in front of it and obscured my view, beside the fact it was almost dark.

And I think she was right.

As we pack up the house we’re selling some things we won’t need in the foreseeable future, or won’t have room for in our upcoming living space. I used Craigslist, which I’m pretty new to, and easily sold our guest bed and couch.

We really miss the couch.

We own other comfortable chairs, but apparently they aren’t comfortable in the same way. The plan was to replace it with a svelte black leather couch that wouldn’t aggravate my allergies like the whimsical, eight year old model we just sold. However, I was looking forward to one less large piece of furniture to move.

So the past few days I’ve been on a hunt to find a cheap and temporary replacement, most likely a comfy chair for the wife to read in. There are a couple places in town that sell used, and I’ve been to a few garage sales as well. So far everything I’ve seen has been dirty or overpriced — or entirely hideous. The one exception was a blue recliner at a friend’s yard sale; unfortunately it formerly lived with cats, which I’m quite allergic too. Another vintage store in town, Amandromeda, purveys a number of well designed seats, though none are suitable for extended periods of time with a book in your lap. I’ve also inquired via Craigslist and the Facebook Marketplace to no avail.

Next up I plan to hit a vintage spot in Fayetteville called the Flying Dog. Moving is stressful enough without a decent place to rest your rump, so I hope I can come up with a chair on this holiday weekend!

“A little bit of dissonance is really required to have something
that will hold our attention for a longer period of time.”

Two things in the past few months prompted me to ponder the idea of contrast.

First off, I’ve taken note this year of the mennonites (at least that’s what we assume they are) shopping at our local Walmart. I’ve long had a fascination with Amish (and old order Mennonite, thus) cultures, probably in large part because of what seems to be their slower paced, more relationship and community based lifestyles. Another part of my interest almost certainly stems from the culture’s seeming affirmation of working with your hands.

There are two observations I’ve made with respect to contrast in observing the local mennonites. First of all, the men dress in such a way that you can’t pick them out of a crowd: Boots, jeans and t-shirts, but you know they are mennonite because of the lady on their arm donning a modest handmade dress, with a bonnet or cap in her hair.

Secondly, the women’s more conservative dress is often at odds with their footwear. I’ve seen them wearing tennis shoes for years now, but it was only a few months ago I saw some of them wearing flip-flops for the first time. This wonderfully jarring discrepancy scrawled a grin on my face that lasted all the way into the parking lot. The nearly neon flip-flops next to pale blue, floral, handmade dresses worked for me in light of Pinnell’s quote at the top of this post, and apparently work for mennonites too. Brightly colored synthetic footwear is simply at odds with the common (mis)conceptions harbored by those of us not immersed in that culture.

I wanted to take a picture with my cameraphone, but abstained from bothering the young ladies. Instead I searched through Flickr and found the fantastic image above, taken by Jizzon, showing a group of mennonite women, some in bright colored flip-flops (click on the image to go to the Flickr page where you can enlarge it). The clothing contrast in Jizzon’s photograph isn’t as stark as it usually is in the Siloam Springs’ Walmart. The girls in his capture are wearing much brighter handmade dresses than I’ve ever seen the group in Northwest Arkansas don.

If you’re craving even more paradox, look at this image of two mennonites in dresses and bonnets on a jet ski.

Secondly, after looking through an album posted by a photographer friend, Aus10, on Facebook I commented as follows:

Interesting to me how so much portraiture (including wedding photography) in the past five years or so has been about creating contrast — or so it seems to me as an observer. The well-groomed subjects are placed in rough and rustic environments: Against decrepit buildings with peeling paint, along derelict railway tracks covered in weeds etc. Seems to me this is a new trend for the media, and one that I like (unlike this everybody jump up in the air phenomenon). Is my observation correct in your professional opinion? And can you talk about why you think this is the case, if you think my assessment is correct?

The photographer’s reply was more or less to say that the high school seniors, in the case of the album I responded to, see their friends’ photos or advertisements for Urban Outfitters and want the same thing. Regardless of these teen’s, um, less than intellectual desire for this aesthetic, I must reiterate that I think it works and works well.

My own senior picture was from one of those gimmicky old-time photo rooms (which is what I wanted it to be, although mom had me submit a color image from a $10 Sears sitting for the actual yearbook.) However, I would have liked something akin to this popular contrasty style if I would have thought it was worth it for my parents to spend $400 (I’m sure it’s much more nowadays) for proper senior photographs.

The timing of the offer, considering our present circumstances, seems Divinely orchestrated. Although there are still a myriad of things that could cause the deal to fall through (it’s still quite early in the process), at the moment we expect to be living with my parents up in Nebraska by the end of July.

On the assumption that we’re moving back north, I thought I’d write a little lament about leaving Arkansas and Siloam Springs.

Other than the pervasive lack of sidewalks, Siloam Springs is a great little community. Sure, it has [other] peculiarities and political, um, intrigue, but so does every town. Overall we’ve come to love this place and its people. Upon moving we’ll especially miss:

• The people, first and foremost. It’s quite rotten that, being summer, some of our closest friends are traveling and won’t be back before we move!
• The flora, something the Ozarks are known for. We’ll miss the the golden raintrees, southern magnolias, mimosas, myrtles, dogwoods, wysteria etc etc
• For the time being, we’ll miss being in a community with a liberal arts university.
• I will miss the sound of summer nights, when a chorus of insects pierce the still, muggy air. Although we won’t miss the insects.
• Tower Bar-B-Q, and barbecue in general.

We’ll also miss the quaintness of the community and the renewed downtown with its parks, just three blocks from our house. I walked through yesterday evening and noticed significant progress on one of the few remaining vacant buildings. A swanky Greek restaurant is going into this building, something that downtown Siloam Springs has wanted for years.