I sought inspiration for writing this letter by taking a look at last year’s update letter. I was actually a bit shocked; some of the things I wrote about last year were on my mind to write about this year. I guess that means that my memories are compressing as I age; truly time seems to pass so quickly.
Last Christmas Laurie and I decided to celebrate the weekend together at a lovely cabin with a sleeping loft just north of Bemidji, Minnesota. We learned something very important about sleeping lofts. When you get the temp in the cabin ‘just right’ as you sit and cuddle on the couch downstairs by the stove enjoying the flames, you’ve warmed the sleeping loft up to about 90+ degrees; a climate not conducive to snuggling under the covers watching the snow fall outside in the moonlight. It was well below zero outside and well past balmy (straight to hot) inside. The next night we drug the mattresses downstairs and slept in the sitting room. As we say in Minnesota, ‘lesson learned’. We were able to enjoy walks, cross country skiing, and a quiet time of togetherness, we say, “Sometimes it’s good to be just, ‘Kent & Laurie’”.
We began the year rather busily setting up our first ever photo exhibit at A Center for the Arts in Fergus Falls. By the end of the year we had participated or been the featured artists in seven exhibits around Otter Tail County. It could be said that this was the ‘year of photography exhibits’ for us. My mother and step-father decided to fly up to Minnesota from their home in Arkansas for the reception at our first exhibit in February. My grandmother was able to join us as well, along with her housemates from the adult foster care home she was living at. She sat at the reception for a while drinking juice and I was able to introduce her to various friends, co-workers, and exhibit-goers. A very nice moment for me was when she said, “Kent, Kent, (I bent down to listen) I’m so very proud of you.”
Ed (my step-father) contracted pneumonia a few days later and ended up in the hospital extending their visit by more than a week. One Saturday morning during their extended stay, Laurie and I were on the way to Fergus Falls for a Red Cross First Aid/CPR instructor training and received a phone call informing us that my grandma had quietly passed away in her bed a few minutes before. She was the last of our grandparents to pass away. We made arrangements with funeral homes and by the next Wednesday we were in Anaheim, California for grandma’s burial near my grandfather and father’s graves. We arranged to stay five days to take a bit of a break after her burial service and were able to have fun one evening at Medieval Times where we were served a meal “medieval” style while watching a real jousting contest. However, we were quickly reminded of why we live in rural Minnesota. It was damp, dreary, and congested in California, so we made arrangements to leave two days early and return to the beauty of snow and crisp-clear air. We were home.
I continue to work at Synstelien Community Services. My title is Services Coordinator and my picture and a bit about me is on our company website (www.synsteliencommunityservices.com). I cannot overstate how much I love my work; it is a large part of what I believe I was created to do. I create many of the reports we make to the various agencies working with our clients, as well as, providing behavioral programming and some case management. Basically, I get to tell our clients’ stories. It’s very cool and I work with the best team of individuals I’ve ever been associated with. Laurie is also involved by volunteering, as needed, for administrative and organizational duties, as well as, taking part in new employee training/orientation by teaching First Aid and CPR.
I was able to upgrade my photo equipment to a Nikon D70 Digital SLR in April, as Laurie teased about in last year’s letter. Our nature photographic work continues to be available for viewing (and purchase!) on our website which can be found at (www.togetherbydesign.com). My new camera, being much more capable and complicated, came equipped with a steep learning curve (what happened to my darkroom; it’s been smushed into my computer!) and my outside time has been somewhat dear this year. Actually, it turned out to be a bad year weather-wise and well-lit days were hard to come by. We had some early summer storms that plowed serious swaths through local woods and nearly flattened some houses. Many large, old trees were simply tossed aside by the wind. I made some photographic progress this year, but not as much as I’d hoped. We also were able to sell some work, but as I say to people, I still need to hold onto my ‘day job’.
In June we traded in our trusty 1997 Ford Ranger on an even trustier 2001 GMC Sierra truck. We needed a larger truck to tow the utility trailer we purchased, that we are in-process of converting to a ‘portable cabin’ so-to-speak. We had shopped for travel trailers off and on for the past 5+ years and always came away dissatisfied with whatever we found, both in price and in quality. All of the used trailers we looked at seemed pretty worn and we realized that they were of fairly poor quality and generally idiotic arrangement. We realized that we could build exactly what we wanted from a utility trailer for much less money so we designed a floor plan (http://web.prtel.com/klrunge/TrailerFloorplan.jpg); told the manufacturer where to locate the doors, windows, and vents; parked it in our woods; and (slowly) got to work.
In July we drove to Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, to visit our niece, Lacey, age 17. Lacey had been diagnosed some months earlier with bone cancer and was at the Mayo for bone graft surgery on her legs…yeow! She had been receiving chemotherapy, so it was a bit of a shock to see her swollen and bald, but we were all thankful for prayer and medical advances that have allowed her to live. Her chemotherapy continued in her home state of Hawaii until earlier this month. Recently she had a CT scan that showed spots on her lungs, but so far doctors don’t think they are cancerous. Many thanks to those who kept Lacey in your prayers. While we were in Rochester we were blessed to be able to spend time with Lacey’s dad (Laurie’s brother), our sister-in-law, and our nieces and one nephew (Lacey’s brother and sisters). They had driven out from Colorado to be with Lacey during the surgery. On the way to Rochester we stopped in Minneapolis for another hospital visit. One of our clients was slowly recovering from spine surgery…more on him later.
In August one of Laurie’s aunts (Marie Bublitz) passed away rather suddenly. We took the day off and drove to Minneapolis for the funeral and were able to briefly visit with Laurie’s mom, dad, and sister, Teri, who drove out from Nebraska. The nice thing about funerals is the chance to visit and reconnect a little with relatives and friends. Laurie finds herself thinking and praying for her uncle and cousins who will spend this Christmas without their wife and mother; life is sometimes so hard. A few days later, Laurie’s sister, Trish, along with her daughter, Kaylee, flew out from Washington state for her high school reunion. It was good to reunite three of Laurie’s five sisters.
Later in the fall we were visited by our eldest niece Jolene, her new husband and two boys, Josiah (4) and Blake (6 mo). Blake is our fourth grand-nephew. (We neglected to mention that we visited him about 6 hours after he was born in April!) We were grateful to have Jolene’s husband (Will) fix the siding that fell from the top of the house (just under the eaves) after both birds and bats had nested there and finally a gray squirrel tore off when trying to get to our bird feeders attached to the upper floor windows. I can’t stand going that high up on a ladder ever since a rock-climbing fall some years back.
Since Laurie was a young girl, she has dreamed of learning to play the piano, so this summer we bought a 1932 Baldwin upright piano from our piano tuning/technician friend (Wally Doric). She began to take lessons in September from a local songwriter/musician named Dave Stoddard (www.davestoddard.com) who recently moved to Fergus from Wisconsin along with his wife Molly and 7 year old daughter, Emily. Laurie met Molly at the Prairie Wetlands Learning Center while removing our photo display there. (We have another exhibit scheduled there next March during their “Marsh Madness” event.) We’ve struck up a neat friendship with Dave & Molly because of our common interests in music and nature, not to mention literature. Their daughter, Emily, loaned Laurie a couple of books about a real, young pioneer girl from Wisconsin named, Caddie Woodlawn; books which Laurie has come to love.
One of Laurie’s interior decorating projects for the year was centered on an interesting architectural feature of our downstairs. There is a place on the ceiling where an air duct for the heating system passes, that leaves about an eleven inch high ‘decorate-able area’ that overlooks our downstairs living/family rooms. A huge part of Laurie’s brain is dedicated to colors, matching, and decorating (you know the part I’m talking about, men, it’s the small part of our mind that eventually learns to say, “goes with”, “brings out”, and follows our wife’s directions about how to match shirts and slacks). Well, Laurie is awesome at this stuff. I can’t pre-visualize like she can, but I can sure appreciate the end-product. The process started this summer when Laurie went on a doily and ‘pretty old plate’ discovery binge at antiques shops and a flea market, with the intent of decorating that area. When she couldn’t find the exact doilies she wanted, she elicited my mom’s (Audrey’s) help in designing and creating over 30 doilies in the appropriate colors and patterns; it was a joint-interstate project that was fun for both of them.
On November 16th and again on December 7th our team at Synstelien Community Services lost dearly loved clients. Just yesterday (Dec 16th) we had a memorial service for the second. We deeply appreciated being able to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of someone we all cared for. The day prior to Thanksgiving we were involved in the funeral service for the client who passed away on the 16th. We sang a couple of country tunes at his funeral, since he and I shared a love of country music. It was absolutely the best funeral we’ve ever attended…an incredible celebration of an incredible life. It is sobering to reconsider all that we hold dear and important to a meaningful life in the context of the effect, one of the ‘least of these’, had on the people around him. In the new year I hope to start researching and writing about the life of this man. I need to work out some details, but hopefully by our next update letter, this task will be well on it’s way. If you’d like to read some of my writings about this and other subjects you can check out my blog (weblog) at (www.saintsandchildren.blogspot.com).
Our client and staff Christmas parties were held just a bit over a week ago. We were able to join in a caroling team for the client party and the planners of the staff party had great fun by placing Daryl (our director) and I on the spot as team leaders for a silly game of, “Synstelien Family Feud”, based on the old, “Family Feud” game show. I’m thinking it would be funnier if they’d not use me again, somehow I seem so stiff and weird in situations like that; I’m not a great “on the spot” thinker.
Laurie worked for a few weeks very recently in the Fergus Falls College Cafeteria; she was thinking that it would be a low stress environment to make a bit of a supplemental income, but it really wasn’t her ‘cup of tea’. She did, however, discover that she made just enough money on the side to be able to afford a daytime companion: a cute, little, black & white Shih Tzu puppy we picked out just last night (Dec 16th), who will be ready to come home with us in two weeks. She is cuter than any “button” ever created and is tentatively named, “Little Girl”. It was tough picking between her and her brother, mostly because in choosing one you feel like you’re rejecting the other. We’ll have some time to get ready for her arrival at our home and Laurie is looking very forward to having someone to take care of and keep company with during my long days at work. Laurie’s making up for lost “puppy” time by planning out bedding and eating spots as well as deciding upon the colors of all her accessories. Laurie can’t wait to put pretty little bows and barrettes in her our new puppy’s hair. The great thing about this breed is that they are one of the lowest on the allergic response scale, which is a big deal to me, since I’m allergic to most dogs. On one hand we’re astounded that we are getting a “foof” dog; on the other hand, we’re wondering why we waited so long. Live and learn. We’re not sure how she’ll do with going potty outside in the snow since it’s already way over her head; guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
We experienced a rather nasty ice storm the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Laurie and I went to Wal-Mart for our monthly grocery shopping and to Perham to deliver some photographs for an exhibit at the Cultural Center in New York Mills. I slipped getting out of our truck and bruised my tailbone on the doorsill, running board, and ground…in that order. While we stopped in Perham to drop off the photos, Laurie stepped from the frozen grass to the frozen sidewalk and ended up flat on her back. I finished off the day’s comedy of falls by sliding (again on my butt, but this time the meatier part) down three stairs; finding myself wadded up in a heap on the frozen grass. Don’t let anyone tell you that driving in freezing rain is the most dangerous; the driving is nothing compared to the walking!
We’ve both battled a tough respiratory infection for the last month or so…sort of a long-acting bronchial crud that atypically started with Laurie…I’m usually the first to become ill. We’re hoping it clears up soon as we’re quite fatigued by the whole thing. Amazingly enough, Laurie’s been able to sing her way through two funerals and a Christmas party (not to mention the practices) without a problem. Singing is Laurie’s antidote to virtually everything that ails her.
We continue to struggle with being childless for these 12 and a half years of marriage as it continues to leave an aching hole in our hearts. We pursued fertility treatments this past year, but to no avail as yet. Please say a prayer for us as we reassess in January as to the direction we should take in fulfilling our long time heart’s desire to be parents.
The sun rose this morning (Dec 17th) on a Currier & Ives scene outside of each and every window of our home. It has snowed nearly continuously since Monday night, in fact, I probably need to get out of here so that I can go plow. The view out of our garage or any window you pick, is incredibly breathtaking and we find ourselves continually thanking our Heavenly Father for creating such beauty for us to enjoy. Please keep in touch; we so love to hear from you all!
Our love and best wishes,
Kent & Laurie Anne Runge
