Hello at last! Yes, I intend to return to my blog more regularly now after the busy, wonderful whirlwind of summer. To start us off, here’s a guest post written by my wife, Julie. These are her reflections on this summer of 2014. I’ll be posting again very soon now, but anyway, here’s Julie:

What I Did Last Summer

A sudden, harsh loss of control. Perhaps you have felt it as a car, or a lightpole, or the ground raced toward your windshield. Or the moment you inadvertently hit Send.

I felt it in May, stepping out of the underpass into the glare of a city lit with summer fire. Not a step: a ramp. I should’ve known.

Crunch. I crumpled to the ground.

Sudden doom and what did I do, what did I do, oh crap oh crap, what did I do?  Images flashed through my mind: Lying on a gurney under a surgeon’s light –he’s armed with a power drill. An early flight home. All this travel for nothing. Oh…WHAT did I do? Look where you walk, you IDIOT.

Hands helped me up onto a chair once I let them. Tanya beside me, worried, trying to calm me. A quickly-assembled action team of post-Maidan Kievans.

My voice: “I think I’m okay now . . . “ and fade to black.

Tanya’s freaked out face came into view. “Why am I . . . wet?” I mumbled.

Wet naps on forehead and chest. A random blonde girl, checking my pulse and asking me EMT-like questions in decent English.

Looking back, I felt as safe and cared for on the street—by random citizens—as I did in the hospital. Perhaps they’ve had some recent . . . experience.

Only one frustrating but later hilarious comment from the first vendor-witness: “Oh, people always fall here. All the Americans fall here. Ten times a day they fall!”

Americans! I’m no stupid tourist American. Harumph.

Or maybe . . . I am. Now.

I was treated quickly and well in the hospital. The doctor saw my trail mix and water—my attempt to stave off lightheadedness and nausea—and told Tanya and Fred that we should’ve bought a Pepsi. Huh.

Casting room looked like a construction site. Joked with the cast lady about amputation when she marked me with an X. Don’t cut off the wrong leg.

“You’ll need to buy crutches,” they told me. Tanya and Fred started wheeling me out. “Oh you can’t get a wheelchair down there.” Consternation. Tanya ran down and brought back the elbow crutches—the only kind there. What on earth do people do if they don’t come here with a team?? I thought, grateful for mine.

***

It is even hard to sit with an ankle in a cast. Your balance is all off. One leg elevated, you can never really sit up properly, which means always feeling a bit drowsy.

Change of plans and timing. New ways of doing things. Hands and pits sore. Getting up in the morning and heading to the bathroom—a herculean task.  Everything—a  herculean task.  Turtle showers.

Terrifying steps are everywhere. Whether two or twenty, they are all terrifying.

I, who used to hail all the benefits of the squatty-potty, suddenly find myself completely incapable of using one. The worst thing.

I don’t miss it. What on earth do the sick, the invalids do? Stay inside, I guess.

How nice it is to have working legs!

***

Many interviews and my questions kept changing. Simplifying. Adapting. Always felt unsure of my effectiveness. Was this very professional? How is this supposed to work?

Months later, I’m still just starting to sift through recordings. Worried I should have—oh I should have transcribed earlier!!! But time rolled by, and I suppose most of the time, I wasn’t just watching it pass. When I wasn’t in migraine-hazes, (or recovering from food poisoning), there were people. Better to be available in the country that cost cash and time and fear and a bone—than to stare at a computer in solitary labor all day, I suppose. But I still worry about when I’ll find the 100 hours to transcribe and then analyze. It’s dumb, though, I suppose, to worry about that when God got us to a war-torn country and back without a scratch (save those I could’ve gotten anywhere).

***

My happy husband wrote and shopped. And did everything. Held onto me on many staircases, warding off my panic.

It was a gift—to not be alone in it all, and to know his light wasn’t snuffed while I worked on mine. I can picture him, sitting at many tables: Amy’s lovely antique in the living room and her desk-nook in the window overlooking many towering blocks of apartment. His makeshift desk in the mission apartment—I didn’t see him working at its kitchen table or big room table, as that always happened after I turned in for the night. Signs & Shadows unfolding all over Ukraine, adding to the list of settings in which Fred wrote this most recent story. I wonder what colors she added.

I know that journeying with my writer-man meant capturing feelings and images from the Maidan that otherwise would’ve slipped through my fingers. My heart grows ten times just being near his.

***

Swimming in people’s heads—I’m still swimming. Not only in ideas about worship and church, how things ought to be vs how things are, but also—a few precious bonuses. Stories from eyewitnesses. From modern-day potential martyrs. Stories from the soon-to-be or recently-been front lines. Oh the glory, the courage. And the mess and the decay and the confusion and the insipid evil. Oh God, save Ukraine.

***

July and August—months of love, loss, much laughter—and a lot of other things that don’t start with l.  Creativity together. A wonderful disappearance into imagination that I haven’t enjoyed in years—have never enjoyed with a boy of 48. And by “boy” I don’t mean what grumpy, tired women usually mean: a man who is selfishly immature. No, I mean a man who was wise beyond his years as a child and is imaginative and wonder-filled as a grown up. I am blessed and we are blessed.

I am not quite ready for summer to end.