Jill Barville

The text from my mother-in-law was direct, though I didn’t see it for hours. My attention was focused on the snow-covered highway and a catch-up conversation with my son. When we finally stopped for dinner, I assumed Penny was checking in on our travels or finalizing whether they were coming for the holidays. But her news was much more important.

We hadn’t planned on going away for our anniversary, even though it’s a major milestone. Before my next column runs, Curtis and I will hit the quarter century mark of marriage. To be clear, this doesn’t mean we’re old. It means we were young.

Driving around town with Santa hats, ice cream and holiday music became a yearly tradition of hunting for holiday displays and the best Christmas lights. For only the price of gas and some ice cream, it was an evening of entertainment and family fun.

The holidays are well-seasoned with concerts, recitals and plays. As a parent of a musician, it’s the Christmas tradition I enjoy the most. But as I anticipate another season filled with song, I have one dread – the audience member, or more, who upstages the performers and mars the music.

The crowd parts like biblical waters, creating a human aisle in the cafeteria, now echoing with a crescendo of clapping. At the end, a boy waits with flowers, a sign and a smile. Marker on poster-board spelling a clever question, often ending with, “Hoco?”

Fall is my favorite season. Like Baby Bear’s porridge, it’s not too hot and not too cold. You can enjoy the vibrant colors wearing light layers without shivering or sweating. My only complaint about fall is that it procrastinates in the morning.

The first time Ian asked for a suit, he was about 7 and I was so shocked he wanted to wear anything besides sneakers and shorts, I bought pinstriped pants with a matching shirt, tie and vest in the children’s department the next time I went shopping.

Before this month I’d have asserted that I’m not gullible, susceptible to spoofing or easily manipulated. I understand and speak sarcasm fluently and have prided myself on seeing through attempts to hoax, deceive and distract, no matter how subtle.

As my family can attest, certain sounds send me over the edge. They spark a revulsion so deep it must be genetic. At least two of my children share my aversion, though in varying degrees.

Finding summer work between high school and college is an industrious endeavor that may make actual work feel breezy by comparison. I don’t envy my son the cold-calling task aimed at getting his first foot in the door.

Summer is in a hurry this year. Never mind its announced arrival later this month, the season couldn’t even wait for the graduation caps to fall from the sky and settle into a corner of the closet or a box under the bed.

The kids may be ready to move on, but for families that have bonded during the high school years, the last spring of school can be a wistful time.

Two dads were cheerfully commiserating about the costs they’d paid for their boys to play on a travel team. One had a note of pride in his voice. His son was good and those receipts had helped pave the way to youth soccer success.

Train noise can become part of the fabric of our lives, if only you let it.

Until last weekend, I’d been driving a mom-mobile for 15 years and five months, not that I was counting. I was too busy strapping children in and out of car seats, carting them to and fro and enjoying the unfettered conversation that often happens when you’re behind the wheel.

It’s the gift giving season. The wonderful, awful, anxiety-invoking season of feeling inadequate at appropriately expressing love or camaraderie through a tradition we cannot culturally escape whether we’re at work, church or home. For some people, shopping, making, wrapping and giving gifts is pure pleasure. It’s their love language. They delight in hunting down the perfect present based on some snippet of conversation you had six months ago. Or they bake, knit, crochet, paint or craft a one-of-kind, labor-of-love that’s not only a gift, but a work of art.

Power outage a good reminder of our community’s capacity for compassion.

The best thing for any trip? A cool-headed companion.

The letter was complimentary. At first read, I couldn’t help but feel my parental pride swell a little. It praised my son on his athletic achievements. Then it offered a string of ego strokes with words like “qualified” and “selected” spread liberally throughout the page, like too much frosting on a piece of cake.

As I read the six inspiring local weight loss stories in Tuesday’s paper, I noticed a commonality that gives me hope for the way our culture considers the human body. They all talked some about what they could do and how they felt instead of focusing on how they looked.

My favorite back-to-school picture was when my kids were starting eighth, sixth and third grades. Decked in new clothes, they stood on the front step and gave the obligatory smile for the camera. Then they made goofy faces with crossed eyes, lolling tongues and awkward postures. I printed the silly second pose and taped it to my freezer door. It still makes me smile when I go for the ice cream.

Last week when I read the article in Sunday’s paper about Idaho campuses targeting sexual assault, I held my breath for a moment, the way I always do when I read statistics about assault. I have a daughter. The article by Idaho Statesman reporter Katy Moeller repeats a statistic I’ve heard before: “One in five women will be sexually assaulted during college and it’s most likely to happen during their freshman or sophomore years.”