Bittersweet visitation

When I woke up this morning I decided to stay in bed for a bit and start a new book. The one I finished last night was part of the Dear Canada series (yes, I'm pretty sure it's a copycat of the Dear America books) about a slave girl from Virginia who escaped with her family to West Canada (modern-day Ontario) during the Civil War. The book I started today "The Unfinished Angel" by Sharon Creech is written very differently than any book I've ever read. I'll probably do a review of it on Enjambments when I'm finished with it though, so I'm not going to spend much time talking about it here. While I was chatting online to Jonathan, my friend Jodi called so I spent about an hour on the phone with her catching up on her life and telling her about mine. It was nice to hear from her again, but it definitely would have been better to see her in person. Oh well. She spent Christmas with her brother and sister-in-law in Spokane and then went to Walla Walla to visit her grandparents before going back to Alberta. After that I was planning to get some of my stuff together and start packing since we're flying down to Seattle tomorrow evening, but that never happened. At this point in time I'm unsure if I'll even be finished packing by the time we have to leave for the airport. I don't even want to think about it since I'm not sure what's going to happen once we get to the airport. Since the Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt most international flights to the States have new security measures and many airlines aren't allowing carry-ons at all. I sincerely hope that rule relaxes before we fly out tomorrow since Bryn and I brought home our violins and we sure don't want to be checking them. Oh well, whatever happens happens. I'm not going to worry about it tonight.

We had a really early supper, well at least it was early by our standards. We ate around 4 p.m. and then cleaned up the kitchen and got ready for a night of visiting. We started by dropping by my friends Brad and Sharlet's house to see their new daughter. She was a week old on Thursday. She's pretty tiny and pretty adorable and Bryn, my mum and I took turns holding her and getting pictures with her. Then Brad and Sharlet gave us a tour of their new place. They've only been in it for two months now so it's pretty new to them. Finally we let them have their baby back and then drove down to the hospital to visit Auntie Beth. She seemed in a better mood then when Mum and I were there to see her yesterday. My mum read her an e-mail and then I asked her some Bible questions from a trivia game my mum had brought with her. Then Bryn read another e-mail, Ty read a short story from the Women of Spirit magazine and then we sang a few songs to her before my dad closed the visit with a prayer. Then we drove to Vernon, a town 40 minutes north of us, where we visited our former pastor and his wife. They have been family friends of both my mum and my dad's side of the family for years and have been like an extra set of grandparents to us kids throughout the years. I really wish I had the words to describe how Pastor Teranski and his wife have impacted my life. Maybe someday I'll be able to find the right words to say, but for now I'll just say that they've always encouraged and mentored us in life whether in our music, or studies or just choices that we had to make. I so appreciate their input and guidance. The best picture I can give you to describe Pastor Teranski is that he is an extremely kind-hearted and caring man, who adores jokes, riddles and puns. He's of Ukrainian descent and his favourite jokes are Ukrainian jokes. He will never pass up an opportunity to tell a good Ukrainian joke. For years Pastor Teranski has raised money for new churches in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. He has traveled to Ukraine many times to dedicate the churches and to put on evangelistic meetings. When I was seven or eight, my mum and her sister went along with the Teranski's and did the VBS and children's meetings for 500 children a night while Pastor Teranski held evangelistic series for three weeks. A couple years later my dad went along with the Teranski's on another visit to Ukraine. Mrs. Teranski is as petite as he is rotund, but they compliment each other perfectly. She always would be playing the piano for church services and meetings and she played so beautifully. I hope that gives you a bit of a picture of the Teranski's.

The visit was bittersweet for me. I care for the Teranski's quite a lot and it's hard for me to see people I care about hurting. Mrs. Teranksi was diagnosed with Alzheimer's about a year and a half ago. The first time I saw her after I heard about her diagnosis was right after I came back from my first year at Southern. I was at our high school gym for the Mini-Campmeeting that our valley has during a weekend in May when I ran into Pastor Teranski. I gave him a big hug and then turned to give one to Mrs. Teranski, too. She was happy to hug me, but then asked her husband, "Now, who is this young girl?" He looked both shocked and terribly pained as he explained who I was. Then she said, "Oh yes, of course I know you," and the rest of the conversation went on normally. This past summer our family went to visit the Teranski's just before Ty left to come back to Southern early for RA duties. Mrs. Teranski seemed to know and recognize our whole family and was pretty good with carrying on a conversation with us and remembering trips to Ukraine with Pastor Teranski and my parents. This visit was different. Right from stepping into their warm kitchen from the chilly outdoors, I could tell Mrs. Teranski was worse off. She kept interrupting sentences with nonsensical phrases. Her words made sense, but not the way she arranged them into sentences. My mum and I sat on either side of her on the couch and tried to respond to her ramblings so that she wouldn't feel left out of the conversations, but it was hard to do that and try to follow what Pastor Teranski was saying. He questioned each of us kids about our schooling and how things were going down in Tennessee and asked about our cousin, Breanna, as well. Of course we slipped in several jokes, too. Then my mum told Tyler to bring our instruments in from the car and joked to Mrs. Teranski that she would have to play the piano to accompany us. We'd brought our instruments along to play some songs for the Teranski's. They've always been so encouraging of our music and Pastor Teranski has always promised to take us with him to Ukraine to play for the churches there that he goes to dedicate. Up to now we still haven't gone, but he mentioned tonight that he feels really urgently about fulfilling his promise to us. He talked about how he was thinking of going back there in June once more to dedicate several new churches that have been built since his last trip. As we got out our instruments Mrs. Teranski stood up from the couch and carefully made her way to the piano. At first we thought she just wanted to be closer to us to hear us better, but then she fumbled with a songbook sitting on the stand. My dad got up to help her flip through the pages and then she stopped at one song and placed her shaky fingers on the piano keys. "Audrey, why don't we just listen to the kids play?" Pastor Teranski tried to encourage, but she broke in. "Let's play a song together," she said to us and pressed the keys. The first few bars were filled with mistakes and incorrect notes. I didn't know the song. Neither did Bryn or Ty, but after quickly glancing at each other, we all started to play along. As we got close to the end the incorrect notes faded into beautiful chords and Mrs. Teranski continued right on to the second verse, the violins and cello following her lead. My dad sang the words and my mum joined in. Pastor Teranski sat in his chair listening to the harmonies fill the living room. As we finished the song, she immediately start flipping more pages, but then Pastor Teranski suggested to her that maybe the Hymnal would be easier for her to play from than the Christ in Song book so my dad got that and helped her find the Christmas section. We played "Away in a Manger" with her and during that song Pastor Teranski was wiping his eyes. He seemed so amazed to see his wife still playing the piano like she has always loved to do and that she was still able to do it quite well. She kept apologizing between songs that she hadn't practiced in a long time and that she wasn't very good, but we made sure to tell her she was doing great. Next we played "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World" with her and for each song she wanted to do all of the verses. Then she wanted to try out some non-Christmas songs and had a harder time with those. It almost broke my heart to watch her try to figure out "All Creatures of our God and King" with two sharps. She could figure out the C sharp, but not the F sharp and she kept playing the first line over and over again and trying to get the F sharps, but the chords kept turning out minor. Bryn tried to show her which key to play, but then in the end my dad found "Softly and Tenderly" and we played that instead to end off. Then Pastor Teranski told her she had done a great job and now she should take a break and just listen to us play. So we played our version of "All Creatures" that we played for church at school at the start of December and they both really enjoyed it. We told them about how we didn't know we were supposed to be playing for communion and that we decided to dial back the rhythms a bit to be more appropriate and Pastor Teranski thought that was so funny. He just let out huge Pastor Teranski-esque guffaws and we all grinned to see him so humoured by our story. Then he made us sit down while he cut up some slices of a Ukrainian poppy-seed dessert for us to try. It was an acquired taste, but by the end of the slice Bryn and I shared I kind of liked it, minus the raisins embedded in the pastry. Then, after a few more jokes and enquiries about family and friends, we gathered together for a prayer before exchanging hugs and saying good-bye until the next time we get to see each other again. Just before we left Pastor Teranski said again that he wanted to take us to Ukraine with him in June. I think if we don't go soon, it won't happen so we'll see what happens with that. We all, including my dad, want to go with him. Anyway, I'm extremely glad we took the time to drive all the way to visit them. They're very special people to us all.

When we got home we made hot chocolate while my dad brought in some wood and built a nice roaring fire in our fireplace. Then we sat around the fire drinking our hot chocolate flavoured with peppermint stir spoons. Somehow we got around to talking about how my parents ever started dating and found out some new things about them. Those kinds of conversations are usually quite interesting and informative. Then my mum read a story from a "Christmas in My Heart" book and then I read another short one. It was a good ending to a kind of happy, kind of sad, day.