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Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

hit the road

Wood Shavings, Baked Bread, Birch Bark

August 13, 2015 By Michelle

Blade and Shavings

I stand quietly behind a carver, hypnotized by the gentle glide of the draw knife as she pulls it down the length of the rough wood. The single shaving curls under the two-handled blade like a sliver of Gruyere, smooth and unblemished, before fluttering silently to the floor. Each discarded shaving at her feet seems like a work of art itself – one wrapped tight like a Chinese yo-yo, another loose like a delicate tendril of hair, yet another spiraled into a perfect corkscrew.

Above my head, wooden skiffs, hulls sanded smooth, fit snug between the beams. Behind me, a woman clamps pieces of birch bark into the shape of a basket and threads a strand of stiff fiber taut in a crisscross pattern to hold the rim in place. Through the double doors, Shasta daisies and fireweed bloom bright, and a sailboat mast tips as a breeze ripples the lake. The air inside the workshop is sweet with the scent of raw wood.

…I’m over at Tweetspeak today, writing about one of my favorite places on the North Shore of Minnesota…join me over there for a tour? I promise even the photos of this place will inspire you to create something with your hands. 

Filed Under: hit the road, Tweetspeak Poetry Literary Tours Tagged With: Grand Marais Minnesota, North House Folk School, Tweetspeak

Up Close and Personal with Willa Cather

September 29, 2014 By Michelle

The author Willa Cather and I have at least one thing in common: neither of us had any interest in living on the Great Plains.

Born in Virginia, nine-year-old Willa initially found Nebraska’s wide sky and endless landscape almost physically crushing.

“As we drove further and further out into the country,” she said, “I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality.”

Willa Cather Memorial Prairie Tweetspeak Poetry Literary Tour

It was April 1883. The land, Cather later recalled, was “as bare as a piece of sheet iron.” The family planned to join Willa’s paternal grandparents on their homestead about a dozen miles outside the town of Red Cloud.

Less than 18 months after they arrived, her father decided he wasn’t cut out for farming and moved the family into a modest rental home in town. Willa Cather lived in this two-story, three-bedroom house with no running water and no electricity along with her maternal grandmother, her parents, her six siblings and their hired kitchen girl—all eleven under one roof. Cather stayed in that home into her young adulthood.

I recently visited Willa Cather’s childhood home with my book club. We’d read My Antonia and O Pioneers, and knowing the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author’s childhood home was less than a three-hour drive southwest of Lincoln, Nebraska, we decided to visit the setting in which Cather had set so many of her novels and stories.

…I’m doing something a little differently today, writing a post as part of Tweetspeak’s Literary Tour series, about my recent trip to Red Cloud, Nebraska, to visit author Willa Cather’s childhood home. Join me over there for the tour? 

Filed Under: hit the road, writing Tagged With: Nebraska, Red Cloud, Tweetspeak, Willa Cather

Why You Need to Take a Real Vacation {without Email, Smartphones, Tweets and Likes}

July 14, 2014 By Michelle

We need to get away. I mean really away.

Away from the siren call of our laptops and tablets.

Away from the urge to check our Facebook page “just one more time,” in case we missed anything. {You didn’t. I promise.}

Away from the Twitter stream scrolling like a Wall Street ticker tape.

Away from the urge to peek, I swear I’ll only do it once today, twice max, at the Amazon book rank.

Away from all the announcements and declarations and opinions. Away even from the good stuff – the celebrations, the party pictures, the 20-year anniversary photos, the blown out candles. Because even the good stuff can be too much when it’s constant, ever-present, right in our face.

I recently returned from ten days on the East Coast, most of it spent in a rented beach house in Rhode Island with my extended family – my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my nephew and Brad and the boys. For the first time since leaping into this writing life five years ago this month, I left my work at home.

I closed my laptop and put it on my desk. I didn’t write while I was away.  I didn’t blog. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t update. I didn’t pronounce or announce or declare. I took the very occasional Instagram photo and posted it to Facebook, but other than that, social media was dead to me.

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Not to worry - Rowan has a flair for the dramatic (the pinch didn't hurt...too much).

Not to worry – Rowan has a flair for the dramatic (the pinch didn’t hurt…too much).

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Instead, I did a whole lot of sitting in a beach chair with an old-fashioned book in my lap (I read Under the Wide and Starry Sky, by Nancy Horan, which I very much enjoyed but not quite as much as her first book, Loving Frank).

I caught crabs with my kids.  I mostly watched, but I did let a tiny crustacean crawl across my palm twice. It felt like a bug, and I tried to be brave but failed considerably.

I ate an epic amount of homemade guacamole and as much fresh fish as I could because, you know, Nebraska.

I drank in deep draughts of cool, sea air while I sat on the couch and drank ginger tea in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.

I talked about books with my best friend.

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I walked dipping, curving, seaside roads and ogled cedar-singled homes I could never in a million years afford but why not pretend anyway for a minute, right?

I ate slowly and savored. And then walked off my meals, strolling leisurely, imaging what life in a bustling 18th-century seaport town must have been like.

I spent almost enough time with my people. We gathered around picnic tables and paper plates. Around sand castles and plastic buckets of baby crabs. In rocking chairs and chaise lounges, on the sofa with our feet propped on the coffee table, on the screened porch under the oaks.

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For ten days I put everything aside: the writing, the book proposal that’s still up in the air, the Amazon rank, the followers and the stats and the future. I didn’t think about what was going to happen next, beyond what flavor of ice cream I might try at the stand we seemed to find a good reason to visit nearly every night. I didn’t dwell on, “What happens if?” or “What will I do when?” I was simply at the beach, with my family, fully present, full of peace.

We Americans work pretty hard, don’t we? Our companies typically give us far fewer paid vacation days a year than our European counterparts (an average of 21 paid vacation days a year for Americans compared to 34 paid days for workers in Spain and Germany, and 31 days for those in France and Italy — and the United States is the only industrial country that does not provide a legal guarantee of paid leave.). And even when we do get paid vacation days (and one in four working Americans don’t get any paid leave at all), only 25 percent of us take our allotted vacation time for the year. 

For the love of the land, what is the matter with us?!

Here’s the truth; here’s what I learned when I took a real vacation for the first time in a long time. Everything falls away. Or I should say, everything falls into place. Everything important, that is. Family. Conversation. Connection. Love. Joy. Peace. It’s all right there, waiting for us to relish. But we have to be there — present, alive, awake, in the moment, our hands free of our devices, our minds unburdened from our work — to embrace it.

Take a real vacation this summer, friends. Take the full two weeks you have coming, all 14 days. Leave your laptop at home. Plug your phone into the charger, behind the toaster if you need to, so you can’t see it.

And then head to the beach…or your backyard. You won’t regret it, I promise.

{Linking with Kelli Woodford for Unforced Rhythms.}

Filed Under: hit the road Tagged With: summer vacation, vacation and technology, why you need to take a real vacation

The Lawn Chair Traveler {thoughts on packing light and a book giveaway!}

September 11, 2013 By Michelle

My friends Laura and Richard and their two boys travel a lot. Richard is a professor, and he takes every opportunity he can get to teach overseas. They spent a summer in Australia and New Zealand, and more recently lived a semester in England. “I’m jealous,” I told Laura. “If Brad had the chance to teach abroad, I’d be all over it. That is so cool.”

Can I just say, that is the biggest lie ever?

I didn’t intentionally lie to Laura when I told her I’d live overseas in a heartbeat. That statement is what I wish was true about myself. I wish I were all adventurous and free-spirited. But the truth is, I’m about as free-spirited as Norman Schwarzkopf.

I’m the woman who has eaten the exact same snack — a handful of salted almonds and a yogurt – at the exact same time every day for the last two years. I don’t like to wander farther than my backyard lawn chair, never mind pack up my family and my stuff and move overseas. Regimented? Yes. Disciplined? Absolutely. Adventurous? Methinks not.

That’s why I assumed Allison Vesterfelt’s new book Packing Light wouldn’t have much to offer me. After all, I’m a 43-year-old mother of two who travels to her lawn chair. How in the world would a twenty-something who quits her job, gives up her apartment, sells all her stuff and hits the open road to travel to all 50 states with a musician friend be relevant to me?  I knew it would make for a great story, but I assumed that story was for “someone else.”

I was wrong, of course (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?).

Here’s the deal; here’s what I learned from Packing Light: we are all travelers in one way or another – even those of us who don’t leave our backyards. God asks each and every one of us to step out boldly, to take a leap of faith and in trust. Your leap may be similar to Ally’s. God might be asking you to trust him with your livelihood. He might be asking you to step bravely and boldly into the unknown, literally into a different place or a different circumstance: a new job, a new place, a new relationship.

Or God might be asking you to leap with your heart. Perhaps he is asking you to live with less baggage, either literally or figuratively. Perhaps he is asking you to live less by the rules, and more by him.

Either way, God is asking you to leap. He is asking you to step out, to let go of whatever burden or baggage is weighing you down and holding you back and travel with him. As Ally says, “Your whole life is an invitation…your life is waiting…but we all have baggage of one kind or another.” The question is: will you lighten your load and trust God to leap?

Ally is a great writer – funny, honest, authentic – and a gifted storyteller. And how she got so wise in so few years, I’ll never know. But I do know this, whether you’re 22 or 82, Packing Light has something to teach you.

I’m giving away a copy of Ally’s book Packing Light. I feel obliged to tell you, this is the copy I read. But I promise, it’s still in pristine condition. No underlines, and I only tiny dog-eared a couple of pages. If you would like to be eligible for the drawing, leave a comment on this post today or tomorrow, and I’ll randomly pick one winner and announce it here on Friday. In your comment, tell me why you’re more of a free-spirited, take-to-the-open road kind of person or more of a backyard lawn chair traveler.

Filed Under: book reviews, hit the road Tagged With: Allison Vesterfelt, book reviews, Packing Light, travel

Cherish the Extraordinary Ordinary

June 26, 2013 By Michelle

A few years ago, as we flew home from a five-day trip to Disney World, I remember asking the boys what their favorite part of the vacation had been. “The goldfish,” my son Noah answered without hesitating. His younger brother Rowan agreed.

I had expected them to say Big Thunder Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean or the Haunted Mansion – one of the more dramatic, popular rides at the park.

“The goldfish? What goldfish?” I didn’t remember a goldfish-themed ride.

“You know, the goldfish at the hotel,” Noah said. “The ones we fed that night after dinner.” I vaguely recalled a fish pond outside the hotel restaurant. My husband and the boys had scattered a few handfuls of fish food across the lily pads while my parents and I had finished our dinners and paid the bill.

“Whatever you do, don’t tell Meme and Pepe your favorite part of Disney World was the goldfish pond at the hotel,” I warned the boys. My parents had spent a boatload of cash to take our whole family on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Disney World. Turns out, we could have walked to the Sunken Garden koi fish pond a mile from our house. For free.

… I’m over at the Journal Star talking about vacations and ordinary moments. Join me over there? {and if you’re a follower of my monthly column over there, you know Frankenstein, the atheist commenter. Check out his comment this month – his FIRST positive comment in almost four years of columns! Of course, it’s because I don’t mention God in this one … but I’ll take what I can get!}

Filed Under: hit the road, parenting, small moments Tagged With: Lincoln Journal Star, small moments

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Triple Type A, “make it happen” (my dad’s favorite mantra) striver and achiever (I’m a 3 on the Enneagram, which tells you everything you need to know), but these days my striving looks more like sitting in silence on a park bench, my dog at my feet, as I slowly learn to let go of the false selves that have formed my identity for decades and lean toward uncovering who God created me to be.

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