Our community group is doing a series of “self-portraits” this year, where everyone takes a turn describing themselves with whatever medium they choose. There have been poems and essays and timelines and memento-filled shoe boxes, each telling a unique story. Given my penchant for reminiscing, I decided to go way back (all the way back!) and cull through my photo albums, selecting and sharing a snapshot from each year I’ve lived. This was such a meaningful exercise that I wanted to capture it here on the blog – not as a complete life story, but as a series of moments or phases or people that have stirred my soul in some way or another. There are high highs and low lows. And some very questionable hairstyles…
My mom woke up in the middle of the night in Denver, Colorado on October 9, 1981 and “felt things happening” – it was go-time! She wanted to pack a lunch for my dad and get a few things ready, but my grandma promptly pushed my parents out the door and told them to get their butts to the hospital. At 11 am, all 7 pounds, 11 ounces of me made my arrival.
I don’t remember anything from 1982, but photos tell me that I took my first trip to Florida that year and loved the beach. I teethed on chicken drumsticks and my favorite hiding place was in the cabinets under the kitchen sink.
In 1983 we took our first family camping trip, in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. My parents were novice campers and grabbed the cheapest gear they could find – my mom ended up zipping our sleeping bags together so that we could keep warm in the cold Colorado nights. I got filthy and poked at the campfire with my “burning stick” (my parents apparently gave me oodles of freedom) and got my first taste of the beloved outdoors. It tasted like Tang and roasted marshmallows, so clearly I was all in.
My best friend Amy lived just two doors down from us on Dean Drive and we spent much of our time running back and forth between each other’s houses. She had a pretend grocery store in her basement with a cash register that actually beeped and I had a sand box in my back yard, so we both brought something valuable to the friendship. In 1984 we had matching Raggedy Anne dolls. And our moms cut our hair.
In 1985 my bowl-cut grew out. But my bangs-game was strong.
Most of my memories from the first few years of my life involve the outdoors – winter snow forts and summer sand box castles and trips to the mountains with my family. I prided myself on being my dad’s fishing buddy, picking the worms out of his bait bowl and then dropping my own line near the shore. Sometimes I got lucky, like on this 1986 trip to the river.
I was always trying (and usually failing) to keep up with my older brother – I remember watching Mitch zoom down the street on his bike or kick the soccer ball around with his friends, our five-year age gap seemingly insurmountable as he left me in his dust. However, on family vacations he had no choice but to hang out with me! This is us on a 1987 camping trip to Ruedi Reservoir.
I have the fondest memories of visiting my grandparents in Maryland – Nannie kept an endless supply of Brach’s hard candy in her crystal candy dish and my Aunt Norma had an above-ground pool in her backyard. My cousin Rachel was the coolest – she taught me all the words to Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now and we had some killer dress-up sessions with treasures from Nannie’s closet. If this picture were zoomed out a little, you’d see that I was wearing a great pair of Nannie’s heels – 1988 was apparently the dawn of my shoe fetish!
The blissful summer of 1989 was our last in Colorado, as my dad was transferred to McMinnville, Oregon in the fall of that year. My brother and I were both devastated when we found out we were moving – I was spending more time than ever with Amy, and Mitch’s best friend Duane lived two doors down in the other direction. Our street was the center of our universe, and the thought of leaving it all behind was unbearable.
Our first few months in McMinnville were…transitional. We lived in a couple of rentals while waiting for our new house to be built. I was quite shy at my new school and didn’t make any immediate friends (though I do remember getting a particularly amorous Valentine from Justin McKinney). I spent a lot of time with my stuffed animals.
By 1991 Oregon had become home – I had found a few friends and loved Friday night sleep-overs, where we’d pull out the sofa bed and watch the full TGIF line-up, making each other giggle with our Urkel impressions.
In 1992 I saw Wayne’s World for the first time, while slumber partying at my friend Lindsey’s house. We both became completely obsessed with the movie, learning all the words to Bohemian Rhapsody and creating our own low-budget version of Wayne and Garth’s cable show. It was called Babe’s World and we recorded episode after episode on my audio cassette recorder. I mean, that perm! Nothing screams “babe” like a triangle-shaped haircut.
In 1993 my dad’s job uprooted our family again and moved us to Turlock, California. I had a lonely start to sixth grade and have distinct memories of sitting at our kitchen table, telling my mom through tears that no one liked me and that I wanted to move back to Oregon and my Babe’s World co-host. Thankfully, my loneliness was short-lived and by October I was able to get up the gumption to invite a few girls over for my twelfth birthday party. And they actually showed up! Bless their hearts. Francine, on the right, ended up being a bridesmaid at my wedding thirteen years later.
In 1994 I entered seventh grade at Turlock Junior High. The words “Junior High” literally make my stomach flip-flop. The girls I had befriended in our cozy, insular sixth grade classroom left me in their dust when we hit the big-time. They joined forces with the richest, prettiest girls from the other elementary schools to become “The Preps” (my words, not theirs). Thankfully, THANKFULLY, I had a true friend in Jody. There were times when I had an only friend in Jody. We saved each other from eating alone at lunch time and we spent every Friday night together, memorizing the words to Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979 and Bush’s Glycerine and No Doubt’s Don’t Speak. We were convinced that good music had the power to make us cool.
In 1995 I dabbled in “grunge”, wearing men’s polos and oversized flannels and suede Vans. I begged my parents for a skateboard, to complete the look, but they said no. I lived for the moment between first and second period when I would cross paths with Justin Houts, the end-all be-all in cute skater boys. He had no idea who I was.
In 1996 I left the cold, cruel world of Junior High for the bigger, colder, crueller world of High School. On the first day of our freshman year, Jody and I walked the two blocks to our high school together, clinging to each other for dear life and setting a very specific lunchtime rendez-vous point. We spent all week every week looking forward to the weekend, when we could hole up in the safety of Jody’s bedroom and be unabashedly silly and talk freely about our crushes and do each other’s make-up.
And check us out, doing a selfie before selfies were even a thing!
In 1997 I had my first beer and my first cigarette and my first joint. I was rebellious and “cool” and down-for-anything (and desperate to feel included). I was also super-involved in my youth group and jumped at each chance to go to winter camp or to summer camp or to Six Flags. I was goofy and fun and intensely boy-crazy (and desperate to feel included). Teenage years are hard, gang.
In 1998 I fell away from the party crowd and started hanging out regularly with a group of seven other girls. We cruised down Geer Road on Friday nights, belting out the words to Cowboy, Take Me Away and spent hours in the aisles of Blockbuster Video, agonizing over the perfect movie selection, which we usually didn’t watch anyway because we spent the whole night talking and giggling. Jody and I had found our people. We belonged, and it felt so, so good.
In 1999 I was asked out on a date by the nephew of a couple whose kids I baby-sat. I said yes, and he took me to the movies to see Notting Hill and then out for milkshakes. He was cute and wore good-smelling cologne and drove an electric-blue Dodge Neon that started only sometimes. His name was Shane.
In 2000 I packed up my truck, said teary good-bye’s to Shane and to Jody, and caravanned with my mom and dad to San Luis Obispo to get settled into my dorm at Cal Poly. I had chosen to major in architecture and was immediately overwhelmed by the work load, staying up well past midnight every night struggling through calculus equations and drafting complicated two-point perspectives. I have a very specific memory of taking my dorm room phone out into the hallway, dialing Shane’s number, and sobbing about how stressed out I was while my roommate, Jenny, invited a pile of friends to come over to our room to just “hang out”. What had I gotten myself into?
In 2001 Shane and I settled into our long-distance relationship. It was hard, seeing each other only once or twice a month, but it freed me up to work like a dog during the week, and the anticipation of those weekend visits was fun and romantic. My stomach would be a-twitter with butterflies on Friday evenings as I waited for Shane to pull up in his yellow Volkswagon, and then we’d greet each other with the ooiest-gooiest embrace. Ahhh, young love…
Between the out-of-town boyfriend and the long hours in studio, I didn’t find myself with a lot of time for socializing with my Cal Poly classmates. I joined a co-ed fraternity and went to handful of parties, but my heart was still very much back in Turlock with my girls. Christmas break 2002 was a series of movie nights and Jamba Juice runs and living into the comfort of being 100% myself.
In the summer of 2003 I boarded a plane for Paris and kicked off my year of studying abroad. That first month in France was one of the best and worst months of my life. Paris was one of Cal Poly’s smaller, less-organized study-abroad programs, so I was left to find my own way through enrolling in classes and getting my student visa and setting up my phone line and bank account – all in a language I was struggling to learn. But I DID IT. And when my friends from Cal Poly’s Florence program came to visit me that October, I showed them around the city like I owned the place.
By 2004 I had fully embraced La Vie Francaise. I met friends down by the Seine for late-night picnics. I frequented a Brazilian bar named Favela Chic with my friend Nikole and sipped Caperinhas and danced until 2 in the morning. I would wake up at 10 am and then spend hours at a time just walking through the city, stopping when I pleased at a cafe terrace to order a 2-euro espresso and write or draw pensively in my little black journal. I got a membership to the Pompidou and fell in love with art. I took a solo trip to Berlin and Prague and Copenhagen and went to a Czech nightclub with a handful of hostel roommates (seriously, who was I?). I wore my independence like a badge of honor.
In 2005 I completed my architectural thesis, a conceptual bath house that commentated on gender and gentrification and other too-big issues. The nights in studio were long, but when the stress got to be too much, someone cranked up Hey Ya on the stereo and we all took a dance break. I ran my pinky finger through the table saw when working in the shop on my final model and was set back a few days by the surgery I needed to reattach the tendon. My half-arm cast made it hard for me to model-build, but my dad came down to help me finish up my shop work and Shane came down to help me set up my final display, pulling his first college all-nighter. All the blood, sweat, and tears was well worth-it – my determination had been pushed to new limits and my confidence that I was cut from creative cloth soared. I was ready for the real world. Which, it turned out, was not at all like college…
In 2006, nearly seven years after our first date, Shane and I said our I-do’s on the lawn of a lovely Turlock dairy. Shane’s vows made me cry and the whole ceremony made my dad cry and then dinner was served and wine was poured and we all laughed and danced the night away.
In 2007 Shane and I signed about a million pieces of paper and were the proud owners of a new Columbia City townhouse. I loved making that place home, painting each room a (regrettable) shade of blue and stocking it with (mostly IKEA) furniture. I was finding adult-ing to be much more satisfying that I’d imagined.
On the afternoon of March 2008, my brother called me to let me know that Elise Wynn had been born early that morning. I immediately loved her. And I really loved this new tender-hearted side of my brother.
We had started a c-group with a group of random folks in 2007 and by 2009 we were all-in, all the time, spending many of our weekends together. Most of us were transplants from other states, so we were each other’s local family. We called each other for help moving and started a slew of annual traditions, like the fall pumpkin patch/dumpling-making bonanza.
After a couple of years of dabbling in art workshops at community colleges and Pratt, in 2010 I hung twelve encaustic paintings on the walls of the Q Cafe and invited all my friends to my real-life “opening”. I had found the realities of architecture to be less creatively-fulfilling that I’d hoped, but getting into the studio and producing a body of work that legitimized my aspirations of “artist” was incredibly gratifying.
In 2011, after a year of trying and hoping and praying for a baby, I found out I was pregnant. Two weeks later, I started my period, which was weird, because doesn’t that go away when you’re pregnant? We went to the doctor and heard the heaviest-ever silence where we should have heard a heartbeat. We went home and I spent the next 48 hours curled up on the couch, sobbing. Nancy came over and I told her I just wanted this thing, this thing that just a few days earlier had been my beloved baby, out of my body so that I could move on. I miscarried that afternoon. I didn’t move on.
I’ve termed 2012 my “dark year”, as I was all-consumed by my infertility, convinced that God, my body, and the glowing pregnant lady I often saw on my morning commute had all conspired against me to make my life less-than. One by one, my girlfriends announced their pregnancies. I sat across from La Verne at the bakery and struggled through tears to tell her that I was happy for her and Jack, but she knew me and my struggle well enough to know that my envy was almost suffocating. On a happier note, the Giants won the World Series that year and we had a hell of a time watching their wins over hot dogs and fried zucchini at the Auto Battery with our crew.
On September 14, 2013, Juliette Grace reluctantly left my belly and entered my arms. She was none-too-pleased about the whole thing, fiercely emotional from the get-go, but it was the happiest day of my life.
In March of 2014 my maternity leave ended and I returned to work, easing back into my job with a three-day work week. Gosh, that very first daycare drop-off was rough. ROUGH. Shane and I stood on the street corner outside of daycare and struggled to hold it together as our very-attached baby cried in the arms of her new caretaker. I spent as many lunch hours as possible with Juliette in those first couple of months, “jail-breaking” her on sunny afternoons for walks along the waterfront.
In 2015 we took our first trip to Minnesota with Juliette. I loved watching her run free on the dirt roads and climb up into Grandpa’s tractor. Mostly though, I loved watching Shane’s family love on our little girl with such abandon. It was abundantly clear: she’s so very lucky to be a Schnell.
In 2016 we took our first camping trip with Juliette – it rained most of the weekend and we spent several hours holed up in a Roslyn cafe with the Hickory’s. But we survived, soggy marshmallows and all, and cemented our fate as a camping family. I was proudly carrying on a much-beloved Jarrell torch.
2017 was a year of incredible adventure – we camped in Canada and wine-tasted in Napa and did the all-inclusive thing in Mexico. I spent a few days in Paris with La Verne. But our close-to-home trips were some of my favorites, like the few days we spent along the Hood Canal with Mitch and his family. We paddle-boarded and kayaked and dance-partied. Shane scooped fresh oysters off the shore. And got unbearably sick. But still, the water was amazing. And the cousin-love was fierce.
And in 2018, the Schnells bought a new house! New to us, at least… We closed on this 1950’s brick beauty on Monday and will move in two short weeks. Our heads are still spinning from how quickly our very long search came to an end, but we are over the moon and can’t wait to kick off this next chapter in our lives.
Closing thoughts? Mostly, I’m exceedingly thankful. Thankful that my parents planted a nature-loving seed in me at a very young age. Thankful for the number of kindred spirits that God has placed in my life over the years, girls and women that have carried me through some dark and lonely times. Thankful for the places I’ve been and the things I’ve done and the person I am. But, I also see the gaps. Gaps in the shape of places I want to go and people I want to know better and ways I want to give more. May the next 36 photos fill in those gaps. And so much more.
