Part of the fun of traveling to 23 states and giving 200 talks on Sears Homes is seeing all kinds of wacky and wild stuff. One Sunday morning in 2003, as my host was driving me back to the airport (to return home to the Midwest), I saw this Sears Madelia (see second photo below). It was in Zanesville, OH (or a nearby town) and we were actually several blocks beyond this building when I told my host, “Please turn around. I think I saw something.”

He reminded me that we didn’t have much time and I told him I understood and this wouldn’t take but a second. And there - in all its painful glory - was this badly butchered Sears house. It’s actually a Sears Madelia and it was not that popular a model for Sears. (Sears sold 370 designs of kit homes from 1908 - 1940.)

The first picture (first image) is a happy, healthy Madelia in Wood River, Illinois on 9th Street. There are 24 Sears Homes in a row, a remnant from the days of Standard Oil’s purchase of $1 million worth of Sears Homes for their refinery workers. The second picture I’ve titled,

A Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.

A happy little Sears Madelia in Wood River, IL

And here’s the Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.

A Madelia trapped in a tavern's body

This next house is a Sears Crescent in Norfolk, Virginia. It’s a happy little Crescent with good self-esteem.

A happy Sears Crescent

And this next picture was taken by Rebecca Hunter, a kit-home expert in Elgin, Illinois.

An unhappy Sears Crescent in Illinois

Here's a Sears Westly, as it appeared in the 1919 Sears catalog

Unhappy Sears House in the Midwest. Too much plastic in one place.

I had not intended to bring a puppy home that day. My daughter Corey and I had gone out to Ahoskie, North Carolina  “just to look.” And then I saw her. She was far too cute to be real. I’m such a sap for puppies and this was one of the cutest living things I’d ever seen.

Theodora Duncan Doughnuts (”Teddy” for short) made the 90 minute trip back home with only three incidents of puppy puking. By then, I suspect she was done. I had never known that one little tiny puppy could hold so much kibble in her little tummy.

My daughter Corey went along for the ride and ended up being the one who held the puppy for the long journey home. That Christmas, Teddy was the happy recipient of about a dozen presents. And she chose to play with a cardboard tube instead. Just like a kid.

Teddy at Christmastime

Teddy and her new father

The Velveteen Rabbit is a children’s book that tells the story of a little plush toy that dreams about becoming “real.” The real hero of this story is the old Skin Horse, who’d lived in the nursery longer than any of the other animals. He was the resident old soul and he was wise and kind and knew much about life and love and truth. The Velveteen Rabbit longed to become real and it was the wizened old Skin Horse that had the answers.

The Skin Horse told Rabbit, “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Beauty - true beauty - is about being real. It’s about becoming the real person that our Creator intended us to be. It’s just as Margery Williams said in The Velveteen Rabbit. “Real isn’t how you are made,” the skin horse told the Velveteen Rabbit in this meaningful story. Rather, “it’s a thing that happens to you” (when you are loved).

Conversely physical beauty - that beauty which is skin-deep - is about conformity.

“Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,” was a Twilight Zone episode that told the story of Janet Tyler, a grotesquely ugly woman. Checking into the hospital for her 11^th and final plastic surgery, she desperately hoped this surgery would be successful. All prior surgeries had failed and in this modernistic society, there was a mandate to conform. Ugliness (as defined by their government) was a failure to conform and a criminal offense.

Down the hallway from Janet’s room, we hear Dear Leader giving a speech about “glorious conformity,” broadcast into the hospital waiting rooms via a large television set. The Hitler-esque voice booms with ominous messages about the importance of conformity. Differences, he tells the masses, are dangerous and will weaken their culture. Conformity is essential to their very survival.

A few days after the woman’s surgery, the medical staff slowly removes the bandages and we see the young woman’s face for the first time. She is a real beauty, a blonde bombshell, perfect in every way.

The doctors and staff gasp in horror. The operation was a failure - again. The camera pulls back and we can now see their faces. They’re hideous-looking creatures, with swinish faces and long snouts, oversized mouths and deep creases. They are the beautiful people in this alternate reality.

Next, Janet is sent away to a special village, where people like her go to live out their lives. A handsome man escorts her out of the hospital with a promise that she’ll now know how it feels to belong, and to be loved. (Originally airing on November 11, 1962, this episode was very well written and absolutely haunting.)

The “glorious conformity” of skin-deep beauty is a moving target and its standards are forever changing, following the lead of the rich and famous, and their copious leisure time. In earlier times, the beautiful people were fair-skinned, un-tanned, pleasingly plump and soft. Most “working women” of that same period toiled in the fields for hours every day, developing muscle mass, dark tans and calloused hands. When women went to work in windowless cubicles, stuck behind a desk for eight hours each day, the beautiful people became the ones with deep tans, hard bodies and sleek figures. Beauty follows wealth and leisure.

True beauty - authenticity - is not about the world’s standards but about rediscovering that kingdom of heaven that is within you. It’s not a moving target, but a changeless standard with its roots in the divine.

The above is from Rose’s book, The Ugly Woman’s Guide to Internet Dating. To read the rest, click here:

When my 26-year-old daughter called to tell me that she’d made the decision to donate one of her kidneys to her best friend, Kaycee, I was not a happy woman. In fact, I was against it - wholeheartedly, or in this case,  whole-kidneyedly.

A few days later, I talked with her father and he made a valid point.

“Rose,” he told me, “the odds of those two girls being a match are one in a million. Don’t worry about this. Chances are good that once she’s tested, it’ll all end right there.”

Several weeks later, there was another phone call from Crystal.

“Mom, please understand,” she pleaded. “There’s a good chance Kaycee will die if she doesn’t get a kidney within the next year or two. She’s 24 years old and has already been on dialysis for 18 months. This is something I have to do. Tell me that you’ll support me in this.”

And then I sighed a motherly sigh and promised her that I’d try to grow into a supportive parent.

A few weeks passed when the next phone call came. “Mom, we’re a match. The doctors are stunned. They say that we’re as good a match as if we were siblings. I told Kaycee that there’s a reason that we always felt like sisters. I knew we’d be a perfect match. I just knew it.”

The surgery was scheduled for April 23, 2007. I told Crystal that I’d fly to Peoria, Illinois for the surgery. I was still not happy about this but I knew I had to do the right thing for my little girl.  My sweet little girl.

Less than five weeks earlier, I’d remarried and now I asked my new husband to fly with me. I couldn’t imagine doing this alone.

Continued at Kidney-shaped Hearts, Part II

Crystal (on the far left) with her sister Anna, Grandma Betty and cousin Laurel (1985)

continued from part I

My new husband and I arrived in Peoria the day before the surgery and spent some time with both girls. I needed to meet this Kaycee person. Despite my best “thy will be done” prayers, I still felt resentful toward Kaycee. I asked God again and again to open my heart and let Kaycee in..

Kaycee was a soft-spoken, sweet girl with freckles, fair skin and red hair. The moment I laid eyes on her, I felt an outpouring of maternal love that could only have its source in the divine. Crystal took me aside and said, “A few weeks ago, Kaycee told me she couldn’t go through with this. She said that it was better for her to pass on than to take a kidney from her best friend. I told her that I wanted to do this.”

Crystal also told me a little about Kaycee’s background. She received her first transplant when she was two years old. That kidney (from her mother), had lasted almost 20 years. Since then, she’d been on massive amounts of drugs and had already endured countless hospitalizations and surgeries. A few years earlier, Kaycee’s father, who’d been a touchstone throughout her difficult childhood, had died suddenly. And now Kaycee was in dialysis three times a week, three hours per treatment. It was after Crystal accompanied Kaycee to dialysis that she realized this was no way for a young woman to live. In additional to the physical and emotional strain, there was a financial strain, too. Twenty-four-year-old Kaycee was more than $100,000 in debt, due to the incredibly expensive dialysis treatment.

At one point during the five-hour surgery, Kaycee’s strong and stalwart mother stepped into a corner of the waiting room and sobbed uncontrollably. I felt a wave of compassion for this woman. How blessed I’d been to have had three healthy girls. How short-sighted and small-minded I’d been to rail against this procedure.

Continued at Kidney-shaped Hearts, Part III

Kasee (left) and Crystal (right)