Winters were tough – cold, with lots of snow – when I was a child growing up in Milwaukee. Many of my memories include cold, gray skies, and snow. Although climate change has affected snowfall in later years, I recall vividly when I lived on Martin Drive in Milwaukee, in an apartment that came without a garage. Winter mornings, as I prepared to drive to Waukesha – west of Milwaukee – I’d often have to start the car, run the engine, and get out to scrape ice off the windshield before I drove away from the street – hoping I’d be able to get back into a car already warm, hoping that I’d make it to Waukesha without running into a pileup.
Ugh.
And as I scraped the windows, I remember clearly thinking, again and again: “who would live in this climate?” Maybe I was planning ahead – unknown to even me – for another future.
Today, a headline in the New York Times reads: Record Snowfall Slams New England as New York Digs Out. Ugh. I can relate. And I’m grateful to have had a busy morning here in Oakland, running a list of errands as I enjoy a sunny day. Again. We’ve had a week of rain, and the forecast is for more rain this week. We’re always grateful for rain, even in years when the rain is unrelenting. The Bay Area is not “sunny California,” which I quickly learned during my first winter, 1981-1982, an El Nino year. Instead of sunny days, I walked all over Berkeley in the rain. I had my mother send a box of my clothes that I’d failed to pack when I left Milwaukee. I needed clothes suitable for rain.
But this winter we’ve had plenty of rain, and another storm is on the way. It’s about time for spring to arrive full force, as the neighborhood trees, already budding, call out.
But I miss the snow, sometimes. I miss those wind-less snow falls, when the snow falls straight from the sky and leaves a blanket on the streets. In one memory, I watched late into the evening the snow fall, gentle, onto the lawn in front of my apartment building. Some memories of snow are gentle, like the snow.
And I don’t miss the times I skidded to a stop at a stop light – or even on the freeway, driving someone else’s car. Ugh. Ugh.
Spring in Oakland – photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2/11/2026
At my retirement gathering, to honor my retirement from active ministry, a woman I went to seminary with and who had retired several years before I retired, told me that after she retired, she felt as if she had lost God for a while. I was surprised at her comment. I didn’t think I would experience the same thing. At the time, I “prayed at all times” by having an on-going conversation with Jesus.
But I was wrong. For a couple of years after I retired in 2014, I felt as if I was adrift in my spiritual life/journey. As time has unfolded, I have returned to my relationship to the Holy, in a new/different way than before.
Now, I have the sense of my being “in” God, as part of God, not separate. I am immersed in God’s presence, as I am immersed in the air, say. The relationship I have now – as I compare my “before” and “after” – is to be part of the Whole. And ‘the Whole” is abundantly huge, “the Whole” is all that is. “The Whole” is loving all of creation and all that is beyond within itself. What that means, I can’t say/explain to myself. I don’t try. My time of prayer now is simply being with awareness, when I have that awareness. Often, my time spent walking is a time for me to be in that presence –
“You will wonder and in the depths of wonder you will discover a simpler way: you will walk, feet planted firmly on the earth, head up. You will walk into that sighing Presence.” – from the Collection, “Moments,” Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2026.
“You will walk into that sighing Presence…” – photo, Mary Elyn Bahlert, 1/2026
Saks is in the news this week. Apparently the company’s business – like so many other businesses, has suffered losses because of the use of online companies taking over the way we shop. I can’t remember when I learned about Saks Fifth Avenue for the first time in my life, but I expect that by the time I was in high school, I knew that my family were not people who would shop at Saks. We were Sears and Roebuck people. Saks did not have a store in Milwaukee, but when I took trips to the Loop in Chicago in my twenties, I was aware of Saks. Like my family, I didn’t shop at Saks.
But my mother shopped at Saks. On one of her trips to California to visit Jeff and me, I took Mom into San Francisco for an afternoon together. We walked around Union Square, happy to be together and to take in the City – the diversity of people, the busy streets. We had lunch at a cafe before we headed back to the BART station to catch our train back to the East Bay. But before we walked to the BART station, we separated for a time – at Mom’s request. She was on a mission.
Mom had a special gift in mind when we separated, although I didn’t know that. We parted ways for a time so that she could do her shopping while I nosed around the Square, looking at the people, looking at the store windows. I always love a new city, and San Francisco was on my long list of new cities I have visited over the course of my life.
When I met Mom at the appointed place and time, she was standing outside of Saks, looking at the people who passed her on the street. Like me, Mom loved the diversity of people she saw wherever she went. In San Francisco, she encountered people who brought a different kind of diversity than she was accustomed to in Milwaukee. And when I met Mom at the appointed place and time, she was standing, looking with interest at the passersby. She had a small bag – “Saks Fifth Avenue” stamped in elegant letters on the front, in her hand. She held the small bag close to her body.
Later that day, Mom handed me the little bag that held something special from Saks. When I opened the bag, I found a small bottle of Chanel No. 5. A gift for me.
That bottle of Chanel No. 5 was more than a gift. That bottle of Chanel No. 5 was a dream, a dream my mother held in her heart for me. She wanted me to have a life she could not have imagined, the life she did not have. She dreamed a life for me, and maybe it was in that bag, too. Maybe my life is even bigger than the dream Mom held. I will not ever know for sure.
*
Still holding on to my mother’s dreams for me, with help from St. Brigid on St. Brigid’s Eve. photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2/1/2026
Summers in Wisconsin can be thick with humidity, languid – enough to suck the air out of you. I was about 13, on summer vacation from Junior High School. I was free of schedules and homework and the hard work of fitting in that takes place at that age. I wasn’t lonely – or was I? Maybe I was lonely in my family, the family beginning to itch against my skin, against my blossoming mind, against my teenage years. I was beginning to argue with Mom, who had her own controlling way of being a mother.
But I was free in my own mind. When I wasn’t reading or riding my bicycle all over the north side of Milwaukee, the long summer days stretched ahead of me. The days stretched ahead of me until they didn’t, and I had to begin another awkward school year in my classes with the smart kids. I had long, sunny, humid afternoons to myself – often.
The upper flat on Medford Avenue had varnished wooden doors and window frames. A small room faced the street and led to the front porch, where I could get a sun tan, where I could lie in the sun, slathered with lotion, reading a book. Sometimes I was alone in the small room, the screen door keeping the creatures of a humid climate outside. Across from the door to the porch was an old, old stuffed chair. I’d sit in that chair, reading, reading, reading. Sometimes, I’d curl up in a ball on the chair, my back to the screen door. I’d day dream.
I had a recurring day dream, a day dream that startles me and fills me with wonder now, all these years later. I was on a journey. The journey began at the front of the porch, facing the street. There, I would step into a moving, escalator-like contraption – vehicle (?) and find a seat with big windows that allowed me to see everything below. My ride took me from that front porch, and it headed west. The moving vehicle with comfortable seats took me clear over the Rocky mountains, across deserts and green farmland, across the Sierra mountains, to a house in South San Francisco, California. I ended my journey at 313 Alta Mesa Drive, South San Francisco.
That was the address of one of my favorite uncles, Uncle Pete, and my cousin Michelle, a few years older than me. I had never been much further west than Madison, Wisconsin. I didn’t know Michelle – I was little when she and Aunt Athalie and Uncle Pete had last been to Milwaukee – but she was the older girl I aspired to be – pretty, wearing the latest trends. She had boyfriends (I was sure of that). I admired Michelle long-distance.
*
After I graduated from high school and university, my world grew, in many ways. I traveled with friends when I could. I had my own apartment. I was lonely, but I was putting my life together, step by step. I had a successful career, first with the Social Security Administration, and then in the Food and Drug Administration. A year after I began work at FDA as a Public Affairs Officer for the State of Wisconsin, I finally took the step to enter seminary. Becoming a pastor was a dream that had taken hold in me during my college years, and it took me a few years to turn toward to that dream. After all, I had not seen or heard of a woman minister – although they did exist – outside my circle of experience.
In 1984, I graduated from seminary at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. That spring, I married Jeff Kunkel. I began my service as a pastor by commuting from Pleasanton, California to downtown San Jose. Then I worked with Jeff in two churches – one in Pleasanton, California, and another for two years in Tracy, outside the Bay Area. As one-half of a clergy couple, I seemed to be the one that the Bishop couldn’t quite satisfy. So I took a leave of absence, and I tried my hand at career counseling, working in a small business with a good friend from seminary.
We were living by then in the parsonage at San Leandro. Jeff came home from church one day in the spring and announced that he was going to take a sabbatical year, to begin July 1, 1995. I was stunned. We made a quick visit to his Superintendent, Nadine de Witt. Nadine had followed me as a pastor in San Jose, and when we met, she told me that the people there had spoken highly of me. Although most church appointments had already been filled, she’d do what she could.
Jeff and I found a flat to rent in Oakland – that was when we first moved to Oakland, where we have our home – and Nadine called with news that there was one small church appointment open. I had an appointment the next week at Aldersgate United Methodist Church in South San Francisco, California.
Some stories in life are too strange to be true. We say: “strange but true.” That little church was in a neighborhood in South San Francisco. Jeff went with me to the appointment with the Pastor Parish Relations Committee that spring, and on July 1, I started as a part time pastor at Aldersgate.
After World War II, that part of the peninsula south of San Francisco was developed, and the church was part of a community that had been built to serve the people in the homes that surrounded the church. The suburban community was filled small middle class homes built on curving streets that rose up the hills. In that suburban community was a small home, a home I’d thought about, years before: 313 Alta Mesa Drive.
I wonder now: did I dream that into being, or was I drawn into the dream? I’d like to know. Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie are gone now, dead many years. During Covid, Jeff and I traveled to Riverside, California to be part of my beloved cousin Michelle’s memorial service. I’m retired, over 10 years. And I still wonder.
My cousin Michelle, with my cousin Dennis – cool teenagers
In March of 1973 I left Milwaukee for Minneapolis to be trained as a Claims Representative for the Social Security Administration. I lived in Minneapolis for three months until I was sent to my permanent station, the Green Bay District Office. At the time, I was happy to be sent to Green Bay; I had marked in my mind Rhinelander as the least happy assignment, and I had dodged that bullet.
And so I began my career in Federal Service. When I arrived at the office, I was the first woman to be assigned to that position in Green Bay; several months later Joanne Tlachac would return to the office after being promoted to CR from being a Service Rep. We immediately became friends, a friendship that continues to today. I was in training status for three years as I learned the ropes of government service, and as I adjusted to life in Green Bay. Finding my way around Green Bay proved easy for me; Green Bay is a small city that sits at the southern end of the Green Bay. I lived a few blocks from Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers; I’ve never been a football fan, and it seems my life in that small, cold city took the rest of whatever interest in the sport was in me away. I was often lonely in my small apartment in Ashwaubenon, but I made friends and explored that area of the State of Wisconsin while I lived there.
Google tells me that the first issue of Ms. Magazine was published in Spring of 1972. Later that year, I subscribed to the monthly magazine. In my lonely apartment I read each issue as it arrived – cover to cover. The rebirth of feminism in the 20th century had sparked something in me.
*
Some time later, the office of the SSA moved to a brand new building in Green Bay. That’s where we worked as my evenings were spent in my small apartment, reading and reading and raising my consciousness (I wish this description was in usage today). Feminists attribute the consciousness of white women as having been affected by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. A rebirth was occurring in many of us. I didn’t know it then, but I would be changed forever.
* Working at my desk in the Social Security office, interviewing claimants, adjudicating claims, I wasn’t aware of how women working as hard as men were underpaid. That was a fact that was entering my consciousness. In my position, I would reach journeyman status and have the same pay grade as the men I worked with. But something in me was coming to life. One day, a the slip of paper arrived on my desk again, several months after it had last landed there. On the paper were the names of all the women in the office, along with dates; every week, a woman was assigned to clean the break room on Friday afternoon.
Hmmmm…
I was ready. I waited for the next time that the paper with assignments would show up on my desk. I waited without saying anything to anyone else, including the woman who was the District Manager’s clerical worker. The paper originated with her and would end up on her desk after we’d all seen our date of service.
When the paper arrived on my desk, I picked it up without adding my initials, which would indicate my acknowledgment. I walked to the front of the office, to the desk that sat in front of the District Manager’s Office. I threw the paper on her desk and said: “I’m a CR. I have the same job as the men in the office. Unless their names are included in this list, until they are given assignments to clean the break room, my name doesn’t belong on this list.”
I walked back to my desk. I’d experienced a “feminist click,” that moment of what was called “consciousness raising.”
I wish I could say that the men in the Green Bay Social Security Office had their eyes opened with my small act of defiance. That didn’t happen. Instead, in negotiations with management (in which I did not participate… ahem…) it was ascertained that the woman who cleaned the office once a week would from now on also clean the break room on Friday afternoons.
