East of the Mississippi

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This summer I made a promise to myself, to the universe, to anyone who cared, that I would stay in the United States and east of the Mississippi. But, because in the last few years I can’t seem to stay put no matter how I try, I immediately planned a trip that tested the limits of that promise: spend most of July journeying around the Northeast and Midwest, visiting friend after friend after friend. Between stops, I would take Amtrak, look out the window, and work on a book about friendship. In my head, this was a satisfying construction. Different friends, themselves homebound with kids or job, affectionately referred to it as my “East Coast Tour” or my “Grand Adventure.” I was pleased.

I boarded the train last Friday in Greensboro—my first time on a train in the US in fifteen years—and immediately found myself glad for its peace. I liked the way it moved. Its glide and shiver suited me. I liked that we passed so many tiny towns called “Crossing” or “Junction” and that I could hear a train whistle (our train whistle) for ten or twenty seconds before we blew through them. I could hear trains from my childhood bedroom and they have always been a home sound to me. And I liked the way mountains and tunnels slurped us up whole like a long noodle before spitting us back out into the green.

Because of a bad delay (the only one I’ve had so far) I spent an unexpected night in DC, courtesy of Amtrak, before arriving outside Boston the next day. Then there was a warm, lovely few days with my friend Heather, seeing her New England. We walked in the woods, ate dinner at an old inn, and drove down many winding green two lane roads. We ate ice cream, visited the ducks at the Boston Public Gardens, and poked around antique and book stores where even my stern sales resistance was put to the test. We wrote together, and wandered round graveyards populated mainly by three hundred year old dead with “memento mori” engraved solemnly on their headstones.

But the best bits were in the rain: hurrying to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through puddles to wander past its tile and courtyard and art and papers and stone and people, and then that evening giggling together under a golf umbrella in Lexington as we waited wetly for early Fourth of July fireworks, which came eventually, lighting our upturned faces with green and red and white. The smoke from up north gradually cleared throughout the week. One evening I sat on Heather’s parents couch before dinner, the house full of the smell of bacon and the sound of a ticking fan and “Clair de Lune” on the piano, and thought that while this was not my home, it certainly was a home, in every good sense of the word.

Early Wednesday morning I left on a train from South Station in Boston. I slept as we sped back down the coast of New England, the way I’d already come, and then, it must be admitted, took some time to check and ponder my students’ newly released AP scores. I switched trains in Philly, and crossed Pennsylvania from side to side, something I’d never done before despite spending my college years there. Here, instead of being encased in tunnels of green overgrowth, there were breaks in the trees and the scenery was lush and simple, homes and hills and fields. We climbed up round edges of mountains rather than shooting through them. This was railroad country in a way my home down south was not. 

Then I arrived in Pittsburgh for my days alone, between proper stops, between friends. Each day I walked downtown a bit—to the park, along the river, where a few people floated along on a buoyant tiki bar beneath gray clouds. After just a couple blocks I was always sweaty, somehow both gooey and squeaky in all my crevices. The people on the street I passed, either swinging along purposefully or wandering lost in their own minds, made me feel both more and less alone. Cutting back up from the riverwalk I found a tunnel lined with tumbling LED-lit waterfalls. It was deserted, cool and fresh.

My AirBnB was convenient and safe and comfortable, but devoid of personality, almost entirely blank. As I curled into its corners to read and write, I wondered how I could, for myself if not for future occupants, fill in that blank. I’d intended an external grand adventure, but I was maybe a fool to think it would not be an internal adventure as well. The Lord usually intends more than we do. I moved home a year ago, and this summer has been my first real break in the action to think about all the changes of my last half-decade. And I don’t intend any more changes for the time being. I’m settling in and that’s significant.

On top of that, the main task of my writing right now is to remember. To catalog many of the most important relationships of my life and try to put into words the way they’ve shaped me. I’m writing about what sort of friend and what sort of woman I’ve become and how. I’ve always been a habitual rememberer, but let me tell you—swallowed in extra-large doses like this, memory is potent stuff. And the faulty memories mold you just as much as the true ones, forming this bright, painfully irreverent patchwork of selfhood.

I am grateful for the ability to remember, to stitch meaning together, to follow steel tracks from one familiar friend to another in a wide slow loop, but something about this trip has made me already hold home a little closer, has made me more hopeful (or at least more desirous) for the now and the not yet, for the settling in to come.

My friend Emily picked me up midday today and I’m now back in the town where I went to undergrad, and then I’ll see Laura and then to Abby and then Hannah. There will be several babies and bigger kids too and I’ll probably stop and see art in Chicago. There is richness in all of that.

But a joyful part of my mind, a part which urges me on, also whispers: You get to go back and write those pieces for church, you get to check on the wildflowers you planted, you get to sketch out improvements to curriculums, you get to paint your cabinets, you get to sort clothing and papers, you get to be in place, your place, and work to make things grow.

Ten Years of Reading

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When I was in middle school I sunk into a particularly pernicious Christian romance novel phase. My mom thought it was absurd and would kick me out of the house for reading too much. So at her behest, I’d take a walk, but I’d bring the book with me and read as I went. Sometimes friendly folks out walking their dogs would call out to me to ask how I liked my book, and I always felt self-righteous annoyance—couldn’t they see I was busy?

Then the other day I left my house for a walk (no book in hand) and saw a man around my age or maybe a little younger walking toward me. It was muggy out—nearly drizzly—and he was wearing sunglasses and reading a book grasped firmly in two hands. I was fascinated and wanted desperately to know what he was reading. I squinted at its back cover as I passed him, but though he didn’t look up, I knew he could feel my looking and suddenly remembered how he must feel. I left him alone, and continued on my merry way, eyes up to the world around me.

So it’s in honor of my twelve year old self and that stranger and everyone in between who has not wanted to tear their eyes from a page that I offer you what I’ve got today.

In my heart of hearts I love a bit of light data, and for the past ten years, beginning with the summer before my senior year of college, I’ve kept track of every book I’ve completed on a running document. It’s titled “The Hooray List.” (I was in an era of celebrating accomplishments, however small.)

The list contains 371 entries total (though some of those are re-reads) which means the actual  number of individual books is 337. I divided it into the summer and the school-time of each year, and the least I ever read was in the summer of 2016, when I read nine books, four of which were for children. The most I read was this past school year, 2022-23 when I read 46 books, 13 of which I was teaching. (I spent a lot of weekends reading. Those were good weekends.) In the re-reads hall of fame there are 22 books that I read twice, six that I read three times, but the big winner is The Great Divorce, which I read four times in ten years.

If it’s not already abundantly apparent, I transferred the list to a spreadsheet just so I could organize it in a variety of ways and procure all this data, so this is, transparently, an ode not only to the joy of reading, but to the joy of list-making, of ordering and organizing the good.

I alphabetized all the titles, and here are some facts that I think are interesting:

Twenty titles begin with “A” but a whopping 101 of them begin with “The.” The only first letters I was missing were X and Z (so if anyone wants to rectify that, feel free!) Four of the titles are questions, and three begin with “Death,” but only one that begins with “Life.” I also read novels titled both Original Sin and Original Prin, which I thought was funny.

And now for some awards, doled out with no regard for anyone’s taste but my own:

Oldest: Beowulf

Most Nostalgic (For Me): A Tangled Web

Complained About the Loudest: Gilead

Best Opening Line: I Capture the Castle

Best Closing Line: Invisible Man

Read It Twice Because I Forgot I Read It the First Time: The Stone Diaries

Most Fascinatingly Niche: A Discarded Life

Most Enjoyed Hating: A Live Coal in the Sea

Took the Longest (4 years): The Brothers Karamazov

Read Aloud in One Sitting: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Most Beautiful Non-Fiction: An Unquiet Mind

Feels Most Like Home (To Me): Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

Least Favorite Book I Taught: The Crucible

Most Favorite Book I Taught: The Sun Also Rises

Most Frequently Recommended to Me: Jayber Crow

Most Frequently Recommended by Me: Everything Sad is Untrue or The Remains of the Day or The Mennyms

Everyone Should Read Regardless of What You Think of My Taste: Jane Eyre

Anyway, that’s that. This summer, I’ve already read a lot and walked a lot and wrote some about my childhood. I don’t like letting go of things—books, cards, scribbled notes on paper, memories. I like storing them up, holding them tight in my fist as I keep moving forward. And on occasion I’ll stop and sort through all the disparate pieces I’ve gained, and try to make sense of the picture they form when laid side by side by side.

The Part That Doesn’t Age in Colorado

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On Labor Day weekend I flew to Colorado to join a family reunion that was already in progress. When I landed in Atlanta for a layover, I turned my phone back on and found emails from two of Bonnie’s children—Bonnie, the elderly client who I spent most of my time with last year—saying that she’d passed away about a month before. I wasn’t surprised. You can’t be surprised when death comes to a house-bound woman in her late eighties with a laundry list of serious health conditions, but she had been my friend, my good friend, and the news sat heavily on my shoulders on my flight to Denver.

The week before I left, when I told one of my freshmen classes that I was going to a family reunion, one of them immediately quipped, “Is it gonna be fun or is it gonna be awkward?” “A little bit of both,” I shot back. Maybe I thought this was true when I said it but in actuality the week I spent there was often fun, never awkward, and just about always good.

At its zenith, there were 45 people. (We thought. An accurate count was more difficult than it should have been.) We stayed in two huge cabins at a YMCA Ranch a couple hours of switchback highway west of Denver. Both had big common areas with tall windows that faced out toward the horizon of mountains and also had comfortable furniture which my sister kept expressing appreciation for. My mom pointed out that my grandma, who has been gone since 2015, would have loved this. She was always looking for a place where all seven of her children and their offspring and theirs could be all together in one room—eat meals cooked in a line-up of vast pots, sit and play cards, talk and laugh. 

And we kept busy. We were the loudest and most cheerful at a bingo night run by Y employees at the rec center, with several of my cousins’ kids ending up calling the numbers themselves. We played a game of kickball in which there were two participants under four, which necessitated a variety of paces. We were the entire population of the Y trivia night one evening, and the room echoed with an inability to keep secrets from other teams made up of siblings and aunts and cousins and uncles. And we hiked over and over in the thin air, up mountains brown and green and rocky, to see little humps of snow melting by waterfalls.

I’d forgotten how much I like the people I’m related to. We are very different, and yet there’s a unity despite our difference—maybe because of it, at times. It is a unity of practicality, of unfussy kindness, of good humor, of just saying what you mean without pretension. I found even the barriers within myself crumbling at times. The rough beauty nudged my heart into order. All year I’ve steadfastly refused to play chess with any of my students even though I have a board in my room for them, but I played a game with my cousin’s son one morning, because though I can easily turn down a seventeen-year-old, saying no to a seven-year-old is entirely too cruel. He beat me soundly, at one point saying encouragingly, “You’ll figure out how the pieces move soon, or maybe you’re just bad at it.”

I read in quiet corners of one cabin or the other where I could see out a window, and on the last day did a loop on a path through a meadow, while listening to an Austen novel, past the old homestead which housed a family of little foxes who had been darting across the corners of our vision all week. 

On Sunday, in the morning light through all the eastern windows, most of us gathered for a service in the assembly style which many of my family grew up with, sharing one-by-one what we were learning from scripture, and singing hymns acapella. I listened to our swell of song rising to the roof and realized that I knew those voices of old, and was glad to hear them again after so long.

I used to write about my cousins on here a lot—nearly every Christmas. But we are all grown now and see each other much less. We’re spread across the country and beyond—tied to the places we live by jobs and families and commitments. But watching us here in adulthood, properly on the far side of excitable adolescence, I still saw a shared and generous familiarity, a sort of assumed kindness in one another we could all rely on—this was the thing which staved off the awkwardness my students joked about. 

Also, I leaned over to my sister one night and said, “You know, we’re all grown up, but everyone still walks the same.” There are certain things we never do, perhaps never can, grow out of. Once last year, talking about my relationship with Bonnie, Abby gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten, particularly because she’s known me so well for so long. She told me I was good at seeing the “part of people that doesn’t age.” And it’s true—that odd loping walk or wild laugh that has always been and always will be is my favorite part of any person, the part I hold precious in my palm.

And this family time away was a reminder that not only is there a part of people that doesn’t age, but maybe there’s a part of relationships that can’t and won’t age either. On Monday and Tuesday nights after the littlest ones were in bed, some of us cousins sat down to play Authors. It’s not a particularly brilliant game, a little like “Go Fish” but fussier and with the titles of more nineteenth century novels. But we played it so much at my Grandma’s when we were young that it’s in our shared DNA now. One summer when I slept on the couch because we were short of bed-space I would regularly wake up to my brother and my cousin Joe sitting on my feet, already deep in a game at 7:30 in the morning. 

When my cousin Charity unearthed the deck she’d brought last week, at first none of us could quite remember how many cards to deal. But then it all came back, and not just the rules, but the joy. We curled up in our chairs, all cares and griefs of our grown selves forgotten, and giggled for forty minutes straight over well-worn cards with pictures of Sir Walter Scott, all in a large cabin made small by a valley of snow-capped mountain peaks and the dome of a black-silk sky.

Much of May

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May has been much, much, much at school and I am grateful for it. 

I’ve struggled to understand my students in this first year back teaching. They feel not only inherently different from the students I used to teach, but inherently different from me. It takes me longer to really see them than it used to. In the last few months I’ve taken to reminding myself that the world in which they’re coming of age is quite different than the one in which I was fifteen and seventeen. History—the kind that will be written in books—has happened in the meantime and their perceptions of life and fairness and value and the way things should be are sometimes alien to me. 

I’ve cared for them and enjoyed them, but I’ve felt a gulf between us, a gulf which not only seems difficult to cross, but which I haven’t been entirely sure that I want to. I’ve sometimes fallen into annoyance and frustration rather than choosing the patience required by love.

But May has been a slow pulling together of the pieces. I gave a talk in chapel in which I was honest because that is the way I know how to be. My little all-boy class held an NFL-style draft for which elderly residents at the nursing home they’d be matched up with before we embarked on an interview project. The school launched a house system, my freshmen drew the nine circles of Dante’s hell, and some of the boys in my AP class performed “Man of Constant Sorrow” for me for extra credit. And student after anxious student recited Psalm 90, eyes boring into the carpet, then glancing up to me for reassurance. 

All these things have been tackle ropes thrown across that gulf, hooking into the soft flesh beneath my armor and tugging the cliff of me and the cliff of my students nearer to one another, inch by definite inch. 

I’ve had proper sit down conversations with a few kids this week, some of whom I haven’t even taught yet, and have been struck by the individual complexity and openness of their questions, how good it is to laugh with them. I now find myself wanting to feel gently towards them. I want to see their humanness, the lines around their eyes that Graham Greene talks about in The Power and the Glory. When I watch them stumble, I want to choose grief over irritation, love over easy dismissal.

And last week I wandered around a secret place on campus, a place on which for the last twenty years most graduating seniors have had the chance to make their mark. My own seventeen-year-old self is there with my classmates, as well as the upperclassmen I was once awestruck by and many of the boisterous kids I taught myself, all of us immortalized at that odd and painful wonder of a moment, on the cusp of we-knew-not-what.

So many things were felt in that place and then pressed into it in felt-tipped marker with immediate eagerness: joy, confidence, cynicism, vulgarity, wisdom, wildness, complacence, nostalgia. And every feeling expressed by those youthful hearts and hands, from before me all the way to after, promises loudly in that place to last forever. In the deep convictions of our emotions, we did not, a single one of us, really understand how much we would change. We considered our words to be final. 

There was an extremity in our certainty, in our hope, in all our desires which demanded fulfillment in permanent ink. And God at all times and in all moments stood watching us in that place, a resounding magnetic force, drawing the true desire rooted deep in each of us toward his center. 

So here I am, tired and content on a Friday after oral exams, digesting the assurance that my world is not so distanced from that of my students as I thought. The cacophony of the teenage years, its extremity, its color, the rawness of its desire for more and better has always been and will always be. May is much, much, much, and so are they.

The Mysteries of Loneliness

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What I’m about to say might be best off as a poem. But let’s try it like this anyway.

This year I’ve lived alone for the first time in my life, and I can’t imagine giving it up. Solitude is a luxury equal to none. This place is my place with things where I put them and all my own beloved oddities on the wall. With the world being what it is, I can even order exactly the food I want to my door—I can choose what suits me at any given moment. I am not responsible for others, for understanding them or for making myself understood. I eat dinner anytime between 4:30 and 11:30. I sit in all my different chairs in turn and take long baths without guilt. I think aloud to myself. I look at a book or a screen or a wall or a pen in my hand or the mirror or out the window where the rain puddles on my neighbor’s paving stones. It’s so easy to be alone.

But sometimes I suspect it’s too easy. With the freedom I have, I choose less for myself. I choose a smaller, more manageable world in which obligations are trimmed to the bone and disruptions are strictly outlawed. But just because I am my own favorite company doesn’t mean I’m my own best company. And perhaps I should already know that I’m meant to have company other than myself.

For much of history this world has not been a place in which someone, particularly a woman, could survive well on her own. Except for believers who sequestered themselves as a decades-long spiritual discipline, people needed community: someone to fix the leaks and someone to bake the bread and someone to stitch the sheets and someone to take out the waste, someone to fill the cabinets with medicine, someone to feed the cattle and someone to keep the hearthfire burning. It took more than two hands to support the flourishing of a human life. In the popular imagination (or at least in mine) people who are perpetually alone eventually starve to death in cramped garrets in Paris while the world dances on just outside their door.

Which is all very confusing when being alone feels so nice.

On top of that, from what we see of Christ in scripture, he was just alone here and there—only when he expressly planned to be. In fact, his moments of solitude are notable exceptions in the midst of a full-to-overflowing life and ministry, just as devout hermits were notable exceptions in the midst of a general population of families and villages and towns. But of course, his life for the first thirty years, before his ministry really began, may have looked much different. We can’t take the pace of Jesus’ early thirties as an exactly prescriptive blueprint for the entirety of our own lives. (And yet, we shouldn’t just ignore it either…)

Perhaps it’s clear already that I have no closing statement to make. Really, I’m just beginning a conversation with myself. It’s not really a discussion of whether or not I should be alone, but rather how I should treat the solitude which already exists within and around me: As a restorative? As a reward? As a natural and unavoidable state? As a place to hide? As a place to create? As a place from which to escape? Or as a place into which to welcome others, a place which can be expanded? And if so, how? (And where and why and when?)

Dearest Freshness Deep Down

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Last weekend I flew to Vancouver for Jolene’s wedding. This act of travel, of going to this other home of mine, was good for me. When you fly west, you end up chasing the light, and we landed around sunset. The skies were clearer than I thought they would be, for all the dumping cold grey the Pacific Northwest has been having, and a smile bloomed involuntarily from my gut when I saw the city’s glittering, twisting self rising to meet me. I split my time between looking toward land, and watching the faces of others who were watching it as well—still and childlike, lit by the reflection of the sun. I would’ve cried if I hadn’t been so busy with the watching.

This is my 300th entry, and I think that after more than a decade of this blog and thousands upon thousands of words I may finally be in a place (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, semantically) to tell you what the dang thing is actually about—it’s about the things that are more than they seem, which make joy and surety and gratitude rise strong and indisputable out of nearly nothing.

The day before I left I finished All the King’s Men with my AP Lit kids and told them that I had cried at the last chapter, that I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d found so moving but that I’d thought—oh, I’d thought—that it was Jack finally calling Willie his friend. And on the plane I watched Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, which was sweet and fun and not notably profound except that when the Dior dresses came out on those models, and the little London house-cleaner gasped over the beauty of them and imagined which she would buy, I thought, “Yes, yes, yes,” and scooted as far forward as my seatbelt would let me. And now back home I’m teaching The Sun Also Rises, which I haven’t read since college, when I remember finishing it right before class one day at a crowded cafeteria table of strangers during the lunch rush, my nose tipped into the book, and every muscle in my chest taut because I could tell something was happening to Jake Barnes, something big. He was being brave.

This blog is about those things, the small, thorny, glistening gifts of this world, of art, of nature, of circumstance. Things that can be buried, unnoticed for a long old time, but then they’re brought out in some new way, and it’s like that song of Andrew Peterson’s: “When the joy that you feel leaves a terrible ache in your bones, that’s the voice of Jesus, calling you back home.” 

So now I’m reminding myself (and maybe you) to look always for the land that’s been lying fallow, to roll up my sleeves and, with gentle assurance, to turn over that soil, to unearth Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things” which have been waiting there, their faces ready to reflect the light.

A Writer’s Retreat

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While I was at Regent I got in the habit of telling people to go on writer’s retreats. A friend would be talking about struggles with focus and confidence in their work, and I would announce to them with great authority that this was the solution to their problems. So they’d go and book a place for a couple days away on one of the islands and come back to me just raving and glad I recommended it to them, because they’d gotten so much done and felt so much better about where their project was headed. I mean, maybe I exaggerate their joy and gratitude, but as someone who rarely takes others’ advice, no matter how thoughtful, I was always caught off guard that they had taken mine and somehow it had actually worked out for them. And maybe I also felt odd about it because I’d never actually gone on a writer’s retreat myself—in that all alone, book-a-place-just-to-go-away-and-focus kind of way.

So anyway, I’m here to announce that I finally have, because we’ve been on winter break and I had a long weekend. I got a room at a historic inn just down the road from Saxapahaw which is ostensibly a town, but mostly consists of a little strip of shops for bougie farm-to-table country people who want to buy home-made soap and craft beer from a “five star gas station” and have bumper stickers that say things like “Manifest that Shit.” It’s good for a day out.

And my place was nice. The grounds were big, with uncertain paths wending their way through something like woodland. I wished I had a map (mostly because I like maps), but didn’t mind scrambling and wandering. I almost never do. It was still and calm as all get-out there except for the sounds of passing cars and daffodils growing, but there was a big brick-pavered front porch which would have glowed all lit-up for a party.

My first day I napped a lot and took two baths. I was coming in so tired, more tired than was optimal, really. I lay and listened to the sound of the road from my bed, waiting for my brain to slow its spinning gears and stop shooting shards of metal off every which way. And then I wrote, because the act of writing can help to order disparate pieces. It is so often like sliding beads onto a string: building up one tentative idea on another, warm and hopeful.

I’m just cracking my way into something long and non-fiction, so the notes I was making were about my own life, from childhood on. I was using what already existed to tell the truth. Instead of having to manifest the facts out of thin air, like with a novel, I had them already growing fertile in my own memory. And I was shocked to find, as I kept going and going, how much life I’ve lived in just thirty years.

I don’t think I’m a special case. I think everyone lives a lot of life. And to marshal so much of it together onto a page into some sort of order, to run your fingers over all its silver threads of meaning which connect one thing to the next to the next, is a real marvel. Not everything that has happened to me has been good, yet even the pains contribute to the great abundance of my experience, experience which has all been grace, every bit of it. I’d forgotten that writing was such an exercise in gratitude. Perhaps this is what those Regent friends were responding to when they came home from their own retreats all lit up.

On Saturday night I took myself to dinner in Saxapahaw. I’d made myself a reservation for one, which felt weird but good, and as I drove, I watched the last remnants of the sunset still leaking out over the horizon, like the celestial clean-up crew had yet to finish their job for the evening. I searched for the color of the sky where the blue and orange met. I wanted to know what that color was. It remained a mystery to me even though it was right in front of my eyes.

I ate alone under soft lighting, and imagining how I must look flattered my vanity, but much more than that, I liked being around people for the first time in days. It was an upscale pub populated by friendly waitstaff, families and groups of friends eating together, people who leaned toward each other comfortably as they talked. I journaled and ate stew and key lime pie and drank wine and just sat. It was my great joy to be quiet in the midst of noise.

In Spite of Our Grief

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My mind has been on my students more than usual recently. Not any kid in particular, just all their half-grown faces. I frequently wonder if they know just how very much is written in their eyes, loud and legible. I see openness and stone walls, loneliness and love, innocence and disillusionment, cruelty and raw compassion, things that make me fear for them and things that make me hope—a dozen absolute contradictions bundled in every glance. They walk around bristling with them.

Recently I was reading the story of Jacob in Genesis and I was struck by the way he too is a whole sharp passel of things that should not be able to exist together: the desire to win, the desire to be loved, brazenness, fear, deceit, remorse, anger, wanderlust. And he was a very long time ago.

This tugging, ripping tension existed then and it exists now, in adults as well as adolescents. Really, I think we never grow out of it at all. And the fact of the matter is that the unwieldiness of these contradictions in ourselves and in others is too much at times, falls unevenly on shoulders which are—in their humanness—fundamentally too weak to bear it, pushing us down into the mud. When I think back over the last couple weeks I can see griefs of contradiction at church, at work, in my own sodden heart and in the hearts of those around me, contradictions which break our molds of understanding, which come near to breaking us.

No wonder my students’ swagger sometimes goes a little crooked like there’s a heavyweight boxing match happening in the space between their collarbones. We’re all left wading through the sludge.

But how? How do we get through?

Well, I’m only guessing, but I think what you do is read The Velveteen Rabbit to your sad freshmen, tear pages out of books to decorate a bulletin board, keep an eye out for the kids looking for a place to sit, cover your friends’ classes, make dinner plans for next week, teach when you’ve lost your voice, and go home with your hands in the pockets of your coat and take a nap in your big chair. You take a long walk with unwashed hair and then make shepherd’s pie and listen to Mark Heard sing about how Jesus “looks at their faces and loves them in spite of his grief.” 

Because we do not struggle through the mud alone. The Lord knows all about contradiction. He allows it, and he himself has lived it. We do not need to force ourselves to master grief and love together perfectly, because he already has. Instead, what we must do is mark each fight, each unknowable contradictory struggle, with an ebenezer monument which proclaims: Here I have wrestled. And here God promised to prevail, against even the flailing labyrinthine darkness of the human soul.

For the Brave and the Steadfast

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I am, in essence, a be-er. I’ve been around the sun enough times by now that I know this about myself. My initial impulse is always to stay home, to say no, to plant myself on the sidelines, to wait and see how the thing plays out, thank you very much. When I dream of the future, more and more frequently I just think of Yeats’ poem “Isle of Innisfree” where peace comes dropping slow and evening’s full of the linnets’ wings.

I leave the pushing and the challenging and raising of voices loud enough to be heard even by those who don’t want to hear them to the fighters of the world. They can have that, I think. I’m not built for that, and I don’t want it.

But in the last month I had a large and sticky situation rise up. It was clear to anyone with two eyes in their head that without my asking this thing had fallen directly in my lap. And as I sat there for a few weeks with it heaving great shuddery, mucus-y breaths on my knees and occasionally baring its teeth, I understood that I needed to do what I never do—I needed to fight. I needed to take a few good swings and risk missing. I stood up, wiped the slime off my skirt and had a series of hard conversations where I pushed and I pushed. It wore me all out. So when I was certain that what I had to say had been heard, I retreated safely to my Innisfree to sleep and sleep the whole thing off. I went back to being the self I knew.

This is not the first time in my adult life I’ve chosen to get up and walk against the current. I’ve done it here and there before, but I can only exist in resistance for so long. I am not one of the perpetually brave. I soon run back to the hollowed hands which say, “The Lord will fight for you, you must only be still.”

And I don’t think I’m wrong, not really. Jesus didn’t spend most of his earthly life picking fights. In fact, he spent decades of it just making tables and eating with his family and praying and following the seasons round and round in their rotation. But when the fights came, the moments to push landed in his lap, he took them. And he fought in all the ways no one expected him to, all the way up a hill, onto a tree, and back down again.

So I think God’s world has a place, an important place, for both the fighters and the be-ers, the brave and the steadfast. But as I have been thinking about all this in the past few weeks, there are a few things the contemplative watchers–like me and maybe you–must remember.

Peace is not dead space. It requires cultivating, which, in fact, is a fight of its own kind. Even Yeats’ island retreat has nine neat bean rows. In peace, we must teach stubborn soil to grow, both the soil of the earth and the soil of our “great sloth hearts.” While we stay at home, we must paint beautiful colors loud and bake good bread and sing with all our might and dole out glasses of cool water. When I sit on the sidelines avoiding the tumult of grit and sweat and uncertainty, and pull out my journal to write a few disjointed words, I must not leave them there to shrivel on the page. I must take them home and add more to them and more, till at last they join up properly and I have made something I can call good. 

If I was formed, as I believe I was, to plant my feet deep but send my words out like lines, to pour my overripe little heart out onto a page from the peanut gallery, if writing is indeed part of my being, then my peace-time, my bee-loud glade, should be full of written words. If I’m not out fighting demons, I should be home with a pen in my hand, teaching castles to rise from stone.

2022 Retrospective

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I started off 2022 by testing positive for covid, along with the rest of my family. But I was working a shift with an elderly client within two hours of getting back to Madison and testing negative. The tone, though I did not choose it, was set for the anxious winter of my discontent. I took walks in slate-colored snow that matched a slate-colored sky and wore through a pair of boots I’d loved for years. I made lots of French toast for Bonnie and tried to find shows on Netflix she would like. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes not. I finally finished the novel to my general satisfaction, and spent a few months querying agents on its behalf. Eventually I got fed up with the whole dang circus, but just in time to save my faith in literary dreams someone asked me to talk to an undergrad student who wanted to be a novelist, and he was so serious and earnest that my lungs filled with fresh air again. 

For days and weeks I sat on couches and listened to the interminable sighing of clients’ oxygen machines. I slid into another car on the ice on the way to work one morning and cried, not just because of the accident but because I felt that I was sliding too, away and away. My parents visited, though, and that was good. My mom cooked and cooked in my friends’ kitchen. Other friends brought me food and had me for dinner and I met Joy at a coffee shop sometimes. Also a friend of Abby’s gave one of the cheapest and best haircuts I’ve ever had.

Then after one of the hardest winters, came perhaps the happiest summer. It was a gift dropped in my lap just when I’d stopped waiting for such goodnesses. It began with a flying trip back to Vancouver for in-person graduation and the thousand hugs covid never allowed. The green of it all reminded me how to stand up straight. Back home in Madison, change was coming. Abby and Taylor were house-hunting in Indiana, fell in love with a house they called Big Red, but had their dreams crushed. I sat and held my client Phyllis’s hand as her breath labored its way in and out of her lungs a few hours before she died. I spent a while searching for jobs in Greensboro and realized, with slight shock, that I’m qualified for more than I thought.

Then I took a trip to the UK that I couldn’t afford and in no way regret. I went to the circus with my family and to parks and art museums—sometimes on my own. I gave a paper at Cambridge and choked humblingly at the first question from the audience. I stayed at a castle and toured an artist’s studio and made butter from cream and scrambled up the muddy sides of mountains ahead of friends. I felt both moody and at peace which are two of my favorite feelings. I came home to a renewed appreciation for Abby’s friendship which had housed and homed and fed me for the past year. It is not simple, but it is good. We took her babies to see my client Bonnie one morning in July.

Then fall came with alarming alacrity. And there I was back in Greensboro teaching vaguely familiar kiddos in very familiar hallways except this time I was teaching literature and I knew none of my co-workers. I realized in successive bursts that I love teaching and am good at it, but also that as far as some of my students were concerned, I was going to have to earn my stripes all over again. Eventually things fell into a rhythm. I went to a brewery with friends, sat too near the band, and played a card game. I worked on filling my new place with things, hung a canopy over my bed, and battled with College Board over getting my AP syllabus approved. I successfully joined a community group at church, rediscovered the wonderfully erroneous map on the basketball court at Lindley, had eight solidly pleasant parent conferences in a row, remembered how little I like spirit week, and let my freshmen make chaos on my carpet with acrylic paint. Regula and Mary Frances both came to visit, and I liked watching them in my childhood kitchen, chatting with my parents, disparate parts of my life coming together as if they belonged all along.

This year like, I suppose, all years before it, has been much. I ate brunch and taught poetry and got a large wooden chest upstairs all on my own. I argued with a 102 year old over whether he or I should carry the groceries and drove through WV in the midst of its blazing October leaves. I went to a retreat I hated and to one I loved. I ended up in the ER twice—once for myself and once for someone else. I walked to playgrounds, walked a farmers’ market, and walked a lot of hills. I visited two whiskey distilleries in two different countries, and neither time was my idea. I brought my mom pasta when she ran out and got hit by a bike while on the phone with my dad. 

I somehow managed to start both a writers’ group and a conversation club that meet monthly. When I wonder how that happened, I then remind myself that as an adult I’ve become the woman who keeps activities moving along at a birthday party which she is not hosting, and volunteers to be the timekeeper at a writing workshop and cut people off when their time is up. Those things happened this year too.

I have fewer philosophical thoughts than usual about this last trip round the sun. The one thread which I’ve found it easy to pick at and unravel is that so many things have brought me back to the beginning. My accomplishments are a varied collection of starts and restarts. I picked up paint-by-number and put one on my wall already. I got my first house plants (but also my first traffic ticket) and shoveled my first driveway. I entered a new decade and celebrated it with two very longtime friends.

Even though my writing has largely been lying fallow the last few months, other things long dormant have been poking their heads up from the soil. Within 24 hours of each other I accepted a job at Caldwell (this made me cry) and agreed to take over the lease of an apartment three blocks from where I grew up (this made me laugh). Now I have a picture of that day taped to my desk at work (because this makes me smile). Beyond those building blocks of life, in the cracks of my days I’m reading more than I have since I was a kid—rereads like Jayber Crow and P.G. Wodehouse and new things like Tana French and memoirs about people’s mothers—and also playing my cello sometimes, and cooking for the first time in years. 

All of these returns, these dances with my former self, are reminders that living my life faithfully does not require that I am capable or impressive. What is required is a willingness to step out onto the floating islands where the Lord controls the currents, to say, Yes, I will follow the Mystery, follow it as it takes me over Calvary and on and on all the way to the feast of all things made right. This trust is not easy, but as I watch the ghost of young Alice and her hesitating steps, I realize that it’s easier than it used to be. Perhaps because every year I understand the promise of that feast—and its host—a little more fully.

Last week, though still recovering from a bad car accident, my mom threw a Christmas party. Fifty people stuffed into four rooms and sang and drank and ate and talked. My brother squeezed past me at one point and said wryly, “Aren’t you glad our parents are so popular?” And then we went for a walk to see the lights and at one point a passing car slowed and someone yelled out of it, “WE LOVE YOU, MISS HODGKINS!” And while I don’t know who that was, it’s a worthy sentiment. I’m all for worthy sentiments. Heather comes to visit this weekend for a mini writing retreat, so I’m getting ready to shake the cobwebs off and chase some new lines of inquiry using words on a page. I’m ready and waiting. On Christmas day I got some very good books as gifts and went to church and ate the Mystery with the people of God—full with the richness of promise.