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2025 Retrospective

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According to my journal, on the first day of 2025 I did “various tasks,” an appropriate harbinger of a year in which I would continue to be busy and full from one season into the next and the next. More often recently I’ve left out the latchstring on the door of myself, let the thing swing open, allowed the fresh air properly in. 

At the beginning of the year we had a few snow days, I cooked a lot of pot roast, and Katie and I started our early morning class meetings for our London trip, the kids straggling in sleepy-eyed in the half-light. A group of boys took to playing blackjack in my study hall and I wrote a poem about it to make them stop. (It worked.) I gave occasional after school cello lessons to a student who begged for them, and helped the women’s ministry at church put on a small weekend conference. I re-read Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day so I could lead a discussion about it at (one of) my book club(s), and I logged onto Zoom a couple times a month for a residency through Fuller Seminary where I watched eager creative people wrestle gently with their place in the church.

This was a year of travel and not a single trip was by myself (though a few flights were.) The first big one was a midwest road trip with Tze over spring break. We talked about tattoos and decision-making and church, and the morning after we left my old home of Madison, WI, when he pulled over to take pictures of something or other, I sat in the car and cried, because I was only just coming to understand how unhappy I had been in that place and how good it had been to me despite everything. We went through a lot of Air Bnbs and more rental cars than was ideal. We ate at Culver’s and nameless diners and saw Lake Michigan from nearly every angle. 

Back home I wrote the text of a song based on Psalm 2 for a project at church, and played my cello in a chapel program at school. I showed the 2015 Far from the Madding Crowd to my juniors, and they reacted with dramatic indignation. I read Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady for the first time and wept with grief and gladness when Ralph died and Isabel called him ‘brother.’ In May, I flew to Colorado along with parents to see my brother walk across a stage in a tent after years of work for his PhD, then came back to my students making up ‘tier lists’ on my whiteboard of all the books they’d been assigned, ranking them from top to bottom as if literature mattered and their thoughts about it did too.

By early June I was in London with my siblings, beginning my second big trip of the year. George and I climbed Primrose Hill and walked part of the canal while waiting for Mary, and then we all three had dinner at Dishoom and went to see a show. We stayed the next few days in a cottage in the Cotswolds and wandered its environs. Back in London, my students arrived—a moment Katie and I had been planning for two years. I was thrilled, and then our rental house cancelled on us right before check in. We found another place to stay, but I spent the rest of the trip reckoning with my own competency. We took the kids to see Oliver! and to Mary’s church in Southall and out to the countryside and to the Victoria and Albert Museum. They enjoyed so much but it was difficult for me to see this, and I cried on the tube home from the circus.

Back home I spent a week or two recovering then flew west with Stephanie (the third trip). We met Regula and drove her car down the coast, past lighthouses and rocks and trees and speeding tickets and deserts. In Tahoe we cleaned my granddad’s cabin, played in the glittering water at Emerald Bay, and drank Turkish coffee. I got blisters on my feet and the tattoo I’d been thinking about since trip #1. Mary came at the end for a few days, uncertain about her future in London and needing a place to think. We posed for so many photos and made playlists to reflect each other’s personalities. 

Back home, I returned to work in early August. When the kids came back I found my classes both delightful and exhausting. I went on exactly one date to a trivia night at a brewery, flew to Minnesota for the weekend for my cousin’s wedding in the woods, hosted ‘meadhalls’ for my freshmen when they finished Beowulf, and took my AP kids outside to read poetry under the sky. And then my sister moved home, with all of her books and her ten years’ memories of London in tow.

I wrote a paper about teaching that my mom really liked and gave it at a conference in South Carolina. Heather visited from Boston while in town for a diaconate meeting, and I invited my friend Ashley to a Caldwell soccer game, then got so involved in a conversation with her about some big emotion or other that I cried standing on the sidelines. I led a Bible study on Galatians, went off my anti-depressants, and started locking the freshmen out of my classroom at lunchtime so they wouldn’t think it belonged to them.

At thirty-three, I am still trying to learn to shut up and listen, to hear the melody of the Maker’s song. I have heard it better at year’s end. I think the music has crescendoed. Yesterday I read a little morality play by Charles Williams that my mom gave me. Towards the end the protagonist says to the angel Gabriel, “You look grander than you used,” and Gabriel replies, “It is only that you give me more attention.”

In this last month or so I’ve gotten a new hot water heater and a new car and walked to see the lights in the very cold. My parents’ Thanksgiving table was full and eclectic, and their Christmas party had more singing than ever before. During exams last week sickness ravaged the student population, and I entertained myself by privately listing every literary figure I’d discussed with my juniors who’d died of tuberculosis: Helen Burns, all four of Charlotte Brontë’s sisters, John Keats himself, and Tiny Tim (in one timeline at least). Then this past Saturday I went to a Christmas brunch at Brooke’s and by the end my temperature was 103°. So I went home and wept. It was all I wanted to do. I felt certain that tears would heal me.

I may have been right, because I am mainly better now, well enough to read Mary’s words in Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being:

My flesh in terror and fire
Rejoices that the Word
Who utters the world out of nothing,
As a pledge of His word to love her
Against her will, and to turn
Her desperate longing to love,
Should ask to wear me,
From now to their wedding day,
For an engagement ring.

Amen and amen.

An Ode to Airport Living

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This will be a summer of travel for me—spring already has been. Throughout June and July I’ll be more out of town than in it. This has me thinking about airports—those odd liminal spaces consisting of high ceilings, endless grey-green carpets, exorbitantly-priced food, ambient intercom announcements, beeping carts, chirring suitcase wheels.

I never think I like an airport. There are restrictions and lines and unspecified waiting times. Sometimes they yell at you to take your shoes off and sometimes they yell at you to keep them on. When you are late for a flight there are always unintentional herds of people directly in your path who are gazing up at departure screens with tired eyes. Also, luggage gets lost.

And yet, in an airport I am nearly always content. Most of the flights I’ve taken in my adult life have been alone. And while this has the downside of not having someone to watch your bags for you, it comes with its own special flavor of autonomy. You are caught in an uncomfortable limbo—Concourse A, perhaps—but there you are utterly free. Free to walk, free to talk on the phone to every friend you can think of, free to treat yourself to a sit-down dinner no matter the hour, free to go in search of the interfaith chapel, free to curl up on the carpet at an empty gate for a nap, free to listen to three hours of an audiobook, free to be either under or overwhelmed by the in-terminal art exhibits, free to have a cleansing cry. 

Those are the things the people around you are doing too. Wherever you settle yourself, you can look across the way and you will see other another human being wearing a neck pillow like an accessorie, waiting to fly away from home or back to it, expectations, hopes, and fears for the destination piled round their feet like so much luggage as they drink a smoothie and watch distant figures on the tarmack wave neon batons this way and that. There is nothing so universally relatable as one solitary person’s very particular experience.

The plane is a different beast altogether. It’s an uncomfortable cocoon in which the only people-watching you can do is out of your literal peripheral vision. But an airport, oh an airport is all cinnamon-pretzel-smelling and full of unguarded faces which bare gut-deep anxiety, boredom, potential. In a few hours we’ll be scattered round the country, round the whole globe, but in this moment we are all in this place, waiting together. Oh, an airport is living.

Christmas in London

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On the Friday before Christmas, I oversaw a bunch of teenagers decorating a gingerbread house while wearing my Christmas tree dress, then went home and changed into corduroys and a big sweater and got a ride to the airport from a friend. My first flight was delayed, then when we did board the pilot had us waiting on the tarmac before take-off for fifteen minutes “because we would make up time in the air,” and then after we landed there was no gate for us for some reason so we waited on that tarmac for about twenty minutes, and I was so convinced that I would miss my second flight and have to wait to travel till the next day that I’d already texted my family and said as much, but when I got off the plane I ran to the other gate anyway in an act of good faith. Another man ran along with me, though perhaps not for the same flight, and more than once we got stuck behind people on the people movers who did not really seem to want to move, but then I made it to the gate, and it was still open and I boarded and sat in my seat and it was a miracle.

This Christmas was a miracle, the kind I often forget to expect.

I landed in London the next morning, and then serendipitously ran into my own brother at Southall Station as if we have spent all our lives living around the block from each other in a small town (which we have not).

The next week-and-change was rich. I wore my sister’s sweaters almost every day. Time passed in a whirl of poems, and foggy Hampstead, and unusual non-perishable food stuffs gifted by my Uncle Jon, and hauling huge pots of paneer and rice to the church, and Christmas carols in the living room, and Asian aunties, and a Christmas group chat with my dad wearing a wig as the icon, and a fourteenth century pub on Christmas Eve, and getting motion-sick on the tube, and walks in Osterley Park (give me a path to tramp across a British field every day for the rest of my life, please), and a brewery in Bermondsey, and dishes done by our friend Zack, and a shop for Christmas dinner at Mary’s big Tesco, and a nativity play with lopsided head-dresses and clear-spoken lines, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at Piccadilly, and egg-white dosas with peanut chutney, and straining cranberry sauce that was much more trouble that I intended, and cream tea at the V&A, and seven adults in a Honda Jazz, and learning that William Buckland once ate the heart of a king, and a clothes dryer piled with all the Christmas goodies like my grandma’s breezeway used to be back in 2003.

I will tell you something: I am unsure if my family has Christmas traditions anymore. Every Christmas of my adult life has been different, this one especially, full of small revelations to bask in. We followed Mary in her hat with its orange bobble through a crowded Covent Garden to track down a Christmas market that had disappeared in the night. My dad sat cheerful and quiet next to an auntie just arrived from India who speaks only Telugu and is hesitant to wear socks. George laughed a lot—often at his own jokes—and rigged up the curtain of saris for the Christmas Mela. My mom bought a floral velvet dress at Harvey Nichols where all of the dresses were very beautiful (except for one which was very ugly). And it was easy to invite in people we haven’t always had with us—my mom’s younger brother and my parents’ student this time. They too can cook and laugh and walk and sing carols and sit on strangers’ couches and hear the good news.

Because every year that news is new, every year we are children again, every year we wait to see what the miracle can possibly be. On Christmas day this year we read Tennyson: “Ring in the valiant man and free, / The larger heart, the kindlier hand; / Ring out the darkness of the land, / Ring in the Christ that is to be.” How much we still have to learn of Him, year after year.

2024 Retrospective

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On January 1st of this year, I wrote with triumph in my journal that all the mice that had been plaguing my kitchen for months were gone: “No more mice!” This did not, unfortunately, turn out to be true—full eradication would take until the spring, but we’ll draw a veil over that. Welcome to the exciting beginning of my 2024. My friend Laura sent me colorful pens for grading, and sometimes I sat in the big chair in my living room and made a mess with watercolors. 

My friend Regula and I joked that this year I entered my “club era”— full of the kinds of clubs that define your thirties. And it’s true that I seem to have become a joiner all of a sudden. Regular commitments include two—and sometimes three—book clubs (only one of which includes my parents), prayer on Thursday evenings, the women’s ministry team at church, and a couple other groups to breathe life into the curious child within me who still sometimes wants to put words on a page that preserve all the good and the odd in the world around her.

But my main commitment, in both time and heart, has been my job—spring teaching this year was hectic and sweet and occasionally made me want to tear my hair out. I cared about the kids so much I got honest-to-God angry at them sometimes and in turn they cared so much about what I had to tell them or teach that they cried earnest tears. A student told me I looked tired and when I told him that wasn’t polite, he took it as an invitation to elaborate on my lack of make up. I bought gold confetti from the dollar store to help teach a George Eliot novel, and it still lives on in my classroom to this day. And one day in mid-spring when we were all tired (not just me), I pressed pause on an honors Lit class so we could spend the period talking about the theology of clothing and I could pretend I was in grad school again.

In April, my friend Katie and I went to London to do teaching research, and it was sweet to see her experience it for the first time and also sweet to see the Victoria and Albert Museum and my sister and other people and things that matter. The week felt intense, but good for beauty and good for friendship. When it rained we sheltered under the awning at Royal Albert Hall. This coming June we’re going to go back and take eighteen teenagers with us. The planning process has sometimes been frantic, especially the financial side, because though I’m a reasonably sensible person, I’ve never been in charge of eighty thousand dollars of other people’s money before, but it will be so good to take the kids. Perhaps we too will wait out the rain at Royal Albert Hall.

My birthday was at the end of April after we returned and though some of those days felt very low, Katie and her husband threw me a birthday party with sparkly pink cocktails and at school students brought me flowers and a cookie cake and general frenetic excitement. 

And then came summer and I returned to writing (though it did not always return to me). I painted my kitchen cabinets and my bathroom. I sorted through nearly every item I own (especially the papers) and worked on applying for foster certification—including fingerprints, interviews, a fire inspection, CPR training, and a map of my home. I watched inarguably too much TV, got set up on a couple dates, listened to most of The Chronicles of Narnia on audiobook, went to the mountains for a day, and spent every single night in my own bed.

School started earlier than usual in the thick blue heat of August and for the first time I was teaching opposite one of my own former students. I took on a new role, helping manage our new(ish) house system, and spent most days teaching kids I’ve taught before, whose handwriting I know and whose growth over the years is a quiet source of hope to me, though many of them cannot yet see it. I had the same study hall advisory as last year and sometimes they argued with me about rules and facts the way kids do with their own parents perhaps because my classroom—sometimes too warm and cluttered—has some home to it. They are used to me and I am used to them.

Laura used to send me emails asking both facetiously and sincerely to hear about my adventures, because my life at the time was full of lots of unexpected newnesses, fresh delights and anxieties, but, as I’ve sifted back through, this year hasn’t seemed even to have many separate events in it, much less adventures. It has merely been long continual rhythms in various parts of my life, all layered on top of one another in syncopation. 

These have been the days of small things, the days of inviting people to this and to that, of getting a french bob and watching it grow out, of my car shutting down as if possessed while driving home from work but then continuing to operate as normal, of a long weekend in Minnesota for a cousin wedding reception by a river, of going to Trader Joe’s, of borrowing a dress to wear to a high school friend’s wedding, of leading a Bible study on Ephesians, of bringing my cello to school, of realizing that there are too many small things and I cannot, in reality, foster a child right now, of driving to Greenville in the quiet, and of going to a reading at a bookstore, hearing flash fiction, then becoming entranced by small things all over again.

December has been a gift. When I walked into church on the 1st and realized it was the first Sunday of Advent my heart made a little leap. I always love this season, perhaps because for much of it the corners of my mind become preoccupied (and therefore filled) with light. When there is more darkness than usual, things that glow become precious: light hanging from trees, light nestled in windows, light bursting out of a night sky in a blinding choir singing “gloria in excelsis Deo!” 

Tomorrow I fly to London to spend Christmas with my family, and I’ll land on the winter solstice when there will be less than eight hours of daylight. But oh, there will be candles and oh, there will be stars. In all these small things I keep remembering some lines of T.S. Eliot I discovered as a teenager, stumbled upon as if they were El Dorado:

For all things exist only as seen by Thee, only as known by Thee, all things exist

    Only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies

      Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.

Popsicle Castles

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The first time I remember hearing the story was on a long car trip with my dad and some family friends. We were driving to Gettysburg, and he was waxing eloquent about his grad school days in Chicago. I was only half-listening, and then, all in a moment, I was fully listening because the story he was telling was not one I’d heard before. The characters and the setting were all new. In my memory the first telling of that story went on for forty-five minutes and felt like a whole tv miniseries, fantastic and weird and wonderful.

I’ve heard it a few times since and it doesn’t seem to last quite as long anymore or be quite the fully immersive experience. Over time it has become less funny and more moving to me, and with each new time I hear my dad tell it I find myself with more questions about its heroes. But here—to the best of my ability—is the tale, likely embellished over time in small hazy ways by both my father’s memory and my own:

My dad moved from California to Chicago for grad school around the summer of 1981, but California was not the only place his people were from. His grandmother was from Louisiana out in Goldonna, which I’ve always pictured as sepia-toned, railroad-track-laden swampland. He wasn’t really in touch with any family from back that way, but his grandma of course still was, and when he left for Chicago, she reminded him that he had kin there. One of her Louisiana cousins, Aubyn Hoyle, and her common law husband, Joe Sebold, had lived in Chicago for several years. Like a good boy, he would, of course, need to look them up. 

Perhaps he did or perhaps his Grandma Veonia, called up Aubyn herself to pass along my dad’s number, but the fact remains that they invited him to spend Thanksgiving with him that first autumn. Aubyn and Joe were going to show him a day on the town.

They pulled up to his apartment at the University of Chicago in a pick-up which didn’t seem to have enough working parts to power a lawnmower. They were probably in their forties, but because of hard-living and a scant amount of teeth, looked much older. They were, however, thrilled to have a chance to be hospitable, and to a polite young relation on top of that.

The first place they insisted on taking their PhD-bound cousin was to see their doctor. Doctors, they felt warmly, should associate with doctors, and theirs was especially good, they assured my dad. So soon they were climbing up long flights of stairs to see Dr. Aspirin, their veterinarian. Despite the fact that it was Thanksgiving Day, his waiting room was full of folks who did not look entirely well themselves speaking a variety of languages with decrepit animals languishing across their laps and at their feet. Canine skin diseases seemed to be prominent. Aubyn and Joe marched my dad to the front of the line and asked the wildly overworked receptionist if they could see Dr. Aspirin. “This here’s our kin, and he’s studying to be a doctor, so we want him to meet our doctor.” The receptionist said she would see what she could do, so Aubyn and Joe and my dad settled in with the rest of the hoi polloi to wait. They waited and waited, which of course was to be expected at a doctor’s office, particularly when you were just there to make a social call, but eventually, the honest-to-goodness Dr. Aspirin appeared. He was a tiny Filipino man in a white coat marked by all manner of fluids. Aubyn and Joe explained who my dad was and what they had in common, and the doctor shook his hand very cordially. Aubyn and Joe were well-pleased.

The next stop was Navy Pier which, in the early eighties was no great attraction, but a crowded gray hulk reaching an arm out into Lake Michigan. And then onto what my dad’s hosts assured him was their favorite piece of sculpture in the whole city. And it was, in its own way, a marvel. Forty feet tall, on a rotating platform at the edge of a junkyard were washers welded to lawnmowers fused to the bumpers of old trucks all sticking out at various angles, forming a looming silhouette of machine life and art. It looked as if the thing had grown there, though in retrospect, it couldn’t possibly have. As they wended from stop to stop Aubyn and Joe kept up a regular chatter in the front seat, often turning around to my dad to address him about various aspects of their lives or their city. At one point Aubyn, craned back and announced, with a clear belief that my dad needed to be informed, “You know, dog is God spelled backwards.”

Thanksgiving dinner was special, Joe told my dad, and turned out to take place at a cafeteria in which the turkey consisted of a variety of meat substances stuffed into a fowl-shaped mold, like a sausage casing, and then revealed in glory to the beholder. It was simultaneously a feast for both the eyes and the stomach, as well as appropriate for Aubyn and Joe’s great dearth of teeth. After dinner they took my dad back to their apartment, which was up many flights of stairs, just as Dr. Aspirin’s office had been, and, once inside, was piled high with all manner of things. But as one does with kin, they extracted the family album from one of the many piles and laid it across my dad’s lap for him to appreciate. He opened it, and three cockroaches ran out, skittering across the room and away to cover. Aubyn was not concerned by this intrusion, but began the pleasant due diligence of pointing out all the photos of his grandma as a little girl, as well as legions of relations he had never met.

At last, as my dad was hoping to make his exit, Joe announced that they needed to show him “what they made.” So they led him to the second bedroom, and he opened the door and peered in. But instead of disordered hills of junk, he found tables covered in careful architectural miniatures: the White House, the Empire State Building, the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, all built entirely of popsicle sticks. They were intricate and ordered and clearly represented many hours of work. Aubyn and Joe glowed with pride behind him. These people had dedicated themselves to building a world. My dad couldn’t think of what to say, and so he asked, “Where do you get all the popsicle sticks?” It turned out to be a foolish question, because they then led him to the kitchen and opened the freezer, which was full, of course, of popsicles. Joe smiled his toothless smile.

My dad never saw them again after that one Thanksgiving with all its revelations, but there is a coda to the story. Years later, he was contacted by a lawyer who told him that Joe Sebold had passed away and left my father a few acres of land down in Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana. There were no buildings to speak of on it, and it was hot and sodden and isolated. My dad was in the midst of finishing his doctorate and getting married, so he did the practical thing—he had the lawyer sell the land sight unseen. But Joe had, at the last, done that thing he and Aubyn knew best—reach out to kin, and hold nothing back, offer the very best of what you’ve got.

2023 Retrospective

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My 2023 started with a walk with my friend Heather, visiting from New England. That evening we sat in my warm living room across from each other and wrote poems about the year and other stuff we’d seen. Then those first few days brought some difficult things at work—quiet things, heavy things, which in retrospect I may have mishandled in many ways. An inauspicious start, but I’m not grading this year on my own performance.

In very rough chronological order, this is what followed:

I took a cold little hike out in Rockingham with Karen and CJ and a hundred strangers. I read a lot and chatted with my coworkers even more in the quiet cracks of planning periods. I got more colds than usual and collected and organized all the digital curriculum guides in the two upper schools.

I had a writer’s retreat in the grey winter hills of the Piedmont where I wrote a bit and took more baths than there were days. I covered the walls of my bedroom in curtain rods, so I could hang my clothes from hooks like garlands. I let students read my novel in bits and pieces, and while waiting for planes and trains I made use of long layovers the best way I know how: talking to friends and walking to see the art.

I flew to Jolene’s wedding and let the Vancouver drizzle permeate my skin. I wrote postcards for my students before their AP exam, and spent two months preparing in excess for a half-hour chapel talk for the high school. Now that I have a place of my own I discovered that I am sometimes unsure of what to do with myself when I am in it—I rattle and chafe—but at school a coworker friend bought a TENS unit so the kids could simulate period pain, and I knew the best response to that was laughter.

Over spring break I went to Tennessee with my mom and, with my aunt, we walked around Cheekwood and saw model trains and spring blooms and paneled libraries. My freshmen illustrated Dante’s circles of hell (and added Where’s Waldo to many of them), I went to a Kentucky Derby party for the first time since childhood, and while on my way to a sweet and full family reunion in the brown and green mountains of Colorado I received news that my client Bonnie, who took up most of my working hours when I lived in Wisconsin, had died.

I went blonde, later covered that in henna, then a few months later chopped it all off, because changing my hair has always been a reliable constant. I took a long train journey for all of July, leaving my life behind to take up temporary residence in the lives of half a dozen friends: attending the birthday party of a little girl I’d only barely met, watching Survivor, chatting with the neighbor kids, and peering up at fireworks from beneath an umbrella. Then I came home in August and killed a couple house plants through well-intended negligence.

I watched Love Island with friends, because you can’t be teachers all the time, and waited six months to get my car repaired after running into a tree. I purloined a couch from storage at school for my classroom, was immediately asked to return it, and then, in perhaps the greatest miracle of the decade, was gifted an armchair and ottoman. My sister came home for a few months, taking lots of walks and visiting every thrift store and church she could find. I made new friends here and there, but struggled to maintain the friendships I already had as I sank into fall. Regardless, I watched people’s dogs for them and cleaned out my gutters.

I went to Charleston with my family where we ate at The Obstinate Daughter and played trivia, and I discovered that I do, after all, like the beach. A student cried over a test I wrote for the first time in years, and I planned trips to London and maybe to Tahoe for next year. I went to the zoo with a friend and her kids, and was asked to write two essays for church, one of which led to me teaching a George Herbert poem around a campfire to a bunch of open-faced grown women. And despite my own grown-ness, I found myself more and more often the recipient of generosity from those around me—rides and patience and time.

God has been just as good to me this year as he is every year, and many of the gifts enumerated above echo his long goodness, but I’ve felt myself straining to keep afloat, despite all that. I know this primarily because writing—which used to be so full of joy, like stepping into sunlight—has become stale, difficult, full of grey sand. I’ve posted here every month since I was eighteen—more than thirteen years—but I’m going to take a sabbatical now. I’m working only within the framework of my own rules, but those rules have often been fairly definite things, so I need a fancy word to feel as if this is allowed. Sabbatical it is. I will return to this space—I think—in six months.

The fact is, I’ve felt both older and younger—more squinting, childlike, and lost—recently, and I might as well dwell in that, holding my empty hands out and taking what others have to offer. Last week, my friend Katie gave me a basic lesson in watercolor and told me she was going to start at the beginning, like I knew nothing, and, sitting at her kitchen table with the paint brush I wasn’t sure how to hold, I said that made sense. Wendell Berry wrote that “when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,” and he may be right. Yesterday was Christmas. I sat with my family for nearly two hours opening the presents that were piled under the tree. It was a very good day, and I thought of Mary two thousand years ago, picturing her as the song does: “not used to the light, but having to squint her eyes in the sunshine,” yet chosen and beloved by God, nonetheless.

The day school let out a week or so ago, my siblings came over in the evening. I was very tired, so they heated up dinner and we ate together. After, as we were cleaning up, my sister asked for a container for the little bit of peas that were left. I reached into the cabinet and pulled out a tiny container the size of two bottle caps stacked on one another, and held it out to her, giggling hysterically. In the space of about five seconds my laughter dissolved into tears. Mary took the container from me, told me to sit down, and began to rummage in the cupboard herself. So there you have it—I don’t always know what to make of things anymore, or what to say about or do about them. But I will treasure them all up, and ponder them in my heart.

Boxes of Glory

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In my bedroom, there’s a box on the low shelf next to the armchair that’s usually piled with the clothes I think I may wear the next day. And in that box is everything: every bulletin I came home with from a church service, every pamphlet from a historical house I toured, every name tag from every retreat weekend and every map of every camp I’ll probably never go back to. That box contains the last few years of life: sparkly leis, birthday cards, notes from students, lists of my own hopes and dreams when I was feeling low, and lists of chores on Saturdays. 

I don’t forget that the box is there—I’m always stuffing more things into it every few days, every time I tidy, but I do forget that what it holds is so good. The conventional wisdom says that to remember is to feel melancholy, to compare what we have now to what we had then, and wallow in a sort of gentle sadness, to miss what we once were and now lack. But I’ve never really thought that argument held much water. It never made sense to me.

Yesterday a friend texted me to ask if I could find a page of Christmas songs from the year before, so I pulled out the box and disemboweled it on my lap and across my bed. And there were all the good things—joyful, painful, unremarkable, and otherwise—of the last three or four years in pink and yellow and scrawling pen. As I unfolded creased papers and spread open folders, I was aware that remembering these things, these past realities, makes me just as happy as I was the day each of them originally arrived in my hands—often happier, because I’ve wised up to their significance. In fact, upon reflection, these paper and ink memories often reappear from the box infused with a divine purpose, a little extra glow that I couldn’t understand when I first received them. “Oh,” I think as I flip through one by one, “Of course! God was doing that, and that, and that all along.” Their small, matter-of-fact glories don’t fade, but become brighter every year.

So sadness, even the gentle kind, doesn’t come into the equation for me. I sat in church this morning wondering why that was as the preacher read from Isaiah: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.” And when those words found their home burning warm in my chest, just as they have the hundreds of times I’ve heard them before, just as they have in the chests of all the children of God through the millenia, I remembered. I remembered that to recall the Lord’s blessings is to recall that he is capable of blessing, that he desires to bless, and that he promises that he will again. The fact is, in the kingdom God is building, every ordinary glory is the harbinger of a splendor even greater.

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end

And the first coming of the second coming.

-T.S. Eliot

Waiting in the Wings

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I have more than one piece waiting in the wings to be written. There is a short essay for a church program—I know that will happen and it will make its way on stage, but the others are slower and less certain. There’s the piece I started a few months ago about my absurd adventure on Amtrak this summer. I planned to submit it for a competition, but the due date cheerfully came and went while the essay remained only a couple dense pages of notes on my google drive. And then, of course, there’s the friendship book which I intended to draft so much of this summer. But I’ve found unraveling my own thousand and one thin, tangled anecdotes and weaving them into a telling is both hard and solitary. It gleams bright with difficulty from every angle.

But why writing has been difficult is not the point. The point is, it has been. Writing has been difficult for the last couple years in a way I hadn’t known before now. The front of my classroom is now a much easier space for me to inhabit than an invitingly blank page. If you had told me at twenty-three that I would be saying that, I’d have laughed in your face, but here we are.

I’ve taken to picturing my writing mind, my writing self, as a barren field which used to yield all sorts of things and now, simply, does not. Some days I tell myself that my mind is lying fallow, resting itself in the shade, leaking out all its contaminants, gorging itself on water and light, readying for some full-bursting harvest in a few seasons’ time. But on other days, winter days, I really begin to suspect it has been abandoned, that the soil in which good things once readily took root is eroding over time and time and time, in the cold, careless wind.

But it has occurred to me that I have the power to choose between these two options. I can choose to care for my words in their dormancy or I can choose to desert them. And of course I want the former. Of course I want light and life to spring from the dim stillness of rested soil. I hope my persistent writing of these words proves as much both to you and to myself.

And even before my realization of that decision, I think the fallowing had begun. Because writing has felt far from me, I don’t really have the words to explain, but there is some kind of softening happening inside me. “Peace has come with work to do.” A couple weeks ago I was reading an old book from childhood aloud to my sister—the chapter in which Mona Melendy gets a haircut and manicure then comes home and cries about it because she wishes that she hadn’t and growing up is so hard—and I almost got choked up myself because I felt for her—with her—so deeply. This stilling of the sentences running through my head and my fingers has perhaps led to a second adolescence, far different from my first. It seems to consist mainly of a kind of humility I have not before tasted.

Earlier this week a freshman girl came to my room after school to ask hard and good questions about God and truth and other things of that sort, and though I couldn’t answer all of them, I did what I could. I gave her a couple books to borrow. I gave her my friends.

In that same spirit, I’ve opened one of the packets of poetry I recently compiled to teach from, and looked to the words of even more of my friends. As my quiet ground waits for its coming season of good green things, I will allow those friends to tell me the story of things to come.

God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in – as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.
—Denise Levertov

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
—G. M. Hopkins

maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
—Mary Oliver

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.
—R.S. Thomas

Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
—Oscar Wilde

Then—- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune—-
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
—Edith Sitwell quoting Christopher Marlowe

If ye have any thing to send or write,
I have no bag, but here is room:
Unto my Fathers hands and sight,
(Believe me) it shall safely come.
That I shall mind, what you impart,
Look, you may put it very near my heart.
—George Herbert

and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.
—Pablo Neruda


So, having read all, having done all, in the shadow of your wings, I will sing for joy.

Community in Quiet

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Yesterday afternoon I came home from work, ate chips and guac, peeled off my tights, and took a walk with my sister—a walk we’ve taken a hundred times. We each arrived back home with novels we’d found in different Little Free Libraries. Then we sat in my living room and I listened to her read a chapter of a favorite childhood book aloud—a chapter where the boy goes to the opera, watches a snowplow, and finds an abandoned puppy. After that, I drove north for dinner, outside city limits down winding late-summer roads, where I sat at a long table with four other women from work in a shining house with a round window. We ate good food with more than one kind of cheese, and laughed deep and long, though now I can’t remember what it was we were laughing at.

This morning I took a hot shower, because the weather almost feels like fall, and then got back into bed and listened to the audiobook of a mystery novel. Three cousins sat around a dinner table pouring drinks for each other with a heavy hand in an effort to nudge the others into confessing to murder, so just my type of thing. Later I got up and drove to Kernersville, where Karen and I took a meandering hike through the woods over rocks and tangled roots. We ate good greasy burgers at a little grill decorated unabashedly with grinning clown dolls, then I came home, laden with two old maps of British Columbia from her historian husband, and napped to the busy whirring of my washing machine.

Weeks ago, I sat down and started making notes for a blog entry about community and audience and the difference between the two. My notes were mostly a series of questions, not answers: Is it possible to have both? Which do I write for? Which do I consider my students to be? Is it possible to be both?

I never did manage to get answers on the page. My mind has been full of a hundred other whirring things while my body has been simultaneously busy following the rich gentleness of the path above. 

In an hour or so, I’ll head over to my parents’ house for drinks. Both my siblings are home for the next week or so, and there is a plenty to our time when we’re together, all talking over each other at once from five different directions, laughing teasingly in the face of one another’s confidence. Then tonight I will get dressed up and drive back to school on a Saturday to stand cheerfully behind a punch bowl and watch my students decide if they are comfortable enough to actually dance for Homecoming. They like to wait until the lights are way down, until they can convince themselves no one can really see. Then, at last, they’ll crowd close together in raucous safety and let loose.

Audience is often good and well and appropriate. But, in the long run, all right human interaction is in hopeful—if sometimes shy—pursuit of community. It’s a need which, unfulfilled, rumbles and aches like an empty stomach. And I suppose it will not be filled by agonized black and white answers on a page, but only by a complex and hearty stew of other people’s chairs and laden tables, of familiar words read aloud in well-loved voices, of silences and noticings, of drives through country this way and that, seasoned over long months and years by patience and by the practice of joy.

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.