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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.

Remembering

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If I’m honest, I have felt still—too still—the last few years. My life has been full of abundance: a job I love, many good friends, settling back into the neighborhood I grew up in, a sweet church full of creative people, so much travel to beautiful and beloved places. Yet I’ve been irked by the sense throughout that I, as a person, am stagnant, that I’ve stopped growing, that I’ll never feel changed or fresh again. In many ways I think this feeling is born out of my loss of desire to write, the fact that ideas no longer seem to come when I want them, or that when they do I don’t find them interesting. This loss makes me afraid.

The best spiritual antidote I have for this is to follow one of the few commands in scripture which I feel I’m naturally good at: I remember. I remember that the Lord led his people like a flock through the parted sea. I remember the woman who touched the edge of his garment. I remember Saul on the road to Damascus and Gladys Aylward on the train to China and Flannery just sitting there writing about her peacocks. I remember these things because I have read them and heard them, but perhaps even more pressingly, I remember the Pieta in St. Peter’s when I was seventeen, and the silent snow in Grove City when I was twenty, and the bursting red tomato on the nearly-dead vine in my parents’ garden when I was twenty-three, and the August smoke in the Vancouver sky when I was twenty-six, and the shared champagne on the beach at Spanish Banks when I was twenty-nine. I remember that I neither expected nor asked for any of these things, but that they came upon me like a warm summer storm. I hope that this can happen again.

But sometimes my remembering is not enough, because the questions nag at me: That is all well and good, but what if it’s all in the past? What if the summer rains are over and what if they never come again? What good does just thinking about them do? And the answer to all the fear at the heart of this is that while my remembering God has value, what has infinitely more value is his remembering me. And he promises that he does. In Matthew, we are told of the attention he pays to the smallest sparrow and to each hair on our heads. And then Jesus says wryly (I love when Jesus is wry), “Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” Because of course all those warm moments I habitually remember which feel like warm thunder in my hands occurred because he remembered me first. He always remembers me first. I am, in fact, always only echoing his remembrance. This practice of remembering between myself and God is not reciprocal—it is wildly imbalanced. He has engraved me on the palms of his hands.

Quick Guide to Success

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Sometimes as I watch my sixteen year old students, I flip back through my own years as if through tinted plastic lenses of twenty different colors, so I can see the world as they do. And probably the singular abstract idea which looks most different to me now than it once did is the idea of success.

When I was young, success was clear and narrow and certain. Success reflected my own abilities and therefore my own worth. But now, in my thirties, I use the word much more liberally. I’m delighted to contemplate its small beauties all around me: a flower succeeds in blooming, ancient walls still succeed in holding up a roof, a baby boy succeeds in drawing his first breath. Success is not just some straight line drawn from desire to achievement. It is, instead, a miracle: an acorn beneath a forgotten mulch of leaves busting open, grasping the earth, then reaching green arms towards sun and rain till one day, unaccountably, it’s an oak.

The place where I feel successful most consistently nowadays is in the classroom. I love seeing students surprised by how much they care about the characters and words in front of them, their sincere engagement with what we discuss. But I can’t get away from the idea that the success in getting these kids to understand the goodness on the page is not mine, but the writers’. I did not dream up Elizabeth Bennet or Huck Finn. I’ve only required my students to introduce themselves to them. The bond that’s formed between the actual soul and the fictional one is a communal achievement—requiring not only the effort of someone a couple hundred years ago ,but my effort, and the kids’, and their parents’ for making them read, and mine, for filling the house with books, all for this one moment of wide-eyed appreciation.

This idea of communal success occurred to me with a vengeance last Sunday when the worship team performed a setting of Psalm 2. I’d written the words, and dreamed up the idea of it sounding a bit Johnny Cash, but my friend Robin had composed the music, and Michael had arranged it, and Griffin sang it, and several other musicians played a part. The isolated way I write often allows me to ignore how creative achievement demands a village in order to come to fruition, but here was an object lesson played out on a literal stage. I just sat still, watching something I had conceived but which a dozen other people had breathed life into—not to mention the original psalmist and the Lord himself. 

These are just passing thoughts, though. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about living an examined life is coming to realize that even if I did not examine it, every goodness I’ve discovered in the world would still exist. These truths don’t rely on my knowledge of them. Regardless of my efforts, we would all still have a thousand threads tying us together in our glories and our failures. We’d still be standing on the shoulders of giants. But sometimes it’s nice to know and to delight.

Travels with Friends

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Late on Sunday I got back from a trip to the West Coast, my first significant one since I moved back to the States four years ago. Stephanie and I flew to Seattle and met Regula, then over two and half days the three of us drove down the splendidly grey and green Oregon coast, through the severe desert hills of northern California and Reno, over Spooner Pass, and into the Lake Tahoe Basin. We stayed there, two blocks from the blue of the water, for a little over a week.

We laughed when things went wrong, made lists like our lives depended on it, hiked up and down, cooked and cleaned, lay on golden beaches, read aloud, took so many photos, and dressed up and took a sunset cruise on a boat called the Tahoe Gal. It was all very good.

In the last few years as I’ve settled into my contented adult life, I’ve not been able to shake the nagging feeling that I’m not as good at joy as I used to be. I’ve become placid. There are worse things, but I miss the child self who I suspect knew without being told how to carry herself into excitement, how to look forward to a thing, how to fall speechless from delight, how to feel beauty for what it is. Now it seems I require teaching.

I took this trip with friends, though, and I think they helped me remember.

Really, I’ve taken three big trips in the last few months, all of them very much with others, so the lesson has been knitting up its little threads inside me the whole time. These last two weeks were just a sunny culmination. The thing which I am coming to understand is this: there are nearly as many good ways of responding to beauty as there are people. It is possible to arrive at the Pacific Ocean or St Paul’s Cathedral or New River Gorge, to climb a stile in the Cotswolds, watch a 92-year-old blow out his birthday candles, see an Amish farmer plow his fields, and respond with a gasp, with a question, with quiet, with laughter, with the urge to create, or the urge to weep. I know this because I’ve experienced all of these things on my recent travels and I’ve had people beside me. I’ve seen their faces.

Sure, I had eighteen expressive and impressionable teenagers with me in London, but as dear as they are, I’m not talking about them. I mean the adults. If it were only the kids who knew how to immerse themselves, that would just support my earlier dreary hypothesis that only children know joy. It was the people who are thirty and up from whom I was seeing these reactions. Sometimes they were picking up a camera, sometimes they were spinning in circles, sometimes they were examining, discussing, and sometimes they were just saying, “Look at that—Oh, look at that!” But all of them were waist-deep in delight.

So all is not lost. In fact, not only is Lake Tahoe still very blue and the water at Emerald Bay still full of something that shimmers, but in southern Oregon on highway 97 there is a remote old gas station where they’ll tell you the pumps only work on one side. On that one side, the front cover is off as you pump your gas in the July heat, and you can see the gears and belts and clanking things whir furiously at their task, inches from your kneecap, while your tank fills at a glacial pace. On Saturday afternoon, I pointed and laughed to see this absurdity. My friends were, understandably, too tired and hot to care much, but in a good and precious rush, I felt joy.

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.

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.

The Joys of Talking About Books You Don’t Like

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I’ve always been good at critique. It’s fun to take sharp words and slice something apart so that people can see the mess inside. I still have vivid memories of reading Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Live Coal in the Sea because I disliked it so much, and as I read I constructed scathing criticism in my mind, line by careful line, making the whole experience a delight. 

But in grad school I remember being at some friends’ house for dinner, and embarking on a treatise about either Marilynne Robinson or Wendell Berry. (Embarrassing that I can’t remember which, but there you have it. It really could have been either one.) My central thesis was that this revered author did not really understand what it meant to write fiction, only what it meant to have their head up their own rear end. I don’t think I said that exactly, but something significantly more lengthy and with nearly that effect. My speech was met with silent, wide eyes from everyone in the room. Though nobody spoke, the air was filled with reproach. And it occurred to me that perhaps I should have held my tongue.

So I’ve tried to keep my mouth shut in recent years, and when about a year ago a friend here in Greensboro invited me to join a book club she was starting, I suggested I might not be a very good candidate for it. “I’d be too critical,” I told her. “I don’t want to stop anyone from enjoying what they enjoy.” She told me that she knew what I was like and I should come anyway, which is always a wonderfully comforting pronouncement, so I did.

And lo and behold, these monthly meetings have been a gift, because they’ve turned out to have things to teach me. Mostly when I talk about books, they’re what I assign, books I already like and know, and I’m talking about them to students who, though they are free to disagree, have to listen to my perspective. My perspective is what I’m being paid for. But in a book club, rather than coming to the novel as a teacher, I come to it merely as myself. Of course that’s true when I read for fun on my own time (which I get to do a fair amount of) but I’m all the more aware of it when I carry my copy into Brooke’s living room and sit down with a group of other women who have all come as themselves too.

We sit and we talk and I will tell you a secret: I’m not the only one who dislikes things. Sometimes I recommend True Grit and no one else enjoys it nearly as much as I do. And sometimes someone else proposes The Women and I dislike it with such vehemence deep in my bones that I stop a quarter of the way through. But we find a way to disagree, and we manage to explain why we think the things we think without enforcing a painful silence on the whole room. We listen to each other, and in doing so we come to understand not only the books on our laps, but one another: our tastes, our comforts, our joys, our fears, our hearts. And then we lean back and chat about everything and nothing with warmth and wine and tea and cake.

For someone like me who talks about books all day while people who know less than I do listen, this is a sweetly humbling experience. And the best experiences with books are always humbling ones, ones that leave you feeling small and surrounded and grateful that so many people out there know the same language that you do and want to tell stories with it.

On Sunday, I drove down to Greenville, South Carolina to visit some friends for a few days and on the way I listened to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’d never read it before and it starts off so funny and sharp, and even though I knew that he dies at the end I found that I deeply wanted to know how, not by what means but in what mental state, in what spiritual land. I listened as his illness pulls him down and the narrative slows, while the peasant boy holds Ivan Ilyich’s feet in a comfortable position and he struggles in terror with the value of the life he’s lived and then stumbles on forgiveness and, at last, “instead of death there was light.”

I cried passing Spartanburg, knowing myself to be small and glad. I badly wanted to talk about the book, sitting on a couch, and to hear what my friends thought too.

Late September

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The waters are still high in the mountains right now. In all the pictures I’ve ever seen of this or any flood the water is a creamy brown—dull, unassuming, lethal only in the way it wraps itself around the waists and necks of buildings, carries in its depths the shards of bridges it has washed out and whole shells of cars and porches.

I’ve had an unplanned long weekend down here in the low hills, since school was canceled on Friday. I read a novel set in Seoul, as well as Ephesians, did some laundry, waited out a power outage on Friday then helped put on an event at church. I walked to the corner farmer’s market in the sunshine on Saturday. Tonight I’m bringing shortbread and roasted veggies to contribute to dinner at community group, and I’ve gained a tiny, stinging blister on my finger from peeling rutabagas.

In the meantime, folks evacuate homes or drive up into the mountains themselves, toward that softly ugly water, to search out family they haven’t heard from since the storm came.

Tomorrow for me is work and Arabian Nights and Wordsworth and grading and leftovers for lunch in a classroom that’s just slightly on this side of too warm and coming home rightly tired at the end of the afternoon.

All these are the facts of the matter, and I balk at the task of ripping the threads of meaning from their core and arranging them before your eyes. You can see them well enough yourself. 

It’s late September. The sun is golden warm, knives are busy in four p.m. kitchens, and He holds our lives in his hands.

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