Tag Archives: home

A Sunday Morning Sidewalk Entry

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I had a blog entry all outlined the other day, but then I didn’t have time to write it, and now, looking at what I’d written, I don’t really understand the flow of it. So…scrap that.

I’m back at Grove City, which is a relief. Sometimes I like myself better here, you know? I like the girl who reads for Storytime and takes late-night walks better than the girl who snaps at her family, and tells her best friends she just doesn’t feel like hanging out–it’s too much effort. Not that I don’t have my screwy problems here occasionally, like bursting into unexpected tears in front of a Bible study group I’ve just met, and taking too many Tuesday-Thursday classes, but overall, I’m better here.

I write to you from my room—MEP 119. Liesel and I needed a little table to go between our beds, so, a week ago Friday, when we went to Salvation Army, we bought one for $4. We were carrying it back down Main Street when a nice man pulled over and offered to take it for us. When we got home, fifteen or twenty minutes later, it was standing sedately on it spindly little legs in the mulch by the PLC. It looked great. And it looks great between our beds too, as do the teapots that cover the walls, and Dr. Jewell in his place of honor. Sometimes college is priceless.

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Just now, I got back from church. I go in the evenings here, to a place called Grace Anglican, attended by a huge sector of the Grove City English Department. Seriously, I think I counted four or five of my professors there tonight.

I love this place because of the way the liturgy constantly drags me into the presence of God with wonderful collects like “Almighty and everlasting God, who is always more ready to hear than we to pray, and disposed to give more than either we desire or deserve; pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord. Amen.” The sermon tonight was about God’s righteous judgment, but it ended (as every good story does) with redemption, and the ever-new proclamation that Jesus died for you and for me that we may “live by faith” and be counted as righteous.

Also during communion we sang “Jesus Paid it All.”

Lord, now indeed I find thy power and thine alone,

Can change the leper’s spots and melt the heart of stone.

My heart of stone is showing signs of life again. Like coming home for good.

In Other News

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I haven’t written in a long time. Sorry about that. There hasn’t been a lack of material, just more of a lack in interest in said material. But I’m gonna muster up some interest, okay? Here goes.

– I got into the Raleigh airport at eleven p.m. and three of my very best friends picked me up and we went to Waffle House, acted obnoxious, and gave the nice waitress a large tip consisting mostly of change.

-My family had a staycation (Hooray, Mom!) which included a visit to Blandwood  Mansion (which I didn’t know existed), a trip to the art museum in Raleigh (where the Rodin was lovely), a voyage to Staunton to see the ASC (The Tempest was wonderful-wonderful), and a drive up to Hanging Rock (where I discovered that sometime in the last ten years I have become a very bad hiker. Awful, actually.)

-I have gone on four runs,  and now own my first-ever sports bra and real running shoes. I have yet to make it a half mile without stopping to die and walk.

-I am addicted to Hulu. Arrested Development, The Glee Project, How I Met Your Mother, Merlin, Project Runway… It really needs to end.

-Last week I had a little Tres Amigas reunion at the lake with Kinsley and Ruth. We watched some weird movies, ate pizza from the grill, and had a mysterious (but casualty-free) accident while tubing. Just like old times.

–Downton Abbey is lovely. Go watch it.

-Mary and I (and Karen [not Hannah]) painted our bedroom, which desparately needed it. I had been subjecting the walls to duct tape for years. It is now ballerina pink and looks like a hotel room. I kind of love it…

-I found out the names of my freshman little sisters, sent them an exuberant email, friended them on facebook, and burnt my fingers making them the best welcome posters ever.

-Everybody got engaged. (And by everybody I mean Beth and Tim, Hannah and Nathan, and Alyssa and John. ) Weddings! Huzzah! In other life-changing news, Emily and Casey will very soon have their new boys home from Ethiopia. Huzzah again!

-Additional highlights of being home have included finally seeing Harry Potter with Abby, making very oily Ravioli with Karen, buying an excellent leather skirt from Goodwill with Hannah, and discovering a diary of a long ago trip to Grandma’s with Mary. Also, that night Hannah, Karen, Patrick and I went to Walmart and put name tags on everything. That was good, too.

On Friday I go back to school. Between now and then I will snap out of myself. I will go see The Help with Annie, I will visit Mrs. Liebmann, I will look up fall fashion and get excited,  I will pack, I will plan, I will smile, I will get of bed the moment I wake up. In a week, I will be hugging so many people so much. It’s gonna feel good.

The Midwest

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I should not have waited till now to write this entry. I should have written it yesterday, or the day before, or the day before. But I am writing it now, from gate forty-five at the Kansas City Airport, and all I can possibly think about is home. All I can think about is how devastatingly pleased I am that Karen and Hannah and Abby are going to be waiting at the Raleigh airport for me. (For me! So pleased!) But I am determined that, even as I leave the Midwest, I’m going to write to you about it.

On Sunday evening, I drove my grandpa over to Chillicothe so he could remove a catheter for an old friend. Other people bring a bottle of wine as a hostess gift, Grandpa brings his black bag and his kind hands. While he helped Lloyd, I sat in the front room with Doris, who worked for Grandpa for thirty years, and she told me about back when her daughter was “Miss Missoura” and she, herself, almost went to New York City.    We stayed after to visit for a little while. Doris left her walker in the other room and my grandpa, who hunches so that he only comes to my shoulder when to retrieve it. He was delighted by how much fun it was to use, until we pointed out that he had it backward. I’m blessed to be my grandpa’s chauffeur and phone dialer, even if it’s on catheter business. When I walk into Walmart, the greeter, a little man named Stan, stops me to ask if I’m Dr. Howell’s granddaughter. When I say yes, he beams. Everywhere I go I am Doctor and Georgeanna’s granddaughter, Hope’s Alice to those in the know. The name of Howell means something in Brookfield. It means an open door, an open wallet, an open hand. For those in trouble it means a number more reliable in the sheriff’s. It means a freezer full of beef, duct-taped copies of The Hiding Place, and a whole lot of large-print Holy Bibles. For countless people, the name of Howell is all they really know of Jesus. From experience I know that it’s a pretty good sampling.                                                                               It’s different here, you know? In the past two months I’ve had healthy doses of Des Moines, the Twin Cities, Duluth (especially its mall!), a few little towns in the Iron Range, and, of course, north central Missouri. Good old Brookfield. When my grandma announces that we’re going out to a nice restaurant for Sunday Dinner (eaten properly at about one p.m.) she means some place with a big buffet, metal chairs and linoleum. She cooks her vegetables with butter, and is a little baffled by my penchant for olive oil. When I am sent for errands it is not to a Harris Teeter with a sushi counter and olive bar, but a Walmart with a cheese aisle full of Velveeta, where the only salmon comes in cans. The middle-aged women who shop there do not have careful tans and silver jewelry, but sloppy ankles and tired faces. (There is a Redbox, though. Ah, there is a Redbox.) Someone’s always starting a beauty parlor and naming it something like “The Rusty Razor” or “Curl Up and Dye.” Welcome to this place where people live.

Last February I flew up to Grand Rapids, Michigan for a college visit, and here is what I wrote on the plane home:

There are no words for my loathing of the color of Midwestern asphalt in the winter. It is a mixture of the worst of brown, and the worst of grey, ending in a color which could aptly describe the worst of everything. It is the color of hell. On the other hand, when I look down on the Midwest from an airplane my heart swells, because it has its moments in a way North Carolina does not. North Carolina has its blue skies, its mountains, its beaches, its green hills, its talkers, its thinkers, its doers, its dreamers. The Midwest has few of those things. On poor days it has none, but it has plain moments of clear life which no one bothers to cover. There is a boy on my plane, not much older than me, who is going to be a U.S. Marine. His mother and his grandparents saw him off. They all hugged. His mother cried awkwardly, and his grandpa told him to “Keep his eye on the ball.” That was it. Then he left. They left. They love that he’s going, and they hate it. They love him, though, and they want him to do them proud, and come back a better man. They don’t really have those words, but that’s okay, because he knows. There are no waving signs of adoration, no groups of hysterical friends, just a boy with a short haircut who knows what he is about and what he is doing. Sometimes I think what all the North Carolinian talkers and dreamers really are striving for is something these people with their ugly streets have had since birth: grit, plain sense, and an understanding which requires no words.

In one sense I will never be a Midwesterner. I am too much enamored of elegance and education. I care too much about white tablecloths in restaurants and Renaissance poetry. But the Midwest has taught me, even just this summer, some rather important lessons. It has taught me how to use a riding mower, how to clean a pool, how to pull a sticker plant, how to pass a slow bailer on the highway, how to scour a counter, and how to be patient. I have been taught over and over again how to be patient. Patient with slow steps and oft-repeated stories, patient with people and patient with God. I am learning, slowly, to wait. I am learning to live in this in-between space. I am learning to want what Paul has in Philippians 4: 12. “I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.”

On Wednesday evenings, when I went to pick up my grandpa from the prison in Moberly after his bible study, I usually had to sit in the parking lot for a few minutes. On my right was the prison, looking like a gargantuan middle school, wrapped round and round in yards of barbed wire that sparkled in the heat. Immediately on my left, on the other side of the drive, was the flag pole, surrounded by carefully manicured little flower gardens full of some of the most brilliant and lively colors I’ve ever seen. I sat in between, and waited. They’ve got a pretty huge sky out here.

Places

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Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle begins with the wonderful declaration, “I write to you from the kitchen sink.” Unfortunately, I only write to you from a very crowded backseat in a very crowded car. Someday I’ll find myself a big old kitchen sink, and climb in.

Really, there are lots of places from which I’d love to write you. There are those of the kitchen sink variety, places I suppose any imaginative person could think of: a window seat, a fireside, a roof full of chimneys, a balcony, an attic. Then there are the places particular to me: the freshly clean breezeway at my grandparents’ house that has Charity and me bursting with pride, the old cemetery across the highway, or the dam at the top of the lake, home to Poopsie’s Greatest Achievement and the world’s most delicious breezes.

Finally, there are the dream places, the places which, as of yet, I only love in fantasy. First there is New England. I’ve never been farther north than New York, so a little back sector of my mind is determined to walk cobblestones in Boston. I’ve been to almost every other part of my country, I suppose because New England is not on the way to anywhere (except perhaps Prince Edward Island—now, that’s a place to write from!) and most of the states I’ve been through have been on the way to family and holiday. But if New England is on the way to itself, then I suppose it must be worth seeing. Right, Liesel?

Next is Hay-on-Wye in Wales, the town with the most used bookstores in the world. I think my very first banner on this blog was a picture of the bookshelves which line the streets: Hardbacks, 50 pence and Paperbacks, 30 pence. In other words, heaven. Then, of course, I’ve just finished Wuthering Heights, and it’s such a wonderfully novelish novel. Though I was really quite pleased to see Catherine and Heathcliff fall dead, it made me want to wander the moors, stand in the wind, have my hair properly wuthered, and above all, write.  There is also Venice. Since reading Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord early in high school, I airily disregard all complaints of its stench and dirt, and instead concentrate staunchly on gold lions, arched bridges, and meeting my dear friend Scipio. Actually, my mother told me if I got a full ride to college she would take me, but obviously that didn’t work out. Sorry, Mom. Someday.

The place which trumps all, though, is mine. I am currently in the throes of a mild-to-severe case of house fever. I look them up online and plan paint, and built-in bookshelves, and secret passageways. It must be big and old and storied. It must have wood floors and stairs that creak. It must have its own peculiar smell (but not too peculiar.) Eventually, it must have the perfect bathroom. Round and domed with a huge, claw-foot tub and sunny windows high in the walls. There will be a fireplace and a big, wide towel rack, and piles and piles of books. (I suppose there’ll be a toilet and sink, too, behind a screen somewhere.) Oh, and probably a daybed and lots of large, ticking clocks. And perhaps a chandelier. That’s my bathroom. A Room of My Own.  A room from which to write you.

A Long, Cumulative Entry

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I have finally had time to think. I finished finals on Monday, missed some people in my good-byes, and left school on Tuesday. The past few days have been full of helping my mom cook, and driving Mary back and forth to Davidson to move her in and out of houses. Next week is for unpacking and repacking, and generally being of use to some favorite high school teachers.

A couple hours after I got home, I went to Caldwell’s spring choir concert, and after about two songs, I wanted nothing more than to sneak out the back door and go home. I stayed because to leave would have greatly perturbed George, my date, and because this was something I had promised my high school self. It wasn’t that the music was hard to listen to. Mama Twigg, you always put on a great show, and the other night was the best I’ve heard. Our choir department is dang good, and I hope they’re getting a heck of a lot more money than they were when I was there. Neither was it loneliness that made me uncomfortable. Lots of faces lit up when they saw me, and I got all the hugs I could reasonably ask for. I think what bothered me most was my own detachment. Last year, I was fine at graduation, but I bawled at the spring concert. Choir was far and away one of my favorite parts of high school. Almost all of my close friends were in it at some point or another, and as one of the few who liked almost every single song we sang (yes, even the Robert Frost cow one) I was possibly its most devoted member. That girl still exists, and I hope she always will, because for the most part, she’s a good kid. But in the last year many layers, some of them rather thick, have stretched over her. I have grown larger, more substantial, more myself. On Tuesday night at the concert I had only just left a heap of dear friends, and there were very few theatrics with which to mark my goodbye. I was not in the mood to watch all these nice kids gush over each other, and the extremely tight bond which was cemented by perfect harmony and pleated black cumberbunds. I wanted to be home on my study couch, writing an entry such as this. Here goes.

It has been, now that I think about it, a wonderful year. A very nice beginning sort of year. I am startlingly, some what of a big girl coming out at the other end of it (dare I say…adult?) When buying lunch I think about food groups. I take myself, and sometimes my friends for long, late-night walks. Sometimes I forget my make up and it’s totally okay. I have a books-to-read list and a movies-to-watch list, and I can identify and mock bad literary criticism when I see it. I am more shy when I am uncomfortable, but I am more honest with those I’m close to. Somehow, by a lovely perverse law of nature, if you get in the habit of always sharing your honest opinions, your opinions honestly become nicer, especially if you make a practice of listening to other people’s first. I’m less theatric, more practical, and in addition to my usual endearments, have picked up some soothing forms of address such as “dude” and “man.” My speech is also sometimes  liberally sprinkled with unintentionally pretentious literary references. I am much more dependent on this little computer than I would like to admit. Aside from this blog, I’m addicted to several TV shows on hulu, and I no longer feel the need to handwrite the first draft of every paper. (I’m a little nostalgic about that last one.) Friends have gotten in the habit of giving me their cast-off clothes (sweaters and dresses in particular,) and telling me when I’m getting sassy. I’ve learned to live with snow and boots and wet jean-cuffs and a Jesus who is much more real and active than I’d ever really known. And, dude, I’ve probably given and gotten more hugs in a nine-month period than the rest of the Borough of Grove City combined. (As Jackie would say: like a BOSS!)

Anyhow, a week from this coming Tuesday, I leave for six weeks at my grandparents’ in Missouri. It’s exactly what I did last summer, and it was not the plan this time around, but, you know? It’s gonna be good. I’ll weed some rose gardens, wash some windows, and forge through that book list. Here, for your reading pleasure, is what that good kid under all those layers wrote as she sat in the car last July heading home to Carolina, after a generous dose of Brookfield, MO.

   As I left for Missouri I had two basic ideas of what would be happening once I got there. Books and Boys. It was to be a summer to remember, a summer to grow up in. Something adult was going to happen. Yet instead of late nights reading or in town, I found myself sprawled across the bed in the end room till midnight or so, comfortably suffocated in the estrogen-saturated atmosphere, telling stories and discussing isms. Shakespeare, Calvinism, elevators, Jane Austen, Silly Bands and feminism. I grew to love Charity’s questions and the way Faith mocked my figures of speech. Every boy was pronounced a “sweetheart” and chigger bites were documented on film. We cut and dyed our hair just for kicks. Girlhood reigned. One afternoon I ran into town to get something from Walmart for Grandma. While there I suddenly noticed something I hadn’t before. There were hordes of girls, about my age or a little younger, wandering around a little aimlessly, wearing a great deal of eyeliner and a uniform of t-shirts which had been ripped open down the sides, then tied back together to artistically display their sports bras underneath. It dawned on me. Walmart is the one place in town everyone comes. This is the equivalent of clubbing in Brookfield. They were looking for love. I bought my bleach and left with no regrets. I had a cake to make, and later maybe the girls and I would lie out. We would get in the pool, pour bleach on each other’s heads, and then go to the front yard to let it dry in the sunny breeze off the lake which feels like the warm moment between waking and sleeping, like Aslan’s breath.

  I have learned many things about myself this past month or two. I have learned  that I easily lose patience with those who annoy me, and I have so little self-control that I will consume an entire jar of Nutella in 24 hours. I have learned that I do not appreciate either KFC or Lady Gaga more on better acquaintance, and that there are moments when sixteen-year-old boys could suddenly go extinct and I would totally be okay with it. But mostly, I have learned that I am blessed. As the psalmist says, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places.” Places like a camp with tall trees, tall cousins, and ginger cookies. Places like a twilight cemetery on a hill full of cicada song. Places like a long, low house looking over a lake, which smells of bacon first thing in the morning, and only has little country mice. And my family. I have several cousins who like to give presents for every occasion, (mostly I think, because they like to buy them…) but I’m not sure they’ll ever understand that the greatest gift they give me is the way they listen. They listen when I talk like they want to hear. They ask me to read; they ask for stories. I’m someone important. I’m their cousin. Of course, my grandparents are the sort of people you rarely meet if ever. They have done what their Lord has asked of them, and spent their lives being the salt of the earth, preserving and seasoning what is good. I will never find better or more godly examples.

            So now I have packed up to go home after seven weeks. I had to sit on my suitcase to zip in all the new clothes I have gotten practically for free and all the letters friends from home have sent. I have learned my way around my grandma’s kitchen, even making a pie of which she approved, though none of my cakes quite made the grade. True, I did not play on any hay bales, but I got to visit the Marceline Business Complex, and drive Highway F with the windows down, so what more could I ask? There were people to hug when I left Brookfield this morning, there will be people to hug tonight in Nashville, and, most excitingly, there will be people to hug when I get home on Friday. Whenever anyone asks my grandfather how he is he answers, “Greatly blessed.” Tell me about it, Grandpa. Tell me about it.

Yeah. I got something to look forward to in a few weeks, don’t I?

Growing Up and Life Abundant

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I have been home, and I’m not really sure what to say about this week, except that, for the most part, I was very grouchy. Mostly because I could be. I turned nineteen today, and I still have a lot of growing up to do. I’m very good at playing grown-up, for weeks on end sometimes, (especially in writing,) but that doesn’t mean I am. I still throw an all-out fit when my mama tells me to put on shoes for a walk. I guess I don’t know a whole lot about growing up, whatever it is. The few times I have done it have come and passed without my noticing till much later. I don’t know–maybe I matured seven years today, but who’s to know?

I’ll tell you something, though. I need to learn a lot of things about cheerfulness and patience and swallowing my words (including the thought process that led to them,) but today is Easter. Resurrection Sunday. A day for being new. A day of waking up for the first time to the Real World itself. A day, above all, for being ALIVE. Granted, I have not been very alive today. I been more than a little dead in my sins and trespasses. But the great thing about Easter is that , in a wonderful cheesy sort of way, it’s just Life Awareness Day. A day to be assaulted by the fact that Christ came out from death bearing life abundant for you and for me.

On facebook today someone posted the lyrics to an Andrew Peterson song that calls today “high noon in the valley of shadows.” I should not be sulking today. You know what I should do? I should go put on the pretty easter dress I took off a few hours ago out of stubbornness, and I should climb out the window onto my roof. I should scramble all the way up to the highest ridge pole like Anne of Green Gables and after teetering and giggling in the breeze for minute I should spread my arms wide and grinningly begin to scream, “Hey! It’s high noon! Christ is offering grace upon grace! COME AND GET IT, KIDS!!!” And then I should follow my own advice.

Silly Thoughts

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I’m lying on the couch in my study at home and dinnertime sun and neighborhood sounds are coming in through the open window. It’s a good place to be. I highly recommend it. My brother is downstairs, probably communing with poptarts and the computer, and my dad will be home anytime, and we’ll have frozen pizza for supper. This evening, I may do some reading for school, I may look for jobs (I have an itch to clean houses this summer), or I may watch a movie. Nothing here is really of a particularly high-caliber, except that this is that place called home, and I can sit on my picnic table and watch the sun stream through the thin oak leaves, so new that they’re almost damp. We have a new car. He’s a 1992 navy Volvo, and I’ve named him Horace. I have a crush on him. Right now I don’t really want to go back to school. I just want to lie on this couch for few more decades. Then maybe I’ll get up and wander off into the sunset.

I can feel myself detaching in a funny sort of way.

Alice Sans Swing: A Rather Lengthy Entry

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This afternoon, I was at Emily’s house trying to get all my Faerie Queene read, and as Edmund Spenser and I have a little trouble understanding each other, it wasn’t going swimmingly. I stared out her back window at the brick house settled in the snow in the lot behind her. It looked so much like home. Not my home, you know, but home. I started to think about where I wished I was, and the answer came with an almost unhealthy quickness. I wished I was standing in my dining room on a July day at about 5:30. The sun was shining at angle in through the Windexed front door onto the perfectly warped mirror in front of me, the sideboard smelled of Pledge. (How I love my mother!) Then into the kitchen, and the wood floor under my bare feet went from flat to a hilly shine. Everything there was warm and smelled of marinade and red wine. My mummy handed me a pan of wrapped corn on the cob to take out to my dad. Through the laundry room, feet skimming over the tattered rubber threshold, the sound of Daddy’s voice saying to Mr. Wolff, “You know, it’s interesting…” as he gestured largely with a huge pair of tongs. The deliciously uncontrolled slam of the screen door behind me and I was teetering down the rough grey steps which I painted myself onto a rougher patio. I handed the platter over, and was called “Sweetheart” for my pains. I wandered onto the grass, green and sinking, half listening to the laughter behind me. Those two entertained each other like no other. The smoke followed me, smelling of steak and unspoilt backyard. I didn’t mind. “Smoke follows beauty,” my mom always said. I reached for the swing, lifted my knee to brace it against the  weathered blue board–and then I remembered. The swing was gone. The tree was gone. I could not go back.

My first memory (perhaps fabricated, but I prefer not to think like that) is of my father tying bricks to the end of a rope, and throwing them over a limb of our biggest oak tree. He was making a swing. That swing could’ve told more stories than I can, and you can really get me going. We all received ritual lumps on our heads from being swung into when we were a couple years old, and had our hands filled with prickles from a particularly bad rope. Mary had a tomato dropped on her head while she swung, Hannah threw up after trying a new technique, and it displayed a penchant for breaking while I stood on it. Oh, how we loved it. We played Circus and Person and did Merrygorounds and Tornados and Tomatoes and Underdoggies. We snuck seconds on it before church in the mornings, and stayed out long after dark, piffling over turns, and dodging dangerously back and forth in the full glow from the porch floodlight. I knew why I had such a wonderful house: the grown-ups who came to visit liked the wood stove we heated with, even though they didn’t know that if you threw water on it it would make fascinatingly bulbous clouds of steam, and the kids who came, well, the swing was worth skipping dessert. Mary and I had a strong sense of proprietorship which we shared with the Wolffs and the Nealons, because it was a truth universally acknowledged that Hannah gave the best Merrygorounds, and Rosie was the only one who had touched the tree. The swing was the center of our world.

To me, I think it was more than that. All of the euphoria ended naturally as we slowly grew up, of course. Friends still loved it, we still took turns in order, but we did not spend hours. There were no more games. I didn’t mind, though. My best moments on the swing were the wondering, dreamy ones. It was a good for a think. I never sat. I always stood, facing the parking lot, and nudged my hips side to side to side until I was flying. I sang and recited poems quite loudly, I had conversations with people who did not happen to be present, I leaned forward into the wind (though I’d never even heard of Titanic,) I was a princess and the world was mine.

One weekend, the spring of my senior year, my parents were out of town and a bunch of friends came over. We started dinner, then responsibly abandoned it simmering on the stove. We took careful turns on the swing and gave each other pushes. We laughed a lot. A couple weeks later I sat in the upstairs bath at about eleven when there was a sound like thunder. It was a slow, deafening crackling right outside my window. It ended in the most deafening silence. Finally, I hauled myself out of the water, put on a robe, and went outside to see. My parents stood silently in the driveway. There were no words. The big tree filled our large backyard like a bowl. (That’s the way I described it to everyone for weeks–“like a bowl.”) It had been struck by lightning years and years before, and we’d had to have half of the top removed. Apparently the core had rotted out anyway. It was the quietest of nights. There was no other explanation. The fallen trunk, which was at least twenty feet around, lead straight to our neighbor’s back fence like a highway. I was suddenly crushed to know that the baby oak leaves waving in the breeze, whose arrival meant spring at last, were already dying as I watched. And then I knew. My swing was gone. It was unreal. I began to cry. My parents hugged me and said scary, wasn’t it?  I said not particularly, went upstairs and crawled into my sister’s empty bed. I pressed my face into the fan that propped the window open, and bawled myself to sleep. I would be eighteen in a couple weeks and it felt as if my world had promptly ended when all I was trying to do was take a bath.

Anyway, I did not quite make my quota with the Faerie Queene this afternoon. I went downstairs, began to tell Emily about the swing, and suddenly I was crying–not prettily and quietly, but messily and swollenly. I am not over it. I am angry that now, when my father grills steak in July, there is no place for the smoke to follow me. As I got older, I think, and I climbed onto the swing less and less, I loved it more and more. It became sacred. It became, in itself, “a spot of time.” It was magic because when I climbed onto it, even at thirteen, I became beautiful. I was beautiful because of something that was not me. I could give no credit to myself, only to that half-second of weightlessness when the swing changed directions and ceased, momentarily, to carry me. Now, there is a gorgeous little flowerbed where the swing hung, and stump of the tree is a huge, odd island. I cannot go back. I cannot, I cannot. Anyway, sorry this is so long. It’s just that I miss spring, I miss my home, I miss my swing.

How Things Are

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I am home. Back at school, I mean–the other home. I am in three lit classes this semester, which is a heaven built of anthologies, and yesterday Sarah and I rearranged our room to resemble something livable. I keep getting distracted from typing because I have to stop and stare at our acres of floor space and cozy-corner-that-would-hold-a-chair-if-we-had-room-for-one. The time to visit me is now. Especially if you like snow–honey, we got it!

There’s another thing about which I’m really quite exhilarated: I’m writing a story. And I think this one’s going to be a novel, or at least it seems gargantuan in my head, and to plan it I’ll need a whole wall of chalkboard which I don’t have. I also need a bunch of Vogues and a pretty detailed cross-section of St. Paul’s Cathedral. To be honest, I probably also need some books about London because the three days I spent there when I was fourteen crying on the Tube and staring at crown jewels aren’t much to draw from. I’m planning on making some nice Wordsworthian allusions and rekindling my love for dollhouses. I’ll see. We’ll see. But please be excited for me.

There’s something else. Not really something else, actually, more the reason for it all. God is pursuing me. I don’t have any specific stories to tell or any great revelations to share (at least not yet). But I can testify that, as my dear Hannah would say, “God is so, so cool, you know? He really is.” He is doing something spectacular. He is making my little stubborn-as-heck heart want Him. I really, really want Him. I have never been able to say that with complete honesty before. I’ve wanted what he has to offer–I’ve wanted forgiveness, I’ve wanted redemption, I’ve desperately wanted to be clean, but I’ve never wanted Christ. And now I do. I mean, not all the time, only occasionally, but I am beginning to have some inkling of what people mean when they pray to have “a heart for Christ.” I can’t remember ever having asked for it in that way, but He is giving and giving and giving. I am beginning to be able to worship my Lord both for what He did for me and who He is. He has been that “still, small voice” recently, and even there, especially there, He is breathtaking.

So, how are things? Well, not that I was in anything like a bad place before, but things are looking up. And so am I.

A Haphazard Winter Tears Christmas Entry

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This morning I woke up to go to my eight-o-clock and looked outside to find that it was snowing heavy and windy. Tramping through dry, slippery winter without a hat sounded unappealing, as did Civilization class, so I stayed in bed. Already you and my day have been properly introduced. Isn’t she lovely? At nine I went to Brit Lit where I blinked my way through “Gray’s Elegy” and Christopher Smart’s cat. As I was walking out, Dr. Brown stopped me, and said that I’d seemed so tired lately, was taking fewer notes, and did not seem to be concentrating very well. Was I getting enough sleep? I said I was just ready for the semester to be over. Then I hurried away and tears sprung from some hitherto unknown reservoir of weariness.

I called my mother just to ask about a novel and she heard my panic. I did my French homework, and began to calm down. I walked over to the SAC to pick up a package from home. On the outside was written in sharpie “Dear Alice, Don’t cry in the mailroom. Mom.” I was startled. How had she known? It wasn’t as if she’d sent the package in the last twenty minutes, and all of this fatigue had only hit me today. As I walked back to MEP I wondered, was there something inside so touching, so personal…? That wasn’t like my mommy. Then I remembered something she’d mentioned several days before. She was only joking, saying that now I wouldn’t feel left out while all my friends were opening their big fat care package ordered by their parents for a campus fundraiser. Of course. She did not expect tears and melodrama, she expected laughter and good sense. That was the mother I knew and loved.

This afternoon I sat in the lobby with friends, and just happened to look up my house on google maps. Then I looked up my grandparents’ house,  then Karen’s, then Caldwell… I gave myself a virtual tour of home. In fact, I even tried to drive home from school using street view, but the going was a little slow. So I just switched back to my house and stood in the middle of Scott Avenue, spinning in circles, watching the summer leaves shading my front porch race by again and again. It was almost as good as the real thing. Well, not almost. Just sort of.

As everyone else is beginning their Christmas season, we here at Grove City are entering our stress season. I already have friends studying behind locked doors, and I myself am contemplating who exactly would be a good jailer for my computer. Maybe Katie? Anyhow, true to form, I’m not worried about exams, but I hate them just as much as everyone else. They haven’t begun yet, though… On Saturday night I went to a lovely Christmas party with lots of families. There were about seven different kinds of soup for supper. Then we went caroling and had a gingerbread house competition. I wished I was nine years old again, sliding around in sock feet with a sparkly Christmas sweater and my hair falling into excited, sweaty wisps about my face.

Then last night were the candlelight services at the chapel which are famous, and rightly so. Lots of people from the community come, touring choir sings, the Christmas story is recited, and then everyone lights their candle and Harbison Chapel’s sanctity seems to be consummated yet again as the organ swells and we all sing Silent Night. At “Christ, the Saviour is born; Christ, the Saviour is born” as everyone lifted their candles in solemn unison, and Liesel and I snorted back laughter, I forgot my constant wish that Christmas would arrive faster. Why wish for something you already have?

So to summarize this jumbled entry: Don’t cry in the mailroom, Alice, because in eight days you will be on a plane zooming toward the dear sister you haven’t seen since August, your tall baby brother, your parents, and assorted cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Also, go ahead, be nine years old with pink cheeks and a sugar high, for “Christ, the Saviour is born!” Happy Christmas, goober. Study hard.