Letter to Mathilde: On your eighth birthday

My little growing one,

This week has involved a whirlwind of activity -- including celebrating your birthday, the end of another school year, welcoming your grandparents into town, and gearing up for another summer. I am already tired, and it’s just begun.

You stand tall these days, doing handstands and impromptu dance moves, bouncing, jumping (ever bouncing and jumping) and smiling with your trademark burst of light. 

Eight years is a long time to live with another, and the eight with you have been full of so much magic and charm. You, forever my baby, have grown and are growing into a young girl who is more than your bubbly, jumping exterior would betray; your empathetic heart, your love of poetry and story; your thoughtful sensitivity; and the uncertainty you possess as you navigate this world are all characteristics that I see from the inside, and therefore understand with a kinship that ties me so closely to you.

The night before your birthday, I recounted to you at bedtime your birth story and how on that morning eight years ago (because your papa was busy taking Liesl to preschool), I drove myself to the hospital and went up to the front counter and said, “I’m here to have a baby” and how odd and funny it felt to declare myself like that at the information desk at the hospital.

Thanks to marvelous Ms. Kelly, who in the first grade introduced you to poetry — and William Carlos Williams’ “so much depends on a red wheel barrow” — you and I talk poetry as if it were nourishment. To celebrate your day, we had a little swimming party with friends and then enjoyed the rest of the day at home. It couldn’t have been more perfect because the forecasted rain held off until later that evening. 

Lessons from a through-hike

I joined my friend Meagan at mile sixty-eight on the one-hundred mile Lone Star Trail in the Sam Houston National Forest last week on one of the prettiest February days we’ve had. 

The plan was to hike the last thirty or so miles of the trail (to my friend’s one hundred miles) in an effort to try something new and give her company for part of her six-day trip. With a few years of regularly attended bootcamp classes under my belt, I prepared the best I could — buying a lightweight backpack and sleeping bag and choosing carefully all that went into my pack: a three-liter Camelbak, a bowl and spoon and cup, some small tortillas and pouches of tuna, instant Starbucks coffee packets as small as my index finger, trail snacks, a headlamp, my Bible and palm-sized journal and a pen, and the few items of clothing I’d need to see me through three nights out. I had Charles to thank for making it happen and ensuring I got to the trail to meet up with Meagan that first evening, and I had my nerves — which were plenty — because I really wasn’t sure how equipped I was to carry a thirty-pound backpack or to hike long days, for several days in a row, even after those few measures of preparation.

. . . 

Being in the Sam Houston National Forest includes traversing a pine needle-lined path, muddy bayous, and crumpled bits of land where wild boars use their snouts to upturn huge swaths of the forest floor into unsightly messes. It includes swatting away mosquitos, even in February, walking through the sections of the forest that have been subjected to an ashy controlled burn, and seeing garter snakes but imagining you’ve just heard a rattler.

It’s walking with one’s head down, plodding, slogging, one foot in front of the other, grateful for the trail people who maintain the long path — whacking bushes and clearing logs, building rickety footpaths over some of the wet parts, and posting trail signs on trees to let you know you’re still where you need to be. It’s coming upon the San Jacinto River, which is swift after winter rain and muddy as the day is long. 

And it’s taking the planned thirty-five mile trip and extending it to close to fifty because the river is uncrossable to us novices. Blisters on feet. Head still down. Logging a fifteen-mile day, then nineteen, and seeing the trail out — now feeble and tired — with another ten or so. 

I do the math of the miles in my head as I hike: How far have we come and how far do we have to go? 

Friends ask when I return: Was it fun? I answer: It was awful and miserable and wonderful. Now, several days out from it: Yes, I think I’d try it again.

. . . 

The sounds at night in the forest change depending on where you go. The first night was loud with screaming frogs, I think. Other nights, coyotes howled, and then silence set in. I read in my tent one night in the Gospel of Luke and lingered on the phrase “So it was thought” with regard to Jesus’s genealogy. So it was thought that Jesus was the son of Joseph, the record of lineage begins. More than sixty generations later it continues: the son of Seth, the son of Adam, Son of God.

I like the phrase, “So it was thought.” It calls out truth from lie, God’s wisdom from conventional wisdom, matter from spirt, and all that can be seen or tasted or touched from what is taken on faith.

Walking in the forest all those long and wearying miles, I felt that in the greatest height of my pain, each step I took — with blisters squarely burning on the bottoms of my feet — somehow translated into an uplifted prayer for another. Pain for glory — isn’t that the way of things?

Walking, I prayed some unknown-to-me kinds of prayers, and I listened to Meagan sing songs and psalms in rhythm with each of her steps, in an old-world voice that called out deep emotion with control and calm.

Being away, I do not think of the world, and I am delighted to again see that a big world exists outside of the worry of politics and man-made things. Nature exists — birds, leaves, trees, decomposing matter, spider webs, rivers, and ponds. Glory be to God.

. . . 

There are a few lessons I learn: It’s worth it to keep fidgeting with your pack so that the weight doesn’t weigh on one’s shoulders (even if it takes two days to get it right). Using two hiking poles, kindly lent by a friend, can propel one forward when it feels too impossible to go on. In some kind of divine way, a good’s night sleep is just the right thing to reset perspective and hope (even when sleeping on hard ground in a tent).

And walking, like life, just requires a faithful kind of persistence even if the steps one takes are small.

In disappearing days

The month of December slipped away, elusively, and when it did I missed so much — failing to mark Liesl’s eleventh birthday with what has come to be an annual letter, or seeing through Advent with any kind of rhythm or rest. It was one thing after another — a party to attend, an errand to run, something to buy, something to make, a package to ship. It was full and rushed, and unwieldy — Christmastime. And then it wasn’t.

Near the end of all that, the girls and I had a quiet walk at Bull Creek Christmas Eve morning, and Charles fell sick with a winter cold and stayed home. We celebrated Christmas morning as a family at church — taking in a service that was full in the best ways and then ended 2016 roughly when Liesl fell ice skating and hit her temple at a high speed on the unforgiving ice. It took me awhile to figure out the full effect, but days after when she was still concussed and was happy to stay tethered to home in her robe and would quietly fall asleep on the carpet mid-day, with zero interest in games or books, the need for her to heal became clearer. 

On any normal week, we are nearly never home. It’s work or school or swim team or violin, or something else that keeps us out and about. Week three of this concussion, and we’ve had more restful weekends and more time at home than I can remember in years. The forced rest her headaches have imposed has been an answer to some kind of prayer that I always feel but never give words to. I always long to be more still than I am. 

She is still symptomatic with headaches that come and go; but she shrugs them off as minor and goes to school while Charles and I go to work, and thanks to kind, wise doctors who helped us through this, easing our fear with care and with words, we know that she’ll be all well again. It is just taking more time than I had planned.

. . . 

January now, the slightest hints of winter have descended on this town, and the only new year’s resolution I made was not aspirational, but necessary — to give the fear I carried most of last year a proper burial. There’s too much there to speak openly about it, but suffice it to say: Too much of 2016 was spent in a fret. That was a first for me, and it was not a year I wanted to repeat. 

It’s not resignation that leads me to say, whatever will be will be. It’s knowing that some things are out of my control, and God will either bless or not bless, or that His blessing will come in a form I do not easily recognize or will have to contend with. There was a set of verses that captivated me on Christmas morning as we lit the last of our Advent candles at home, and they stay with me in the way that the refrain calls for some kind of contention with God, recognizing the futility and the hope all in one:

Photos from top: Christmas Even morning at Bull Creek, majestic roots, Mathilde and her doll house, winter in our front yard, Liesl on the mend

Letter to my daughter: Turning 11

Dear Liesl,

Thinking of who you are, I think of an article I read this week about women in Iraq who have been forced to live under the oppressive rule of ISIS. Where before they were to wear loose fitting gowns and a head covering in line with their religion, they’ve gradually been forced to live under the tyranny as a result of their existence. It became punishable for a woman to show her ankles or her hands or her face, until it became punishable for a woman to even show her eyes. This kind of oppression aims to erase the women away.

I cannot imagine you being erased in this way, and I cannot imagine not seeing your eyes and your face and the many ways that you convey the depths of all that you feel through a generous heart and an equally generous temper, which flairs to anger in sudden, sullen bursts.

The article struck me deeply, and I’ve begun to pray for these women after reading of them. It’s a silent prayer that lives somewhere in the back of my mind as I go on with my day,  a prayer like so many of the quiet prayers I ask for — things that are so far beyond my understanding or control.

. . . 

The eve of your eleventh birthday, you asked if you could just say your birthday is on the sixteenth of the month instead of the fifteenth — because you’re going to go your whole school day and not technically turn eleven years old until the day is over at around eight-thirty at night. What a funny little request that was. It makes me recall other birthdays — like when you turned four or five — and how you wanted more responsibility with another year added on. This year, you’re on the cusp of something altogether different: middle school next year, and with it who knows what. 

That uncertainty of what’s to come is why we gathered your best friends this year for a birthday party last Saturday. The weather had turned colder just days before, and what was going to be an outdoor celebration at a park resorted to a hastily put together plan B that turned out just as well. You were so agreeable throughout the planning and seemed most interested to be with the people you love in friendship. What a joy that was to see.

I don’t have very many words for you this year. We are out and about a lot more, and home a lot less. But I always enjoy the quiet moments with you and love watching you grow. Of course, I want to bottle this moment and all of the other moments that have passed. Too much changes too quickly, and you are right there at the helm growing in such unexpected ways.

Mostly, I am so glad that you are. You are fierce and kind and quiet and stormy in such a peculiar way. You have so much determination and confidence that your father and I have begun to pray for you to have need as well.

We are rooting for you to grow in all the right ways. And I know there is so much to behold around the corner. We behold you, our precious first-born; and we behold God — just as we’re beheld and so very thankful that you are ours.

Letter to Liesl and Mathilde, after elections

Dear Liesl and Mathilde,

If it wasn’t clear before, in the past two weeks, the world here seems to be upturned. Half of America is comforted at the election of the man who will next be president, and the other half is experiencing an emotion somewhere between dejection and absolute fear. We know people on both sides of that equation, and I — who now approach all elections skeptically, despite having been recently accused of still possessing youth’s idealism — remember that this was also the case eight years ago. We’re a divided lot, it seems, and for these and other reasons I have turned to the book of Ecclesiastes for understanding:

Life’s a corkscrew that can’t be straightened, A minus that won’t add up.

And:

Whatever was, is. Whatever will be, is. That’s how it always is with God.

There is either despondency or contentment in those verses depending on how you read them; and admittedly, in my re-reading of this book, I haven’t gotten to the part about hope yet — but I know that it’s there.

. . .

In the past days, we’ve heard our current president say that he is heartened after meeting with the president-elect, and we’ve had Oprah express hope about what comes next, only to be trolled for it on social media. For you, Liesl, I see the safety pin you’ve placed on your shirt, which you wear to school now and which I made sure to emphasize cannot be worn in protest of the people’s election but in solidarity of otherness and kindness and that which God has already named as good; and I see you go buy winter gear to donate to the Dakota pipeline protesters — and I try to cajole you out of mere humanism. It is good to do good, but we cannot depend that alone.

As you girls grow older, I see that instead of viewing yourselves as created beings that you may fall into thinking that you’ve created and fashioned yourselves. This is in part through the education you’re receiving in school and in part as a result of just living in this world. The words aspirational and post-truth have come into fashion as of late, as have an emphasis on other words like safe space, and striving and curate. I know what my problem with post-truth is (by definition — and in the words of poets — “Truth is as old as God — his twin identity,” truth is eternal, and nothing precedes or follows it). It’s harder to get at the reasons these other words and phrases rub me the wrong way. I think, in general, that no one wants to admit any sense of being false or finite; and not many want to see that there is more log-in-eye worth examining in what we are doing and in who we are than in the threat or offense of someone next door or miles away. I can’t imagine these are new tendencies in us humans; perhaps we just have a new way of packaging who we are or how we live in avoidance of that. 

With regard to the election that just transpired, I talk to many people (the ones who are upset about the outcome of this election), and everyone agrees that we need to draw in a bit closer and love family and neighbors. That is not the response of religious people, necessarily; it’s the response of many who are disheartened or afraid. It also is not fail-safe, the idea that we come in closer to our own kind. An author I admire pointed out that it’s not our differences that divide us; it’s not multiculturalism or too-varied political or religious beliefs, which half of Europe and America seem to be railing against. She gave Northern Ireland as an example, where her husband is from, and said: “[It] is a completely racially homogeneous place, and was for hundreds of years, and they still managed to find the difference between which way you faced an altar, and then kill each other for at least 600 of those years.”

Meanwhile, family members on different political sides live in avoidance, and since an article about this appeared in the New York Times the other day, it must be a phenomenon. I say that only in half jest but, truthfully, Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and sharing a table with others who may think about the world differently than we do is inevitable. We must learn to love the differences and to see how we are so much like what we disdain in others. We must also just learn to love and to hold fast to truth.

. . .

Not much happens in my soul these days with regard to reflection or meditation. When I’m not shuttling you girls about or otherwise helping you, I work downtown, and one of the most marked thing about my days there is seeing the homeless people — out on Seventh Street by the shelter and service organizations, in the big city parking lot and under bridges camped in clusters, by the bank drive-through, which is empty as a ghost town because people don’t drive through banks anymore, on Congress Avenue, and so many places else — and what I notice, which I told you all the other night at dinner, is that homeless people and crazy people seem to have a tendency toward strife and argument and yelling and cursing at one another. I see it everywhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s early in the morning before the sun has come up or at noon or midday or later — the people I see (whom I deem to be crazy, but who a friend more kindly described as stressed and without margin) fight and yell at each other unceasingly.

That conversation met everyone like a brick the other night, but I only brought it up because I feel I am somehow like them; or I feel that we as a family are somehow like them in contention and quarreling — not always, but enough of the time to merit contemplation. Love seems to be a gift, and it is a fruit of something, but it’s not a fruit of our own making; and it’s not manufacturable. That’s why I tell you girls that we can’t depend on our good works. We’ll never do enough of them to dig our souls out of the muck that we so often live in.

This whole past autumn we’ve lived with anticipation of your sweet father losing his job from a layoff. It’s been a season of uncertainty with us, and yet provision came through — good provision — and now the uncertainty is gone. Or is it, I wonder? There is always the question of what comes next and where to go from here.  

King Solomon, be he the writer of Ecclesiastes, concludes that the wise and the foolish all have the same fate, but it is perhaps better to be wise. Parenting you with wisdom and for wisdom is such a daunting thing when I feel a lack of it myself. But it’s what I want for you, and what I want — for you both — is to be able to take an event like this recent election and to hold it lightly; to hold others lightly, seeing that what is seen is not all there is. When you, Liesl, go to the Goodwill to buy supplies for the Dakota pipeline protesters, I want you to go with a heart that has compassion for the protesters and the workers of the pipeline both. When you, Mathilde, go out into the world with the very deep caution and self-doubt you seem to possess, I want you to know that you have a foundation to stand on that is deep and strong and exists outside of and in spite of how you see yourself as you stand next to others. The world’s problems are more than I know, and we the people of the world bear the image of a good God just as we act contrary to it. Republicans do that; Democrats do; independents, environmentalists, Christians, atheists, agnostics, Muslims, the elderly, the young, the homeless, the wealthy, presidents, soon-to-be presidents, religious leaders, each and every one of us. The rain falls on each of us, and common grace abounds.

After the election, I think half the country fell to thinking that the end of the world was coming, and the other fell to thinking that heaven had been re-established on earth; in terms of the latter, we still live a kingdom-life in this fallen world. In terms of the former, it’s not the end. And in the words of our current president, “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes.”

Ecclesiastes suits me now in how it shows that all is futile until it’s not. The world now (or still is?) bent toward tribalism, toward an us and them; heed the words of Solomon and seek out more than just that:

By yourself you’re unprotected, With a friend you can face the worst. Can you round up a third? A three-stranded rope isn’t easily snapped.

Thanks be to God.

Whether well fed or in want

A gray fox appeared in our backyard yesterday evening, as the sun was setting on the day. It was red around its neck and head and blue-gray everywhere else, and it looked — from a distance — to be eating at prey in the far corner of our yard. We peered at it from inside the house, and Charles got his binoculars so we could see it as though close-up. It was the kind of moment that just falls into your lap with a kind of gift-giving, and the fox lingered just a few minutes before it went on to some other place.  We caught a sunset like that a few weeks ago in the same kind of serendipitous way: 

We walked from a restaurant downtown one evening across the town lake bridge to the performing arts center — and when we weren’t anticipating it, the most beautiful sky unfolded and the warmest pinks and oranges reflected in a kind of bright darkness on the waters below. 

Speaking in generalities, we have been in a kind of limbo lately, after getting news that Charles’s job will be outsourced at the end of November. Though unsettling, the news did not come as a big surprise. We anticipated this lay off more than a year ago; and though we hoped it wouldn’t happen, we knew it could, which is why I started with a full-time job last November. 

After months spent fearing this possibility, the present is here; and Charles finds himself navigating a search for re-employment after spending sixteen years at the same company. I simultaneously feel thankful and ill-tempered knowing that it might be my job that sustains us for either a short while or possibly longer than that. My whole being is thusly conflicted: living in a state of thanks and ingratitude, hate and love, and I remind myself of the character in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov who says, “I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.” 

And of course the paradox is: without particular love, it is not love at all.

Like the silver fox and the sunset, there are days that I get glimpses of the girls, who are growing in independent, weedy directions. I behold Liesl, who out of nowhere, has begun to keep a to-do list of tasks and goals she wants to accomplish. The list is a mystery to me, and it makes me wonder what pressure she is putting on herself to do or to be: Learn seventh-grade spelling words, learn to write left-handed, look up if gravity is matter. She’s in her last year of elementary school, and I can see a new striving in her to please and to do work that is seen. It is endearing and worrisome both, the way she keeps moving and changing, and developing an interior life that keeps me guessing and presents her as a mystery to me.

Mathilde, second-grader,  tries to keep up with Liesl — even better, tries to beat her in emulation — and she looks up videos on how to write cursive and then sets herself to it, wanting to learn it before big sister did. She tries to draw as well or better; and she goes in her own direction too: She’s begun using sign language in quiet notation, something she’s learned at school. This is in keeping with the way she writes notes to herself on the whiteboard in our home. Her use of sign language seems to be another kind of note taking: spelling out intention and desire letter by letter. She, too, is working toward something.

For all the soul-wandering and the up-and-down that I feel day to day, the kids hold steady in their own ways, and there is a solidness underneath the uncertainty.

Poet Pattiann Rogers writes in The Grand Array that, “Something good happens to the body and to perception when gratitude is expressed for the life we experience, not for life in general, but thanks for the particular form of life in the particular moment, because that is the most genuine and vibrant kind of thanks.“

Our appetites are fed daily, and it feels like a touch-and-go kind of existence many days — living in the rut of manna that appears in good measure but never can be held for too long. We have just enough, which on some days feels like too little; and yet we have the particulars that catch our attention and help us see there is so much more than that.

End-of-month miscellany: Familial

All summer long, in the smallest and meanest manner, I have been slowly reading a book about liturgy, which speaks to the habits that a person cultivates and how that points to what he or she loves. The intention of the book, I think, is to encourage a community that is greater than a single family unit and to involve others in spiritual practice — for without an other to love and to serve, there is no faith-life and no way to mimic sacrificial love. Families are often the things of Christian idolatry, the author writes, in the way that everything falls and rises within the walls of our home; and yet the call to discipleship requires stepping outside so as to invite others in.

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. . . 

Truth is, most days the cry becomes something smaller like Thank you or Give us this day our daily bread. 

But those are not bad repetitions, either. 

. . . 

This month, we had summer camps, a few magical days at a friend’s house, and a week wherein my children went to Oklahoma to stay with my parents so I could work and not worry about childcare. The girls picked up the summer league swim team for nightly practices, had the always fun experience of swimming at the regionals meet, and slept in and stayed up late the past few weeks. Summer is brilliant for altered schedules and lazy days, and somehow even though I worked more than ever, the ease of summer still crept into our lives a bit. School starts in just two weeks, and I will need bolstered hope to re-engage in the too-structured days that August through May provides.

. . . 

In July, I visited my mother’s parents’ grave site in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. We drove there at dusk just a few days ago when I was in Tulsa to pick up my children, and I realized that I had never been to their grave. Suddenly, it felt important to visit. My aunt, my dad’s sister, was there visiting, too. And I listened, with curiosity, as they answered my questions about where the Scotts and Ticeses and Pratts all come from. No one knows much about our family history. My paternal grandparents came from Arkansas both. My maternal ones, the Metcalfs and Pratts, came from Kansas. They arrived to Oklahoma (from where originally?), seeing the state’s rolling green hills, red-dirt land, and open plains; and there they built homes, had families and worked at jobs. Oklahoma itself has a labored history, with the Choctaws and the Muskogees still living in active tribes. Today, tribe-owned casinos dot the state’s roadsides in towns like Durant. Aside from the casinos, not much is big or glittering in that state. The land is open; the beauty understated. In winter, I remember seeing ice fall from trees in gleaming daggers and droplets.

Neither my parents nor aunt want to know any more than what they already know. They’re here and they know who they are, they all declared, and no more amount of story or genealogy seems important, though I did hear snippets about my mother’s Uncle Spider, who was a traveling salesman and would drive out of the way to check on his elderly relatives living in other towns, as well as my grandpa Pratt whom, my aunt called, “a man cut from old cloth,” as he would don a fedora and a jacket for work each day and spoke not a lot. I want to know where those blood lines trace back to, and I want to know the inheritance my children have been given. Sitting in my parents’ kitchen having this conversation informed me that at least some of us are no nonsense; there are few words between us, and there’s a practicality and an ethos that calls individuals to take care of themselves. What else is there, though?

. . .

It’s odd, then, to write about wanting to know family history and idolatry of family in one sitting. The world is larger because of media and technology, and in some ways we’re better acquainted with the tribulations happening half a world away than ever; but knowing of the tribulations also has a minimizing effect. We grow more inward. We seek what is familiar. We hold to party lines, have little tolerance for disagreement. Civility is a rarity; we all agree. 

I see this in another way: Now seven months into a job where I’m working downtown, the more I’m confronted with the homeless I see there each day, the more callous I become toward them. It’s easier to overlook their need when it’s routine and when in that familiarity I also don’t know them particularly. There must be an intimacy that supplants knowledge. It has to happen societally and it has to happen within me in my relationship to family, friends, and neighbors. 

I guess I hope that story would help accomplish that. 

Photos, from top: Floral Haven Cemetery, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma; the Pratt gravestone; Mathilde shouting out the team cheer at a swim meet; a little visited coffee shop; saying goodbye to the Grands; my grandmother’s headstone, and Mathilde’s namesake (her middle name); near the Texas-Oklahoma border; the marker for my grandfather, who died when I was eight. 

End-of-month miscellany: Abroad

We visited Europe as a family the last two weeks of June and just returned home this week, and we’re now in that in-between state of being neither here nor there; not when it comes to our circadian rhythms nor our hearts — for moving almost anywhere always sounds so appealing, and the place from which we have come filled us up so much.

The trip we took, visiting Munich and several places in Austria (including Vienna and Salzburg, the Alps, and medieval, beautiful Melk), was the best kind of gift and is undoubtedly not going to happen again anytime soon. Before departing, I hadn’t mustered up any excitement about going and expected that there was no way our children could handle such a long and demanding trip. I had also been in my own kind of melancholy here at home, grappling with the end of a school year and the start of a summer that is always too fleeting but also too challenging in the way that work and children and summer camps must be juggled.

When I think of travel mercies, I think of safety en route and other kinds of practicalities being answered. I had not ever before experienced the kind of traveling mercy that turns a hardened heart into a softer one and that elevates one’s soul into a happier state. As we went along, my children looked out for one another and helped each other at many points. And I, knowing that parental patience or lack thereof could make a bad situation better or worse accordingly, had a keener eye that anticipated what my children needed. I knew more deeply when they were tired and needed a break, and the schedule of our travels enabled me to be flexible with them and to give them what they needed. In short, the ease of it all was nothing but a miracle. On any other kind of day, we are full of disunity and look out for our own best interests; somehow, traveling, we had the heart of a family who looked to support one another and to build each other up. What joy there was in seeing that bestowed so unexpectedly.

. . .

Even in this, I am not speaking about perfection. The girls still had their moments of being a bit frayed and bickering, and our first day in Vienna — in short, I didn’t like the accommodations we had settled on — left me feeling as dark and despairing as I can end up feeling here at home, to the point where all seems for naught. But perfection is never the end goal, and so what I write here is just the thanksgiving for a gift that has been given: mercy unmerited, grace bestowed even on something as inconsequential as a summer vacation.

And what I remember the most of this trip, aside from the sense of family we experienced, or aside from the taste of blessed fresh food or hiking in Alpine mountains or listening to birds sing or seeing royal treasures behind glass casements — robes and scepters and ancient artwork and reliquaries all of which were constructed in the name of God (for right or for wrong) — was sitting in thousand-year-old cathedrals worshipping with priests who perform liturgy for just a handful or two of tourists. Masses like these go on every day of the week several times a day in cities and towns throughout Europe; tourists come by the tens of thousands to take pictures and to see the gilded Baroque decorations or the art and sculptures therein, and only a few at a time come to hear the Word as a source of life for food. But the fact that only a few come doesn’t alter the schedule of worship. Confessions of faith, even if spoken by a few, don’t lose relevance. The verses in the Bible still stand for an audience of one or many. The church bells chime at monasteries on the hour and quarter-hour; their sound resounds and goes out in waves into apartments and flats and hotel rooms, meeting people where they are even if they don’t realize it.

. . . 

In one church, there was a sign outside a door that said: Enter the Door of Mercy as a pilgrim. For sightseeing, use the other entrance of the cathedral. 

What a gift to enter the door of mercy, as we did.

. . . 

Here at home, we’re juggling daily life again. The suitcases are unpacked and laundry has been largely done; summer camps await; work is already here; and we battle the sense of foreboding that asks, Is this all there is? I think of the seasons of life and how in so many different parts of the world and in this city and in this neighborhood, life goes on usually unseen like the Mass that a priest performs in ancient cathedrals. Faith calls for hoping for what you can’t see, and what I can’t see now is the gift in the mundane or that anything else is at work beyond a life of managed chaos. Still, I think it’s there. The unceasingness of what we do each day produces our perseverance and faith. Pilgrims seeking mercy ask and wander. So I think of this and hold onto four words — While the earth remains.

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease. (Gen. 8:22)

The continuousness, somehow, is good.

Photos from top: Windows in Vienna’s Votivekirche, Alpine beauty, overlooking Munich at Alter Peter, Austrian flowers, traveling on the second half of the trip, inside Fraunkirche, a Jubilee Year Holy Door at Fraunkirche

End-of-month miscellany: This May

In one week, a school year ended, Liesl went to her first sleep-away camp, and I watched her just as it may be eight years from now when she — who will be an adult child then — will go her way, perhaps with hardly a look back. In this same week, we’ve gotten to have Mathilde all to ourselves and to see her come to terms with life without sister. She depends so much on her older sister and has never known a day without her. Tonight at dinner, she got water for herself to drink and pulled out the canning jar that Liesl likes to drink out of. Last night and tonight both, as I put Mathilde to bed, she asked to sleep in Liesl’s bed. Her sister occupies her thoughts and ways, and we miss her presence greatly. It will just be a few more days (long days, since we don’t get to talk to Liesl while she’s away) before we go to pick her up. Then, the quietness of the week (it has been very quiet) will make way for the usual bubbling noise of two sisters at play, or two sisters bickering and growing tired of one another, and all of the activity that happens between them.

. . . 

In May, I realized: At some point recently, my children stopped calling me Mommy. Now, I am more often than not just Mom. As in “Oh, Mom,” or “Mom, can you get me that?” or “Not now, Mom.” “Mom.”

. . . 

In May, it occurred to me: We all take pretty pictures. I take them of this city, which somewhere in the back of my mind I fear is being taken over by homelessness and poverty and graffiti just as the high-rise luxury condos go up and the streets bet busier with cars. Or I photograph flowers and my children and moments in a day or moments in a moment where things are good, maybe even right, and sometimes beautiful. But it dawns on me more and more: the outward presentation does not reflect what’s inside, and the Instagram account or the blog post, though truthful, is not fully true — it is not the story of the struggles that we have. An example: My post about Mathilde’s magical birthday didn’t tell how irritable I was the better half of that trip — how age and change wrought by age makes me feel less sturdy and able; how on that weekend when we were celebrating I missed a call from a friend who is struggling with severe anxiety, and I felt guilty about that because I don’t feel very equipped to help her; and how even the things which I count as blessings in my life have a double edge to them: good is not best and best is something reserved for heaven.

So when I think about my firstborn not looking back as she leaves, an act that pains me and makes me afraid of the future, that verse in the Bible comes to me. Because I’m too busy, I don’t look it up, but the words are there: forgetting what lies behind; pressing on toward the goal. 

. . .

Acknowledging that life is rife with the precarious frailty we humans carry into our relationships and being feels risky to me (family joy and family argument; provision of work and the constraints that a job brings; and so much that’s good and undesirable).

So I loved what I read to Mathilde in Love That Dog about not wanting to write because it might make someone sad, but how underneath that, unspoken, is the call to take account of things and name them as they are: These two are in the midst of a messy divorce; this one is sick with anxiety of mind; this one is angry; this one is overwhelmed; this one cries at the drop of a hat; this one worries; this one has joy; this one forgets; this one . . . (I will speak for myself) is like all of these now and at one time or another too. 

. . .

Conversely:

That entropic unraveling that youth do not seem to know but that I and the aged feel daily isn’t as dire as all that (I tell myself.) For I remember the doctrine of sanctification: and that just as a body crumbles a spirit is made whole. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. Or there’s the greater force which brings forth hope and mutes despair. In one week a school year ended and so much more.

Now summer is here. It’s June.

Photos from top: Rainy day in color, poetry from Love That Dog, rainy day in black and white, last day of first grade for Mathilde with her beloved teacher, Liesl happy to be at her camp, a pink flower in bloom, dear friend Meagan who took Mathilde out for the day while I worked.

Letter to Mathilde on her 7th birthday

Dear Mathilde,

We celebrated you yesterday on our birthday weekend getaway in Houston, and you were at your best all day -- full of ease and joyfulness. Throughout the day, as we opened presents and swam in the morning, walked in Hermann Park, got caught in the gusting rain unexpectedly, and went to dinner at The Cheesecake Factory (your pick: because Ms. Kelly took you there last year), we talked about the morning of your birth and told you stories all day about how life was like when you were born: How it felt so funny to me to check myself into the hospital and walk up to the counter and say to the receptionist, “I’m here to have a baby!” and how your conception was a surprise so I determined that your gender would not be (we found out at 20 weeks that we were having a girl); how Papa held you that whole first day after you were born because I was too sleepy from medicine to do it myself; how Liesl and friends brought chocolate cupcakes to the hospital to celebrate you, and Nana and Poppy came from California to stay for several weeks; and how we spent that whole first summer of your life with you in my arms and taking everything as it came. Those were our slow days, and they were good. These are the stories I told you.

This past year, you grew into confidence that came from accomplishing more. You for the most part threw off shyness and decided you wanted to be on a stage in a production like Annie. You gained a sense of self from reading and learning new words, writing stories, and researching projects with autonomy so that you also decided that you are going to be the kind of girl who is a “nerd” (bookish and studious) and sporty, too. Your birthday wish this year, which you whispered into my ears (like keeping the secret all to yourself, I assured you) is that you’ll grow up to be a great poet and writer. Without question: Your great first-grade teacher Ms. Kelly is to thank for all of that inspiration.

So it was perfect that we happened upon a writer’s workshop for children yesterday morning, and it was perfect that you and your sister spent an hour there writing list poetry, and that you wrote about how to play a soccer game. 

While you were writing, I tried my hand at a birthday poem for you. Like all of what I write these days, the first drafts are rubbish and I never find time to revisit them. My poem to you talked about how you chased your sister through water fountains and caught your breath at home base, a pole at one end of the splashing area. It saw you like an infinitesimal prism, casting light in multi-hued layers and in precise direction, growing into the future as you always seem to grow.

. . .

What I get back to -- spending time with you like rewriting a poem -- I see how you change shape and direction, grow bold and fade and see that there is no constant but the gift God gave us when he formed you,

Happy birthday, gift of mine. You shine bright. Thanks be to God.

xo 

Photos, from top: Out past bedtime and at the end of your big day, opening the present and card your sister gave you, happy birthday to you, your soccer poem, a photo from our quiet days, seven years old and exploding with surprise

Forty-six

My birthday came and went on what turned out to be a very normal work day, and turning forty-six was a blip. Since last year, I have thought I might as well be fifty -- and so aging incrementally to that half-century mark has no bearing on much of anything. I take on more wrinkles and age spots. I get closer to needing reading glasses. I keep up a modicum of health and try (with half futility) to get myself to the 5:30 a.m. bootcamp with consistency. I set my alarm for it most mornings, though; and in that lone act there is hope.

On my birthday, I wished, perhaps, that Jesus might rapture me. It’s a pipe dream I sometimes cling to, and I walked around the neighborhood that day where the girls’ school is before pick-up, trying to get in a small workout because I of course had slept in earlier that morning and missed my exercise class. The girls’ school is in East Austin, and I walked along streets that had not yet been hit by gentrification. I walked along box-shaped houses with small, fenced in yards and big dogs that barked at me as I passed by. I saw that people really live there and had for generations, living small lives (smaller than the grandiose among us).

A few days ago, Liesl asked me what my life philosophy was. I think she was thinking something along the lines of Keep your head up or Always do your best, but I told her that mine has come to be More Jesus. As I was walking in that small, untouched neighborhood, I took some pictures of things that interested me. And in a melancholy state, I decided to start a photo journal that I will keep and add to as the days pile up: It is to be my More Jesus photo journal. Now, until all this passes away.

. . . 

For all the tears of the day, the evening was pure and abundantly full of joy. Charles and I went to see Paul Simon, but we didn’t go to see Paul Simon as much as we went to see Joel Guzman, Liesl’s accordion teacher, who is playing on Paul Simon’s tour. 

I think you’d have to see it for yourself: This man, a musician who’s won a Grammy award, who was a child prodigy and plays numerous instruments and sings beautifully, teaches Liesl and some other students the accordion in an after-school class several times a week. It’s the biggest case of pearls before swine I’ve ever seen. The children, who labor with the instrument and don’t listen to him when they should, have no idea the treasure they have in being taught by him. To know this, and then to see this man on a big and brightly lit stage performing out of a sense of musical gift and passion was the most glorious experience. It made me think about the drudgery of days and how somewhere, somehow, when we’re working with godly diligence that it’s as pleasing as seeing Joel Guzman on tour with Paul Simon. The delight is incalculable. It really is.

This is in contrast to how I’ve been feeling as of late -- dreading the summer to come, as it will be the first in ten years that I will be working five days a week with no time off to spend with my girls; dreading the last few weeks and how demanding work was, leaving me to neglect most everything I hold dear. 

This, the work schedule, is something to contend with. The fact just is -- and I have come to increasingly feel and bear this the last six months -- that when one’s time is so fully accounted for, the margin for spiritual thought, tending to others, and anticipating future need of individuals or a community comes to a deadening halt. It’s the plight of working parents, and it gives me some deeper understanding of Charles, who never seems to live or see more than what’s just in front of him.

. . . 

One last thought with this post: The next day, after swim team practice, Mathilde was in tears because she’d bumped into Liesl while doing laps and they both hurt their heads pretty good. She quit practice early as a result, and as we walked to the car I saw the emotion creep into her face -- shame and devastation in full force. I picked her up and held her close to me, and I began to cry with her, declaring, “We share the same heart!”

We started talking after that, and it was the first time I felt like I had talked to God in weeks. What a mystery to me it was that talking to my child about sorrow and soft-heartedness and mercy was entering into a conversation with God also.

I feel I entered into God’s glory seeing Joel Guzman play with his embellished accordion gleaming under colored lights with a wide smile on his face. He played with the conviction of gladness. We talk to others, when we’re really with them, with the deepest, most intangible kind of intimacy that the conversation touches heaven. And that brings gladness, too.

These, hands down, are the good moments.

Photos, from top: East Austin peace sign, my children at home, date night spot where a cocktail and no iPhones prevailed

End-of-month miscellany: Just this

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” —Graham Greene, The Power and The Glory

. . . 

I started writing this post the last few days of Lent, when I tried on one occasion to go to noon Mass at the Catholic church downtown. At that time, work was starting to get busy and spring had arrived with its usual magic, bearing light so soft that it hung in the air almost visibly. That was March: Roses unfolded baby pink petals and cool mornings dawned and required a sweater.

Since then, the pace of work accelerated so that last week I felt I completely neglected my family. The kids ate fast food for dinner nearly every night of the week. When Liesl tried telling me one morning that her throat hurt and she wanted me to look at it, I barely lifted my eyes from my laptop long enough to respond to her. “I’ve just got to finish this thing,” I said distractedly. The week before, my oldest niece came for a visit as she had just finished her first year of college. The last time she was here she was five and was a darling flower girl when Charles and I got married. Nearly fourteen years later, we saw Austin through her eyes, taking in downtown and other parts of the city with renewed appreciation. 

It is a humble thing to invite someone into your home to stay and to lay out all that you have, though it may be worn. Being with her, whom I remember to be an advocate for the truth even when she was five or six years old, felt like taking up a shield of righteousness, somehow. During her stay, it felt a privilege to talk with her, particularly since my family -- brothers, sisters-in-law, lovely nieces and nephews, and parents -- are all states away and our visits are few. Knowing someone allows you to pray for them. So it is always good to know.

These are things I thought of in January and February, when I felt the lock-step movement of days contain so many missed moments. I began to feel, even with just my children and husband, that we are often together in common places but rarely do we push past the niceties of tolerance or whatever that is to dig and know one another. I had the feeling that I was directing their movements or issuing commands. Parenting from afar is not parenting at all, and a marriage that is all about the practical matters of households and children misses out on the intimacy that marriage is meant to provide. And so I had the nagging reminder talking to me, We’re not called to direct one another, we’re called to abide.

Part of abiding has been reading a book to my girls at bedtime. It is called Flora and Ulysses, and as my friend Meagan — a school teacher to sixth graders — thoughtfully described, the author is one who writes (through her entire body of work) about unlovable, overlooked characters being loved. In this book, in one particular scene, Flora fiercely calls out her mother for speaking in euphemisms. My heart lifted in a kind of joy when I read the passage in which this happens, and it’s stuck with me since. I had a conversation with a friend about it later. And we wondered if the whole world has gone mad in the way nothing is truthfully spoken. Why do we sugarcoat truths? Why do we portray what is not as though it is? 

Community and relationship acknowledge what is. I think that happens from a young age, too. I feel it with my daughters who are starting to more deeply enter the world and name it. What comes from that is feeling the little arrows that daily life and others can throw.

Our never-ending aim is learning to sit with one another and to speak in truth. So it is as we enter May.

Photos from top: St. Mary’s Cathedral on Holy Week, Flora and Ulysses favorite passage, “Love More” bench found around town one day, hiking among flowers on Good Friday, blue lake, canoeing on Town Lake, with Megan, something pretty for Megan’s stay at our house.

In midwinter

Over the now, long-past Christmas holiday, Charles and I went to see the movie Brooklyn, our first in months. When the credits were rolling, the tears hit, and I found myself crying at the end of it because I couldn’t believe the depth of loss the story told. It made me think about how even when we make good choices, right choices, there may be much we leave behind and how that alone can be full of much regret.

In the weeks since, some of our greatest artistic heroes have died, and the lament rings on. At the new year, I read in Luke how after Jesus’s temptation, he read the prophecy of Isaiah that proclaims a year acceptable to the Lord. Starting our new year, I thought of what that would mean in this day and age, when there is no year of jubilee and when all appears like it’s being held together by a string. 

. . . 

Now about seven weeks into new employment, and after a fair amount of worry and adjustment over whatever this new bit of life holds, which I recognize is also full of blessing and provision, I walk in the morning and afternoon to and from work and see with remorseful frequency the people who live in this city and who make their way through downtown amid the office workers and the tourists. 

I’m speaking of the homeless who congregate on the north end of Congress and sit on the same corner or same bench each day of the work week. They ask for money (I never have any) and sometimes for breakfast (a request I usually oblige); they cover themselves up when it’s raining outside, seeking inches of shelter under a building’s narrow overhang; and on really cold mornings, they disperse from their regular perches and are nowhere to be seen. They talk to themselves, shout out to no one in particular, fight with one another, and talk to or harangue passersby like me. I can go my whole work day without thinking of anything but what’s before me — all material thoughts and details — but I can’t walk by these needy strangers without thinking of spirit and that which is afflicted and, though afflicted, mercifully sustained.

. . .

My heart hurt yesterday when Mathilde came to me in tears upon realizing that a neighborhood friend who is never available to play anymore may not be truly busy, but just uninterested in friendship with her and her sister any longer. When I asked Liesl how she felt about it, she acknowledged its possibility but didn’t absorb it like Mathilde did. 

Seeing my children’s different responses to this situation, this morning I realized the essential thing about community and the call to bear one another’s burdens: we each have a different gift to offer, another way of seeing, and when some of us may fall under the weight of a slight or circumstance, another one of us may be able to speak of life after injury.

This morning, also, one of the homeless women I regularly see was on the street and looking worse for wear, as though she’d been on a weekend-long bender of the worst kind. She was still high, very high, whereas normally she has more clarity about her. On other days, when I’ve passed her, I’ve heard her spewing out facts about the presidential campaign and the candidates while sitting with a newspaper in her hand. When I was going home from work today, her drugged-up elation was gone and she was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk a few blocks south from where she normally is. She was banging on the concrete, angry, as though beating out demons after a fall.

Within this world, which sees the sick and the poor living in feeble existence, and hand in hand with other sorrows and injustices, there’s a year that is acceptable to the Lord, in Isaiah and in Jesus’s words. 

I pray for that to come. 

It’s too grave to happen in one movement. So much needs atoning, though with one life all is atoned. So maybe the year of jubilee to come, a pleasing and acceptable year, will be made up of many small moments; and looking back millennia we’ll see them all assembled in a kind of collage with mercy on top of mercy, provision, forgiveness, grace. Because I don’t think what we see is just what we get. There is spirit in every atom, and in every person we see — whether bleary-eyed or clear — is the image of that which beholds us.

Letter to Liesl on your 10th birthday

My dear, growing girl,

It is now a week since your birthday and you turned 10. I’ve started this letter several times the past week, and there hasn’t been enough time or downtime to allow me to begin and finish it.

We celebrated your birth this year as we did 10 years ago -- in between the wash of Christmas trees and nativity sets. This year, you had your two best buddies over, along with their families, for an evening dinner and for free play out in the yard and inside. It always feels good and right to welcome others into our home, and that evening was no different. The week before that, Papa took you camping to Big Bend for a double-digit father-daughter trip -- the first of hopefully many. According to him, you fell in love with the place and with being out in the middle of nowhere: just you two, a trail to hike, and the desert sunset and a tent under a pitch black sky.

In the week since your birthday, I’ve reached the end of myself and this Advent season. As a family, we haven’t lit our nightly Advent candles as much as we normally do this time of year. Attention is prayer of a sort, or at least it can be, and our attention has been elsewhere instead of on the truest meaning of this season that we celebrate. If there’s one chorus for the past year, it’s that we’re too busy and don’t have enough time together at home.

As it is, it is the middle of the night and I’m up alone after falling asleep hours earlier in a kind of hopeless mood. I have the laundry going because it was beginning to stack up. And I may stay up longer to finish off the last of the Christmas cards that need mailing. These seem to be the only free moments I’ll get.

But here I am writing about the burden of seasonal over-activity and it is you that should be at the center of this letter. 

The Sunday after you were born in 2005, we were to have had a Christmas party at our house. I was well into its preparation, but it naturally got cancelled since you came into being so prematurely. It was on that Christmas -- 10 days after you were born -- that we first held you in our arms in the NICU. Christmas was on Sunday that year, and we had just come from church with my father. Now, Christmas and your birth are inextricably linked; and I may forever struggle with how to carry on well in the Christmas season but still give you the time and attention your birth (and its celebration) requires. 

Apropos of nothing, I told you that my hope for you this year is that you would grow in thoughtfulness and mindfulness of your presence among others, and how you may take greater care and attention of your surroundings and others in that way. You and your sister seem to have grown closer the past few months, forming a bond that is so sisterly and lovely that it is a joy to see and to be on the outside of. Conversely, we have had more than a few conversations lately about how -- in the midst of anger -- it serves community the most to stay put rather than to flee. You are always one to run away from us when you get angry, and it pushes my buttons to no end. Speaking to you kindly in those instances is always at the heart of my desire, and I succeed and fail equally. 

Everything now seems a precursor for the teenage years; so I am trying to deal with you compassionately, most especially when it is hardest. That, and I am trying to let you be who you are. At this point, it’s about letting you (more often than not) choose your own ways of wearing your hair and clothes. What small things. And yet how big and hard that is for me; I who have seen you come up from being a nursing infant who once was happiest in my arms. You often prefer your father over me now, and I am well aware: from this point on, it is all about letting you go, and letting you go well. 

I am sure you will help me do that my bold, brave one. The past years are held so closely. A friend and I talked recently about how difficult it is to not be known. It is so difficult, and I have had the experience of that recently and in times past. I want to know you and keep knowing you in all the ways you abide by me and go your own untraveled path.

Happy birthday (so, so late). I love you for all this and more. 

Photos from top: Dressed for Christmas; this summer, on one of your adventures; nature girl in cowboy hat; from earlier days

Miscellany in autumn

Sylvie died, and I haven’t written here since. Weeks and months passed, and I was still sensing her presence in the house. She’d appear in a rustle of noise or motion in the corner of my eye as I was tending to something else in our home. What a welcome presence those visitations have been. Nearing the third month after her death, she visits me less often. But we were out trick-or-treating this past weekend, and for some reason Mathilde spontaneously burst into tears over it. “I miss Sylvie,” she cried in the middle of candy-hunting and dress up.

There, again, joy and sorrow’s intertwined.

The past months, we’ve prayed daily and nightly for a young friend who has brain cancer. We have a friend whose mother and sister are also gravely sick. We pray for them, too. It’s taken me two months to read Mary Karr’s book on memoir writing, and I’m still not finished with it. I read so little because in the evening, Charles and I opt for mindless videos on Netflix instead. I work and move all the day long (job, housework, kids, and driving to and fro), and by nightfall, I have nothing else in me. There’s a fount of spirit that needs more replenishing than I’ve been giving it. The lack shows up in my back, which on the left side is a pinched bundle of nerves that sporadically give out on me. I’m not as fit as I was in the spring.

In October, I joined some lovely friends in an effort to write every day of the month. We had a calendar of writing prompts, and I stuck to it mostly, but gave the barest amount of time to it. My entries, therefore, showed it. Writing is in me and comes out of me by some kind of necessity, even if it comes out poorly constructed.

Liesl is turning ten in December, and for her birthday she wants me to give her all of the letters I’ve written her. So I feel I need to keep up this blog for that reason if no other. I had imagined I’d give her the letters when she turned 18. She is always so far ahead of me.

I got a new job this month, and I start in just two weeks. It’s been ten years since I’ve worked full time, which is what I’ll do come November 18. It’s been ten years that I’ve been raising babies who have grown into younger and older children. What I hold in my heart are the many walks we took, the Thursday morning ballet classes, the mornings and afternoons spent at home.

What a new season. I can’t imagine what’s coming. When I thought about taking the position, I envisioned that my lessened availability may cause our family to come together in a different way so that we each — Charles, Liesl, Mathilde, and I — put in more individually to create a whole. As I think about starting (new schedule, new work, new people), this is what I’ll be praying for. Where I am weak, may God enter with his being and grace.

. . .

Photos: Sunset on I-35, Dia de los Muertos at my children’s school, the girls in reading adventures; more photos of the months that’ve passed.

Letter to my husband: Missing Sylvie

There is an emptiness and a quiet here at home that is unusual. The girls are still asleep from our late night in San Antonio, and it’s just the cats and me and the sound of the refrigerator humming in the kitchen.

Sylvie is gone, and I keep wanting to undo yesterday’s euthanasia. She’ll never sleep in her little dog bed again. We won’t ever need to clean up after her, wiping up pools of urine from the hardwood floors with paper towels and vinegar. She’ll never again get her paw prints on the glass back door or come tottering down the hallway, clicking all the way, because she never wanted anyone to clip her long nails. 

Oh, how I miss her.

I slept with her next to me on Friday night, and I wrapped her tight into a towel so that she’d be burrowed into it a bit. I don’t know why her health declined so quickly in just a few days. You said, in response to my own question about that matter, that we could’ve done more for her; and I know that is true on a level. 

. . .

Yesterday morning before our appointment with the doctor, the girls played in the backyard with the neighbor, and I cleaned the house and rearranged the rooms a bit. I know you hate it that I change the arrangements so often, but I felt like I was preparing for a burial somehow in the act of doing so. I also contemplated as I cleaned that the whole purpose of one’s life is to serve others: to clean up the messes, drive the sick to the doctor, put together the meals, and do it seventy times seven. Maybe this is why God says he desires mercy and not legalism and why faith is something to be lived out in relation to others with fear and trembling, and with what also must include certain missteps and imperfection. We are human, after all.

. . .

We watched Sylvie pass into death in the doctor’s office, and it was a slipping away that was too quick to recount in any kind of detail: five seconds for the anesthesia to kick in, less than thirty seconds for the subsequent cocktail to completely halt her body and organs, and then just two words from the sweet vet, “She’s gone.” 

The girls reacted with such sorrow yesterday. Mathilde cried like I’ve never seen her cry, and we talked about death from so many different directions as their questions came up. 

I told them on Friday night that this was coming, and they were sad then but quickly returned to play and giggling laughter. Their response, which was so attached to the moment, made me recall the part in the BIble when Jesus’s disciples ask why they’re not fasting and the Pharisees are. He points to days and seasons by saying, “The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?” And that’s how the girls were: Sylvie was still with us, and so they could carry on in childlikeness. I am sure they will carry on today as well.

It strikes me that the world these days is ready to hang up the hypocrites. I count myself among them. I grieve Sylvie’s passing only to acknowledge how uncaring I also was. How many times did I get angry at her for peeing on the carpet or vomiting on the bed? How many times was I too rough with her little frame? I want it to be known, as you know, that I’m not the best lover of souls.

We celebrated Jeanenne’s mom yesterday, and it looks like later this week I’ll travel to go to a funeral for the passing of my friend’s father. This was a man who had a true gaggle of children (ten or more?) and who greeted them in the morning with pancakes and an invitation that called, “Wake up merry sunshines.” If ever there was a bright and shining father, it was him.

Knowing that there are greater losses, I still sit in the loss of our little rat dog and think that every time I’ve faced the death of another, I am always left thinking that I should’ve loved the deceased more . . . when I could’ve, when there was still the allowance for that.

And therein is the struggle, I don’t do what I want to do and I do what I want not to do.

So we’ll go about today with the slate of love-work that needs to be done: keeping a lazy morning of intermittent laundry and prepping for another week of school, welcoming you home from your work trip (you have been so missed), and meeting the moments as they come and to the extent that we’re able. 

End of summer miscellany

I stopped writing back in the months of early summer in part because speaking out from a desert perch grows wearisome for speaker and listener both. And it seems to be from the desert that I only tend to speak.

Summer passed for us in blessing. On my three work days, the girls had an angel of a babysitter who took care of things and who carried about such love that I never worried — much less even thought about — how they were or what they were doing while I logged in my hours at work. The sitter’s name is Holly, and I count her among our family’s biggest gifts to happen since May.

The days in between, the Tuesdays and Thursdays and weekends, were filled with much swimming, unscheduled moments, occasional music lessons on the accordion and violin, and a few trips away. 

The last two weeks, we marked off the days on the calendar too aware of summer’s end. Blue Hole with friends on Monday made us long for heaven. New Mexico did the same. This morning the end of summer came, and the girls and their classmates are off and starting another full year of school.

I thought I had already grieved my children’s leaving last year when Mathilde started school full time as a kindergartner. But that feeling of uncertainty and the tears that come with it are back again, and while my girls get situated in classrooms with blessed teachers, I’m sorting myself out here feebly for the second autumn in a row.

I wish I had some sort of blessing for them, or for all the children and their parents. The days go on in circular motion, and within this liturgy are the conflicts and resolutions. I guess I pray for those: Grace over all and in all.

When we hiked just a few weeks ago up the strenuous trail to William’s Lake in Taos, I cursed a lot in my mind because I was so mad at how hard the climb was. A hike to a lake sounded like some kind of bucolic and leisurely pursuit, and that hike, turns out, was anything but. Plus Mathilde had to be carried, and all I could do was huff and puff the two miles up. When we finally reached the lake, there was a Catholic youth group who had hiked and who were about to start Mass outdoors. They, and the priest who came with them, hiked all that way to have a church service. The timing of our arrival and the beginning of their liturgy was arresting. It made me think that God is everywhere, even in those moments when the days are the hardest. In my photo journal, I wrote that we lingered on the edge of their service taking in any bits of it that we could from afar. We felt like beggars who were given food before we knew of our hunger. I hope I never forget that day. 

At some point in the past month, the phrase “But God” got stuck in my mind like a song lyric that won’t go away. I read the words in Ephesians where Paul says, “But God who is rich in mercy made us alive . . .”

The phrase is a balm to me still, and I finally jotted it down in my commonplace book. The days go by; the struggles come and go; we know the future, and then we do not; we sin, ask for forgiveness; our children grow up and ever slowly away, “but God” is over it all.