Month: October 2016

Around here lately

It’s been a while since I shared snapshots of what’s going on around here.  I realize I tend to do that more and more on Instagram these days.  It’s been a quiet fall, with a lot of time at home following a rough couple of weeks, and in a weird way as we come out of the fog back into real life I find myself strangely nostalgic. There was definitely a silver lining to those challenging days.
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This fall has been a lot, lot, lot about the kids’ sports.  Matt came to watch one of Grace’s home xc meets.  He was unable to sit down, so as you can see, he lay down on a bench to wait for the start of her race.  img_3641

At another meet, my parents came to watch with me.  I took this photograph of our shadows as I stood next to Mum.  Now and then the good fortune of my parents living so nearby that they are able to do stuff like that threatens to swamp me.  Of course, it’s deliberate, that we live here, and this is precisely why.  Still.  I am so, so lucky.  img_3649

Matt’s parents sent me flowers.  How lovely is that?  The happy energy of these sunflowers filled our kitchen for days.  Once again: I am so lucky. img_3666

Whit is playing football for school.  Which is to say he is practicing, and in the game for one or two plays per game.  Which is fine by me.  But I do love him in his little uniform (they had to order new pads, since they didn’t have any small enough for Whit or his friend).  img_3639

I take a lot of photos of Grace running, and this is my favorite so far this year.  Somehow the blur, the movement, the way she’s looking away … feels like right now.

Seventh annual

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Saturday night sunset on Chappaquiddick

This past weekend I was with my native speakers.  It was our seventh annual weekend gathering (2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 – not sure how I missed 2011).

This year we were a smaller band than usual, and it was hard not to notice the ways that life’s demands kept many away.  We are in The Middle Place, there’s no question about that. In the past year we’ve celebrated christenings and sat at the bedsides of ailing parents.  We’ve watched children be born and turn into teenagers.  We are reckoning with work challenges and what marriage looks like after 10 years and who we are.

We have reached the top of life’s ferris wheel.  The view is spectacular, but we know the trip down will be too fast.

We’re walking together – what an outrageous blessing it is to write the word together, I know that – into the early afternoon of life.  As I drove Grace and Whit to school on Friday morning, before heading to the airport to pick up a couple of friends who were flying in, they wanted to know more about who was coming.  I described each person, all of whom are familiar to my children (what a pleasure that is!), and then said to them that I hoped in their life they made friends that they’d make a point of seeing every year.  I didn’t expect the tears that filled my voice and eyes as I said that.  It’s true, though: one of the many wishes I have for Grace and Whit, and one of the fiercest, is that they meet friends like the ones I’ve been lucky enough to make. People who will answer their texts and calls, laugh and cry with them, people who will show up.

I’ve written before and I’ll write again that these friends are the ones who knew me as I was becoming who I am.  We are part of each others’ lives in an indelible way.  We share a colorful, vivid past, a rich, exhausting, blessed present, and, God willing, a long future. We experienced together some of life’s most formative years.  These women are a part of what shaped and molded me into who I am.

On Saturday night I sat at the top of the bluff outside of our hostess’s house and watched the sun set.  I took the photo above (and many more).  I was struck silent by the spectacular pageant in the sky, but I was also overcome by an immense wave of gratitude. I love our tradition and hope there are a great many more weekends ahead.

the silent and invisible life

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel the silent and invisible life.
~Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Thank you to my friend Emily, whose beautiful blog Barnstorming reminded me of these lines from my all-time favorite book.

Things I Love Lately

The best chocolate sheet cake ever – This is not an overstatement.  This recipe, from the Pioneer Woman, is incredible and I make it a lot (we always seem to have too much buttermilk).  I leave out the pecans.  Cannot recommend more highly.  This cake looks humble but is absolutely delicious.  A classic weeknight treat around here.

The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead’s spectacular book is, as of now, my favorite of the year.  This extraordinary story manages to be both excruciatingly raw and violent and luminously beautiful at the same time.  I can’t stop thinking about Cora.  Run, don’t walk, to read this.

Want to Raise a Tail-Blazing Daughter? – I’m so grateful to my friend Gale for sending this marvelous piece to me.  Every piece of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s advice resonates, and of course I love that fostering a love of reading is #1.

24 Great Books that show Empathy and Kindness – I adore this list, which I found on twitter when my idol Michael Thompson re-tweeted it. Such a terrific list.  Grace, Whit, and I have read some but not all of these, and I’m madly ordering from the library.

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

Rethinking ease

Right now, when I think about the word I chose as my word of the year, I feel a grudging sense of oh, yeah, now that’s ironic.  Life right now is not replete with ease.  I was surprised to see, when I went back to see what I’d written about ease so far in 2016, that in the spring I was already asking is this the opposite of ease?

Now, ease does not mean easy, of course.  It doesn’t look like I expect it to.

When I think more about it, I realize that it’s not an accident that this is the word I chose for this year.  It’s precisely in the midst of these turbulent months that I am learning how to live with ease.  I’m not learning fast, let me be honest: I feel exhausted, and overwhelmed, and sad, and grateful, and emotional right now.  I do not feel ease.  But I’m aware of it, floating around me, and maybe that is the lesson right now.  It is there, the ease I want, and the way to reach it is to grasp less frantically, to breathe more deeply.

It’s only a goal now, ease, a desire, a fierce hope.  I am snappy and easily frustrated and my poor children are bearing the brunt of my not-easeful way of being in the world.  I’m so tired that the other night Whit observed that I looked like I had bruises under my eyes.  But still.  And yet.  Every morning I can wake up and get out of bed and as Jane Kenyon said, I’m keenly aware that it could have been otherwise.  Each day is an opportunity to do better, to be more patient, to be more gentle, to live in the days of my life with more ease.

So maybe that’s why this word presented itself to me at the opening of this year.  To remind me of what I want, what I aim for.  I think every single day of this quote, one of my favorites (author is unknown):

Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of these things and still be calm in your heart.

And so I return to my life, forgiving myself for being far from the peaceful, easeful person I want to be today, allowing myself to imagine that tomorrow I may inch closer to her.