At Sea
Okay, so I know you all want photos. I will take photos soon and download them and then post them, I promise. I want photos, too.
It's a beautiful, sunny, warm, windy day. Autumn was in the air as I walked Charley around the corner of our neighborhood past the bright turquoise house on the corner, past the potted yellow roses and the dropping cherry tomatoes. Autumn was in the blackberry brambles hacked unceremoniously back to stubs, dark fruit clustered amongst yellowing leaves. Autumn. The children disappear into the sighing maws of buses and reappear again at the end of the day, hung like coat racks with sweaters and backpacks and the detritus of their school days.
I can't seem to calm my spirit.
As I told my good in-laws in an e-mail this morning, we have not calmed down enough to enjoy or luxuriate in our new place. After two years of uncertainty and anxiety about What's coming next, my insides still feel as if they're scrunched into a messy, dense ball. What will unwind me? Good work? Routine?
Big pots of soup, simmered slowly?
Bushels of apples diced and warm and spiced with cinnamon?
A manuscript finished, tied with a ribbon and taken?
A contract, perhaps from God, with his seal at the bottom?
Or maybe it's just that inability that we seem to have to trust and relax, no matter what we tell ourselves--a word or two of uncertainty shake the flimsy cardboard walls that we've slapped up around ourselves, trying to build shelter. I'm sure it's this feeling that we've found hard to shake from Pennsylvania, the memory of the way things just dissolved in a minute. All these walls, all these fortresses that we naively thought were solid were instantly reduced to a shimmering wall of water. It's hard to trust "solid" after that, even two years later.
Still, I like to picture that walls are being built of a new place around us even as we blunder around in the darkness, that steady, sure hands are mortaring bricks of belonging, lifting timbers of lasting promise into place.
Or maybe, like the dwarves in Lewis' Last Battle who sit down to partake of a delectable feast, we are so full of our own myopic concerns that we can't see the food in front of us, can't taste anything but sawdust. After a season of feeling "between," we need to return as a family and as individuals to a steady center, a place where we feel truly at home again, where we're not waiting for the knock at the door that signals bad news.
Ah. Breathe. After all, it's Friday. After all, it's the end of a good half week of school. After all, we are loved and surrounded by love.
It's a beautiful, sunny, warm, windy day. Autumn was in the air as I walked Charley around the corner of our neighborhood past the bright turquoise house on the corner, past the potted yellow roses and the dropping cherry tomatoes. Autumn was in the blackberry brambles hacked unceremoniously back to stubs, dark fruit clustered amongst yellowing leaves. Autumn. The children disappear into the sighing maws of buses and reappear again at the end of the day, hung like coat racks with sweaters and backpacks and the detritus of their school days.
I can't seem to calm my spirit.
As I told my good in-laws in an e-mail this morning, we have not calmed down enough to enjoy or luxuriate in our new place. After two years of uncertainty and anxiety about What's coming next, my insides still feel as if they're scrunched into a messy, dense ball. What will unwind me? Good work? Routine?
Big pots of soup, simmered slowly?
Bushels of apples diced and warm and spiced with cinnamon?
A manuscript finished, tied with a ribbon and taken?
A contract, perhaps from God, with his seal at the bottom?
Or maybe it's just that inability that we seem to have to trust and relax, no matter what we tell ourselves--a word or two of uncertainty shake the flimsy cardboard walls that we've slapped up around ourselves, trying to build shelter. I'm sure it's this feeling that we've found hard to shake from Pennsylvania, the memory of the way things just dissolved in a minute. All these walls, all these fortresses that we naively thought were solid were instantly reduced to a shimmering wall of water. It's hard to trust "solid" after that, even two years later.
Still, I like to picture that walls are being built of a new place around us even as we blunder around in the darkness, that steady, sure hands are mortaring bricks of belonging, lifting timbers of lasting promise into place.
Or maybe, like the dwarves in Lewis' Last Battle who sit down to partake of a delectable feast, we are so full of our own myopic concerns that we can't see the food in front of us, can't taste anything but sawdust. After a season of feeling "between," we need to return as a family and as individuals to a steady center, a place where we feel truly at home again, where we're not waiting for the knock at the door that signals bad news.
Ah. Breathe. After all, it's Friday. After all, it's the end of a good half week of school. After all, we are loved and surrounded by love.
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