a new hope

A while back, I read a book by Elizabeth Berg, The Year Of Pleasures.  The reviews on Amazon were indifferent; she is accused of lacking cohesion and indulging in flights of fancy.  I dug in anyway.  The protagonist is a freshly-widowed 55-year-old woman, grieving her husband while simultaneously trying to make a new life for herself, per his instructions before he died of cancer.

Somehow, I could relate.

I still - thank God! - have my Farmer by my side, to love me, and provide a buffer from many of life's bumps.  And I am still far (it seems to me) from 55 years of age.

But lately I am grieving - the passage of time, the dreams I haven't yet realized that I thought I would have by this ripe old age of 39, the immaturity still resident in my personality and habits.  Maudlin, I know.  But what I loved about the book was that the widow's grieving gave her new eyes, to see beauty both in remembrance and in hope.

Her husband left her slips of paper, just a word or phrase on each, to remind her (or sometimes, befuddle her) with memories of things she'd let slip through her fingers, in essence to tell her over and over - say yes!  It's like the one thousand gifts in reverse - the gifts unseen, refused - enumerated not to incite guilt, but to spur the widow on to an acceptance of beauty, of abundant life.

This summer some girlfriends and I were browsing a vintage shop in town.  Upstairs, one of them called my name: "You have to look at this set of plates - they are you!!"  I looked, and they were.  The price was fair, too, but I reasoned the dinnerware away - I have a perfectly serviceable set of dishes [that I heartily dislike] and ... pretty things are not for me.

I'm not sure where that belief came from, but when it showed itself that day, I realized I had believed it many times, for many things.  I'm glad to say that I was able to see truth, that day, and bury the lie:  my household budget allowed easily for the purchase, and the beauty of the plates would cheer us daily for years.  In the end, I bought them, and every time I set them out, they whisper "pretty things are for you...."

A couple of years ago, a group of wives gathered in a different friend's house to talk about how to be good wives, good mothers.  A question was raised about the Bible's call to self-denial versus the world's call to self-care.  We puzzled over it, some in favor of one, some in favor of the other, no one quite sure if the two could be reconciled.

But then I found a paragraph from Lisa Bevere's book Out of Control & Loving It that caught my eye.  She contended that self-neglect is different from self-denial.  I had never before seen that I was confusing the two, that I could deny selfish desires while still caring for basic needs.

Much in The Year of Pleasures is unrealistic, yes.  But like a list of gifts yet undiscovered, it calls to me, like the ocean, like a Japanese maple aflame with autumnal glory, like the opening strains of the Moonlight Sonata - "there is hope .... life can be abundant .... accept the beauty offered."

I will be keeping my eyes open.

I turn 40 in a few days.  This decade will be a new hill to climb, and beauty, and gifts, will be my fuel.

fake it till you make it

I lied to dozens of people at church, just three days ago.

I woke up that morning feeling as fine as I can at 5:42 a.m., with no intentions of being dishonest to anyone, least of all my church family.  But somehow as the morning unrolled, the fine feeling rolled off to somewhere dark and dusty and I (and my family) was left with a sharply fragile shell of my former self.

I was impatient, irritable, and desperately unhappy.  I felt my all failings instead of all His faithfulness, and believed every lie thrown my way.  Disorganized - yes.  Undisciplined - true.  Alone - always.  Ugly - yes.  Unlovable - that, too.

By the time I got to church I was in bad need of it, but too battered to ask for help.  I never answer "fine" to "how are you" but I did that morning, to everyone who asked.  Anything more truthful would have shaken out an overflowing I wasn't ready for.  I wore the churchy smile I so despise, hiding myself behind "Good morning" and a handshake.

The funny thing is, after two hours of church and another of the unexpected [forgotten] fellowship meal ... I was starting to believe my own act.

It was like a piano piece, played so often your fingers can play it in your sleep, that saves the day when your mind forgets.  Or kneading bread, or riding a bike, or dialing your sister's number, or any of those things that your body knows more deeply than your brain, and can carry on without your conscious thought, but if you stop to think about it, you lose your rhythm, your balance.  My act carried me.

It made me think that maybe, for all the value I place on honest vulnerability, perhaps there is value, too, in acting on what's true, even when your heart can't see it.  Not to deceive, but to stand witness to what really is, instead of what really isn't.

What do you say to this?  Truth?  A fake escape?  Courage or cop-out?

[And if you're tempted to say "I told you so" (as I'm sure at least one of you is), forebear.  Lessons do not come to us all in the same order, else what would we need grace for?]

grass magic: the whole truth

Remember a post from our family week two summers ago?  Where my Farmer led the children in a glorious cheese-making venture involving fresh mozzarella and a certain artistically paraffin-coated round?

We were remembering at breakfast this morning ... and I realized that my glowing post gave a prematurely positive impression of our success.  Here's what really happened:

The mozzarella started out so nicely ...

And their little hands had so much fun squeezing and shaping ....

... that no one noticed that those lumpy little balls showed no resemblance to the silky orbs of fresh mozzarella that we've enjoyed from the store.  It was our mozzarella, after all.  Never mind that it tasted, well, cooked.

So that was the mozzarella.

Then there was the beautiful, carefully waxed "soft cheese" that aged for 90 days on my Farmer's dresser (naturally, you've heard of "dresser-aged" cheeses....):

Unfortunately, this gorgeous cheese developed some suspicious molds.  It must have been an amazing cheese, though we never got to taste it once it "matured", because every mold in the vicinity jumped on board - we had pink mold, black mold, green mold, brown mold, even orange mold.  My Farmer tells me that you really don't want to eat pink or black molds.  I guess the others are okay - ??

So that's the rest of the story.

I just wanted you to know.

night vision

[yet another eye-opener from my Lil' Snip:]

Up the morning steps I go, toward the sound of energetic, tuneless singing, punctuated by enthusiastic commentary in the little yellow room.  I round the corner, unlatch his door, and swing it open - always an excitingly unpredictable moment, followed by anything from a happy "Mommy!!!" to a suddenly, inexplicably furious squeal.

This morning, he's standing in the far corner of his crib, pointing hard at his changing table.

"There's a fox!!!" he exclaims.

A what?  I open the blinds and let light in.  Yesterday's jeans and shirt lie crumpled in a pile.  He looks.

It doesn't take long for him to regroup with a revised exclamation:  "When it was dark, it was a fox!!"

Ahhh.....!  Not "oops, it was only my clothes," not "it was dark; I couldn't see," not "I was wrong," but "when it was dark, it was a fox."

He's just a toddler.  He couldn't know that what I heard was myself, insisting on the truth of a lie freshly-exposed by the light, unwilling to release an old familiar hurt to embrace instead an opportunity for life.

Open my eyes, O Father of the heavenly lights, to see what's truly there, instead of pictures painted in shadows.  Open my heart to receive your good gifts.

Every good and perfect gift is from above,

coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights,

who does not change like shifting shadows.

He chose to give us birth through the word of truth

James 1:17, 18

confession

I have been bleating everywhere the wonders of a sugar-free diet.

My friends, I'm sure, are exercising extreme patience when they hear me getting started on The Topic.  The few who read my blog probably delete new posts from their inbox as soon as they see it's on sugar again.  Facebook friends have most likely changed their settings to "hide all by ..." until the word sugar disappears from my vocabulary.

So, given this afternoon's indulgence with my Farmer, a confession is probably in order:


I ate a bowl of ice cream.


Green's Columbian Chip, to be exact.  My very favorite.  The last half of the carton has been lingering in the freezer ever since The Big Switch.

I have been low on sleep lately (thank you, Lil' Snip) and that has always been a sugar trigger for me.  I should have been on the alert.  No, that's not quite true:  I was on the alert.  I took a nap first - an hour or more of hard sleep.  I didn't really "need" the ice cream by the time I woke up.  I wanted it.

And I ate it.

I should tell you that it was too sweet, that I feel terrible now, that that does it, I'm swearing off sugar FOREVER.

Actually, it was good.  And I feel fine.  Sorry, but that's the truth.  I love a good story as much as the next guy, but I love truth even more.

I'm back to sugar freedom again now ... and there will probably be more posts on that adventure ... but in the meantime ... I wanted you to know.

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(click here for my next post on sugar freedom, and here for the first post in my story)