Chaos
Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure. - Rumi
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A Day in the Life – not so lucky
The day before yesterday Otto found nine four leaf clovers in our yard. NINE. And I found three. (Which beats my life time score of finding four leaf clovers – previously I had only ever found one four leaf clover. In my entire life.) I thought maybe Otto’s luck would transfer over to our whole family. But I don’t know. We drove on a bit of an excursion to visit a dairy farm that provides milk to several local restaurants for a story. The smell of farm air and manure and cow and hay and copious amounts of milk was all very familiar to me.…
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the days.
The stack of stuff to do on any given day is high. The ability for me to focus lately is low. Maybe it’s spring fever or distracted living or too many plates spinning while riding a tilt-a-whirl. It’s not the first time I have felt like this. It will not be the last. They’re all seasons, right? And they all pass. But the nights are finding me too tired to process my thoughts intelligently and the mornings are too early to string sentences together. The days are full of mothering and teaching and business running. Those three situations present some tricky issues for a writer. It’s been a challenge…
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What Never Gets Done: My Partial List
You guys. Y’all. Whatever the right word is. I need a Time Management tool. Or like one of those time turner things that Hermione uses in Hogwarts so she can attend more classes than she ought to. That is EXACTLY what I need. How on earth do people work forty plus hours away from their home and then ever actually have a clean home when they just are not in it that much? Today as I did laundry I thought, I could keep up with this if I had nothing else to do. But I have everything else to do. Like all of us. Does anyone else find the…
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switching words; seeing light
Sinking ship. Wheels falling off the cart. These are the words I have used to describe my life. My heart. My story. Sometimes they are the words I feel are true. Sometimes they are the words I assume other people feel are true when they look at me. They’re definitely the words I have felt have been chosen for me. I am beginning to see how they are also the words that I have chosen to sit under. The words I have circled in red. Underlined. Used a highlighter to accentuate. The words I might as well have tattooed on my body. (Don’t worry Dad – it’s just a…
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redemption: questions unanswered and perhaps rhetorical
I believe in redemption. Redeeming relationships. Redeeming situations. All sorts of redemption really. But is redemption possible in every situation? I guess, speaking specifically of the miraculous role God plays in redemption, the answer has to be yes. God can redeem anything. Any situation. Any wrong. Any relationship. God can, as in He has the ability. But we know, because we live and breathe it, that every situation that every relationship is not redeemed. Not right now. And I wonder how hard should we fight for redemption? How much effort should we give? Is it okay to allow some relationships to just live in the in-between? ______________________________…
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plate spinning
I guess last week I took an accidental hiatus from writing. And from responding in a timely manner to my emails. I’ve felt a lot like I’ve been swimming underwater and the struggle to “get it all done” has been overwhelming. This is the song a lot of people are singing, I know. Life is full of all the things and the list of people who can do All The Things for you is short. In fact, my list usually feels like there is just one name on it. My own. I’m guessing this is not an incredibly unique feeling that I am describing. Maybe we’re all carrying too…
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on shapes …… of houses and lives
On the way to soccer practice we drive through a tidy neighborhood. It’s cute. Full of squares. Lots of squares. Square houses. Square screened-in back porches. Square lawns. Manicured lawns. Lawns with the grass cut at an angle and a criss-cross pattern that just politely declares tidy. Men younger than me are standing in their garages, near their garages, in their driveways in front of their garages. In front of their tidy square garages. Garages lined across the back with rectangular shelves housing square storage containers stacked high and in order, full of the organized stuff of their organized lives. Stuff they Don’t Need Right Now. Christmas decorations. Autumn…
Keep Reading . . .
Colorku: A Timberdoodle Review
Discipline of Gratitude
single and other conditions
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the unpleasant unexpected.
Like all the grieving I have ever waded through, it’s the stages that take me by surprise. Some of my hard has looked like this: Giant to-another-state moves where our family left one sort of life to live another sort. Raising one child to an adult. Close friends moving away from our circle. The loss of my mother. The death of my marriage. It’s all been a path more jagged than straight. A good morning followed by a bad afternoon on the heels of a beautiful evening smashed up against a weepy week. Unpredictable and often unexpected. A storm on a calm sea. A rain shower on a sunny…
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this train of thought ….
You guys, if procrastination was a job – I would win. Wait – that does not even make sense. So many days I feel as if I am ramping up for take off. I’ve got lists and stacks and piles. I feel as if I work all day on something (I don’t know what) and then, at the end of the day, I’m still standing here, sort of empty-handed, maybe two things checked off the list, sixteen more things added, one pile shoved under the table and another stack carried outside and nothing really feels accomplished or completed. Pretty much like I’m already defeated. Like maybe I can’t win.…
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can they all be good days?
Returning to Normal Life can be a challenge. It’s not just Colorado that’s dreamy with its Pike’s Peak and its no humidity and its no biting mosquitos. What is also dreamy is pushed aside deadlines for work and zero meal preparation and no daily chores and a sense of time standing still. Exchanging all of that for high humidity and a one hundred plus year old house and e-mails pouring out of their inbox is a sort of brutal position right off the bat. To add more insult to the injury of rising early after an excruciatingly long road trip, the car dashboard has set itself in…
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On Why I Can’t Wait To Drive 3,000 Miles Next Week
Part of the reason why I cannot wait for our departure on this Beyond Wildwood adventure is because the last month or so has found me and mine shockingly busy. Unusually so. Schedule stacked sort of busy. The kind of busy I have spent the majority of my parenting years actively avoiding and orchestrating our family’s life in an opposite direction. I know some of this shift is natural with the rising ages of my children. Also, with the sheer number of children in my house. (Not that the number seems big to me.) Not even every child currently has an activity or a sport or a hobby they…
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the plan we’re living . . .
Sometimes I know I can be a sub-par mother. We continually go to bed without taking the time to change into pajamas. I forget to have my children brush their teeth, especially in the mornings. That shower after swimming rule (and shower before swimming rule) has never been enforced strongly at our home. The kitchen lives in a perpetual state of dishes needing to be loaded, floor needing to be swept. It’s easy to let things slide when your plate is so very full. It’s hard to be the only grown up enforcing all the house rules. Early on in the Aftermath of the earthquake that shook…
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don’t sit in your struggle alone
Struggle. It sometimes seems like it’s the predominant characteristic of our lives. And, even when your own life isn’t full to the brim overflowing with hardship or disappointment, you still have people you know, love, care about, meet on the street, whose lives are slopping over the sides with struggle and hard and heavy. You can personally be floating along in a relative calm, a ray of sunshine across your canoe, and you just bump your oar right up against someone who has capsized, who is flailing around outside their canoe, clinging to their life jacket, head bobbing in the water next to you. It happens All The Time.…
