1968 frigidaire, avocado green

I never think that making dinner is going to be a frenzy.  I enjoy cooking, and if I think seriously about, I feel blessed to be able to nourish my family in this way, to love them with food from my hands.  I can even get all crazy-spiritual about it, finding myself caught up in the meditative rhythm of chopping vegetables, getting pulled into the deep metaphors of simmering pots and rising bread.

But the drama of kitchen theater in my head looks remarkably different than the sit-com that most often unfolds in my house.  On this particular evening, with the familiar comfort of practiced dishes, I keep pace around my kitchen domain without referencing notes or double checking measurements.  Even still, the frenzy was building. The Littlest was fully determined to crawl straight for the dog bowl, and having picked him up and turned him around no less than ten times already, I surrendered to carrying him on my hip, scooping out teaspoons of cumin with the one-handed adeptness of the seasoned mother that I am.  I thought that I told the bigger kids to stop jumping on the couch, but who can be sure anymore?  There they are, and it’s only moments until it gets out of hand.  But even still, dinner goes on.

There I was, dinner madness in full swing around me, making the usual mad dash between the stove and the sink, the worn tile betraying the path between refrigerator and table top.  I poured the cornbread batter into the skillet, opened up the oven to bake, staring down the last fifteen minutes before we sit down for dinner.  To my surprise, and more importantly, the utter standstill of dinner, the oven was cold.  I touched the rack.  Stone cold. I shut the oven door, turning away from what I knew was now undeniable: our oven had baked her last bread.

Lest I be accused of being overly sentimental about a kitchen appliance, let me tell you about our oven. Built in 1968, it is older by far than any of the people in this house.  Avocado green, it was just the accent that our kitchen needed, and I’ve learned it’s quirks the way I know those of good friends. It was big — wider than any traditional range nowadays, it’s heft anchoring our kitchen to days past. I envision Helen, the matriarch of this house before my time, doing just as I have, stirring pots and holding babies, pulling her family together, meal after meal.

Browsing the aisles, then, today of the big box home improvement center I realized that there is little offered  in terms of character.  Maybe today’s stainless is the avocado of yesteryear, but I doubt it.  I opened oven doors, peering into sparkly interiors.  I turned knobs; I pushed buttons.  We pretended like we knew what we’re doing, and chose a model that seemed just as good as the rest.  Later, Mark heaved our old oven out, and shuffled the new one in.

Of course, there is much to be grateful for: the new efficiency of this oven will no doubt ease our electric bill.  I won’t have that same hesitation of turning on the oven in the summer, knowing that this oven will keep much of it’s heat to itself.  It was not even 48 hours that I was without an oven, and though it gave me that feeling in my belly to have to spend such money, I’m thankful that it is only a small stress.

I spent some of the afternoon pacing our kitchen, and sighing.  Our kitchen, though the heart of our house in many ways, has been neglected from our full vision, mostly because it is such a costly room to upgrade.  Our old oven, with it’s heft and character, pulled our piecemeal kitchen together.  This new oven opens my eyes to what an old and weird kitchen we have. The oven’s vintage style gave authenticity and grace, and without that what we have is just plain old. I paced the kitchen, thinking if I could just get a different view, it would feel different.

Here’s what I know now:  our oven did anchor our kitchen in so many ways, but (get a grip, Campbell) it is just an oven.  Our kitchen is weird and awkward and dated, and now I’m seeing it for what is is: a reflection of who we are, and a place at the heart of our home where we serve up love alongside our dinner.  I want to have you at my table, serve you some cornbread, and offer up to you the weird ways that God is making me whole.  I want to tell you to about this awkward and piecemeal life – unpolished and unfinished.  This kitchen is a work in progress – and so am I.

The more I make myself at home with this new oven, the more I’ll see the next vision for this kitchen.  We’ll figure out how to fill the awkward gap between the new oven and the adjacent cabinet.  Maybe we’ll finally choose a color for our kitchen cabinets, and paint new life into them.  Someday, when our refrigerator dies (because it will, one of these days) we’ll find something that matches this new oven, tying things together a bit more.  I know this: there will always be fresh, hot food and I will always want you at my table, to share your story and to hear mine.

notes for my teenage self

With graduation at the fingertips of many, here are some thoughts:

Hey you.  I get it, I do.  Everything is so intense, and the things that aren’t get jazzed up to make them so. Sometimes I still feel it.  Feel like I’m in high school, feel like I’m that funky sprite dancing down long corridors, mostly too loud, sometimes too quiet, never tied down.   But what I’ve lost in funk I’ve gained in perspective.  I have distance from everything that felt so burning.

Here’s what I can tell you:  life is more nuanced than you can see it for now.  The gray far outweighs the black and white.  I know, now you need to cast those shadows, draw those lines in order to carefully, safely break through the cocoon and into the world, but give it time.  Every one has a story.  Learn to listen for it. Explore the gray: but know that all actions have reactions.  These can be unpredictable and not always fairly applied, but for every choice there is a consequence.  Some things can’t be undone.  Know that you’ll screw it up.  Be kind to yourself.

The memories grow fuzzy but you’ll have strong feelings attached to the blur.  Proms were never as much fun or as drama-filled as everyone hoped or feared.  It was just another thing to do.  The pictures you’ll have when you squeeze your eyes shut and throw yourself back are of soccer games, and car rides.  Of football games, and bus rides.  Of freedom that comes with new legs, new friends, new faith. Of crossing the bridge into town to eat greasy french fries at the local pizza joint.  Of water ice and lying in prickly grass, sun on your face.  You’ll remember every word to those songs, still, years and years later.  You’ll smile and turn it up loud when it plays through the car radio, and you’ll be right back in that moment again.

Hold your friends loosely.  You’ll be surprised at the ways you all will go, and you’ll be proud to have been part of their stories.  Many will weave themselves back into yours.  And there are others that are friends in spaces and places.  This doesn’t make them any less true.

Those hurts that feel so stingy and so immediate become less so, with time.  It still hurts now, yes.  There is no solace in the waiting.  But that seven page handwritten letter that a friend gave you, listing the disappointments?  The wisdom gleaned from this was not in the content of the letter but in letting it wash over you.  Not surprisingly, this friendship didn’t last, and you didn’t mourn it long.  Others are truer, wiser, kinder and you learn to seek out these qualities in the ones you share you soul with.

Speaking of soul sharing: be kind to that boy who drives you too fast in his car, the one that makes your belly all bubbly and causes you to say things without thinking.  The one who makes the five hour drive to upstate New York to visit you, countless times and in the wee hours.  He takes a knee, ask for the future.  He grows man-hands and works harder than any one you’ve ever known.  He loves, and gives, and loves some more, and together you go far.  He dials down his expectations, you learn that he far surpasses yours.  And he still makes your belly all bubbly.

Don’t worry: it may seem like everyone has it all figured out.  They spell their plans A, B, C, but what I can tell you is mostly nobody accounts for the Qs, or the Ns,  or the Xs.  Don’t let that throw you: stick it out, follow through, and eventually you’ll get where you want to go.  And you’ll have better stories for the telling.  Here’s what I would say:  do the thing that you’re scared of doing.  Choose to major in English, even though it seems silly, and you’ll have to take a foreign language.  You’ll see yourself reflected in words.

Don’t always be nice, but be kind.  Nice doesn’t bother anybody, doesn’t ask questions — ask away.  But be kind in the asking, be kind in receiving the answers.  Be kind always.  The seeds of your words and actions may not be reaped for years.  Likewise, lavishly give grace.

Yes, life gets harder, but easier, too.  The scope narrows.  Things gather weight and speed, so the pull of momentum is strong.  Don’t be afraid to stop and adjust your course.  There is no hurry.  No prizes for getting there (wherever that is) first.  Time seems to be something to bank on. It’s yours to fill.

And don’t forget that funky sprite is in there always.  The one who doesn’t care what people think.  The one with the mismatched socks.  The one who knows her own insides.  You’ll need the reminder, because sometimes it can be hard to recognize her.  She’ll dress differently, sound softer.  But ask her to dance every once in a while.

Peace.

life, unexpected

Facing full into the force of the wind-wave of life, unexpected the staccato movements of ordinary are swept up, and with it our tidy anticipation of things to come.

***

It was a routine service check-up for our furnace.  But when the technician with the rough hands and the darkened fingernails told us of the crack, the leak, and with concern for our Littles, pulled the plug on our heat, we gave thanks for the sun and the rare March warmth.  75* and windows flung wide gave heat enough to our home, and days passed as we looked this unexpected in the eye.  Naive of us, maybe, we knew that our system was old, but we had trusted it to noisily chug on for almost forever.  People talk of “emergency money” and “reserves” for just this thing, of course, but our reality has much more to do with groceries and school bills, new clothes for the always growing Littles and our life has been full of little emergencies.  So it is that life, unexpected again is at our feet, and we choose how we respond.  We sign the dotted line, take our two-years interest free, and hope this warmth lasts until they can get it done.

The leaves, dry and brittle, whip against the window.  The air cuts through the cracks between window glass and aged wood, whistling in to my space.  Last week I peeled off layers of clothing, checking my calendar against the sweat and the sun.  The unexpected warmth sent me scrambling.  I pitched baskets of clothing in strong attempts to unearth a t-shirt or two for Littles, cursing my unorganized self and again bewildered by the sudden growth of these babes. I shrugged my shoulders at the realization that no thin cotton pajamas in this house would fit these long limbed bodies.  Today, though, I force sweatshirts over shoulders, fleece blankets wrapped tight to ward off the chill of the wind. Though it is brisk, it is familiar and expected as March shakes its lion’s mane.  And today, I am thankful for those workmen, Rob and Tom, banging and clanging in my basement, replacing that sixty year old furnace and creating heat once again for my babes.  Tonight, the weatherman predicts 28*.

***

Sunday sighed weary towards Monday, and I resigned to the unknown ups and downs and around the bends of Mark’s working schedule this week.  We had pizza with wine, catching the news from friends missed while little ones wore each other weary.  We said our g’nights too late, and piled drowsy bodies into the station wagon, headed home.  Home, though, was dark and quiet, no electric hum  to illuminate our path.  Life, unexpected, and with no clear explanation of a storm or accident, our house stood still, without power.  Strangely, too, we had no way of even getting into our house: garage door can’t budge, chains lock our front door from within and an odd assortment of the wrong sorts of keys can’t open the back.  We turned back, u-turned to tuck tired babes into bed with friends, brainstorming our next move.

***

I claimed another number to my years, and I became 32 with barely a voice, my throat scratched and parched, my head feeling the vice’s pinch.  Life, unexpected - who wants to be sick on their birthday? My only wish was to sleep, to stay in bed and not get out.  And thus it was granted, and my 22 year-old self would have laughed, but I snuggled in deep.  And though it was quiet, I was celebrated with homemade birthday cards, tender kisses, and these Blessings with two feet and runny noses, laughter contagious and silly faces.

Sometimes the best memories come at us in moments of unexpectation: the mind-photo I now have of the Eldest and Middlest, tucked into one big bed, her legs thrown over his body, and then being midnight-scooped up to head back to our home, our dog.  Upside down days filled with daytime Daddy-play.  The unexpected life carries moments to trust in the provision of God, and loved ones.

This life, unexpected, trains us to bend to the pressure of the wind, the cold, the necessary, so that we don’t snap.  We practice staying agile so as not to grow brittle and break.

we’re sisters; we share

My younger sister and I are just shy of two years apart in age.  My love for her is fierce and refined by years of sisterly struggles: we are oh-so-different and still so  much the same.  Being close in age has had great benefits.  We shared clothes, cars and friends. We were, and are still, built-in playmates, and though drama could always be just around the corner, my stronger memories are those of laughter and friendship.

We each had our own bedroom in my parents’ house growing up.  They were side by side in the square-shaped upstairs hallway, each with tall windows looking out into the backyard with the creek and the woods beyond.  There was a time, maybe when I was around 12 years old or so, when our beds shared a wall, each butted up from within our private spaces.  This shared wall became our sacred space, a space of friendship. That paper thin layer of drywall and spackle was just a thin veil between us, and her presence just a few inches from me was palpable.

My favorite part of this arrangement was our intricate knocking code.  It didn’t take long before one of us would tap on the wall trying to get the other’s attention.  But we would still have to breach the boundary, clamber into the hallway to be further understood.  We couldn’t spend our time shouting at each other through closed doors, trying to be heard.  We needed a system, a way send a message, and even better if could be covert.  Little by little our knocking code grew.  One knock to say “hello.”  Two knocks to say “goodnight.”  Six knocks to say “Turn on the radio!”  A hand scribbled list was taped on the wall by my pillow with each number clearly documenting a corresponding message.  The list grew as we thought of more things that we wanted to say: this list is iconic of the things that were important to our preteen selves.  Number 22: “help!”  This became a joke as we grew older, laughing at both our naive placement of this message, and the difficulty that we could have counting twenty two knocks — wait, was that 21 or 22?  She might just be telling me that the phone is for me.

Another message that developed for us a few years later was “We’re sisters; we share.”  I know that this line came out of a family vacation, but I’ve since lost track of it’s particular origin (TSC, do you remember?) This, though, has stuck around, quoted on birthday cards and thank you notes, and it’s one of the things that I find to be most true about sisterhood.  Of course even siblings have different experiences within family, both because we are different people and because we were at different stages of life with each family episode.  But we each, alone, were there for those episodes, together.  We shared those experiences.

Even though Mark might be familiar with the well-worn folkloric stories of my childhood, it is all just second hand to him.  With my sister, it is part of her story, too.  We are woven so deeply into the making of ourselves.  My sister is the one who is witness to my history: she was there when my jelly-shoe fell off my child-foot, sailing down the creek, and one of the neighbor boys saved it for me.  Together we sang and danced in countless basement shows for our parents.  We both carry the guilt of dressing up our cats and parading them around in baby  doll strollers.  These stories add up to mark my history, an arrow pointing towards my life now. My sister shares in this narrative that anchors my life. We continue to share a wall, knocking into this sacred space of each other’s lives.

“We’re sisters; we share.”
p.s. i love you.

winter and weekends and worlds of white

My emotional pendulum tends towards bluesy-ness in the deeper days of winter. Touting my own self-awareness, I have always allowed my self to lean into it, not fight what feels so natural in the world around me.  A glimpse out the window reveals tall trees, darkly silhouetted against an often steel-grey sky, each individual tree set apart from the cluster of trees; the forsest that seems so integral in summer.  So, too, I feel individuated, alone; narrow and darkened.

This year, too, for added measure, I have a cascade of chemicals in my body as I live in this postpartum time.  Add to these things the swath of winter illness in our community.  My intense need is to cover my Littles with these mama wings, thinking I can offer some sort of inoculation.  This could be a perfect storm for my brewing melancholy to dive to deeper depths of blue.  We’ve chosen isolation, mostly, because I am fearful to expose the Littlest to much of the world just yet, and while, with the tendrils of our own hearts, we have woven a tapestry of this new version of our family, I am still missing my larger tribe. I am choosing to stand alone, guarded tall and strong, but can’t help and yearn for deeper community, too. Living this tension of my own creation, I, like those trees, am reaching skyward alone in this season.

Which is also why this weekend, so simple in its form, was so good for my heart.  I have taken to not making calendar plans for these days, and have found freedom in following our own rhythm instead.  Snow pitter-pattered down around our house, making the outside world glisten a bit like a storybook tale.  Still tightly tethered to the Littlest, I decline the snow adventure, though never fear!  Daddy to save the day!  Ever watchful from my perch, I witness the joys of winter play. Snowmen, snow angels, snowball fights, drippy snotty noses, mud thick on their boots as the snow became rain (and then back to snow again).  Most of all, though, it was the brightness which delighted me.  The sunshine, multiplied exponentially because of the snow, cut a path through the dust into my family room, and I followed that path around the room all morning, turning my face towards the warmth.  My cheeks were tugged in the crescent of a deep smile that I couldn’t deny.  Thankful, oh-so-thankful for the swath of sunlight.

It was the simple company of my family-folk, little else to do but fold laundry, and build cities, and make paintings, and read stories, and take baths, and dig our roots deep.  The weekend was time carved out to bless my soul, strengthening me for other dark days to come.

Winter has it’s purpose.  I know that Spring will soon be upon us, and those dark and lonely trees will sprout out tender little buds.  I know, too, that this Littlest one gets stronger by the day, and soon I needn’t worry so much about his shelter.  My greater tribe will still be there, continuing to march out the paces of life, and we will come alongside again, matching our footfalls to theirs.  My tree-like limbs will grow strong again and leaf out to create the dense familiar green forest of summer.