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[On Going Back]

We all say the same thing: It’s a flash

and slug.

 

You can’t wrap up time in a pink box

and raise it high in definition. You can’t seal

an envelope with a slow, deliberate lick –

explain the work and love, hate and despair

of four years.

 

What do you say to two shining faces

that’s honest, loving, real?

 

Sometimes, I would forsake all the settledness

I’ve uncovered in these two stretched years

for one day surrounded by the me and yous

of that place.

 

Ponds are dark even when they’re shallow.

The paths around them hold every word

whispered, shouted, proclaimed

until you wonder if the very gravel

has ears.

 

So I tell them: Sometimes, I would forsake

all the settledness I’ve uncovered.

 

Mostly, though, I look with gentleness

at those long-tough times, and I praise God

for not giving me the choice.

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Good Things #4

Today’s Good Things

  • Being at the beach with family
  • Playing a horrible game of Phase Ten until 10:30 at night (horrible because I lost – totally demoralizing experience)

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  • Swimming in a pool that seemed humungous when we were five and now proves to be quite tiny
  • Eating ice cream
  • Driving with the top down. The sunburn is worth it.

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  • Quoting movies we haven’t seen since we were twelve and laughing. Emperor’s New Groove and Mulan never get old.
  • Showing our Gram a Madtv video clip and thinking she was going to weep with laughter. Acupuncture’s funny when it doesn’t go well.
  • Not having enough time to read, watch movies or tv, or listen to music. No recommendations, but that’s another kind of good thing.

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And two years later…

I got up a little early this morning. No reason, just the birds woke me up through the open window.

The water’s on for coffee, and I’m thinking about the weekend. Not for the usual reasons, but for the Big Ones:

My little brother and sister are graduating from college.

I was shocked by my own graduation two Mays ago, but this one. This one’s even more surprising.

I have no problem with me growing and changing and maturing. But my brothers and sister? No, can’t you just stay where you are? Can’t you keep going to school and thinking about classes?

Time doesn’t stop for other people, either.

My cousin and I were talking about what to wear, and I said, “Well, it better be cute, cause these pictures go down in history.” Our family has scads of graduation photos, all six of us cousins lined up, showing support and 20+ years of camaraderie. It started with me, and a year later my cousin, and now the twins.

It’s even stranger to hear my parents say it feels like yesterday they were in college.

What’s the deal?

I thought if I were slow and really looked at things – the sun in the plum tree, the honeybees gathering yellow pollen on their legs – that time wouldn’t seem so fast.

But even that doesn’t stop it.

Here’s to the beginning of a crazy busy weekend. Here’s to celebrating hard work, the end of an era, and the christening of a new one.

IMG_0313[This was seriously one of the best days of my life. I know it’s weird, but it’s true. My sister says I can post pictures of their graduation, so be on the look-out.]

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Good Things #3

You know those days when you think: I wish this day never ended?  That’s how I feel most Sundays this spring.

But, it ended and Monday dawned bright and sunny.

Here’s how I’m starting my 5th-to-last week of school:

Music. This song is getting me. Originally sketched by Bob Dylan, the song was completed by Old Crow Medicine Show (what a great band name!). Maybe it’s the New England part, maybe it’s the harmonies. The romance doesn’t hurt, either.

Art. I went to my first art show in nearly two years, and it was like I’d forgotten part of myself for awhile. I don’t know much (or, really, anything) about the visual arts, but part of me wants to keep it that way. To just sit back and marvel at the artistry without worrying about how they did it. I can’t do that with writing or music, so I think I’ll keep visual art in that beautiful, ignorant place.

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Movies. We went to see The Great Gatsby with two friends Saturday night. We’d heard It’s all glitter and one long music video. There was glitter. And there was certainly music. But the thing is, that was the point. The book was all about the corruption and debauchery of the 1920s, and that’s what this movie showed, just in more 21st-century terms. I’m sure LOADS of my English-friends will disagree with me, saying it destroyed the book. Well, I enjoyed the destruction.

Family. Yesterday afternoon, I brought books out to the lawn and read in the grass. My brothers and sister played cribbage, and their laughter and arguments over the score drifted out to me through the garden. When I looked over, I could only see pieces of them through the white birch tree.  You know how wonderful it is to listen to people you love? And it was even better because I was a little separate, reading and reveling in the sounds.

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[That is NOT a honey bee.]

[P.S. The chicken class went well! It was kinda funny – only two older women and me, but it was great. More like a coffee date than anything, and we probably spent more time on writing and other nonsense than the down-and-dirty-facts of chicken-rearing. People are so interesting.]

[P.P.S. The morning glories are from last summer – there’s no way they’d be that big already. Soon!]

What Good Things are you enjoying? Feel free to link-up a youtube video for music or movies!

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A Past Worth Preserving

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I wrote my great-grandmother’s “biography” when I was nine or ten. It was terrible. It all started because I had a magazine, and I wanted to interview her for the “Premier Edition.” (My aunt had worked for a magazine for a few years after college, hence the language.) I took a yellow legal pad and a blue pen and sat across from my great-grandmother in my dead great-grandfather’s blue recliner. The sun shone hot through the bay window, and I remember feeling pretty grown-up, asking all these questions. I had a legal pad, after all.

I asked her about growing up in the early 1900s. I asked her what she did for fun, what school was like, what her home was like filled with six people. I asked her how her hometown was different during WWI than it is now, and I asked her what she liked to eat and how she met my great-grandfather. I wrote furiously because I didn’t want to miss a word and the thought of writing shorthand never occurred to me. My great-grandmother’s handwriting was always beautiful – smooth and looped – and mine was hurried and uneven and merely served a purpose.

I think I was in awe of the sheer amount of time sitting across from me. Born in 1909, my grandmother had seen both World Wars and all the other atrocities and beauties of the 20th century. I crafted the interview with all the intensity of a ten-year-old who wanted desperately to preserve the past, and a copy of that old magazine is tucked away in my great-grandfather’s briefcase where I keep all my old creations.

I’d forgotten about the interview and the resulting mini-biography until this morning. For Christmas my mother bought me a book by Donald Hall, the former poet laureate: String Too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm. It’s a thin paperback, first published in 1961, and it has a poet’s carefulness of language and transcendent moments.

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Hall writes of his grandparents’ farm and the summers he spent living and working alongside them. He writes of moments in the hayfield when all he ever wanted was to hay, and of a time when he was so exhausted and thirsty from picking blueberries that he couldn’t imagine his 70-year-old grandfather was still plugging away, stripping the low-growing bushes of their tiny wild berries. The love Hall felt for his grandparents and the place is so palpable, it made me fall in love with them myself. His poetry was born in the fields of New Hampshire.

Hall says he had a “need to conserve the past,” and I know that is what I felt sitting across from my great-grandmother, desperate to grasp this other life that I would never know.

It seemed abominable to me that I had only one life to live, and that the realities and hardships and loveliness of this woman’s life would be lost to nothingness when she died.

I don’t think she herself felt such a desperation.

During college, Hall found himself longing for his friends during the lonely summers in New Hampshire. He doesn’t hide the horrible guilt he felt, and I knew exactly what he was talking about; the deep love you have, yet the desire for something stirring inside you.

The book ends as I knew it would. His grandfather dies when Hall is 24, and even though that is the way of every life, I cried. I haven’t cried at a book in a good long time, and I was surprised and glad that no one was around. How can you explain crying over someone else’s dead grandfather? Someone who’d lived a good life and worked hard and loved well?

I think I was struck as much by the beauty as the sadness. There was such strength in the life of this man I will never know, this grandfather who had shaped a young boy more than he realized. I saw the sweet progression of life, the stories of family and friends and small-town myths all woven together. It was not mysterious. It was not filled with world-travel or adventures or death-defying heroic acts. The adventures and heroic acts were contained in the fields of generations of farmers, and they breathe in the pages of this book.

My great-grandmother’s life is much the same way. She grew up and lived in the same city until she was 95 and moved in with my aunt and uncle. She didn’t go to college, but she loved words and music and games. She had four grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and she made lemon meringue pie and cole slaw for every family dinner. She went to Niagara Falls and took pictures and she attended the same church her entire life.

What is this desire to preserve the past? In some ways it feels like an avoidance. I am constantly living in the past or the future, my eyes set both forwards and back. I hold on to my great-grandmother and my grandmother’s words tightly, as if they hold some secret to a better time. How do I get that? I wonder. How do I get stories? How do I live? I don’t think either one of these women ever really thought about that; living was what you did, not what you thought about.

I am striving to live some huge life, some remarkable, adventurous life. I’m wondering if I have my priorities straight. Maybe a past worth preserving doesn’t have to be of legendary proportions; maybe it has to be true.

Summer 2008 016The summer after I graduated high school – all six of us kids on our yearly vacation.

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The Sibling Police [Thanks for Being There]

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“Isn’t it kind of scary that people you don’t know read your blog?”

This question always comes from people who don’t write.

I thought I would be a writer when I was two years old. I’m not even exaggerating. I remember one day in the apartment before we’d moved to our house, and I wanted to write a letter. I didn’t know how to spell anything, so I ran out to the living room and asked my mother how to spell “Dear Gramma.” I wrote letter after letter of the same sentences: “Dear Gramma, I love you and God loves you too. Love, Catherine.” A little redundant, huh? But that’s the day I remember thinking something along the lines of I want to write books because books were some of my best friends. (Don’t get me wrong, I was extremely social. Don’t imagine me all reclusive and lonely in a diaper.)

It’s because I’ve always hoped to write that I’m not too worried about others reading my work. It’s a natural result of writing. It’s what we all hope will happen one day.

I am not worried about people I don’t know reading my blog. I’m worried about people I love reading it.

I was thinking of writing a post about my selfishness and my strivings for graciousness and self-sacrifice and gratitude. And then I imagined my brothers and sister reading it, and all the hubbub that would’ve caused: “Um, excuse me, but didn’t you just write about being more giving? I could really use xyz right now…” And then I laughed because I realized I don’t want anyone keeping tabs on my soul-work but me. I guess God can be in on it, but even that’s a little dicey sometimes (I half-kid).

The idea of “live and let live” has never crossed my family’s mind, at least not my siblings and me. My parents are much better at stepping back and watching us screw up (not in a ‘haha!’ way, just a good, healthy, you-are-adults-now way). The four of us, on the other hand, are constantly giving our two or three or four cents-worth and then raging when our obviously-correct advice goes unheeded. I am by far the worst culprit, but the other three are fast at my heels.

It isn’t my words that make me feel vulnerable, it’s the implications those words have on my life that make me (and any writer) easier to critique.

That’s the trade-off, though. To hold everything inside because someone might discover I’m not nearly as good at doing what I strive to do as I am at claiming the coffee as “mine!” and the bathroom as “mine!” and the warmest winter coat in the house as “mine!”. This is not an option.

So when people ask me if I’m nervous about strangers reading my blog, I’ll just smile and say, “I’m honored when strangers read my blog. I’m terrified when people I know read it.”

Note to the Siblings: I am NOT working on graciousness today, FYI.

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Song of My Mother

My mother and I are very different. I am sharp where she is soft. My tongue is quick where hers is careful. My eyes roll where hers share compassion.

Sometimes I think I will never be as good as my mother. When I tell her this, she starts to cry because she doesn’t believe in her own beauty. There are some things that you just can’t be told.

I hate it when people take my time. This is probably my Big Number One Badness. I am quick to listen over coffee, happy to write back and forth, delighted to exchange ideas and longings and go on day trips. But I am slow to do for people. My family (sort of) jokes around about the fact that I am not the most reliable when it comes to cleaning the house or doing favors. They joke because they love me anyway, but I know that it isn’t exactly funny.

My mother gets up every morning to drive my father to work. She taught us at home for twelve years; I still remember the moment she showed me Little House on the Prairie when I was in kindergarten and my life changed forever. My favorite place to learn is still the little round table with the blue and white checkered table cloth, just me and my mom while the three younger kids were taking naps. She drops what she’s doing to help any one of her children. She works in the house and she works in the garden and her loyalty is sometimes so strong I’m scared. She bakes amazing cookies for no occasion other than it’s Tuesday and I don’t think I’ve ever heard her complain.

Some people think she’s too emotional; they see her emotion as weakness. What we – my father, my brothers, my sister, and I – know is that she is the strongest woman in our lives.

We are so different in so many ways. My mother doesn’t write, but she crafts the most delicious meals and the feet of loved ones are never cold with her cozy knitted socks. She doesn’t sing, but she knows how to encourage and make you see where you can grow but also how far you’ve already grown. It’s taken me years to see that these are gifts of infinite value.

I know my mother will read this and she will say, “We are not so different,” and I will hope and pray that she is right. It might not be against the grain to say that my mother is my dearest friend and my closest mentor. There isn’t a smile more genuine or a heart more compassionate. God shines through her, and I want everyone to know what a woman lives in this little no-name town.

IMG_0737[from this summer on our rare family weekend-away. the coast and good food and a mini-hike – all six of us together in the bright sun.]

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Trying to Beat the Winter Doldrums

IMG_1342A rainy afternoon in one of my favorite towns with some of my favorite people.

We made two coffee stops, because that’s how we roll. It’s called “I have a giftcard to this place,” and “But I want to go to this cozy, independent coffee shop!”, so instead of fighting we did the only logical thing: we went to both.

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IMG_1336Cousin-love. A shout-out to my college-stuck cousin. It’s weird – I kept counting wrong when we were making plans. It just feels wrong without her.

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My mocha was BY FAR the best drink at the table. Sorry, guys.

We wandered aimlessly around Banana Republic. So much pretty! I made a mental list for later…

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It was rain-snowing, so our walk down the brick walkways was short.

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[Isn’t this great?! If I ever open a store, I’ll probably stress out more about the name than anything. I should start brainstorming right now. Except it kind of depends on what type of store we’re talking about.]

On the ride home, we listened to Fleet Foxes, John Mayer, and the Lumineers. It was a good day, even if we didn’t see a ray of sunshine.

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The Writing Life [and its many components]

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The feeling I get standing in the wings, waiting to walk out on stage.

The scratchy grass on my back, the sun too bright in my eyes, and the smell of the earth baking.

Singing “Caput, umeri, genua, pedes” (“head, shoulders, knees, and toes”…or feet, technically) til I feel like I’ve gotten my workout for the day.

Digging in the cold, icy earth first thing in the spring. Clearing away old brush. Seeing nothing but gray-brown until one sunny morning green shoots magically appear.

The moment I scan through the mail and see in beautiful or messy or barely-there handwriting my name and address. Opening a letter that’s traveled from Pennsylvania or Maine or Switzerland. Remembering that geography isn’t strong enough to destroy good friendships.

The ocean, cold and thick with seaweeds. The feeling of rough sand on my feet, when I can barely see because the wind is whipping my hair in my face. The long stretches of days when for a moment I truly think it will never end.

When I walk around the corner at a museum and come upon a life-size sculpture. The lines of the body, the artistry in the way the cloak is draped across the torso, the way the sculpture seems to be breathing right there in front of me.

Explaining the word “etymology” to a too-young class because they’re too excited to wait. Opening their minds up to the beauty of language and the world ahead of them.

The way I feel when I’m surrounded by people I love. Maybe at my house, maybe at a dark cozy restaurant, maybe at a beach house or church or the lake.

~     ~     ~

I don’t think it’s possible to be a writer and love only writing.

Last summer, I wrote a post about my plans to write when I was at the beach for a week. I foolishly anticipated long stretches of time when I would be able to read and write to my heart’s content. What I forgot to factor in was people: the people who make everything worth it. Who can turn down a four-hand cribbage game with the Gram, a brother, and a cousin? Who can stay cozied up on a beach chair while everyone else goes for a long ambling walk along the ocean? Who asks a room-full of family to “Please stop singing along to the record player because I’m trying to write?”

Some people probably do, but this girl finds it pretty difficult.

Writing is a solitary act in so many ways. Right now, I’m sitting at my kitchen table, waiting for the water to boil so I can fill my french press. I’m alone, and that’s okay for now. In fact, it’s rather nice. In the long term, though? Not so much fun.

Maybe there is a writer out there who loathes people. Maybe he sits at his desk for ten hours a day and throws his hands up in gratitude that he never has to interact with anyone. Maybe he doesn’t like music or art or the outdoors or any of the other beautiful things of life.

I don’t think I’d really connect with whatever he wrote.

~     ~     ~

I had a long talk with a friend from college. He was asking what I was up to, what life looked like lately. I told him about teaching Latin (“You wouldn’t believe it! When I teach them derivatives it’s like they cannot believe ‘manipulate’ comes from manus and they freak out.” Granted, this is only my younger grades. My high schoolers are a little less enthused.), directing Alice in Wonderland (“Do you know what it’s like to have those songs stuck in your head ALL THE TIME?”), and applying to MFA programs (Um, scared.). It was in talking with him that I remembered one of the best parts of being a writer: Everything I do will add to it.

I came across this woman from Colorado. We’d actually met briefly four or five years ago, but I found her because of Twitter (that all-too-kind-suggester thought we should be friends). We’ve been writing back and forth, and she was telling me about applying to grad school – but in history, not writing. What is history if not stories? What is music if not stories in sound? And what is good conversation if not a sharing of our personal plot lines?

Being a writer is like having the biggest job description ever.

Do I make my money from writing?

Not yet.

But writing makes you look at the world and your life in a different way. It makes you more attuned to the little things, and it reminds you that sharing those experiences and being able to reproduce a moment of truth for someone else is your job.

[Over-nighted my last MFA application. Any nervousness I would’ve felt was nervoused-away in the days leading up to it. I popped it in the mail between Latin classes, and I’m currently attempting to pretend to forget.]

Writing (and reading) connect us to each other. Just as I met Anne who’s going to study history, I can write about any of those things and someone in the middle of South Dakota or Canada or the United Kingdom probably loves them too. It’s all part of living the Full Life, like I tried weakly to express in an earlier post. It’s one of those constant discoveries I keep discovering.

Do I regret going for walks at the beach? Playing cribbage and screaming during games of Taboo? Do I wish I’d really committed and sat down and written line after line of poetry or what-have-you? No way.

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Lenten Growth

We didn’t observe Lent growing up. I guess it’s something most Baptists don’t do… I remember when I was nine or ten, one of my Catholic friends looked at my piece of chocolate sometime in March and said, “I can’t. I gave up chocolate for Lent.”

I’d never heard of Lent (I was well-educated, I swear!), so I asked her what she was talking about. She said you choose something bad for you to give up until Easter, “but I hardly ever eat chocolate, so it isn’t that hard.”

And that was that, because we were nine and had better things to do than discuss Church history or the spiritual significance of sacrifice.

IMG_1242[I guess I’m taking a pretty big risk, hanging a horseshoe upside down…]

In college, I was surrounded by so many different expressions of Christianity that it sometimes felt like a free-for-all. I could pick and choose my favorite parts of each (I still don’t know what’s wrong with this approach, as long as the tenets are there). I watched friends give up coffee, chocolate, and Facebook in pursuit of a closer walk with the Lord. In my cynical mind, I failed to understand the beauty of this tradition. It felt more like a cheapening of Christ’s sacrifice than a spiritual discipline: so giving up ice cream is your personal equivalent to Christ giving up his life? That doesn’t fly.

Last year, my Lenten season was a peculiar one. I was working three part-time jobs, so my hours were all over the place. I found long stretches of time when I could read my Bible, surf the web for interesting reading, and try to reconcile the fact that I believed in God’s power and Truth, but that I had serious fear of dying. For the first time, I felt compelled to observe Lent, and by “observe” I mean mostly “be aware.” Instead of giving something up, I would add.

Every night, I prayed to the Lord. I do this most nights, but usually in the comfort of my warm bed. For Lent, I decided to pray on my knees.

It wasn’t revolutionary; kneeling happens in every liturgical service. But for me, it was rare. As I feared a potential (huge) surgery, I needed to be reminded of my perfect posture in life: kneeling before the Creator, so that I could stand with his strength.

I had a hard time remembering at first. There were a few nights when I’d roll out of bed, groaning, to get on my knees and offer a few sentences to God. I don’t remember a word of what I prayed, but it’s the feeling of my knees on the rough rug that’s stayed in my mind.

~     ~     ~

This Lenten season, I have a lot of ideas brimming. I want to check my email and Facebook less (although work makes this a little difficult). I want to read a daily prayer or meditation, and not forget it throughout the day, like I normally do. I want to learn how to offer up every relationship – friends, parents, siblings, everyone – to be shaped by Someone other than myself.

I don’t see Lent as a time of deprivation. Instead, I see it as a time for intentional and careful reflection. And by giving up something material or adding on something meaningful, I’m hoping that the external will allow the internal to more fully connect with what it means to share in Christ’s suffering and resurrection.

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[We found this cross off the beaten path as we climbed Mount Untersberg in Austria.]