Sarah

I don’t usually recount her “sparklingness” or share her silly statements or devote words to her specific past dramas. I don’t have much to laugh about, save in relief, when it comes to my, in so many ways born-grown, child, Sarah.

Sarah, is my “I don’t worry about her” child. She always finds a way to do well, regardless the difficulty or complexity of the circumstance. She succeeds, anyway…without my assistance, editing, quiz-bowling, reminders, etc. SHE does it, on her freaking own…and I, the ever overwhelmed mama, have been too dang grateful to ask if she would like it to be otherwise.

All my children ( and yours) are geniuses, in their own way. But, Sarah has that beautiful, steady, sane streak. She quickly recognizes both the value of justice and unity. She is bright and a quick study. She is also thorough and incredibly creative.  She is a high-school sleeper who quietly does excellent work, dispenses grace to others who have digested less themselves, and leads by integrous example. Few really see her, yet. But, I who have made an uncompensated career of seeing just such, do see. Her becoming presence blares, flashes violently; it is unmistakable.

I wonder sometimes how I am to make it up to this child who willingly mama’d whomever ever little was just below her, in months, whom I was not wrangling or chasing or peeling from me. She without a request from me, packed their bags and pushed a stroller and just did more than I could have ever expected.

Sarah turned 16 this weekend. She was feeling sickly and I was over-scheduled. We didn’t do all we wanted to celebrate who she still was and has become these years. In my house, the squeaky wheel gets the grease…she doesn’t falter or freak or ask for help, what she does do is more than any sane parent could ever ask of a daughter.

Sometimes, I wonder if I have done enough, anything, to make her life feel as special as she is. There is no shiny new car in our drive. There was no sweet sixteen blow-out to celebrate. I didn’t take her on a spree to buy her beautiful things. I didn’t even get this out, until today.

I hope she knows how grateful I am to have her. How much hope she gives me…this child who writes better than I after all theses years of practice. Not too long ago, she wrote a sermon, her heart,  with insight and wording to rival Brian McLaren’s best, and no, she has not yet read a line of his thought. I hope she knows how much I admire how she seeks to understand and navigates her relationships through that lens. I hope she realizes that she is becoming, daily,  a woman of great wisdom and compassion and fortitude to do good, well.

We have plans, Sarah and I, after we get Number One Son off to school… plans to wander toward beauty and visit (her) possible future homes. Soon, it will be her turn, she will be first, foremost…I promise, I will (finally) make it all about her. All she has invested these years will be returned to her, with interest.

Happy Birthday, Sarah! I love you so.

Mama

We all came back alive

This past weekend we finally pulled off our long-awaited, “Weed out the Weenies” weekend. We camped, no bathrooms, no electricity, no running water, in the relative wild of Helena, Alabama. There were a few fateful moments of potential pitfall, including our 1am pitch black ( no flashlights) Capture the Flag game in a field that daylight revealed to be more treacherous than did the flickers of the falling stars that cheered us. But, though we did stumble and otherwise fall a time or two, no one was cast head long nor seriously hurt. And we made up quickly for any bravado during the game…we are serious gamers.  Jeremy and Tiff and I sat in the warmth of a fire, watching faces that we love more than life, speak hard questions and respond to them, not with proof texts and platitudes, but with unshakeable Love. Somehow, these kids get what it took us years of unlearning and then learning to get  ourselves. They run through the ravines and briars and pitted places that snared us and rolled us to the ground and charged us for the experience.  They run narrow, dangerous spaces as if they were wide and smooth. Because, to them, led of Love, only, they are.

I find myself too often, frozen or feeling my way along, only inching my feet forward, trying to stay on the track of Love…

God, put me, too, in that wide, safe space…and let me, too, run without regard to life and limb. Amen

hallowed ground

Their  1/2 acre says “home” to me more than any space on the planet. After Nana died, Mama rented Nana’s house to nice caring couples for a few years. And then, about 5 years ago, Mama called and said she thought she was supposed to sell it to someone.  Inwardly, I agonized, not that I had the funds to pay the taxes, much less buy it or keep it up for Mama. My mother told me that she finally felt good about these folks; she thought she could sell it. Her good vibe must have traveled up the telephone line to me…because after talking with her, I, too, was okay with it.

I have driven by the house several times since the day she signed those papers, let others put their names on Nana and Dada’s house. I’ve watched dying gargantuan trees come down, a portico and tasteful sun-shades go up. I’ve noticed new ornamentals in the front yard and observed every space I could see, without stopping and walking on up, righted,  restored, and revolutionized.

Saturday, I asked if the couple she sold it to would let me look around the yard. Mama had been by about a month before. The owners had told her to come back any time, to bring “the girls” to see the house as well, when we visited. We drove up, unannounced, Mama rang the front door bell. I watched from the car, my stomach flipping a bit…

My Dada was abroad most of my mother’s childhood: WWII and Korea. When he was home, I think he was moving earth, hacking up the brick-like clay of Clarke County and working in countless tons of compost and manure. That, combined with my Nana’s champion garden-club skills, made their yard a virtual showplace. Never one to buy what she could root or grow from seed, from her own garden or a friend’s, Nana did not invest  much money in this beauty she brought to be.  She did, however, spend nearly every “free” moment there, when she wasn’t doing all the normal  home-maker duties including: cooking huge meals for Dada and Mama or me, sewing all of our  gorgeous clothes, canning all that her large vegetable garden and ours produced, or taking care of neighbors and me.

The wondrous world she wove is where I spent my childhood days…high in the trees: white pine and pecan, red bud and old, strong dogwoods. I dug bulbs free to flower anew with her in the fall, dead-headed Iris in the spring and summer, cut Dahlia’s the size of my head to dip over the rim of arrangements of snowballs and roses. It was the most beautiful garden on earth to me…but, honestly, it was genuinely, even to the eyes of a trained horticulturist, beautiful. No one could make something come to life, even back to life, and bloom like my Nana.

So, Saturday morning as Shel came out to welcome my Mama with a hug and waved us on over, I finally got to see the garden, again. I am going to write Southern Living and insist they send a photographer out. Not only has Shel, long an instrumental part of UGA’s Botanical Gardens and past owner of a nursery just down the road, added depth and whimsy and inviting places to sit and relax in the garden, he has kept a “child” of everything that had to be surrendered to old age and disease. Where shade now blankets once sunny beds, he has moved, by hand, all  the old-fashion varieties of bulbs that Nana ever planted or at least their posterity. I teared up several times, on my tour. Sheldon pointing out this and that of Sara’s that he had saved and moved…to now better ground.

I missed my calling.  I chose the lifeless green of business. I should have gone to Horticulture school, it is in my blood as well. I am most me and the happiest in a garden space, hands dirty, muscles tired.  But God in His grace, has preserved that particular Holy Place for me…for us all…through the hands and heart of a brother, who somehow saw it as much for what it was as for what it could be.

Hey y’all! My pal is playing tonight!

I love friends who greet me with a smile, reach out to hug me tight and then step back into their space. Thankfully, I have lots of those good  folks around me.

And then there are the “Throw Their Arm Around You” kind of folks, the “Come On With Me A Bit, Hang Close,” folks  - who whisper such into your ear as they pull you along, without a real option of release. They are rare in this life. And maybe the most precious thing God ever sends me.

I have one of those. You may be imagining a woman, a little older than I am. You may be imagining a childhood friend, still in it with me, all these years later. But, my Alabama “Arm Around, Come On…” pal, is 18, and going on 50, in so many ways. She has escorted me to so many places to which I probably would not have dared to journey, on my own. Artist do that; they dare us. Pals, who are artist, walk those frightening paths with us, making sure to stay near and that we can feel them so, even if that sometimes feels like a choke hold, if we do not keep our legs in stride with theirs. ‘Cause they aren’t stopping and they aren’t letting go, either.

Tonight, my pal, Hannah, is playing an hour set on the radio for one of my bestest buddy’s radio show. I get to go along, since for once, I pulled her into this. My universes are converging. And though my chest is pretty full of the adrenaline that goes along with this kind of thing, “I’m not afraid.” ( just psyched.)

So, you all may want to listen in to hear great music – your favorite covers and a few of Hannah’s own songs. Here’s the link to listen tonight, 8pm to 9pm, Alabama time. (CT)

Why can’t we just tell them?

Most of the adults around me love young people, one doesn’t teach them in a “private Christian school,” read for nearly no money, and not love them. We’ve had a tough go at school of late: several students got caught with drugs, ones we have long loved and begged God to help sort through all they battle, ones who we never suspected but who fooled us and ones who were doing so much better than they themselves admitted they had been before. It broke our hearts to have to send them away for the balance of the year. Broke our hearts. I don’t know if they each know that. I want them to.

Within the next week, we had three serious accidents involving our students and/or their families…We were shaken and this mama who might have let her first-born drive a little prematurely, license wise, might have forbade him to go anywhere on this last week’s wet roads.

Today, the students were gathered up for us to pray over them…We gave them a lot of theology that was iffy, that flowed from a good heart. We focused our frustration on the devil…if feels good to focus. But, the reality is…life is iffy. We don’t always know and we can’t control and every day is a risk, and as such, a gift.

That’s what I think we needed to share with them this morning. It’s what we all need to hear: “Life is iffy; you are a gift; I don’t want to lose you; I couldn’t bear it.  Help me with that, any way you can. Help me. It will break me in two to lose you…in my classroom or on this earth.”

I walked back into my room of cast-off math students, upon whose raft I jumped when they were cast from the boat in the raging sea of Geometry, to say, “I want you …in your greatest weakness, I want you.” I saw their kinda less than impressed with Jesus music and we are praying for you and we have to pull together against a common enemy ( to save our school – implied) stuff. They looked at me with clear eyes – saying plainly to my ears which I have dedicated to hearing them more than saying what comes easy for me, Why are you all so afraid to be real?

I met their eyes individually and said, “We are trying to say, ‘We love you’… Sorry.”

They, too often the wiser in the room, nodded and smiled softly.

“I love you,” I continued to each set of eyes. “Do you know that?” my voice broke as I watched their eyes carefully. The first did, know, he promised me he did. Our eyes meet a great deal in silent despair over what could be. The second would not look at me, much work to do there. The third, The Child I Love, let me rest my cheek against her temple and cry. I was the one hugging her as she sat before me in her desk, ably extracting metaphors from Gatsby. But, even as she was in my grasp, I was the one comforted by her assurance that she well knew of my love.

I think we make it hard, try to relate to them through unnecessary hoops, give them too little credit. We’ve all  felt so many of the same things these last few days.  Things I hear the students saying to one another, sometimes to me. All we have to do is say those things we feel ourselves, aloud, to them. All we have to do is to voice those things and let our brokenness and love be apparent. Then, I think, love will flow between us.

Love is our greatest and only defense in this life, it is all that holds.

A day home

Today was a day off to do what I do best. I changed to roaming clothes and walked barely any distance, just up the little unsubdivided, wooden knoll behind my house. The week’s rain had ceased and the now dry leaves well shielded the still damp ground. A February sun’s warmth began to bear down on my dark blue running pants, welcoming me to sit and stay. I lay back and let my hood  frame the nearly still lifes above. Young white oaks stretched their arms in unison, their southern sides iced by the early afternoon light. Alabama February sometimes snows, but usually teases of Spring’s soon coming.

The sky was nearly Carolina Blue and cloudless, I tried to take in the subtle shiftings of the naked and slightly blushing arms and torsos. My ears cleared and heard anew the background of my life when I was little: a distant woodpecker’s buzz, dogs barking behind the hill, a train on around its intersection with our nearby roads. Birds chirped and darted and the winds stirred the leaves lazily, the way I do a simmering pot of stock.

The sun bore on into me. It seemed warmer still, when I let myself feel deeply only such. As I warmed, I made myself feel the earth beneath my back, cool, and I was again, made comfortable, the way a foot stretched out from under the covers seems to solve the problem.

And as I relaxed and lay quiet, heard the faint sounds of soon coming spring, and I was home. Not a door frame nor desk, not a property line nor place at the table, home for me is a sense of stillness and subtle sounds. Home is the whisper of a wood, the patter of a pond, the taste of a tender field. I cannot often journey to those places where home and I have tabernacled before, but it is joy to know that  home is also…just up the little wooded hill, on a blanket of long layered leaves.

Bahia del Espíritu Santo

For the last few summers, I have been traveling south, as in, of the border, with some of my kiddos and dearest friends. The water has been beautiful, the creatures wild and wonderful, the landforms breathtaking. I have been comforted and nurtured in those places where the names of holy things seemed as beautiful on Latin lips as did the entities themselves. This summer, I am staying stateside. My heart is pulling me to a place I have visited once before. We, Americans, call it Mobile Bay. Such a title seems a taunt to my summer groundedness.

But, I discovered an interesting fact that had long escaped me, today. Karen Zacharias, my writer hero, informed me that the Spanish had once named the Bay of Mobile, the Bay of The Holy Spirit. Well, as I have had some of my best moments on and near to that stretch of water, I have to believe the Spanish explorers were on to something.

In 2003, a few very brave ladies and I loaded up all of our children and a few dear, 18-20 year olds and took them all to stare into and over those waters of the Spirit. Imagine the seashore sans snow-cones and Skeeball, much less roller-coasters and redneck air- brush. God did deep healing in me that week as I watched children corral crabs and seine shrimp and flick fish from the waves. The quiet, interrupted only by delight, cured.

We took nets and lines and buckets. We had nearly no phone nor radio reception. We cooked our own food, well, my world-class cook/chef friends cooked our own food, be jealous. We rested on beaches where no one’s shadow ever fell across us. We caught our breath and a clue as to how much beauty resides all about us.

That’s the way I love to do vacation: with dear friends who can stand the quiet and children who are as curious about creation and the other creatures which share the earth as I am.

I am officially planning another trip this summer…Karen’s re-introduction confirmed a dream which I was holding in my heart to return.

“Bahia del Espíritu Santo,” indeed.