Category: Mirror Mirror Mondays

In Which I Give Thanks for the Soup Makers

Last week, in the middle of a hurricane, I got sick. And my girls got sick. And three times, soup was delivered to my door by people who love me. I don’t know how food didn’t make it onto the list of love languages, but I firmly believe it deserves its own category.

I grew up watching my mother make meals for friends and strangers, casseroles in sickness and at the arrival of new babies, a warm dish after a cross-country move, a hot meal weeks after the funeral. If I had to write an essay on grief as a child, it would have been titled Ziti, because I grew up knowing that if someone died, pasta was as close to comfort we’d get this side of heaven.

I am grateful, and we are healing.

At church this week, we gathered our broken lives and came together at the communion table. After we remembered the life and the death and the life again all mixed in with the cup of the vine and bread of life, we filed down the rickety narrow stairs, and shared a meal, the whole lot of us.

There were fifteen crock pots lined up, all filled with piping hot soup. We all stayed later than we intended, scraping the bottom of the bowls and swallowing up teenager-and-toddler-interrupted conversation.

I am grateful, and we come home full.

Sharing a favorite fall soup recipe, a conglomeration of a few I found online and altered to taste. It’s so easy to make. This recipe makes 6 quarts – perfect for sharing.

Pumpkin Curry Bisque

Saute 1 minced onion and 2 cloves of garlic in  butter.
Add a liberal dose of curry (5 Tablespoons? More? Can you have too much curry?), and stirring constantly, heat just until color darkens (about 30 seconds).
Immediately add 2 large cans of pure pumpkin and 48 oz of chicken broth.
Whisk together and add 28 oz. coconut milk.
I also add 1 pint of heavy cream to make it extra delicious.
Add brown sugar, salt, and cinnamon to taste.
Allow to simmer.

Share your favorite fall soup with us in the comments?

Of Acorns and Orange Candles

Some years we’ve bought gourds and pumpkins galore, hay bales and cornstalks for the sake of decoration (and for the porch-braving squirrels, of course). But this year I just pulled a box out of the basement, rediscovered the orange candles that warmed the sanctuary for our October wedding nine short ago. I kept them for nostalgia, now we let them glow. There’s a bittersweet garland and some twiggy pumpkins too.

I remember when I was small. Come fall, every year, my mom swapped lace curtains for heavy ones, wildflower pictures for Grandma Moses winters. As the seasons turn corners outside, our house followed suit. This has stayed with me.

So this weekend, we lit apple candles and collected acorns. I stitched a quirky little made-up cross-stitch the other night and felt like I was ten again, or maybe seventy. This weekend we painted the porch. Sunday I lingered all day in the kitchen with an old friend. We made pumpkin curry soup, more apple crisp.  Seasons are changing, and we are celebrating in a small, good sort of way way.

Stopping again and remembering to count gifts here on a Monday. I am grateful for:

- friends who drive north just to play for the day
- late night porch painting
- good talks, and hard talks, and long talks, and silly talks
- a washing machine that’s working again
- these words about art from Elora and Ed and the inspiring Makoto Fujimura
- a little dream that’s coming to life, a little place for my artwork, in the works
- and on Thursday, we celebrate nine years since we made our vows
- that husband, who hears my heart

Of Slippers and School Buses

Yellow buses round corners and rattle over half-paved August roads: we are all under construction and there are new routes to be learned.

I can still see my mother, in that terry-cloth zip up robe. Maybe it was chenille. On a good day, she’d taxi us down the endless gravel driveway and past the cornfield to the real road, where the bus idled a moment, collected my sisters and me. Most days were good days.

It’s the first week of school here. Friends pin back to school breakfasts and love letters in lunchboxes, and when we were little, I’m sure our back-to-schools were replete with merry making traditions to breathe an ounce of courage into us, into her.

But the first-day-of-school memory etched most deeply into my mind came years later, during those awkward in-between years.

There is my mother, robed in slippers and a weary summer’s worth of grass-stained laundry and adolescent bickering: her, standing smack dab on that yellow line behind the bus as we rolled away. My mother, with both hands raised high, singing the Hallelujah chorus: belting it right out loud, smile beaming in her bathrobe.

We would laugh and pretend to be embarrassed as her voice was enveloped in the bus’s roar, fading away as we chugged along to our next stop. Another September.

And she would drive home, I suppose, take a shower. It never much occurred to me that she, too, filled seven hours until the bus rambled back up that hill.

School starts this week, and we’re rounding new corners, packing a little lunchbox and learning a new route.

And all these years later, it’s my mother, unabashedly celebrating our return to school that breathes courage into me.  Perhaps she was just relishing in the prospect of a quiet day, but when back to school butterflies return to this now twice stretched belly, her voice echos there too: a slipper-clad soundtrack for back to school nerves.

There are days we hum praise as straight-from-the-tree peaches drip from our fingertips, little streams of sweetness meandering down to their little elbows. And it is natural and good and easy.

Sometimes we whisper the hard hallelujahs in the darkest night, just to hang on to a thread of fragile hope. And it is hard and good and necessary.

But other times, we stand in the middle of the road, throw our hands up and up belt out the thanks with laughter – even when the bus is headed to a new destination, and we’re left standing on the yellow line. We drown out the fear with a crazy love, tip the scales toward laughter, teach our daughters how to sing it louder and wilder than we ought.

And then, I suppose, we head home, take that shower, fill the seven hours and the years of this one small life, and hope the hallelujahs echo long in the chambers of their hearts.

{Thank you, Mom…}

On Sheltering Trees

Three years make all the difference.

I ask what makes a tree grow, and my five year old tells me about roots pushing through soil, about sunlight dancing in through leaves and life-giving water that travels up itty-bitty straws inside the tree. The little one, though, she knows plain and simple: God makes the trees grow. I nod, at both of them. You’re right, both right.

Someone asks “What’s saving your life right now?” and my thinking splits, like a path in the woods, my mind sprinting, pulsing forward in both directions at once.

Racing down the first path I recount the last few weeks:

Last night I sat at a bus stop with a woman, a stranger with all her babies in tow. She was taking flight from abuse, stranded, halfway to the shelter. I lent her my phone and waited until the social worker arrived. She loaded her kids up with brave uncertainty; I climbed back in my car and headed home to love, to family.

Across the country, the matriarch of my husband’s family is slipping away, bound for glory. Her children gather around. My oldest bears her name, and all over the world her grandchildren and great-grands remember the sound of her laughter, wait for a phone call.

My sister’s been in town for two weeks. This morning, when their van pulls out and heads west, I wish I’d spent every waking moment with them, despite the chaos of grandparents and siblings and spouses and twelve cousins spread over three families trying to eek out some sort of temporary rhythm. Already, I miss them like crazy.

I think of the few days we stole away and spent with my in-laws, how good it was to just be together, and the tears in my mother-in-laws eyes as we talked about her mother-in-law, and how goodbyes always make my heart ache for home.

Along this path, I count the simple graces of standing beside my sisters in church for the first time in a very long time, of wild wedding dancing, raised eyebrows and secret winks across baby shower tables.

And you could say all the small graces – the families gathering together and the celebrations of new life, the husband who listens to my heart pour out in the dark quiet, and the cousins giggling under the dining room table – these are the nutrients being pulled up from soil. Sunlight transforms into energy as it’s pulled in through green leaves, and gratitude is a photosynthesis that translates even blinding heartache into thanksgiving. And all these things have been saving grace these weeks. I could count on and on. And I do.

At the same time, the other path circles again and again around one strong tree.

What is saving my life right now? Only Jesus. Always Jesus.

It sounds simplistic, but it’s the one thing I return to again and again: the gospel, a God who humbled himself and took on flesh, died and rose again to offer new life, to fulfill the law and promises and the aching of our sin-sick, broken hearts. Redemption.

It is only his kindness, leading back to repentance, again and again: when I open my mouth and let sarcasm drip; when I feed off of drama rather than quiet my heart and speak peace; when injustice and grief well up, and death and brokenness do sting.

When the whole world seems to be groaning, and my own heart feels faint, I remember that I have seen redemption unfurling, and tasted heaven’s life pulsing through the deepest brokenness, and my hope is in Christ alone.

God makes trees grow, and just this is saving my soul: Jesus.

The paths converge, and I shelter here, under the hope of the gospel, and the many graces that point me again and again to this old rugged tree.

This post is a response to Sarah Bessey’s question: What is saving your life right now? Read her original post here, or click here to read others’ responses.

On Practicing Life-Music and Meditating over Meatloaf

We wander through her sleepy streets, in and out of galleries, until we settle on a cafe, across from an old church that serves as a music venue now.  We choose an outside table, and the metal chairs wobble on cobblestone sidewalk, just him and me. At home I make us curry chicken wraps, replete with peaches and cilantro, serve them with smoothies, but here I order meatloaf and potatoes, and this makes him laugh.

We eat slowly, we people-watch, we talk. This night we circle around the same thread we always return to, like the favorite corner of a well-worn blanket. This is the conversation we come home to when our hearts grow quiet, more often when they need quieting: calling, purpose, vocation, what we are made for and where we are going.

We pay the bill and across the street a few teenagers file into the old church, gangly arms around awkward instrument cases and amplifiers in tow. And older couple follows, her white hair loose, long, liberated. I watch a young family struggle up the stone steps with a stroller and a pizza box. I wonder what kind of music draws all these people together.

We make our way back to the car, across the bridge and home. Home. Back to the sink full of dishes and the little people who call us Mama and Daddy, the laundry and the litanies.
And I think of the music being made in that house meant for worship, and the cacophony of sounds my house must leak out: the clinking of dishes and (not so) occasional tantrums, the laughter of friends gathered around the back table and the rare moments of silence, intense conversation and the uncontrollable giggling of toddlers – all our lives in sound bites emanating through screens and back doors, wafting to the ears of kids walking home from half-days of school and the kind rector faithfully walking her dogs.

The longer I search for direction and calling, the smaller my vision seems to become. The building matters less, and the music matters more. And I’m nervous and comforted by this at the same time.  I’m less sure about my where‘s and what‘s, learning to lean into my how‘s and who‘s, and mostly Whose.

At home, I sit quiet, and think about the music: how I long for my life-song to be, above all else, a song of love – always love at the center; and to dare to traverse to the lower keys: lower, lower to serve and to see rightly; how I am craving a rhythm of obedience, a cadence that carries the joy and grief and beauty and heartache all back to praise.

And all that sounds nice, scrolled out all flowery, and there are moments when this music flows and wafts, but more often it is afternoons spent in mundane practice. And practicing obedience and humility and love is a messy practice of missed notes and off keys.

I think of the oboe packed away at my parents’ house, abandoned in the eighth grade for lack of commitment, as much as lack of talent. And the piano lessons I wriggled out of for lack of gratification. And I can live without oboe and piano, but this life song is one I cannot stop singing.

So I keep fumbling and practicing the music of love.

My mind wanders back to the teenagers, and I imagine mothers that made them practice instruments after school. I’m home tucked in for the night, but I wonder what kind of music they’re making at that old church by the cafe, and if the family with the stroller is still there.

Well, Hello There…

Happy Monday, friends.  Hope it’s full of wonder (even if it’s slow coming).

Zucchini Boats

I remember the gravel slipping beneath our feet like ball bearings as gravity and childhood whimsy propelled us down the steep driveway, through the woods, where we raced to “the pit:” a little pond where we sailed our hollow zucchini boats.  We imagined ourselves quite the adventurers, the old fashioned triangle our only signal to come home for dinner.  Last week I made stuffed zucchini for dinner, and remembered those wild summer nights, told the girls all about it.

These ones, though, they’re filled with goodness, and super easy to make, especially if you go meatless, or cook up some extra meat during your meal prep the night before. There’s no real recipe here, because I just filled them with veggies and cheese and a little meat. (But if you must have exacts there are plenty of recipes out there for zucchini boats.) Here’s how we made ‘em.

Half your zucchini. Scoop out the middle. I left a good half inch of zucchini flesh in my boats.
Mix up your filling. I had sauteed some hamburger meat earlier in the day, so I just added onion, fresh spinach, red peppers, tomato, garlic, and the chopped zucchini, along with some grated Parmesan & shredded mozzarella. I think I threw in some sea salt & pepper. I would have added some oregano & basil if I had any. The possibilities are endless, though.
Fill your boats & top them with cheese.
Bake ‘em. I did mine at 350 for a little while, then jacked it up to 375 to get the cheese nice & crisp. They’re done when you can pierce the zucchini. Throw some bread in the oven while you’re at it. Maybe rubbed with olive oil. Better on the grill, but the oven will work, since it’s already hot. (Tin foil underneath to catch any spare oil.)
Leave it in a bit too long because a neighbor stops by to chat.  It will be crunchier, but worth it.Let your kids make sails for their boats. And yours.
Eat. Try to keep your calm when your kids squeal and squirm about the squishiness of zucchini. Come back & apologize if you don’t.
Watch them discover a new food. One of them may decide she likes it. The other may not. Enjoy anyway.

On Shifting Perspectives & Messy Houses

I thought about posting a picture of these sweet pussy willows this morning. It’s Mirror Mirror Monday, and they remind me of my mom, and the way she keeps scissors in her glove box to collect wild flowers and unexpected beauty from fields and the shoulders of country roads.
I bought them last spring at the library – a few bucks for a bunch of branches I could have cut myself, all for the love of the local library. And on this blustery April day, they look pretty nice in the entry way, and not too shabby here on the blog either.
And unless you looked close enough to see the dust (which, for the record, does not remind me of my mom and her impeccable home), you’d never know they’ve graced that telephone desk for a full year now, a little holly thrown in at Christmastime to disguise the out-of-season foible.

And if I just posted that little picture with some quote about spring and hope, well, I bet you’d never know that my dining room became an impromptu art studio two months ago, and how life piled up right on top of it, three times over, and nothing’s gone back to where it ought to be.
My husband just texted to see how my day was, how I was, and I told him I was blogging about our messy house instead of cleaning it. Everyday this mess is at the top of my to do list, every night headlining the failure monologue that runs through my head: and now I know why people fall asleep with the TV on, the numbing blue lights emanating into the dark from upstairs windows up and down the street.
And people ask when I find time to paint. Perhaps on the tag under the paintings, right under title and medium, I should list the amount of hours of sleep sacrificed, or the shameful number of mind-numbing Dora episodes consumed by my children.
And my little organizer lines up the shoes that didn’t get put away here in the hallway, and I had just those kind of good intentions when we built the counter in the laundry room, and somewhere under all this stuff there are baskets for sorting bubbles and sidewalk chalk, beads and outgoing mail. Or at least there were a few months ago.
And this is just the physical mess, the places that just need attention and discipline and hard work to be set straight. This doesn’t cover my lofty intentions for Holy Week: the butterscotch bird nests we eeeked out (and promptly consumed) instead of the labor and delight of resurrection gardens from Easters past.

And what of the beautiful Tenebrae service we attended on Good Friday, right before I ran to Target to buy chocolate bunnies and something, anything to fit this “nine-months-to-put-it-on three-years-and-counting-to-loose-it” rubenesque figure (see aforementioned butterscotch nests)? And after all that, of course, came the harsh words that sometimes follow late night shopping, mine and his; you know, the ones about the piles of laundry and the money and the hearts that haven’t been connected so much these last few weeks?
And on Friday afternoon I talked to my sister, the one who lives too far away, who mothers seven children, and she tells it like it is, almost always. And even though she knows wiping babies’ bottoms can be as much a liturgy of the sin-stench that drives us back to Christ as a beautifully crafted Easter service, her kids are sick again, and she’ll miss the Easter hymns sung in the congregation and the simple traditions that sometimes hold us together.

And I only have two kids and I can’t seem to get it together this year, either. And sometimes right now is just plain hard, and it doesn’t seem significant or worth talking about, much less writing about.
But then I think about the pussy willows, and the glimpses we pick up of each others’ lives, of having it all together, and how none of us do, really. And on Saturday I meet a woman at a baby shower, and she tells me that she reads my blog, and how much she loves it, and then she leans closer, and almost whispers words that break my heart: she tells me it makes her feel a little less than, too, and she laughs it off. She reminds me of me.

And I wish she didn’t live so far away and she could stop by to see the mess. And if she knew the way I can be so selfish and demanding to those who love me most, or how I often turn into a twelve year old version of myself when I’m around my family – awkward, insecure, sarcastic, I don’t think she’d feel the same way.

And I wonder what else is lost in translation. And at its worst, I fear all this writing and word weaving just provides an escape from the broken pipes and mundane difficulties for me, and another window of comparison for you, another heap on piles of laundry and shame for us both.
So today, I photograph the mess in my house, and there is no shortage of subject matter, with seventy three images captured in a moment’s stroll over piles of shoes and make shift forts. And to tell you the truth, when I open them on my computer, press the little button that adds light and contrast to the images, I am surprised how bright and beautiful the mess looks on screen in comparison to real life, where the auto-filters of failure and frustration often tint my view, and where the nitty-gritty of scrubbing and ordering is required.

And I would do well to remember the lens that sees most clearly is the one not bound by time and space, not altered by a harsh word or shifting hormones or the blur of comparison and ingratitude. And when we let light dispel our dark corners at the foot of the cross, and when we share our mess with those we walk alongside, share the ugly and the vulnerable, it is then that we find the comfort and courage to live in our wrinkled and stretch-marked skin, the boldness to own our stories, and to put those shoes away for the seven hundred and eleventh time.

And Easter may be over, but we’re all living life in a perpetual Holy Saturday – somewhere smack between the dark reality of this broken mess and the tomb-bursting hope of the resurrection. And some days are full of revelation and beauty unfurling, and others are for scrubbing floors and putting one foot in front of the other. And today is the latter, here, and that’s just what I intend to do right now.

Do you struggle with the mundane of the everyday, with the litany of failures as you lay your head on your pillow, or the clutches of comparison? What helps restore your perspective, helps you put one foot in front of the other and keep walking?

On Coffee & Creativity Percolating

Oh, hello there, friends. It’s been a little quiet around here.

I’ve been busy: creativity oozing out of my brain kind of busy. (Warning: adverse effects may include lack of sleep and mountains of unwashed laundry.)I’ve been working away – painting, decoupaging, tracking down burlap coffee sacks, and chopping up century old sheet music, replete with little lesson notes: “Curve fingers. Don’t rely on no. 3. Memorize by June 18, 1918.”
I’m doing some decor for a little coffee shop that just opened up. I’ve never done anything like this, and it’s been a ball. Here’s a few shots of my work in progress.
That last one’s my favorite. I spent hours working on the others; I painted those in less than three minutes.  I’m thinking about starting a little Etsy shop to sell some prints. What do you think? I might just do it . . . that is, just as soon as I can unearth my dining room table.

This is The Day, This is the Day

I wrote it on the chalkboard the day my little one woke up for the day at 3:30 in the morning, and her sister an hour later. It was a moment of desperation, the trained teacher in me picking up the chalk and yelling over the chaos: “Everybody, listen up!”  just because the craziness had to stop. I mustn’t have expected them to listen, because when they stopped short and turned towards me, I had no plan, no words.

So, I scratched out the words penned by a psalmist, the lyrics of one of few songs my mother would belt out on the piano. Just to put a marker in the day, just to keep me from loosing it completely. I wrote it out from memory, words I needed more then they, and I told them, after the seventeenth meltdown, and just before a very early morning nap, that we would all work together to find the goodness to be glad in.

And writing truth in chalk, it didn’t create world peace or prevent the eighteenth meltdown, but somehow it did slow me down, and that was days ago, and the words still linger, and I am learning to rejoice in these busy, small days.

Stopping with Ann to offer thanks today, for…
- my amazing sister, and the sweet baby boy she birthed early this morning, her seventh!
- letters and packages from grandparents far away, and a visit from Papa
- the rare treat of watching the SuperBowl with all three of the men I love most: my husband, my Dad, and my Father-in-law, all in one house for an evening!
- visiting our old church and the sweetness of old friends and familiar faces
- how heartache draws community together, and the gift of offering presence and prayer
- little questions that force me to stop, and answer thoughtfully, and evaluate the state of my own heart
- a new (old) book to read and friends to hash it out with
- chocolate chip cookie dough, enough of it to freeze some and give some and bake more than we should have eaten!
- a creative venture – paintings and decoupage and new friends being made here
- decades old Lincoln Logs, resurrected for another generation
- a husband who hears my heart
- warm breezes and little walks in the middle of winter
- piles of old sheet music, with little notes from piano teachers a century ago: “curve fingers, memorize by April 8, 1918″
- quiet here tonight